Page 17 of Angel Down

and Veck goes dreamy again and, still goddamn handsome, says, “When I heard the order, all I thought was how proud Naomi would be when I told her Major General Reis chose me,”

and there it is again, the pride of being selected all that’s keeping Veck going, proof that he’s valued in France as he never was in the U.S., and the truth is, right now Bagger needs Veck to keep that pride going, what with Arno reverting to the child he is and Popkin not to be trusted, so Bagger rolls over in his funk hole and replies softly, “Naomi will be as proud as a flipping peacock,”

and exactly when Cyril Bagger became such a delicate fucking listener he’s got no idea, maybe the extra ear is to blame, the ear that got splatted onto his cheek all those hours ago, maybe it took root and sprouted an eardrum, maybe it carried the worst curse in the book, the curse of giving a shit, and before Bagger can decide if that’s baloney, a bomb of exhaustion hits like the last three shells didn’t, he’s pounded into the ground, gone like a gasp, only not rapidly enough to elude Veck’s final whisper, as faithful and haunted and sweet and deranged as anything Bagger’s ever heard,

and what Veck says is, “Oh, she is. She’s proud. Aren’t you, Naomi, baby?,” as if the little girl is right there beside the field gun, screened by fog, laughing into her hand, a clever stowaway bemused by her own overseas trick,

XXIV

and what Bagger dreams of is chickens, not for eating, that would have been nicer, but rather for brutal profit, a cockfighting derby he ran in Cedar Rapids, fall 1915, a battalion of cockerels with the youth of drafted soldiers, the steadiest dough he ever made, men in hats paid to enter the tent, paid to buy smokes from the girl Bagger hired, paid to bet on their favored gamecock, paid for booze to dull the ache of defeat,

and defeat most of them suffered because Bagger, the Sioux City Sharpie, rigged the results, stage-painting wounds and cracked beaks on birds that were actually remorseless killers, attaching sharp blades, gaffs they called them, to certain roosters’ ankles to guarantee they’d fight till the ring was a bloodstorm of feathers Bagger had to peel from his face,

and he learned to hold his nausea long enough to pad his pockets in paper and coin, the usual routine, really, ignore the revulsion, Bagger, ignore the blood, ignore the death, and die the gamecocks most surely did, muscles too herniated to be eaten afterward, though in this dream, Bagger’s the one on the menu, roosters waddling up to him, gaffs outward, beaks herky-jerky, pecking off wads of his flesh while the angel watches in cryptic contemplation,

and the cockfight carnage transforms into photoplay reels of basic training in the Tennessee swelter, the whole thing laughable, Camp Winn officers teaching battle techniques they picked up in Cuba and the Philippines, irrelevant to what waited in Europe and the recruits knew it, all they did was march and drill with cut-out rifles sawed from wood, though when it came to close combat training, soldier versus soldier, Bagger was ready, he had a gaff on his ankle, secured there by his father,

and he cockfought the shit out of his fellow recruits, it was easy, all you had to do was go literally insane,

and Bagger wakes up fighting like his angriest rooster, claw and beak, scrapping for his very life, no idea who he’s going after, only that the gaff won’t let him stop, and in the furor he gets skin under his fingernails and tastes sweat and blood, good signs he’s striking true, but the instant he breaks free and tries to stand, his skull whacks the field gun’s belly again,

and he’s out, gunpowder black, entombed in lurid shock,

and new hands, eager ones, lift and shake him, Bagger’s eyes banking from howitzer black to mucky morning gray to Veck, the actual Ben Veck, not the horse-man, his bugged eyes, one of them newly swollen, only inches from Bagger’s own, mouth moving in shouts Bagger doesn’t hear, he’s busy discovering blood smeared from his sore lips to his aching cheek, evidence of being socked in the mouth,

and Veck’s voice breaks through, “He took her! Bagger, he took her!,” and Bagger tries to reply but as a gamecock can only squawk, so he wings Veck aside and pivots on a knee to check behind him, and straightaway finds that it’s true, the angel’s gone, nothing lights their camp but the thin gruel of dawn,

and in that gruel lies Arno, pupal in his funk hole, skin sky-colored, hands crawling over a neck spouting cherry jets of blood,

and for one second, or for a thousand years, Bagger can only stare as Arno gurgles and chokes, his boot heels carving through clay, torso in arhythmic writhe, olive drabs watermelon-striped with his own blood, look at it all, babbling through the kid’s fingers, the kid, the goddamn age-fibbing orphan, and the main regret that overtakes Bagger is the climax he contrived The Son of Tarzan, in which young Korak falls to Tarzan, the kid’s going to die believing that injustice, and the shamefly inside Bagger swells to the full size of top-hatted, bearded Uncle Sam,

and Bagger hiccups to life, looks for a bandage, pats his own person, overcoat, blouse, puttees, everything filthy, so he rips a gunnysack, crunchy with frost, from the howitzer, where gunners of yore left it to cool the 155mm barrel, he has to hope weeks of rain cleansed it of munitions toxins, Bagger knee-walks to Arno’s side and boxes the kid’s slippery hands out of the way, and thereby glimpses the wound, outer skin ragged, muscles prolapsed, silken with pulsing blood,

