Chapter IX
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,