by Ben Fountain
“He’s hammered,” says Billy.
Crack sniggers. “This oughta be good. He can’t drill worth shit even when he’s sober.”
“Don’ be wishin’ bad on me!”
“No worries, Load. You don’t need my help to suck.”
Jesus Christ. Billy tells Lodis to key on him. Stay on my shoulder, just do everything I do. He wants to tell Dime they have to call it off but Dime is clear on the other side of the formation, yes, thank you, in addition to everything else they have split Bravo in half to please some fascist bandmaster’s jones for symmetry. Holliday, Crack, Billy, and Lodis stand four abreast on the home sideline. To the rear and sides the Prairie View A&M marching band is moving into position. It could be the setup for a night attack, there’s that same edgy rustling of gear and clothes, the covert thump of boots on turf. Somewhere a lone drummer is marking time with his sticks, left, right, left, right, tick, tick, tick.
“Load, take some breaths. Clear your head.”
Scgggggck. Scgggggck.
“He dying over there?” Crack asks.
“Coal!”
“Hell yeah it’s cold. Suck it up, bitch.” Thirty-four degrees, so they were informed by an unseen voice in the tunnel, and stepping onto the field they were met by a stinging crystalline mist, swarms of frozen micro-droplets like polar gnats. Ranks of young flag girls stood bravely in the cold, pinch-faced, pale, their bare legs pebbled and chapped, heads shiny with condensed mist. Lambs to the slaughter, Billy thought, as if they were truly forming up for battle, and farther on stood the high school bands in silent ranks, all those rows and rows of pink-cheeked baby faces so still and focused beneath their feathered caps, so seriously fixed on what they were about. Billy envied these kids the sincerity of their youth, their orderly student lives of classes, pep rallies, sleeping late on Saturdays. They looked so sharp! He felt tremendously tender toward them. They made him nostalgic. They made him feel so damn old.
The Prairie View drum line sets up at midfield, led by a towering black warlock of a drum major in high-church drum-major rig, cape, spats, golden braids and epaulets, a funnel cloud of a shako strapped to his head. The other four Bravos are somewhere to the left, and between their two contingents stands the United States Army Drill Team out of Fort Myer, Maryland, twenty drill grunts in flawless dress blues who can make their fixed-bayonet Springfields flip, twirl, spin, do cartwheels about the waist, loop the loop around the shoulder, sail through the air in a daring four-man diamond toss, and probably moonwalk if so ordered. A corps of ROTCs is positioned behind this front rank of Bravos and Drill grunts, the Rots stomping and huffing like water buffalo.
“Heeuunh, hoooo, hreeee, horrrr,” the warlock barks, and the drums erupt in a driving rataplan, tatta-tottta tatta-totta drrrrp drrrrp boodly-boo, a stirring take on the ructions of the smitten human heart. Then trumpets. Brass is jailbreak and bust out, the horns swinging in martial counterpoint as three slender women slip in from the side and take position front and center of the Drill grunts. It is Them. Billy floats a little outside of himself. The women’s backs are to the soldiers, but even or maybe especially from behind there is no question that Destiny’s Child has arrived, the current undisputed world champs of mass-market pop, Colored Girl Division. Beyoncé takes the starring middle spot, while Michelle and Kelly—which is which?—decant themselves on the flanks. They wear tight low-rise pants, stiletto heels, flirty midriff tops with long lacy sleeves, and there’s an awesome physical discipline in their stance, hips cocked, coaxialed to trunk and legs, backs sturdy and supple as flexed bows. Thus posed, they freeze. The music snaps to a halt. Cameramen are crab-walking around the singers, this is live TV happening as the girls raise the microphones to their lips, and soft as bedcovers being turned down for the night they croon in lush a cappella
bending toward a reprise of the national anthem, it could tip that way with the slightest nudge, but their voices flower into something softer, sweeter, a rain of sugared rose petals batting the ears
