Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

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 humpbacked 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.”

Somewhere in the house there’s a trunk full of glossy promotional photos of rock and metal bands from the seventies, eighties, and into the nineties, “the mullet years” as Kathryn has tagged that primitive era, most of these bands long forgotten and mercifully so, though Ray’s collection does contain a few bona fide stars. Meat Loaf. 38 Special. Kansas. The Allman Brothers. Proximity to talent as well as the empire of his own considerable ego propelled Ray to a minor local stardom all his own, and while the pop music juggernaut of love, lust, and endless adolescence powers on and on, it endures without the oral gifts of Rockin’ Ray Lynn, who in the 9-11 climate of recessive economics found himself out on his downsized and too-old ass. We love ya, big guy, but you’re gone. And all those years he’d kept apartments in Dallas and Fort Worth, that era came to a sputtering and ignominious end too, though he was plotting his comeback in between the odd jobs that came his way, emceeing local beauty pageants and Rotary Club banquets, “monkey gigs” he called them in the bitter, waspish voice he used at home, the one best suited to his default settings of contempt, sarcasm, and general hatefulness. The way he could switch from that to his professional voice was something to see, a kind of ventriloquist’s trick, no dummy necessary. He’d be berating you for, say, failing to lather the tires with sufficient Armor All to achieve that lustrous showroom shine, and in the midst of his ruptured sewer line of fucks and damns and worthless-piece-of-shits his cell would ring and it was like a switch flipped, all at once he was the hip, happy voice of ten thousand drive-times and the perennial metro-area Arbitron champ.

Billy hated that. Not just the lie of it but the affront to nature, like someone’s head changing shape right before your eyes. But the comeback. That was his mission. Through research Ray concluded that the market could support yet one more aggrieved white male defending faith and flag from America’s heartland. He studied the masters, followed the news, logged serious hours on the Internet. He began making demo tapes and sending them out; the family became his test audience for ever more baroque elaborations of conservative creed. “America’s Prick,” Billy’s elder sister, Patty, called him after an especially inspired riff on the welfare state. He’d leaped straight from rock ’n’ roll to hard-core right wing with no stops in between. It was a remarkable feat of self-actualization, but at what cost, what stresses of body and soul, a bending of the psyche beyond human limits such as might be endured on a space voyage to Mars. The man existed in a 24/7 paranoid clench. He had TV and radio for intellectual affirmation, a two-packs-a-day habit for sensual sustenance, and none of the mundane distractions of fresh air or exercise. Thus he was operating at peak efficiency until the day he rose punch-drunk from the couch, staggering, sloshing his words, comically swatting his head like a man trying to ward off a swarm of bees.

Stroke. Then another before the EMTs arrived, the one that nearly killed him. Now he mumbles and mewls like the Tin Man pre — lube job, and Billy makes not the slightest effort to understand. Kathryn understands him, and their mother, Denise, and Patty, who drove from Amarillo with her toddler son, Brian, just to spend these two nights and one day with Billy, she mostly understands. Not that Ray tries to talk except where his personal needs are concerned, and therein lies the family secret which dare not speak its name. It wasn’t that he screwed around during all those years of keeping an apartment, which he had to do, keep an apartment that is; as the morning DJ for a succession of Metroplex radio stations no way he could handle the daily commute from Stovall, and Stovall was where they chose to raise the kids, steeped in the neighborly virtues and core American values of small-town Texas. Plus Denise had a pretty good job there, so the arrangement was he’d stay in the city during the week working his fingers to the bone, and would return home in triumph on the weekends. Extramarital sex wasn’t the terrible family secret, neither the screwing around nor the evidence thereof, the surfacing after his stroke of the alleged teenage daughter and the lawsuit for acknowledgment of paternity and child support. A sorry business to be sure, but no secret, no tiptoeing around the smirch to family honor. But that other shame they never spoke of, thrilling though it was. You felt bad about feeling good, was what the shame amounted to. Ray wouldn’t — couldn’t? — talk:! The famous silver tongue was finally stilled, and what a relief and secret joy that was for everyone.

“Some days I think I’m living in a bad country song,” Kathryn said, and she told Billy about walking into the den one day to find Ray whimpering on the floor, stuck between the coffee table and the sofa. He’d clearly been there awhile, judging from the dark stain across the front of his pants, and not ten feet away Denise sat at her desk paying bills and shuffling insurance forms. Mom! Kathryn cried. Don’t you see Dad lying there? Denise gave her husband a breezy glance. “Oh,” she said, turning back to the desk, “he’s okay. He’ll get up when he’s good and ready.”

Kathryn laughed when she finished the story. “I swear I think she’d let him die if I wasn’t around.”

You couldn’t please him, not if you happened to be his son, not even if you came home a national hero. There was a noisy happy scene when Billy walked in the door, his mother crying, his sisters laughing and crying, little Brian swinging among their knees and crying too, everyone lumped in a big sloppy blob of a hug. Ray was in the den watching TV. He glanced up when Billy entered, gave a noncommittal grunt, and turned back to the tube. Billy stood at parade rest and sized up the situation. Still dyeing your hair I see, he said, and indeed the old man’s brick of a pompadour was the glossy jet-black of a fresh oil spill. Nice boots, Billy went on, nodding at the brown ostrich quills, never creased. New? Ray cut him a look, eyes glittering with dangerously high IQ. Billy chuckled. He couldn’t help it. Still the dude with his Bible-black hair and prickly attention to grooming and dress, the pretty pink candies of his fingernails gleaming from a house-call manicure. He wasn’t tall, he had a pinched dirt-dauber sort of build and his sharp-featured face was just this side of handsome, but a certain class of woman had always gone for him. Waitresses, hairstylists, receptionists, the moment he opened his mouth they were hormone mush. Secretaries were a specialty; his own, others’. Much had been learned in the course of the lawsuit.

“Your chair’s looking all spiff. You get it waxed?”

Ray ignored him.

“Looks like a little Zamboni, anybody ever told you that?”

Still Ray didn’t react.

“So does it make that beeping sound when you put it in reverse?”

For dinner Denise served up a spectacular chicken tetrazzini feed. She’d had her hair done. She’d put on makeup. She wanted everything perfect, which Ray deftly sandbagged by cranking up the volume for Bill O’Reilly and chain-smoking through dinner. “It’s every daughter’s dream to die of secondhand smoke,” Kathryn wistfully crooned, then she turned to Billy and laughed. “Listen, if he could stick the whole pack in his mouth and smoke it all at once he would, nothing would make him happier.” Ray just ignored her. He pretty much ignored them all, and that night it struck Billy as never before how completely they were all bound up in one another. You can deny him, he thought, watching his father across the table. You can hate him, love him, pity him, never speak to or look him in the eye again, never deign even to be in his crabbed and bitter presence, but you’re still stuck with the son of a bitch. One way or another he’ll always be your daddy, not even all-powerful death was going to change that.

