Page 1 of Angel Down

Élan

I

and Cyril Bagger considers himself lucky, he ought to be topped off, gone west, bumped, clicked it, pushing daisies, a new landowner, napooed, just plain dead, not only dead but scattered around in globs, for the last thing he saw was a shell dropping on top of him with the noise of colliding freight trains, a jim-dandy of a shot from Fritzy the Hun, and kind of ironic, seeing how the whole reason Bagger prefers burial duty is artillery shells can’t reach this far behind the frontline trench, but this shell sure did, the way he always pictures it in dreams, a red skull of fire screaming down, giving him one second to think, That old Bagger luck has finally run out,

and the afterlife, for the brief time he knew it, had been delectable, he was gentled back into the arms, and the long, long legs, of Marie-Louise, the prostituée on whom he’d lavished all his francs when the Butcher Birds of the 43rd had been stationed in Vosges, pretty, dry, warm, quiet, bloodless Vosges, where every inhale was Marie-Louise’s La Rose Jacqueminot parfum, her rosewater hair and periwinkle powders, every exhale the flutter of her dyed red hair and the lace whatchamacallits of her lingerie,

and so the last thing he wants is someone fucking with him and demanding, “You alive?,” to which Bagger responds, “Fuck no,” to which the man laughs mirthlessly and pulls him up by the armpits like a breech birth, so Bagger the newborn unseals his eyelids, a crust of mud, oil, and embarrassing tears, and discovers he’s being lifted from the burial pit he’d been digging when the mortar hit, now blown to triple its size and is stacked with triple the dead, all being sprayed with quicklime and hastily carpeted in soil,

and Bagger would have been buried alive if not for this sharp-eyed private, he really ought to reward him with a cigarette, but Bagger’s distracted by the corpses packed slick hot on all sides of him, one dead doughboy nearly beheaded by a pelvic bone, another who bit it collecting his intestines in one of his boots, a third stomped so flat by a shell that his spinal column protrudes from his gaping mouth,

and yet Bagger, by his own baffled accounting, is intact all the way down to his little piggies, so how the fuck is he alive when everyone who’d been near him, by the look of it, was exploded, shredded, and scattered, he tries to credit the corpse he’d been carrying, it must have absorbed the shrapnel, but a nagging voice insists it’s a miracle, which only pisses him off, he’ll be goddamned if he’s going to start believing in miracles here in hell,

and once his ass is on solid ground, more or less, he realizes this marshy patch of land between the Argonne Forest and River Meuse has fallen quiet, and there’s nothing more suspicious, a Western Front quiet is tetchy, one side always gets itchy and opts to bleed a few hundred more men over a few inches of land so ruined only a maniac would want it,

and so Bagger sits up with vision aswirl and shoos away the filthy pelt of air, the pigeon-gray smoke and eyeball-white fog, and beyond the hills of diarrheal mud and the pappy craters from whence those hills were upchucked, Bagger sees trucks and carts and wheeled guns crunching east, looks like the whole fucking U.S. First Army, III Corps, 43rd Division has vacated the scene with the likely exception of Bagger’s lowly Company P, forever dangled like a gonorrheal dick from the brigade’s leftmost flank,

and Bagger feels for his haversack, still there, and extracts his Bible, and opens it, and stuffs his nose into the gutter, and inhales, doesn’t give a fuck about kings and shepherds and carpenters and prophets, but the damp protean smell of the book’s red leather and the woody scratch of its onionskin pages, each one half-mooned by his father’s finger-stains, has a smelling-salt effect on Bagger, has since he was a kid, it brings him back to the cramped study over the church where Bishop Bernard Bagger labored on sermons, back when Cyril’s heart, now filled with smoke, was filled with what must have been hope,

and it’s only through the motions of inhaling that Bagger feels a brittle tightness, his face is glazed in dried blood, clearly not his own, and he orders himself not to imagine whose, it’s best when blood has no deeper meaning than rain, especially in the Argonne where so few trees remain to block the October wind that flash-dries blood so rapidly to your skin,

and while there’s no telling which boy bled this blood, what kind of blood is a different matter, fourteen days into this cyclone of cartilage and lead, Bagger has developed a sommelier palate for the tart fizz of brachial blood, the fudgy sorghum of femoral, the meaty sludge of heart wounds, the rancid reek of any gut juice at all, and the warm salt lick of arterial blood he now licks from his lips,

and it’s good the Bible is here to push him through it, Bagger takes a loud, greedy sniff, sinuses bathed in the aromatic nostalgia of comfort and solace, then reluctantly pockets the book and sticks fingers into his ear holes to clear out the creamy plugs of mud and blood, in this trenchworld hearing is so much more vital than seeing,

and the world’s noises whoosh back, and Bagger catches his breath at a rubbery wail that overrides everything, another minenwerfer dropping, the same kind of shell that ripped his fellow buriers to cutlets, oh no, oh shit, but hold on, wait, no, this is different, less a wail than a shriek, no rival to a minnie on a decibel level but with an edge that chisels through the end-times grumble at a pitch he’s never heard,

and though there’s plenty of attack machines in extremis out in No Man’s Land, their death moans are as predictable as hinges, while this shriek is organic, as alive as Marie-Louise’s pleased moans or Bishop Bagger’s stentorian damnations, it could be male or female, human or animal, but whatever it is, it’s dying, dying slow, dying loud, ripple after glissading ripple of agonized lament,

and Bagger, already weighed down in mud and blood, further heavies in the dreary certainty that the shriek won’t ever end, just like the war won’t ever end, like the carnage won’t ever end, it’s a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can’t ever be stopped, a sentence doomed to loop back on itself to form a terrible black wheel that, sooner or later, will drag each and every person to their grave,