On the far sideline a stage has been concocted, a spangly three-tiered affair with a jigsaw backdrop of multicolored panels that seems to strive for a modernist stained-glass look. A dance troupe is freeze-framed on the various tiers, guys in shimmery white sweat suits and jumbo bling, women in tight slacks or cutoffs and artfully mangled Cowboys jerseys, ripped, cropped, sleeveless, no two alike. To Billy’s right Lodis seems to be gagging on his snot. Destiny’s Child reprises the take me there refrain, then the drums sound off and that’s their cue, the entire formation steps out. The cameramen start backpedaling, going on faith. Up ahead the drum line peels left and right, clearing a route to the stage. Later, watching the performance on YouTube, Billy will start to piece together the enormous scale of it, at least five marching bands cycling on and off the field, the frantic sex-show choreography happening onstage, flag girls and drill squads from one end zone to the other, Rotcees, Bravos, Drill grunts, Destiny’s Child. The proverbial cast of thousands. Someone will describe it as a production worthy of a Broadway musical, and though Billy has never set foot in New York, much less seen a musical of any kind, that will sound about right, but while it’s happening he’s just trying to hang on. A baton twirler skips by in a blur of skin and spinning chrome. High school drill teams in one-piece leotards are doing a shoop-shoop sort of booty-bump routine, they are training to be strippers apparently. Drum lines wheel alongside the soldier column, flying squads of flag girls zigzag across the route and Destiny’s Child powers through it all with a back-leaning hip-heavy sashay strut that doesn’t look quite possible from where Billy is, as if some mystical combination of diva mojo and StairMastered thighs keeps them upright when mere mortals would fall flat on their ass. Up ahead troupes of dancers flank the stage, guys in floppy shirts and pants, caps to the back, girls in silver sports bras and royal-blue tights. Already there’s so much for the mind to absorb and then the disco lights get going, rows of blue and white strobes between the stage tiers, more strobes trimming the steel-pipe frame and everything flashing all at once, electro-visual spaz-pulse and epileptic overload, retinal scarring, frontal lobes blown to caterpillar fuzz—
This is yr brain on meth! Lodis is flinching, his poor head keeps swagging to the side, then the explosions start and they all flinch, boom boom boom boom, lum rounds are shooting off from somewhere backstage, smokers that explode with the arid crackle of cluster bombs scattering over a wheat field. A howl commences deep in Lodis’s throat. “It’s cool,” Billy murmurs, “it’s cool, it’s cool, it’s just fireworks.” Lodis starts laughing, gasping for breath. On Billy’s other side Crack is looking clammy and grim. If there was ever a prime-time trigger for PTSD you couldn’t do much better than this, but lucky for Norm, the crowd, America, the forty-million-plus TV viewing audience, Bravos can deal, oh yes! Pupils dilated, pulse and blood pressure through the roof, limbs trembling with stress-reflex cortisol rush, but it’s cool, it’s good, their shit’s down tight, no Vietnam-vet crackups for Bravo squad! You can march these boys straight into sound-and-light-show hell and Bravos can deal, but, damn, isn’t it rude to put them through it.
The formation moves on eight-to-five step with the beat, boody-Boom boody-Boom boody-bood-bood-BOOM, snare drums make a fella damn proud to be a soldier. It’s not a joke, Billy realizes. They spent too much money and went to too much effort for halftime to be intentionally ridiculous, which isn’t to say that big expensive things can’t be dumb. The Titanic was dumb. Enron was dumb. Hitler invading Russia, dumb. Boom-diddy boom-diddy boom-buddah-dit-BOOM, so go the Prairie View drums, thunder’s wind chimes. Lodis knocks into Billy, steadies. “Sorry, Biyee.” At the north hash mark all soldiers will about-face and march south while Destiny’s Child proceeds to the stage. Billy is watching for his mark and trying not to hyperventilate. Boom-diddy boom-diddy diddy-diddy BOOM. Disco strobes, hump dancing, lum rounds and flares, marching bands marking time in regal high step, and here is Billy soldiering through the vast mindfuck of it, coiled into
himself and determined to deal.
