Brrraaaaahhhh, even the guy’s own friends send up a howl. “Hey, these are the Bravos,” one of the young husbands says. “Don’t mess with these guys.”
“The whos?” cries Crack’s new friend. “The what-hoes? Oh yeah yeah yeah I heard of you guys, yeah, goddamn, you’re famous. Hey, tell me something, what do you think about that whole don’t-ask-don’t-tell deal?”
“Stop it, Travis!” one of the young wives scolds. “You’re being a jerk.”
“I am not either being a jerk, I really wanna know! This guy’s a soldier, I’m just curious what he thinks about gays in the military.”
“I think more of them than gays not in the military,” Crack says. “At least they’ve got the balls to join.”
The rowdies send up another howl. “I hear you, dude, hear you,” Travis says, laughing. “Serving your country and all that, very cool and everything. But I don’t know, it just seems kind of wack to me, say you’re in your foxhole at night and some queer comes on to you, what’re you supposed to do? Guys blowing each other in foxholes, that just doesn’t sound right to me. Like maybe it’s got something to do with why we’re getting our butts kicked over there, you know?”
“Tell you what,” Crack says, “why don’t you join up and find out. You can get in a foxhole with me and see what happens.”
Travis smiles. “You’d like that, dude?”
Billy wishes Crack would just smack the fool and be done with it, but his fellow Bravo merely stares the guy down. Perhaps one melee is enough for this Thanksgiving Day. Billy checks his cell. Nothing from Faison. Yet. He indulges in another episode of the ranch fantasy, but now while he and Faison are having sex ten times a day he’s also thinking about Bravo back at FOB Viper, getting slammed every time they go outside the wire. So he puts that inside the fantasy, how much he’d miss his fellow Bravos, he would mourn them even as they live and breathe. They are his boys, his brothers. Bravos would die for one another. They are the truest friends he will ever have, and he’d expire from grief and guilt at not being there with them.
So it seems the war is fucked and his fantasy no less so. He sends another text to Faison. Wd like to see u and say g-by after game. She responds almost immediately, Yes! but when he asks where and when, nothing. Dime makes his way down the row and kneels in the aisle by Billy’s seat.
“What’d Albert say?”
“Well, he’s not mad at us.”
“No, Billy, what’d he say about Ruthven.”
“Oh. He said it’s cool. Ruthven did just what you said he’d do.”
Dime smiles. “We need to send that man some flowers!”
“Albert said Norm might come back with a better offer—”
“Fuck that, we’re not doing a deal with that guy, not for any amount of money. Not for a million bucks apiece.”
Billy and Mango look at each other. “A million bucks—” Mango attempts, but Dime cuts him off.
“Look at it this way, say we do the deal and Norm makes his big-shit Bravo movie, gets everybody all pumped for the war again. What happens then? I think what happens is they’ll keep stop-lossing our ass until we’re dead or too damn old to carry a pack. Well, fuck that. I got no use for a deal like that.”
Dime turns and bounds up the aisle. The Bears score to make it 31–7, and the game has officially become a rout. One of the rowdies in row 6 drops his bottle, and the sound of shattering glass sends his buddies into hysterics. “Assholes,” Mango mutters, and Billy agrees. They’re too drunk, too loud, too pleased with themselves — more people who could use some humility in their lives?
Billy’s cell chirps, signaling a new text. He checks the screen.
“Faison?” Mango asks hopefully.
“Sister.” Billy waits for Mango to turn away before he opens it.
CALL HIM.
They r ready.
They r waiting 4 u.
Oh Jesus. Oh Shroom. What would Shroom do? What would he do if he was Billy, that is the better question, one that turns on the most intimate, pressing issues of soul, self-definition, one’s ultimate purpose in life. The two-minute-warning gun fires, which means, great, he has about 120 seconds to figure out what he’s doing here on planet Earth. Oh Shroom, Shroom, the Mighty Shroom of Doom who foretold his own death on the battlefield, how would he counsel Billy here at the Victory Tour’s end? He needs Shroom to make sense of the situation, to calm the neural scramble of Billy’s brain, but now the Jumbotron is playing the American Heroes graphic and the rowdies in row 6 send up a big whoop and holler, clapping, stomping their feet, the young marrieds try to shush their friends but there is just no stopping the fun.
“Brav-ohhhh!”
“Hay-yull yeah!”
“Woooo-hooooo!”
“Army of one, dudes!”
“See?” says Travis, twisting around to grin at Crack. “We’re all kick-ass patriots here, we totally support the troops.”
“Hell yeah,” yells one of his buddies.
“Hell yeah,” Travis woofs. “Listen, don’t-ask-don’t-tell, I’m totally down with that. I don’t give a shit if you guys are gay or bi or tranny or screw lesbian monkeys for all I care, you’re studs in my book. You guys are real American heroes.”
He raises his arm for a high-five, but Crack just stares, lets him dangle. “No?” Travis flashes a smile. “No? Whatever, it’s cool. I still support the troops.” He laughs and turns away, reaching under his seat for his bottle. When he sits up, Crack leans forward and methodically, almost tenderly it seems, locks his arms around Travis’s neck and proceeds to choke him out. All soldiers learn this in basic training, how a forearm applied to the carotid artery cuts off blood flow to the brain, rendering your victim unconscious in seconds. Travis flops a bit, but it’s not much of a struggle. He grabs at Crack’s arms, kicks at the seat in front of him, then Crack squeezes a little harder and Travis goes limp. Several of the rowdies start to rise, but Crack warns them off with a grunt.
“What’s he doing?” hisses one of the young wives. “Tell him to stop it. Somebody please tell him to stop.”
But Crack just smiles. “I could break this asshole’s neck,” he announces, and shifts his hold, applies some experimental torque. Travis gives a spastic kick; his friends can only watch. They seem to understand he’s beyond their help.
“Crack,” says Day, “enough. Turn the motherfucker loose.”
Crack giggles. “I’m just having a little fun.” There’s a masturbatory aspect in the way he twists Travis one way and then the other, squeezing, relenting, squeezing, relenting, probing the physiological point of no return. Travis’s face is dark red, shading to purple. A full-on carotid choke results in death in a matter of minutes.
“Damn, Crack,” Mango murmurs. “Don’t kill the son of a bitch.”
“Stop him,” pleads one of the wives. “Say something to him.”
Billy thinks he might be sick to his stomach, but part of him wants Crack to go ahead and do it, just to show the entire world how fucked the situation is. But finally Crack relents; it’s as if he loses interest, the way he turns Travis loose with a casual slap to the head, and Travis sags into his seat like a broken crash dummy. In short order the rowdies decide it’s time to leave. They brace up their woozy friend and file out of the row, careful to avoid eye contact with the Bravos. “You guys are crazy,” one of them mutters as he sidles past, and Sykes shouts Hell yes we’re out of our motherfucking minds!, and adds a burbling Valium laugh that in fact sounds pretty batty.