Denise waited on her husband’s every need, though she was never quick about it, Billy noticed, she seemed quite fine with him harrumphing a second and third time, and when she did get around to fetching, pouring, cutting, she performed with a multitasky air of distractedness, like she was watering plants while talking on the phone. She was sneaky. She had those passive-aggressive wiles. Her hair was an indeterminate washed-out chemical color, and most of the emotional muscle tone was gone from her face, though she was still capable of sad, skewed smiles from time to time, forcing the cheer like Christmas lights in the poor part of town. She strove mightily to keep the conversation upbeat, but family troubles kept leaking in around the edges. Money troubles, insurance troubles, medical-bureaucracy troubles, Ray-being-a-stubborn-pain-in-the-ass troubles. Halfway through the meal young Brian grew restless. “Hey!” Kathryn cried. “Hey, Briny, watch this!” She stuck two of Ray’s Marlboros in her nose and bought them five more minutes of peace.

“She called today,” Denise said, helping herself to a third glass of wine.

“Who called?” Billy asked, not knowing any better. His sisters hooted. “That hussy!” Kathryn answered with a berserk-debutante sort of shriek. She plucked the cigarettes from her nose and returned them to Ray’s pack. “Mother knows she’s not supposed to talk to her. Everything’s supposed to go through the lawyers.”

“Well,” Denise said, “she called. I can’t help it if the woman keeps calling my house.”

“Doesn’t mean you have to talk to her,” Patty pointed out.

“Well, I can’t just hang up. That would be rude.”

The girls yelped. “That woman,” Kathryn began, and had to pause for a fit of dry-heave laughs, “that woman had an affair with your husband, and you can’t be rude? Ye gods, Mom, she did your old man for eighteen years, they had a kid together for Christ’s sake. Be rude, please. Like that’s the least you could do.”

Billy wanted to point out that Ray was sitting right here — as if the situation called for a certain delicacy? But this was how they did, apparently, the women talked about and around him as if discussing the price of bleach, and Ray, for his part, might as well have been deaf for all the notice he took. He kept his eyes on O’Reilly and worked his fork with a fist grip, like little Brian.

“Mom,” said Patty, “next time she calls, you need to tell her your lawyer said you can’t talk to her.”

“I do, I tell her every time. But she keeps calling anyway.”

“So hang up on the bitch!” Kathryn cried, cackling, widening her eyes at Billy. See? See what a bunch of lunatics we are?

“I don’t know what difference it makes,” Denise answered. “We might as well talk, I mean, it can’t do any harm, it’s not like either of us has any money the other could take. ‘I’ve got bills,’ she says, ‘how’m I supposed to raise this child? What’m I gonna do about sending her to college?’ Tell me about it, I say, I’m in the same boat as you. If you can find any money you’re more than welcome to it, just take his medical bills too.”

Kathryn was laughing. “Oh come on, Mom, say it. Say it! She can take him too!”

What was soothing and not something Billy had even anticipated was the pleasure of masturbating in his old room. He walked in and all the old associations mugged him, the twin beds with their plain blue bedspreads, the plastic sports trophies lined up across his dresser, the faint musk of adolescence lingering in the air like the loamy smell of last year’s mulch. He tossed his duffel on the bed, shut the door to change clothes, and boom, the Pavlovian response reared its angry head below. He was done in ninety seconds so it wasn’t like he kept anybody waiting, then next was the pleasing discovery that his old shirts were tight from all the muscle he’d packed on, his size 30 blue jeans slack through the waist. That night he had another j.o. session after turning in, then again first thing in the morning, and each time with this relaxed mood of easy reconnection, as if a fond former girlfriend had welcomed him back with open arms. What a luxury not to have to meet your masculine needs in some stinking horror of a port-a-potty, or even worse in a hardpan Ranger grave out in the field with mortal enemies all about and always, always, always some torment of nature with which to contend, bugs, rain, wind, dust, extremes of temperature, no misery too small for such a small thing as a man. So give it up for America, yes! And God shed His grace on thee, where a boy can grow up having a room of his own with a door that locks and a bottomless stash of Internet porn.

“Nice to be home,” he said at breakfast, which was Cheerios, bacon and eggs, raisin-cinnamon toast, orange juice, coffee, and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. For lunch there would be homemade split-pea soup, Waldorf salad, fried bologna sandwiches, and warm brownies. For dinner, a slow-cooked pot roast with carrots, potatoes, and scallions, braised brussels sprouts, a citrus congealed salad, and double-fudge chocolate cake with Blue Bell ice cream. Denise had taken the day off from work, “this special day” she kept saying at breakfast, which Kathryn echoed in swoony Hallmark tones, then Ray tumped the coffeepot and placidly motored into the den, leaving the mess for everyone else to clean up. As they hurtled around the kitchen with rags and paper towels, the Fox News theme came thundering from the den.

“Does he watch that all day?” Billy asked. His mother and sisters turned to him with long-suffering eyes. Welcome to our world.

After breakfast Billy took his little nephew out to play. It was a mellow fall morning, the blue sky-dome stretched high and tight with that sweet winesap smell in the air, the honeyed, vaguely melancholy scent of vegetable ferment and illegal leaf burns. Billy figured they were good for ten, maybe fifteen minutes before he, Billy, was bored out of his mind, but half an hour later they were still at it. Based on his highly limited experience with small children, Billy had always regarded the pre-K set as creatures on the level of not-very-interesting pets, thus he was unprepared for the phenomenal variety of his little nephew’s play. Whatever came to hand, the kid devised some form of interaction with it. Flowers, pet and sniff. Dirt, dig. Cyclone fence, rattle and climb, grit links between teeth. Squirrels, harass with feebly launched sticks. “Why?” he kept asking in his sweetly belling voice, its tone as pure as marbles swirled around a crystal pail. Why him wun up the twee? Why him nest up theah? Why him gadder nuts? Why? Why? Why? And Billy answering every question to the best of his ability, as if anything less would disrespect the deep and maybe even divine force that drove his little nephew toward universal knowledge.

What to call it — the spark of God? Survival instinct? The souped-up computer of an apex brain evolved from eons in the R&D of natural selection? You could practically see the neurons firing in the kid’s skull. His body was all spring and torque, a bundle of fast-twitch muscles that exuded faint floral whiffs of ripe pear. So much perfection in such a compact little person — Billy had to tackle him from time to time, wrestle him squealing to the ground just to get that little rascal in his hands, just your basic adorable thirty-month-old with big blue eyes clear as chlorine pools and Huggies poking out of his stretchy-waist jeans. So is this what they meant by the sanctity of life? A soft groan escaped Billy when he thought about that, the war revealed in this fresh and gruesome light. Oh. Ugh. Divine spark, image of God, suffer the little children and all that — there’s real power when words attach to actual things. Made him want to sit right down and weep, as powerful as that. He got it, yes he did, and when he came home for good he’d have to meditate on this, but for now it was best to compartmentalize, as they said, or even better not to mentalize at all.

