Page 4 of Angel Down

and Reis looks like he could pace like this all day, the far-off booms of enemies and allies as pleasant as garden-party chatter, while magenta clay oozes down the crater like liquified skin, until he says, “It is unlikely any of you have ever been nominated for anything. This, indeed, is how you came to stand before me,” and Reis points his walking stick rather casually at the sky and asks, “What do you see up there? Private Goodspeed,”

and despite Reis and his cane, despite the fresh welt on Bagger’s shoulder, Bagger creeps his eyes left to glance at Private Vincent Goodspeed, a man he knows only by reputation, but who exudes a squirmy, squirrelish air, as thin as birch bark stripped from a tree and topped with a tight bowl of blond hair and the steel-rimmed pince-nez of Woodrow Wilson, so tightly applied the spectacles dig grooves into the sides of his nose,

and what’s most suspicious about Goodspeed is his cleanliness, nobody’s clean out here, even your insides are filthy, you drool mustard gas, sneeze soiled gauze, cry soot, shit mud, but since the start of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, rumors have circulated of a private who goes over the top willingly enough only to stop ten yards out to clean his boots while fellow Butcher Birds meet Jerry’s iron hail, and it has to be Vincent Goodspeed, his olive drabs still olive, the brass buttons of his ammo patch bright as pennies,

and Goodspeed follows Reis’s walking stick to the continent of smoke shifting tectonically over No Man’s Land, darkening the frontline to the crisped paste of an uncleaned oven, and with a sniveling grin, Goodspeed replies, “Sir, that’s artillery smoke, sir, they say we’ve got over four hundred thousand artillerists now, the French 75s, the Schneider 155s, the long-range GPFs, they fire higher and farther than anything ever built, sir, and I’m proud to fight alongside them, sir, I’ll say that much,”

and it’s the breathy tumble of a schoolboy eager to cozy up to the king of the playground, and Bagger, a former king, aches to dole out the smacks such bootlickers deserve, he’d love to sock Goodspeed right in the kisser, for although Bagger prides himself on knowing as little about the U.S. Army as possible, he knows Goodspeed is spewing agitprop, American and French arty are Tinkertoys compared to Tommy’s guns, and even those pale alongside the Heine heavies, just look at the size of these shell craters, you dunderhead,

and Reis withholds a head-pat, in fact glares at the ass-kisser, then shares that glare with the others, saying, “And here is the problem with the lot of you. Devoid of vision, melancholic of spirit. Why have I been cursed with the First Army’s most sullen and fatalistic men? The injustice rankles. There is a limit to what a man can accomplish with such donkeys,” and he shakes his stick at the sky and demands, “What else do you espy? Private Popkin,”

and Bagger has to suffer the horsey lip-smack of Hugh Popkin drowsing to life, he’s always privately called Popkin the lummox, and oh, how he wishes it were the lummox’s blood splashed across his face, he’s hoped to find Popkin’s head in every new pile of doughboys to be buried, and only his head, as Bagger doesn’t think he could lift Popkin’s full corpse, he’s like one of the ape kings Korak duels in The Son of Tarzan, a tank physique that suggests greatness but only mirrors the impotent French landships Company P found junked along the south bank of Le Wassieu,

and, all right, okay, to be frank, they have history, Bagger and Popkin, the lummox having found a genuine diamond ring glinting up from between his planted feet at the latrine, the latrine Bagger himself had built, which meant, Bagger figured, that the ring was rightfully his, and so, casual as hell, he bet Popkin’s ring against everything Bagger owned that he could win five of five blackjack hands, the only game Popkin could follow, and of course Bagger won, the lummox was too slow to catch Bagger’s palmed aces,

and naturally Popkin had raged and tried to hit him, but he moved too slow, everything about Hugh Popkin is slow, he talks slow, he moves slow, look how long it takes him to follow Reis’s gesture, his huge mouth drawbridging down to reveal the worst case of trench mouth Bagger’s ever seen, gums hotdog red and swollen around gray teeth so guttered by ulcers they look as long as fingers,

and though Popkin is two men to Bagger’s left, the mouth’s gamy odor conquers all other stinks, and to top it off, the lummox forgets himself and lifts a hand from where it’s supposed to remain at his side, and scratches the scabs of a scalp nearly bald from chemical gas burn, the result of an ill wind that blew the battalion’s mustard gas back into their trench, Popkin’s got nothing left but sprigs of red hair, and he replies, “Sky? Sir? Blue sky? Sir?,”

and Bagger’s surprised, he’s hasn’t noticed any blue sky, but when he scours the battlefield canopy, he’ll be a monkey’s uncle, a blue spot soaks through the brown haze like the fishing holes Bagger once drilled through Lake Zabriskie, the only indication that it’s not, in fact, the middle of the night, it’s the middle of the goddamned afternoon,

and Reis drives his stick into the clay and cries, “Our ogre, the seer! He’s correct, boys. See for yourself. The inevitable clearing of smoke, the cyclic passage of black skies into clear. If a man of Private Popkin’s bovine intellect can see this truth, how, I ask you, can the muckety mucks nibbling their biscuits in Souilly be so ignorant? Of the give and take of battle. Of how the strategic retreat of a cunning leader can swiftly turn the tide,”

