Page 32 of Angel Down

and this reveals to Bagger the upsetting truth, that every quality the angel has so far displayed, the meekness and mildness, the lameness and languor, has been an act, and she stops in front of him, and he withers, he can’t hold her gaze, even though he’s held her, carried her, slept beside her, all he can do now is look at her feet, remarkably clean for this landscape of offal and ooze,

and Bagger covers his face with his hands, one floppy of finger, the other clinging to the pistol, and doubles over enough to feel the remnants of his left eye drip out, which tells him all of this is real,

and he whimpers, “I didn’t know,” and her skeptical grunt turns Bagger back into the whippersnapper scolded before the congregation for horseplaying in a pew, and his face, ablaze in injury, burns blacker in disgrace, he’s bowing now, begging, “I mean, I knew, I knew you were, I knew you had, I knew you could,” but he’s unable to finish a thought, thoughts don’t matter in this oblivion of pure sensation,

and when Bagger dares peek again, the angel has him trapped in the same glare, but she’s also holding out her right hand, palm up, and he doesn’t know what else to do, so he places his left hand there, the three busted fingers dangling in three different directions, and it does, in fact, hurt when she folds her hand over his, it’s all goddamn real,

and then they are rising, that’s real, too, Bagger looks down and the floorboards, jumbled with detritus and laked with blood, grow smaller and smaller, so he looks up and finds that he and the angel are moving through the hole in the roof, into the cold loam channel blasted out by some explosive, the stony subsoil, the greasy clay, the weeping mud, it’s strangely gratifying to understand the trenches at the level of the rats that own them,

and then Bagger is born unto a battleground turned epic diorama, a square mile of toy soldiers staged in poses more disturbing than can be purchased at the store, bayonets through chests, bodies dragging satchels of their own guts, tiny faces etched in horror, as well as giant bags of smoke as motionless as mountain buttes, mortars hanging like coconuts, rounds of machine-gun bullets gathered midair like strands of fish eggs,

and right below Bagger, the boys of the 2nd Battalion are arranged like mannequins, look, there’s Sergeant DiStefano, an ersatz stretcher bearer tilting at the field hospital, neck cords like rope, there’s Captain Greisz, dragging an absconder trenchward at such velocity that neither of his boots touch dirt, there’s Major Chester, battalion honcho, mouth ovaled against a telephone, photo-flashed in the act of taking a bullet to the heart, the ejected blood like the petals of a red flower that only grows in doomed flesh,

and Bagger wants to snap off one of his broken fingers and plug Chester’s hole, but he and the angel keep rising through constellations of detonated dirt clods, high enough to see the enemy trench to the north, the supply trains and big guns to the south, the wales and fissures carved through a France not only dead but disfigured by autopsy, all morticians halted in unnatural armistice,

and then gasping shock, a massive bloodbeast beside him in the sky, wingspan so vast that Bagger ducks, but the angel tightens her grip, so Bagger clings back and realizes it’s the triplane he saw from three thousand feet down, black Iron Cross painted on the cherry-red chassis, the golden propeller halted and yet the thing doesn’t fall, nor does the pilot, clad in leather cap and goggles, bearing down on his gun, bullets from which are so solidly situated in air that birds could perch on them,

and still they rise, getting colder now, the Colt an icicle in his hand, Bagger afraid the angel doesn’t know he needs air to breathe but equally afraid to tell her, with that expression of hers, with her hair and cape whipping, not to mention that they are fucking flying, all signs that she’s done with his bullshit and is liable to drop his ass if he says a word,

and they rise until, another hundred feet up, the angel reclines and their path goes obtuse, and like that, Bagger spots the largest object he’s encountered in his life, seems impossible to have missed it before, but Bagger cuts himself slack, his father had a portrait of Christ in his study and once asked little Cyril if he could see Christ’s temptation, and he studied the portrait and said no, so the Bishop repositioned him to the side so he could see the red worked into the thickness of paint, visible only from an angle, Bagger’s only true moment of religious marvel,

and it’s like that, suddenly Bagger can see a great fold in the air, a pocket stitched into the sky, one that grows in size as they approach, big as a mountain, big as the Alps, big as France, and this close, Bagger can discern only a soft, fleshy edge, and his heart accelerates, and his cock stiffens, the fold is labial, it’s soft and warm, and he gives in to it, back in Marie-Louise’s bed but shrunken to weevil size, and in they go,

