Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Read Online Free PDF Page A

other forms of team bling, some have little Cowboys helmets painted on their cheeks. Billy finds this touching, how earnestly they show devotion to their team. The women display more aptitude for game-day style than the men, who lumber around with Cowboys jerseys hanging past their coattails and their pants bagged around the heels of their boots, a fatal foreshortening of vertical line that makes them look like a bunch of hulking twelve-year-olds.
    Oh my people. The soldiers finish their beers with the air of a job well done, and going back to their seats Billy aims his gaze firmly on the aisle steps and away from all that nullity clawing at his face. It freaks him, the monstrous void of it dangling there, the vast empty center creates a vacuum of sorts and all the gravity seems to flow in a reverse-flush action toward that huge gaping blowhole at the top. Billy reaches his seat in an actual sweat. Some of the Bravos are texting, others staring at the field, still others chewing gum or spitting dip into cups. Then Mango gets careless and rips a seismic burp that might as well scream Beer!, and Dime swings about like a shark smelling blood.
    “Where’s Major Mac?” Billy alertly asks. A crude diversion, but it works. Dime frowns, looks left and right.
    “Where’s Major Mac?” he woofs at the squad. Bravo does a collective bobble-head waggle, then bursts out laughing. Braaaah! Major Mac has disappeared!
    “Billy! Mango! Go find Major Mac.”
    Up the stairs again, Billy hunching his shoulders against all that horrible space. The stadium is huge. It is deformed. It is a deformation of the human mind. They head straight to Papa John’s and buy two more beers. This time a small crowd gathers as Billy does his push-ups; they count off and give him a cheer when he’s done. “Do it again!” someone cries, but Billy hoists his beer in salute, and drinks. He and Mango start walking.
    “This should be easy.”
    “Right. Only, what, like eighty thousand people here?”
    “If you were Major Mac, where would you go, and when would you go there?”
    “Dude, maybe he’s back at the mother ship.”
    They laugh. Major Mac rarely speaks, hardly ever eats or drinks, and has never been seen to relieve himself, prompting speculation among the Bravos that their PA escort might be a new kind of human being, one that consumes and voids through the pores of his skin. Thanks to mysterious back channels Sergeant Dime discovered that on the major’s very first day at the war he was blown up not just once but twice, resulting in profound but as-yet-to-be-determined hearing loss. For now he’s been parked in public affairs while the Army figures out what to do with him. The major is a chiseled, cleft-chinned, iron-spined specimen, he looks every inch the ideal Joe, which might explain why he’s hung on this long, because in truth the man is deaf as a post, not to mention prone to spells of extreme dissociation. As in, checked out. Stroked. Spaced. Peed on the fire and called in the dogs, everybody gone. Dime calls it the major’s thousand-yard Prozac stare.
    The search for Major Mac is one of the million pointless tasks that make the Army what it is, but Billy is happier doing this than sitting on his ass, plus he feels all right with Mango at his side, not just for the street cred of having a Latino best buddy but for the calm, companionable 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