Page 31 of Angel Down

and hawking and spitting, Bagger looks up at a looming Lyon Reis, devolved into the negative of a French mime, his face blacked with soot but red eyes still stabbing, stabbing, and he’s got the walking stick, the gold plating gone marmalade with Bagger’s blood, in the grip of his right hand, his new right hand, and Bagger, unable to speak through blood soup, holds up a hand to ask the major general to wait,

and Reis does not wait, he strikes again with the wonder weapon of his right arm, all the gears of his body finally working in factory synchrony, and the stick cutlasses through air too fast for Bagger to track, he only hears the whistle and feels the wind quiver his eyelids, one second Bagger’s outstretched hand is whole and a blink later, his index, middle, and ring finger are snapped flat against the back of his hand, three metacarpals poked through the skin, all smaller bones demolished,

and somewhere Arno’s snarling like a little mutt, but Bagger’s lost inside white wallops of pain and doesn’t see when Reis swings the golden stick a third time, only hears the same whistle again and feels the same breeze, and on instinct retracts his demolished hand into his chest, one more hit will rip the fingers clean off,

and so he takes the blow in the eye and that’s it, the lamp goes out, sure as a shattered bulb, his left eye gone, the pain a strange electricity in the fat of his brain, though worse is the crisp, alien feel of air inside an open socket and the syrupy crawl of vitreous humor down his face, some of it dribbling into the hole Reis knocked through his cheek, all of which tells Bagger that this is how he dies, the eggshell obliteration of every single piece of his body,

and Bagger waits, but the final strike doesn’t come, so he spends time choking, the imbroglio of his sinuses full of blood, he gags and strangles and retches, and tries to catch it, like Father Muensterman once palmed his puke, but the vile potage ends up in his finger wounds, now he’s dying of his own poison, if he hasn’t been poison all along, a lying, cheating, stealing, walking bottle of arsenic,

and his ears pick up the sounds of a struggle, he wants to know what kind, but must first relearn how to see, his field of view is halved, all depth flattened into a sketch by an artist obsessed with the color brown, and there, brushed into the background, two familiar figures frolic,

and the first is Arno, spider-monkeyed around the angel, trying to keep hold of her through his full weight, and the second is Reis, who has the angel by her wrist and is pulling her with madness and might, he’s liable to detach the angel’s arm from its socket, while his other arm, the new one, bludgeons the kid with the walking stick, the red leeches of welts erupting across Arno’s skin, his hair raspberry with blood, blood fluming from a forehead gash, blood spouting from an ear, the kid’s about to be killed, no third chances for Lazarus,

and yet the heroic brat doesn’t let up, he levers a boot heel into a floorboard crevice and leans the opposite direction, a tug-of-rope for the fate of the world,

and all the while, Reis squeals, “Minerva is mine!,”

and Bagger plants his good hand into his own jellied blood, curls a leg under him, and sways, or else it’s the dugout swaying, about to collapse, and he pistons his thighs, by some miracle his legs still working, and he’s up, somehow up, forehead batting the boards that dangle from the ceiling, salty spit eddying in the chasm of his three lost teeth, each gasp crackling like a straw at the bottom of a drink,

and Bagger’s bones sling back into their sockets like he’s made of pool cues and billiard balls, his left foot lands and the world slants leftward, same routine on his right, like he’s on the observation deck of the Lusitania, trying to reach his father in time to save him, and if there wasn’t a war lusting overhead, Reis would hear the hiss of Bagger’s sliding feet and the splat of his sleeting blood, but as it is, he closes the distance unnoticed,

and there on the floor, right behind the tug-of-ropers, lies the Model 1911 Colt .45 that Reis wears on his belt, incredibly it has fallen free, perhaps bungled while trying to point it at Arno, a black steel beauty, the slide already pulled back, the recoil spring tight, aching to empty its seven-cartridge mag,

and Bagger doesn’t believe the gun’s really there, must be a trick of one-eyed vision, until he drops to a knee and picks it up, ice cold, scapula smooth, redolent of mulled wine, and anchor heavy, it’s a struggle to lift with a sprained right wrist, but also a palpable joy, the textured butt in perfect union with his calloused palm, the half-moon trigger another match for the crease in his index finger, and the Colt’s steel freeze creeps up his hand’s bones, wrist bones, and onward, a whole new arm to rival Reis’s,

and quickly the steel undergirds Bagger’s whole body, he’s no man anymore and he’s sure as hell not made of dough, he’s a .45-caliber tool built for a single purpose,

