Page 30 of Angel Down

and but one hair of a second before he squeezes, he’s yanked down, as if by a shark, and his very first shot of the war goes wild, rounds spitting into the wolfen mat of smoke, fog, grease, and blood, and then he’s on his back in six inches of water, staring up into the darting cardinals of traded fire, mind in cyclone, either he fell or got shot,

and a soldier’s head eclipses the destroyed dawn, a face of filth claw-marked by the tears of smoke-stung eyes, Bagger instinctively hates this doughboy, the war machine unto which Bagger gave himself to must be built of anonymous men, and this face isn’t anonymous at all, it shouts, “Bagger! You can’t! You promised her!,”

and of course it’s Lewis Arno, the kid the unluckiest of pennies, always turning up even after Bagger hurled that penny off the highest available cliff, and Bagger has the urge to smash the BAR into the kid’s nose, he’ll show the brat, he’s here to kill, kill, kill, but the kid’s more balanced than Bagger and finds the automatic rifle first and throws it away,

and Bagger screams, “Fuck!” and the goddamn kid slaps him, a rifle crack of its own, and Bagger gasps, and the kid grabs his drabs and slams him into the water, mud sliming over both their faces, and screams, “You promised her you wouldn’t kill!,” and Bagger disinters his arms from grave muck to strangle the boy’s puny neck,

and the kid’s slapping, pounding arms wind around Bagger’s shoulders, extracting him from mire, embracing him, punching little fists of fury into Bagger’s back like the tank directions he kicked into Bagger’s kidneys, instructions on what to do, where to go, and though Arno’s orders defy those of Uncle Sam, they have the timbre of truth, and Bagger’s arms of strangulation hug the kid right back,

and he sputters into Arno’s ear, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” not even sure which transgression he’s apologizing for, there’s been so many in such a short, ugly time, and though he knows what this clinch looks like to any doughboy who spies them behind the hailstorm of detonated dirt, two chickenshits holding each other in the last chickenshit seconds of their chickenshit lives, he doesn’t care, he’s worked with chickens before and they happen to be Earth’s bravest beasts,

and Arno shouts, “We gotta save her!,” and Bagger holds tight, men exploding all over, and screams, “She’s not your mom, kid!,” and the kid yelps, like he’s been stuck, and screams, “We still gotta save her! You’ve got to save her, Bagger!,” and Bagger sobs, “Why?,” and the kid hollers, baritone now, suddenly a man, “Because she’s yours more than ours,” and Bagger pulls back and stares at the kid, who nods and says, “Or you’ve always been hers,”

and the feeling isn’t confusion, or even surprise, it’s astonishment, for he knows the words as truth the second he hears them, they answer the question he never had the wherewithal to ask, it was never Bagger who found the angel, it was the angel who found Bagger,

and the astonishments mount, that first mortar blast back in Bois de Fays, the one that should have killed him, maybe it did kill him, maybe he dwelt in the razor world of death long enough for the angel to notice him before the inadvertent resuscitation of a corpse thrown atop him brought him back to life, and from that moment, he and the angel have been in unbroken contact, everything Bagger has wanted, the angel has tried to deliver, and what he’s wanted has been violence, just think back to Rochambeau, the symbols he used to win,

and how Goodspeed fell to scissors, and was scissored by shrapnel,

and Popkin fell to rock, and was buried in the rock of a falling wall,

and Veck fell to paper, and perished after finding Reis’s paper note,

and Bagger, why, he was the one to kill all three, he was the major general shaking his walking stick, each Rochambeau victory translated by the loyal angel as a direct order to kill each loser, kill them in a specific way, and though Veck died believing he could bend the angel to his will, that was a fool’s mistake, I am the sword in the hand, she said, and it has been Bagger’s hand the whole time,

