Page 29 of Angel Down

and Bagger would not have believed one arm more or less could result in such a change, but the evidence is in a three-step sway as steady as the cuckoo’s pendulum, Bagger’s a fine enough waltzer, it helps pass the time on riverboats, but Reis is poetry, a dashing master of the chassé, hover corte, hairpin, oversway, and developpé, and what’s more, dancing for two, manhandling the angel into each position and kicking her feet to where they ought to be,

and Reis talks as he dances, “End the war? No, no. Prolong it. Lengthen it. Draw it out as one does a waltz, until the only cartridges we have left are scrounged from the dead, the only food our own boiled belts, until the Reichstag has our armies inside its closing fist and all hope is lost,” which Reis illustrates by bending his torso in the feminine lily, a position of yielded conquest,

and it’s only to pivot on the next one-count, reversing positions, the angel dipped low, halo scraping dirt, “Only then do I reveal my hand,” Reis crows, “the wonder weapon I alone wield, and with which I win the war and save the world,” and he kisses her, hard, as the position might suggest, and the angel doesn’t resist, forcing Bagger to wonder if she might accept this plot, even consent to it, and his viscera festers in jealousy, all the times he rescued this ungrateful bitch,

and yet if Bagger could speak, if Reis would allow it, if the angel would accept it, he would plead, Don’t do anything he says, he’s talking about sabotaging the war, turning a victory that’s weeks away into years more of gruesome attrition, the deaths of millions, all so he can be the hero rewarded with his country’s highest honor, though even that might not be high enough, emperor of the world will be the only role he accepts with a wonder weapon such as you loaded at his side,

and Reis disconnects the kiss, the angel’s face marred with the profanity of a sleazy smudge, and swings her around, only this time he miscalculates, either his right arm has some learning to do or the angel is upset by the kiss and no longer playing along, either way, she’s slung too far and the inexperienced Reis overcompensates, and they end up colliding, the tasteful distance between them collapsed, hip bones crashing,

and Reis hisses and pulls away, and the angel drops to the floor like a haversack, and Reis holds his right hand before him, it has suffered its first big-boy wound, a nick on the palm, a check mark of blood wrought by an angelic fingernail, perhaps, though who knows, maybe it was something beyond an earthbound man’s perception,

and Reis pants from the dancing and chuckles at the cut before bringing it to his lips and sucking it clean, harder and wetter than the kiss, and he gives the angel a jailer’s leer, “So the lady has claws, does she? Tut-tut. I was hoping we could be friendly. It is of no consequence. The Adversary will learn to be friendly,” and the way he says the word, Adversary, feels truer than anything said about the angel thus far,

and that’s because she’s lovely, and unassuming, and perfect, and yet, and yet, and yet, just look at the blood in her wake,

and Reis checks Bagger for the first time in minutes, making Bagger realize that he hissed, too, at the dancers’ collision, and Reis frowns, displeased to find an observer to the bloodshed of man and virgin, the wrong one deflowered, and directs his eyes at the stairs and says, “I am obliged, Private Gravedigger. Your contribution to the Allied effort will be remembered. That will be all,”

and now Bagger knows what Arno felt when dismissed at the dugout entrance, You hear me, little puke?, the sensation of being cloven from a family you helped create, but what else can Bagger do, he’s the one who brought the angel here, he can hardly attack Reis, a division commander with two strapping arms, and besides, Bagger’s thirsty, starving, and needs to sleep for a million years, which is exactly how long it might take for Reis’s new world order to come and go,

and so Bagger salutes, and wonders how he ended up weaker leaving the dugout than when he entered, Cyril Bagger used to be a man, or so he believes, but now he’s something else, and he stretches his neck to try and see the angel one last time, but she, in her cape-and-dress puddle, faces the other way, having given up on him, same as everyone else,

XXXVIII

and Bagger sleeps in straw munched by horses that will soon be dead, breathing the odor of moldy oats and uric acid, his helmet hugged like a stuffed toy, stubble cottoned with crumbs of crusty bread and gut sloshing with non-muddy water, all tortured thoughts erased, he makes sure of it, that nudge of horse muzzle is the turning hips of Marie-Louise,

and he awakes to thumps and slaps, echoes of sex, which he dreamed of all night, Marie-Louise disrobing, and disrobing, endless layers shucked until she was nothing at all, but after he swipes straw from his face, he locates the source of the sounds, soldiers in dawn’s gray putty using rifle butts to bash frozen extremities back to life, as if angry at the apostate feet that led them here, the treasonous arms that carry the weapons that make them targets,

and there’s a rhythm to the self-battery that inspires admiration in the sleepy Bagger, it’s not quite right to compare the soldiers to flagellating monks, those idiot vandals of their own bodies, these soldiers are more like farmers, rising in cold fog, same old, same old, the creak of their bones answering the bickering of birds and the umbrage of unmilked cows, while silver hoarfrost uplifts the gutted terrain into something you could paint and hang over the hearth,

and though both France and Iowa are filled with farms, Bagger accepts they represent a life he’ll never know, scoundrels like him belong alone, it’s part of the deal, but for this agrarian, frost-muffled instant he can pretend, what’s the harm, that these are his farmhands, his horses, his equipment, his land, his morning, his planet, his eternity, all distilled to a drop of honey sunlight he might yet catch with the tip of his tongue,