Patty emerged from the house, shading her eyes against the sun. She took a seat on a lawn chair at the edge of the patio.

“You guys having fun?”

“You bet.” Billy was rolling Brian around as if breading a fish filet, coating his sweater with crunchy brown leaves. “He’s an amazing little guy.”

Patty snuffled a laugh around the cigarette she was lighting. Former hell-raiser, high school dropout, teenage bride; in her midtwenties she seemed to have slowed down enough to start thinking about it all.

“He sure doesn’t lack for energy,” Billy called.

“Briny’s got two speeds, fast and shut off.” Her lips produced a tight funnel of smoke.

“How’s Pete?”

“Fine,” she said, a bit wearily it seemed. Her husband, Pete, worked the oil rigs around Amarillo. “Still crazy.”

“Is that good?”

She just smiled and looked away. In Billy’s memory she was always so lithe and bold; now she was packing saddlebags on her hips and thighs, spare tubes on her upper arms. With the extra weight had come an almost palpable air of apology.

“When do you go back?”

“Saturday.”

“You ready?”

“Well.” Billy gave Brian a last roll, and stood. “I guess I’d just as soon stay here.”

Patty laughed. “That sounds like an honest answer.” Billy walked over and sat on the low patio wall near her chair. Brian remained where Billy left him, lying flat on his back, staring up at the sky. Patty cut her brother a shy look. “How does it feel to be famous?”

Billy shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

“All right then, sort of famous. A lot more famous than the rest of us’ll ever be.” She had a taste of her cigarette, tapped off the ash. “You know, you sort of surprised a lot of people around here. I don’t think this was what they were expecting when they put you up in front of that judge.”

“I know I didn’t have the best reputation around here. But I wasn’t the worst fuckup in my grade.”

She laughed.

“Or maybe it’s just…”

“What.”

“I just hated school so much, hated everything about it. I’m starting to think that was what was fucked up, a lot more than me? Keeping us locked up all day, treating us like children, making us learn a lot of shit about nothing. I think it made me sort of crazy.”

Patty chuckled, a low gunning of the sinuses. “Well, I guess you showed them. What you did over there—”

Billy hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and looked away.

“—that was something. And we’re all really proud of you, your family. But I guess you already know that.”

Billy tipped his head toward the house. Out here the roar of the TV was an underwater growl. “Not him.”

“No, him too. He just doesn’t know how to show it.”

“He’s an asshole,” Billy said, lowering his voice for Brian’s sake.

“That too,” Patty acknowledged pleasantly. “You notice I was never much interested in hanging around the house? Mainly I just feel sorry for him now. But then I don’t have to live with him, do I.” She shrugged, examined her cigarette. “You heard the latest? About the house?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s kind of fucked.” She did that gunning chuckle again, a nervous habit. Billy wished she’d stop. Out in the yard Brian was sweeping his arms and legs back and forth, making leaf angels.

“Mom wants to take a loan out on the house. She says there’s a hundred, hundred ten equity in it, she wants to use that to pay down the medical bills. Kathryn looked into it and she’s like, no way, you can file for bankruptcy and wipe out most of the medical bills, plus you get to keep the house. But if she does the equity loan and then can’t make the payments, she and dad lose the house. And even with the money from the equity loan, they’re still gonna owe a ton of medical bills.”

A ton. Define ton. Billy was afraid to ask. Random neighborhood sounds came their way — a dog barking, a car door slamming somewhere, a stack of two-by-fours clattering to the ground.

“What do you think she should do?”

“No-brainer, dude. File for bankruptcy and keep the house.”

“So why won’t she?”

“Because she’s worried what everybody else might think. And Kat and me are like, who gives a flyer what people think, you can’t gamble the house.” Patty crushed her cigarette against the patio wall. “You know what Idis McArthur told her after church one day?”

“No.”

“She said the reason our family’s had so many problems is because we didn’t pray hard enough.”

“Well, isn’t that special.”

“It’s a sick little town,” Patty agreed.

“Hey”—Kathryn poked her head out the door—“anybody want a beer?”

They did, though until that moment they hadn’t realized. For the rest of the morning his mother and sisters kept asking him what he wanted to do. See a movie? Drive around? Go out to eat? But this was enough, just chilling on a warm Indian-summer day, a sweet abeyance in the golden tone of the light and nothing to do but sit in lawn chairs or sprawl on blankets and let the morning lazily take its course. Two years ago Billy couldn’t have done this, the very notion of family time would have sent him running down the street tearing off his clothes. I am a changed man, Billy solemnly told himself. The person you see before you is not the person you were. Maybe it’s age, he thought, leaning back on his blanket, watching the sun do its stately pinwheel through the trees. Or maybe not so much a function of calendar days as the way Iraq aged you in dog years, and how with that kind of time under your belt you could bide here in the company of your mother and sisters and somewhat hyper little nephew and be, if not exactly calm, then still. Taking it slow and letting it be what it would be. Perhaps this was what came of being a soldier in Iraq, and the farther perspective war brought to things.

He had a beer now and then, nothing major. Ray stayed inside with the TV and that was fine with everybody, though whenever he wanted something, which was often, he’d wheel to the storm door and thump the glass until Denise or Patty or Kathryn rose to serve his needs. Worse than an infant, Kathryn observed, and when Patty pointed out no diapers were involved, Kathryn said, Don’t give him any ideas. A few of the neighbors got word of Billy’s visit and dropped by with cakes and casseroles, as if there’d been a death in the family. Mr. and Mrs. Wiggins from church. Opal George from across the street. The Kruegers. We are so proud. We always knew. So brave, so blessed, so honored. Edwin! I yelled, come quick! Billy Lynn’s on TV and he’s taking out a whole mess of al-Qaedas! Nice people but they did go on, and so fierce about the war! They were transformed at such moments, talking about war — their eyes bugged out, their necks bulged, their voices grew husky with bloodlust. Billy wondered about them then, the piratical appetites in these good Christian folk, or maybe this was just their way of being polite, of showing how much they appreciated him. So he smiled his modest hero’s smile and waited for them to leave so he and his sisters could go back to drinking beer. After her third of the morning — she was keeping pace with Billy — Kathryn pranced out of the house with his Purple Heart pinned over her left breast and the Silver Star pinned over her right, the medals flopping around like stripper’s tassels. Billy and Patty howled, but their mother was not amused. “What? Oh, these?” Kathryn answered in a ditzy coo when Denise asked just what she thought she was doing. “Why, Mother, I’m merely displaying the family jewels.” Denise pronounced the whole thing indecent and ordered Kathryn to return the medals to Billy’s room, but she was still sporting the hardware when Mr. Whaley stopped by, and it was worth virtually any amount of money to see this eminence’s eyes bug out at the sight of Kathryn, not just the medals riding high on her proud perky breasts but the whole tanned, taut, leggy length of her.

