Page 34 of Angel Down

and still Bagger registers the sandy shift of the ceiling collapse, and he dives forward to tackle the angel and the kid, dropping the pistol to enclose them in his arms and shove them against the wall, a collision Bagger’s pretty sure rips one of his own broken fingers clean off, but what’s one fewer finger at the beginning of the end,

and the roof falls for a while, Bagger feels mud and clay gathering over his outstretched legs, the Butcher Bird’s burier buried, there’s justice to that, and hell, he tries to enjoy it, holding Arno close, the first time he’s ever really done it and probably the last time, too, making up for the brotherhood they didn’t get to grow up with, all the scraped knees and bloody noses, it’s going to be okay, kid, even though it’s not going to be okay, not even close,

and when Bagger hears war screaming louder than before, he knows the earth above them has finished falling, and how about that, they didn’t get buried after all, he shakes soil off his back, the dugout behind him now a dirt hill topped with that most routine of Great War accessories, the dead horse,

and he shovels the three of them out, not easy with one hand, but then two other hands join in, the kid’s hands, Arno’s still kicking, and Bagger gets so occupied extracting the kid that he doesn’t notice that, once again, the angel has vanished, until he sees Arno, muddy and dazed, gaping dopily at the stairs,

and the angel stands at the dugout entrance, the gas curtain crumpled where Bagger stomped it, and she’s as spotless as she was in Raphael’s painting, though unlike Mary, she looks as resigned to catastrophe as any zero-hour commander, and she beckons with a hand, to which Arno responds by struggling to his feet, and Bagger’s appalled, he tries to grab the kid, but his grabbing hand is mangled,

and the kid slips away, punch-drunk from wounds he can’t fathom, and the angel offers him her hand and, to Bagger’s horror, Arno takes it, of course he does, in his eyes she’s his mother, and the angel begins picking her way up the blasted stairs, and Bagger knows she’s leading the kid to his demise, one of rock or paper or scissors, whether it comes right now or later with the demise of the world, it’s like the angel told Bagger, he’s got no appreciation of time,

and what he does appreciate, however, is the nearsightedness of his choice, the kid’s saved, sure, but future conflicts will seize Arno, and Arno’s children, and Arno’s children’s children, whole family trees of corpses to be fed into the woodchipper that outputs only fury, Bagger was a buffoon to break his promise, and he looks away, unable to watch Arno head into a world unfit for any child,

and that’s when Bagger’s eye falls upon Reis’s pistol, packed under clay and wood, and he leans over, works it free, nearly laughing now, desperately inspired,

and he holds the muzzle two inches from his temple,

and shouts, “Hey! Listen to me!,” and Arno turns, and the angel as well, and a bursting delight effervesces through Bagger’s blood, maybe he can throw a loaded die one last time, he thinks of Gavrilo Princip, the nutty Serb who started the war by shooting Archduke Ferdinand, and only because the Archduke’s driver took a wrong turn, a minor goof that flipped the switch on a war machine that seemed impossible back in 1914, when every nation’s king was married to another king’s cousin, and how Princip tried to shoot himself seconds later but failed, only Bagger will not fail,

and he shouts to the angel, “You said I couldn’t take another human’s life! You didn’t say I couldn’t take my own! I’ll give it to you! Let me give you my life! To balance the scales! To make up for Reis! To make up for everything! For everybody!,” and the angel cocks her head like an animal puzzling over human industry,

and she asks, “You would do this?,” and Bagger nods, spattering flecks of bloody sweat and gasping laughter through the hole in his cheek, certain that his father laughed at the end, too, it’s all so perfect, this damaged dugout is Bagger’s Lusitania, a ship with which he will happily go down, just listen to the men dying overhead, what’s one man more, and his forefinger twitches against the cold steel trigger,

and the angel’s eyes fog as she says, “You do not get to change the deal,” and Bagger waves his free hand, flopping two obliterated fingers, and laughs, “I always change the deal! Changing deals is what I do! You said our promise was a wager! I know better than anyone you can always increase a wager! Always up the ante!,”

and though the angel looks unconvinced, it’s Arno, the dumb kid, who shoves the moment over the cliff, his perplexed features sharpen as he recalls Bagger’s promise and clocks this violation, and the kid yelps, “Bagger, don’t!” and rips his hand from the angel’s, bolting back across the dugout landslide,

and, honestly, it’s an uplifting thing to see at the end, brother protecting brother, but older brothers are wiser than their rascally youngers, so Bagger smiles, lips splitting, gums bloody, he hopes the kid can tell he means it, he fucking loves the little bastard, and realizing there’s no better thought to exit on, Bagger pulls the trigger, the report cracks, and he hopes the bullet has kick enough to exit the other side of his skull and drive to the center of the world, lodge into a critical cog, and break the engine, for the sentence has gone on for too long, it’s past time for a period to end it,

