Read Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk for Free Online Page B

what? Shroom and Lake, were they produck too? Bravo’s talk these days is so much about money, moneymoneymoney like a bug on the brain or a hamster spinning his squeaky wheel, a conversation going nowhere at tremendous speed. Billy would just as soon move on to other subjects, but he won’t call his fellow Bravos on it. The way they obsess, it’s as if a big payday involved more than mere buying power, as if x amount of dollars cooling in the bank could bring your ass safely through the war. He intuits the spiritual logic of it, but for him the equation works in reverse: The day the money comes through, the actual day his check clears, that will be the very day he gets smoked.
    So he attunes to the movie talk with pronounced conflictedness. Bravo peppers Albert with questions. What about Clooney? What’s going on with Oliver Stone? How about the guy who said he could get Robert Downey Jr.? Then the distinguished-looking gentleman seated behind Albert leans over and asks if he’s in the movie business.
    Albert freezes, head cocked to the side as if he’s heard the call of some rare and wonderful bird. “Why, yes.” he answers sweetly. “Yes I am in the film industry.”
    “Director? Writer?”
    “Producer,” Albert allows.
    “L.A.?”
    “L.A.,” Albert confirms.
    “Listen,” says the man, “I’m a lawyer. I do white-collar criminal defense and I’ve got a great idea for a legal thriller–type script. Care to hear it?”
    Albert says he’d be delighted, as long as the lawyer can describe it in twenty seconds or less. Meanwhile a couple of dozen Cowboys players have taken the field and begin warming up. This isn’t the real warm-up, explains Crack, who played a year of college ball at Southeast Alabama State, but the pre-warm-up warm-up for the guys who need some extra loosening up. Billy’s attention is soon drawn to the Cowboys punter, a slope-shouldered, moon-faced, paunchy fellow with hardly any hair, the kind of guy you’d normally find behind your supermarket meat counter, except this guy can kick a football to oblivion and back. Foom, the soggy thump of each kick resounds in Billy’s gut as the ball rockets off on a steep trajectory, up, up, onward and upward still, your eye falters at the spot where the ball should level off and yet it climbs higher still as if some unseen booster charge has fired and straight for the bottomless dome it goes. Billy tries to mark the absolute highest point, that instant of neutral buoyancy where the ball hangs or dangles, actually pauses for a moment as if measuring the fall that even now begins as the nose rolls over with a languid elegance, and there’s an aspect of surrender, of grateful relinquishment as it yields to the gravitational fate. After seven or eight kicks Billy feels a kind of interior vaporization taking place, a dilution or relaxation of self-awareness. He feels calm. Watching the kicker is restful for his mind. The peak moments give him the most intense pleasure, a bristling in his brain like tiny lightning strikes as the ball sniffs eternity’s lower reaches, strokes the soft underbelly of empty-headed bliss for as long as it lingers at the top of its arc. Billy can imagine that’s where Shroom lives now, he is a citizen of the realms of neutral buoyancy. It’s sort of a childish and sentimental thought, but why not, if Shroom has to be somewhere then why not there? Bravo has long since been reduced to bestselling produck, but even the long arm of marketing can’t touch Shroom now.
    It’s a Zen thing, watching punts, as absorbing in its way as watching goldfish paddle around an ornamental pond. Billy would happily watch punts for the rest of the afternoon except the fans behind him start pounding his back, crying, Look! Look! Check out the Jumbotron! And there on the screen loom the eight operational Bravos literally bigger than life, plus Albert, who’s smiling like a proud new papa. Small pockets of applause spark off here and there.