Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

IF IN THE FUTURE YOU TELL ME THIS IS LOVE, I WILL NOT DISAPPOINT YOU

NO ONE COMES FOR them. They gather around Sykes and wait as instructed for the woman in the Russian officer’s cap, but Bravo has fallen through a crack in the collective mind and so they stand there marooned while a roadie crew swarms over the stage and ash from the fireworks settles on their heads. They have been through the wringer of a world-class spectacle and need some time for their nerves to recover. Like, about six years might do it? Bravo is roasted, toasted, and ready to pop, or maybe already popping in the case of Sykes, who sits himself down on the bottom step and weeps sparklers of racy little hopeless tears. “I don’t know why I’m fuckin’ cryin’!” he squawks when Lodis asks. “I just am, dammit! I just am!”

“You guys have to leave,” the roadie foreman barks at Bravo.

“Well fuck you too,” Mango mumbles as the guy stalks off, and the Bravos stay put. Day and A-bort sit down on either side of Sykes while the rest of them mill around feeling torn and frayed, fluttery hands shoved deep in their pockets.

“Dudes, we finally saw Beyoncé,” Crack points out.

“Woo, ain’t we special.”

“Yeah, but we saw her up close.”

“Uh-huh, she’s hot and everything. But I’ve had better.”

They manage a few yuks at that. Billy finds himself standing next to Dime, and confides:

“Sergeant, I feel sick.”

Dime gives him a once-over. “You look okay to me.”

“Not like sick sick. More like bent. Baked.” He taps his head. “Halftime sort of skitzed me out.”

Dime laughs, at-at-at, a machine-gun rattle high in his throat. “Son, try to look at it this way. It’s just another normal day in America.”

Billy’s heart melts a little at that son. The stage is disappearing around them like a mortally wounded ship beneath the waves.

“I don’t think I even know what normal is anymore.”

“You’re fine, Billy, you’re fine. I’m fine, you’re fine, everybody’s fine. He’s fine.” Dime nods at Sykes. “Everything is fine.”

Billy looks at Sykes and starts to ask, Yeah, what are we going to do about him? but the foreman is coming at them again, snapping at Bravo to get the hell off his stage.

“So where we supposed to go?” Crack snaps back. “Nobody told us where to go.”

The foreman stops, spares them a harried moment’s regard. He’s well over six feet, bearded, broad shouldered, with a face slack and frowzy as a blown-out air bag, but there’s a shot of chemical voltage in his eyes, the crazed-lumberjack look of the veteran roadie. His gaze lingers for a second on the hot mess that is Sykes.

“Look, I have no fucking idea where you’re supposed to go, but you can’t stay here.”

“All right, Rufus, tell you what,” Crack answers. “We’ll go right after you’re done sucking my dick, how about that?”

Later, thinking back on it, Billy will be struck by the fact that he never saw an actual punch being thrown. It doesn’t last long — ten, fifteen seconds at most? Though in the way of such things it seems to go on for hours. At first the foreman tries to lift Crack like he thinks he’s going to bodily throw him off the stage, so he’s bigger than Crack but not that much bigger, and what a bummer it must be for the guy when he finds himself locked in a young-buck clench. For an instant the two men hardly move. Only their bulging eyes and necks betray the tons of thrust at work, then they’re twisting, spinning, they are the hub of a free-radical swirl of bodies that slides off the stage onto the field. People are pushing, chesting up, there’s much half-assed shoving and garbled smack talk about who dissed who and who crossed whose line and of course everybody’s gotta have their boy’s back. A melee, you’d call it. A fracas. Not quite a throw-down brawl right here on the sacred turf of Texas Stadium. Billy is skying on a full-bore adrenaline rip as arms, hands, faces go crashing by, then there’s Dime stroking past like a man swimming rapids, pushing through bodies to pry Crack clear. A roadie swipes at Dime’s back and Billy grabs his collar and there’s the guy’s wild look as he twists around, and Billy thinks: Whoa shit, don’t let go now. The guy reels as Billy rides him from behind, riding, riding, he wishes it didn’t look so much like he’s humping the guy but he hangs on until the cops wade in, and all it takes is a word from Dime for Bravo to disengage, “like a bunch of excellent hunting dogs” as he likes to say of his squad.

Casualties, minor. Crack has taken an elbow in the eye; Lodis’s lip is split and bloody; Mango’s ear tenderized by a roadie headlock. The cops herd Bravo down the sideline and hear out their story, then send them packing across the field toward the home sideline. “Somebody over there can tell you where to go,” the cops say, so like the remnants of some long-lost jungle patrol Bravo makes its straggling way across the field. They’ve passed the first hash mark when Billy looks up and sees, oh mother of mercy, Faison coming out to meet them, her head cocked at a questioning skew, face full of concern. She’s pumped, Billy can tell. This is a girl who likes her drama.

