He doesn’t resist, because there’s just so much to lose. He will forgo the greater risk in favor of the lesser, even though the lesser — and isn’t this funny, funny! — is the one that might get him killed. He plants his face in her hair and breathes deep, trying to store enough of her smell to last for all time.
YO BRAAAAVOOOOOO booms across the plaza, Sergeant Dime’s parade-ground bellow. MOO-HOOOOVING OUT! LET’S GOOOO!
“That’s me,” Billy whispers. Faison moans, and they fall into another bruising kiss. There’s a violent moment when they try to pull apart — they grab at each other, pick and jab at clothes, body parts, a weird rage burning through them that they can’t quite control. Faison’s face suddenly crumples and she mashes into him.
BRAAAVOOOOO! NOW!
Billy kisses her lips and pulls away, and it feels like the last thing he’ll ever do. “Be careful!” she calls after him, and he raises his fist in acknowledgment. “I’ll pray for you!” she calls louder, and that just makes him feel hopeless. He’s dying out here, dying, and that thing in his pants makes it difficult to walk, the rock-hard prong of his virgin member like a flag that refuses to fly at half-mast. He knocks at it with his wrist, the back of his hand, trying to force the creature down without the whole world seeing, and then, oh shit, they’re on him, a group of seven or eight fans who want him to sign their game programs. So grateful, they say. So proud. Awesome. Amazing. This only takes a couple of moments, but while he’s scribbling his name it dawns on Billy that these smiling, clueless citizens are the ones who came correct. For the past two weeks he’s been feeling so superior and smart because of all the things he knows from the war, but forget it, they are the ones in charge, these saps, these innocents, their homeland dream is the dominant force. His reality is their reality’s bitch; what they don’t know is more powerful than all the things he knows, and yet he’s lived what he’s lived and knows what he knows, which means what, something terrible and possibly fatal, he suspects. To learn what you have to learn at the war, to do what you have to do, does this make you the enemy of all that sent you to the war?
Their reality dominates, except for this: It can’t save you. It won’t stop any bombs or bullets. He wonders if there’s a saturation point, a body count that will finally blow the homeland dream to smithereens. How much reality can unreality take? He’s in somewhat of a daze as he passes off the last program and starts walking toward the curb, hands fisted in his pockets to hopefully hide his crazed erection. Thank you! the nice people call after him. Thank you for your service! Sleet pecks at his eyes, but he hardly feels it anymore. The cops step aside as he approaches, revealing Josh and Albert standing by the limo’s rear door, and Albert is grinning, waving him on. “Hurry!” he cries playfully. “Come on! They’re leaving!” As if this was the ride you couldn’t miss, the one that would save your life? Albert gives him a quick hug as he slides past. Josh says good luck and squeezes his arm, then Billy is stepping off the curb, half-falling onto the limo’s rear banquette.
Albert slams the door behind him and throws out a final wave. “We’re good,” Dime calls to the driver. “Let’s go.”
“Hell yeah, get us the fuck out of here,” says Sykes.
“Before they kill us,” Crack seconds. “Take us someplace safe. Take us back to the war.”
“Seat belts, everyone,” Dime tells the squad, and Bravo paws around the seats, sorting out their belts. Dime notices the steeple in Billy’s lap.
“Looking proud there, soldier,” he murmurs, just between the two of them.
“Some things can’t be helped, Sergeant.”
Dime chuckles. “You say good-bye to your girl?”
Billy nods and turns to the window. He knows he will never see Faison again, but how can he know? How does anyone ever know anything — the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation. And yet he knows, at least he thinks he knows, he feels it seeded in the purest certainty of his grief as he finds his seat belt and snaps it shut, that snick like the final lock of a vast and complex system. He’s in. Bound for the war. Good-bye, good-bye, good night, I love you all. He sits back, closes his eyes, and tries to think about nothing as the limo takes them away.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks are owed and cheerfully given to the Ucross Foundation and the Whiting Foundation, both of which supported the writing of this book. Many thanks to Gary Downey, Evan Mayer, Bethany Niebauer, and Eric Reed for guidance on military life. Very special thanks to Heather Schroder and Lee Boudreaux, for keeping faith. And, finally, profound thanks to my wife, Sharie, without whom I would be, quite simply, lost.
B.F.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Fountain is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. He has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers’ Award, an O. Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and two Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Awards, among other honors and awards. His fiction has been published in Harper’s, the Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Sunday Magazine, among other publications. His coverage of post-earthquake Haiti was nationally broadcast on the radio show This American Life. He and his family live in Dallas, Texas.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.