Читать книгу Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk - Ben Fountain - Страница 11
ОглавлениеBY VIRTUE OF WHICH THE MANY BECOME THE ONE
SADDLING UP TO THE sumptuous buffet, Sykes keeps calling it “brunch” like this makes him some big-stick metrosexual stud until Dime finally tells him to shut, this is lunch, yo, or Thanksgiving dinner if you want to get technical about it, and indeed they are faced with a postcard-perfect orgiastic feed, no less than sixty linear feet of traditional and nouveau holiday fare glistening like an ad in a Sunday magazine supplement. Billy palms a clean plate off the stack and thinks he might be sick. It’s just too much for his hangover, all the mounds, slabs, sheets, hummocks, and hillocks of edible matter resembling a complex system of defensive earthworks, and it’s that thing-ness, the sheer molecular density on display, that gives him the lurch. He stands there swaying for a moment—will he lose it?—then his stomach asserts the primal need and growls.
“Load up, guys,” Dime tells them. “Then we’ll talk about how do the little people live.” With its establishment odors of gravy and furniture wax, this is clearly the game-day hangout for the country-club crowd. You pay ten bucks just to pass the door, then $40 plus tax and service for the meal—gratis for heroes, Josh says, to which Bravo answers troof—though the “club” isn’t much to look at, a rambling, low-ceilinged space with a bar at one end and at the other full-length windows overlooking the field. The light is a nerve-jangling palette of hards and softs, the rancid-butter mizzle of the overhead fixtures cut by the harsh silver glare from all those giant windows, a constant wrenching of visual tone and depth such that the patrons’ eyes never properly adjust. The carpet is coal-slurry gray, the furnishings a scuffed, faux-baronial mélange of burgundy vinyls and oxblood veneers reminiscent of a 1970s Holiday Inn. Clearly, all expense has been spared save for the bare minimum to keep a captive market from outright rebellion.
Billy gets how shitty the place makes him feel, the quick sink of depression in his gut, but he thinks it’s just an allergic reaction to rich people. He clenched the moment he walked in and felt the money vibe. He wanted to back right out of there. He wanted to punch someone. Rich people make him nervous for no particular reason, they just do, and standing by the hostess station in his kudzu-green class A’s Billy felt about as belonging here as a wino pissing his pants. But—surprise! As Bravo stood there waiting to be seated, the Stadium Club patrons rose as one and achieved a stately round of applause. Several of the nearby millionaires stepped over to shake hands, while farther back in the room a group of patriots, drunk from the sound of it, offered up a woozy ballpark cheer. The manager himself, a slender, oleaginous fellow with the unctuous patter of an undertaker murmuring pickup lines in a bar, showed them to their table, and in a way this was worse, having all these high-powered people looking at you. Billy felt his stride going wonky, his arms starting to flail, but a quick glance at Dime settled him down. Shoulders square, eyes forward, head tipped six degrees as if dignity was a shot glass you balanced on your chin—he assumed the Dime tilt, and immediately everything clicked into place.
Fake it till you make it, he reminds himself. This is how he’s survived Army life so far.
Josh sees to it that they’re served and seated, then announces he has to leave them for a short while.
“Dawg, you gotta eat,” A-bort says. “You’re getting skinnier just standing there.”
Josh laughs. “I’ll be okay.”
“When do we meet the cheerleaders?” Holliday wants to know.
“Soon,” Josh answers over Crack, who’s saying the hell with that, bring on Destiny’s Child, he wants some quality “facial” time with Beyoncé.
“They gonna give us some lap dances?” Day persists. Josh hesitates. “I’ll ask,” he says in perfect deadpan, and everybody haws. Josh. Jaaaaassssshhhhh. Jash is all right for a pussy boy. They are seated at a big circular table near the windows with an excellent view of the playing field, on which nothing much is happening at the moment. Dime allows them one Heineken with lunch, one, he says, glancing at Major Mac, who nods. Billy has made sure to sit next to Dime and Albert, because whatever they say he means to hear it. He knows he doesn’t know enough. He doesn’t know anything, basically, at least nothing worth knowing, the measure of worth at this point in his life being knowledge that quiets the mind and calms the soul. So he makes it his business to sit next to Dime, and where Dime sits, that’s the head of the table. Albert is to Dime’s right, then A-bort, Day, Lodis, Crack, Sykes, Major Mac, Mango, and finally, rounding off the circle, Billy. So how about a couple of place settings for Shroom and Lake? This is his private mental ritual at the start of group meals that he does in lieu of prayers. Another ritual: Never cross a threshold with your left foot leading. And others: Fasten body armor from the bottom up, do not start sentences with the letter W, don’t masturbate within six hours of a mission. Yet he’d adhered to all such tics and talismans on the day of the canal so maybe it doesn’t matter a damn that they stayed at the W Hotel in Dallas last night, or that said hotel featured an upscale club called, how fucking weird, the Ghost Bar. So many omens, so many signs and portents to read. It’s the randomness that makes your head this way, living the Russian-roulette life-style every minute of the day. Mortars falling out of the sky, random. Rockets, lob bombs, IEDs, all random. Once on OP Billy was pulling night watch and felt a sick little pop just off the bridge of his nose, which was, he realized as he tumbled backward, the snap of a bullet breaking the sound barrier as it passed. Inches. Not even that. Fractions, atoms, and it was all this random, whether you stopped at the piss tube this minute or the next, or skipped seconds at chow, or were curled to the left