Page 25 of Angel Down

and he’s tickled by a twinkle of laughter,

and a gentle kiss pressed to his blighted lips,

XXXIII

and what brings Bagger back is the venom sting of his left wrist, the return of blood to handcuff-pinched flesh, and his eyelids open to find Lewis Arno sitting on the Fahrpanzer, a little pale but otherwise still the kid, twirling the handcuff around a finger and whistling “Over There,” his helmet a steel yarmulke at the back of his skull, and when he notices Bagger awake, he doesn’t halt the twirling or whistling, only smiles, an armistice sun through war’s black wool, and says, “Hi,”

and Bagger figures it was all a dream until he sits up, discs cracking, massaging his wrist, and sees the angel sitting against Arno’s legs and giving Bagger the coy look of someone with whom you share a secret, and though Bagger knows the secret is his pacifist vow, not their clandestine kiss, he licks his lips anyway, suspecting angels taste like cotton candy, but all he detects is the salty grape of blood,

and Arno, twirling, says, “I’ve been thinking,” and Bagger croaks, their old joke, “Uh-oh,” and Arno continues, “You said Korak and Tarzan end up fighting to the death. But that doesn’t make sense! Tarzan’s an ape man. But he’s not an ape. What Tarzan would do is stretch out his neck, you know? He’d rather die than hurt his son. If Tarzan dies, Korak becomes king, and what would make Tarzan happier than that? I think you read it wrong. Or did you make it up? Bagger, did you make it up?,”

and as scorched as Bagger’s throat is, and as cymbaled are the plates of his skull, and as cold blue are the aches of his wrist, Bagger feels his organs go buoyant in the helium of joy, this goddamn kid, who’s too clever to swallow Bagger’s made-up climax to The Son of Tarzan, he’s going to pester Bagger with questions enough to kill him, and Bagger laughs at the figure of speech, he can’t wait to be killed like this each and every day,

and Bagger shrugs and says, “Yeah. But my ending’s the only one you get. We lost the book,” to which Arno frowns, catches the cuffs in his hand, and digs into his haversack, pulling out, of course, The Son of Tarzan, the pages’ edges as red as dead leaves, saying, “I brought it. It was just sitting there under the howitzer,”

and Bagger’s still staring at the book in blank shock when Arno grins slyly and pulls an improbable second book from the sack, they might be the only two books left on the whole Western Front, where all cognoscenti pursuits have been usurped by jungle ones, and when Bagger sees this book is red as well, he thinks, here it is, the record of our time, authored by the angel, the ultimate Book of Blood,

and it’s the Bible, the red leather Bible, the Bishop’s Bible, Arno must have noticed it way back in the trench and spent a few death-defying seconds digging it out,

and Bagger nods his thanks like it’s no big deal, but has to look away fast, eyes underwater from a rush of tears he palms aside while fabricating a yawn, and when he’s got control of himself, he asks, “How’d you find me?,” and the kid replies, “You guys left a million footprints,” and Bagger thinks of all the mud, all the snow, all the blood, and gives the kid a guilty smile, and notices the blood-snarled bandage under the kid’s shirt collar, Veck’s handiwork,

and though his heart hammers, Bagger says in an offhand tone, “Nasty cut you got there,” and Arno flips the handcuff key like a quarter and laughs, “Yeah, somebody stabbed me! Can you believe it? Wait’ll they hear back home,” and Bagger’s protoplasm bubbles, he’s a surgeon gingerly asking questions of a cadaver who just sat up from the slab, if only the Bishop could have seen this, he might never have lost his faith and boarded that boat,

and Bagger probes, “What was it like?” and Arno flips the key and asks, “What was what like?” and Bagger warns himself, careful now, and clarifies, “Before you woke up. You see anything? Hear anything?,” and Arno catches the key and gives Bagger a grin and asks, “You mean did I have a dream? When I was asleep?,” and Bagger, baffled on how else to proceed, nods,

and Arno chimpanzees the cogitation of a philosopher, stroking an invisible beard, then lights up, and says, “You know what? I did have a dream! It was weird,” and Bagger dares not speak, only managing another encouraging nod,

and Arno says, “Let’s see. I was walking through the trenches. I was trying to find somebody. Anybody. But it was a big maze. I walked for days. And eventually I knew I wasn’t getting out. I had to make the trenches my home. So I became the thing that lives in the trenches. And once in a while other people ended up there, too, but by then, I didn’t want them there. So I,”

and here, the kid lowers his voice, “so I killed them, Bagger. I killed them like Korak killed the Kovudoo. With my bare hands. I think I might have ate them? Yeah. I definitely ate them. And the weird part is, I started to like it. The trenches weren’t mine to begin with, but I started to think I owned them. So I dug till my trenches spread all over the world. And more people kept falling in. Which meant more people for me to eat,”

