Page 2 of Angel Down

and when he’s not working a shovel, he’s insubordinating in front of every captain, major, lieutenant, and sergeant in the 43rd so they’ll “punish” him with more backline duty, and by accident, he’s gotten good at those duties, he’s practically become the 2nd Battalion’s burier-in-chief, planting fellow doughboys in the dirt makes him feel like a proper goddamn artiste,

and the idea of other men doing Bagger’s work job while he was briefly unconscious offends him, what does the HQ staff, those signal men, cooks, clerks, quartermasters, bugle boys, and stretcher-bearers, know about burying bodies, nothing, that’s what, the savages probably laid them head-to-head instead of head-to-feet and neglected to cover their faces, and when they came across disarticulated parts, a foot or a head or a perfectly preserved bottom jaw, they probably chucked them in like olives into cocktails, and furthermore, probably failed to note the coordinates of the burial pit, not that it’s worth a crap, no recovery detail is ever coming back to exhume doughboy bodies and everyone knows it,

and, what the hell, there it is again, that voice, Bagger,

and then it’s replaced by something louder, realer, “Bagger! Bagger! There you are, Bagger!” and Bagger’s vertebrae crackle as he swivels his neck to see Lewis Arno dancing around upended oak roots and furry-looking clumps Bagger identifies as moss, only to feel stupidly naive, there was a minnie, there was a burial pit, and that’s not moss, Cyril Bagger, you dumb fuck,

and Bagger’s guts thicken like they do anytime he sees Arno, the kid’s fourteen, lied about his age to some Nebraska National Guardsfuck trying to make quota, and ever since has been a tick sucked to the 172nd’s underbelly, devoid of skills but too damn small for the Germans to hit, and Bagger resents the kid, really goddamn resents him, the kid complicates Bagger’s otherwise flawless loathing for everyone out here, there’s not even any point in swindling Arno, the kid doesn’t have a penny to his name,

and Bagger also loves seeing Lewis Arno, and there’s nothing he hates more than love, so he snaps, “What do you want? Little trench rat,” and Arno sets aside a Chauchat rifle bigger than him, stares big goose eggs, and whispers, “Are you dead?,” the second time Bagger’s heard this, he must look really goddamn bad, so he snaps, “Yes. I’m a ghost. And I’m going to haunt the fuck out of you,”

and this seems to satisfy Arno, who presses sooty palms over sooty ears and asks, “What’s that noise?,” which gives Bagger some relief, if Arno hears the shriek, it means Bagger’s not loony, he’s not gone 4-F, not yet,

and so he gins up the wildman grin he knows the kid wants to see, and replies, “Sounds like someone’s letting the air out,” and Arno asks, “Of what?,” and Bagger says, “The whole big balloon” with a mad chuckle, though what he imagines is quite sad, the earth, punctured by a 105mm heavy, leaking air, cratering inward, with all of them along for the crash,

and Arno says, “It hurts,” juvenile but accurate, the shriek does hurt, though not the ears, feels more like a small, feminine hand sliding into Bagger’s chest through a shrapnel wound and squeezing his heart arrhythmically, and if he wasn’t already kneeled, he’d have to take the posture, so damn the kid all over again for making the hard parts of him go soft, “You’re bellyaching to the wrong soldier,” Bagger gripes,

and what impresses him about Lewis Arno, from a con man’s perspective, is that the kid’s not easily bluffed, Arno points at him and says, “You got face on your face,” a statement that, at any other time and place would be gibberish, but there’s only one interpretation here, a real unfortunate one, and Bagger gingerly touches his own face, cracking the blood glaze into fragile plates, and Arno grimaces, and Bagger traces the grimace to his own right jaw, where something dangles, slight and flexible like a human ear,

and Bagger peels it off his face and holds it before him, and that’s exactly what it is, a human ear, clotted with clay and matted with a tuft of blond hair,

and he wipes his face of the face, and the only way not to throw up is to make a joke, so he takes the ear by its helix, holds it out to Arno, and says, “Ear you go,”

and the joke lands flat, the kid is appalled, so Bagger tosses the ear over his shoulder, devil-may-care, but he does care, he does, so much he wants to spin around and find the ear and pin it to his lapel, a medal more useful than the Croix de Guerre, one that might lend him super hearing to better understand the unending, undulating shriek,

and it’s within this phantasmagoria that Arno asserts an even harsher reality by stating, “The major general wants you,”

and because that’s preposterous, Bagger pshaws, “You gotta learn your stripes, kid,” but Arno shakes his head and insists, “I know my stripes,” and Bagger peaks an eyebrow and says, “You mean the first lieutenant,” but Arno shakes his head harder, “No, the major general,” and Bagger levels a look, “Major Chester?,” and Arno shakes his head hard enough to untwist the fool thing off, and Bagger asks, now with a cramp of concern, “Brigadier Motta?,” and Arno moans in exasperation, “The major general! The man with the tiny little arm!,”

and descriptions don’t get clearer than that, Bagger’s face goes slack, which causes more mud to slough off, unless it’s really brains this time, and it might be, that’s how hard Bagger’s thinking, he’s done an ace job fleecing privates, corporals, lieutenants, majors, brigadiers, and captains, but no way does a lowly PFC like Cyril Bagger get the chance to interface with the commander of the U.S. 43rd,

