Billy thinks about this lately when he looks in mirrors. Out in the hall he meets Mango coming the other way with one of the waiters, a stocky young Latino with a gold hoop earring and the high-fade haircut of the ghetto cat. They’re smirking. Something is up. Mango pulls Billy aside, and right there under a photo of Tom Landry shaking hands with Ronald Reagan, he whispers, “Wanna get high?”
Hell yeah. The waiter leads them through the kitchen, down a cluttered service corridor, and into a junky storeroom with no heat, and from there they exit into a trapezoidal pocket of outdoor space, a kind of hutch hollowed out of the stadium’s armature. It’s a mistake, a design flaw neatly tucked out of sight, hardly big enough for the three of them. The waiter, whose name is Hector, has to bend to clear the I-beam cutting across his corner.
“What is this place?” Billy asks, because he has to ask something.
Hector laughs. “It’s not nothing.” He kicks a chunk of wood under the door. “It’s nowhere, man, it’s one of them places don’t exist. Me and some of the guys, we use it for smoke breaks.”
They laugh. The cold air feels good. A neutered sort of daylight filters down to them, strained and sifted through the steel fretwork. For several moments Billy imagines the stadium as an extension of himself, as if he’s wearing it, strapped into the most awesome set of body armor ever known to man. It’s a fine, secure feeling until his chest starts to labor under the weight of all that steel, but the joint coming around helps with that.
“Nice,” Mango says appreciatively.
Hector nods. “Takes the edge off, vato. Gets you through the day.”
“That it does,” Billy sagely agrees. Certain lights are switching on in his head, others switching off. “That’s some dank-ass bud.”
“Hey, you know, gotta support the troops.” Hector laughs and takes his hit. “You guys ain’t worried about pissing hot?”
Mango explains that, no, they aren’t worried about it. Bravo has deduced that the Army is loath to risk all this good PR by tagging Bravo with random drug tests, so for the duration of the Victory Tour they feel safe. “And what’d they do if they nailed us, yo, send our ass back to Iraq?”
Hector shakes his head with stoned gravitas. “No way, not for a blunt. Even the Army ain’t that harsh.”
Billy and Mango hesitate. Command seems sensitive about this, Bravo’s imminent return to Iraq. The Bravos are not to deny they’re redeploying if the subject comes up, but higher would prefer to omit this detail from the Victory Tour conversation.
Mango grins, cuts Billy a look. “Dude,” he tells Hector, “we already goin’ back.”
Hector squints. “Shittin’ me.”
“Shit you not. Leaving Saturday.”
“The fuck you gotta go back.”
“Gotta finish out our tour.”
“The fuck! The fuck you gotta go back, after all you fuckin’ done, fuckin’ heroes? Where’s the fuckin’ right in that? You guys done kicked your share a ass, like whyn’t they let you just coast on out?”
Mango laughs. “The Army don’t work that way. They need bodies.”
“Shit.” Hector is scandalized. “For how long you gotta go?”
“Eleven months.”
“Fuck!” Sheer outrage. “You wanna go back?”
The Bravos snort.
“Man. Fuckin’ harsh. That just ain’t right.” Hector casts about. “Ain’t they supposed to be making a movie about you?”
Uh huh.
“And you still gotta go back? Fuck, so what happens if you, uh, you, uh—”
“Get smoked?” Billy offers.
Hector turns away, stricken.
“No worries, homes,” Mango says, “that’s a totally different movie.” The Bravos laugh, and Hector smiles bashfully, grateful to be absolved for raising the spectre of their deaths. The joint makes another circuit. The light in their little space takes on a pearly, numinous glow. The war is out there somewhere but Billy can’t feel it, like his sole experience with morphine when he could not feel pain. At one point he even tried as an experiment, stared at his cut-up arms and legs thinking hurt, but the notion simply gassed into thin air. That’s how the war feels now, it is at most a presence or pressure on his mind, awareness without content, an experiential doughnut hole. When he tunes back into the conversation, Hector is asking if they’re going to meet Destiny’s Child, the headliner for today’s halftime extravaganza and currently number one on the national wet-dream charts.
“They ain’t said nothing about that.” Mango’s English is getting looser, leaning toward the street. Not that he’s slurring, just taking the corners wide. “Ain’t told us much of anything, like we’re supposed to be in the halftime show? They said we’re gonna meet the cheerleaders.”
“Shit, vato, everybody meets the cheerleaders, fucking Boy Scouts meet the cheerleaders. You guys are rock stars, they oughta get you with Beyoncé and her girls. Shit, heroes ’n’ all, they oughta let you bone those bitches fah real.”
Bonemfahreal, Billy says to himself. Not possible. Not that he necessarily would if given the chance, though probably. Maybe. Okay, definitely. Or it depends. He decides he wants both more and less. He’d like to hang with Beyoncé in a nice way, get to know her by doing small pleasant things together like playing board games and going out for ice cream, or how about this, a three-week trial run in some tropical paradise where they can hang together in that nice way and possibly fall in love, and meanwhile fuck each other’s brains out in their spare time. He wants both, he wants the entire body-soul connect because anything less is just demeaning. Has the war done this to him, he wonders, inspired these deeper sensitivities and yearnings of his? Or is it just because he’s going on his twentieth year of life?
Time is growing short. They need to get back to the unit, but the engine’s dropped out of their urgency. The joint has burned down to a glowing squib when Hector confides that he’s thinking of joining the Army.
The Bravos groan. Don’t.
“Yeah, I know it’s fucked, but I got a kid and her moms don’t work so it’s all on me, which I accept, I mean I wanna take care of ’em and all, but the way it is now it just ain’t happening. I got the job here, I work five days a week at Kwik Lube and don’t get insurance neither place, and I gotta have insurance for my little girl. And I got debts. Like, you know, who don’t have debts.” Billy notes that Hector is worried in the way a man worries, not freaking and thrashing around like a fuckwit kid but soberly taking the measure of his trouble, manning up to live it every day. He says the Army is offering enlistment bonuses of $6,000, and once he’s in he wouldn’t have to worry about insurance.
“So you gonna do it?” Billy asks, panged by the $6,000. The Army got his carcass for absolutely free.
“Dunno. You guys think I should?”
Billy and Mango lock eyes. After a couple of seconds they all bust up laughing.
“It pretty much sucks,” says Billy. “I don’t know why the hell we’re laughing.”