of the other way.
Walking back to the table they start giggling. No reason, they’re just punchy, the food has given them a glucose high, but on arrival Dime tells them to sit the fuck down and shut up and he is not messing around. Something has happened. What happened? Soon they will learn that the powerful producer-director team of Grazer and Howard has relayed its desire to make the Bravo movie, Universal Studios has even verbally committed, but all on condition that the story relocates to World War II. But for now the only thing Bravo knows is that Dime is suddenly OTR, on the rag, while Albert carries on as if everything’s cool, placidly keying in a message on his BlackBerry. “A master of the psyche,” Shroom said of Dime, after the sergeant spent the better part of a morning smoking Billy’s ass for leaving his night-vision goggles in the Humvee overnight. Push-ups, crunches, stress positions with sandbags, then six deadly laps in hundred-degree heat around the FOB’s inner perimeter, roughly the equivalent of four miles. “You’ll never figure him out, so don’t even try,” Shroom advised.
“He’s an asshole,” said Billy.
“Yeah, he is. And that just makes you love him more.”
“Fuck that. I hate the son of a bitch.”
Shroom laughed, but then he could, he and Dime had served together in Afghanistan and he was the only Bravo who Dime never smoked. This exchange took place in the shade of the concealment netting that Shroom rigged up outside his Conex, to which he would repair in his leisure hours to smoke and read and ponder the nature of things from the camo camp chair he bought in Kuwait. It calms Billy to think about him thus arranged, barefoot, shirtless, cigarette in hand, and with a book in his lap, Slowly Down the Ganges. He was heavy into the whole ethnobotanical mystic trip and even looked like a giant shroom, a fleshy, slope-shouldered, melanin-deficient white man with the basic body type of a manatee, yet he possessed a prodigious blue-collar strength. He could one-hand the SAW like a pistol and ready-up the .50 cal, and forty-pound sacks of HA rice were like beanbags in his grasp. Every other day he shaved his head, a surprisingly delicate orb that seemed a couple of sizes too small for the rest of him. In heat conditions his face lit up in swirling lava-lamp blobs, and he didn’t so much perspire as secrete, producing an oily substance that covered his body like a slick of stale pickle juice.
“If people lived on the moon,” Dime liked to say, “they would all look like Shroom.”
It was Shroom who told Billy that Dime’s father was a high-powered judge back in North Carolina. “Dime is money,” he said. “But he doesn’t want people to know. And you know what that means.”
No, Billy said. What does it mean?
“It means that money’s old.”
They made the oddest of odd couples, handsome Dime palling around with mooncalf Shroom, and they seemed to know more about each other than would be considered healthy in a normal environment. From time to time Dime would allude to Shroom’s horrific childhood, an apparently epic tale of hard knocks that included a stint in some sort of religious institution for waifs, or, as Dime called it with never a batted eye from Shroom, the Anal Redemptive Baptist Home for Misplaced Boys of Buttfuck, Oklahoma. Billy supposed that’s where Shroom came by his impressive repertoire of Bible verses, in addition to such gnomic pronouncements as “Jesus was not a U-Haul” and “We’re all God’s Pop-Tarts whether we like it or not.” In Shroom World, bricks were “earth biscuits,” trees were “sky shrubs,” and all frontline infantry “meat rabbits,” while media pronouncements on the progress of the war were like “being lied to on your tombstone.” Early on, before they’d seen any real action, Billy asked him what being in a firefight was like. Shroom thought for a moment. “It’s not like anything, except maybe being raped by angels.” He’d say “I love you” to every man in the squad before rolling out, say it straight, with no joking or smart-ass lilt and no warbly Christian smarm in it either, just that brisk declaration like he was tightening the seat belts around everyone’s soul. Then other Bravos started saying it but they hedged at first, blatting “I love you man” in the tearful desperate voice of the schmuck in the Budweiser ad, but as the hits piled up and every trip outside the wire became an exercise in the full pucker, nobody was playing anymore.
I’m going down. Like a slide show, alive, dead, alive, dead, alive, dead. Billy was doing about ten different things at once, unpacking his medical kit, jamming a fresh magazine into his rifle, talking to Shroom, slapping his face, yelling at him to stay awake, trying to track the direction of the incoming rounds and crouching low with absolute fuck-all for cover. The Fox footage shows him firing with one hand and working on Shroom with the other, but he doesn’t remember that. He thinks he must have been cutting Shroom’s ammo rack loose, pulling the release on his IBA to get at his wounds. Is this what they mean by courage? Simply doing all the things you were trained to do, albeit everything at once and very fast. He remembers the whole front of his body being covered in blood and half-wondering if any of it was his, his bloody hands so slick he finally had to tear open the compression bandage with his teeth, and when he turned back to Shroom the big bastard was sitting up! Then going right back down, Billy sliding crabwise to catch him in his lap, and Shroom looked up at him then with his brow furrowed, eyes burning like he had something crucial to say.
“He’s your sergeant,” Shroom said that day outside his Conex. “It’s his job to make your life as miserable as possible.” Then he went on to explain to Billy how Dime’s mastery of the psyche involved intermittent doses of positive reinforcement, intermittent being a more effective behavior-modification tool than a consistent program of same. Whatever. From all his reading Shroom knew lots of useless stuff, but what Billy is thinking here at the Stadium Club is, Thank you for making us feel like shit, Sergeant! Thank you for ruining this delicious meal! Probably the last non-Army-issued or -contracted-for meal they will get for some time, but no matter, they are scum-sucking shitbag frontline grunts and their task at this moment is to shut up and eat.
Dime snaps, “A-bort, what the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m texting Lake, Sergeant. Just saying what up.”
Dime can’t very well object to that. He scans the table for other targets, but everyone’s staying low to his plate, shoveling it in. Then Albert starts chuckling.
“Here, take a look at this.” He passes the BlackBerry to Dime.
“Dude’s serious? Can’t be serious.”
“I’m afraid he is.”
Dime turns to Billy. “Dude’s saying our movie’s another Walking Tall, but in Iraq.”
“Ah.” Billy has never seen Walking Tall. “Was Hilary Swank in that?”
“No, Billy, Hilary Swank was not—Jesus, never mind. Albert, who are these people?”
“Twerps,” Albert says. “Nerds, wimps, liars, they’re a bunch of skinny mutts with not much brains chasing a fake rabbit around a track. Content scares them, no, absolutely terrifies them. ‘Is this any good? Ewwww, is it bad? Ewwww, I just can’t tell!’ It’s pathetic, all that money and no taste. You could hit them over the head with another Chinatown and they’d say let’s stick a couple of cute little dogs in it.”
Dime is casual. “So you’re saying we’re screwed.”
“Whoa, did I say that? Did I say that? Oh no indeed, I don’t think I did. I’ve made a living in this business for thirty-five years, do I look screwable?” The Bravos laugh—well, no, screwable does not leap to mind when considering Albert. “Hollywood’s a sick, twisted place, I will most certainly grant you that. Corrupt, decadent, full of practicing sociopaths, roughly analogous to, say, the court of Louis the Sun King in seventeenth-century France. Don’t laugh, guys, I’m serious, sometimes it helps to visualize these things in concrete terms. Gobs of wealth floating around, obscene wealth, complete over-the-top excess in every way, and every jerk in town’s got their hustle going, trying to break off their little piece of it. But for that you’ve got to get to the king, because everything goes through the king,