Page 5 of Angel Down

VI

and the men unlock postures, puddled and dangled, and cover their ears, the shriek a screwdriver to the earholes, and Goodspeed rips a stick of chewing gum from his pocket and stuffs it in his mouth, seems the wait nearly killed him, his chewing sounds like a child being spanked, and Popkin flattens one nostril with a thumb and ejects snot from the other, and Arno blinks at Bagger in confusion, while Veck remains the obelisk, eyes closed and quaking,

and Arno aside, they can’t look at one another, a sensation Bagger recalls from Camp Winn, where recruits were divided into teams every day for internecine bullshit like obstacle course or rope-pull, and because Bagger was emptying everyone’s wallets at craps, no one wanted him on their team, a revenge Bagger mocked until team selection was down to him and one other guy, at which point Bagger’s smirks cooled to wax replicas, for being hated together is so much worse than being hated alone,

and, you know what, to hell with it, Bagger slaps on his helmet, takes up his Springfield, and goes into the trench, can’t see Reis but hears the marching orders, which kick off an orchestra of weary groans, jangled buckles, slorping boots, and clunking rifle butts, all of it contributing to a terrible crunch, an entire society gnashed between titan jaws, and beyond the murk, the Germans crunch that way, too, like an Iowa county fair contest, who can eat the most hamburgers, the most pie, the most world,

and huzzah, the parade of troglodytes begins, Father Muensterman the sole loiterer, the old chaplain’s pressed from the same mold as Bishop Bagger, he holds his Bible aloft and points a Grim Reaper finger at Bagger, as his chin, crudded with vomit, joggles in supercilious glee, they call Bagger a hustler, but Muensterman plays a harsher three-card monte, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,

and Muensterman cries, “You’ll find the devil out there, Private Bagger!,” and Bagger grins, a long zipper of teeth unzipped, he enjoys this, the chaplain’s so much easier a target than Lyon Reis, not to mention the Reichstag army,

and Bagger says, “It’s devils you’re after, padre? Well, that’d be us. Private Mephistopheles reporting for duty. Over there you’ll find Private Beelzebub, Private Baphomet, Private Lucifer, and Private Antichrist. I know there’s only supposed to be four horsemen, but it’s the War to End All Wars, so we went all out,”

and Bagger detects a ratlike scurry, and checks over his shoulder, and it’s Arno, naturally Arno, and over the kid’s head he glimpses the last marchers vanishing centipedially around a trench corner, the gunmetal sky glowing off the canteens clipped to every pack so it looks like there’s a big, silver hole punched through each soldier, the air thick with the molar grind of men overburdened with matériel, the drowsy clops of horse-pulled supply wagons, the asthmatic hack of covered trucks dragging fifty-ton howitzers over cratered rubble,

and it’s misting, but mist is a gift in the vulgar deluge that has been every day of the offensive, where only rain stops the bullets, and the men would prefer the bullets, so with Arno back at Bagger’s heels, he leaves Father Muensterman with his sanctimonious face drained of blood, a not-bad Pierrot act, and snakes through fifty feet of trench before the underfoot mud slopes ten inches beneath black water, each stomp sending toads hopping and rats paddling,

and because the trenches are French-built and only recently wrested from the Boche, all intersections are marked by darling little replicas of village road signs, which means, of course, that all of them are in fucking French, not that it matters, the international language of BANG pulls Bagger toward the battlefront, still going strong to the west in Bois de Romagne and to the east across the Meuse, feistier fronts with soldiers more saturated in élan,

and as Bagger blinks away the ash that snowfalls heavier with each northward step, he imagines it as the whispery tickle of falling ticker tape, New York City mistaking him for the kind of guy who, back when the war was raging, gave a flying fuck,

and he finds the frontline trench looking like a mouthful of busted teeth, the tops rounded by the fretting of bayonets or the clawing of soldiers on their way out or back in, while inky water covers Bagger’s boots and runs in rivulets down the walls like blood down a riddled body, but Bagger leans into the front wall anyway, a puppy into his mama, and the wall leans back into him, as if seeking the same comfort,

and he scans for a periscope but it looks like the Butcher Birds took them, though a wooden ladder waits like the cross of an absconded Jesus, each rung whittled by thousands of metal-studded trench boots pushing men over the top, so Bagger lodges his foot onto a rung and feels it vibrate like a bicycle wheel, and he imagines a bike chain routed around his scapulas, pelvis, femurs, and patellas, by taking this rung, he’s threaded himself into some sort of machine,

and Uncle Sam’s finally quiet as Bagger extends his calves to peek over the trench’s muddy crenellations at the black world hulking beneath the slow cyclones of smoke, he can only see ten or twelve yards into a landscape reminiscent of soldiers he’s seen pulled from fires, their outermost layers of charred skin peeled to reveal a soft, pale hypodermis,