and he rises without pain because he’s solid metal, and finds Reis has nearly taken full possession of the angel, Arno’s a mallard color, warted in bruises, bathed in blood, yet still clinging to the angel’s legs, prepared to die before giving her up,

and Bagger wonders if he’ll be able to line the V of the .45’s sight with only one eye, but at this range aim shouldn’t matter, he extends his arm and points the Colt at the back of Reis’s skull, not two feet away, and Bagger feels a grin, October air burning through the hole in his cheek, into the abscess of his missing teeth, he’s eager, it turns out, for the symphony of broken bone and splattered brains,

and echoes of his promise pelt him like attacking gulls, You must promise, oh fuck, never to take another’s life, fuck fuck, for as long as you live, the angel said. If you fail in this promise, fuck this, a catastrophe beyond imagination, not fucking now, will consume your entire world, and Bagger’s grin wilts into a toddler’s frown, it’s not fair, the vow must be voided, a few strikes more and Arno will be killed,

and with his single-eyed vision screwing into black vignette, Bagger bellows in a voice mangled into unintelligibility, but of course the angel understands all, “HELP ME! PLEASE! I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO!,” a cry not too different, after all, from Save me,

and the reply comes from the Argonne and beyond, the world and its peaceable creatures, not quite extinct, the lion’s roar, the wolf’s bay, the robin’s call, the puma’s growl, the frog’s croak, the dolphin’s click, the bee’s buzz, the elephant’s trumpet, the grasshopper’s rasp, the snake’s rattle, the monkey’s chatter, the antelope’s grunt, the alligator’s hiss, the bat’s squeak, the cicada’s chirp, the deer’s bleat, the donkey’s bray, the hawk’s screech, the elk’s bugle, the goose’s honk, the horse’s nicker, the lemur’s whoop, the leopard’s snarl, the mosquito’s whine, the owl’s hoot, the pig’s snort, the pigeon’s coo, the raven’s caw, the seal’s bark, the songbird’s warble, the turkey’s gobble, the boar’s grumble, the zebra’s yip, the whale’s song, and the chicken’s buck, oh, the emphasis of the chicken, prodded by the sharpest of gaffs,

and together, you could call it a shriek,

XL

and stop,

and what stops is the whole shebang, war’s babel severed sharply enough to produce a pop as dry as a desert thunderclap, leaving Bagger gasping in the hush, all movement stopped, too, everything fixed in upheaval, one arm-length board fallen from the ceiling just hanging there midair, clods of dirt, too, suspended like fruit from an earthen tree, even smoke hovers like giant cobwebs intricate in turmoil and mystification,

and Reis, too, has stopped, body petrified, the last strike of his walking stick undelivered, and cautiously, suspiciously, Bagger lowers the Colt and tiptoes around Reis, it’s like the man’s trapped in amber, regal face fatted into rolls of arterial sausage, red eyes protuberant and glassy, the ribbons of spit between his jaws turned into translucent stalagmites and his coughed beads of spit strung up like floating pearls,

and Bagger’s eye catches something else and he looks straight up and finds the entire dugout roof in mid-downfall, a vortex of lumber and clay and soil and roots that, ten feet up, peeks into the outer world, Bagger spies a fringe of barbed wire up there, the sideways wheel of a wagon, a puffy artillery streak like a keloid scar, and a red aircraft faraway and perfectly still,

and Bagger shivers with the awe of cheated death, the men down here oblivious to the cave-in about to bury them,

and he shuffles away from the overhead hole, better safe than sorry, and turns to Lewis Arno, in hopes the kid will blink back at him in shared wonder, but Arno’s as deadlocked as Reis, teeth bared in frozen agony, each cut and bruise on his head, neck, shoulders, and arms more hideous as a still life, the flaps of skin, the exposed collarbone, the kid was being ripped apart,

and only then does Bagger notice the angel is gone,

and he whirls, he’s lost her again, but no, she’s behind him, standing on her own two feet and watching him, everything coy, amused, or dreamy about her turned as sharp as an entrenching tool, her arms dangled like readied weapons, chin lowered, chest forward, lioness ribs expanding, legs in the stance of a dauntless boxer,

and the silence stretches thin, her disappointment, his anxious panting, the pressure building, until abruptly the angel moves, striding at him, so much poise and vigor that Bagger recoils, he can’t help it, he’s a low beast and she’s the huntress, look at the rolling strut of her hips under the red dress, the flick of the blue cape off her swinging elbows, she looks like she could end this war by simply glaring into the faces of the kaiser, Ludendorff, Hindenburg, the whole Reichstag lot, until they begged for clemency,