Page 28 of Angel Down

and before Bagger can warn off this request, explain what happened when Veck made an equivalent demand, Reis hurls his coat to the ground, revealing the polished and holstered Colt .45 implicit to officers, as well as the sleeve tailored to snug his withered arm, a jolt to Bagger, it resembles a flaccid cock in prophylactic rubber, and then, accelerating the shocks, Reis grips the left shoulder of his blouse and rips it downward, a moist tear, and there’s his concave chest, his baby-fat tummy,

and one more tug and Reis’s right arm flops free, nothing like the ham-hock stumps amputees tote back home, this arm resembles a thick noodle, milk white from lack of sun, glossy as wet clay, dimpled at a neonatal elbow and ending in a flipper with one-inch vestigial fingers, far less terrible than the mutations imagined by Butcher Bird busybodies, but far more terrible, too, for Bagger need only glance at it to know it’s the parasite that has fed off Lyon Reis his entire life,

and the revealed arm reveals Reis, ego stripped as bare as his torso, every button and fold and cuff and trinket rendered irrelevant, he’s the spindly, off-center, poorly assembled human male General Pershing knew him to be, and his hungry left hand claws at the air, wanting, needing,

and Reis orders, or urges, or pleads, or sobs, “Give me my arm. Give me the arm God took from me. How hard I’ve worked for those who only see me as incomplete. If my career must end here, give me the arm with which I might forge a new one. That might make a woman look upon me with something other than dread. If you really are Minerva, bring to me that which I deserve,”

and shit, fuck, the major general’s weeping, nothing could make Bagger squirmier, back when the 2nd Battalion was repelled at Cuisy by mustard gas, Bagger couldn’t even look at the soldiers who cried carbolic tears, and even forced himself to laugh at how they jumped into his latrine ditch to splash sewage into their burning eyes,

and that’s Reis now, chest hitching like a well bucket on a rope, skin ruddy except the right arm, the accursed right arm, still custard white, still flexing happily like a dreaming puppy, and when nothing happens, Reis’s face takes a magenta plunge and his lips curl into his mouth, over his teeth, inchworming toward self-ingestion, and Bagger thinks Reis might tear the arm off himself, a club with which to thrash the angel,

and so Bagger looks at the angel and whispers, “Please,” and hears Reis gag through spitty slobberings of tears, and Bagger hisses, “Please, do what he says,” and Reis’s coughs sawblade through his humiliation, while the angel’s eyes go from Reis to Bagger, she’s the map now, and her shifting geography asks Bagger if this is really what he wants, and he nods, this time it’s her own skin the angel needs to save,

and the angel closes her eyes,

and every lantern in the dugout curtsies for half a second, and the angel’s white light pulses, silent, incandescent, and too much for human eyes, Bagger peels away, covering his face, and from across the table comes the gamy reek of slaughter or birth, and a wet sound, almost flatulent, like venison mashed through a grinder, noises quickly overtaken by Reis’s shriek, he’s the shrieker at last,

and in the maelstrom of wincing and yawning flame, Bagger sees a thing he wishes he could scrub from his eyeballs, Reis’s doughy little arm flayed open as if by scalpels, the eggy epidermis, the yellow pudding of fat, the chocolate red of toneless muscle, the skin undulating like a bedsheet over cockroaches,

and then the muscles unthread as if guided by invisible fishhooks, the underdeveloped radius and ulna unsheathed like two bamboo stalks, at which point the unstrapped muscles ripple like ribbons while the tiny hand swells until it explodes, an orderly explosion, each scroll of skin, cartilage, and tissue arrayed like tools in a toolbox,

and Bagger gags, how in heaven could any miracle be so repellent,

and with the arm unraveled, sectioned, anatomized, and exsanguinated, a biologic basket-weaving begins, knots of tissue slugging down from Reis’s shoulder like snake-swallowed mice, a journey that, per Reis’s moan, is unspeakably painful, before the bone, larger now and stinking of sweet marrow, is enveloped by nets of nerve, knits of muscle, needlepoints of skin, all of which start pink and finespun but thicken and darken until the skin fuses smooth like melted rubber and arm hairs blade upward, a garden at breakneck growth,

and the angel, simple as that, opens her eyes,

XXXVII

and once again the lanterns are as steady as potted flowers, the angel’s light a sunny canopy in the underground box, and Bagger’s canine panting is overcome only by Reis’s, the major general viscous with sweat, face a slick mask of bug-eyed incredulity as he slowly, slowly takes the right arm held away from his body like a torch and brings it nearer, his look of terror lightening, smoothing, going slack,