in your bunk instead of the right, or where you lined up in column, that was a big one. At first they were hitting the lead Humvee, then they switched to number two, then it was a toss-up between two, three, and four, then they went back to one, and don’t even talk about the never-ending mindfuck debate as to your odds in any particular seat inside the vehicle, on any given day it could be anything, anywhere. “You can dodge an RPG,” he said to a reporter a couple of days ago. He hadn’t meant to reveal such a fraught and intimate fact, and felt cheap, as if he’d divulged a shameful family secret, but there it was, you can dodge an RPG, that damn crazy thing lamely fluttering at you, spitting and smoking like a cheap Mexican firework, tttttthhhhhhhpppppfffffftttt-FOOOM! What he’d meant to say, been trying to say, is that it’s not a lie, sometimes it really happens in slow-motion time, his ultimate point being just how strange and surreal your own life can be. Lately he thinks he could have tapped it as it flew by, sent it spinning off to nowhere like thumping a balloon instead of merely dodging as it sputtered past on its way to making such a christfuck mess back there. What’s happening now isn’t nearly as real as that, eating this meal, holding this fork, lifting this glass, the realest things in the world these days are the things in his head. Lake, for instance. “Lake,” that’s all it takes to get this bleak little movie going, a night shot of, say, the berm road in pale moonlight, crickets cheeping, dogs barking faintly in the distance, the slow suck and gurgle of the nearby canal. So there is the berm road on a quiet night, then a slow tracking shot that peels off the road and gradually keys on something in the high grass. A leg. Two legs. Lake’s. Peaceful. Those crickets, the soft moonlight, the purring canal. As if waking from a long sleep, the legs begin to stir. Tentative at first, they move with a childlike air of sweetly baffled innocence, but eventually they rise, shake themselves off, and set off in search of the rest of Lake. It could be a Disney movie about a couple of household pets mistakenly left behind, for they are as brave as that, as trusting and loyal, how can they know they’re screwed from the start for Lake is six thousand miles and an ocean away? Not that these are appropriate thoughts for mealtime, but once these little movies get going in your head—
“Billy!” woofs Dime. “You’re flaking on me.”
“No, Sergeant. I’m just thinking about dessert.”
“Thinking ahead, good man. God-damn I trained them well.”
“They certainly can eat,” Albert observes. “Hey, guys, you can slow down. It’s not going anywhere.”
“It’s chill,” Dime answers. “Just keep your hands and feet away from their mouths and you won’t get hurt.”
Albert laughs. He is having only a mixed green salad and fizzy water, along with a barely touched “Cowboyrita” on the side. “I’m gonna miss you guys,” he tells them. “It’s been an experience getting to know you fine young men.”
“Come with us,” says Crack.
“Yeah, come to Iraq,” A-bort urges. “We’ll have some laughs.”
“No,” Holliday objects. “Albert gotta stay here and make us rich, ain’t that right, Albert.”
“That’s the plan,” Albert responds in a studiously mild voice, and there, Billy thinks, there it is in that soft deflation at the end, the almost imperceptible slackening of ego and effort that denotes the triage mode of the consummate pro. “I’d just get in the way,” Albert is saying, “plus I’m pretty much your classic pacifist twerp. Listen, the only reason I went to law school was to stay out of Vietnam, and lemme tell you guys, if my deferment hadn’t come through, I would’ve been on the bus for Canada that night.”
“It was the sixties,” Crack observes.
“It was the sixties, exactly, all we wanted was to smoke a lot of dope and ball a lot of chicks. Vietnam, excuse me? Why would I wanna go get my ass shot off in some stinking rice paddy just so Nixon can have his four more years? Screw that, and I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. All the big warmongers these days who took a pass on Vietnam, look, I’d be the last person on earth to start casting blame. Bush, Cheney, Rove, all those guys, they just did what everybody else was doing and I was right there with ’em, chicken as anybody. My problem now is how tough and gung-ho they are, all that bring-it-on crap, I mean, Jesus, show a little humility, people. They ought to be just as careful of your young lives as they were with their own.”
“Albert,” says Mango, “you should run for something. Run for president.”
Albert laughs. “I’d rather die. But thanks for the sentiment.” The producer is clearly enjoying himself, a smiling, avuncular presence not so much slumped in his chair as taking full advantage of it, as comfortably shored against gravity’s downdraft as Jabba the Hut on his custom throne. “Why’s he fucking calling us?” Crack asked when Albert first got in touch, after a quick Internet search confirmed that he was what he said he was, a veteran Hollywood producer with three Best Picture Oscars from the seventies and eighties, plus the distinction of having produced Fodie’s Press and Fold, the biggest money-losing film in the history of Warner Bros. “It was that year’s Ishtar,” he likes to say, laughing, wearing the flop like a badge of honor, for only an A-list player could engineer that kind of legendary bust, and anyway the third Oscar came a couple of years later, so he was redeemed. The midcareer sabbatical was his choice. The paradigm was shifting, the studios moving away from long-term producer deals, plus he’d just gotten married for the third time and was starting a new family. He had all the money he’d ever need and decided to step back for a while, but now, three years on, he’s itching to get back in the game. Thanks to old friends he’s got a solo shop on the MGM lot, with a secretary and assistant provided by the studio. “I like where I am right now,” he told Bravo in their first face-to-face. “No overhead, no pressure. I feel like a kid again, I can do whatever I want.”
