Chapter III
and as Bagger’s strides are man-sized, Arno has to rabbit his pace to keep at Bagger’s heels, and the kid asks, ignorant as ever of being a pest, “You think Korak’s going to kill Baynes?
,” and Bagger replies, “Nah. Baynes is going to chop up Korak and make stew out of him,” which sets off loon laughter from the kid, who goes about listing all the reasons Korak the Killer is too powerful and crafty to be taken down by the silver-spoon likes of Morison Baynes,
and Arno prattles on, “You think Korak is going to rescue Meriem again?,” to which Bagger snipes, “If I hadn’t lost my sewing kit, I’d sew your lips shut,” but the kid’s happy chatter proceeds unbothered, characteristic of their daily palaver, in which the kid asks a thousand dunderhead questions about whatever they’re reading and Bagger doles out the most upsetting answers possible,
and you get one guess which soldier Arno chose to confess his shame of illiteracy, fuck the luck, and before long the kid was begging Bagger to read him The Prisoner of Zenda, and though Bagger initially told the kid to scram, war is a slog even when you’re not warring, and at last came the day Bagger was too pooped to resist the kid’s begging and ripped the book from Arno’s hand and began reading aloud with plans to insert passages of sickening violence and shocking pornography, only to find himself engaged by the plot,
and it’s bar none the biggest mistake Bagger’s made in the Army, and worse still, he keeps making it, King Solomon’s Mines, The Count of Monte Cristo, Treasure Island, and now The Son of Tarzan, a tale in which, so far anyway, Tarzan barely appears, the stage ceded to the ape-man’s civilized son, who follows his daddy’s footsteps to become Korak the Killer, an idiotic coincidence, but diverting enough as Bagger, of course, inserts explicit content, Tarzan revised to be a randy sodomite and Lady Greystoke a nudist cannibal, to which Arno only nods along, suggesting there’s no atrocity Bagger can concoct the Great War hasn’t reduced to believability,
and with Arno still at it, “Big Bwana is really Tarzan, right, Bagger? Bagger, you can tell me!,” they pass a side of human ribs still flexing, powered by the heart, always the last organ to let go, and because there’s no time to direct Arno away from it, Bagger stomps the heart before the kid can notice it, and the heart feels like his own,
and here come several aching somnambulists through the fog, HQ staff dragging wagons so heavy with carnage they need to be yoked through the mud like sleds, arms and legs and scalps and entrails swinging from the sides, so Bagger distracts the kid, yanking him close, shouting, “Mind that hole!,” to which Arno cries, “Whoa! Close one!,” except there is no hole, and Bagger wonders if Arno knows it and they’re both just playing the role the other needs,
and Bagger drops into the shallowest stretch of trench he can find, knees like hamburger, and when Arno crouches like he wants help, Bagger pretends not to notice, he’s not the kid’s daddy, and he walks off and hears Arno splat down in the mud, so what, they’re all muddy, though he wishes it was the kid’s landing that made the trench quiver instead of the war machines over the next slope, either that or a hundred thousand of Ludendorff’s Huns exiting the fortified pillboxes of the Hindenburg Line, a choppy sea of pointed helmets heaving south,
and it could also be the shriek, palpitating everything,
and whatever it is, it’s bothering the Butcher Birds of the 43rd, they low like Iowa cows needing milking, mud slurping at their hooves, and Arno scurries ahead to lead Bagger through a U-shaped elbow, a turn that reveals the remains of Company P, there’s Lieutenant Jules Aquila blurting inspirational falderal and slapping the chests of men dead on their feet, there’s Sergeant Moss DiStefano passing a salt vial beneath the noses of those who need it,
and it’s all because P Company, too, is finally on the move, forming a column to march, which means Bagger needs to fall in, but before he can, Arno swerves left, away from the line of forty-some drooping men and past Father Muensterman, who pukes into his own carefully cupped hands as if he intends to pass off the vomitus as both body and blood,
and they bank into the lopsided amphitheater of a shell crater, a striated bowl of clay scalloped as if from a giant’s closing fist, painted by vertical stripes of blood that rise up the sides of the bowl, a pattern accentuated by a mash of tissue right where a clock should hang, something yuletide about it, the color of fruitcake, the shape a wreath, and only the ornaments of a dozen teeth tell Bagger it used to be a human head,
and the next thing he notices are three men, not dead in the mud but standing in formation with Springfield rifles at their sides and spines at high attention, and though Bagger has but seconds to look, he identifies them as the three most disposable men of Company P, a label that makes him curl his lip with detestation and superiority before he gets to the demoralizing punch line, that it isn’t the three most disposable gathered here but the five,