and, for the first time in his life, Lyon Reis makes a fist with his right hand, and wrist bones gristle, knuckles pop, veins extrude, tendons articulate, and Reis is breathless as he opens the fist and stares into the empty palm as if it holds the universe, and it just might,

and Reis’s head snaps up hard enough to fling sweat, and he stares at the angel with a garbled expression that might break into anything, shock or disgust or rapture, and after a pregnant second, his face delivers the most unsettling possibility of all,

and it’s a grin, a sinuous, gleeful grin that taints Reis’s eyes with a jubilant jaundice, this man Bagger believed was incapable of anything but embittered scoffs, a bubbly giggle that percolates into a toddler peal, a spill of broken glass, so sharp Bagger flinches away,

and Reis giggles, “You,” glancing at Bagger before returning his admiration to his refurbished hand, and it’s the hand he talks to now, “You have brought me this incredible gift,”

and as rare as it was for Bagger to be in a frontal trench when an officer rang the gas klaxon, he still viscerally feels the routine, the reflex fumbling for his mask, the worry that gas will sperm its way into his crevices, and that’s what Bagger hears now, clang clang clang, he brought the angel here for a reason, to help the army if not the world, but there’s no hint of any of that in the word Reis emphasized most, the word me,

and something, maybe Bagger’s heart, tells him to abort, snatch up the angel and race up the stairs, find a trench ladder, run away, he was a goddamn idiot to bring a being like this to man like this, but Bagger deliberates the extra second it takes Reis to approach the table, thread his newly muscled arm beneath the angel’s neck and lift her into the crook of his capable elbow,

and Reis tries to suppress his gaiety, being a combat visionary requires sobriety, after all, and he says, “From the start of this war, men have spoken of wonder weapons. Planes phased with interrupter gear to fire through propellors. U-boats that hunt like sea serpents. Tanks that spit bullets like dragons spit fire. No one saw chlorine gas coming before the Germans opened those cylinders at Ypres. As no one, Private Gravedigger, will see the coming of this, the most wondrous weapon of all. My Minerva,”

and Bagger’s gut cramps, he’s made a blunder all right, the worst blunder of his life, if not the worst blunder of the war, and he stutters, “She’s, no, sir, she’s a healer, I told you what she can, listen, sir, she could end it, she could end the entire,”

and it’s pathetic how Reis talks right over him, he became Private Gravedigger again the moment he handed over this miracle in flesh, and the major general talks to himself now, himself or a full house of imagined admirers, “General Pershing just described to me how the Great War crawls toward its end. A matter of weeks, sayeth our vaunted leader, if not days. The Germans are pushed to the Heights of the Meuse. The Hindenburg Line will shatter and they will be chased all the way to Luxembourg. The world about to phoenix from the ashes will belong to the Allies, and America will soar highest of all,”

and Reis bends to the angel, a Valentino pose, though Bagger wonders if the real target of his adoration is his naked right arm, and he says, “And yet Pershing wishes to replace me. Wishes the ruination of my career. For what purpose? Humiliation. Duly, duly, General Pershing, I am humiliated. Only how great, I ask, can a war be that lasts but four years? Look to the Peloponnesian War. The Punic Wars. The six hundred years of the Crusades! Those were wars. Wars given space for proper prosecution. Never again will I be offered a war. This is my only chance. To show them how they underestimated Lyon Reis. Oh, I shall show them. I will let them pin their medal upon me before I make them kneel,”

and it’s baffling how Bagger’s mind ties it all together, but it does, he need only picture the medal Reis desires, the five-pointed star around a woman in golden profile, hair flowing from beneath her helmet, a likeness Bagger recognizes thanks to a bit of schoolhouse trivia,

and it’s Minerva, goddess of war, who is imprinted on the Medal of Honor, the only woman Reis has ever lusted after, finally that gap over his heart can be filled, and maybe his actual heart as well, filled with black blood, the commingled grout of good and evil,

and Bagger wonders if this consummation would have been better left to Goodspeed, the angel as freakshow capitalism, or Popkin, the angel as a body upon which men could demonstrate domination, or Veck, the angel employed to scorch the earth of injustice, an apocalyptic turn, but preferable to the rule of one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, so long as all is Major General Reis,

and Reis laughs, full-throated, the laugh of a groom swirling his bride in post-nuptial waltz, which is exactly what happens next, he lifts the angel, glorying in his right arm’s effortless might, and away he whirls, his Colt .45 flapping in its holster, the angel’s blue cape rising like a petticoat at a barn dance, Reis’s leather-gloved paw swallowing the angel’s fine-boned fingers as they spin across the dugout,