And if his hot young wife (Bravo googled her too) is miffed that he’s not home on Thanksgiving Day, well, she’s a good kid. She understands the demands of his work. Albert watches with interest as several Stadium Club patrons stop to pay their respects. The men have the hale good looks and silver hair of successful bank presidents or midsized-city mayors, tanned, fit sixty-year-olds who can still bring the heat on their tennis serves. Their wives are substantially but not offensively younger, all blondes, all displaying the taut architectonics of surgical self-improvement. So proud, the men say, going around shaking hands. So grateful, so honored. Guardians. Freedoms. Fanatics. TerrRr. The wives hang back and let their men do the honors, they look on with vaguely wistful smiles and not an ounce of evident lust.
Enjoy your meal, the men say in parting, with the stern yet coaxing manner of white-glove waiters. “They sure do love you guys,” Albert observes after the group moves on. Crack snorts.
“If they love us so much, how about if their wives—”
“Shut,” Dime woofs, and Crack shuts.
“I mean everybody loves you guys, black, white, rich, poor, gay, straight, everybody. You guys are equal-opportunity heroes for the twenty-first century. Look, I’m just as cynical as the next fella, but your story has really touched a nerve in this country. What you did in Iraq, you went head-to-head with some very bad guys and you kicked their ass. Even a pacifist twerp like me can appreciate that.”
“I got seven,” Sykes says, which is what he always says. “Seven for sure. But I think it was more.”
“Listen,” Albert says, “what Bravo did that day, that’s a different kind of reality you guys experienced. People like me who’ve never been in combat, thank God, no way we can know what you guys went through, and I think that’s why we’re getting push-back from the studios. Those people, the kind of bubble they live in? It’s a major tragedy in their lives if their Asian manicurist takes the day off. For those people to be passing judgment on the validity of your experience is just wrong, it goes beyond wrong, it’s ethics porn. They aren’t capable of fathoming what you guys did.”
“So tell them,” says Crack.
“Yeah, tell them,” says A-bort, and Bravo strikes up a spontaneous chant, tell them, tell them, tell them like a frog chorus or monks at prayer. The nearby Stadium Club patrons smile and chuckle like it’s all a high-spirited college prank. As abruptly as it started, the chanting stops.
“Tell Hilary to tell them,” says Dime.
“I’m trying, hoss. Lotta moving parts to this deal.” Albert’s cell hums and the first thing he says is, “Hilary’s officially interested.” Then: “Sure she is. It’s a very physical role and she’s a very physical actress. Plus she’s a patriot. She really wants to do this.” Pause. “I’m hearing fifteen million.” Pause. “Will there be politics?” Albert rolls his eyes for Bravo’s benefit. “Larry, you know what von Clausewitz said, war is simply politics by other means.” Pause. “No, you illiterate, not The Art of War. The German guy, the Prussian.” Silence. “My ass you read The Art of War. You might’ve read the CliffsNotes for it. I could believe you read the blurbs.” Albert’s eyes glower down as he listens. Big listen. Mouth twitching, hairy fingers fribbling the tablecloth.
“Tell me this, Larry, how could you make a movie about this war and not be political? You want a video game, is that what we’re talking about?”
The Bravos glance at one another. Could do worse, is the general thought.
“Okay look, how about this for politics. My guys are heroes, right? Americans, right? They’re unequivocally on the right side and they also unequivocally kicked ass, now when was the last time that happened for this country? There’s your politics, Lar, it’s all about feeling good about America again. Think Rocky meets Platoon and you’re on the right track.” Pause. Eye roll. Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh. “Listen, we’re at the Cowboys game right now and I’m telling you, I’ve never seen anything like it. They can’t take a step without getting mobbed, it’s like the Beatles all over again. People respond to these guys in a very visceral way.”
The Bravos look at one another. What’s amazing is a lot of what he says is true.
“Look, talk to Bob. He could use a hit right now, and I’m bringing him one on a goddamn silver platter.” Silence. “Jesus.” Silence again. “Well fuck me, it is Thanksgiving. Just trust me when I say Hilary’s interested. You’ll be glad you did.”
“Problems?” Dime asks when Albert clicks off.
“Nah. All normal.” Albert takes a drink of Cowboyrita and winces. “It’s all accountants running the studios these days. Midgets in Maseratis, tiny men in big suits. They have to google themselves every morning just to remember who they are.”
“Didn’t you say Oliver Stone went to Nam?” Sykes asks.
“Yes I did, Kenneth. Did I fail to also mention he’s a lunatic? And he can’t bring the money anyway. Look, if I have to hit the street to make this film that’s what I’ll do, that’s how much I believe in you guys.”