and then Arno goes solemn and whispers, “I ate you, too, Bagger. You fell into the trench, and I ate you. Sorry,”

and to Bagger it’s less dream than prophecy, one day the kid will kill him, as sure as one day Korak will succeed Tarzan, a fate Bagger can only feel resigned to, so he nods grimly and asks, “How did it end?,”

and the kid pooches his lower lip, eyes faraway, and says, “I think there was a rain cloud? Or a storm? It was dark. Like the inside of a tornado. And I tried to hide. I dug myself into the mud. I kept throwing rats at it! I thought maybe if I gave it enough rats it would leave me be! But it didn’t want rats. It sucked me right out of the mud. Then I was up inside it. It was scary. It was loud, like when we’re getting shelled. There was red lightning all over. And I felt somebody touch me,”

and Bagger, desperate for just one goddamn happy ending, asks, “The angel?,” but the kid looks troubled and says, “Felt like leather. Not leather like your Bible. Like a trench boot. Except alive. It had claws. Cold claws. And a long, cold, leather arm. It flew me out the top of the tornado,” and the kid shivers, and blinks,

and then he smiles, startled but happy, a kid exiting a carnival ride, and concludes, “Then I woke up and I was alone. And I’d been stabbed!,”

and Arno laughs, a short jolt, the whole story so absurd, and Bagger is breathless at the derring-do, the kid so flippant in the face of death that Bagger laughs, too, there’s no other reaction left, and Arno laughs at the sight of the bedraggled Bagger laughing, and that’s it, they are howling, rolling in snow and mud, and if someone were to pass by, they would keep their distance, believing the Butcher Birds to be expiring in agony, or dangerously unhinged, or both,

and after a time, Bagger’s jubilations relax enough for his happy tears to freeze into pearls, a mentholated counterpart to a rush of air that’s too warm to be anything but hope, for if Lewis Arno can be healed, anyone might be healed, the kid, after all, is a messenger, and Bishop Bagger always said that’s what angels were above all else, messengers climbing up and down Jacob’s ladder between heaven and earth,

and if the job being offered to Bagger is to serve as a bodyguard to messengers, two of them now, he accepts, what a gift that the most cataclysmic event in history has handed him a reason to live, not to simply survive but to live,

and so Bagger tells Arno about the promise he made to the angel, it’s only fair after the kid shared his dream, and the kid nods along like a pint-sized professor, like it all makes good sense, and when the kid asks, “The other guys are dead?,” Bagger nods, the era of mollycoddling kaput, and Arno looks thoughtful but not surprised, and glances at the angel as one might a beloved dog that doesn’t remember eating the neighbor’s cat,

and Bagger stands, wobbly but confident nothing can stop him, and gazes around, a forest iced in celestial white, a battlefield of sloughed flesh, a centaur of ash that used to be Ben Veck, a sky of cinereal clouds somersaulting like fat children, urging Bagger along, the wind at his back, the 43rd surely close now, twenty-thousand men ready to receive the good news of the angel, whether they realize it or not,

and the good news is that the angel can heal, heal the world like it healed the kid’s mortal wound, like it delivered every other reasonable thing the soldiers wanted, Popkin’s Lucky Strikes, Arno’s evaporated puncture wound, the recovery of Veck’s squashed kitten, seems reasonable to Bagger she could melt every firearm in Europe with a gesture of her hand, at the very least make the millions of murdered stand up, as they did around Veck, to show everyone alive the true cost of willy-nilly slaughter, it could be the first shot of a new war, a war of shame, one way or the other ending the suffering, he’s just got to get the angel to Reis, and get Reis to understand and employ her properly,

and Bagger, dizzy with purpose, finally purpose, picks up the angel, lightweight as ever, turns his back to Arno, and says, “Hop on,” and the kid whoops, stuffs the cuffs and keys and Tarzan and Bible into his haversack and scampers close, and Bagger squeezes the kid’s shoulder, an act of affection he uses to ruffle his thumb through Arno’s bandage and get a peek at the should-be deadly wound, and it’s there, ugly for sure, but its black crevasse is jacketed with fresh skin, blood sealed away, a flesh wound, nothing more,

and Arno leaps onto Bagger’s back, squat-kicking his legs through the loops of Bagger’s elbows, and he asks, “Where we going?,”

and Bagger says, “You tell me,” and Arno hums deliberation before slashing his hand east and announcing, “That way!” and Bagger, having fun, he nearly forgot what fun is, replies, “What’s that way, cap’n?” and Arno declares, “Dracula!” and Bagger chuckles, Dracula is a book the kid’s wanted to read since hearing that the Germans defeated the Romanians in the Carpathian Mountains, right at Count Drac’s doorstep,