ALSO BY BEN FOUNTAIN
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
Published in Great Britain in 2012 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Copyright © Ben Fountain, 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in the United States of America by HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 438 3
Export ISBN 978 0 85786 452 9
eISBN 978 0 85786 439 0
Designed by Mary Austin Speaker
This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books.
For my parents
CONTENTS
IT IS MOSTLY IN YOUR HEAD BUT WE HAVE CURES FOR THAT
BY VIRTUE OF WHICH THE MANY BECOME THE ONE
JAMIE LEE CURTIS MADE A SHITTY MOVIE
BILLY AND MANGO ARE OUT FOR A WALK
IF IN THE FUTURE YOU TELL ME THIS IS LOVE, I WILL NOT DISAPPOINT YOU
THE THING BEGINS
THE MEN OF BRAVO are not cold. It’s a chilly and windwhipped Thanksgiving Day with sleet and freezing rain forecast for late afternoon, but Bravo is nicely blazed on Jack and Cokes thanks to the epic crawl of game-day traffic and the limo’s minibar. Five drinks in forty minutes is probably pushing it, but Billy needs some refreshment after the hotel lobby, where overcaffeinated tag teams of grateful citizens trampolined right down the middle of his hangover. There was one man in particular who attached himself to Billy, a pale, spongy Twinkie of a human being crammed into starched blue jeans and fancy cowboy boots. “Was never in the military myself,” the man confided, swaying, gesturing with his giant Starbucks, “but my granddaddy was at Pearl, he told me all the stories,” and the man embarked on a rambling speech about war and God and country as Billy let go, let the words whirl and tumble around his brain
Thanks to asswipe luck Billy will have the aisle seat at Texas Stadium, which means he will bear the brunt of these encounters for most of the afternoon. His neck hurts. He slept but poorly last night. Each of those five Jack and Cokes puts him deeper in the hole, but the sight of the stretch limo pulling up to the hotel aroused a bundle of nervous cravings in him, this boat of a snow-white Hummer with six doors to a side and black-tinted windows for maximum privacy. “What I’m talking a-bout!” cried Sergeant Dime as he pounced on the bar, everyone whooping over all the pimp finery, but after destroying all hopes for a quick recovery Billy subsides into a gnarled, secret funk.
“Billy,” says Dime, “you’re flaking on me.”
“No, Sergeant,” Billy says at once. “I’m just thinking about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.”
“Good man.” Dime raises his glass, then conversationally remarks to no one in particular, “Major Mac is gay.”
Holliday yelps. “Damn, Dime, the man sitting right here!”
And indeed, Major McLaurin is seated on the rear banquette, watching Dime with all the emotion of a flounder on ice.
“He can’t hear a damn word I say,” Dime laughs. He turns to Major Mac and slows down his rate of speech to moron speed. “MAY-JURH, MACK-LAAAUUURIN, SIR! SAR-JINT, HOLLI-DAY, HERE, SAYS, YOU’RE, GAY.”
“Aw fuck,” Holliday moans, but the major’s eyes merely take on a needling glint, then he holds out his fist to show his wedding band. Everyone howls.
There are ten of them in the limo’s plush passenger bay, the eight remaining soldiers of Bravo squad, their PA escort Major Mac, and the movie producer Albert Ratner, who at the moment is hunkered down in BlackBerry position. Counting poor dead Shroom and the grievously wounded Lake there are two Silver Stars and eight Bronze among them, all ten of which defy coherent explanation. “What were you thinking during the battle?” the pretty TV reporter in Tulsa asked, and Billy tried. God knows he tried, he never stops trying, but it keeps slipping and sliding, corkscrewing away, the thing of it, the it, the ineffable whatever.
“I’m not sure,” he answered. “Mainly it was just this sort of road rage feeling. Everything was blowing up and they were shooting our guys and I just went for it, I really wasn’t thinking at all.”
His chief fear up to the moment the shooting started being that of fucking up. Life in the Army is miserable that way. You fuck up, they scream at you, you fuck up some more and they scream some more, but overlying all the small, petty, stupid, basically foreordained fuckups looms the ever-present prospect of the life-fucking fuckup, a fuckup so profound and