Eh-hem. Ah ha. Ha ha. He was Denise’s boss so there was some awkwardness about imbibing in the A.M., but Whalers was a sport and pretended not to notice. Balding, liver-spotted, about forty pounds overweight, with a wardrobe that ran to checked blazers and stay-pressed slacks, he was what passed for money in Stovall, the founder of the moderately prosperous oilfield-services company where Denise had worked as office manager for fifteen years. “Miz Lynn’s the real boss around here,” he liked to tell visitors, laughing affectionately in her direction. “I just try to stay out of the way and let her run the place.” They served him a Diet Coke and moved the chairs into the shade just off the patio. Denise and Patty sat on either side of their guest, while Billy took a perch on the patio wall. Kathryn lolled like a lioness on a nearby beach towel. Brian was somewhere in the house, ostensibly in the care of his chain-smoking grandfather.

“Your mother tells me you’re home just for today,” said Mr. Whaley.

“That’s correct, sir.” It was a challenge, maintaining eye contact while spuming your beer-breath off to the side.

“No rest for the weary, eh.” Mr. Whaley chuckled. “Where’ve they sent you so far?”

Billy rattled off the cities. Washington, Richmond, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Minneapolis — St. Paul, Columbus, Denver, Kansas City, Raleigh-Durham, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay, Miami, and practically every one, as Sergeant Dime pointed out, happened to lie in an electoral swing state. Though Billy didn’t say this.

Mr. Whaley took a dainty sip of Coke. “What’s your reception been like?”

“People’ve been really nice everywhere we go.”

“I’m not surprised. Listen, the vast majority of Americans strongly support this war.” Whenever Whaley’s gaze happened to land on Kathryn, he practically fainted with the effort of tearing his eyes away. “Nobody wants to go to war, goodness sakes, but people know sometimes it’s necessary. This terror thing, I think the only way to deal with that type of agenda is to go straight to the source and rip it out by the roots. Because that crowd’s not going away by themselves, am I right?”

“They’re extremely committed, a lot of them,” Billy replied. “They don’t back down.”

“There you go. Either we fight them over there or we fight them over here, that’s the way most Americans see it.”

Denise and Patty nodded with bovine agreeableness. Kathryn, meanwhile, had sat up straight and pulled her knees to her chest; she was following the conversation with real attention, looking from Billy to Mr. Whaley as if their talk contained a code she was trying to break. Heroes, Whaley said. Iraq. Freedoms. Gaining freedoms to make our own freedoms more secure. Then he asked about the movie deal, sagely nodding as Billy explained their progress to date.

“You’ll want a lawyer to take a look before you sign anything.”

“Yes sir.”

“I can fix you up with my firm in Fort Worth, if you like.”

“That would be great. I’d sure appreciate that, sir.”

“Son, it’s the least I can do. You’ve made us all proud, not just your family and friends but all of us here, the entire community. You’ve given this whole town a tremendous boost.”

Billy summoned his most modest chuckle. “I don’t know about that, sir.”

“Listen, everybody’s so damn proud of you, pardon my French, if word got out you were home today there’d be cars lined up from here to the airstrip. Oh yes!” he cried in a playfully ferocious voice. “Now, we didn’t know soon enough to get it together this time, but next time you’re home we want to have a parade in your honor. I already spoke with Mayor Bond and he’s on board, he talked with the city council and they’re on board. We want Stovall to honor you in the way you deserve.”

“Thank you, sir. I do appreciate that.”

“No, son, thank you. What you’ve done just says so much about who we are—”

“He has to go back,” Kathryn broke in.

Everyone turned to her.

“To Iraq,” she added, as if this wasn’t entirely clear.

“Yes,” said Mr. Whaley in mournful tones, “your mother told me that.”

“So they’re gonna get another shot at him.”

“Kathryn!” Denise scolded.

“Well it’s true! If it’s supposed to be this great Victory Tour then why can’t he just stay home?”

Mr. Whaley’s voice was gentle. “It’s fine young men like your brother who are going to lead us to victory.”

“Not if they’re dead.”

“Kathryn!” Denise cried again. Billy felt like an innocent bystander in all this. It wasn’t his place to say one way or the other.

“We will pray every day for Billy’s safe return,” said Mr. Whaley, soothing as the doctor with the best bedside manner. “Just as we pray for all our troops, we want them all to come home safely.”

“Oh God, he’s going to pray,” Kathryn snarled to herself, then she screamed, a guttural urrrrrrggggghhhhh like an in-sink disposal backing up. “I’m losing my mind out here,” she cried, and like a sword being drawn from its sheath she rose in one swift motion and stalked toward the house. The rest of the group sat quietly for several moments, waiting for the area turbulence to subside.

“That young lady’s been through a lot,” Mr. Whaley ventured. Denise started to apologize, but he waved her off. “No, no, she’s had to deal with so much in her young life. When’s her next surgery?”

“February,” said Denise, “then one more after that. The doctors say that ought to be the last.”

“She’s made a remarkable recovery, that’s for sure. The past year hasn’t been easy on the Lynns, has it, and with Billy doing all he’s doing overseas, I know that makes it a special sacrifice. And Billy, if it’ll ease your mind any, I want you to know you’ve got a standing offer to come work for me when you’re done with your military service. All you’ve got to do is say the word.”

Now there was a depressing thought, although Billy could see how it might come to that, assuming best-case scenario he made it home with all his limbs and faculties intact. He’d go to work for Whalers hauling oil-field pipe and blowout protectors all over the wind-scrappled barrens of Central Texas, busting his ass for slightly more than minimum wage and shitty benefits.

“Thank you, sir. I may be taking you up on that.”

“Well, I just want you to know you’ve got options here. I’d be honored to have you on our team.”

