Page 13 of Angel Down

and so what the hell, Bagger lurches and bends an elbow around the tree trunk of Popkin’s neck, and the beast bellows and twists like a saddled rhinoceros, and Bagger’s collarbone gets crunched against a discarded helmet, pain in bright pinwheels, and he’s slammed into the water, his turn to drown, and he grapples through the gumbo of lost slickers, boots, pipes, pocket watches, bandages, rats, not a single good bludgeon among them,

and then Veck rises like a kraken, mud glopping from his open maw and sluicing down his chin like black merlot, his jaw twitching like never before, enough to rip open his cheek, and as he launches at Popkin, one of his boots plants onto Lewis Arno’s knee,

and Arno wails himself awake as Veck cannonballs helmet-first into the lummox’s kidney, Popkin ejecting brown batter, but even with the P3, Veck’s an underweight foe, and Popkin finds undermud purchase and slings Veck toward, well, Bagger doesn’t see, because Bagger’s juking toward Arno, the kid’s clutching his knee as Bagger loops him by the armpit and dives both of them into the safety of a cold clay wall,

and Bagger knows his noises, the snap of a rifle strap across rain-sogged drabs, the metallic joggle of a bolt handle, either Popkin or Veck has gained the upper hand, and when a soldier out here gains an upper hand, two things reliably follow, the cough of a cartridge and the whine of death, and Bagger wraps himself around Arno while noting he could have just run, just left the kid behind, maybe it’s the influence of the,

and before he can finish the thought, Arno points and yells, “There!,” and Bagger orients his eyes into the needling sheets of rain, there will be no outfoxing a third trench mortar, its grim reaper finger selects you to die and you die, and Bagger’s luck has run up a tab his flesh is overdue in paying,

and so he’s surprised to instead see Goodspeed spidering off the top of a trench ladder, the only ladder in sight, and rolling onto an elevated island of incinerated turf, while Bagger and the others tussled like Korak and the baboons, Goodspeed just took the fuck off, but that was the Vulture for you, three steps ahead and always hoarding the most valuable treasure,

and though Goodspeed isn’t strong, the angel has a canteen weight, and with a final heave, he shifts her from the ladder into his lap, and Bagger’s so dumbfounded that Arno weasels away, vaults the trench water, and grabs for the angel’s dangling ankle, begging Goodspeed too softly for Bagger to hear, a useless effort, Goodspeed simply lifts the angel up out of the kid’s reach,

and Veck, reptilian with mud, sputters, “She’s not yours,” and Popkin, hacking foul water, says, “I’m warning you, Goodspeed, don’t you fucking leave us,” and for a few seconds Goodspeed looks cooperative, as if ready to tell them they can all reconnect post-armistice, where he will parse out their earnings, all promises kept,

and then, ah, fuck it, Goodspeed drops his mask of dopey earnestness and lets a long, wicked grin eel outward, so long it threatens to detach everything above his jaw, and with the angel draped over his thighs as if for a spanking, he takes hold of the ladder and lifts it out of the trench, easy as can be,

and like that, the rest are cut off, and Bagger hustles in hopes he can leap and snag the lowest rung, but everyone else is closer, and Arno jumps, and Veck jumps, and Popkin jumps, the tallest but still a foot shy, and Goodspeed watches from above in giggling delight, the same way, Bagger wagers, he watches a rabbit suffering in a snare, and if Bagger hadn’t lost his rifle in the trench-side miracle, he’d spray Goodspeed with blazing lead, though Popkin, a more frequent firer, knows better than to bother, Goodspeed could roll out of view in half a second,

and knowing he’s beyond their reach, Goodspeed untwists his lizard body and stands before a brass sky flowered with explosions, chuckling so hard it sounds like hiccups, the angel limp as a bath towel in his arms, and he gazes down at her, chuckling, chuckling, and with two fingers pinches the robe hood and lifts it entirely off her head,

and maybe it’s the low angle, maybe it’s the smoke saturated in dusk’s amber, but the light coming from the angel’s face is now joined by something else, floating a few inches off the crown of her head, a golden ring as faint as dust, and if there was any doubt in Bagger’s mind, that doubt is gunned down, the ring is a halo, a fucking halo, the woman’s an angel, all right, a proper angel,

and Goodspeed lords down through his pince-nez, tips his helmet, and says, “Bon voyage, boys! I’d like to say we’ll meet again, but we all know that’s not in the cards. Not even the kind of cards you deal, Bagger! You’ll see my Theda again, though,”

and Bagger notices he calls her Theda,

and Goodspeed continues, “You’ll see her in newspapers and film reels, and maybe in person, too, if you can save up the scratch to buy a ticket. If you do, rest easy that a hefty portion of the ticket price went to good old Private Goodspeed. Though I’ll have dropped the rank by then. Sir Goodspeed. Lord Goodspeed. Has a nice ring, don’t it? I’d say look me up, but that’s assuming any of you surv,”

and there’s a great flash of light like the sudden death of the sun, a noise so loud it’s silence, it’s that third minenwerfer Bagger has been expecting, fired by Jerry, who, after Goodspeed uncovered the light beam of the angel’s face, had a direct target to shoot at, and the shell lands just north of the trench, a near miss, but it’s followed by a wallop of sweltering wind that squalls a blue blur of shrapnel over the trench top, and with a swift, moist snick, Vincent the Vulture Goodspeed is cut in half just below his ribs, neat as a holiday fruitcake,

