Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Ben Fountain

fuck, Billy thought, how’d they know about that? “Depends on whose car,” he said.

      So whose?

      My sister’s fiancé. Ex-fiancé.

      This got their attention. What kind of car? Dime asked.

      A Saab, Billy told them. Convertible five-speed with graphite-alloy rims, three months off the lot. By then they were ready to hear him out, so Billy told them about Kathryn, his middle sister and the star of the family, an extremely beautiful girl and gentle and smart who won a partial scholarship to TCU. So far so good. Majors in business, joins a sorority, makes dean’s list every term. All good. Becomes engaged to a guy three years her senior who’s getting his MBA, kind of a tight-ass pussy boy and far too impressed with himself, but it’s still good, mostly, sort of, even though Billy secretly hates the guy. Then one rainy May morning at the end of her sophomore year Kathryn’s driving to work, she has a job as receptionist and broker-trainee at the Blinn Insurance Agency, all good except she’s T-boned on Camp Bowie Boulevard by a hydroplaning Mercedes in a flat spin, this enormous dark object windmilling her way and it’s the sound she remembers more than anything, the whoof whoof whoof of its rotary vortex like the flapping wings of the angel of death. Next thing she knows she’s lying flat on her back and three grizzled Mexicans are standing over her, trying to shield her from the rain with a sheet of cardboard. Kathryn always cries when she gets to this part. She simply cannot talk about it without breaking down, describing the three men hovering there wide-eyed and scared, their soaked clothes, their whispered Spanish, the delicate way they held the cardboard like an offering of some sort.

      Never even thanked them, Kathryn will say. I just laid there looking up at them, I couldn’t talk. In fact all the doctors said she should have died. Fractured pelvis, fractured leg, ruptured spleen, collapsed lung, and massive internal bleeding, then the complicated lacework on her face and back, 170 stitches below the neck, 63 above. You’re gonna be fine, the plastic surgeon tells her the day after. It may take a couple of years but we’ll get you there, I do this all the time. But pussy boy can’t handle it. Three weeks after the wreck he drives to Stovall and breaks off the engagement, whereupon the gentle Kathryn thumps the engagement ring in his face, thumps it as you’d thump a spider or slug you found crawling on your hand. But Billy felt called to a more active response. His sister, family honor, basic goddamn human decency, all these and more seemed crucially at stake. He drives to Fort Worth, locates the pussy-boy Saab outside the pussy-boy condo, and proceeds to reduce said vehicle to scrap and spare parts with the True Value crowbar he bought along the way. A sanctifying calm came over him as he mounted the roof and prepared for that first mighty swing at the windshield. He had a job to do, that was his sense of the moment, and after a frazzled adolescence marked by much conflict with authority and numerous self-inflicted fuckups, he was determined to get this right. He swung calmly, picking his spots with real care and deliberation. The work was pleasing. Even the shriek of the car alarm couldn’t shake his concentration. The feeling had been building for quite some time that something drastic needed to happen, and now it was.

      He was two weeks away from graduating. After several meetings and much official jerking around, the school board decreed that Billy would receive his diploma, but only by mail. He would not get to “walk,” i.e., do the traditional senior passage across the stage to receive his diploma. “You will not walk,” the chairman of the school board announced in the darkest, direst tones of churchly reproach, and Billy thought his throat would burst from holding in the laughs. Like he gave a flying fuck! Ooooo, I don’t get to walk? Ooooo, my life is over! The lawyer who cut the deal with the school board had to work rather harder to keep him out of jail. The demo job on the Saab wasn’t so much the problem as chasing p. boy across the parking lot. With the crowbar. “I wasn’t gonna hurt him,” Billy confessed to the lawyer. “I just wanted to see him run.” In fact Billy had been laughing so hard that he could barely stand up, much less manage anything like a credible chase.

      The DA agreed to drop the felony charge down to criminal mischief if Billy joined the Army, which seemed as good a place as any to be sloughed off, better than jail and being raped every night by guys with names like Preacher and Hawg. Thus he came to be a soldier at the age of eighteen, a private in the infantry, the lowest of the low.

      So how’s your sister? Shroom asked when the story was done.

      She’s better, Billy said. They say she’s gonna be okay.

      You’re still a fucking delinquent, Dime said, but after that they didn’t ride him so hard.

      IT IS MOSTLY IN YOUR HEAD BUT WE HAVE CURES FOR THAT

      BILLY HOPES JOSH BRINGS some Advil soon. The five Jack and Cokes made his hangover worse, but now that he’s stopped drinking it hurts worse still. Dime and Albert are standing in the aisle and Dime is telling him about Shroom’s funeral yesterday, how what should have been the most solemn service ever, a tribute to the spirituality of the man with readings from the Tao, Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” and prayers from an elder of the local Crow tribe, had instead turned into a freak show of Christian wingnuts, a little group standing outside the church with signs like GOD HATES YOU 2 THESS. I:8 and U.S SOLDIERS ARE GOING TO HELL, screaming chants about abortion and dead babies and God’s curse on America.

      Crazy, Albert says. Disgusting. Outrageous.

      “Hey, Albert,” Crack calls, “make sure you get that in the movie.”

      Albert shakes his head. “Nobody would believe it.”

      The Goodyear Blimp is making labored passes overhead, bucking like a clipper ship in a storm. The Jumbotron is airing a video tribute to the late, great “Bullet” Bob Hayes, and displayed along the rim of the upper loge are the names and numbers of the Cowboys “Ring of Honor.” Staubach. Meredith. Dorsett. Lilly. This is the undeniable big-time, there is no greater sports event in the world today and Bravo is smack in the frothy middle of it. In two days they will redeploy for Iraq and the remaining eleven months of their extended tour, but for now they are deep within the sheltering womb of all things American—football, Thanksgiving, television, about eight different kinds of police and security personnel, plus three hundred million well-wishing fellow citizens. Or, as one trembly old guy in Cleveland put it, “Yew ARE America.”

      Billy always thanks people for these sentiments, though he has no idea what they mean. Right now he’s thinking maybe if he pukes he’ll feel better. He tells Mango he’s going for a piss, and Mango glances around to see if Dime’s watching, then murmurs, “Wanna get some beers?”

      Hell yeah.

      They take the steps two at a time. A few people call out greetings from the stands, and Billy waves but won’t look up. He’s working hard. He’s climbing for his life, in fact, fighting the pull of all that huge hollow empty stadium space, which is trying to suck him backward like an undertow. In the past two weeks he’s found himself unnerved by immensities—water towers, skyscrapers, suspension bridges and the like. Just driving by the Washington Monument made him weak in the knees, the way that structure drew a high-pitched keening from all the soulless sky around it. So Billy keeps his head down and concentrates on moving forward, and once they reach the concourse he feels better. They find the head—he pees, forgoes the puke—then buy beers at Papa John’s. Technically they aren’t supposed to drink while in uniform, but what’s the Army gonna do, send us to Iraq? The Bravos do, however, ask for their beers in Coca-Cola cups, but before taking a drink Billy hands his to Mango and rips off fifty push-ups right there on the concourse. He can’t stand how soft he’s gotten. For the past two weeks it’s been all planes and cars and hotel rooms, no time for working out, no way to stay sharp. The pussification of Bravo, that’s what the past two weeks have been, so now they’ll return to the war all stale and crusty with a corresponding falloff of effectiveness.

      His head is pounding when he stands, but the rest of him feels better. “Push-ups, beer chaser,” Mango says.

      “You got it.”