No one knows what this means exactly, but the buffet beckons. When they go back for seconds—only Dime, Albert, and Major Mac stand pat—a long line precedes them, but as soon as people notice Bravo standing there they move aside and urge the soldiers forward. At first Bravo declines, which triggers a merry hue and cry. Go on! people insist in mock-scolding tones. Get on up there, go! They nod and chuckle as the Bravos pass, heartened by the sight of these fine, strapping American boys with their big broad shoulders and excellent manners and ability to eat everything in sight. Everyone is happy. It is a Moment. A point has been made, assumptions proved, and now they can all go forth and enjoy the day. Billy’s hangover has been shocked into remission by the onslaught of calories, and on this second pass he marvels once more at the gorgeous food, the woody grain of the turkey beneath its golden crust, the lush, moist plaids of the vegetable casseroles, the luxuriant mounds of stuffing, and the six different kinds of mashed and whole potatoes, including an exotic purple variety with the strangely pleasing texture of leavened mildew. Here in the God-blessed realms of mainstream America you eat civilized meals and take civilized dumps, indoors, in peace, on toilets that flush, in the common decent privacy that God intended as opposed to the wide-open vistas of the barbarous desert, nature nipping at your ass like a pit bull puppy. So perhaps, it occurs to Billy, this is the whole point of civilization, the eating of beautiful meals and the taking of decorous dumps, in which case he is for it, having had a bellyful of the other way.
Walking back to the table they start giggling. No reason, they’re just punchy, the food has given them a glucose high, but on arrival Dime tells them to sit the fuck down and shut up and he is not messing around. Something has happened. What happened? Soon they will learn that the powerful producer-director team of Grazer and Howard has relayed its desire to make the Bravo movie, Universal Studios has even verbally committed, but all on condition that the story relocates to World War II. But for now the only thing Bravo knows is that Dime is suddenly OTR, on the rag, while Albert carries on as if everything’s cool, placidly keying in a message on his BlackBerry. “A master of the psyche,” Shroom said of Dime, after the sergeant spent the better part of a morning smoking Billy’s ass for leaving his night-vision goggles in the Humvee overnight. Push-ups, crunches, stress positions with sandbags, then six deadly laps in hundred-degree heat around the FOB’s inner perimeter, roughly the equivalent of four miles. “You’ll never figure him out, so don’t even try,” Shroom advised.
“He’s an asshole,” said Billy.
“Yeah, he is. And that just makes you love him more.”
“Fuck that. I hate the son of a bitch.”
Shroom laughed, but then he could, he and Dime had served together in Afghanistan and he was the only Bravo who Dime never smoked. This exchange took place in the shade of the concealment netting that Shroom rigged up outside his Conex, to which he would repair in his leisure hours to smoke and read and ponder the nature of things from the camo camp chair he bought in Kuwait. It calms Billy to think about him thus arranged, barefoot, shirtless, cigarette in hand, and with a book in his lap, Slowly Down the Ganges. He was heavy into the whole ethnobotanical mystic trip and even looked like a giant shroom, a fleshy, slope-shouldered, melanin-deficient white man with the basic body type of a manatee, yet he possessed a prodigious blue-collar strength. He could one-hand the SAW like a pistol and ready-up the .50 cal, and forty-pound sacks of HA rice were like beanbags in his grasp. Every other day he shaved his head, a surprisingly delicate orb that seemed a couple of sizes too small for the rest of him. In heat conditions his face lit up in swirling lava-lamp blobs, and he didn’t so much perspire as secrete, producing an oily substance that covered his body like a slick of stale pickle juice.
“If people lived on the moon,” Dime liked to say, “they would all look like Shroom.”
It was Shroom who told Billy that Dime’s father was a high-powered judge back in North Carolina. “Dime is money,” he said. “But he doesn’t want people to know. And you know what that means.”
No, Billy said. What does it mean?
“It means that money’s old.”
They made the oddest of odd couples, handsome Dime palling around with mooncalf Shroom, and they seemed to know more about each other than would be considered healthy in a normal environment. From time to time Dime would allude to Shroom’s horrific childhood, an apparently epic tale of hard knocks that included a stint in some sort of religious institution for waifs, or, as Dime called it with never a batted eye from Shroom, the Anal Redemptive Baptist Home for Misplaced Boys of Buttfuck, Oklahoma. Billy supposed that’s where Shroom came by his impressive repertoire of Bible verses, in addition to such gnomic pronouncements as “Jesus was not a U-Haul” and “We’re all God’s Pop-Tarts whether we like it or not.” In Shroom World, bricks were “earth biscuits,” trees were “sky shrubs,” and all frontline infantry “meat rabbits,” while media pronouncements on the progress of the war were like “being lied to on your tombstone.” Early on, before they’d seen any real action, Billy asked him what being in a firefight was like. Shroom thought for a moment. “It’s not like anything, except maybe being raped by angels.” He’d say “I love you” to every man in the squad before rolling out, say it straight, with no joking or smart-ass lilt and no warbly Christian smarm in it either, just that brisk declaration like he was tightening the seat belts around everyone’s soul. Then other Bravos started saying it but they hedged at first, blatting “I love you man” in the tearful desperate voice of the schmuck in the Budweiser ad, but as the hits piled up and every trip outside the wire became an exercise in the full pucker, nobody was playing anymore.