XIX

and there’s no fear, fear requires understanding, there’s only awe at how fast the rules of the game change, the legs half of Goodspeed teeters backward, the torso half tips forward into the trench, and Arno, directly below, wiggles away like a trench rat, and Veck parries back with the P3 lance like a saber, and Bagger’s just too far away,

and so it’s Popkin who plays valet to the gruesome luggage, Goodspeed’s head still grinning, mouth still chuckling, arms spasming around Popkin’s neck, a better brother in death than in life, and the lummox is bowed by the weight until Goodspeed’s organs begin unwinding from the chest like a bolt of fabric,

and the angel rolls down onto Arno, the kid’s huddled back breaks the fall, and Bagger skids to his knees in the black porridge and folds her into his arms, loath that one drop of mud might sully the red dress and blue cape, and he’s shocked, but also thrilled, at the singing of his skin and the chiming of his bones, the full-body exaltation to have her back, Alleluia, he’s whole again just as Goodspeed is halved,

and the German fusillade unrolls over the trench, a blanket of yellow flame, each tendril a hissing viper, something chemical in the mix, the steel of Bagger’s helmet going ice-hot against his scalp, and he crawls away on two legs and an arm, the other arm toting the angel, an elbow all he’s got left to whack Arno on the ear, get moving, stupid kid,

and Bagger launches to his boots and glances back to see Goodspeed’s bodiless legs, way up above, drop to their knees and tip forward, the pelvic bowl pouring steaming intestines into the trench, while Goodspeed’s haversack, bisected by the same shrapnel, pours salable goodies like signal whistles, pocket watches, insignia pins, campaign bars, and division patches, though the last item to tumble is none other than The Son of Tarzan,

and the book is inches from the hot offal when a hand plucks it from the air, Veck’s hand, and Bagger doesn’t know if Reis was correct and Veck is the finest Butcher Bird of all, or if he simply wants protection, Veck holds the book alongside his face and fire gnaws at it, the largest word on the cover promptly sizzled away to TARZ,

and here come the Boche, their hounddog blood bullwhipped by the smell of miracles, but the advantage of the Company P relics is that there’s only four of them, five with the angel, but to maintain those odds they need to move, so Bagger sprints down the trench, each footfall detonating a six-foot geyser of mud, and when he takes a southward turn, his side vision catches Arno, Veck, and Popkin in pursuit, their own cracking footfalls indistinguishable from Gewehr rifles,

and still Bagger believes he can hear Vincent Goodspeed’s lunatic giggle, you fools, giggle, you suckers, giggle, you doughboys all too ready to give up your dough, you’ll join me in hell soon enough, giggle, giggle,

and Bagger goes harder, if only to outrun the giggle, no fucking clue where he’s headed, he’s spent less time inside trenches than anyone, he tries to keep war’s false sun at his back, zigging right, zagging left, fleeing Jerry like he’s heard you ought to flee alligators,

and abruptly Bagger’s scaling the ramp of a trench exit, out of dank sewage funk into a troposphere of hot ash that burns a cigarette cherry into his every bronchiole, they are out in the open, boots scrunching through scorched grass, sitting ducks until Arno catches up and throws the hood over the angel’s face, hiding the halo, blotting out her illumination, and everything goes dark, like they have been stuffed into a giant’s pocket,

and Popkin gasps, “Woods,” but Veck gasps in dissent, “Stay by the trenches,” and Bagger thinks he agrees, if they get lost in the woods, lost from the 43rd, they will be a whole new kind of fucked, they will be the deserters Goodspeed wanted them to be, so Bagger hunkers down, the angel held to his chest like a baby, Arno shuddering close,

and he shouts, “We stick to the trenchline and we’ll run right into the division,” to which Popkin sputters “With her? You just want to hand her to Reis?,” and Bagger snaps, “Goodspeed lied! There’s no doctor in Nancy!,” and Popkin says, “I don’t give a shit about any doctor! That girl belongs to me!,” and Bagger’s astounded all over again by the lummox’s entitlement,

and more astounding is his willingness to fight Popkin over the angel, a devotion he’s only ever heard from new parents and young lovers, the two biggest categories of sucker that exist, but now he gets it, it’s a release to feel so strongly, this is the point of a purpose, the purpose his father wanted for him, the purpose Uncle Sam wants for him, too,