Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Ben Fountain

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СКАЧАТЬ vibe his friend exudes. Mango is rock-steady in both war and peace. Tough as hell, never complains, can carry major pounds on a stocky five-foot-eight-inch frame and has photographic recall of stats and timeline-oriented facts, such as, for instance, he can rattle off the names of not just the U.S. presidents but the vice presidents as well, which tends to put a quick stop to any illegal-alien talk. The one time Billy ever saw his buddy break down wasn’t in a firefight, nor any of the times they were mortared, rocketed, sniped at, or roadside-bombed, not even the time he was blown out of the Humvee’s turret and asked, “Is anything sticking out of my head?” Rock-steady, except for the day a car bomb blew up Third Platoon’s checkpoint, and Bravo was tasked to pull security in the aftermath. A bad day by any standard, but it was only when they fanned out to search for the correct number of severed limbs that Mango sank to his knees in a blubbering heap.

      But now they’re walking, and how fine it would be if they could out-walk the war by sheer force of will. Billy checks his cell and there’s a text from Kathryn, his sister with the divot in her cheek. Where r u she wants to know, and he texts stadium. Then it’s mom worried ur cold and he answers kid is smokin, and she sends back the smile sign. He and Mango grunt whenever a good-looking female passes, though everyone’s so bundled up there’s only so much you can see.

      “Can you believe those girls last night?”

      “Ridiculous,” Billy agrees. “Everybody says Dallas has the best strip clubs.”

      “No shit. Like sensory overload, dawg, where do they all come from? That place we were, not the last place, the one before that, the one with the cage dancers—”

      “Vegas Starz.”

      “—Vegas Starz, I’m like, damn, girl, why you workin’ here? Any one a those girls could be models, I mean like real models, not just stripper hos.”

      Mango seems truly distressed, as if confronted by a tragedy in progress, one he could prevent.

      “Dunno,” Billy says, “maybe talent is cheap. Too many hot girls out there.”

      “You know that ain’t right.”

      Billy laughs, but he’s struck by a broader notion about young lively bodies and the human meat market and supposedly inexorable laws of supply and demand. Society may not need you, strictly speaking, but some sort of use can usually be found.

      “Maybe they’re there because they wanna be,” Billy says, but he’s just talking now. “So they can meet fine young men such as ourselves.”

      Mango laughs. “That must be it. It’s not the money, dawg. They were really into us.”

      Which is what Sykes said on returning from his private dance in back. She was really into me. It wasn’t about the money. Still in shock from Shroom’s funeral that afternoon, Bravo changed into civvies at the hotel and emerged forthwith to get extremely drunk, and at one point or another in the course of the evening they all got blown. She was into me became the big joke of the night, but today the memory just makes Billy depressed. It is its own hangover, a scum around his psyche like a bathtub ring, and he decides blow jobs suck, just by themselves. Well, sometimes they’re all right. Okay, usually they’re awesome as far as they go, but lately he feels the definite need for something more in his life. It’s not so much that he’s nineteen and still technically a virgin as it is this famished feeling deep in his chest, this liposucked void where his best part should be. He needs a woman. No, he needs a girlfriend, he needs someone to mash into body and soul and he’s been waiting for it to happen these entire two weeks, the girlfriend, the mashing, two weeks he’s been traveling this great nation of ours so you would think that after all the miles and cities and positive press coverage, all the love and goodwill, all those smiling cheering crowds, he would have found someone by now.

      So either America’s fucked up, or he is. Billy walks the concourse with his aching heart and awareness that time is running out. They report to Fort Hood at 2200 tonight, tomorrow will be PACK YOUR SHIT day, and the day after will commence their twenty-seven hours of flying time and the resumption of their combat tour. It seems to Billy a flat-out miracle that any of them are still alive. So they’ve lost Shroom and Lake, only two a numbers man might say, but given that each Bravo has missed death by a margin of inches, the casualty rate could just as easily be 100 percent. The freaking randomness is what wears on you, the difference between life, death, and horrible injury sometimes as slight as stooping to tie your bootlace on the way to chow, choosing the third shitter in line instead of the fourth, turning your head to the left instead of the right. Random. How that shit does twist your mind. Billy sensed the true mindfucking potential of it on their first trip outside the wire, when Shroom advised him to place his feet one in front of the other instead of side by side, that way if an IED blew low through the Humvee Billy might lose only one foot instead of two. After a couple of weeks of aligning his feet just so, tucking his hands inside his body armor, always wearing eye pro and all the rest, he went to Shroom and asked how do you keep from going crazy? Shroom nodded like this was an eminently reasonable question to ask, then told him of an Inuit shaman he’d read about somewhere, how this man could supposedly look at you and know to the day when you were going to die. He wouldn’t tell you, though; he considered that impolite, an intrusion into matters that were none of his business. But talk about freaky, huh? Shroom chuckled. Looking that old man in the eye and knowing he knows.

      “I don’t ever wanna meet that guy,” Billy said, but Shroom’s point was made. If a bullet’s going to get you, it’s already been fired.

      Billy realizes that Mango hasn’t spoken for the past five minutes, so he knows his friend is also thinking about the war. He’s tempted to raise the subject, but really, what can you say short of everything? As if once you opened your mouth would you even be able to stop, though in the end it all amounts to one and the same thing, how the hell are they going to get through eleven more months of it.

      “You’ve been lucky so far, right?”

      This was Kathryn, talking to Billy over backyard beers.

      I guess I have, he answered.

      “So keep on being lucky.”

      Sometimes it feels as easy as that, just remembering to be lucky. Billy thinks about this as he eyes the fast food outlets that line the stadium concourse, your Taco Bells, your Subways, your Pizza Huts and Papa John’s, clouds of hot meaty gases waft from these places and surely it speaks to the genius of American cooking that they all smell pretty much the same. It dawns on him that Texas Stadium is basically a shithole. It’s cold, gritty, drafty, dirty, in general possessed of all the charm of an industrial warehouse where people pee in the corners. Urine, the faint reek of it, pervades the place.

      “Fierce,” Mango says in hushed tones of wonder.

      “What?”

      “All these thousands of gringos, and not a single Major Mac.”

      Billy snorts. “You know we’re never gonna find that mofo. He’s a grown man anyway, like why are we even looking for him.”

      “He knows where he is.”

      “You would think.”

      They look at each other and laugh.

      “Let’s go back,” Billy says.

      “Let’s go back,” Mango agrees.

      First they stop at Sbarro and get СКАЧАТЬ