Billy had been trying to avoid a certain thought, a realization born of his recent immersion in the swirl of limos, luxury hotels, fawning VIPs; he knew intuitively the thought would bring him down and so it did, mushrooming into awareness despite all best efforts. Mr. Whaley was small-time. He wasn’t rich, he wasn’t particularly successful or smart, he even exuded a sad sort of desperate shabbiness. Mr. Whaley will return to the forefront of Billy’s mind on Thanksgiving Day as he hobs and nobs at the Cowboys game with some of Texas’s wealthiest citizens. The Mr. Whaleys of the world are peons to them, just as Billy is a peon in the world of Mr. Whaley, which in the grand scheme of things means that he, Billy, is somewhere on the level of a one-celled protozoan in a vast river flowing into the untold depths of the sea. He’s been having many such existential spasms lately, random seizures of futility and pointlessness that make him wonder why it matters how he lives his life. Why not wild out, go off on a rape-and-pillage binge as opposed to abiding by the moral code? So far he’s sticking to the code, but he wonders if he does just because it’s easier, requires less in the way of energy and balls. As if the bravest thing he ever did — bravest plus truest to himself — was the ecstatic destruction of pussy boy’s Saab? As if his deed on the banks of the Al-Ansakar Canal was a digression from the main business of his life.

Mr. Whaley left. Kathryn did not appear for lunch. After the meal, Ray and Brian went down for naps, Denise and Patty went to the store, and Billy had a relaxing jack-off session in the friendly confines of his room. Then he repaired to the backyard and laid himself down on a blanket in the sun. He dozed. Dreams came and went like fish drifting through the wheelhouse of an old shipwreck. He stirred, took off his shirt so that the sun would toast his chest acne, and dozed again. He dreamed in paisleys now, big atom-bomb swirls of biomorphic colors that presently resolved into a parade. His parade. He was in it yet watching from slightly above, and he was happy, safe, he’d made it back home. No worries! It was a sunny winter day and everyone was bundled up except for the strippers riding by on floats, blazingly naked but for G-strings and long evening gloves. A high school band stomped by, trombones and trumpets flashing in the sun, then there was Shroom far back in the crowd, his pale onion of a head sticking out of the general mass. His eyes met Billy’s and he laughed, raised a big Bud Light cup in salute. Yo, Shroom! Shroom! Get your ass up here! He kept yelling at Shroom to join him on the float, but Shroom seemed happy where he was, content to be just another face in the crowd. Shroom. Fuck. Get up here, man. The dream contained awareness that Shroom was dead so there was the huge anxiety of an opportunity missed, the parade moving on and Billy’s float being carried with it, this ridiculous paper barge coasting down the river of life and the banks lined with all these thousands of cheering folks who — dear Jesus! terrifying thought! — were they all as dead as Shroom?

His sleep broke with that throb of panic, a desperate lunge into waking. Someone was leaning over him, breathing in his face. He tipped open one eye to find Kathryn staring down at him through big Angelina Jolie — style sunglasses.

“You better be careful over there,” she murmured darkly. “If anything happens to you, I’m going to kill myself.”

Hunfh. He opened both eyes, lifted his head. His sister was stretched out beside him on a beach towel, propped on an elbow with her frontage facing him. She was also, he couldn’t help noticing, wearing a bikini, the sight of which cracked his lungs even if she was his sister. Despite the divot in her cheek she was undeniably hot: long, tan legs, an amply palmable rack, tummy flat and golden-brown as the most perfect pancake.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I’m the reason you’re over there.”

“Oh, right.” He closed his eyes and let his head drop back. “Your bad, getting whacked by that Mercedes. Getting dumped by whatsisface, yeah, thanks. Thanks for getting me in the shit, Kat.”

She snickered, a breathy whiffling like wind through a microphone. “Yeah, but anyway. Sorry, dawg.”

“Not a problem,” he mumbled, sounding sleepier than he was. Though if he kept his eyes shut sleep would come. Kathryn rustled about, doing female preening sorts of things.

“Mom’s pissed at me,” she said.

“Imagine that.”

“Whalers, gimme a break, a fucking parade. Those guys are talking about a parade, and you might die.”

Billy had to laugh. It was refreshing, having someone put it right out there. Living at home as she had for the past sixteen months, enduring all she’d endured by way of health and family troubles and getting dumped by p. boy, Kathryn had undergone drastic and interesting changes. For one thing, her trials had burned off all her baby fat, her tendency to pudge toward the rounder, gentler line of wholesome Christian voluptuousness. Now she sported the lean, rangy frame of a girl bartender in some kick-ass honky-tonk, if such places even existed anymore. A glossy track of keloid tissue looped over her shoulder and down her back like the dangling tail of a coil of rope. Her face was “eighty-seven percent” recovered, she told him, utterly deadpan as she emphasized that “eighty-seven percent” like a dimwit sportscaster flogging statistics. She loved that her orthopedic surgeon’s name was Dr. Stiffenbach, whom she endowed with a jaw-breaking German accent. “High ham Dock-terr Shhhtiffen-bock, jah! You vill do dese exercises for your healdth, jah!” She called Billy’s commander in chief “idiot-head,” as in “What was it like meeting idiot-head?” which had provoked scolding shushes from their mother. “Well he is!” Kathryn protested. “He’s got the brains of a cicada!” Billy’s sweet, beautiful, studious, supremely square sister who’d always been so reverent toward authority, who thought only good clean all-American thoughts and never cursed or denigrated anyone, she’d become a punchy hell on wheels.

She reached into the cooler by her side and brought out two Tecate beers. “You miss drinking over there?” she asked, handing one to Billy.

“At first. But after a while, not so much.” He popped the top and savored that happiest of fizzy sounds. “There’s days, though, you’d give about anything for one.”

“No shit. Listen, I think drinking’s way underrated in our society, like for its therapeutic values? Lets you bust out from time to time, take a little vacation from yourself. It’s hard living in your own head twenty-four/seven.”

“You sort of go insane.”

“Explains a lot, eh, all those preachers getting caught doing hookers. I just hope I never have a drinking problem, then I’d have to quit.”

They drank. A healthful sense of well-being enveloped them.

“So tell me about the Victory Tour.”

“The tour. Huh. Well, it’s kind of a blur.”

“Then just tell me about the groupies.”

He laughed but could feel himself flushing from the shoulders up. A puritanical mood came over him. “Haven’t been any groupies,” he muttered.

“Lie.”

“No lie.”

“You are a lying sackful of it. Listen, boy, you better be out there hitting it! Like, get out there and get some for me.”

“Kathryn, stop.”

“The truth, dude, I’m going a little crazy in this burg.”

“You’ll be gone soon enough.”

“Soon, maybe, yeah, but not soon enough. Not one decent guy in this freakin’ town, believe me, I checked. Some nights I’m like, whatever, maybe I’ll drive over to Sonic and hit on the high school boys, like, hey bubba, come take a ride with me! Once you’ve had a chick with a scar on her face you never go back.”

“Kathryn,” Billy pleaded.

“I should be graduated by now. I could be making sixty thousand a year someplace.”

“You’ll get there.”

“Yes, I will,” she said firmly.

“You’re getting there,” Billy amended.

“If I don’t go crazy first.”

