Page 20 of Angel Down

and that’s how it comes to him, she has no wings, a halo but no wings, and a long icicle slides between his ribs, everyone knows angels have wings, even if they’d been blown off by artillery, there would be snapped feather shafts and busted scapulars, he’s watched enough gamecocks get eviscerated to know how tenaciously wings hang on,

and Bagger persists, “Why won’t you answer me?,” to which he gets nothing, so he taps his bloody tongue with a filthy finger and orders, in quasi-French, “Par-lay,” to which her lips part as if she has only the vaguest sense of his wishes, and he spits mud and blood, the heat of his anger enough to steam the falling rain, and he says, “I saved you. Haven’t I twice now saved you? Don’t you owe me something? A word of fucking thanks? Your name? Something?,”

and after Bagger receives precisely jack shit, he can’t stop his demands from growing in volume, “Can’t you talk? Can’t you hear? Are you deaf and dumb?,” which feels possible, it would explain a lot, and he takes her shoulders and shakes her, and when he discovers he has nothing more to ask, shakes her even harder,

and her silky copper hair bounds like sparks from a crumbling fire, and with every new shake, her collarbones articulate, and Bagger feels the delicate twigs of her arm bones, she’s sure built like a regular woman, and therefore must be able to feel pain, and Bagger wants to use that, wants to shake her till it hurts, the idea’s exciting, pain’s a language they can share, the universal language, and out here, you grow fluent fast,

and what if Honest Abe knew what he was talking about when he’d coined the better angels of our natures, what if he meant it literally, that our judgment at the holy gates is based on how we treat angels when chancing upon them, maybe your angel looks like a woman in a red dress, maybe it looks like a puppy, as long as the being is defenseless it serves as a test of benevolence, maybe that’s what’s happening, Cyril Bagger is being fucking tested, drilled in empathy as he was once drilled in warfare,

and all Bagger knows for sure is five soldiers were assigned to take care of the shrieker and three of those soldiers are dead, and those deaths didn’t come at the hands of Jerry, they came from this shining woman whose one major miracle was only witnessed by a few men whose observational abilities were compromised, and not to be trusted to begin with,

and so maybe the angel is nothing special, nothing at all,

and so he chooses the only choice that’s ever made any sense to Cyril Bagger, the choice to make no choice at all, he grabs the blue cape, crawls out into the rain, and drags out the angel, no, the woman, the regular woman, and with a grunt hoists her into his arms and covers her radiating face with the sopping hood, so he doesn’t have to see her, doesn’t have to think of her,

and Bagger doesn’t point himself back west, there’s nothing west but a hysterical Ben Veck and a dead Lewis Arno, but rather east, toward the Butcher Birds and Major General Reis, the head butcher, the only butcher at the paygrade to deal with this, and right now that’s all Bagger wants, dump the problem, get back to self-protection, get his ass home,

and as the sun ascends with all the beauty of bullet-pocked canteen, Bagger stomps past Popkin’s burial mound and wends from the village along a skinny dirt path until the path vanishes at a half-mile battle scar scribbled across the plain as if by a giant-sized schoolboy,

and so Bagger veers northeast into a bronze sky, over a steep hill perfectly preserved but for the biplane squashed into its side, identifiably Reichstag from the Iron Cross on the tail, a plane Bagger considers pillaging for rations until he glimpses the pilots’ barbecued remains,

and then it’s over the crest to a downhill grade slapdash with forty-some bodies, all of them named Jerry, they had been fleeing when death swung its scythe, the men’s corpses grouped in patterns like a language only readable from the sky, maybe that’s what the barbecued pilot was up to,

and though these signs make Bagger hesitate, he doesn’t stop, Tarzan and Korak wouldn’t stop, he hitches up the woman and descends, stepping around bodies like he used to dodge cow patties in Iowa pastures, though in doing so, there’s no avoiding the faces, skin of blue leather, lips berried with rot, the whole platoon white-bearded by frost,

and because Bagger’s good at games, he invents a new game, an honest game, he calls it Think of Anything Else in the World and it goes like this, you see something atrocious and you let it remind you of something nice, for example, here’s a soldier with nothing left of his neck but a soft flap of flesh, so he says to the woman he carries, “Looks like the back of a lady’s knee, nothing prettier, if you don’t mind me saying,”

and Think of Anything Else in the World round two involves two hands, just two hands lying in the dirt like a pair of white mittens, and Bagger doesn’t let himself down, “Look like two sunflowers at the end of summer, when they get all pale,” he says, “but I still like the look of them, don’t you?,”

