The possibilities set off a whinge in his gut like air escaping through a pinhole wound. He wants to be on TV, and he doesn’t. He wants to be on TV as long as he doesn’t screw up and it might help get him laid, but watching the stadium swell outside his window to Death Star proportions he wonders if he’s truly up to the day. Self-confidence has been a struggle these past two weeks, this sense of treading water way over his head. He’s too young. He doesn’t know enough. Not counting the small-time drag races his father used to emcee, he’s never been to a professional sporting event. In fact he’s managed to grow up in Stovall, a mere eighty miles west, without ever setting eyes on fabled Texas Stadium save through the expurgating medium of TV, and this first sighting feels historic, or at least strives to be. Billy studies it at length, with real care and attention, taking the measure of its size and lack of humor, its stark and irremediable ugliness. Years and years of carefully posed TV shots have imbued the place with intimations of mystery and romance, dollops of state and national pride, hints of pharaonic afterlife such as always inhere in large-scale public architecture, all of which render the stadium of Billy’s mind as the conduit or portal, a direct tap-in, to a ready-made species of mass transcendence, and so the real-life shabbiness is a nasty comedown. Give bigness all its due, sure, but the place looks like a half-assed backyard job. The roof is a homely quilting of mismatched tiles. There’s a slumpiness, a middle-aged sag to the thing that suggests soft paunches and mushy prostates, gravity-slugged masses of beached whaleness. Billy tries to imagine how it looked brand-new, its fresh gleam and promise back in the day — thirty years ago? Forty? The past is always a shaky proposition for him, but there’s a backdoor link between the way he feels now, looking at the stadium, and the feelings he gets when he thinks about his family. That same heaviness, the same torpor and melancholy, a kind of sickly-sweet emo funk that’s almost pleasurable, in the sense that it hints at something real. As if sorrow is the true reality? Without ever exactly putting his mind to it, he’s come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory. Something new appears in the world — a baby, say, or a car or a house, or an individual shows some special talent — with luck and huge expenditures of soul and effort you might keep the project stoked for a while, but eventually, ultimately, it’s going down. This is a truth so brutally self-evident that he can’t fathom why it’s not more widely perceived, hence his contempt for the usual public shock and outrage when a particular situation goes to hell. The war is fucked? Well, duh. Nine-eleven? Slow train coming. They hate our freedoms? Yo, they hate our actual guts! Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity.
“Shit,” someone murmurs, a speed bump in the silence — their first burst of enthusiasm on sighting the stadium has flatlined into verbal arrest. Maybe it’s the weather that brings them down, all this early-winter gloom, or maybe performance anxiety or just plain weariness, the burden of knowing much will be required of them today. Bravo doesn’t do so well with silence anyway. Guff and bullshit are more their working style, but the spell of introspective dread concludes with the appearance of a large, carefully rendered homemade sign affixed to a roadside utility pole. STOP ANAL RAPE IN IRAQ! the sign reads, below which someone has scrawled, heavens to betsey. Bravo howls.
A PRIVATE IN THE INFANTRY
THEY ARRIVE TWO HOURS before kickoff and no one seems to know what to do with them, so they’re parked in their seats for the time being, forty-yard line, home side, seventh row. Sykes and Lodis immediately start debating the retail value of such totally sick seats and how much they would bring on eBay, $400, $600, up and up they go, their analysis based on nothing more than air and wishful thinking. It’s a fuckwit conversation and Billy tries not to listen. He’s got the aisle seat with Mango on his left, and they talk a little bit about last night and how awesome it is to be here instead of spitting sand out their ears at FOB Viper. Hebert known as A-bort is sitting to Mango’s left, then Holliday known as Day, then Lodis a.k.a. Cum Load, Pant Load, or just plain Load, then Sykes who will never be anything other than Sucks, then Koch as in coke which makes him Crack and Crack kills! especially when he squats and shows a slice of his ass, then Sergeant Dime, then Albert’s empty seat, then that infinite enigma known as Major Mac. Everyone says it’s cold, but Billy doesn’t feel it. The forecast calls for sleet and freezing rain by late afternoon, and through the stadium’s open dome they can watch the weather going to hell, the cloud deck bristling like a giant Brillo pad. The half-empty stands — it’s early yet — give off the low hum of a floor buffer or oscillating fan.
“Load!” barks Sergeant Dime. “How long is a football field?”
Lodis snorts; too easy. At least ten times a day he has to prove that certitude is the hallmark of the true moron.
“A hunrud yards, Sergeant.”
“Wrong, dumbshit. Billy, how long is a football field?”
“A hundred twenty yards,” Billy answers, trying to keep it low-key, but Dime leads the rest of Bravo in whooping applause.
Hooah, Billy, get some. He’s leery of this roll Dime’s on for singling him out for favors and praise and doing it in so frontal a manner, as if daring the other Bravos to call him on it. It’s like a punishment, whose Billy hasn’t figured out, but instructional aggression is a specialty of Dime’s. NO he’s bellowing now at Sykes, who’s begging permission to place a couple of small bets. Ever since he maxed out his credit cards on porn, Dime has had him on a vicious budget.
“Sergeant, just fifty bucks.”
“No.”
“I’ve been saving up—”
“No.”
“I’ll send every penny to my wife—”
“Damn right you will, but you aren’t betting.”
“Please, Sergeant—”
“Sucks, have you not had your morning glass of shut up?” With that Dime is stepping over the seat below and sidling down the vacant row at Bravo’s front. “Gentlemen, what it do?” he says on reaching the end of the row.
“Just chillin’,” says Mango.
“You get any chiller, we’re gonna put you on a stick and sell mango Blow Pops. Lodis still says the football field’s a hundred yards long.”
“Is!” Lodis calls from down the row. “Since when anybody count the end zone, yo.”
“Sergeant,” Sykes wails, “just please this once—”
“Shut!” Dime barks, the stalk of his neck twisting around as if he means to pop his head off by self-induced torque, then his eyes alight on Billy and there it is, The Look, the fixed fire of Dime’s gaze bearing down on Billy’s humble self. This has happened a lot lately and it’s freaking Billy out, the concentrated calm of Dime’s gray eyes with that sense of mad energy swirling at the edges, like finding yourself at the center of a hurricane.