Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk Read Free Page B

seems sort of weird, having a girl play a guy.”
    “But Billy, haven’t you heard, weird is the new normal.” Dime is buzzing with game-day energy, arms swinging, hips juking little half-feints and slants. “But maybe she’d play it as a girl, you heard Albert. They’d turn you into a chick, how about that? So for the rest of your life people’ll be like, ‘Look, there goes ol’ Billy Lynn. He let them turn him into a girl for that movie they made.’ ”
    “She wants to play you too, Sergeant. Would you do it?”
    Dime gives a lippy sort of laugh. “I tell you what, maybe. If she’d let me be her boyfriend for a couple of weeks, I could be persuaded.”
    Now he laughs for real, cackling with the wicked innocence of the bright and easily bored. Staff Sergeant David Dime is a twenty-four-year-old college dropout from North Carolina who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Maxim, Wired, Harper’s, Fortune, and DicE Magazine, all of which he reads in addition to three or four books a week, mostly used textbooks on history and politics that his insanely hot sister sends from Chapel Hill. There are stories that he went to college on a golf scholarship, which he denies. That he was a star quarterback in high school, which he claims not to remember, though one day a football surfaced at FOB Viper, and Dime, caught up in the moment, perhaps, nostalgia triggering some long-dormant muscle memory, uncorked a sixty-yard spiral that sailed over Day’s head into the base motor pool. He has a Purple Heart and Bronze Star from Afghanistan, and among the other company sergeants his tag is “Fuckin’ Liberal,” but what was extraordinary about Bravo, the miracle that only gradually became apparent to Billy, was the presence in the squad of not one but two demonstrably superb warriors, neither of whom had any use for the prevailing orthodoxies. When Vice President Cheney made his morale-boosting stop at FOB Viper, Dime and Shroom had cheered with such sick abandon that even Captain Tripp registered the savage mockery of it. Woooo-woooh, yeanh, Dick! Give ’em hell! Bring it awn ! Woooo-woooh, let’s kick some raghead ass! The entire platoon snickering and giggling, about to piss their pants, finally the captain passed a note to Dime saying to “tone it the fuck down now ,” though Cheney seemed well pleased with his reception. Standing there onstage in his L.L.Bean khakis, hands in his pockets, NASA windbreaker zipped to his neck, he complimented Viper on its fighting spirit and offered up encouraging news about the war. There is no doubt, he said. The latest intelligence, he said. Our commanders in the field, he said, all in that modulated dial-tone Cheney voice that made everything sound so fucking reasonable. So what was it he said? Oh, right. The insurgency was on its last legs, he said.
    “Albert!” Dime calls out. “Billy thinks Hilary Swank is weird.”
    “Wait. No.” Billy turns, and there’s Albert coming down the steps, smiling with a bemused sort of West Coast cool. “I just said I thought it’s weird she’d wanna play a guy.”
    “Hilary’s all right,” Albert says mildly. “In fact she’s one of the nicest ladies in Hollywood. But if you think about it, Billy”—the young soldier is always shocked when Albert calls him by name; Dude, he wants to say, not necessary, you don’t have to remember my actual name—“that’s the supreme challenge for any actor, playing the opposite sex. I can see why she’d be interested.”
    “He doesn’t want a chick playing him,” Dime says. “He’s scared people are going to think he’s a pussy.”
    “Albert, don’t listen to anything he says.”
    Albert chuckles, and for a second Billy thinks of Santa Claus, another jolly man of girth. “Stay loose, guys. We’ve got a long way to go before you have to worry about that.”
    Albert’s target is a hundred thousand down for each Bravo’s life story, plus all manner of arcane