Page 10 of Angel Down

and, oh, how things change, at last he feels like a Butcher Bird, this helpless woman impaled before him, his prerogative to nibble her, or eat her whole, or leave her for later, all options he discards, for he only wants to help her, so he pulls her arm upward in hopes he can rip her dress free of the barbs,

and the arm comes right up, not in fact snagged to anything, which seems impossible, but it’s a gift Bagger won’t question, he bends the arm around his neck, light as a scarf, and as he leans to get her left arm, accepting the fanged attack of wire into his crotch, he gets his first clear look at her face,

and hold on, what the fucking hell, he knows this woman, Bagger’s mind starts spinning, could it be Marie-Louise, lovesick and pursuing him all the way to the trenches, no, he’s known this face longer than that, perhaps a devout woman from his father’s church who followed her preacher’s footsteps across the Atlantic, or maybe a celebrity on the level of Mary Pickford, shipped abroad to inspire her fighting boys, only to get lost in the chaos,

and then her eyelids part, soft as a daub of honey,

and her shriek severs, abrupt as a rubber sole,

and gone with the shriek, Bagger realizes, is the undertone that had been buried in it since he awoke from the minenwerfer blast, Bagger, it had said, Save me, it had said, the words had come from this feminine effulgence, she had cried out to him, specifically Private Cyril Bagger, long before he could have possibly heard her, it’s so outlandish an act he wonders if he died in the mortar blast after all, and this blazing oracle is a creature dispatched to drag his stubborn corpse to the hereafter,

and her eyes are brown, no surprise, because he knows her, and while he’s transfixed, the whole pile of wire rollicks, it’s Arno blundering into the thorny mesh, wire cutters abandoned, and the kid grabs the woman’s ankles, the light from her skin so intense it functions like Röntgen’s X-ray machine, Arno’s hand flesh bright pink, each finger bone defined,

and the kid’s weeping, which makes Bagger realize his eyes are leaking, too, and it’s not like getting gassed or getting soot in his eyes, it’s like the tears of the devout he used to see at his father’s church, moved by some vision incomprehensible yet gorgeous,

and with Arno in the wire, Bagger gets moving, placing the woman’s other arm around his neck, turning her over, the red dress as impervious to being snagged as the blue cape, and he rolls the woman into his arms, and in accordance with that roll, the tower of light falls hard as an axed tree and Bagger’s abruptly eye to eye with the coruscating dazzle,

and it ought to blind him but doesn’t, it’s like being suffused in the sunlight of some arcadian glen, pollens and danders and seeds and fluff newly visible, an invisible world of wee floating things revealed, the October chill stoked to a cozy snug, the slaughterhouse reek sugared into a bakery bouquet, the gravel crunch of war muffled by a calming rustle of leaves,

and then the woman’s chin notches over Bagger’s shoulder and her lighthouse beacon blazes toward the Allied trench, and the screech and talon and stink of the Great War resumes, nothing in front of Bagger but Bois de Fays smeared into the gray-purple of a flayed trout, and Bagger’s chest pangs with the loss of beauty, like the last time he saw Marie-Louise, applying woeful wartime cosmetics, mascara of vaseline and charcoal, rouge of dampened red crepe, lipstick of red cake coloring, when Bagger was dragged from her bed by a corporal under orders of a bugle call, no basking one last time in the sarcastic curl of her lips, or kiss her nipple, or admire the arrowhead of hair pointing between her thighs,

and now that beauty’s back, watch what you wish for, asshole, the sedentary murk of the northern forest blossoms into spectacular magnolias of Maxim fire, the Germans having seen the steeple of light topple and decided they’d had enough of the mystery, time to shoot, and it’s the closest Bagger’s ever been to machine gun fire, bullets coming in shiny ropes like spittle, like semen, everything in war is the residue of men,

and Arno tackles Bagger, that’s a new one, all three of them splatted to the mud as the uppermost yard of concertina wire is sawed off by a chugging chain of bullets, individual barbs flung from the wire and embedding into Bagger’s right hand, which protects the back of the woman’s head, and Bagger pushes away from the wire with his boots but hardly moves, heels going nowhere in the loose mud,

and Bagger thinks, this is it and it serves me right, Reis was spot-on that the shrieker should be killed, you learn pretty quick out here, especially on burial duty, that there are ideas humans shouldn’t have and tools they shouldn’t build, and to allow a being of such purity to live within such sloppy Armageddon is wrong, even if she survives this assault, it’ll ruin her, war isn’t merciful, no matter if he and the kid were handed a mission of mercy,

and so Bagger, under darting sparrows of bullets, shifts his hands to the woman’s throat, tender and slim as one of those pretty French poppies, so easy to admire, so simple to pluck,