Her last two surgeries were scheduled for spring. In January she’d start a couple of classes at community college, which she had to do, otherwise the compassionate bankers at College Fund Inc. would start charging penalty interest on her student loans. “You know what’s funny,” she said, “everybody around here’s such a major conservative till they get sick, get screwed over by their insurance company, their job goes over to China or whatever, then they’re like, ‘Oooooh, what happened? I thought America was just the greatest country ever and I’m such a good person, why is all this terrible shit happening to me?’ And I was one of ’em, man. Just as stupid as the rest. I never thought anything bad would happen to me, or if it did there was a system that would make it all right.”

“Maybe you didn’t pray hard enough.”

She coughed up a laugh. “Yeah, that must be it. The power of prayer, dawg.”

They drank. Kathryn touched the cold beer can to her cheeks, her neck, her navel, each touch triggering starbursts in Billy’s brain. He asked what their mother planned to do about the home equity loan.

Kathryn frowned. “Who knows what that woman’s going to do. She’s not rational, Billy. She’s not dealing with the facts. Look, don’t you worry about the damn loan. Not your life, not your problem, or mine either, really. She and dad are gonna do what they’re gonna do, and we can’t stop them.”

“How much do we owe on the medical?”

“We? You mean they. Or I suppose me too, if you want to get technical.” She consulted her beer. “Four hundred thousand, give or take. Bills keep coming in from stuff they did a year ago.”

Four. Hundred. Thousand. It was like God appearing in all his nuclear glory, omnipotent, all-consuming, incomprehensible.

“No way.”

Kathryn shrugged. The numbers bored her.

“Not your prob, Bill. Let it go. And anything you get from your movie deal, keep it. Don’t be blowing it trying to bail those two out.” When Billy said nothing, she laughed and rolled onto her stomach, her bottom smartly rising from the small of her back like an island appearing on a tropical sea.

“You know what Dad bought that girl when she turned sixteen?”

“What girl?”

“Come on, Billy, our sister. Half sister.”

“No, I don’t know what he bought her when she turned sixteen.”

“A damn car.”

Billy swallowed, turned away. He could be cool about this.

“Mustang GTO, dawg, right off the lot. This was before he got fired. But still.”

Billy could feel the air hardening in his chest. “New?” He hated that his voice cracked.

“Total cherry.” She laughed. “So don’t be a sap. Anything you do for him or Mom, they’ll just dump on it. Look after yourself and let them do whatever they’re going to do.”

Billy managed to refrain from asking the color of the car. “Well.” He reached beyond the blanket and pulled up a twist of dry grass. “It’s not like I’ve got anything to give them anyway.”

Kathryn brought out two more beers. Billy’s philosophy was, any buzz you caught during daylight hours was a bonus; that time didn’t count against your total allotment here on earth, therefore the daytime buzz was that much sweeter. And today, what could be more perfect than lying in the sun, drinking beer with an extremely hot blonde in a bikini? The only problem, of course, being that the girl was his sister, but what was the harm in pretending for a few short hours? The afternoon took on a spangling beer-buzz glow. He didn’t mind that Kathryn probed him about life “at the front,” as she called it. How’s the food? How’s your quarters? The Iraqis, what are they like, and do they all hate us yet? She kept touching him, tapping his shoulder and squeezing his arm, pushing her bare feet up against his blue-jean legs. All the contact simultaneously sharpened his senses and made him passive, relaxed, as if an especially fine drug was kicking in.

“What’s gonna happen when you get back?”

He shrugged. “The same, I guess. Patrol, eat, sleep. Then get up and do it again.”

“Do you dread it?”

He pretended to consider. “It doesn’t matter what I feel about it. I’ve gotta go, so I’m going.”

She was lying on her side with her head propped on an elbow. A small gold cross lay on the swell of one of her breasts, a tiny mountaineer going for the top.

“How do the other guys feel?”

“The same. I mean, look, nobody wants to go back. But it’s what you signed up for, so you go.”

“Then let me ask you this, do you guys believe in the war? Like is it good, legit, are we doing the right thing? Or is it all really just about the oil?”

“Kathryn, Jesus. You know I don’t know that.”

“I’m just asking what you believe, what you personally think. It’s not a quiz, dude, I’m not looking for the big objective answer here. I just want to know what’s going on in your head.”

All right. Well. Since she asked. He found he was strangely grateful that someone had.

“I don’t think anybody knows what we’re doing over there. I mean, it’s weird. It’s like the Iraqis really hate us, you know? Just right there in our own AO, we’re building a couple of schools, we’re trying to get their sewer system up and running, we bring in tankers of drinking water every day and do a meal program for the kids, and all they wanna do is kill us. Our mission is to help and enhance, right? And these people are living in shit, literal shit, their government did nothing for them all these years, but we’re the enemy, right? So what it ends up coming down to is survival, I guess. You just pull in, you aren’t thinking about accomplishing anything, you just wanna get through the day with all your guys alive. So then you start to wonder why we’re even over there.”

Kathryn heard him out. She set her jaw.

“All right, how about this. What if you didn’t go back.”

He flinched. Then he laughed. No. No way.

“I’m serious, Billy. What if you said nope, no thanks, been there, done that, you think they’d have the guts to come after you? The big hero and all? Think of the headlines, ‘Hero Staying Home, Says War Sucks.’ You’ve got major cred, it’s not like anybody’s going to say it’s because you’re scared.”

“But I am scared. Everybody’s scared.”

“You know what I mean, like scared scared. Like coward scared, like if you never went to begin with. But with everything you’ve done nobody’s going to doubt you.” Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a website she’d found that listed how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, four educational deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh, 4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O’Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the “do not volunteer” box as to service overseas.

“You see where I’m going with this?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I’m just saying, those people want a war so bad, they can fight it themselves. Billy Lynn’s done his part.”

“Kat, it just doesn’t matter. They did what they did. I’m doing what I’m doing. There’s no point in us trying…” Two fat tears seeped out from under her sunglasses, and he had to turn away.

“What about us, Billy, think about that. With everything this family’s been through, what do you think it’ll do to us if something happens to you?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

She paused long enough for him to want that one back.

“Billy, there’s a way to do this. There’s a group down in Austin, they help soldiers. They’ve got lawyers, resources, they know how to handle these things. I did some research, and it looks like they’re really good people. So if you decided… look, I’m just saying, you’d have some help with this.”

“Kathryn.”

“What?”

“I’m going.”

“Dammit!”

“I’ll be okay.”

“You don’t know that!”

She was so fierce. He was touched. Then he felt scared.

“I guess I don’t. But we get a lot more of them than they get of us. And they can’t get all of us.”

