Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain Page B

pompadour was the glossy jet-black of a fresh oil spill. Nice boots, Billy went on, nodding at the brown ostrich quills, never creased. New? Ray cut him a look, eyes glittering with dangerously high IQ. Billy chuckled. He couldn’t help it. Still the dude with his Bible-black hair and prickly attention to grooming and dress, the pretty pink candies of his fingernails gleaming from a house-call manicure. He wasn’t tall, he had a pinched dirt-dauber sort of build and his sharp-featured face was just this side of handsome, but a certain class of woman had always gone for him. Waitresses, hairstylists, receptionists, the moment he opened his mouth they were hormone mush. Secretaries were a specialty; his own, others’. Much had been learned in the course of the lawsuit.
    “Your chair’s looking all spiff. You get it waxed?”
    Ray ignored him.
    “Looks like a little Zamboni, anybody ever told you that?”
    Still Ray didn’t react.
    “So does it make that beeping sound when you put it in reverse?”
    For dinner Denise served up a spectacular chicken tetrazzini feed. She’d had her hair done. She’d put on makeup. She wanted everything perfect, which Ray deftly sandbagged by cranking up the volume for Bill O’Reilly and chain-smoking through dinner. “It’s every daughter’s dream to die of secondhand smoke,” Kathryn wistfully crooned, then she turned to Billy and laughed. “Listen, if he could stick the whole pack in his mouth and smoke it all at once he would, nothing would make him happier.” Ray just ignored her. He pretty much ignored them all, and that night it struck Billy as never before how completely they were all bound up in one another. You can deny him, he thought, watching his father across the table. You can hate him, love him, pity him, never speak to or look him in the eye again, never deign even to be in his crabbed and bitter presence, but you’re still stuck with the son of a bitch. One way or another he’ll always be your daddy, not even all-powerful death was going to change that.
    Denise waited on her husband’s every need, though she was never quick about it, Billy noticed, she seemed quite fine with him harrumphing a second and third time, and when she did get around to fetching, pouring, cutting, she performed with a multitasky air of distractedness, like she was watering plants while talking on the phone. She was sneaky. She had those passive-aggressive wiles. Her hair was an indeterminate washed-out chemical color, and most of the emotional muscle tone was gone from her face, though she was still capable of sad, skewed smiles from time to time, forcing the cheer like Christmas lights in the poor part of town. She strove mightily to keep the conversation upbeat, but family troubles kept leaking in around the edges. Money troubles, insurance troubles, medical-bureaucracy troubles, Ray-being-a-stubborn-pain-in-the-ass troubles. Halfway through the meal young Brian grew restless. “Hey!” Kathryn cried. “Hey, Briny, watch this!” She stuck two of Ray’s Marlboros in her nose and bought them five more minutes of peace.
    “She called today,” Denise said, helping herself to a third glass of wine.
    “Who called?” Billy asked, not knowing any better. His sisters hooted. “That hussy !” Kathryn answered with a berserk-debutante sort of shriek. She plucked the cigarettes from her nose and returned them to Ray’s pack. “Mother knows she’s not supposed to talk to her. Everything’s supposed to go through the lawyers.”
    “Well,” Denise said, “she called. I can’t help it if the woman keeps calling my house.”
    “Doesn’t mean you have to talk to her,” Patty pointed out.
    “Well, I can’t just hang up. That would be rude.”
    The girls yelped. “That woman,” Kathryn began, and had to pause for a fit of dry-heave laughs, “that woman had an affair with your husband, and you can’t be rude ? Ye gods, Mom, she did your old man for eighteen years, they had a kid