Page 9 of Angel Down

and there’s no battle cry this time, no Reis, no Greisz, no Motta, Chester, no Hollis, no Aquila, no P Company over!, no Butcher Birds advance!, no Bash the Boche!, no Spite the kaiser!, no lies of elation, of glory, of grandeur, of nobility, of triumph, of pageantry, of exaltation, of magnificence, of sublimity, of dignity, of honor, of prestige, of extolment, of idolization, of worship, of rapture, of radiance, of ascendence, of immortality, which leaves only the lie Bishop Bagger might have offered his son if the old man could have broken free of his mind’s prison, the lie of forgiveness,

and the lie goes like this, Bagger tells himself, you deal this one card honestly, my boy, this one single card cleanly off the top of the deck, and maybe all the bad deals of the past will be pardoned,

XIII

and if you imagine it from Arno’s perspective, it’s quite the fright, first the kid’s elbow crawling, a misnomer, you’d have to be an idiot to use your elbows, that’d put your noggin into prime exploding range, more like he’s dragging himself shriekward with his hands, one of which has to carry along his no-good rifle, he’s in and out of rain-swamped craters, holding his breath for the underwater slither, chin and neck rawed by the detritus of shells or casings or belt buckles from annihilated men, he’s alone, so alone, a bug on a leaf, his death will be insignificant, but that don’t mean it won’t hurt, and so when he feels a bear-trap grip his ankle, he’s gobsmacked to find not gristled flesh back there but Bagger’s hand,

and that’s pretty much how it goes except with a lot more screaming and kicking, Bagger has to hiss for the little fucker to shut up, and even after Arno does, he looks uncertain whether Bagger is real, and as much as Bagger hates to further degrade his noninvolvement, he can’t help but splash a swaggery Tarzan grin onto his face, he’s not going to make a habit of this hero business, but it does feel pretty fine,

and he points at what looks like a long pale string of lower intestine but is really the white tape the engineer regiment laid out this morning to mark the charge boundaries, as if war followed tennis-court etiquette, and though most of the tape has been tramped beneath mud, enough remains to indicate the kid has crawled off course, while the shriek sounds to Bagger like it’s resounding straight down the engineered lane,

and so they go that direction, mud-slicked torsos reading a belly Braille that details four years of voracious futility, wagon wheel spokes, snapped trench knives, spent magazines, detonator plungers, incinerated flare pistols, scabbards bent to right angles, an airplane altimeter if you can believe that shit, soggy piles of puttees that might have unraveled from severed legs, and all Bagger and Arno can do is keep crawling, keep reading, and hope the story ends up like the other books they finished, the good guys easily definable and victorious,

and the shriek, good lord, the shriek pervades everything, so shrill it rings harmonies from the dead, altos of discarded guns, sopranos of spent stick grenades, booming basses of riddled canteens, so blistering a dissonance that Bagger’s relieved when he has to crocodile through a marshy crater, it’s quieter in water, even with Arno gagging beside him,

and the sky is slashed with yellow howitzer shot revealing body parts in the stew through which they squirm, two severed arms holding hands, boots still potted with feet, a set of shoulders that dangles a curtain of hairy chest, nothing alive here but opportunistic animals, a stoat dragging away a complete digestive system, a blackbird perched atop an opened head to peck at the brains,

and Arno freezes, and Bagger’s almost glad, and if the kid wasn’t here to rouse, Bagger’s not sure he’d ever move again, so he takes Arno by the sodden wool and hefts him up the crater incline, never mind that half a horse, that field telephone box filled with blood, that pair of lips still pursed over a cigarette, “Élan,” Bagger says, Reis’s word but he’s stealing it, “Élan” on the inhale, “Élan” on the exhale, and the kid, a sign of life, echoes feebly, “Élan,”

and at the top, Bagger rests his face in the crook of his arm, but Arno slaps him and gasps, “Light, Bagger, look at the light,” and Bagger thinks, well, shit, Jerry fired a Big Bertha, the monster gun capable of lobbing two thousand pounds from six miles away, shells that only explode after embedding fifteen yards into the earth, a fairy tale to Bagger until he saw it happen a week ago, the forest floor leaping a hundred feet into the air, whole groves of trees airborne, if you gotta die out here, at least the Big Bertha does it fast,

and Bagger pulls a Lot’s wife and looks up to behold his slayer, but instead finds a different kind of light fifty yards away, not the vaporous fireball of a plunging shell but a tower as newfangled as the Woolworth Building, except made of nothing but blinding white light, six feet in diameter, endless in height, an elevator between No Man’s Land’s world of slime and the fuliginous clouds,

and the kid cries, “Is it a plane?,” and Bagger understands, it could be a spotlight from above, an ace trying to light their way, but no Curtiss can hold so tight a pattern, certainly no Nieuport, and although the RAF is capable of anything, the Brits are nowhere near Bois de Fays, which leaves the possibility of a German zeppelin, except zeppelins are fucking balloons, and no balloon could have survived the day’s firefight,

and the light scintillates like fire behind a waterfall, a depth Bagger feels more than sees, like when he was on the ship to Europe and feeling the Atlantic’s depth by the flex of its topmost wave, and all around the lucid beam is an ash-and-soot darkness that reminds Bagger of pubic hair around a cock, a vulgar but adroit comparison, the way the light imbues the earth feels downright lustful,