and beyond that are foundations of obliterated buildings like the vertebrae of buried gods, lying beside slag heaps of bricks of no obvious origin, as if German Fokkers have taken to dropping brick in lieu of bombs, though some of these bricks must have once been homes, for there’s an upright piano out there, gap-toothed, down two legs, but still technically a piano, its exposed wires droning in the scraping wind,

and Bagger ducks down, it’s like surfacing from water, breaking back into breathable air, where Arno waits with big red eyes, asking “Bad?,” to which Bagger gives him a flat look and replies, “Not at all. They’re selling popcorn. Go get some,”

and a leathery hiss of drabs heralds the galumphing elephant train of the others, Veck first despite his shakes and the weight of the P3, followed by Goodspeed and the shrewd assessments of his blue ice-pick eyes, then Popkin, lollygagging a good twenty yards back, his beefy bulk making it hard for him to reach the back of his neck, he reaches, and reaches, could be a rat there, usually it’s a rat,

and this time it’s a tongue, a human tongue that had been hiding in the trench like an asp viper, and wow, tongues are long when detached from their heads, Bagger wonders if the lummox might keep it, it’s got to be superior to the one infected with trench mouth, but Popkin flings it and takes a moment to collect himself, looking like he’s going to puke, or cry, or shoot himself in the face, all of which Bagger has seen before and none of which would surprise him,

and the weight of No Man’s Land strains against the men’s shoulders, no longer twenty thousand pairs of shoulders, only five, five versus what could be ten thousand Huns who still think there’s a 43rd Division there to absorb their next barrage, and Bagger considers this as the shriek shrieks, and tree bark sizzles, and mortars explode close enough to filigree brimstone onto the drifting whales of smoke, which cause Bagger and the others to do the trench dance, it’s easy to do, you hold your helmet down, you do a little dip, and you believe in the fiction that being six inches lower will save you from the wrath of God,

and Popkin says to no one, “Yeah, well, I ain’t going. Reis wants this screamer so bad? He can go. Go get his guts unwound,”

and Goodspeed brushes soil from his uniform as quickly as the soil appears and says, “Who said we have to go out there? We don’t have to go out there. You have to look at what the man actually said. He said, ‘find the guy.’ He’s found, isn’t he? It’s not like we don’t know where he is, he’s straight thataway, shouting like mad. Reis wants him to shut up is all,” and Goodspeed titters, “I say we just wait till he shuts up,”

and a third voice, a new one to Bagger, says, “Waiting won’t work,” so whispery Bagger wonders if a sandbag is draining sand until everyone turns to Ben Veck, one more of the day’s surprises, Bagger’s never heard the flamethrowing Negro say a word and doubts anyone in the 43rd has, but the whites of Veck’s eyes wolflight like trench lanterns, he has indubitably spoken,

and Popkin’s forehead doughs over his eyes and he says, “That guy out there? The racket he’s making? He don’t make it to sundown. No way, no how,” and Bagger actually thinks the lummox would take a swing at Veck if not for the tank of combustible oil strapped to Veck’s back, so Popkin’s belligerent fists hang like dual scrotums, and he grunts, “I think the darkie’s gonna tattle,”

and though Bagger has no reason to defend Veck, boy, does he hate Popkin, so he says, “Well, tattling’s what you do to bad little boys, Popkin,”

and it’s a risky thing to say, given Popkin’s size and mood, but Bagger’s got no interest in hors d’oeuvres of violence before a main dish of violence, and maybe Popkin feels the same, for all he does is spit tobacco at Bagger’s feet and say, “I’ll make boots of you,” a threat that Veck, anyway, weighs with his deadlights before he nods his head at No Man’s Land and says, “No telling how long that boy will go on yelling. Reis might send a runner back to check up on us,”

and Popkin scoffs, “That bastard’s got bigger problems,” and Veck, in a frankly shocking display, locks his jaw and rasps, “The major general is a good man,” and Bagger can’t help it, he laughs, and asks, “How do you figure?,” to which Veck stretches his knotted body into a prouder stance, and says, quietly and firmly, “He chose me,”

and Bagger could dispute that, Reis wanted a flamethrower operator, not specifically a battle-rattled one, but the world makes his point for him, a blast from the west, trouble in V Corps, a peach aurora like dawn’s youth soaking into the age-old dark, and Veck hits the deck, slams himself into muddy water, the habit of the shell-shocked, and though Popkin laughs, Bagger is envious, must be cool under the water, and quiet, and what he wouldn’t give for both,

VII

and it’s too much for Arno, who sits down, something Bagger hates to see, mud’s going to soak through the kid’s drawers like he’s loading a diaper, and under his dented helmet, Arno does look pretty shitty as he mumbles, “He’s not stopping. He’s been yelling for longer than anyone’s ever yelled,” and he screws the heel of a palm into his eye, “It hurts my head,”

and Bagger wonders if the kid’s onto something, what if the shrieker is some new kind of Hun weapon, a sonic cudgel intended to drive doughboys batty, turn them against one another to release the pressure in their skulls, and if so, it’s one more reason not to dally, either they do this task or they don’t,