Page 3 of Angel Down

and whatever it is, it’s bothering the Butcher Birds of the 43rd, they low like Iowa cows needing milking, mud slurping at their hooves, and Arno scurries ahead to lead Bagger through a U-shaped elbow, a turn that reveals the remains of Company P, there’s Lieutenant Jules Aquila blurting inspirational falderal and slapping the chests of men dead on their feet, there’s Sergeant Moss DiStefano passing a salt vial beneath the noses of those who need it,

and it’s all because P Company, too, is finally on the move, forming a column to march, which means Bagger needs to fall in, but before he can, Arno swerves left, away from the line of forty-some drooping men and past Father Muensterman, who pukes into his own carefully cupped hands as if he intends to pass off the vomitus as both body and blood,

and they bank into the lopsided amphitheater of a shell crater, a striated bowl of clay scalloped as if from a giant’s closing fist, painted by vertical stripes of blood that rise up the sides of the bowl, a pattern accentuated by a mash of tissue right where a clock should hang, something yuletide about it, the color of fruitcake, the shape a wreath, and only the ornaments of a dozen teeth tell Bagger it used to be a human head,

and the next thing he notices are three men, not dead in the mud but standing in formation with Springfield rifles at their sides and spines at high attention, and though Bagger has but seconds to look, he identifies them as the three most disposable men of Company P, a label that makes him curl his lip with detestation and superiority before he gets to the demoralizing punch line, that it isn’t the three most disposable gathered here but the five,

IV

and with a flare of coat hem, a man in the center of the crater turns, a soupçon of operatic grace in the graceless affront of the gutted countryside, and Bagger jerks back, he didn’t see him there, though the high-laced field boots are unmistakable, and surprising, for one might expect a sideways lean from the man, given the lesser weight of his withered right arm, but no, his martial stance is ramrod, all crookedness resolved by the golden walking stick clawed by the leather-gloved hand,

and it’s Major General Lyon Reis’s costume that’s most often mocked by the Butcher Birds, the shin-length wool trench coat, once ivory, now smoke-stained and unbuckled to affect a cavalier’s flair, three coin-sized medals dangling over his left breast from pentagonal ribbons, typical for his rank but arranged with a space reserved for a medal not yet earned, which, according to rumor, is the Medal of Honor, that’s how certain Reis is that the war will win it for him, how sincerely he believes it’s his due,

and it’s highly irregular for Reis to be speaking to privates without his staff, who must be busy pushing carts through mud, or without the leaders whose ranks fall between Major General Reis and Private Bagger, in this case, in ascending order, Lieutenant Aquila, First Lieutenant Hollis, Major Chester, and Captain Greisz, none of whom like Bagger, and the feeling’s mutual, though now Bagger feels a pipsqueak yearning for those authority figures to protect him from big, bad Major General Reis, whose light brown eyes have gone arachnid with the points of several lanterns,

and Reis asks, “Did little bunny get lost in the warren?,” and Arno, Tarzan fantasies forgotten, replies, “No, sir,” and looks like he’s going to blabber a more detailed excuse, so Bagger knuckles the kid in the back and takes over, saying, “Sorry, sir, we took a pretty direct hit back on burial detail,”

and Reis lifts his lips to his nostrils, a disgusted inhale that siphons the lower half of his face into his sinuses, which broadens the Van Dyke beard the major general inexplicably finds time to manicure, the vanity of youth, some of the boys say, for Reis is the youngest division commander in the Army, though reports of his age hitch higher with every strategic blunder, Reis was thirty-three in Alsace, thirty-five in Vosges, forty on September 26 when the 43rd jumped off at Bois de Malancourt, and now, two weeks into the lathe of the Meuse-Argonne, Lyon Reis is nearabout sixty, seventy-five on a bad day, and this is a very bad day,

and Reis leans his head back, back, back, the way the upper crust always look at cretins who dare intersect their path, which tilts his gold-braided cap so the two stars pinned to the front catch fire in the lantern light, eyes more fiery than Reis’s own,

and he echoes, “Direct hit. You think you know about direct hits?,” a question to which Bagger would say yes, if not for the three men slashing him with their eyes to say, Why won’t you shut up, Bagger, why must you always make it worse?, a complaint true enough to make the fly trapped inside Bagger’s rib cage fling itself against prison bars of bone,

and the fly’s been with Bagger since Camp Winn, where there was a poster tacked to the barracks door, I WANT YOU FOR U.S. ARMY, unsound grammar Bagger would have disparaged if he hadn’t been so struck by the man painted on the poster, a top-hatted, red-bow-tied, billy-bearded Uncle Sam who looked uncannily like his father, Bishop Bagger, drowned to death two years prior when the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a U-boat torpedo,

and once Bagger swatted away the Tennessee flies, he found this Uncle Sam, too, to be more cadaver than man, skin tight to his skull, pearled with putrescence, the ripe pouches of flesh beneath his eyes ready to burst with maggots, and Bagger thought it boded poorly that the man who most wanted him in the army was already dead, it made Bagger reach for the poster to trash it, comeuppance be damned, and that’s when one of the goddamn Tennessee flies zipped right into his open mouth and down his throat,

