Page 26 of Angel Down

and Bagger nods crisply, a paradigmatic soldier at last, and reports, “Yes, sir!,” and the kid gives him a kick in the back to get him going, and Bagger marches out of the forest and through the ossuary of sculptured dead, until the kid kicks him in the right kidney to direct him right, the left kidney to direct him left, and Bagger laughs, the kid always enjoyed how Renault commanders, inside their buttoned-up tanks, signaled directions to their drivers via kicks,

and now Bagger’s the tank and he couldn’t be prouder, he imagines both of the kid’s boots ending in blades, the same model Bagger once attached to gamecocks, Lewis Arno the gaff, he’ll spur Bagger to fight as hard as he needs to fight, for as long as that fight needs fought, until all who try to stop him are a discombobulation of feathers,

Mercy Seat

XXXIV

and All-High Warlord Kaiser Willy’s never looked better, Bagger thinks in a rush of American zeal, the Prussian’s Rottweiler head represented by a cankered jack-o’-lantern, his distinctive pronghorn mustache inked above pumpkin teeth gummed inward like Popkin’s trench mouth, the candle flickering through triangle eye holes like mortar fire reflected in Goodspeed’s pince-nez, the gourd stem topped with a decent likeness of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Garde Du Corps helmet, the ornamental eagle replaced by dead crow, otherwise Willy is naked, right down to a stubby cigar butt for a cock,

and Bagger flicks the dick hard enough for it to spiral off into the fallen night, which makes Arno cackle and the angel raise an eyebrow,

and just beyond, heralded by the fetor of soiled bandages and trench foot, and the sound of a doughboy playing bagpipes like a Scot, is the 43rd’s support legion of wagons and trucks and wheeled artillery and horses, lord, the hundreds of horses, kicking shit from their hooves, feeding from grazing masks, and emanating a barnyard stench that raises the temperature ten degrees as Bagger and Arno weave through a torch-lit perplexity of mess tents, water caissons, and latrine benches, which Bagger can tell are being built all wrong,

and what does it matter, though, he’s home, back with good old Company P, and as Bagger enters the trench behind Arno carrying the angel in her concealing cape, it becomes clear the pumpkin-head bogey was constructed not by playful privates hopped up on patriotism, but frostbitten woebegoners who might sculpture their own effigies with similar deformities,

and this suggests to Bagger the Butcher Birds have yet to receive a new commander, but something’s sure the hell happening, the soldiers ought to be passed out, yet they fidget like men about to go over the top, except no one’s preparing to do any such thing,

and Bagger would question them if they didn’t stab him with glares of accusation or turn away in disgust, which deflates Bagger, his all-night march has been sustained by the prospect of forging camaraderie with his fellow man, but he tells himself to be patient, these grunts don’t know the body he carries will change everything for them, their country, their world,

and in fact, they likely believe he’s carrying the shrieker’s corpse, and furthermore, that the survivors of Reis’s clean-up crew were, of course, its two biggest cowards, the ones who must have looked on as the other three died, which isn’t correct or fair, but again, Bagger soothes himself, the doughboys will understand soon,

and finally a boy barely older than Arno waves his arms from above and gestures for the body Bagger carries, he’ll take care of it, harvest the ID tag and get it buried, a kindness that makes Bagger regret how grumpily he’s dug his graves, so he nods his thanks even as he refuses the offer and follows Arno, and because no one hates Arno, soldiers listen to the kid’s repeated plea for directions and keep pointing him down the trench,

and at last they arrive at a reinforced dugout radiating the yellow, orange, and reds of competing lanterns, a sure sign of officers doing officer things, ditto the four armed sentries guarding the downward stairs, the first two of whom are hardscrabble Butcher Birds, a hard contrast to the two guards so snappily outfitted they could only hail from Army HQ,

and Bagger holds Arno back with an elbow, leans into the nearest soldier, and asks, “Who’s in there?” and the soldier, knowing he’s observed by HQ guards, doesn’t move an inch, but bulges his eyes, to which Bagger asks, “Bullard?,” and the man bulges his eyes bigger, enough to hush Bagger to a whisper before he asks, “Pershing?,”

