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.
Someone pushes Billy onto the catwalk, then pulls him up short of the opening. The noise out there is just tremendous. He looks to his right and sees more Bravos similarly positioned, and at this instant he wishes he was back at the war. At least there he basically knew what he was doing, he had his training for guidance and the entire goddamn country wasn’t watching to see if he’d fuck up, but this, this is all wing-and-a-prayer shit. Middle level a voice is yelling in his ear, turn left and look for the purple X. Abruptly the music gears down to a meat-grinding crawl, kah-thunka, kah-thunka, it is a trash compactor mulling over more than it can chew. On the lowest tier of the stage Destiny’s Child is standing in front of three Prairie View drummers, the girls have taken the sticks and are pounding out the beat with the flailing elbows and lunging stance of fashionable women trying to jack up a car. By the time Billy gets stiff-armed onto the stage he’s barely breathing. It’s like stepping into a sun-filled cumulus cloud, a dazzling, cottony glow all about your person and nothing but air beneath your feet. He moves right-oblique toward the center stairs and arrives, small miracle, in sequence with the other three Bravos and everyone is marching more or less in step. He hears a rushing in his head and not much else. Directly in front of the stage the Drill grunts are doing the overhead rifle toss with fixed bayonets, the fuck, they could kill themselves and wouldn’t that be the shit, stabbed through the eye on live TV with your own bayonet!
Need me a soldjah, soldjah boy
Where dey at, where dey at
Billy is last in file, thus he ends up on the purple X closest to center stage. Right face, halt. The rest of the Bravos have somehow appeared on the bottom tier, Dime-Sykes-Mango-A-bort all in a row. Soldjah gonna be real fah me, Beyoncé sings against Michelle’s and Kelly’s bass-line chant,
Soldjah gonna be real fah me
Yeah dey will, yeah dey will
Soldjah gonna get chill fah me
Yeah dey will, yeah dey will
They are serenading the bottom-tier Bravos, slinking and spooning about on dainty cat feet, mewling minor-key trills of do-me angst. The entire stage has become a blowup of foreplay aerobics, rocket thrusting, shadow humping, knurling hips and ass, here on the second tier the dancers are twurking Bravo and not a damn thing you can do except stand at attention and get pole-danced in front of forty million people. It’s not right. Nobody said anything about this. What might be merely embarrassing in real life is made obscene and hostile by TV. Billy hates to think of his mother and sisters watching this, then one of the guys starts dancing a little too close, punking Billy with glide-by swivels and squats. Like I really wanna see your junk, fool! Billy gives him a look; the guy smirks and spins away. Then he comes back around, and Billy speaks with all the feeling he can jam through his teeth:
Fuck off.
The guy laughs and he’s gone again. The beat quickens as a line of Prairie View drummers comes marching down the stairs, boom-Lacka-Lacka-Lacka boom-Lacka-Lacka-Lacka. The Drill grunts are doing the Queen Anne Salute while troupes of smiling dancers decorate the flanks with jazzy kung fu moves. Down on the bottom tier Sykes is weeping. For some reason Billy is not surprised, he only hopes it will be over before all the Bravos lose their minds. Destiny’s Child regroups at center stage as a gathering storm of lights and fireworks signals crescendo time. Sykes’s back is a heaving pantomime of sobs, yet he maintains strict attention, chin up, chest out, and he has never seemed so brave or dear to Billy as at this moment.