I’m going down. Like a slide show, alive, dead, alive, dead, alive, dead. Billy was doing about ten different things at once, unpacking his medical kit, jamming a fresh magazine into his rifle, talking to Shroom, slapping his face, yelling at him to stay awake, trying to track the direction of the incoming rounds and crouching low with absolute fuck-all for cover. The Fox footage shows him firing with one hand and working on Shroom with the other, but he doesn’t remember that. He thinks he must have been cutting Shroom’s ammo rack loose, pulling the release on his IBA to get at his wounds. Is this what they mean by courage? Simply doing all the things you were trained to do, albeit everything at once and very fast. He remembers the whole front of his body being covered in blood and half-wondering if any of it was his, his bloody hands so slick he finally had to tear open the compression bandage with his teeth, and when he turned back to Shroom the big bastard was sitting up! Then going right back down, Billy sliding crabwise to catch him in his lap, and Shroom looked up at him then with his brow furrowed, eyes burning like he had something crucial to say.
“He’s your sergeant,” Shroom said that day outside his Conex. “It’s his job to make your life as miserable as possible.” Then he went on to explain to Billy how Dime’s mastery of the psyche involved intermittent doses of positive reinforcement, intermittent being a more effective behavior-modification tool than a consistent program of same. Whatever. From all his reading Shroom knew lots of useless stuff, but what Billy is thinking here at the Stadium Club is, Thank you for making us feel like shit, Sergeant! Thank you for ruining this delicious meal! Probably the last non-Army-issued or -contracted-for meal they will get for some time, but no matter, they are scum-sucking shitbag frontline grunts and their task at this moment is to shut up and eat.
Dime snaps, “A-bort, what the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m texting Lake, Sergeant. Just saying what up.”
Dime can’t very well object to that. He scans the table for other targets, but everyone’s staying low to his plate, shoveling it in. Then Albert starts chuckling.
“Here, take a look at this.” He passes the BlackBerry to Dime.
“Dude’s serious? Can’t be serious.”
“I’m afraid he is.”
Dime turns to Billy. “Dude’s saying our movie’s another Walking Tall, but in Iraq.”
“Ah.” Billy has never seen Walking Tall. “Was Hilary Swank in that?”
“No, Billy, Hilary Swank was not—Jesus, never mind. Albert, who are these people?”
“Twerps,” Albert says. “Nerds, wimps, liars, they’re a bunch of skinny mutts with not much brains chasing a fake rabbit around a track. Content scares them, no, absolutely terrifies them. ‘Is this any good? Ewwww, is it bad? Ewwww, I just can’t tell!’ It’s pathetic, all that money and no taste. You could hit them over the head with another Chinatown and they’d say let’s stick a couple of cute little dogs in it.”
Dime is casual. “So you’re saying we’re screwed.”
“Whoa, did I say that? Did I say that? Oh no indeed, I don’t think I did. I’ve made a living in this business for thirty-five years, do I look screwable?” The Bravos laugh—well, no, screwable does not leap to mind when considering Albert. “Hollywood’s a sick, twisted place, I will most certainly grant you that. Corrupt, decadent, full of practicing sociopaths, roughly analogous to, say, the court of Louis the Sun King in seventeenth-century France. Don’t laugh, guys, I’m serious, sometimes it helps to visualize these things in concrete terms. Gobs of wealth floating around, obscene wealth, complete over-the-top excess in every way, and every jerk in town’s got their hustle going, trying to break off their little piece of it. But for that you’ve got to get to the king, because everything goes through the king, right? But that’s a problem. Huge problem. Access is a problem. You can’t just walk in off the street and pitch the king, but at any given moment there’ll be twenty, thirty people hanging around the court who can get to the king. They’ve got access, influence, they’re tapped in—the key is getting one of those guys attached to your deal. Same thing in Hollywood, there’s maybe twenty, thirty people at any one time who can make a project go. The names might change from year to year, but the dynamic’s the same, the number stays about the same. You get one of those people attached to your deal, you’re gold.”
“Swank,” Crack offers.
“Swank is gold,” Albert confirms.
“Wahlberg?” Mango asks.
“Marky can make a project go.”
“How ’bout Wesley Snipes,” says Lodis. “Like, you know, say we got him to play me.”
“Interesting.” Albert ponders a moment. “Not this movie, but I tell you what, Lodis. I’ll see if I can get you the bitch part in his next film, how about that.”
Aaaaaaaannnnnnnhhhhhhh, everybody slags on Lodis, who just grins with food mashed all over his teeth. They’re interrupted by a Stadium Club patron who wants to say hello. It’s never the young or middle-aged men who stop to speak but always the older guys, the silverbacks secure in the fact that they’re past their fighting prime. They thank the soldiers for their service. They ask how is lunch. They offer praise for such assumed attributes as tenacity, aggressiveness, love of country. This particular patron, a fit, ruddy fellow with some black still in his hair, introduces himself with a lavish trawling of vowels that comes out sounding like “How-Wayne.” Soon he’s telling them about the bold new technology his family’s oil company uses to juice more crude out of the Barnett Shale, something to do with salt water and chemical fracturing agents.
