Maybe it’s not supposed to make sense. Or maybe not for you, Billy reasons, because you are a duh-umb shit. Then they turn, he’s missed the hash mark by half a beat, the Drill grunts razor-sharp on the mark while Bravo flops around like loose shoelaces. “Change step march,” Day woofs sotto voce; as team leader he’s responsible for getting them through halftime with some semblance of their dignity intact, and now he counts time with the Drill grunts, trying to shoehorn the Bravos into lockstep. “Left, left,” the mantra settles Billy’s mind and his feet start to follow, though it would help if he had a weapon in his hands. Just ahead are the Rots, a herd of shambling, big-assed kids, many of them no doubt older than Billy and yet they look so young from the back, their soft, fleshy, baby-fat necks practically screaming for the sacrificial ax to come down.
“Left face,” Day softly woofs. They’ve reached the sideline. Bravo steps off seven strides, left face again, halt. For the moment their job is to stand next to the Drill grunts and look pretty. High school girls in fringed leotards go skipping past, waving long twirly streamers from six-foot poles. The Prairie View drum line has reconvened at midfield, glide-stepping to the beat of crunchy snare rolls, and everybody except Bravo is moving it seems, the field has become a huge jam-up of hip-hop choreographics and rigid blocks of synchronized marching-band mass. The stage apparatus belches gouts of flame and fireworks as Destiny’s Child ascends with their prancing diva strut. The stage dancers go right on humping like the nastiest video on MTV as Beyoncé and her girls bring the microphones to their lips.
You say you gonna take me there
they sing in kittenish, pouty trills,
Say you know what I need
Show devotion to the notion of our mutual creed
The Drill grunts are doing their thing, snapping their Springfields around in the rock-star version of close order drill. Chack, chack, chack, the strike of palm to rifle stock a high-fiber sound, perhaps a skilled listener could follow the stunts just by cadence alone. Out here on the end Billy has only a peripheral view, the rifles flitting in the corner of his eye like cards shuffled and stacked.
You think it all in the moves
Like some robot lover do?
That ain’t the way you get
A grown woman into her groove
Beyoncé slinks one hand down the inside of her thigh, then drags it toward her snatch, not quite cupping herself at the critical point; this is the PG-rated crotch grab, suitable for family viewing. The streamer girls go skipping by, their pale skinny legs like pogo sticks. Those strobes are doing a number on Billy’s head. He narrows his eyes to slits and everything blurs, it is a rat-bite fever dream of soldiers, marching bands, blizzards of bodies bumping and grinding, whoofs of fireworks, multiple drum lines cranking go-team-go. Destiny’s Child! Drill grunts! Toy soldiers and sexytime all mashed together into one big inspirational stew. How many dozens of times has Bravo watched Crack’s Conan DVDs, many dozens, they know every line by heart, and out of all the streamings and veerings of his over-amped brain Billy flashes on the palace orgy scene, James Earl Jones as the snake king sitting on his throne while his stoned minions sprawl about the floor, slurping and licking and humping in glassy-eyed bliss. It creeps him, the overlay of that sludgy sex scene on what he sees before him now, the complete and utter weirdness of the halftime show and the fact that everybody seems okay with it. The stands are packed, the fans are on their feet and everyone is cheering, everything makes them happy today. Fine, be happy, is Billy’s attitude. They can cheer and scream and holler all they want, but it’s nothing, their show, just fluff, filler, it’s got nothing to do with Billy or going back to the war.
I ain’t scared, I’m comin’ through,
I ain’t scared, I ain’t scared,
Big man can’t you handle this good thing I’m offerin’ you?
In the stands behind the stage a huge American flag appears, a card stunt, each one of a mass of twenty thousand fans comprising a pixel in this antique special effect. The cards spin, and now the flag is presented as if rippling in the wind, though on second look it’s more like the thing’s been badly pressed, the pattern gashed through with wrinkles and kinks. For several moments Billy’s eyes play tricks with it, tweaking the perspective back and forth, then his inner ear jolts and the ground seems to tilt, a lurch that sets him down in a different place. It occurs to him that maybe he’s wrong. Maybe the halftime show is as real as anything; what if some power or potent agency lives in it? Not a show but a means to something, something conferred or invoked. A ceremony. Something religious, so long as “religious” extends to such cold-blooded concepts as mayhem, chance, nature out of control. He feels the pull of a superseding reality that trumps even the experiential truths of a grunt on the ground — the blood on your hands, the burn in your lungs, the stink of your unwashed feet. Merely thinking about it sets off a pounding in his skull, not his headache but a heavier sonar throb deep in the lower brain stem. And very clearly the thought comes to him, that’s where it lives. The god in your head, all the gods — is that what’s happening here? He’s too self-conscious and church-averse to accept a completely straight notion of god, so how about this — chemicals, hormones, needs and drives, whatever is in us that’s so supreme and terrifying that we have to call it divine.
Lemme break it down for you again,
Stop actin’ like a boy, stand up and be a man,
What’s sad is all your talkin’ ’bout love and affection,
You get yours and leave me hangin’ like a prepubescent
Billy is cold where the warmest part of him should be, as if meaning naturally registers first in the most delicate instrument he has, his balls. He’s scared. He knows this is a bad place to be. They love to talk up God and country but it’s the devil they propose, all those busy little biochemical devils of sex and death and war that simmer at the base of the skull, punch up the heat a few degrees and they rise to a boil, spill over the sides. Do they even know? he wonders. Maybe they don’t know what they know, given that what he sees before him is so random, so perfect, porn-lite out of its mind on martial dope. Short of blood sacrifice or actual sex on the field, you couldn’t devise a better spectacle for turning up the heat.
Left face, Day softly woofs, and they step off, right face and they’re crossing the field toward the belly of the beast, Lodis following Billy, Billy following Crack, Crack following Day, who tails the Prairie View drum corps through a blur of fancy uniforms and bared flesh. Individual sounds spire out of the din like guitar drones, the squeanings of whales. Time gears down to a lower speed. The strobes pulse in stretchy Day-Glo smears. Billy knows where they’re supposed to end up though he’s vague on the mechanics of getting there. As each Bravo crosses the sideline they face left, then they’re hustled along a gauntlet of stressed-out handlers to a chaotic holding pen behind the stage. A tall slender woman in a knee-length parka pulls the Bravos out of line. She’s pretty, at least the part of her that shows between the flaps of her Russian officer’s cap. “All right,” she says, gathering the Bravos into a huddle, yelling like a sailor in a gale, “we’re gonna get you guys in position backstage, then when we give you the go you step out and take the stairs down to the middle level. You’ll be marching, right? Like this?” She mimes a military strut. “You turn left on the middle tier and march out along there. Look for the purple X’s, one for each of you, that’s your mark. Then just turn and face the field and stand at attention.”