and these might not be hypotheticals, but the only man left to address them can’t be expected to do it, for a man like Lyon Reis doesn’t speak to a man like Ben Veck, Bagger identified Veck as the anvil of their life raft the moment he entered the crater, the surest sign their fivesome was doomed, for Negroes don’t fight alongside whites, yet here Veck is, and has been, for an astonishing seven days, a mystery that the men of the 172nd have chosen not to solve in favor of spitting both saliva and invectives at him,

and the only reason Bagger knows about Veck at all is that his arrival marked Lewis Arno’s sole success as a runner, and the kid, big for his britches, jabbered Bagger’s ear off about Veck’s history, how the all-Negro 368th Infantry Regiment failed to plug a hole at the west end of the line and had been exiled to Marbache, of little consequence until P Company’s last flamethrower operator was burned alive, and because Major General Reis was partial to flamethrowers, he requested, nay, demanded a prompt replacement, who arrived, led by Arno, in the form of Ben Veck,

and Veck arrived damaged, he’d seen battle to a degree the Butcher Birds haven’t, it’s clear from the way his eyes ping side to side, the wormy vein in his forehead, the contorted way he creeps, as if every step is certain to trigger a mine, and the truth is, Bagger doesn’t feel safe around a man that jittery strapped to combustible tanks,

and the tanks are part of the French P3, the latest iteration of the Schilt “liquid fire projector,” Bagger’s seen the two-tanker spit a ten-second arc of flaming oil and petrol a hundred yards, and here’s the kicker, P3s are supposed to have two-man crews, but Ben Veck wields the lance and turns the propellent valve both, impressive, Bagger supposes, but sooner or later something’s going to go wrong,

and though Bagger always understood Veck’s arrival as the writing on the wall for the 43rd, only now can he read the whole sentence, the division is being marched not only out of Bois de Fays but off the line entirely, and because General Pershing can’t afford to lose a whole division, that means the 43rd is being organized under a new leader,

and Bagger is caught in an eddy of giddy delight, Reis is being replaced, the Butcher Bird’s butcher is actually being replaced,

and that explains Reis’s fixation on gray skies turning blue, the unfairness of being retired before he can enact the counterstrike that will change everything, and Bagger suffocates a grin, Reis’s Medal of Honor gap will never be filled, hell, it’s an outrage the major general wasn’t yanked within a half-day of H-hour,

and while Reis peers through field glasses at the splotch of blue, Bagger looks around to share the victory with the others, but Arno’s attention is on a scampering lizard, and Goodspeed’s lips rustle through private calculations, and Popkin only stares back with lax hostility, no indication he’s caught on, leaving only Veck in rigid formation, or as rigid as a man can get when afflicted with perpetual tremble,

and they all adopt Veck’s posture when Reis slips his field glasses into their case and drops his dreamy gaze back to the singed planet and, following a stare as sharp as a billhook, says, “We have ten working eyes here. But do we have a single working ear?,” and he cocks his head to reference to the shriek, always the shriek, forever the shriek,

and Bagger’s ribs shiver and marrow stirs, the shrieker has not quit shrieking, not paused for air, not cried for water, which reminds Bagger of something his father said, that God built parents to feel stricken when babies cried so they didn’t simply eat their children, sensitivity to shrieks is what keeps the human race rolling, apocrypha Bagger now fully believes,

and Reis says, “I imagine hearing such a cry is quite the inconvenience. I imagine it disrupts the pleasant music in your heads. While you happy wretches have tended to your own concerns, other men, better men, have cleared Bois de Fays of the injured. Some of whom might even live. Do you have any inkling, I wonder, what it is to live? I think not. Your kind of survival, bought on the backs of the brave, is a walking death,”

and defiance pushes from Bagger’s belly, his only sin is duping rubes who ought to know better, it’s Reis who shoves men into a delicatessen slicer with no plan other than to slice them up thinner, but Reis muses onward, “No longer will I risk such men. We must,” and here Reis locks his jaw for strength, “we must be on the march. But the United States Army does not leave a man behind,”

and Bagger only appreciates the blood crusted over his face as a protective mask after it starts sliding apart with sweat, as Reis distills his order to its briefest essence, good military practice, it could even be mistaken for conviction if Bagger didn’t know better,

and Reis says, “Stay behind. Find the man. Help him,”

and Reis’s pained smile is as unexpected as the daub of blue in the brown-bruised sky, he looks transported, to where Bagger has no idea, but he longs to be there, too, where soft clouds roll over a clean, contented populace whose workaday niceties convey quiet affection, a vision that nearly moves Bagger to tears, except, no, that can’t be what waters his eyes, it must be one or another toxic fume,

and Reis extracts a handkerchief, tidies his gloves, and delivers his final words without the favor of eye contact, “Élan, boys. Élan,”

and because it’s famously the major general’s favorite word, Bagger despises it, it’s French for sprint, but Reis uses it to mean soldiering with unsnuffable zeal, an impossible ask amid the wet clay, the mashed rats, the human innards, but Reis snaps his handkerchief clean of mud and with the poise of a man choosing to stand erect before a firing squad, strides across the crater, grand-marshaling his walking stick, his missing Medal of Honor no longer a dragging weight,

and so Major General Reis exits the crater a better man than he entered, a fact Bagger knows will gnaw at him, and the second he’s gone, Bagger looks and finds panic slithering like chemical gas between Goodspeed, Popkin, Veck, and Arno, they know as well as Bagger the euphemisms endemic to the Army, and “help him” is one they don’t need translated, for in the eyes of the First Army, it’s always better for a dying doughboy to be finished off by a fellow American,