Page 18 of Angel Down

XXV

and this means Popkin hasn’t imitated Goodspeed by taking the angel off to barter, what he’s done is strip the angel of her red dress and blue cape inside a truck stinking of coagulated blood, putrid bandages, and the sweat of the doomed, with Popkin’s sweaty drabs next to be stripped, why not, no one was around to intervene but a couple of elderly mice-eaters,

and though Bagger has known Popkin as a beast for months, this turn makes Bagger’s hindbrain throb, lusting for the angel is sick, worse than pedophilia, Bagger’s never even thought of the angel as having genitals, though she must, she has nipples, she has pubic hair, and Bagger’s anger at Popkin fireworks into sputtering fury,

and so he strides at Popkin, his lack of hesitation catching the lummox off guard, and though the angel weighs little, rebalancing her in one arm is tricky, she’s rolling shoulders, rolling hips, flopping arms, flopping legs, and in two seconds Bagger has closed to ten feet so Popkin simply drops the angel, who hits the ambulance floor like a sack of potatoes,

and up comes the Springfield on its leather sling, carving through rain, and though Bagger’s had guns pointed at him before, this is the first time in France, where he’s seen what a .30 caliber can do at close range, the barrel’s foresight like the steel-rivet eyes of the snake he once bumped into at Lake Zabriskie, and Bagger halts on wet cobblestone, arms to his sides in the universal plea for dispassion,

and Popkin’s eyes have the greasy sheen of a dead fish as he bellows over the rain, “None of your business, Bagger,” and the part of Bagger forever allegiant to his own welfare agrees, all he’s got to do is hump back to the 43rd, dig more latrines, bury a few thousand more corpses, and get back to fleecing fools along the Mississippi,

and he’s ready to do just that when he thinks of Tarzan again, maybe it’s the junglelike deluge or maybe it’s Popkin’s great-ape size, and if Bagger’s learned one thing about Tarzan, it’s that he never turns away, never abandons a weaker party, and if Bagger wants to give Lewis Arno the send-off he deserves, this is how, be Tarzan to the kid’s Korak just this once,

and so Bagger shouts, “Do this and you’ll regret it,” and a smile as miserable as a broken twig surfaces from the chub of Popkin’s cheeks, gums as red as clown noses, gray teeth draining caramel drool, and he angles his face so rain strikes it straight on and washes mud down his neck, and closes his eyes like he’s luxuriating in a bath, and says, “No one tells the rain it’ll regret falling. I’m gonna be the rain, Bagger. I’m gonna be the storm,”

and Popkin’s never talked like this, to say the fucking least, so Bagger squints through the downpour to see if the lummox has suffered a head injury, but instead Popkin has a look Bagger recognizes from his father’s congregation, he looks goddamn empowered, and Bagger’s gut constricts with the notion that Popkin, otherwise destined for a life of hillbilly irrelevance, believes intercourse with an angel will elevate him to godlike status,

and Bagger thinks mad thoughts, what happens when an angel is infected with the clap, do the heavens rain fire, do flowers release poison pollen, fantastical terrors already indigenous to the Great War, which makes Bagger wonder if a whole brigade of angels has fallen to Europe’s battlefronts, loaded with sicknesses holy enough to bring down the human hellions,

and Bagger shouts, “You’re not the fucking rain, you fucking jackass, you’re a shitty fucking private who doesn’t know his rifle from his pus-oozing dick,” and the single wrinkle that clefts Popkin’s forehead tells Bagger the jab has landed, the lummox’s eyes clear a bit and he says, “You want her too. But she’s mine,”

and because the rain’s so thick, Bagger can fake a stumble to get closer, eight feet away now, and he distracts from his advance by saying, “Stealing her doesn’t make her yours, you dumb side of beef. If she belongs to anyone, it’s me and Arno. We found her. We rescued her. And she rescued us, remember? She doesn’t give a shit about you,”

and Popkin’s forehead goes into full furrow, and here comes the toddler frown, and he simpers like a boy whose birthday party is being ruined, and he says, “She let me hold her hand. She let me touch her hair. She loves me, Bagger. You don’t know. Just because she don’t put it in her letters don’t mean it’s not true,”

and Bagger’s really fucking confused until a needle of clarity slivers in, and Bagger slops rain from his face and shouts, “Effie? You think she’s Effie Weffie?,” and Popkin goes pink, and he gets that snorting-bull look, and he cries, “She’s mine, Bagger! Stay away!,” and Bagger laughs, he can’t help it, he can’t believe what he’s hearing, “Popkin! You fuckwit! That’s not Effie,”

