Page 35 of Angel Down

and there she is, fifty yards ahead, parading into No Man’s Land like no man ever has, hood down, face of sunlight held high, an easy target for thousands of bullets crisscrossing through smoke, some missing the angel by inches, yet she proceeds unperturbed,

and there’s no way, absolutely no way, that Bagger and Arno enter this hornet’s nest and aren’t pulled like pork, and so, by silent accord, they enter anyway, no weapons to speak of but the ferocity of their cries, Bagger’s the fermata of the final hymn echoing through his father’s church, Arno’s the high-pitched yap of apelings as they sling themselves through jungle eaves, élan, boys, élan,

and gunfire passes so close it’s like piano string plucked against Bagger’s ears, parting the dry-mud tangles of his hair, tugging at his drabs like the small hands of a hundred buried children, but he torpedoes on, pausing only to hoist Arno by his collar when the kid trips over a helmet, a pair of shoulders, horse ribs like a bear trap, nitwit pratfalls against the psychedelic pageant of a world in total rupture, neon arches of lobbed minnies, the red rain of strafing planes, white fountains of flamethrower fire, iron sparking off cycling tank treads, all florid in night’s inkwell,

and at last, chests crushing, bodies oiled in sweat and dusted with the ash of a thousand near misses, they arrive at the dead center of No Man’s Land, equidistant between American and German earthworks, amid the ejecta of a body-strewn crater, the angel kneeled at the lowest point six feet away,

and Bagger slides down the wall, kicking aside the top half of a corpse, Arno sliding beside him to kick aside the bottom half, and they are painted black when they reach the angel, who is, as ever, immaculate,

and on all fours, coughing and gagging, Bagger and Arno watch as the angel, using the pert motions of a flowerbed gardener, finishes digging a fist-sized hole in the yellow clay and inserts the bullet, the one that ought to be embedded in Bagger’s brain, after which she buries it at a leisurely pace, unmindful of the ear-bleed booms and the overhead fronds of exploded earth,

and bullet as seed is a nonsense idea, yet it fills Bagger with unexpected hope, if the infernal engine could turn dead people into ammo, perhaps ammo could turn into something alive if imbued with enough longing, handled with enough care,

and with his head leaned against Arno’s, watching the angel pat the clay nice and flat, Bagger allows his fatigued mind to dislodge from the realities of mud and oil and fire, and try to overcome what the angel said was his weakest trait, his failure to allow for the mystifications of time, ever too fixed in the present to imagine how things might yet bloom,

and he sees, before his stinging, dirt-filled eye, night turn to day, then day turn to night, then both at once, time moving too rapidly to differentiate, and he watches this stretch of the Argonne repair itself, craters filled, detritus cleared, grass daring to regrow, braver each season, each year, until suddenly the gray is green, and the exquisite antenna of saplings sprout branches and bud,

and decades pass, a generational blur of sun and rain and snow, and the forest becomes a forest again, weeds, creepers, and lichens clabber over hills and valleys the precise contours of Marie-Louise lying on her side, faster and faster, home base for the expeditions of boars, deer, rabbits, foxes, and wildcats, how they scamper, reproduce, live, die, and reabsorb into the chestnut and pine that unfold like bears from hibernation, stretching arms, interlocking with neighbors to form a compound body, not as large as the giant balled up to create Earth, but with enough fingers to salve the giant’s wound in abundances of aloe, echinacea, and turmeric,

and no tree is more splendid than the one that grows from the bullet seed, a magnificent beast with a trunk of bison girth, bark like elephant skin, bowed under the weight of moss-furred branches varicose with twig squiggles no machine could ever predict, not even in this distant future, with leaf coverage so total sunlight has to bleed through chlorophyll, which turns the air green and the shade as cold as the Celtic Sea,

and Bagger sees a group of people approach in numbers uncertain, though it’s clearly a family, outfitted in brighter clothing than Bagger’s ever imagined, walking in shoes of colored leather and taking photographs with tiny cameras, and at their forefront is an old man in a Panama hat being pushed in a wheelchair through mowed grass until the bullet tree’s roots thwart the wheels, at which point a middle-aged fellow supplies the man with a double-handled, four-footed cane of lightweight metal,

and the feisty old bastard waves off the younger man’s attempts to help and proceeds toward the tree alone, the family holding back in deference, stab after stab of the cane over twisted terrain, Bagger can’t help but smile, he likes this stubborn codger, and when the old man reaches the trunk, he tosses his cane, and drops to a kneel, and Bagger feels the pain in his own knees,