“What happened?” She peers up at him, touches his arm as they meet. The rest of the Bravos lapse into reverential silence.

“It was stupid, just this stupid little thing. We kind of got into it with the roadies over there.”

“Were yall fighting? We couldn’t tell if yall were fighting or goofing around.”

“I guess we were fighting. Though you couldn’t call it much of a fight.”

“All we did was ask if we could help!” A-bort says, and everybody yuks except Sykes, who breaks down all over again.

“Are you hurt?” Faison asks Billy, then she’s speaking to all the Bravos. “Is anybody hurt? Oh my God, look at your lip!” she cries at Lodis. “Who’s supposed to be taking care of you guys?”

She’s incensed to learn that Bravo has been left on its own. “All right,” she says, turning, motioning Bravo to follow, “yall come with me, we’ll get this figured out. I can’t believe they just left yall stranded out here, that is so NOT the way we treat our guests.”

The Bravos clump about her in a loose bundle, murmuring their thanks. “Listen,” she tells them, “that stage crew? We’ve had problems with those guys before, it’s like they think they own the place. They almost beat up Lyle Lovett a couple of weeks ago, they were like, Get off the stage! Get off the stage right NOW! And Lyle and his guys had all their equipment up there, it’s not like they were gonna just walk off and leave it. Lucky security was right there or we mighta had a situation.”

“I think they’re tweekin’,” says Mango.

“They sure act like it, don’t they, they act like they’re on something. Somebody ought to speak to management about those guys.”

More cheerleaders are coming out to meet them, and it dawns on Bravo that this might turn out all right. A kind of mixer develops there along the home sideline, Bravos and cheerleaders chatting it up while calls are made upstairs on the soldiers’ behalf. The fracas gives them something to talk about; the cheerleaders are shocked at first, then indignant as the story gets around, the flip side of which is a bonus serving of sympathy for Bravo. Ice is fetched for Crack’s eye and Lodis’s lip. A couple of cheerleaders tenderly probe Mango’s rug-burned ear.

“What’s wrong with him?” Faison asks, nodding at Sykes. She and Billy are standing somewhat apart from the others.

“Oh, that’s Sykes.”

“Is he hurt?”

Billy considers Sykes, who’s squatting in the lee of a portable equipment locker, quietly weeping.

“He misses his wife.”

“Wow.” Faison seems impressed. “Really?”

“He’s kind of an emotional guy.”

She keeps glancing over at Sykes. She’s fascinated, or perhaps just troubled that nothing’s being done about him.

“Does he have kids?”

“One on the ground, one on the way.”

“Oh my God, I can’t imagine. Do you think I should go over and talk to him?”

“I think he just wants to be alone right now.”

“You’re probably right. Sheesh, the sacrifices you guys make! How long did you say you’re gonna be over there?”

“Through next October, unless we get stop-lossed again.”

“Oh Lord.” It comes out as a kind of rattling moan, oh Lord, like she’s rollerblading on a gravel road. “And you’ve been there how long already?”

“We infilled August twelfth.”

“Oh me. Oh my God. You must dread going back.”

“I guess. In a way.” Somehow their faces have ended up mere inches apart, and this seems like the most natural thing in the world, as basic as wind, tides, the magnetic north. “It is what it is, I guess. But we’ll all be together, that’s something. That counts for a lot, actually.”

“I think I know what you mean. There’s that whole bonding thing when you’re challenged as a group.” While she talks Billy is trying to memorize her face, the supreme excellence, for example, of the delicate butterfly clasp of the bridge of her nose, or the smattering of freckles high on her forehead, the way their gingery carotene tint matches her hair exactly. The desire comes over him to stretch his mouth wide open, as wide as a lion’s, say, and tenderly hold her perfect face between his lips for a while.

“Sometimes I wonder if the whole thing might be a mistake. I mean, I think we ought to be fighting terrorism and everything, but it’s like, okay, we got rid of Saddam, maybe we should just bring our guys home and let the Iraqis work it out for themselves.”

“Sometimes we think that too,” Billy says, remembering something Shroom once said: Maybe the light’s at the other end of the tunnel.

“Ha ha, no doubt.” She peers past his shoulder. “The second half’s gonna start in a minute,” she says, then pulls back and looks Billy in the eye. “Listen, can I ask you something personal?”

