Page 11 of Angel Down

and Bagger saw a moving picture once, nine chairs crowded into a wagon, My Fearful Visage was the title, a grayscale play in the form of rapidly cycled photographs, a tawdry melodrama acted out by thespians shrunk to pygmy size on a wall, followed by a sales pitch from a chap hawking a scald cream called Mr. Stick’s Suffradine, all of which intrigued Bagger, he was always on the lookout for novel magics with which to bewitch his marks, and it’s sad, really, that he never got to see another photoplay until right now,

and this one’s projected on the inside of his skull, Private Bagger Goes to War, set in Davenport, Iowa, May 1915, our hero is twenty-two and reading a Des Moines Register piece titled MANY WOMEN AND CHILDREN AMONG LUSITANIA DEAD, and there, under the subhead 1,000 gone, is “Bishop Bernard Bagger,” drowned in the Celtic Sea when a U-boat, enforcing a Reichstag blockade, torpedoed the British liner, which the Bishop had booked in the desperate hope that ministering to Entente soldiers might restore his belief in a righteous God,

and it’s hard to fathom it was only ten days earlier that Bagger had come, dragging the heels of his fringe-tongued, patent-leather brogues, nicely paired with shin-length checkerboard socks, back to the old church, now closed, and to the drafty apartment above, soon to be closed as well, where he’d grown up with his spartan father and his father’s memories of Bagger’s mom, who the old man described as having blond hair, chubby cheeks, and a lamblike soul,

and Bagger had been summoned to see his father off on the 20th Century Limited, which would spirit him to Manhattan’s Cunard pier, with grandstands in sight of the White Star pier that was meant to have received the Titanic one year earlier, how about them apples, and finally onto a cruiser called Lusitania that would deposit him in Liverpool,

and how flippant Bagger had been, chewing ice, calling the ship “Lucy” to be a brat and asking, “Why not stay at the Biltmore, Pop?,” though under no circumstances would Bishop Bagger stay anywhere but New York’s most fleabagged of flophouses, just as he’d accept no Lusitania berth but the C-deck bunkhouse, and the old man’s disappointed look withered Bagger as it always had, his father considered him a useless dandy, no matter how fine his finery,

and that’s probably why Bagger lost his cool and spit his ice in the hearth and ranted how the old fool ought to get off his high horse, the only concern the U.S. had in Europe’s war was cold hard cash, if the Entente vanished, so did the money they paid us for our goods, that’s what Bagger read in the paper, and he concluded by accusing his dad of running from failure, the failure of his church, the failure of his faith, “You’re looking for a purpose to save you!” he shouted, to which the Bishop, rather mournfully, replied, “Aren’t you?,”

and it was a low blow, and Bagger got up to leave, but the Bishop raised a hand, fingers osseus, skin crepe, he’d aged a thousand years in ten, and he asked, with a tenderness Bagger had forgotten was possible, if Bagger wouldn’t consider coming with him, C-deck still had tickets, and Lucy was, after all, the world’s fastest, most luxurious ocean liner, a detail tailored to tantalize his son’s poltroon interests,

and Bagger hesitated, what if he said yes, simply said yes, and got on that train, on that ship, and left behind the guilt of being the baby that killed his kindhearted mother in childbirth, left behind the shame of cheating others for a living, not to mention that the gambling on a boat like Lusitania would be gangbusters, though what if he didn’t gamble at all, what if he stood by his father’s side on the deck and found purpose in the sun, the water, the gold braids where the two forces met,

and what if Bagger died trying to save him,

and what if they went down with arms intertwined,

and when the Register confirmed that only one Bagger male had drowned, Bagger thought, well, old man, does that answer your question, it was either that or start sobbing, and he had a casino to get to, for while he knew plenty of boys who’d take their father’s murder as a sign to volunteer against the Huns, he’d already lost half his life to dear old dad’s suicide mission, and he’d be damned if he was going to lose the second half, too,

and what he’d never admit to anyone was that, before he polished his brogues and headed out to work that day, he picked up the red leather Bible, the single item his father had pushed into Bagger’s hands before he left the apartment, and he inhaled deep from its pages in hopes of smelling the forgotten parts of childhood, the good things, paper, glue, charcoal, milk, chocolate, skin, fur, grass,

and it was the Bible the Bishop had revelated from every Sunday of Bagger’s youth, the leather adumbral with old sweat, gilt edges rubbed free of gold, silk bookmark frayed to a serpent’s tongue, the only object that ever felt holy to Bagger, for nothing else had the power to drive the Bishop to his knees,

and how many times, while the flaking paint of the apartment flapped like shamefly wings from the vibrations of the organist downstairs, had Cyril tried to pull his father from his whirlpool of ponderings, pull him literally by the sleeve, only for the Bishop to gently, crushingly, extricate his son’s fingers and hand him the Bible to read, the way Red Cross nurses give a man about to be amputated a rag to bite on, like all the answers were in this book, you only had to be willing to let them drive you insane,

and because the Bible had too many words, little Cyril instead studied the pictures bunched at the book’s center, reproductions of famous paintings of the whole cast, Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Esther, Jesus, Judas, the two Marys, how he came to adore those portraits, the big, eccentric household Bagger never had,