XLIV

and he’s heard of point-blank shots going awry, suicide bullets that ricochet off a condyle of bone, or frolic with physics by shearing around the skull, or destroy a part of the brain that turns you into a vegetable but doesn’t let you be topped off, gone west, bumped, clicked it, pushing daisies, a new landowner, napooed, just plain dead, and Bagger thinks this is what happened, for he feels no pain at all, he’s neither sailing through the sky nor back in the celestial church, he remains grounded in the destroyed dugout, the photoplay finished and spinning on its reel,

and it’s through purls of gunsmoke that his eye finds Arno standing over him with his hands over his ears, probably screaming but Bagger’s not sure, the gunshot gonged his eardrums, all he hears are subaquatic rumbles, what Lusitania passengers must have heard as they all went down, but there’s the peppery charcoal of a spent cartridge and the warmth of the Colt, confirmation the gun fired, yet still there’s no pain,

and the angel strolls past Arno, right up to Bagger, who follows her only with his eyes, afraid if he moves an inch, he’ll feel the nose or jaw he just shot off, but when the angel stands before him, she shows no alarm, only the half-affectionate exasperation Bagger has seen on her before, What am I going to do with you?,

and she reaches for his face with index and thumb shaped to pinch, and Bagger grimaces, she’s going to snap off a twig of splintered bone or pick a blob of brain from his cheek, but she frowns in a silent request that he stop being a baby, so he clenches his teeth and carefully, carefully rotates his head toward the smoking gun,

and the bullet floats there, a hair’s breadth from his eyeball,

and there’s a heart skip, of course, rarely does a man get to see his death so close, the lead tip, the copper jacket, the whole bullet warped by the Colt’s propulsion, just suspended there, an aneurysm in caesura, though Bagger shouldn’t be surprised, it’s the second time the angelic boxing ref has halted the bloodshed,

and this time, it’s only the bullet she’s stopped, war itself shakes and squeals the same as ever, the angel has rescued Bagger, Bagger specifically, in what he assumes is reciprocation for the times he rescued her, until he sees the exquisite care with which she plucks the bullet from the air and cradles it in her palm, as if it’s the bullet, not him, that is precious, she beholds it like Solly Madonna beheld baby Jesus, eyes beatific, lips pursed,

and she peeks at Bagger, and though he’s never sired a child, not to his knowledge anyhow, he knows what he’s feeling is what any father feels when the mother, holding her baby for the first time, locks eyes with him over the child’s head, that boil of pride and fear, but also melancholy, it’s a farewell of sorts when a father meets the child who, as of this moment, will begin to replace him,

and the angel’s beauty intensifies, no, exacerbates, it’s nearly painful, she’s moonbows, arctic auroras, desert roses, her satisfaction brighter than any interior glow, and Bagger’s moved when she takes a moment to palm his cheek, his skin of rash and scab against her skin of silk, and gives him a small, sweet, earnest smile, and says, “Always full of surprises,”

and Bagger can’t tell if she’s referring to him or humans in general, it seems vital to know even though he never will, for her right hand slips off his cheek and joins her left hand in cradling the bullet, and too late does Bagger realize her jeweled gaze had a warmth, a warmth now gone forever, somehow he knows he’ll never feel it again,

and the angel turns, eyes to the bullet, and walks silently on tidy bare feet around the hill of landslipped ceiling, past the bewildered Arno, and up the ash-swirled stairs, her toes finding all the dregs of board available to climb,

and Bagger’s filled with loss, but also the manic need to understand the loss, his only chance to properly grieve, so he stands, every muscle spasming from the contraction his body made when he pulled the suicide trigger, and staggers forward, and though his ears remain too stunned to hear what Arno’s saying, he gathers the kid under his arm and drags him along as fast as their tumbling feet can go,

and it takes too long to scale the shattered jaw of the dugout steps, exploding shells cleave mud, break apart handholds, cause avalanches of soil, but eventually he and Arno make it, and enter into the flames of earthbound hell, the gasp and sick and song and fury, the miasma of pooled blood, the torridity of molten metal, and peer through the fiery black of scramble and surrender, and there, dead ahead, striding fearlessly across duckboards laid over trenches, goes the lightning bug of the angel, straight into battle,

and they run after her, no strategy to their charge, the kind of full-bore rush that built the war, brick by cadaver brick, racing over trench tops filled with gray tides of human meat, bayonet blades spearing skyward, spumes of hot blood frothing Bagger’s exposed skin, and with a giant leap they hurdle the frontline trench and spin their oaf bodies away from barbed-wired bulwarks, and end up in mud, and dead men, and the sludgy solutions of both,