Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain Read Free Book Online Page B

whatcha call one a those metrosexuals,” Sykes said, whereupon everyone agreed that Sykes was gay just for knowing such a word.
    “Well,” Josh says, “I guess he’ll turn up. You guys feel like getting some lunch?”
    “We wanna meet the cheerleaders,” says Crack.
    “Yeah,” says A-bort, “but we wanna eat too.”
    “Okay, hang on.” Josh consults his walkie-talkie. The men exchange WTF looks. The vaunted Cowboys organization seems to be winging it with Bravo, the planning somewhere between half-assed and shit-poor. During a lull in the walkie-talkie confab Billy motions Josh closer, and the ever-alert Josh flexibly squats by his seat. “Advil,” Billy says, “were you able to find me any—”
    “Oh shit, ” Josh exclaims in a hot whisper, then “Sorry,” in his normal voice, “sorry sorry sorry, I’ll definitely get that for you.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Still hungover, dude?” Mango asks, and Billy just shakes his head. One night, eight men, and four strip clubs, all to no real purpose except that transactional blow job there at the end, thoughts of which make him want to shoot himself. Like a dental procedure it was, a blunt-force plumbing job, the memory of that girl’s head bobbing in his lap. Bad karma, for sure. Billy has overdrawn his karma account, that running tally of good and evil that Shroom described to him as the expression, the mental crystallization, as it were, of the great cosmic tilt toward ultimate justice. Billy scans the field but the punter is gone. His gaze sweeps the stadium’s upper reaches where the punts topped out, but it’s just air, he needs the concrete marker of the punts’ arc to get that vibe of Shroom hovering on the other side.
    Shroom, Shroom, the Mighty Shroom of Doom who foretold his own death on the battlefield. When their deployment was done and he got his leave he was going on an ayahuasca trek to Peru, “going to see the Big Lizard,” as he put it, “unless the hajjis send me first.” Unless. Guess what. And on that day Shroom knew. Wasn’t that the meaning of their last handshake? Shroom turning in his seat just as they hit the shit, Mango already opening up on the .50 cal as Shroom reached back and took Billy’s hand. “I’m going down,” he yelled into the racket, which at the time Billy heard as it’s, “It’s going down,” his ear rounding off the weirdness so the words made sense. Later he’d cycle back to that moment and know it for what it was, the words and Shroom’s eyes with their hint of far remove, like he was looking up at Billy from the bottom of a well.
    If Billy thinks about this for more than a couple of seconds a synthesized hum starts up in his head like a tremendous swell of organ music, not the sickly calf bleatings they played at Shroom’s funeral but a thunderous massing of mighty chords, the subsurface rumble of a tidal wave as it rolls unseen through the ocean depths. Spooky as all shit, not that he fights it; the big sound might be God banging around his head or some elaborately coded form of essential truth, or maybe both, or maybe they’re one and the same thing, so put that in your fucking movie, if you can. Were you good friends? asked the reporter from the Ardmore Daily Star . “Yes,” Billy said, “we were good friends.” Do you think about him a lot? “Yes,” Billy said, “I think about him a lot.” Like, every day. Every hour. No, every couple of minutes. About once every ten seconds, actually. No, it’s more like an imprint on his retina that’s always there, Shroom alive and alert, then dead, alive, dead, alive, dead, his face eternally flipping back and forth. He saw the beebs dragging Shroom into the high grass and thought Oh fuck or maybe just Fuck, that was the extent of Billy’s inner reflections as he scrambled off his belly and made his run. Weirdest thing, though, he retains this sense as he got to his feet of knowing exactly how it was going to turn out, the visualization so intense