and that might mean tales of Bagger’s bamboozles have gone all the way to the top, which could lead to a court-martial, to prison, and to cover his dread, Bagger tries to play it off like nothing, asking, “Yeah? He say why?,” to which Arno shakes his head earnestly, so Bagger just blinks and breathes, blinks and breathes, and sits at the edge of the mass grave, just him, the boy, the fear, and the shriek,

and it brings him close to voicing a fantasy he’s nurtured like a houseplant, in which the two of them, Bagger and Arno, simply stroll the fuck out of this cunting nightmare, Arno sitting atop Bagger’s shoulders like a kid brother, livening Bagger’s path through shell craters and around dead horses, until the terrain goes dreamy, twitching clover patches, handcrafted stone fences, until they find a wee farm more charming than its Iowa equivalents, and acquire it, and live there, the two of them, accruing personal trivia, the only swindle being the years they wasted anywhere else,

and fuck it, it’ll never happen, a fruitcake fantasy to be kept close to his chest, same spot he wanted to pin the ear,

and so Bagger struggles skyward, and Arno holds out a hand to help, and Bagger clubs it aside same as he does trench vermin, because he’s not the kid’s big brother, he’s just a guy who’s going to get through this war by living how he’s always lived, not giving one shit about anyone, regardless of age or innocence, but he rises too fast, he’s dizzy, he buckles and pitches and weaves and flounders, a necessary struggle, or else he’ll fall into the soupy mass grave he never finished digging but the kill-happy world dug for him, for every last one of them,

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and as Bagger’s strides are man-sized, Arno has to rabbit his pace to keep at Bagger’s heels, and the kid asks, ignorant as ever of being a pest, “You think Korak’s going to kill Baynes?,” and Bagger replies, “Nah. Baynes is going to chop up Korak and make stew out of him,” which sets off loon laughter from the kid, who goes about listing all the reasons Korak the Killer is too powerful and crafty to be taken down by the silver-spoon likes of Morison Baynes,

and Arno prattles on, “You think Korak is going to rescue Meriem again?,” to which Bagger snipes, “If I hadn’t lost my sewing kit, I’d sew your lips shut,” but the kid’s happy chatter proceeds unbothered, characteristic of their daily palaver, in which the kid asks a thousand dunderhead questions about whatever they’re reading and Bagger doles out the most upsetting answers possible,

and their current book is The Son of Tarzan, published in 1915 by Something Something Burroughs, little boy stuff, but Arno is, in fact, a little boy with a little boy’s passions, and as far back as Camp Winn at Fort Sinclair, the kid was badgering recruits about their dime novels until they started tossing their finished books at the kid, never realizing that just because Lewis Arno liked adventure stories didn’t mean he knew how to read,

and you get one guess which soldier Arno chose to confess his shame of illiteracy, fuck the luck, and before long the kid was begging Bagger to read him The Prisoner of Zenda, and though Bagger initially told the kid to scram, war is a slog even when you’re not warring, and at last came the day Bagger was too pooped to resist the kid’s begging and ripped the book from Arno’s hand and began reading aloud with plans to insert passages of sickening violence and shocking pornography, only to find himself engaged by the plot,

and it’s bar none the biggest mistake Bagger’s made in the Army, and worse still, he keeps making it, King Solomon’s Mines, The Count of Monte Cristo, Treasure Island, and now The Son of Tarzan, a tale in which, so far anyway, Tarzan barely appears, the stage ceded to the ape-man’s civilized son, who follows his daddy’s footsteps to become Korak the Killer, an idiotic coincidence, but diverting enough as Bagger, of course, inserts explicit content, Tarzan revised to be a randy sodomite and Lady Greystoke a nudist cannibal, to which Arno only nods along, suggesting there’s no atrocity Bagger can concoct the Great War hasn’t reduced to believability,

and with Arno still at it, “Big Bwana is really Tarzan, right, Bagger? Bagger, you can tell me!,” they pass a side of human ribs still flexing, powered by the heart, always the last organ to let go, and because there’s no time to direct Arno away from it, Bagger stomps the heart before the kid can notice it, and the heart feels like his own,

and here come several aching somnambulists through the fog, HQ staff dragging wagons so heavy with carnage they need to be yoked through the mud like sleds, arms and legs and scalps and entrails swinging from the sides, so Bagger distracts the kid, yanking him close, shouting, “Mind that hole!,” to which Arno cries, “Whoa! Close one!,” except there is no hole, and Bagger wonders if Arno knows it and they’re both just playing the role the other needs,

and Bagger drops into the shallowest stretch of trench he can find, knees like hamburger, and when Arno crouches like he wants help, Bagger pretends not to notice, he’s not the kid’s daddy, and he walks off and hears Arno splat down in the mud, so what, they’re all muddy, though he wishes it was the kid’s landing that made the trench quiver instead of the war machines over the next slope, either that or a hundred thousand of Ludendorff’s Huns exiting the fortified pillboxes of the Hindenburg Line, a choppy sea of pointed helmets heaving south,

and it could also be the shriek, palpitating everything,