Page 7 of Angel Down

and Popkin’s eyes open slowly thanks to the weight of mud and the intoxicating notion that he, at long last, might be the driver of his own sexual future, and there’s a dull bison glow to his eyes that unsettles Bagger, makes him worry that, if Popkin does get out of the war alive, Effie Inez Barbeau will need better protection than a well-manicured slapping hand,

and Popkin’s eyes roll toward the trench top, and Bagger holds his breath, and Popkin leans away, the clay slurping as it lets him go, he’s picturing No Man’s Land, how he can keep his big body low, how he might bludgeon the shrieker to death so as not to tip off Jerry sharpshooters, deep thoughts for a lummox, but this is how good cons work, your mark’s imagination finishes the con for you,

and Popkin takes a single step, the first station of the cross en route to the trench ladder, the first stage of keeping the rest of them safe and sound, when the whole effort is ruined by the kid, the goddamn kid, bouncing up, hands bolted to ears, screaming,

IX

and it’s enough like the shriek for Bagger to believe the shriek is a new social disease, the kid’s infected, the rest of them soon to be infected, too, and when Reis sends a detail back to get them, they’ll find five men with mouths agape like baby birds, unable to eat or drink or talk, only shriek, and they will be taken to Paris, still shrieking, installed in a sanitarium, still shrieking, last rites performed by a priest, still shrieking, until Saint Peter welcomes them to heaven with one last joke, opening his mouth and shrieking,

and Arno claws red gems of blood from his temples and shouts, “It’s killing me! It’s killing me!,” and the men stare, and Arno whimpers, “Isn’t it killing you?,” so Bagger holds up a hand, “Kid. Hey, kid. It’s okay. Things are going to be,” but the kid interrupts, “Nothing’s going to be okay! We’re just sitting here! We have to do something!,”

and, Jesus, this is bad, Bagger looks for something to help and sees the stiff yellow clay of the trench’s substrata, and digs out two plugs, and holds them so Arno can see before he pushes the blobs into either of the kid’s ears, which recalls the sensation of the dismembered ear stuck to Bagger’s face, no good deed goes unchased by bad memories,

and Arno goes quiet to gauge whether the plugs help as a black wind teases the overgrown hair fringing his helmet, and there’s motion, and Bagger looks, and Veck’s screwing a finger into his own ear, and Goodspeed’s rubbing his ears, too, it’s happening, the shriek’s worming its way into their systems like typhoid, diarrhea, pneumonia, trench fever,

and Popkin stares at all of them, appalled, before he investigates his own ears, and Bagger’s ribs roast in fury, all the gains of his Effie Weffie gambit lost,

and Veck says, “Only one of us should go. But we gotta choose fair,” and Goodspeed snaps, “How do you do this fair? This is like the story of the sailors on the lifeboat, they’re starving to death so they randomly choose who’s gonna get their leg cut off so the others can eat it, and right after they cut it off, a rescue ship shows up, and now they gotta live with it, what they did, all of them have to live with it,”

and Bagger’s had enough, “Give me a break. The shit you do? You seem okay living with that,” and Goodspeed goes goggle-eyed, “The shit I do? That I do? You’re the only one of us without a scratch, not a ding-donged scratch!,” and Arno gasps, he knows Bagger’s going to do it, going to break Goodspeed’s skull, but Veck asks, “How’d they choose? On the lifeboat?” and though Goodspeed gestures wildly at the missed point, he replies, “I don’t know! Straws?,”

and Popkin, fully roused from Bagger’s spell, points a finger at him and says, “No straws. Not with him. He cheats,” and Bagger laughs, “How do you cheat at straws?,” even though he knows exactly how to cheat at straws, but Veck interjects, “Something you can’t fake. Flip a coin,” and Bagger’s gut tightens, rigging coin flips takes goddamn time, so he bluffs, “No one’s got any coins,” and it’s Arno who fucks him over again, gesturing at Goodspeed and saying, “He does,”

and it’s true the main thing stopping Goodspeed from being an effective No Man’s Land operator is the weight of money in his cartridge pockets, and Goodspeed folds more gum into his mouth, a defensive gesture, “You expect me to hand over cash? I give you a single franc and you’ll lose it, and then you’ll ask for another and another. Maybe you don’t like how I earned this money, but I’m not going to let you toss it in the mud, I won’t do it,”

and suddenly everyone has an opinion, Popkin says they should arm wrestle, Veck says they should guess numbers, Goodspeed says they should bid valuables, Arno says they should go in birthday order like they do in school, and Uncle Sam the shamefly goes wild, incensed by the festival of cowardice, every soldier living down to Reis’s opinion of them,

and that’s when Veck, over the woodpecker dill of distant machine guns and the porcelain clack of his jaws, says, “Rochambeau. You know it?” and Bagger’s breath catches the way honest folks’ breaths do at the sight of a glorious sunset,

and so much hot opportunity creeps from the collar of Bagger’s scratchy wool coat that he has to choke it back down, you can’t pull off a fleece if you betray excitement, but Ben Veck has handed Bagger a different kind of trench ladder, one he can climb right up out of this mess, so he holds his tongue and lets the others think they’re the ones choosing the game,

and Goodspeed shrugs to say of course he knows Rochambeau, he’s no lunkhead, and Popkin grins like his knowledge of the child’s game is a palpable point of pride, and Arno asks, “Is that the rock, paper, scissors game?,”

and Bagger nods, yes it is, and he cycles through masks of skepticism, reluctance, and capitulation, before shrugging his willingness to go along with the idea, and he observes the straighter postures, replanted boots, and exchanged glances of men confident they have attained the upper hand, the poor, confident fools, the word confidence is right there in the phrase confidence man,