and it’s this same sun blading men’s eyes that prevents them from seeing the telltale streaks in the sky, so when a wall of clay bounds upward from a trench three hundred yards away, it seems to happen spontaneously, the earth upchucking an epochal breakfast, though the tiny bodies of soldiers flung wiggling into the air mark this as Hun handiwork,

and it means Jerry has both caught up and caught the 43rd unawares,

and the crackling booms of curtain fire hit seconds later, like a boot camp prank of palms slapped over Bagger’s ears, and he rocks upward, gasping, horses overhead neighing and rearing, and Bagger rolls away, hooves can crush skulls, and when he’s face up, the whole regiment has appeared out of nowhere, five thousand men scrambling like ants from a booted anthill,

and soldiers strap on bandoliers as they leap into reserve trenches, men toss other men Springfields and Enfields and Garands, knights in olive drab storm through craters with Vickers guns strapped to their backs, a team of artillerists wheel out an eighteen-pounder, engineers emplace bridges over trench tops, and staff sprint across them to string cable to telephones already being shouted into by officers, cooks drop breakfast tins in favor of rum rations, medics raise aid posts and dash off with stretchers, never enough,

and Bagger, to his breathless shock, is among them, finally among them, racing to a front carapaced by mud and straw, the horizon lit by wrath’s votive fires, ground sliding like calving glaciers, ghostly afterimages stamped onto his retinas from staccato blasts, all of which resolve into the shape of the angel, she’s probably still in that dugout, and as bad as it is that Reis has her, letting the Krauts get her would be worse, so Bagger’s got to do what he can to protect her, and that means fight, finally fight,

and someone, from somewhere, throws him a rifle, cold matte black in his hands, the weight nearly sinks him, gotta be twenty pounds, so heavy it’s got its own handle, Bagger glances down as he runs, holy shit, it’s a BAR, a Browning automatic, the sons of bitches finally arrived, the thing’s practically a myth, shoots a Spring-field’s .30-caliber round but from a twenty-round box mag, it’s a mobile machine gun and he, Private Bagger, inveterate coward, has got one,

and he bellows, top of his lungs, can’t hear it over the barraging drums of a new round of Jerry’s shells but sure the fuck feels it, larynx shredding in the force of his war cry, holy shit, Cyril Bagger’s got a war cry, same as the other boys, it expels from his guts with the same skyward explosion as the missiled earth, he’s bloodthirsty, he’ll do anything he needs to protect she who needs protecting,

and a piece of him, a tiny, Arno-sized splinter, knows there’s something awry with all this, something awry with him as he fuses into the bloodlust funnel, the precise act he’s always avoided, individuality swapped for the exhilarating namelessness of being a ball bearing inside a mechanism, he’s succumbed, but lord, don’t it feel good, ain’t it the easiest way to bash past regret and shame, feels so much better to lose himself to a mass, to dilute into a flood of fury,

and Bagger vaults the reserve trenches, grunts with helmets askew and whistle-blowing officers flashing beneath him, though his eyes are on the front, a hundred yards off now, great quilts of smoke unfurling across No Man’s Land to divulge screaming Squareheads charging the 2nd Battalion, they haven’t seen a charge like this in weeks, it’s as if Jerry’s already heeding Reis’s plan of providing a few more years of Yank slaughter,

and the support trench yawns open and Bagger jumps into the rabble, no telling the company, Bagger doesn’t care and neither do they, the gravedigger has traded his shovel for a BAR and that’s good enough, a whoop goes up and Bagger’s ragged heart sings, it’s not too late for him after all, boys are slapping him on the back, shoving him up the line, and he can’t think of anything grander, now this, this is how to die,

and he’s into the frontline trenches, men leaping onto dirt parapets to lay out defensive fire, and there’s an officer gesturing Bagger up a ladder, a prime spot, and he follows orders, just watch him follow orders, doesn’t feel so bad to be a cog in a machine, to accept you’re a hinge and your only job is to do that, to hinge,

and he lodges himself on the top step, elbows driven into red clay, the soundscape yawping wide, a thunder of Roman conquest, boots in beating ritual, muzzles cracking, shells pealing, bayonets clashing, the first wave of Germans close enough to fence, and more than that, to stab, Bagger hears the raw-meat squish, the Revelations of the Bishop’s fiercest sermons, the scourge of frogs and lice and flies, of water into blood, of pestilence, of boils, of hail, of unbreathable darkness,

and whomp, the trench to Bagger’s right is throttled into a tidal wave of black dirt, Jerry hurling grenades, whomp, the trench to his left convulses like a gagging throat, men left without jaws, without scalps, without faces,

and it’s all the more reason for Bagger to fire and kill, he plants the BAR’s bipod into the mud, kill, the gun feels like a strong new arm, how Reis must feel, you get yourself a new arm, you goddamn use it, kill, he grips the gas tube, kill, whole body longing, kill, for the pulverizing thrust of the initial spray of lead, kill, the jellification of his biceps, kill, the tintinnabulation of his bones, kill, he tries to line up the foresight amid concussions buffeting his eyeballs, kill, and curls his right index finger, no, not even his, it’s Uncle Sam’s, the finger belongs to the shamefly, and he loops it over the trigger, kill,