Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Ben Fountain

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      A PRIVATE IN THE INFANTRY

      THEY ARRIVE TWO HOURS before kickoff and no one seems to know what to do with them, so they’re parked in their seats for the time being, forty-yard line, home side, seventh row. Sykes and Lodis immediately start debating the retail value of such totally sick seats and how much they would bring on eBay, $400, $600, up and up they go, their analysis based on nothing more than air and wishful thinking. It’s a fuckwit conversation and Billy tries not to listen. He’s got the aisle seat with Mango on his left, and they talk a little bit about last night and how awesome it is to be here instead of spitting sand out their ears at FOB Viper. Hebert known as A-bort is sitting to Mango’s left, then Holliday known as Day, then Lodis a.k.a. Cum Load, Pant Load, or just plain Load, then Sykes who will never be anything other than Sucks, then Koch as in coke which makes him Crack and Crack kills!, especially when he squats and shows a slice of his ass, then Sergeant Dime, then Albert’s empty seat, then that infinite enigma known as Major Mac. Everyone says it’s cold, but Billy doesn’t feel it. The forecast calls for sleet and freezing rain by late afternoon, and through the stadium’s open dome they can watch the weather going to hell, the cloud deck bristling like a giant Brillo pad. The half-empty stands—it’s early yet—give off the low hum of a floor buffer or oscillating fan.

      “Load!” barks Sergeant Dime. “How long is a football field?”

      Lodis snorts; too easy. At least ten times a day he has to prove that certitude is the hallmark of the true moron.

      “A hunrud yards, Sergeant.”

      “Wrong, dumbshit. Billy, how long is a football field?”

      “A hundred twenty yards,” Billy answers, trying to keep it low-key, but Dime leads the rest of Bravo in whooping applause.

      Hooah, Billy, get some. He’s leery of this roll Dime’s on for singling him out for favors and praise and doing it in so frontal a manner, as if daring the other Bravos to call him on it. It’s like a punishment, whose Billy hasn’t figured out, but instructional aggression is a specialty of Dime’s. NO he’s bellowing now at Sykes, who’s begging permission to place a couple of small bets. Ever since he maxed out his credit cards on porn, Dime has had him on a vicious budget.

      “Sergeant, just fifty bucks.”

      “No.”

      “I’ve been saving up—”

      “No.”

      “I’ll send every penny to my wife—”

      “Damn right you will, but you aren’t betting.”

      “Please, Sergeant—“

      “Sucks, have you not had your morning glass of shut up?” With that Dime is stepping over the seat below and sidling down the vacant row at Bravo’s front. “Gentlemen, what it do?” he says on reaching the end of the row.

      “Just chillin’,” says Mango.

      “You get any chiller, we’re gonna put you on a stick and sell mango Blow Pops. Lodis still says the football field’s a hundred yards long.”

      “Is!” Lodis calls from down the row. “Since when anybody count the end zone, yo.”

      “Sergeant,” Sykes wails, “just please this once—”

      “Shut!” Dime barks, the stalk of his neck twisting around as if he means to pop his head off by self-induced torque, then his eyes alight on Billy and there it is, The Look, the fixed fire of Dime’s gaze bearing down on Billy’s humble self. This has happened a lot lately and it’s freaking Billy out, the concentrated calm of Dime’s gray eyes with that sense of mad energy swirling at the edges, like finding yourself at the center of a hurricane.

      “Billy.”

      “Sergeant.”

      “Your thoughts on the Hilary Swank deal.”

      “I don’t know, Sergeant. It seems sort of weird, having a girl play a guy.”

      “But Billy, haven’t you heard, weird is the new normal.” Dime is buzzing with game-day energy, arms swinging, hips juking little half-feints and slants. “But maybe she’d play it as a girl, you heard Albert. They’d turn you into a chick, how about that? So for the rest of your life people’ll be like, ‘Look, there goes ol’ Billy Lynn. He let them turn him into a girl for that movie they made.’ ”

      “She wants to play you too, Sergeant. Would you do it?”

      Dime gives a lippy sort of laugh. “I tell you what, maybe. If she’d let me be her boyfriend for a couple of weeks, I could be persuaded.”

      Now he laughs for real, cackling with the wicked innocence of the bright and easily bored. Staff Sergeant David Dime is a twenty-four-year-old college dropout from North Carolina who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Maxim, Wired, Harper’s, Fortune, and DicE Magazine, all of which he reads in addition to three or four books a week, mostly used textbooks on history and politics that his insanely hot sister sends from Chapel Hill. There are stories that he went to college on a golf scholarship, which he denies. That he was a star quarterback in high school, which he claims not to remember, though one day a football surfaced at FOB Viper, and Dime, caught up in the moment, perhaps, nostalgia triggering some long-dormant muscle memory, uncorked a sixty-yard spiral that sailed over Day’s head into the base motor pool. He has a Purple Heart and Bronze Star from Afghanistan, and among the other company sergeants his tag is “Fuckin’ Liberal,” but what was extraordinary about Bravo, the miracle that only gradually became apparent to Billy, was the presence in the squad of not one but two demonstrably superb warriors, neither of whom had any use for the prevailing orthodoxies. When Vice President Cheney made his morale-boosting stop at FOB Viper, Dime and Shroom had cheered with such sick abandon that even Captain Tripp registered the savage mockery of it. Woooo-woooh, yeanh, Dick! Give ’em hell! Bring it awn! Woooo-woooh, let’s kick some raghead ass! The entire platoon snickering and giggling, about to piss their pants, finally the captain passed a note to Dime saying to “tone it the fuck down now,” though Cheney seemed well pleased with his reception. Standing there onstage in his L.L.Bean khakis, hands in his pockets, NASA windbreaker zipped to his neck, he complimented Viper on its fighting spirit and offered up encouraging news about the war. There is no doubt, he said. The latest intelligence, he said. Our commanders in the field, he said, all in that modulated dial-tone Cheney voice that made everything sound so fucking reasonable. So what was it he said? Oh, right. The insurgency was on its last legs, he said.

      “Albert!” СКАЧАТЬ