“Some of my friends’ kids are serving over there with you,” How-Wayne tells them. “So it’s a personal thing with me, boosting domestic production, lessening our dependence on foreign oil. I figure the better I do my job, the sooner we can bring you young men home.”
“Thank you!” Dime responds. “That’s just excellent, sir. We certainly do appreciate that.”
“I’m just trying to do my part.” And that was cool, Billy will later reflect. If he’d just said enjoy your meal like everybody else and returned to his lucrative patriotic life, but no, he got greedy. He had to squeeze just a little bit more from Bravo. So, he says, just from your own perspective, how do you think we’re doing over there?
“How’re we doing?” Dime echoes brightly. “Just from our own perspective?” The Bravos fold their hands and look down at their plates, though several can’t help smiling. Albert cocks his head and pockets his BlackBerry, suddenly interested. “Well, it’s a war,” Dime continues in that same bright voice, “which is by definition an extreme situation, people trying very hard to terminate each other. But I’m far from qualified to speak to the big picture, sir. All I can tell you with any confidence is that the exchange of force with intent to kill, that is truly a mind-altering experience, sir.”
“I’m sure, I’m sure.” How-Wayne is gravely nodding. “I can imagine how hard it is on you young men. To be exposed to that level of violence—”
“No!” Dime interrupts. “That’s not it at all! We like violence, we like going lethal! I mean, isn’t that what you’re paying us for? To take the fight to America’s enemies and send them straight to hell? If we didn’t like killing people then what’s the point? You might as well send in the Peace Corps to fight the war.”
“Ah ha,” How-Wayne chuckles, though his smile has lost some wattage. “I guess you’ve got me there.”
“Listen, you see these men?” Dime gestures around the table. “I love every one of these mutts like a brother, I bet I love them more than their mommas even, but I’ll tell you frankly, and they know how I feel so I can say this right in front of them, but just for the record, this is the most murdering bunch of psychopaths you’ll ever see. I don’t know how they were before the Army got them, but you give them a weapons system and a couple of Ripped Fuels and they’ll blast the hell out of anything that moves. Isn’t that right, Bravo?”
They answer instantly, with gusto, Yes, Sergeant! Throughout the restaurant, dozens of well-coifed heads whip around.
“See what I mean?” Dime chortles. “They’re killers, they’re having the time of their lives. So if your family’s oil company wants to frack the living shit out of the Barnett Shale, that’s fine, sir, that’s absolutely your prerogative, but don’t be doing it on our account. You’ve got your business and we’ve got ours, so you just keep on drilling, sir, and we’ll keep on killing.”
How-Wayne opens his mouth and flaps his jaw once or twice, but nothing comes out. His eyes have receded deep into his head. Behold, Billy thinks, the world’s most mindfucked millionaire.
“I’ve gotta go,” How-Wayne mumbles, glancing around as if checking his escape route. Don’t talk about shit you don’t know, Billy thinks, and therein lies the dynamic of all such encounters, the Bravos speak from the high ground of experience. They are authentic. They are the Real. They have dealt much death and received much death and smelled it and held it and slopped through it in their boots, had it spattered on their clothes and tasted it in their mouths. That is their advantage, and given the masculine standard America has set for itself it is interesting how few actually qualify. Why we fight, yo, who is this we? Here in the chicken-hawk nation of blowhards and bluffers, Bravo always has the ace of bloods up its sleeve.
By the time How-Wayne leaves, the Bravos are openly sniggering. “You know, David,” Albert says, gazing thoughtfully at Dime, “once you’re out of the Army, you really ought to consider acting.”
The Bravos hoot, but Albert seems serious, and Dime does too because he asks quite solemnly, “Was I too hard on him?” which cracks everybody up, yet he sits there completely straight-faced. Several Bravos start chanting Holly-wooood while Day tells Albert, “Dime ain’t no act, he just like fucking with people,” to which Albert answers, “What do you think acting is?” which inspires another round of hoots. As all this is going on Dime leans toward Billy and murmurs:
“Now dammit, Billy, why did I give that man such a hard time?”
“I don’t know, Sergeant. I guess you had your reasons.”
“Dear Jesus. And what might those be?”
Billy’s pulse takes off. It’s like being called on in class. “Hard to say, Sergeant. Because you hate bullshit?”
“Yeah, maybe. Plus I’m an asshole?”