and, sure enough, he’s been here before,

XLI

and it’s been so long since he’s seen his father’s church that he feels what he always feels when revisiting a childhood haunt, that combination of offense that the place had the temerity to keep existing without him, and awareness that the place has hoarded part of him and only by returning can he reunite with that lost fragment,

and crossing the mewling floorboards, his senses are flushed with memory, the sickly sweetness of the narthex and its vases of dying flowers, the lambent mystery of the frosted-glass door stenciled with CRYING ROOM, the red-carpeted nave Bagger processioned up and down hundreds of times as an acolyte, his candlelighter unsteady, the guttering wick, all those faces anticipating his failure,

and the caramel varnish of the pews hasn’t changed, nor have the merlot pull-apart men of the stained glass windows, nor have the ancient light fixtures hanging from above, each holding a quartet of bulbs that are the spitting image of shrapnel shells, the clues to his ultimate demise hinted at way back then,

and then he’s up the altar steps and scuffing his iron-heeled boots across the gray blotches of wax on the carpet, dropped there each time he mishandled the candlelighter and glanced up to find crucified Christ looking disillusioned, and the Bishop, just below the cross, looking sad, and making Bagger, the son, sad too,

and now Bagger wonders if the sadness had less to do with Sunday fuckups and more to do with his lockstep march toward a redundant future, he was baptized here, he’d be married here, he’d be mourned here, but not for too long, another acolyte was already donning the surplice,

and lying on the altar is the very red leather Bible that Bagger carried with him to France, so Bagger, still the acolyte, pulls back the front cover, and the broken spine flops the book open to the section of images that, as a boy, Bagger preferred to the flavorless text, one image in particular,

and it’s a painting by Raphael called Solly Madonna, depicting the Virgin Mary with Baby Jesus on her lap, his arms too stubby, thighs like drumsticks, belly distended, weird little naked penis, and the head of a balding old man, a depiction young Bagger found unsettling, and so he always focused on Mary, the placid, patient, half-closed eyes, rosebud lips, center-parted copper hair, skin so white it looked as if lit from within,

and the blue cape,

and the red dress,

and all at once Bagger can’t breathe, for he does know her, he’s always known her, she’s been present in a way his original mother never was, she’s been with him always, always, always, the tender half his father lost the instant Bagger was born, and Bagger feels his wearied knees give and folds himself over the altar so as not to fall,

and it’s here, inches from the Bible, that Bagger notices small dark circles on Solly Madonna, something pushing from behind the image, and Bagger drags a hand up to turn one page, two pages, ten, a hundred, until he finds three black holes drilled through the book’s back cover, which means Jerry had, in fact, shot Bagger while he fled across No Man’s Land with the angel,

and that means Bagger would have died but for the Bible that stayed the bullets, which is to say, the father who stayed the bullets, as the Bishop had forced the Bible into his unappreciative son’s hands the last time they saw each other, Solly Madonna the sacrificial lamb as surely as Bagger’s mother, their lives relinquished all so Bagger, a petty swindler, could keep on swindling, he wasn’t worth it then and isn’t worth it now,

and Bagger puts his hands over his face and feels the most surprising thing, tears from his right eye, and though it’s the only eye he’s got left, it’s capable of everything a son needs, it all makes sense now, his lack of faith never mattered, there might not be a God or a Jesus or a Mary, but there was a Bishop Bagger, and all this time, it’s him that Bagger has been saving, from the cold, lonely frights of his wavering belief, from the straying of his flock, from the cold, salty waters that pulled him under with a barbed-wire grip,

and a sob breaks from Bagger’s chest, and other sobs come pell-mell after it, a jailbreak, he’s wailing now, tears raining like bullets and softening the charred holes in the red leather,

and the angel’s voice comes from behind and above, “Each of the others wanted something particular from the person they imagined me to be,” and sounding every bit as human as Bagger, she asks, “But what do you want?,”

and Bagger doesn’t have to think, “All I wanted was to protect you,” he gasps through sobs, “like he protected me,”