Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Ben Fountain

out in their spare time. He wants both, he wants the entire body-soul-connect because anything less is just demeaning. Has the war done this to him, he wonders, inspired these deeper sensitivities and yearnings of his? Or is it just because he’s going on his twentieth year of life?

      Time is growing short. They need to get back to the unit, but the engine’s dropped out of their urgency. The joint has burned down to a glowing squib when Hector confides that he’s thinking of joining the Army.

      The Bravos groan. Don’t.

      “Yeah, I know it’s fucked, but I got a kid and her moms don’t work so it’s all on me, which I accept, I mean I wanna take care of ’em and all, but the way it is now it just ain’t happening. I got the job here, I work five days a week at Kwik Lube and don’t get insurance neither place, and I gotta have insurance for my little girl. And I got debts. Like, you know, who don’t have debts.” Billy notes that Hector is worried in the way a man worries, not freaking and thrashing around like a fuckwit kid but soberly taking the measure of his trouble, manning up to live it every day. He says the Army is offering enlistment bonuses of $6,000, and once he’s in he wouldn’t have to worry about insurance.

      “So you gonna do it?” Billy asks, panged by the $6,000. The Army got his carcass for absolutely free.

      “Dunno. You guys think I should?”

      Billy and Mango lock eyes. After a couple of seconds they all bust up laughing.

      “It pretty much sucks,” says Billy. “I don’t know why the hell we’re laughing.”

      “Hell yeah,” Mango says, “all those days I’m thinking, Yo, I am so fuckin’ done with this shit, and then I’m like, Okay, so I get out when my time’s up, what the fuck’s waiting for me gonna be any better? Like, fuck, workin’ at Burger King? Then I remember why I signed up in the first place.”

      Hector is nodding. “That’s sort of my whole point. What I got out here sucks, so I might as well join.”

      “What else is there,” Mango says.

      “What else is there,” Hector agrees.

      “What else is there,” Billy echoes, but he’s thinking of home.

      BULLY OF THE HEART

      THEY GOT TWO NIGHTS and a day. Sykes went to Fort Hood, to the tiny on-post house where his daughter and pregnant wife live, at the edge of the artillery drop zone. Lodis went to Florence, S.C., which is also the hometown, or so he claimed, of his fourth or maybe second cousin Snoop Dogg. A-bort went to Lafayette, La., Crack to Birmingham, Mango to Tucson, and Day to Indianapolis. Dime went to Carolina. Lake continued his long-term residency at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, and Shroom was being held against his will at the Merriam-Gaylord Funeral Home in Ardmore, Oklahoma. And Billy, Billy went to Stovall, to the three-bedroom, two-bath brick ranch house on Cisco Street with sturdy access ramps front and back for his father’s wheelchair, a dark purple motorized job with fat whitewalls and an American flag decal stuck to the back. “The Beast,” Billy’s sister Kathryn called it, a flanged and hump-backed ride with all the grace of a tar cooker or giant dung beetle. “Damn thing gives me the willies,” she confessed to Billy, and Ray’s aggressive style of driving did in fact seem to strive for maximum creep effect. Whhhhhhhiiiiirrrrrrr, he buzzed to the kitchen for his morning coffee, then whhhhhhiiiiirrrrrrrr into the den for the day’s first hit of nicotine and Fox News, then whhhhhhhiiiiiirrrrrr back to the kitchen for his breakfast, whhhhhiiiiirrrrrr to the bathroom, whhhhhhiiiiirrrrrr to the den and the blathering TV, whhhhhhiiiiirrrrrr, whhhhhiiiiiiirrrrr, whhhhhhiiiiiiirrrrrrr, he jammed the joystick so hard around its vulcanized socket that the motor keened like a tattoo drill, the piercing eeeeeeennnnnhhhhhh contrapuntaling off the baseline whhhhiiiiirrrrrrrr to capture in sound, in stereophonic chorus no less, the very essence of the man’s personality.

      “He’s an asshole,” Kathryn said.

      To which Billy: “You just now figured that out?”

      “Shut up. What I mean is he likes being an asshole, he enjoys it. Some people you get the feeling they can’t help it? But he works at it. He’s what you’d call a proactive asshole.”

      “What does he do?”

      “Nothing! That’s my whole point, doesn’t do shit! Won’t do his physical therapy, never goes out, just sits in that damn chair all day watching Fox and listening to fat-ass Rush Limbaugh, won’t even talk unless he wants something, and then he just grunts. Expects us to wait on him hand and foot.”

      “So don’t do it.”

      “I don’t! But then it all falls on Mom and she wears herself out and I’m like, Okay, whatever, I’m in. As long as I’m living here I might as well be part of the problem.”