and Bagger wants to cover the kid’s virgin eyes from so intimate a scene, but Arno doesn’t look abashed, he looks like he’s being reunited with the parent he never had, there’s a grin cutting through the kid’s grimace, and though he’s got both hands over his ears to buffer the metal-on-metal shriek, he’s hollering over it, too, “Bagger, Bagger, it’s her!,”

and of all the things the kid could have said, Look, Bagger, it’s a giraffe! or Hey, Bagger, is that Fatty Arbuckle?, this single word, her, is the most jarring, the Western Front is Earth’s malest place, an effluvium of burps and piss, jeers and jokes, strength and sacrifice, where any woman, from Red Cross nurses polka-dotted in blood, to the so-called war godmothers and their care packages, all the way to Marie-Louise and her sulky pout, exists so far to the fringes they feel like fading dreams,

and the kid’s gotta be crazy, except he isn’t, right there at the foot of the light shaft, snarled in concertina wire in a pose both pained and graceful, is a woman, there’s no mistaking the copper sheet of hair, the delicate fingers splayed as if in want of a handhold, the gather of red dress over her hips, the swathe of blue cape off her slender shoulders, the cream skin, a living American flag in tortured repose,

and Bagger believed himself devoid of chivalry until this injection of gasoline into his heart, and when Arno says, “We gotta save her,” Bagger nods, it’s true, they do, maybe this is what gallantry feels like,

and Bagger follows the kid’s order with an obedience he’s given no one else in the army, he grapples through mud, hurls aside forsaken gear, shuts down the lobes of his brain that short each time his hands touch cold, slippery body parts, while rainbows of death arc overhead and the put-put-put of machine guns throbs Bagger’s chest like he’s sprouted several new hearts,

and all of them seize in the unexplainable fear that this woman might perish, Bagger’s never felt the need to save anyone, with the exception of his father the night before the old man left for the Lusitania,

and just as Bagger thinks it, barbed wire stabs inside his nostril, he sputters and draws back so fast the barb exits through the cartilage, a sting, a run of blood, Bagger slitted like the nostrils of the First Army’s suffocating pack mules, that’s how he feels, animalistic, here only to serve, to burro this woman out of here no matter how finely he gets minced,

XIV

and she’s right there, Bagger could touch her if not for the wire sickles between them, the forest shakes so wildly from mortar-shell punches that the whole nest of spikes bounces like bedsprings, the pain must be indescribable, that’s why she shrieks, it’s this woman who’s been the shrieker all along, and Bagger’s guts flop, she lay here in agony while he and the boys sat around playing Rochambeau,

and then the shrieker writhes, a sinuous ripple from upturned face to pointed toe, and the beam of light over her ripples, too, and Bagger’s struck stupid, the beam isn’t pouring down onto the woman, it’s coming from the woman, specifically her exposed skin, the dewy face, the extended arms, the bared ankles and naked feet, every inch cascading like Veck’s flamethrower unleashed,

and she ought to be a latticework of charred bone, but only soft perspiration beads her closed and quivering eyelids, an expression that mixes pain and purpose, the look Bagger imagines on women giving birth,

and Arno arrives next to him with wire clippers in hand, a tool that comes with implications, you don’t euthanize someone with wire clippers, which means Arno agrees this woman isn’t to be taken care of in the way Reis suggested but rather taken care of, rescued at all costs, and the begrudging warmth Bagger feels for the kid leaps to a furnace burn,

and Arno rises to a kneel, a height that puts him in view of German sharpshooters, and though Bagger wants to yank the kid back down, he, too, takes to his kneecaps and pretends he’s protected by this thicket of wooden posts and fist-sized knots of barbed wire so tortured Bagger sees faces in them the way he does clouds, except all these faces do is shriek, shriek, shriek,

and Bagger gets out his M1910 cutters, too, and he and Arno get working, finicky snip-snip-snips, like trimming a dragon’s hair with tweezers, it’s taking too long, killing her would have been easier, and so when a sugar maple a hundred yards to the left explodes into tangerine fire, a sure sign Jerry sees them, Bagger drops his wire cutters and uses his rifle bayonet to fight down the wire’s rusty hedge no matter how many punctures he takes,

and he threshes loops of wire low, then stomps them lower and thicker, which allows Arno to start cutting two, three, four layers at a time, and suddenly Bagger’s got fingers closed over the woman’s wrist, though he can barely feel it, it’s like dipping his hand into a pitcher of warm milk,

and he thinks how the blue cape must be snared by hundreds of barbs, which brings to mind the 43rd’s nickname, the Butcher Birds, an embarrassment compared to the Red Arrows, the Buckeyes, the Cyclones, divisions that came to their nicknames honestly, instead of having a peacock like Major General Reis force it upon them because he liked the sound of it, butcher bird being a colloquialism for shrike, a bird that impales insects, vole, lizards, mice, and other birds on twigs, thorns, and yes, barbed wire, a means of keeping its kill fresh till the shrike wishes to eat it, a sadistic thing to call your division, if you asked Bagger,