and Think of Anything Else in the World round three involves a Jerry so well cooked, Bagger can’t stop his traitor stomach from growling, so he focuses on the lung that hangs from the man’s open chest, inflating and deflating in the wind, and tells the woman, “Looks like laundry in the breeze, and smells like it, too,”

and Think of Anything Else in the World gets easier every round, a skinny pair of legs are two birchwood baseball bats, the gap where a man’s nose used to be is the precise contours of a succulent pear, the big black liver lying there is a leather purse straight from the Marshall Field racks, he can nearly detect the perfumed tickle of forgotten affluence,

and when the massacre is behind him, Bagger laughs, a noise absurd enough to make him laugh again, and he wonders if he’s gone the way of Veck before deciding he doesn’t give a shit, madness is a gift, and he guffaws the guffaw of the all-American types who, back home, always avoided him, and here in France all got snuffed out pretty quick, and now he’s joined their cocky ranks, maybe he’s not a shirker after all, maybe he’s been a proper soldier the whole time,

and he lets the super-soldier scenario play out as he drinks rainwater from tire tracks and plods into a patch of verdure slashed by rampaging troops that might have been Company P, suddenly he misses those guys, wait till they get a load of the new and improved Cyril Bagger, he had a shrieker to save and goddammit, save her he did, such a fine surprise that even old Bishop Bagger will sit up from whatever cloud he’s claimed with Bagger’s mother, and look down, and finally feel something akin to pride,

XXVIII

and the fantasies put a real spring in the old step, a spring that gets springier when Bagger hears the mechanized chug and brook babble of a battalion, he tries to speed up, but the woman’s limbs start catching on every branch, bush, and bramble out there, which forces him to slow down, whoever this lady is, Bagger can’t deliver her to Reis covered in nasty red scratches,

and while he’s mincing through thorns, he picks up unfamiliarities in the noises, the gears of machines hoarser, the mutters of men a pile-up of consonants, and Bagger’s forced to accept the truth, these aren’t doughboys up ahead, this is Jerry, and Bagger gives the woman in his arms a careful study, for it was her meddlesome limbs that prevented him from prancing right out in front of the Reichstag Army,

and Bagger slithers to the burnt relics of the forest edge and hunches behind the squat metal silo of a toppled Fahrpanzer, a stationary German tank, and the woman sighs, the way a mother sighs at a child who insists on playing in mud, and Bagger peeks out at a terrible sight, a hundred stormtroopers moving across a field sludged by a demolished drainage system and lumped with American and German bodies,

and, sure, it’s disquieting seeing so many Sturmtruppen, for once not candlelit by machine guns or leaping like demons in a minenwerfer scarlet, but more than that it’s eerie, these Germans don’t look particularly alive, they are wights who hold their Mausers at the lowest point of their straps like slack jaws, while their boots drop and scrape like pistons and gears,

and moving just as painfully are the machines grinding through the morass alongside them, steel-wheeled due to Germany’s rubber deficiency, munitions carriages snagged in peaty bogs, Mörser howitzers cleaving through black mucilage like dinosaurs, mounted Maxims coming apart with every bounce, antiaircraft guns so mired in winter’s resin that stormtroopers beat it to put it out of its misery,

and galumphing among them like a processional elephant is an A7V, tumid with clay, sickly with chemical corrosion, its ten-thousand rivets the excrescence of a terminal disease, the tank’s seen too fucking much, it trembles like Ben Veck and cries a petrol storm, this advance the last it will ever make,

and Bagger’s got no choice but to sit and wait, and wait, and probably wait some more, it’s going to take all damn day for this company to pass through a battlefield so fresh it still coughs phlegm of flame, they aren’t even collecting the German dead, only the dog tags, or at least that’s what it looks like from the dead men’s collars, all of them ripped wide open,

and some of the dead must be Bagger’s fallen brethren, caught in enfilading fire, which means the 43rd is on the run, but also means it is nearby, Bagger has almost caught up, and as soon as this frangible stream of overextended Huns dries up, he’ll be able to cut behind them, refreshed and rested, and all the food and water he wants for will be waiting, along with the accolades, the acceptance, the everything,

and so he ducks behind the Fahrpanzer, covers himself and the woman with his overcoat, and crooks his neck to fill the makeshift sleeping bag with warming breath, he even closes his eyes, why not, these stormtroopers lack the energy for a single step outside their chosen drudge, he’ll be safe here till he wakes up, how about that, the first time he’s felt safe in France and it’s fifty yards from the German elite,

and the last thing Bagger hears before descending another hill, this time the hill of sleep, is another of the woman’s sighs, this one a tut-tut at a birdbrained decision, as if to say, Cyril Bagger, now there’s a real dummy, but one she can’t help but like,