Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Ben Fountain

after that. Unless your lawyers feel like parachuting into a war zone.”

      “Hooo-kay,” Crack resumes, rattling the paper. “Will Drew Henson throw an interception—yes, minus a hundred and twenty, versus no, plus a hundred and five.”

      “Yes,” Holliday says.

      “No,” says A-bort.

      “Will Beyoncé show me her tits while sitting on my face,” Sykes offers, then starts singing in a screechy black-girl falsetto, I need a soldjah, soldjah, need me a soldjah soldjah boy . . .

      “Quiet,” Dime woofs, “Albert’s on the phone,” which the rest of the Bravos take as their cue to scream at Sykes. Shut up, fuckhead, Albert’s on the phone! Quiet, shitbag, Albert’s trying to talk! Meanwhile an SUV has drawn even in the next lane, and women, actual females, are hanging out the windows and yelling at the Hummer, college girls, maybe a couple of years older, and they are fine prime examples of that buxom talent pool of all-American booty that runs amok every night on reality TV.

      “Hey,” they cry as traffic crawls along, “roll down your windows! Hey you, whoever you are, got any Grey Poupon? Woooo-hoooo, go Cowboys! Roll down your window!”

      Oh Lord, beauties they are and amped as all fuck, bellowing, whipping their hair around like proud war banners, they are the girls gone wild of Bravo’s fondest dreams. Sykes and A-bort futz with the windows on that side and are roundly cursed for their incompetence, then they realize the damn things have been childproofed and everybody screams toward the front, finally the driver flips a switch and the windows go down and you can just see those girls deflate. Oh, soldiers. Jarheads, they’re probably thinking, because it’s all the same to them. Not rock stars, not highly paid professional athletes, nobody from the movies or the tabloid-worthy world, just grunts riding on some millionaire’s dime, some lame support-the-troops charity case. Bravo tries, but the girls are just being polite now. We’re famous! A-bort cries. They’re gonna make a movie about us! The girls smile, nod, look up and down the freeway as if scouting better prospects. Sykes flops his entire torso out the window and yells, “Hell yes I’m drunk baby and I’m married too! But I’ll still love you ugly in the morning!” This gets the girls laughing and for a moment there’s hope, but Billy can see the light already dimming in their eyes.

      He sits back and pulls out his cell; they were probably never serious anyway. Ten hut! reads the text from his sister Kathryn,

       keep it in yr holster kid

      Then from Pete, his other sister’s roughneck husband,

       Bang a cheerldr

      Then this from Pastor Rick, who won’t leave him alone,

       He who honors me, I will honor

      And that’s it, no more texts, no calls, nothing. Fuck, doesn’t he know anybody? He is sort of famous after all, at least that’s what people keep telling him, so you would think. Traffic is moving and they’ve lost the wild girls, but now the stadium appears on the horizon, rising from the sweep of suburban prairie like an engorged and wart-spattered three-quarter moon. They are supposed to appear today on national TV, details pending, no one knows the actual drill. They might have lines to speak. They might be interviewed. There’s talk that they’ll take part in the halftime show, which raises hopes of personally meeting Destiny’s Child, but equally if not more plausible is the possibility that they’ll be coaxed, cajoled, steamrolled, or otherwise harassed into doing something incredibly embarrassing and lame. Local TV has already been bad enough—in Omaha there was footage of a very stiff Bravo “interacting” with the zoo’s new monkey habitat, and in Phoenix they were taken to a skateboard park, where Mango did an ass-plant for the evening news. Humiliation always stalks the common man when he ventures onto the tube, and Billy is determined it won’t happen to him, not today, not on nationwide TV, no sir, thank you sir, I respectfully refuse to act like a moron, sir!

      The possibilities set off a whinge in his gut like air escaping through a pinhole wound. He wants to be on TV, and he doesn’t. He wants to be on TV as long as he doesn’t screw up and it might help get him laid, but watching the stadium swell outside his window to Death Star proportions he wonders if he’s truly up to the day. Self-confidence has been a struggle these past two weeks, this sense of treading water way over his head. He’s too young. He doesn’t know enough. Not counting the small-time drag races his father used to emcee, he’s never been to a professional sporting event. In fact he’s managed to grow up in Stovall, a mere eighty miles west, without ever setting eyes on fabled Texas Stadium save through the expurgating medium of TV, and this first sighting feels historic, or at least strives to be. Billy studies it at length, with real care and attention, taking the measure of its size and lack of humor, its stark and irremediable ugliness. Years and years of carefully posed TV shots have imbued the place with intimations of mystery and romance, dollops of state and national pride, hints of pharaonic afterlife such as always inhere in large-scale public architecture, all of which render the stadium of Billy’s mind as the conduit or portal, a direct tap-in, to a ready-made species of mass transcendence, and so the real-life shabbiness is a nasty comedown. Give bigness all its due, sure, but the place looks like a half-assed backyard job. The roof is a homely quilting of mismatched tiles. There’s a slumpiness, a middle-aged sag to the thing that suggests soft paunches and mushy prostates, gravity-slugged masses of beached whaleness. Billy tries to imagine how it looked brand-new, its fresh gleam and promise back in the day—thirty years ago? Forty? The past is always a shaky proposition for him, but there’s a backdoor link between the way he feels now, looking at the stadium, and the feelings he gets when he thinks about his family. That same heaviness, the same torpor and melancholy, a kind of sickly-sweet emo funk that’s almost pleasurable, in the sense that it hints at something real. As if sorrow is the true reality? Without ever exactly putting his mind to it, he’s come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory. Something new appears in the world—a baby, say, or a car or a house, or an individual shows some special talent—with luck and huge expenditures of soul and effort you might keep the project stoked for a while, but eventually, ultimately, it’s going down. This is a truth so brutally self-evident that he can’t fathom why it’s not more widely perceived, hence his contempt for the usual public shock and outrage when a particular situation goes to hell. The war is fucked? Well, duh. Nine-eleven? Slow train coming. They hate our freedoms? Yo, they hate our actual guts! Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity.

      “Shit,” someone murmurs, a speed bump in the silence—their first burst of enthusiasm on sighting the stadium has flatlined into verbal arrest. Maybe it’s the weather that brings them down, all this early-winter gloom, or maybe performance anxiety or just plain weariness, the burden of knowing much will be required of them today. Bravo doesn’t do so well with silence anyway. Guff and bullshit are more their working style, but the spell of introspective dread concludes with the appearance of a large, carefully rendered homemade sign affixed to a roadside utility pole. STOP ANAL RAPE IN IRAQ! the sign reads, below which someone has scrawled, heavens to betsey. Bravo howls.

      A PRIVATE IN THE INFANTRY

      THEY ARRIVE TWO HOURS before kickoff and no one seems to know what to do with them, so they’re parked in their seats for the time being, forty-yard line, home side, seventh row. Sykes and Lodis immediately start debating the retail value of such totally sick seats and how much they would bring on eBay, $400, $600, up and up they go, their analysis based on nothing more than air and wishful thinking. It’s a fuckwit conversation and Billy tries not to listen. He’s got the aisle seat with Mango on his left, and they talk a little bit about last night and how awesome it is to be here instead of spitting sand out their ears at FOB Viper. Hebert known as A-bort is sitting to Mango’s left, then Holliday known as Day, then Lodis a.k.a. Cum Load, Pant Load, or just plain Load, then Sykes who will never be anything other than