and Bagger presses the gunnysack to the neck and screams, “Veck!,” and screams, “Veck, get over here!” and screams, “Veck! Veck!,” and then Veck’s there, gamy horse head back on, but Bagger’s got no time to complain, he grabs Veck’s hand and slaps it over the gunny-sack, demonstrating how hard to press, then snags Veck’s mane and tugs it so the horse’s forehead meets Bagger’s and he can bore into Veck’s eyes through the slimy sockets,

and he shouts, “Take care of him!,” verbatim the same mission Reis gave them, and muffled through horseflesh, Veck cries, “I can’t do anything for him!,” to which Bagger roars, “Take care of him!,” and rolls from beneath the howitzer into piercing needles of rain, electric with loss but voracious with rage, there’s only one type of weapon that punches a hole like that into a body and that’s a bayonet, and bayonets attach to rifles, and only one fucker in their party still has a rifle,

and Bagger looks from the hog wallow where Hugh Popkin slept to the muddy bootprints where Hugh Popkin fled after knocking out Bagger, socking Veck, and stabbing Arno, who would have clung to the angel with all he had, and Bagger bolts after the prints, rain going horizontal, the whole Meuse pelting the back of his throat, all of France a moontide smear as Popkin’s bootprints vanish into trampled weeds only to reappear on the bare faces of a rock, or a duckboard, or a helmet, or the shoulders of a dead Jerry,

and not once does Bagger slow, to slow would be to think too hard of Arno, who will be dead before Bagger makes it back, dead not despite his goodness but because of it, like poor old Job in the Bishop’s sermons, and though the kid’s death should feel no different than any death Bagger has witnessed, it is different, it feels like Bagger’s life, too, hinges on this sprint,

and if he can’t catch Popkin, he can’t catch himself from the distance he has fallen, and then there will be no point in surviving long enough to go home, there won’t be any home, the Iowa corn stalks will slash him and the rich soil will rebuff him, it’s only in this wet, windblown instant that he understands the angel as the only buckle that belts him to Earth, an Earth that, four years ago, was pleasant but is now unlivable, all due to the loss of one parentless, homeless, worthless, perfect little bastard kid,

and Bagger might collapse and become a shrieker himself if he wasn’t so sure he was going to catch Popkin, the lummox didn’t leave behind his gear, which means he’s traveling at a sluggardly doughboy pace, that’s why his bootprints swerve into a village, cobblestone roads conceal prints better than mud and buildings offer lots of hiding places for a man and his kidnapped angel,

and this is despite each building having been reduced to a couple walls bracketing atriums of broken stonework, an architecture of subtraction that transforms the village into an absurdity of brick porticos, pergolas of twisted steel, doors leading to nothing, stairways to nowhere, windows that open to the bleakest vistas, there’s a roofless church, there’s a bombed town hall surrounded by ejected seats, there’s what was either a hotel or a brothel, the only excuses for the charred mattresses cast about like beached fish,

and two townsfolk marbled in mud look up from where they balance rocks atop sticks for some reason, and scurry through the rain at him, an old man with a mustache the size of his arm, and his wife, who holds in her apron what appears to be a dead cat, and they run up to Bagger, who waves them off, the couple looks as shell-shocked as Veck, and you don’t know what people like that will do,

and the husband jabbers French that Bagger interprets as begging, so Bagger repeats, “Affaire militaire,” a handy shibboleth he picked up from First Lieutenant Hollis, easy to memorize because it rhymes, only for the old woman to take the dead cat by the back legs and start pummeling Bagger with it, the sodden little corpse squishing with every strike,

and Bagger catches the cat in his hand, wrenches it from the wife, and throws it like a football into a drift of burnt mail in front of a destroyed post office, and the wife screams and chases it, while the husband keeps on jabbering with breath so foul Bagger looks straight at him, and the pleased husband grins, showing the mouse tail stuck between his front teeth, which makes Bagger realize those rocks and sticks were deadfall traps, this old couple has been living off squashed mice,

and Bagger sees a broken-down army ambulance, a red cross painted on its canvas carriage, but has no intent to investigate it until he hears a plea coming from it, the same plea that cajoled him to join Arno in No Man’s Land, Save me,

and he halts so hard the snap of his boots resounds off what few walls still exist, and he peers through the rain into the black void of the truck bed, the metal bars of a bunkbed cot all that’s visible, and the old man notices and shuts up, and the single-note song grows even clearer, Save me, Save me, before the ambulance interior yowls as feet clump across the thin steel,

and the light from inside turns raindrops into fireflies, and only brightens as the source grows nearer, and then, like a tank crunching from Argonne fog, the lummox appears, silhouetted in the glow, the Springfield’s strap over his right shoulder, the barrel aimed loosely at Bagger, Popkin’s hard-on visible through his trousers below the angel he carries, who is startlingly naked, head tipped back, halo vertical, body alive in coruscation, a minor god created to illuminate this one shitty village forever and ever, amen,