XXXIX

and with Uncle Sam roaring, no way in hell can Bagger maze the path back to Reis’s bunker, but again the kid proves he’s a born runner, he weaves around and between the legs of fighting men, and nuzzles deep into clay when shells rock the earth, and jumps straight through fires crepitating with scorching oil, and climbs half-buried corpses whose limbs extend like branches,

and Bagger focuses on Arno’s dervish body through blood, sweat, smoke, and soot, he can’t risk taking his eyes off the kid because Bagger defeated him in Rochambeau, too, same as the others, only he can’t remember what symbol he threw to beat Arno, and if he can’t picture the symbol, he can’t predict what kind of death is barreling toward the kid at locomotive speed,

and he collides with Arno, maybe that’s how the kid dies, a blow to the back of the head, but being thrown to his knees doesn’t stop Arno from pointing, and Bagger will be damned, there’s the stairwell to Reis’s dugout not ten feet away, behind a scrim of dirt thickening from embeddeding bullets,

and Bagger grabs the kid by the scruff and shouts, “Stay here!,” which makes the kid glower like he could kill Bagger for pulling this shit again, there’s no keeping the kid back a second time, nor is there time to argue it, so Bagger bolts ahead and nearly somersaults down the stairwell, the stairs took a direct hit and are a pile of matchsticks, but enough solid wood clings to the left side for Bagger to prance down, metal cleats pinging rusty nails,

and the gas curtain’s on fire, so Bagger tears it down and stomps it into the dirt, then scans the dugout, blinking in the dark, it’s chaos, all four walls tilted inward, the map table knelt with a broken leg, the map itself crumpled and doused in ink, the wee wooden blocks scattered just like the companies they represent,

and Bagger kicks aside rolling wine bottles and ducks beneath the drooping wooden ceiling that drains muddy water like Popkin’s drool, but the place is vacant, “No,” he says, there’s no stopping Arno’s death if he can’t find the angel and demand she stop it, “No!,” and he hurls aside Reis’s chair, “No!,” and spikes the cuckoo clock, somehow still going thuck, boot-heeling it to splinters, “No! No! No! No!,”

and Arno’s lost it, too, he’s wrestling a wooden trunk like it’s a bear, and Bagger crabs over to join in, eager for something to punish, only to realize Arno’s trying to wrench the lock off, knuckles bloodied from the effort, and the kid’s insight gusts through him, the trunk’s plenty big enough for a woman, and Bagger presses his ear to a dowel and blocks out the war to listen,

and there’s the verseless chorus, Save me,

and this time, the words invoke Bishop Bagger, who once preached how angels pulled double duty as God’s protectors, flanking God in a space called the Mercy Seat, a site of unfathomable terror, where only the truest hearts dared plead for mercy, a higher-stakes gamble than anything proffered aboard a riverboat, but what bothered Bagger as a child was the notion hidden inside the story, the notion that God needed protecting, which, by extension, posited that God could be hurt, even killed,

and hold on, now, if Bagger’s been drafted to protect God’s protector, simple logic holds that he, then, is the most powerful of all, maybe all humans have the valence to overthrow their creator and establish a better world, all they have to do is join together to topple God’s ramparts, which might mean war is God’s defensive tactic, slabs of meat earth’s factions can tussle over while the Mercy Seat goes unchallenged,

and so Bagger elbows the kid aside and kicks the lock from the bottom, drives his heel into it from the top, up, down, up, down, while the dugout walls teeter and the girders overhead shit soil, and the lock yields whine by whine, black steel unplugging from pale wood, and then tubes of brilliant light shoot through new holes, and Arno eeks and undoes the hasps, and Bagger fumbles for the slats and hurls off the lid,

and let there be light, and let there be blue cape, and let there be red dress, and let there be halo, and also that sulky comma between the angel’s eyebrows, as if it took Bagger longer to rescue her than she would have preferred, and Bagger apologizes, “Ma’am,” and begins to unpack her, tougher than it looks, it’s barbaric how Reis smushed her inside,

and then she’s in his arms, where she belongs, she fits so well, and Bagger tucks her face into his chest, tenting her precious light, yet feels no canine jealousy when Arno encircles her by the waist, tears slipping, lips tapping a pattern that looks like Mommy, Mommy, and despite the prospect of another shell burying them alive, Bagger allows himself a few seconds to dream, one family lost, one family found, perfect for this broken shard of time,

and pain shatters across Bagger’s face,

and he’s on his back with no memory of getting there, vision hot and knotted like his face is cinched in barbed wire, and he feels foolish until agony shrills from his cheekbone like a scream, he brings both hands, empty of anything angelic, to his face, and finds slippery blood and a soft, weeping tear in his cheek, his pinkie tip slides inside it, could be a bullet hole, could be he’s been shot in the fucking face,

and he rolls to all fours and a liter of liquid shifts in his mouth, and, aghast, he opens wide and a gallon of blood dumps to the floor, along with three teeth, cracking hard and rolling funny like his weighted dice, except these bones roll from the toss of a player even sneakier,