X

and what they can’t know, can’t begin to imagine, is that Rochambeau was Bagger’s first grift, he took it up around the time parishioners began breaking from his father’s church, an overdue exodus, as Bishop Bagger had gone hardshell following the death of Bagger’s mother, who’d always been the one to focus on fellowship, he said, and without her, the Bishop got lost inside the cave system of his intellect, learned Hebrew even, and passed his uneasy revelations onto his flock, forgetting that flocks don’t want truth, truth is too much to take on a Sunday morn,

and the only invulnerables were the church’s children, too bored by preachments to care, and like millennia of brats before them, they turned to games, Rochambeau reigning supreme in pew play, pocket money changing hands in silent tournaments with no child achieving supremacy, and because Cyril Bagger, the Bishop’s son, had no pennies to wager, he spent months studying matches that seemed based on predicting what your foe would predict that you predict, a chain of prognostication no one could sustain for long,

and Bagger’s eureka was how a player’s reactions to success or failure gave away the store, and so one day, after mapping current trends inside a hymnal, Bagger entered a Rochambeau round-robin on a five-cent loan, which he paid back at triple interest, and proudly, for if Bishop Bagger was going to set fire to their lives for things as stupid as belief and ideals, young Cyril Bagger would need to start looking out for himself,

and that’s why Bagger, beneath the carbonation of gunfire and digestive upset of falling shells, humbly suggests to his fellow doughboys how to arrange their little contest, imagine if you will the pentagon shape of the Medal of Honor ribbon Reis has all but forfeited, and draw a line between each point, a five-pointed star, which is to say each player plays every other player once, zero points for a loss, one point for a win, math even the lummox can handle,

and Bagger sighs woefully, “At least this will be fast,” and the men, these chumps, these stools, these patsies, think they smell blood and draw close, there’s nothing like war to habituate you to physical proximity, forever are you jostled by wet, cold, filthy male bodies, the group lurches within inches of Bagger, hands out, fingers flexing to work out the bone chill,

and it begins without ceremony, Bagger and Veck, the former feigning nerves, the latter swallowing the bait, his lantern eyes irising to pinpricks, an intimidation tactic that is Bagger’s best clue, for while it’s true naive players lead with rock forty percent of the time, it was Veck who suggested Rochambeau, so he’s not naive, or doesn’t consider himself to be, but Bagger also knows paper is the classic first choice of players who fancy themselves clever,

and Veck raises his fist, the call to arms, and Bagger mirrors it, and together they drum the beat, one, eyes locked, two, breath held, three, Bagger lets insight flood through the seams of his skull, Veck’s too smart for paper, but no way does he go for scissors, on no planet does a man who’s been through what Veck has been through choose the fussy, fallible gadget of scissors when it’s been rocks thrown at him all his life,

and so it goes, Veck with rock, Bagger with paper, and weight leaps from Bagger’s back like a gargoyle, the hardest round now behind him, he can forget about Ben Veck forever, good riddance, quickly he logs Popkin’s result, paper, and Goodspeed’s result, scissors, and the absurdity wallops him, they are five soldiers, lost in forsaken craterlands, wedged into a collapsing crevasse, playing a child’s game beneath falling ash while earth convulses around them,

and it’s no more absurd than the opposite, world leaders in play costumes of braids, buckles, aiguillettes, pompons, tufts, cords, plates, and sashes, in playpens of castles and state rooms, pushing wooden blocks around a game map, a magic trick that shoves millions of men across actual battlefields, it’s really the same game, rock crushes kaiser, paper covers tsar, the scissors of the Entente snips Europe into new configurations,

and Popkin comes at Bagger like a hellbeast, purple-ringed eyes, nostrils pink and crusted, face a flaky agglomeration of red clay, brown blood, black mud, and orange tobacco, everything shellacked with sweat, the lummox gasping like a fish, a furor that makes it easy for Bagger to see the future, one, human nature is to replace a losing weapon, two, but Popkin will overthink it to the extent he can think at all, three,

and Popkin’s scissor is dispatched by Bagger’s rock, the lummox goes down fuming while Bagger eyes the other matches, Arno faring poorly, Goodspeed cruising until Veck beats him, prompting the Vulture to check over his shoulder in hopes he might accuse the Negro of cheating, but Bagger won’t have it, he reaches through the pyre of men’s arms, grabs Goodspeed, and pulls him over, Goodspeed wily enough to know he’s being cornswoggled, one, crying, “You can get into their heads, Bagger, but not mine, not mine!,” two, but it’s not Bagger getting into the Vulture’s head, it’s the shriek, three,