She began to weep. He put his arm around her shoulders and held her close in a brotherly, determinedly nonsexual way. She cried harder and rested her head on his shoulder. Her hair had a clean woody smell, with hints of spice like fennel or freshly rained-on ferns. There was something peaceful about her crying, some sort of music or psychic nourishment in the sound. Her tears dribbled across his chest like hatchling turtles. The last thing he remembered before falling asleep was that she’d gone inside to get some Kleenex, saying she’d be right back. He wasn’t even aware of falling asleep until being waked in the most unpleasant way by the whoom of the back door bursting open as if fireballed, blown out by a breaching charge, then the whhhhhhiiiiiiirrrrrrrr of the latest in assisted mobility systems. Son of a bitch! Heart going like a speed bag, eyes sparking tiny gigabytes of shock, Billy spun onto his belly, wrenching various small muscles in his back, and there was Ray buzzing across the patio. What the FOCK!!! Is that any way to wake a combat soldier? The startle reflex triggering a highly refined set of quick-response skills, i.e., had Billy happened to have his M4 handy, Ray would be a steaming pile of hamburger right about now.

Bastard, he probably meant to do it. He didn’t acknowledge his son or even glance Billy’s way, but Billy detected a faint smirk in the set of his mouth, a crimping of flesh at the corners of his lips. Ray motored down the ramp and into the yard. Billy felt sick from all the adrenaline jamming his system, but he scruffed up on one elbow and had a look around. Kathryn was gone. His mouth was skunky from all the pre-nap beers. The afternoon had turned overcast, the sun bleared by the clouds like a soap ball floating in a tub of dirty bathwater. Out in the yard Ray paused to light a cigarette. A real piece of work, that one, Billy mused. Highly intelligent and glib as hell, you couldn’t beat him in any argument. Never went to college but made a shit ton of money, back in the day. Ray snapped his lighter shut and trundled farther into the yard, his chair waddling over all the little bumps and rills. It had a sad lack of dignity when viewed from behind, as graceless in motion as a hippo’s backside, and the American flag decal stuck there dead center seemed like a cruel and tasteless joke, someone’s lame attempt at satire.

Billy leaned back on his elbows and watched his father. You’d think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing. For proof all you had to do was take a quick poll of Bravo. On Holliday’s last visit home before shipping out, his brother told him, I hope you fuckin’ die in Iraq. When Mango was fifteen his father cracked his skull with a monkey wrench, and Mrs. Mango’s comment was, So maybe now you’ll stop pissing your father off. Dime’s grandfather and one of his uncles were suicides. Lake’s mother was an OxyContin addict who’d done time, his father a dealer who ditto. When Crack was eleven years old his mother ran off with the assistant pastor of their church. Shroom, he barely had a family. A-bort’s father had been the deadbeat poster dad for the state of Louisiana, and Sykes’s father and brothers blew up their house cooking meth.

Yes, family was key, Billy decided. If you could figure out how to live with family then you’d gone a long way toward finding your peace, but for that, the finding, the figuring out, you needed a strategy. So where did you go for that? Age by itself didn’t do it for you, obviously. Maybe books, but they took so long, and in the meantime the thing was always coming at you. When violent animal forces were in play, who had the fucking time for books? The morning after 9-11 Ray was on the air advocating “nuclear cleansing” of certain Middle East capitals, playing “Bomb Bomb Iran” by Vince Vance and the Valiants and “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” Billy remembers thinking, Is this how it works? Terrible things had happened, which meant more and greater terrors were on the way, as if the process was not merely automatic, but absolute. Those days and weeks have since acquired an aura of prophecy in his life. Billy thinks he sensed the fatedness of it even then — war was coming and he was bound for the war, and some occult, irresistible father-son dynamic was at work to ensure that this was so. If the father loved the war, how could the son stay away? Not that love for the war would necessarily translate into love for the son.

Whhhhiiiirrrr, stop. Whhhhiiiirrrr, stop. What was he doing? Ray paused at the flowers growing along the fence, a stand of powder-blue puffballs on tall, skinny stems. Something blue mist, they were called — Billy had asked his mother that morning, after he and Brian counted seventeen monarch butterflies feeding on the blooms. All day the monarchs had been wobbling through the yard on their way south, pausing to snack on the something-blue-mist before continuing on their way to Mexico. Ray lit another cigarette and sat there smoking, watching the monarchs flutter around. Billy had never seen his father do such a thing, spend any amount of time in contemplation of nature. This was a man whose chief relation to the natural world was that of a carnivore toward his steak, but with him sitting there quietly observing the butterflies, Billy sensed, if not an opening, then some potential or possibility that threw him back on himself. It made him a little desperate, this feeling. If the opportunity came along, would he know what to do? If there could be some minor good between them and they lacked the skills to make it happen, well that would be a damn shame and maybe even tragic, given that this might be their final day together. Then the door banged open, boom, not so loud this time, and here came Brian trotting across the patio.

“Hey, Billy,” he chirped, so sweetly matter-of-fact that Billy had to smile. Brian jogged across the yard to Ray and climbed onto the back of the old man’s wheelchair. Ray smiled and wheeled the chair about, and they went rattling across the yard. “Make it jump!” Brian cried. Ray pulled back the joystick, then rammed it forward; the chair bucked, its front rising an inch off the ground. The thing did maybe three miles per hour, max, and Ray somehow juiced a wheelie out of it. Brian squealed and called for more, and off they went on a wide loop, popping and bucking, Ray gaming the chair for all it had while Brian hung on the back and laughed himself silly. Their loop gradually brought them around to Billy, and thinking about it later he will recall that he was smiling not just out of a general sense of pleasure, but in a specifically feeling way toward his father. In these later reflections, Billy will realize he’d been thinking he and Ray might have a Moment, and what he got instead was one of the great silent fuck-offs of all time. How exactly Ray did this Billy will never figure out, though it seemed to happen mostly in the eyes, in the cool, dismissive edge to their sidelong cut, that briefest of glances as the wheelchair tractored by. Some vast rejection was rendered in that moment, but Billy couldn’t describe it any better than as his father’s way of saying, This isn’t for you. You aren’t part of it, you don’t belong. Ray was keeping the Moment all to himself; he could make Brian love him whenever he wanted and none of the rest of them even deserved his effort.

All of which went to prove the point, that without a strategy you were a big fat target dangling out there, chum in the shark tank of family dynamics. At dinner that night Bill O’Reilly raged on the TV, Denise and the girls bickered about the home equity loan, Brian was tired and started acting like a little shit, the roast was overdone, Ray wouldn’t stop smoking, and Denise broke down crying because she wanted everything perfect and of course it couldn’t be. Mom, Billy said, laughing, putting his arms around her, plumbing reserves of serenity he didn’t know he had, Mom, don’t worry about it. I’m happy. I’m home. Everything’s cool. What was amazing was this actually seemed to help. His mother calmed down. Brian fell asleep in the high chair. Patty and Kathryn got the giggles and opened another bottle of wine, and Billy felt so much older than nineteen, as if blessed with wisdom beyond his years. Had the war done this? All that ever got talked about was how war was supposed to fuck you up, true enough but maybe not the whole truth. He tumbled into bed that night buzzed on chocolate cake and wine, closing his eyes with the satisfaction that disaster had been averted, something crucial salvaged. There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.