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and Bagger will never know if Arno guesses the thought in his head or if the kid’s simply a finer soldier, but the featherweight takes handfuls of Bagger’s drabs and muscles him to his hands and knees, the woman safe beneath him, and the kid’s screaming words Bagger can’t hear over the clack and cough and zing of lead sparking off barbed wire in gold doubloons that expose the terrain, mud knobbed with the chins, noses, and cheekbones of embedded corpses,

and when the woman’s head lolls, her citadel of light hinges west, carving across pitted landscapes, through skeletal barricades as well as actual skeletons, and into the bosks of the battle’s perimeter, and, as far as Bagger knows, straight down the longitudinal line, a new kind of engineer’s tape stretched through Bois de Romagne and Bois de Bas, erupting from the woods at Brest, spooking submarines in the Celtic Sea, a bridge of light all the way to Boston, a new border for a new world,

and just as Bagger accepts there’s no way to evade Jerry’s fire while carrying a human torch, Arno becomes a dressmaker’s assistant, he pulls the sleeves of the long blue cape over the woman’s arms, and tucks the hood over her head, dousing her phosphorescence,

and Arno, crazy kid, he’s got Bagger’s Springfield 1903 lodged into his shoulder, his piece-of-shit Chauchat forgotten, and waves for Bagger to make a run for it, but fuck that, Bagger’s not getting up, the kid’s going to get decapitated up there, but Arno starts firing at the German trench, one kid versus the entire Hun army, so what the fuck else is Bagger supposed to do, he braces the woman tight to his chest, right over his gas mask, and tries to stand, only to spring right up, the woman weighs no more than her dress and cape,

and Bagger runs, oh shit, and with his arms over the woman, his legs have to do all the work, oh shit, tendon-stretching strides, heels planted into muddy marsh, warped metal, mushy organs, crackling bones, oh shit, and he sees at his periphery the red starbursts of Jerry’s grenades and feels the hawkwind of the resulting shock waves, shit shit, feels fallen men claw at his shins, desperate for water, desperate for a bullet, hands that are really only rogue weeds, oh shit,

and he scrambles arcs around craters he can see and splashes through craters he can’t, shit shit, while Arno’s noises grow increasingly distant as the kid keeps stopping to shoot, oh shit, and all Bagger thinks is how he’s never checked his ammo, why would he, he never shoots any, but cartridges bloat in wet weather, his Springfield might blow up in Arno’s hands, shit shit shit,

and there, fifty yards off, is the long, toothless grin of the Allied trench, a shade darker than the sackcloth day, only first here’s a dead soldier propped against an oak stump, facing the Hun trench like a spectator, a bullet caught between his front teeth, the guts in his lap still wispy with steam, and Bagger thinks this is why they call U.S. soldiers doughboys, you slit them open and their guts roll out like dough,

and Bagger looks at the dough too long, his right boot clips the corpse’s knee, and that’s it, his adrenalized dexterity is disrupted, he’s spun, the battlefield a carousel of yellow gun blasts, his legs cycling too fast, can’t extend his arms for balance, he’s a runaway wheel, not falling, not yet falling, not quite falling,

and then a factory-made product of destruction lands, well, somewhere, and the earth digests it with an earthquake, and Bagger finally falls, twisting so as not to crush the woman, a dive into cold, hard mud, the trench but a few arms’ lengths away, all Goodspeed or Popkin or Veck has to do is reach out and pull him in, if they haven’t murdered one another or skedaddled,

and Bagger’s heard men describe the whoosh of howitzers shot over their heads as they go over the top, both shit-your-pants scary and the apex of exhilaration, and here it is, oven-hot air singeing his neck, a shell with a German accent, yes, there’s the minnie scream, nothing like the woman’s shriek now that he hears it isolated, a barbarian noise, lionlike in solipsistic bloodthirst, its shadow a swelling, widening, black pool,

and, boy, it stings to have gotten so close to saving his own butt one last time, stings even more that he failed to protect this woman’s breathtaking light, but at least Uncle Sam’s gone quiet, happy and satisfied, at long, long last,

and then, so then, but then, it happens, a thing happens, a thing, it happens, how else to put it, Bagger knows he’ll never grasp it, the thing, which happens, the thing that’s like a pinch, like a thumb and forefinger pinch, taking him by the back of his olive drabs, same as a mama cat takes her kitten by the scruff, and he’s lifted, that’s the thing that happens, lifted right off the ground till he’s watching mud dribble ten feet down from his dangled limbs, and though one of his hands holds the woman’s hand, she’s above him, it’s like she’s pulling him into the air, they’re floating, and not only them, three rats and whole colonies of bugs, and who knows, maybe Arno, too, and then they are tossed, the lot of them, fifteen feet into the trench, and a second after this thing happens, the mortar lands, embeds, and detonates, the trench wall obliterated, but that’s not where Bagger is anymore, he’s way over here, inside a clay avalanche but alive, alive, what did Bagger tell you, he’s always been a lucky son of a bitch,

The Gaff

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