“I’m from Tucson,” Mango answers mildly. “I was actually born there, Sergeant. You know that.”
“You could be from Squirrel Dick, Idaho, for all I care. Football’s strategic, it’s got tactics, it’s a thinking man’s game in addition to being goddamn poetry in motion. But you’re obviously too much of a dumbfuck to appreciate that.”
“That must be it,” Mango says. “I guess you’ve gotta be a genius—”
“Shut UP! You’re hopeless, Montoya, you are a disgrace to the cause. I bet it was sad fucks like you who lost the Alamo.”
Mango giggles. “Sergeant, I think you’re a little confused. It was the—”
“Shut! I don’t wanna hear any more of your gay revisionist crap, so just shut.”
Mango bides a couple of beats. “You know, they say if the Alamo’d had a back door, Texas never woulda—”
“SHUT!”
The Bravos titter like a bunch of Cub Scouts. The Cowboys punt, but there’s a penalty so they do it again, then everybody stands down for a TV time-out. Dime has the binoculars to his face.
“Which one is she?” he murmurs, understanding this is a private, no, a sacred matter.
“To the left,” Billy says in a low voice, “down around the twenty. Kind of blondish reddish hair.”
Dime swivels left. The cheerleaders are doing a hip-rock fanny-bop routine, a fetching little number to pass the time. Dime watches for a while, then with the binoculars still to his face he extends his hand to Billy.
“Congratulations.”
They shake hands.
“Lady is bangin’.”
“Thanks, Sergeant.”
Dime continues to watch.
“You really mugged down with that?”
“I did. I swear, Sergeant.”
“You don’t have to swear. What’s her name?”
“Faison.”
“Last or first?”
“Uh, first.” Billy realizes he doesn’t know her last.
“Umph. Damn.” Dime chuckles to himself. “Depths and depths in young Billy. Who’da thought.”
When Dime leaves Billy asks if he can borrow the binoculars, and with grand, silent solemnity Dime drapes the lanyard around Billy’s neck as if anointing an Olympic champion. Billy has a fine time with the binoculars. Mostly he keeps them trained on Faison, tracking her dance routines, her strenuous pom-pom shaking, her arm-waving exhortations to the crowd. The binos conjure a strange, delicate clarity from the material world, a kind of dollhouse fineness of texture and detail. So framed, everything Faison does is sort of miraculous. Here, she gives her hair a coltish toss; there, idly cocks her knee, thumps her toe on the turf while conferring with her sister cheerleaders. Billy conceives an almost delirious tenderness for her, along with sweet-sour roilings of nostalgia and loss, a sense of watching her not only from far away but across some long passage of time as well. Which means what, this melancholy, this mournful soul-leakage — that he’s in love? The bitch of it is there’s no time to figure it out. He and Faison need to talk — he needs her number! Along with her e-mail. And her last name would be nice.
“Hey.” Mango is nudging him. “We’re gonna hit the buffet. You comin’?”
Billy says no. He just wants to sit here with the binoculars and watch everything. The game doesn’t interest him at all but the people do, the way the steam, for instance, rises off the players like a cartoon rendering of body odor. Coach Tuttle stalks the sidelines with the addled look of a man who can’t remember where he parked his car. A sense of relaxing omniscience comes over Billy as he studies the fans, a kind of clinical, gorillas-in-the-mist absorption in how they eat, drink, yawn, pick their noses, preen and primp, indulge or rebuff their young. He lingers on all the hot women, of course, and spots no fewer than six people dressed up in turkey costumes. Often he catches people staring into space, their faces slack, unguarded, verging on fretfulness, fogged in by the general bewilderment of life. Oh Americans. Oh my people. Then he swings back to Faison and his vitals turn to mush. She’s not just hot, she’s Maxim and Victoria’s Secret hot, she is world-class and he needs to get a plan together. A woman like her requires means—
“There’s my Texan!”
He looks up. March Hawey is coming at him, sidling down the row. He starts to rise but Hawey palms his shoulder and guides him back down. He sits next to Billy and props his feet on the railing, and Billy immediately conceives a lust for his cowboy boots, a pair of lustrous sea-green ostrich quills with toecaps of silver filigree.
“How you doin’?”
“Really well, sir. And you?”
“All right, except I wish our boys would get their butts in gear.”
Billy laughs. He’s only a little bit nervous, much less than he’d expect sitting next to a man who changed the course of history. Mr. Swift Boat. He wonders if it’s impolite to talk about that, not that he knows much about it one way or the other. Then there’s the question of why he’s even sitting here with Billy.
“Somebody said you’re from Stovall.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yall got some excellent dove hunting out that way. Some kinda weed yall got out there — gussweed? gullweed? Big old tall yellow thing with these long seed pods, all kind a birds on that, doves love that stuff. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Not really, sir.”
“You’re not a hunter?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, we had some great days out there. I’m telling you, man, we slayed ’em.”
Hawey asks if he can “borry” the binoculars. In short order he reveals a whole repertoire of endearing senior tics — nose-snuffling, cuff-shooting, soft glottal pops. He smells of talcum powder and clean starched cotton, and wears a diamond horseshoe ring on his right hand. His wispy gray hair flops across his forehead in boyish Huck Finn bangs.
“You got any money on the game?” He’s twiddling the focus back and forth.
“No, sir. Some of the guys do.”
“You don’t bet?”
“No, sir.”
Hawey cuts him a glance. “Smart man. We work too hard for our money just to throw it away.” He smiles when Billy asks what business he’s in. “Oh, buncha things,” he says, handing the binoculars back. “Energy’s our core business, production and pipeline, we’ve been doing that close to forty years. Do some real estate, a little on the hedge fund side, some arbitrage and whatnot.” He chuckles. “And every once in a while we go raiding, if we see something we like. You interested in business?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. After the Army. But not if it’s going to bore me to death.”
Hawey sits up with a yelp and whacks Billy’s knee. “Man, I sure hear that. Why do it if you aren’t having fun? In my experience the most successful people truly love what they do, and that’s what I tell young people when they ask my advice. If you wanna make money, go find something you enjoy and work like hell at it.”
“That sounds like a good philosophy,” Billy ventures.
“Well, it fits my personality. Luckily I found a line of work I like, and I’ve been fortunate to have some success at it. You know, in a way it’s like a game.” He pauses as the Cowboys go deep. The receiver stretches, snags the ball with his fingertips, then bobbles it out of bounds. “What it boils down to is predicting the future, that’s what business basically is. Seeing what’s coming and getting the jump on everybody else, timing your move just right. It’s like a puzzle with a thousand moving parts.”