A limo would come for him at 0700, courtesy of some well-to-do patriot who either wished to remain anonymous or whose name Billy forgot. A limo. For him. Whatever. He slept poorly and woke hungover, his mouth fouled with a reechy copper scum out of all proportion to the wine he’d consumed. He knew this taste, knew what it meant — fear, loathing, and bad karma beyond the wire — but he still had enough sass for one last jack-off in the friendly confines, a comical momentousness attending the act as if this farewell shot was the historical equal of Troy Aikman’s final game at Texas Stadium. Folks, he’s at the forty! The thirty! He may go all the way! The twenty! The ten! The five! And… touchdown! Thus refreshed, he showered and shaved, got his kit together, made his bed, and placed his duffel by the front door. Then there was nothing left to do but face the family.

“Ya gonna miss me?” he crowed cheerfully as he entered the kitchen, but the women just stared at him, stricken. They were miserable. So was he, but if he showed it they would be more miserable yet. The kitchen windows seemed to have been laminated during the night, nothing in them but smooth unadulterated gray. Gusts of wind thumped the house like a bellows; hard little pellets of rain popped and rattled across the roof. The season’s first winter storm was pushing across the plains, the same front that would deliver snow and freezing rain by Thanksgiving Day.

“Where do you go next?” Patty asked. Billy’s sisters drank coffee and watched him eat. Denise was upright and mobile, a one-woman strike force for small kitchen tasks.

“Fort Riley, they’ve got a rally scheduled there. Then Ardmore. For, you know.” He glanced at their mother. “Then Dallas. I think.”

“The big game!” Kathryn mooed. “You gonna meet Beyoncé?”

“You know as much as me.”

“You will, dude, for sure. So don’t blow it. This’ll probably be your only chance to sweep her off her feet.”

“No doubt.”

“So, listen, start by telling her how nice she looks.”

“Kathryn, it’s Beyoncé. She doesn’t need me to tell her she’s hot.”

“Dude, women can never get enough of that stuff! What you wanna do is come at her like, ‘Bey, yo, you crushin’ it, girl, lookin’ all funky-fresh and fly, your hair so jump and everything, what say we hang after the game?’ Patty, wouldn’t it be so cool to have Beyoncé for a sister-in-law?”

“Very cool.”

“Guys, come on. I’m a grunt. She’s not going to have the time of day for me.”

“Bull hockey! A handsome young stud like yourself, a hero? She’s gonna be all over your junk!”

“Isn’t she dating that Jay-Z guy?” Patty asked.

Denise began to cry. She was wiping down counters and started weeping, the same way she might hum any old tune that happened into her head. Kathryn clicked her tongue as if angry, vexed. Patty’s eyes pinked up but she held it together. Just get through it, Billy told himself. Once he was in the car he’d be okay, but there was a lump in his throat the size of a charcoal briquette. This was worse than when he shipped out the first time, which surprised him; it should be easier the second time around. But it seemed like he had more to lose now, though what that was he couldn’t say. So there was that, whatever it was, plus this time he knew the nature of the gig he was going back to.

“Now, where is Ray,” Denise said vaguely, as if talking to herself might help. “Maybe one of us should…”

Kathryn and Patty glanced at each other, then looked to Billy. He shrugged. Ray’s presence did not seem essential to their happiness this morning. As if in answer to the logical follow-up, Brian padded into the kitchen in his footie pajamas, his cheeks plump and rosy with the fullness of sleep. He climbed into his mother’s lap and snuggled close, clinging like a baby koala bear in the bush.

You want some juice?

No.

Cereal?

No.

You just want to sit with Mommy for a while.

Yes.

His presence had the effect of settling everyone down. He stared and stared at Billy, not so much out of curiosity, it seemed, as in witness, as if channeling some ancient gravity. Billy’s beret in particular seemed to hold his attention. As long as he didn’t start with the whys they would be okay, Billy thought. Denise poured more coffee for him. Kathryn cleared away his plate. The clock on the microwave was two minutes faster than the stove clock, which was in turn a minute faster than the wall clock, and every time you looked at one you had to look at the others in a never-ending quest for congruity. It was awful, watching those clocks. One by one they sequenced to 7:00 and beyond, then Kathryn was hissing “shit” under her breath. From the kitchen they could look through the dining room and out the front window, where a black Lincoln Town Car was pulling into the driveway.

A small melee erupted. Kathryn took off down the hall for the front door. Denise turned to the sink and just bawled. Somehow Brian ended up in Billy’s arms, so he was right there in the middle when Billy hugged his weeping mother, Billy purposely blurring his senses as he leaned in because it was just too much, the crying, the bleakness, the whole tragic vibe, but at least Brian was there to muffle some of the shock. “Bye, Mom,” Billy whispered, then he was moving down the hall with Brian in his arms, Patty following so close she kept clipping his heels. Out in the driveway Kathryn was helping the driver load Billy’s gear in the trunk.

“Take care of yourself,” Patty said on the porch. She was a teary, phlegmy spongeball of hiccups and sobs. “Don’t do anything crazy. Just get your butt home.”

Billy took a last sniff of his nephew’s head, rich with notes of spring grass and warm homemade bread, and handed him back to Patty. A scumbled three-way hug ensued.

“You tell him,” Billy murmured to his sister in the clutch, “if I’m not around you tell him, I said don’t ever join the Army.”

Kathryn was waiting at the car. She was crying, and laughing at herself for crying, outdone by the sheer unmitigated suck of it all. Later he would recall the scrabbling action in her hug, as if she were sliding down a cliff face and clawing for purchase. She shut the door behind him and stepped back, then tossed off a windmilling cartoon salute. Billy could not have been more spent if he’d just run a marathon. It felt like organ failure, like his face was melting, but the car was backing down the driveway and the worst was over. Kathryn waved from the yard as the Town Car pulled away. Patty was waving from the porch with Brian slung to her hip, and behind them, thinned out by the glare of the storm door, Ray was watching from his chair. Billy cursed to himself and leaned back in his seat. The Town Car gathered speed. So his father made an appearance, what was he supposed to do with that?

“You want some music?” the driver asked. He was a heavyset black man, pushing sixty. A thick lip of flesh spilled over his suit collar.

Billy said no thanks. They went several blocks before the driver spoke again. “Hard on the families,” he said in a lilting preacher’s voice. “But something wrong if it weren’t, I guess.” He glanced at Billy in the rearview. “Sure you don’t want some music?”

Billy said he was sure.