and the soldier flexes his jaw, holy fuck, the man himself is here inside this junky burrow, General John J. Pershing, commander of the U.S. First Army, architect of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, so preposterous an event Bagger’s instinct is to elongate his spine to salute, no matter all the times he’s fantasized about burying Pershing with the quicklimed dead,

and Bagger attunes his ears to the bunker’s boss tones and swears he hears Pershing’s voice, a bit mumbly, a bit sibilant, but unlike all the times Bagger has heard it on radios, also enraged, a series of attack-dog barks that the dugout’s walls mitigate into the soft smacks of wet clay,

and most everyone has cleared the area, unwilling to be excoriated when Reis emerges, if indeed the major general has the balls to emerge ever again, but Bagger stands tall, and breathes deep, he’s got to finish this, the stakes are too impossibly high,

and soon the bunker acrimony shifts to the sounds of paper slapped into folders and hats slapped onto heads, and then the lava light is blotted out by uniformed men streaming up the stairs like flamethrower fire, and the guards part ways and Bagger stands at attention, he doesn’t know the last time he saw so many gray-haired men, and their nucleus is the grandfatherly Pershing with his shovel jaw and ticket-stub mustache, muttering while his staff nervously checks the sky as if privy to intel the Butcher Birds are not,

and Bagger knows he should stop Pershing, cry out his name, even grab hold of his stripes regardless of the rifle stock he’d take to the face, because here’s the one man in the world who needs to know what he and Arno found in Bois de Fays, and how her earthbound fall is a warning to stop firing guns into realms they can’t understand,

and yet Bagger says nothing, dumbstruck as the pious,

and then Pershing’s gone, nothing but a cold wind, a hallucination of power, Bagger will have to go up the proper chain of command, it’s the only way this is going to work, so he kneels to form a private space in which he can open his Bible and take a restorative sniff before handing it to Arno for safekeeping once again,

and Bagger stands before the armed duo and says, “Private Cyril Bagger, Company P, I need to see the major general, it’s a matter of life and death,” and the guards, groggy from Pershing’s holy jolt, share a look to make sure they are both still characters in this nightmare, and black tributaries of soil accentuate their wrinkling eyes as they debate telepathically, then pivot aside like drunkards,

and Bagger pins Arno with a look and says, “Go sleep. I’ll find you when I’m done,” to which the kid’s face pinches as he objects, “That’s not fair, I want to stay with her,” and Bagger can’t deal with this now, there’s a window of opportunity and he needs to hurry through it, so he raises his voice like he never has to the kid,

and booms, “Goddammit, Private Arno! Go get some shut-eye and sleep off that subordinance! You hear me, little puke? Why are you still standing here? Get your ass going!,”

and the betrayed look that settles over Arno’s face breaks Bagger’s heart, but he can’t drag a fourteen-year-old kid into Reis’s lair, if this goes wrong, Bagger alone must take the blame, so he sharpens a chisel glare to scrape the kid off his boot,

and Bagger turns away, Arno nothing to him now, that’s what he tells himself, what he has to tell himself, and he shifts the angel into his left elbow and with his right hand wipes his face, eager to make himself presentable, only for his palm to feel just how many layers of muck have caramelized his skin, it’s no use, so he exhales, nerves bouncing, and heads down the steps toward the gas-proof curtain, ocean-cold down here but bright, too, aflame with all the interplanetary possibility of an alien sun,

XXXV

and every time Bagger has laid eyes on Major General Lyon Reis, the man has been standing as if posing for a portrait, no matter the strategical blunder unfurling through his field glasses, an affect Bagger suspects the man has employed all his life to ameliorate the effect of his underdeveloped right arm, so it’s ominous to find Reis sitting, all alone in the dusky eigengrau, no staff of sycophants before which to perform his tin-soldier bit, staring into a hissing lantern,

and it’s with apparent great effort that Reis rotates his head a few inches to his right to aim his half-lidded eyes on the unbeckoned soldier standing at the base of the stairs, a body in his arms, and Reis delivers a blink of slow odium before staring back into the low flame, saying, in the rasp of the browbeaten, “Private Gravedigger,”

and though Bagger can’t salute while holding the angel, he snaps his heels and woofs with a fanatic’s brio, “Sir!,” in hopes Reis will notice his revitalized soldierhood and welcome him into the fold, but Reis only says, “Too little, too late,”