“Lay-dees A N D gennelmunnn,” booms the PA announcer in the fawning, basso profundo lilt of the pitchman who doesn’t know he’s a fool,
Such an unholy barrage of noise pours forth that Billy thinks he might be lifted off his feet. It is a dam bursting, bridges collapsing at rush hour, tsunamis of killer froth and boulder-sized debris revising the contours of the known world. Just assume you’re going to die, so they were instructed the week before deploying to Iraq. Affirmative! Roger that! Sir yes sir! Carnage awaits us, we are the ones who will not be saved, the poor sad doomed honorably fucked front line who will fight them over there so as not to fight them here! A harsh thing for any young man to hear, but this is part of every youth’s education in the world, learning the risks are never fully revealed until you commit. Destiny’s Child is really laying into the strut, they could be wading through a storm surge up to their waists, goddamn, Billy thinks, watching them sling it, goddamn, so how is he supposed to redeploy with such sights in his head? Within days, no, hours, Bravo is back in the shit and he’s waiting for them to say it again, he dreads it but the harsh words need to be said, you’re going to die, just get that part of it over with please, but no, no one will do it, they get Beyoncé and her mouthwatering ass instead!
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 get
ting 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.”
The Bravos nod. No one speaks. They’re all quietly freaking.
“There’s gonna be a lot going on out there but you guys don’t move. That’s your job, just stand there. No-brainer, right?” She smiles, gives Day a light cuff on the shoulder. “You guys okay?”
The Bravos nod. Even Day seems rattled, his neck bulging like he’s swallowed too much air. Crack is looking at the ground and mumbling to himself.
“Guys, come on, chill, you’ve got the easy part.” The woman laughs, exasperated by how tight they are. “Once you’re on your mark just stay there till the show’s over, I’ll come up and give you the all-clear.”
“This about to be stoopih,” Lodis grumbles, but the handler lady pretends not to hear. Bravos can deal, you bet, though none of them is looking particularly good at the moment. There’s too many people running around, too much bug-eyed panic, all the freak-out flavors of an ambush situation without any of the compensating murderous release. Fireworks crews to their left and right keep shooting off nasty little rockets that hiss and sizzle like RPGs. Portable sets of metal stairs lead up to the highest stage level, and the Bravos are placed at the tops of these stairways, one Bravo per. A narrow catwalk is all that separates them from the stage backdrop, and Billy is standing there, a step below catwalk level, when a magnificent female creature bombs through the backdrop, it is a louvered sort of opening she steps around as several handlers swarm in. One takes her microphone, another offers Evian, a third presents some sort of small, furry garment that the woman proceeds to pull over her head. Beyoncé. If Billy chooses he could reach out and touch her thigh. Her hair springs free of the pullover like a solar flare, and from Billy’s vantage point a foot below the catwalk she towers with a Rocky Mountain majesty. Up close her skin is the honeyed brown of apple butter, limned with a film of perspiration that holds the light. Michelle and Kelly have their own handlers farther down the catwalk. No one speaks. They are all business, these show people, as quiet and lethal as sniper teams. Beyoncé shoots her arms through the sleeves of the jacket, a cropped, off-shoulder sateen number with a fur-trimmed collar, and as she arranges herself inside the garment her eyes meet Billy’s. Excuse me, he wants to say, go on, go on, she’s so focused and fierce in the moment that he’s sorry to impinge even to this small extent. Carrying the show in front of forty million people makes her one of the top human beings on the planet, and what strength of nerve that must take, what freakish concentrations of soul and energy. She’s not even winded! A yogic mastery of the mind-body balance. She inhabits some far distant astral plane, yet her eyes do something when they meet his, for an instant he seems to register there. In that split second Billy searches for something in her look—not mercy, exactly, nothing so grand as compassion, maybe just a bare acknowledgment of their shared humanity, but she’s already turning, she takes the mike and one of the handlers is saying kick butt as she steps through the slot and disappears.