and now the fly, also named Uncle Sam, lives in Bagger’s chest, all that’s left of Bagger’s father, and though Bagger’s tried to drown the fly with moonshine, incinerate him with cigarettes, even dope him with opium, Uncle Sam’s a tough little bastard, but at least Bagger has him trapped, and one day the shamefly, as Bagger thinks of him, will die, and with it will go that pestering nip of shame, that filmy wing flutter of guilt, and Bagger’s life will be launched anew,

and Reis’s challenges excite Uncle Sam, which Bagger takes as his own challenge, he’ll show the shamefly that he doesn’t kowtow to imbecilic militance, so he says, “Yes, sir, Major General, sir, direct hits are my area of expertise. If the major general would care to visit, I’d be happy to show him all the pieces. It’s hardly III Corps anymore, sir. More like III Corpse, I’d say,”

and Reis’s face drops like claybrains and his eyeball arachnoidism spreads until suddenly he’s got too many lower appendages, some legs and a cane, and he’s racing at Bagger like an out-of-control carousel horse, up and down, the leather case of his field glasses pendulating, the Medal of Honor gap gawping like a eyeless socket, and he’s in Bagger’s face, same height yet shouting downward because Bagger is shrinking,

and Reis barks, “I see you find American sacrifice funny, Private Bagger!”

and it can’t be good the major general knows his name, Bagger’s stunned, and it must read on his face as easily as a Tarzan book, for Reis smirks and says, “That’s right, I know you. Shirker. Archschemer. I call you Private Gravedigger,” and he cuts a look at the others, “I have names for all of you. I make it a priority to receive reports on the division’s disreputables,”

and all Bagger can think to do is double down, he shapes himself into a caricature of soldierdom and says, “Major General, sir, I was merely making a lexical observation!,”

and Reis flattens his mustache with an equine blast of hot air and says, with great odium, “You are a mosquito, Private Gravedigger. Imminently squashable. And you will be squashed before this war is over. I won’t do the squashing myself. I wouldn’t give you the honor. Nor do I believe your end will come from one of your ‘direct hits.’ Your demise will be typical to vermin. Your long, greasy tail caught in some trifling mousetrap. And when your tail is thusly pinched, who will come to your aid, Private Gravedigger? These men?,”

and Reis jabs his walking stick at the glowering soldiers, before swinging the stick toward Company P’s column and asking again, “Those men?,” and Bagger knows he’s right, none of these boys give a shit if Bagger lives or dies,

and Reis swears, “You will be solitary in your suffering, Private Gravedigger. No man will risk anything to assist you, as you have risked nothing to assist your fellow man. They might return the favor you gave to their fallen brothers and toss what is left of you down a hole. I should think you deserve your own hole, one of your signature latrines, perhaps, the sort that collapse upon the first stream of piss. Of this resting place, no record will be made, though I do fancy a sign to warn farmers to keep their flocks away. What lies beneath is a man made of poison,”

and with that, Reis sneers, “Wipe the blood of the valiant off your face, Soldier. On you, it is profane,” while Uncle Sam goes amok in Bagger’s chest, the same wingbeat of shame he felt seeing off his father on that final doomed voyage, Bagger wants to punch back now like he did back then, maybe this time literally,

and he could, Reis is no physical specimen, adenoid eyes, noodle neck, a matronly pelvic misalignment that sets his feet to a 10:10 configuration, shortcomings Bagger presumes originated from whatever defect blighted Reis’s right arm, which all the boys snicker about, one claiming to have seen the little arm employed to brush Reis’s mustache, another swearing Reis keeps a tiny box of tiny cigars to be held by the tiny fingers, but it’s bullshit, no one’s ever seen the arm, it hides inside its specially tailored uniforms and coats,

and even if Bagger saw it, he wouldn’t stoop to ridicule it, the arm’s not the major general’s fault, it’s how he’s twisted his life in reaction to it that has turned his men against him, his refusal to adhere to the frontline rotation the Great War has made standard, his threat to outright shoot deserters, and his belief that flank attacks are unworthy of the 43rd, which forces hundreds of men to directly assault machine-gun nests until they are no longer men at all,

and before Bagger can force Uncle Sam the shamefly down and make a cutting jibe, Very creative, Major General, sir!, Reis’s left arm, the good one, whip-cracks Bagger’s shoulder with the walking stick, and son of a bitch, it fucking hurts, though not as much as a bullet, a fact of which Reis will happily remind him if he produces even a squeak,

and “Formation!” is Reis’s order, so Bagger stumbles left, blind beneath black plumes of pain, the only sign he’s in position coming from the bump of the next man’s shoulder, and then the crater goes silent, except, of course for the shriek that continues to unfurl in an infinite ribbon, and since Bagger can’t see so good right now, a tableau forms in his mind, the shrieker as a grief-stricken villager watching these five men standing on the gallows, a hooded executioner gripping the lever that, when pulled, will send them swinging till they are dead, dead, dead,

V

and Reis paces the slime in smart spiderleg, indifferent to the day’s necrosis, while just past the vomiting chaplain, the poor devils of Company P force themselves to stay upright on their blisters, awaiting Reis’s order, knees singing, brainpans percussive, eyelids blue flame, radiating loathing for the five flunkies, all of it rancid gravy down Bagger’s throat,