Billy declines to answer. Dime laughs, sits back and waves for a waiter. When he turns back to Billy there it is again, The Look, his gaze so frank and open-ended that Billy can’t help but wonder, Why me? At first he feared it was the start of some hideous gay thing, gay being virtually his sole reference point for prolonged eye contact from a fellow male, but lately he doubts it, a conclusion that required no small broadening of his view of human nature. Dime is after something else, some acknowledgment or as-yet-to-be-determined insight, though Billy knows if he described it to your average third party it would come out sounding gay, just based on a strict visual rendering of the trigger event. You had to be inside it to understand the pure human misery of that day, the desolation, for instance, one among many, of seeing Lake up on the table fighting off the docs, howling and flailing and slinging blood like he wasn’t being saved but skinned alive. Billy has come to see that as the breaking point, the bend in his personal arc that day. There was before and there was after, and whatever of his shit he still had together he lost it then, broke down sobbing right there on the aid station ramp. Surely his mind would have cracked from shock and grief had not Dime shoved him into a supply pantry, slammed him up against the wall and pinned him there as if bent on bodily harm. By then Dime was weeping too, both of them hacking, gagging on snot, covered in mud and blood and sweat as if they’d just that moment climbed gasping and retching from some elemental pit of primordial sludge. I knew it would be you, Dime was hissing over and over, his mouth a butane torch in Billy’s ear, I knew it would be you, I knew it I knew it I so fucking knew it I am so fucking god-damn proud of you, then he grabbed Billy’s face in both his hands and kissed him full on the lips like a stomp, a whack with a rubber mallet.
Billy’s mouth was sore for days. He kept waiting for Dime to say something about it, and when that didn’t happen he’d put his fingers to his mouth and feel the bruise on his lips. You couldn’t put this in a movie and have people understand, not based on any movie Billy’s ever seen. If you could then he’d say, Okay, put it in, he could give a flying fuck if people think it’s gay, but it would have to be done with real shrewdness and skill, you couldn’t just throw it out there and expect people to understand, but now Swank has totally screwed up his thinking here. If she plays him and Dime both, where does it go? Like, good luck kissing yourself. Good luck saving yourself. Maybe in the movie they will all just have to lose their minds.
Fuck it, nobody knows about it anyway. Dime orders another round of Heinekens for the table, though he requires that the empties be cleared away first. After the waiter leaves another waiter arrives and asks would they like coffee. Coffee? Hell yes, coffee! Caffeine being one of the essential drugs. Crack asks if there’s Red Bull and the waiter says he’ll check, which prompts orders for Red Bull all around. Everyone rises to go for desserts but Billy needs to find the head. He’s too shy to ask where it is so he wanders the outer sanctums of the club for a while, which is fine, he needs a break anyway, and viewing forty years’ worth of pro football memorabilia is as good a way as any to numb the mind. There’s a poster-sized photo of the Hail Mary catch, Staubach’s cleats from Super Bowl VI, Mel Renfro’s grass-stained jersey from the Cowboys’ last game at the Cotton Bowl, every item curated with all the pomp and reverence of relics from the Holy Roman Empire. Billy finds the men’s room and takes his time. Everything is so clean. Iraq is trash, dust, rubble, rot, and bubbling open sewers, plus these maddening microscopic grains of sand that razor their way into every orifice of the human body. Lately he’s noticed the crud is even in his lungs. It whines when he takes a deep breath, a faint screeching down there like bagpipes playing deep in the valley, and he wonders if it’s a permanent thing or just a temporary backup in the filtration system.
He takes a long time washing his hands, watching himself in the mirror. Growing up in Stovall he knew a boy named Danny Werbner, the older brother of his friend Clay. Danny had a distant manner and rarely spoke, but he’d narrowly survived a car accident in which his two best friends died, and for this reason everybody just shrugged off the strange things Danny did. Such as, he’d strip naked in the room he and Clay shared and stare at himself in the mirror for long periods of time, not caring if the door was open or how cold it was or whether posses of younger boys were tromping through. This was just one of the weird things Danny Werbner did, disturbed behavior with its own inarguable logic, Danny staring in the mirror to make sure he was there.
Billy thinks about this lately when he looks in mirrors. Out in the hall he meets Mango coming the other way with one of the waiters, a stocky young Latino with a gold hoop earring and the high-fade haircut of the ghetto cat. They’re smirking. Something is up. Mango pulls Billy aside, and right there under a photo of Tom Landry shaking hands with Ronald Reagan, he whispers, “Wanna get high?”
Hell yeah. The waiter leads them through the kitchen, down a cluttered service corridor, and into a junky storeroom with no heat, and from there they exit into a trapezoidal pocket of outdoor space, a kind of hutch hollowed out of the stadium’s armature. It’s a mistake, a design flaw neatly tucked out of sight, hardly big enough for the three of them. The waiter, whose name is Hector, has to bend to clear the I-beam cutting across his corner.
“What is this place?” Billy asks, because he has to ask something.
Hector laughs. “It’s not nothing.” He kicks a chunk of wood under the door. “It’s nowhere, man, it’s one of them places don’t exist. Me and some of the guys, we use it for smoke breaks.”
They laugh. The cold air feels good. A neutered sort of daylight filters down to them, strained and sifted through the steel fretwork. For several moments Billy imagines the stadium as an extension of himself, as if he’s wearing it, strapped into the most awesome set of body armor ever known to man. It’s a fine, secure feeling until his chest starts to labor under the weight of all that steel, but the joint coming around helps with that.
“Nice,” Mango says appreciatively.
Hector nods. “Takes the edge off, vato. Gets you through the day.”
“That it does,” Billy sagely agrees. Certain lights are switching on in his head, others switching off. “That’s some dank-ass bud.”
“Hey, you know, gotta support the troops.” Hector laughs and takes his hit. “You guys ain’t worried about pissing hot?”