and the old man reaches out with a hand that looks like part of the tree, knobby and gnarled, and lays it against the bark as if checking if the thing still breathes, and then, reassured, takes off his hat in a gesture of respect, revealing his eye patch,

and the old man is him, Old Man Bagger, and Private Bagger’s heart breaks, he’s so old, so old, scant hair wisped to either side of his head, but Bagger’s heart soars, too, look at how long he lived, his old skin wrinkled from so much time in the sun, look at the family that loves him enough to haul their asses all the way to France, look how the man’s sagged flesh maps all the places he’s been,

and the suspension cables of Old Man Bagger’s flabby neck sway as he begins to murmur, and to hear, Private Bagger has to lean into the vision so far that he feels the sticky peach of summer sun and feels the caress of living leaves, and hears Old Man Bagger whisper to the tree, “You were right about everything,”

and Private Bagger shivers, it’s the worst possible thing he could know of the future, that the angel kept her promise, that the engine of death kept cranking, that wars kept warring, that blood kept spilling, that all the lives lost in this forest were worth jack shit, but then Old Man Bagger cracks a smile that strikes breathtaking new intersections of wrinkles,

and he whispers, “But I regret nothing,”

and Private Bagger’s frail heart pounds back with force, and his bloodstream makes music, and he laughs, just once, but it’s the best laugh of his life, joyful surprise, and with it comes a tickle in his throat, inside his mouth, within the new gap in his teeth, and then the shamefly, good old Uncle Sam, comes buzzing out through the hole in his cheek and flies away, finally, finally away,

and Bagger’s tears are hot enough to steam the filth from his face, and this part of him, he believes, will always stay clean, and he turns to Arno, wondering if there’s any chance the kid was the middle-aged man pushing the wheelchair, anything is possible, but the kid’s staring straight ahead, having seen none of Bagger’s vision,

and there’s a brisk, snapping, wet-dog noise, and Bagger looks forward, the sunny vision gone, the husked gray world returned, the bullet tree only a buried bullet, and finds the angel has moved several paces away, and she’s shaking, not at all like her, a graceless, bestial buck,

and the blue cape kilts outward as if punched from within, and the red dress bulges as if containing tumors at rapid growth, and Bagger reaches for Arno and feels Arno’s fingers interlace with his own,

and the angel’s garments sunder, dress and cape torn into segments that fly like soft shrapnel before braiding ugly in the mud, the angel as naked as she was in Popkin’s ambulance, except this time she’s changing, her Old Glory hues polluted into the smutch of a profaned flag, smooth skin ridging into alligator scutes, lean limbs thickening with ropes of outlandish muscle,

and with a wet crunch, her spinal cord rips apart into twin columns of bone, two spines, both of which push out at the distended sable skin,

and the skin splits, and two knuckled sickles of bone emerge and unfold, unfold again, unfold again, spiked bat wings as long as the crater is wide, fingers of black bone, membranes of red leather, Bagger’s seen that color before, and the giant wings flap once, experimentally, and then again, this time with enough might to lift the angel off the ground and into the air, dirt and ash corkscrewing into Bagger’s eye,

and then she’s aloft, elevating over the crater, rising over the battlefield, wingspan elongating until it dwarfs every aircraft yet invented, each leather flap powerful enough to change the trajectory of shells, to blow back volleys of gunfire, to tumbleweed soldiers and medics, the living and the dead, until she’s high enough that the moon, peeking through grit, gleams off two obsidian horns that have grown from the angel’s head where the halo used to be,

and Bagger hears Father Muensterman’s curse, You’ll find the devil out there, Private Bagger!, maybe the old padre was right, though here at the end, here at the beginning, there’s no telling what’s an angel or a devil or if the two are the same, it’s just the Adversary, forever the Adversary, having left a good world to a rotten people who turned it into a butcher box, a box with a lid called the Mercy Seat,

and all Bagger knows is that they need to hang on so they don’t get blown away, and Arno, reading his mind, holds his hand harder, any fantasy of the angel-as-mother ripped from the kid like a scream, while someone else holds Bagger’s mangled left hand, which hurts, but not in an unkind way, and Bagger recognizes the grip from boyhood, calloused from too many turned pages, arthritic from scribing too many sermons, rather like a leather Bible, rough but familiar, as useless as it is perfect,

and Bagger grips both hands back and the being above ascends, and vanishes into the sky, and Bagger waits to see if he has enough life kicking inside to climb out of this crater, get back to the front, back to the world, to live and persevere, to love and suffer, to become that old man who will one day come back to measure the page turns of an ever-turning world, and he inhales and waits for either the story to end or for the story to start over, and waits, and waits,

and,