and it’s a household he didn’t need anymore, after the Lusitania came the best part of Private Bagger Goes to War, all obligations to his father released, allowing him to barnstorm the Mississippi with impunity, imbibing wine, check, women, check, and song, check, and once President Wilson, reelected on the slogan of He Kept Us Out of the War, declared war, Bagger made paper airplanes of the loyalty leaflets that littered the streets, and enjoyed many a hearty guffaw at the suckers who rushed to enlist,

and he began to see his draft dodging as a kind of vaudeville dance, look at Cyril Bagger go, maybe his purpose was to resist having a purpose, be the hedonist against which valorous sorts measure themselves, that’s its own kind of service, for without villains there can’t be heroes,

and so he hid behind the skirts of the women’s peace movement, which included, to his delight, a bevy of shapely charmers in full swoon to his principles, until Wilson blew that up, too, with the Espionage Act, though Bagger would have survived that as well, if not for an enlistment officer who spotted him in a Des Moines red-light brothel, good and tipsy, and in possession of a card cutter,

and that was curtains for ol’ Bagger, he was dunked in a horse trough to sober him up, and escorted to an Army office to fill out his Selective Service form under threat of jail, where he goldbricked a final time by misspelling everything in hopes they would deem him daft, even writing WAR IS RONG at the top of the form, but they didn’t bite, and thus Private Bagger Goes to War comes to its bittersweet end, our hero drafted into the American Expeditionary Force on August 10, 1917,

and four hundred and twenty-nine days later the AEF’s still got him, and for a second time in as many hours he stirs from oblivion, the backs of his eyelids a-flicker with the photoplay’s final words, THE END?, and the first thing he sees is Lewis Arno’s face, will you look at that, his face is still on his head, his head still on his shoulders, his shoulders still on his torso, the kid’s not only alive but whole, Bagger’s luck must have rubbed off,

and before Bagger can see what Arno is up to, he notices three more faces far above, Vincent Goodspeed, Hugh Popkin, and Ben Veck, each holding a lantern, a sure sign they’d been fixing to ab-squatulate when Bagger and Arno were delivered, but now the trio stares down in shock, not at Bagger but at Arno,

and so Bagger looks again, and this time sees that the kid is snuggled like a toddler into the side of the woman, her eyes closed, Arno’s eyes closed, too, he’s smiling beatifically, cauled with clay the others must have dug him from, and because the woman’s lying face up, brilliant ivory light spears upward into the gloom,

and what felt so fantastical in No Man’s Land, dancing along the razor of a dozen different demises, feels realer in this mudworld setting, the woman has all the upsetting tangibility of the two-headed lizard Sergeant Neil paraded around at Montfaucon, a worrisome aberration, for who can say if such a lizard, or such a woman, carries a novel disease, it could be seeping into Arno’s pores right now, yet none of the soldiers do shit, maybe because the kid has never looked so happy,

and Bagger stands, legs bowing like rubber, and joins the others at a safer distance, and regards the bizarre tableau, his dizzied mind wilding, he goddamn knows this woman, and what’s more, he’s seen her in this exact pose, holding a child, it’s a clue, but Bagger’s cranium throbs too hard to seize upon it,

and that’s how he remembers the minnie blast, oh shit, that’s right, the facts sink in like tiger claws, the blast, the floating through air, the impossible everything,

and he wipes Earth’s mucus from his eyes and really looks at the woman lit by lanterns, face a placid moon, features fine as china, cheeks the same pink as the petals of her lips, brows only a suggestion, reddish-brown hair center-parted and disappearing down the back of her cape, the hand she has around Arno so delicate Bagger mistakes her fingers for a spill of cigarettes, the red dress hiding a body that Bagger somehow feels no prurient curiosity about,

and one of the rats that was floated into the trench with Bagger and Arno lazes atop the kid’s knee, as content with the kid as the kid is with the woman, and though Bagger despises rats, he finds the detail stirring, natural laws have been supplanted by a law even more natural, restored from a time before humans taught animals to fear them, and perhaps a floated insect lies happily atop the rat, and on that insect rests a happy fungus, and so on,

and despite the chortling of bullets, the thunder of heavies, the mist unbraiding into pattering rain, the bubbling mud, the heart still hiccuping in his chest, Bagger is strikingly glad that Private Bagger did, in fact, go to war, if only to witness this strange nativity, and to know, if only for an instant, what the world might have looked like if, as his father used to preach, the Tree of Knowledge had gone unplucked and the Garden of Eden had been allowed to grow into the sort of paradise Bois de Fays once was,

XVII

and Goodspeed sounds angry when he asks, to anyone, “Did you see what she did?” and Popkin grunts, “We didn’t see nothing,” but Goodspeed insists, “She flew them right up out of there and saved them,” and Popkin growls, “That was the shell that blew them,” and Veck, astonished or terrified, asserts, “The shell hit after they flew out,” and Popkin snarls, a promise that if the Negro doesn’t adhere to the lummox’s version, there’s going to be fists,