Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Read Online Free PDF

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