11

and Bagger wipes his face with his forearm and five pounds of matter plop off his head, his brains, he supposes, all that blood on his face was his after all, and because he’s become educated in what brains look like, he stares into his lap for confirmation but all he sees is yellow clay, there’s nothing more ordinary than yellow clay in the Argonne,

and while he’s staring at the claybrains, he notices a voice,

and the voice feels like part of the shriek, an undertone,

and Bagger knows undertones, he grew up enveloped in the poly-phony of the church’s old pipe organ, the Swell, the Choir, and the Great woven like flutes, strings, and reeds, but this undertone is from a yet uninvented keyboard called voice,

and the voice says, Bagger,

and it’s stimulating how the word seems to buzz from within his own flesh, that’s how it felt when standing beneath the sanctuary pipes, though Bishop Bagger would have told little Cyril that’s only guilt murmuring from inside you, a sentiment the adult Cyril Bagger refuses to buy, he’s worked too long to bury such weepy notions along with the hundreds of dead bodies,

and so he ignores the voice, it’s just his skeleton vibrating from the mortar strike, and takes a big, fetid inhale, all right, Bagger, your division’s on the march, not good, but otherwise things are as you left them, which is to say absolute shit, Jerry’s shells have slashed a half-mile cleft through the trench system’s doglegs so that front, support, and reserve trenches all reside under a fourth designation called smithereens,

and within those smithereens Bagger verifies that Company P indeed lingers, there’s Lieutenant Aquila’s gorilla limp, there’s Sergeant Rasch’s crow caw, but instead of slumped like mutts in post-battle stupor, Company P is on its feet, bumping like windup toys between fat tongues of displaced mud, and Bagger wonders if the shriek is driving them mad, too, damn sure something strange is afoot, and Bagger’s got to goose himself to life if he’s going to outfox it same as he’s outfoxed everything else,

and so he imagines General John. J. Pershing lording over him, demanding, Where are you, Private?, and he saying, France, sir!, and Pershing saying, More specifically, Private!, and he saying, Bois de Fays, sir, and bois is frog for woods, sir!, and Pershing saying, Very good, Private, and do these look like woods to you?, and he saying, No sir, but they might have been woods a few years ago, sir, before the giant trolls came through, and Pershing saying, And what were those trolls’ names, Private?, and he getting the gruff old army commander to crack a smile by saying, Marne, sir, Verdun, sir, Somme, sir, stomped the shit out of everything, sir,

and Bagger laughs, and it helps more than the Bible, hallelujah, hoist the flag and let her fly, Yankee Doodle, do or die, Private First Class Cyril Bagger feels more like lucky old Bagger again, the Hawkeye Hustler, the Sioux City Sharpie, the Council Bluffs Crossroader, the Dean of Dubuque, nicknames he earned from being banned from half the riverboats on the Mississippi, not that he doesn’t own a tackle box of disguises capable of getting him back on those boats the second he gets home,

and once he’s back in Iowa, he’ll rerun the same schemes, the flop, the ring reward, the pigeon drop, mine salting, pig-in-a-poke, the fake-counterfeiter, he’ll even do a classic melon drop just to prove he still can, hell, before the Army nabbed him, he even toyed with psychic boobery, finagled a metal rod to jut from a hidden leather cuff to make the table seem to rise beneath his hands, a total bust, though he knows the spiritualism con is a growth area, grievers make the best marks and postwar America’s going to be lousy with grievers,

and it’s this same sleight of hand that has kept him safe out here, that and a bacon can packed with dominos, bottle caps for shell games, loaded dice, a pen for drawing pips on sugar cubes in case he loses those dice, and marked cards, and when it’s too dark to read those marks, he razes the card edges with a fingernail he keeps sharp, or puts literal cards up his literal sleeves, there’s always a cornpone private unable to identify him as a shark who has more teeth than Iowa has corn, and those boys bet everything, lives included, when their manhoods are impinged, and here in frogland, challenges to one’s manhood crop up every few seconds,

and the result is soldiers who end up so far in arrears they have to pay back Bagger in derring-do, infantry charges mostly, they go over the top in his place and get on a first-name basis with bullets while Bagger steps back, way back, keeping to latrine and burial duties, where flying lead doesn’t whistle past one’s ears but rather whines like late-summer mosquitoes,