and Popkin’s pink goes red, and the Springfield’s bolt action rattles back, and he spits, “Get her name outta your mouth!,” and Bagger recoils, doesn’t like the gun’s snake-eye trained on him, so he holds out hands to ward off any rash triggering and yells, “Popkin! Fucking listen! Effie’s back home! Back in whatever shitheel town you come from!,”

and Popkin bellows, “This is the last time I’m warning you, Bagger! All you ever do is trick me! But this ain’t no blackjack! This is my girl. She came all the way to France to see me. That’s love is what that is! You can’t tell me it’s not!,” as the rifle butt lodges harder into his shoulder, he’s really going to goddamn shoot,

and it shouldn’t surprise Bagger, the lummox already mortally wounded Arno, Bagger only regrets he didn’t move fast enough to stop him either time, there’s no point even trying to hide from the bullets, not in this mud-and-rubble slurry, all he can do is lock his jaws and wait to learn what millions of soldiers already know, how it feels when your innards meet iron,

XXVI

and then he explodes in sobs, not Bagger, not Popkin, but the overlooked third character, the old husband, and the soldiers break their face-off to watch the old man limp at the ambulance, mustache spread broadly above over the outlandish diameter of his sudden smile, mouse tail flapping from his teeth, blubbering in disbelief,

and the scamper is so unexpected that the old man makes it all the way to the ambulance, hands grasping inches from the angel’s hair, but at the end of the day, he’s only an old man, and Popkin redirects the rifle a few inches, nothing simpler, and shoots, no visible burst of light because the angel’s light absorbs it,

and the back of the husband’s skull explodes open like a broken egg, raindrops going red as they are impregnated with blood, while the cobblestone is splattered by brains like thrown mustard,

and though the report is loud, Bagger knows from experience that rain dampens gunshots too much for the farmer’s wife, wherever she is, to hear and come running and discover her husband, the last person she has left in the world, dead, and it’s a good thing she doesn’t, the man’s body tips backward and falls, the fractured skull splooshing as it shatters against stone,

and the whole thing takes three seconds, the first two of which Bagger spends immobile with shock, but that third second is all he needs, he darts forward, wraps his arms around Popkin’s shins, and pulls, the lummox’s boots sliding off the slick truck bed and into the air, which punts the angel to the ground as Popkin’s shoulder blades slam to the bumper, both his helmet and the Springfield knocked aside, clattering off cobblestone,

and Bagger drives the meatier man to the hard road, and how strange it is, he thinks, that he’s finally engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and it’s not even with a Hun Heinie Boche Fritz Jerry Squarehead,

and Popkin gobbles in startlement and pain, and Bagger wants that rifle, but he’s afraid he’ll die if he turns away, so he rolls to his knees and rabbit punches Popkin in the nose, blood bursting fast and short like a stomped tomato, Popkin blinking, stupid and childlike, but when Bagger unleashes a second fist, the lummox’s big hand springs up and catches it like a baseball in a mitt, then grips that fist like the head of a gearshift and flings Bagger all the way off,

and Bagger rolls and rolls, each cobblestone a clawing crustacean until he brakes himself and pushes to all fours only to be hurled back down, Popkin’s full weight on him, the smothering mode of combat he used against Ben Veck and Frenchy Franchouillard,

and Bagger’s nose is smashed flat to the road, lips split between teeth and stone, breath vacuumed out, he’s emptied and gasping, the lummox’s weight like grave soil, the big belly a bag of wet cement, the hard-on like a revolver jabbing Bagger’s kidney,

and there’s a fist to the back of Bagger’s head, he hears the skin of his forehead pop open against cobblestone, then a fist to his left side, ribs squealing, lungs beneath spasming from the blood loss of ruptured vessels, and then the goddamn animal bites him, right on the scalp like a bat, and over his own confounded blat Bagger hears Popkin rasp, “You don’t touch my girl, you don’t ever touch my Effie,”

and Bagger believes he could talk his way out of this friendly fire if his mouth wasn’t full of blood, he’ll be dead before he can get out a single word, so he reaches behind him with both hands, and though Popkin slaps away the first, the other finds a rogue puff of hair on Popkin’s head and yanks it,

and the lummox honks like a goose and tries to pull away, hard, riding Bagger like a sled before Bagger’s hand makes a tarantula hop from Popkin’s tuft of hair to the scalp itself,