Mango explains that, no, they aren’t worried about it. Bravo has deduced that the Army is loath to risk all this good PR by tagging Bravo with random drug tests, so for the duration of the Victory Tour they feel safe. “And what’d they do if they nailed us, yo, send our ass back to Iraq?”
Hector shakes his head with stoned gravitas. “No way, not for a blunt. Even the Army ain’t that harsh.”
Billy and Mango hesitate. Command seems sensitive about this, Bravo’s imminent return to Iraq. The Bravos are not to deny they’re redeploying if the subject comes up, but higher would prefer to omit this detail from the Victory Tour conversation.
Mango grins, cuts Billy a look. “Dude,” he tells Hector, “we already goin’ back.”
Hector squints. “Shittin’ me.”
“Shit you not. Leaving Saturday.”
“The fuck you gotta go back.”
“Gotta finish out our tour.”
“The fuck! The fuck you gotta go back, after all you fuckin’ done, fuckin’ heroes? Where’s the fuckin’ right in that? You guys done kicked your share a ass, like whyn’t they let you just coast on out?”
Mango laughs. “The Army don’t work that way. They need bodies.”
“Shit.” Hector is scandalized. “For how long you gotta go?”
“Eleven months.”
“Fuck!” Sheer outrage. “You wanna go back?”
The Bravos snort.
“Man. Fuckin’ harsh. That just ain’t right.” Hector casts about. “Ain’t they supposed to be making a movie about you?”
Uh huh.
“And you still gotta go back? Fuck, so what happens if you, uh, you, uh—”
“Get smoked?” Billy offers.
Hector turns away, stricken.
“No worries, homes,” Mango says, “that’s a totally different movie.” The Bravos laugh, and Hector smiles bashfully, grateful to be absolved for raising the spectre of their deaths. The joint makes another circuit. The light in their little space takes on a pearly, numinous glow. The war is out there somewhere but Billy can’t feel it, like his sole experience with morphine when he could not feel pain. At one point he even tried as an experiment, stared at his cut-up arms and legs thinking hurt, but the notion simply gassed into thin air. That’s how the war feels now, it is at most a presence or pressure on his mind, awareness without content, an experiential doughnut hole. When he tunes back into the conversation, Hector is asking if they’re going to meet Destiny’s Child, the headliner for today’s halftime extravaganza and currently number one on the national wet-dream charts.
“They ain’t said nothing about that.” Mango’s English is getting looser, leaning toward the street. Not that he’s slurring, just taking the corners wide. “Ain’t told us much of anything, like we’re supposed to be in the halftime show? They said we’re gonna meet the cheerleaders.”
“Shit, vato, everybody meets the cheerleaders, fucking Boy Scouts meet the cheerleaders. You guys are rock stars, they oughta get you with Beyoncé and her girls. Shit, heroes ’n’ all, they oughta let you bone those bitches fah real.”
Bonemfahreal, Billy says to himself. Not possible. Not that he necessarily would if given the chance, though probably. Maybe. Okay, definitely. Or it depends. He decides he wants both more and less. He’d like to hang with Beyoncé in a nice way, get to know her by doing small pleasant things together like playing board games and going out for ice cream, or how about this, a three-week trial run in some tropical paradise where they can hang together in that nice way and possibly fall in love, and meanwhile fuck each other’s brains out in their spare time. He wants both, he wants the entire body-soul-connect because anything less is just demeaning. Has the war done this to him, he wonders, inspired these deeper sensitivities and yearnings of his? Or is it just because he’s going on his twentieth year of life?
Time is growing short. They need to get back to the unit, but the engine’s dropped out of their urgency. The joint has burned down to a glowing squib when Hector confides that he’s thinking of joining the Army.
The Bravos groan. Don’t.
“Yeah, I know it’s fucked, but I got a kid and her moms don’t work so it’s all on me, which I accept, I mean I wanna take care of ’em and all, but the way it is now it just ain’t happening. I got the job here, I work five days a week at Kwik Lube and don’t get insurance neither place, and I gotta have insurance for my little girl. And I got debts. Like, you know, who don’t have debts.” Billy notes that Hector is worried in the way a man worries, not freaking and thrashing around like a fuckwit kid but soberly taking the measure of his trouble, manning up to live it every day. He says the Army is offering enlistment bonuses of $6,000, and once he’s in he wouldn’t have to worry about insurance.
“So you gonna do it?” Billy asks, panged by the $6,000. The Army got his carcass for absolutely free.
“Dunno. You guys think I should?”
Billy and Mango lock eyes. After a couple of seconds they all bust up laughing.
“It pretty much sucks,” says Billy. “I don’t know why the hell we’re laughing.”
“Hell yeah,” Mango says, “all those days I’m thinking, Yo, I am so fuckin’ done with this shit, and then I’m like, Okay, so I get out when my time’s up, what the fuck’s waiting for me gonna be any better? Like, fuck, workin’ at Burger King? Then I remember why I signed up in the first place.”
Hector is nodding. “That’s sort of my whole point. What I got out here sucks, so I might as well join.”
“What else is there,” Mango says.
“What else is there,” Hector agrees.
“What else is there,” Billy echoes, but he’s thinking of home.