“Sure.”

“Are you seeing anybody?”

“Not me,” he allows bravely, with breezy resignation. He doesn’t care if she knows he’s not a player.

“Me either. So how about if we stay in touch.”

“Ye-uh,” he says, half choking on it, then “yes. Yes, I think we should.”

“Good.” She’s suddenly very brisk and businesslike. “You’ve got your phone? Get out your phone and I’ll give you my information, then call me and leave a message so I’ll have yours. Because, frankly, I don’t wanna lose you.”

She says it just like that, a casually earthshaking statement of stupendous fact. Him, Billy, a person not to be wanted lost! His life has become miraculous to him. Maybe he should just go ahead and ask her to marry him.

“What’s your last name?” He’s got his phone out.

“Zorn.”

Billy clears his throat.

“I know, everybody thinks it’s funny.”

Billy says nothing.

“It means ‘anger’ in German.”

“Roger that,” he deadpans.

“Stop it! You’re so funny.”

She’s at his side, their heads practically touching as she watches him key in her information. The phone gives them socially acceptable cover for standing so close, good thing because it’s happening in front of thousands of people. Billy breathes deep, pulling in her clean outdoors smell, the sharp vanilla tang of snow and winter wind. It’s as if she’s absorbed the sweetest essence that the season has to offer.

“Who’s Kathryn?”

Billy is scrolling through his contact list. “My sister.”

“You’ve got a call from her.”

“I know.” He highlights the next name. “That’s my other sister.”

“They older, younger?”

“I’m the youngest. There’s ol’ Mom.”

“Denise? Not ‘Mom’?”

“Well, that’s her name.”

Faison laughs. “Where’s your Dad?”

“My Dad’s disabled. He doesn’t have his own phone.”

“Oh!”

“He had a double stroke a couple of years ago, impaired his speech.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right. It’s life.”

She’s holding his arm just above the elbow, her grip concealed by the bush of her pom-poms. “Are you going to see them before you leave?”

Billy gets a sudden clutch in his throat. “Ah, no.” He swallows. It’s fine. “We all said our good-byes yesterday.”

“That sucks.” She snugs a few millimeters closer.

“There’s you.” He’s scrolled all the way to the end.

“Zorn. I’m always last on everybody’s list.”

“I’ll change you to Anger, that way you’ll be first.”

She laughs, looks over her shoulder. The cheerleaders are moving toward the tunnel to welcome the players onto the field. “Sweetie, I gotta go,” she says, and gives his arm a squeeze. Her hand recoils as if electrically shocked, then she’s squeezing again, then palpating his entire upper arm.

“My God, what a great body you’ve got. Do you have even an ounce of fat on you?”

“Not so much, I guess.”

“Not so much I guess,” she echoes in a gruff voice, and laughs. She’s still feeling up his arm. “You don’t even know how good you are, do you? That makes it even better!” she declares with lip-smacking enthusiasm, then gives him a fierce fast hug, as if grasping a buoy before the storm tears her away. Billy practically keels over in a delirium of bliss. How wonderful, how absolutely holy to be appreciated for yourself, to be handled, petted, groped, pawed, and generally hungered over. “Okay, I gotta scoot,” she says, releasing him. “Come see me at the twenty, same place.”

Billy says he will, and she goes trotting down the sideline after the rest of the cheerleaders. Bravo turns as she jogs past, their eyes helplessly drawn to the bounce of her bottom inside those teeny tiny cup holders that pass for shorts. Billy punches up her number and waits through six rings while watching her take position at the mouth of the tunnel. The first players come jogging onto the field like rhinos on the plod. The Jumbotron cranks up a Guns N’ Roses riff, the cheerleaders rise on their toes and wave their pom-poms high, and a swell of applause rolls through the stands like thunder rumbling down the mountainside.

“Hi, you’ve reached Faison! I’m not able to take your call right now…”

It makes for an odd sensation, watching her real-time person in the middle distance while holding her disembodied voice to his ear. It puts a frame around the situation, gives it focus, perspective. It makes him aware of himself being aware of himself, and here is a mystery that seems worth thinking about, why this stacking of awareness should even matter. At the moment all he knows is that there’s structure in it, a pleasing sense of poise or mental ordering. A kind of knowledge, or maybe a bridge thereto — as if existence didn’t necessarily have to be a moron’s progress of lurching from one damn thing to another? As if you might aspire to some sort of context in your life, a condition he associates with adultness. Then comes the beep, and he has to talk. The funny little message he leaves for her — two seconds after clicking off, he can’t remember what he said.