Chapter XII
XII
and if forced to choose, Cyril Bagger would say the ugliest minutes of his life are the five it takes Lewis Arno to prepare for his solo mission to dispatch the shrieker, doughboy packs weigh seventy pounds and the kid weighs probably ninety, so he disencumbers himself of everything he won’t need, canteen, magazine belt, Sbr gas mask, shelter canvas, entrenching tool, soap dish, mess kit, sewing kit, shaving kit, which looks brand-new because the fucking kid’s too fucking young to fucking shave, and, of course, The Son of Tarzan, a sight that hurts Bagger more than any bullet,
and because life is cruel, and because Bagger deserves it, the kid looks back at him one last time, and there’s so much Bagger could say, words of encouragement, words of regret, but Uncle Sam is livid and Bagger can think of nothing but the shriek, so he flaps an impatient hand and snaps, “What? Get going already,”
and Arno obeys, and Bois de Fays rumbles as it digests him,
and Bagger stares at the empty ladder, the cowlick of grassy mud where Arno’s boot pushed off looks like a scalp, and Bagger has the urge to slip it into his pack, a memento truer than anything Goodspeed sells, while behind him, the others stir,
and it goes, “Don’t look at me like that.
What did I do?,” and “Shut your face. Or I’ll shut it,” and “I’ve been the one.
Plenty of times I’ve been the one,” and “The one what, darkie? To get their face rearranged?,” and “To jump off like that. No one cares if I live or die,” and “So he’s a kid!
So what! We’re all kids! We all have to take our turns!
,” and “Bury me. Just bury me here,” and “Darkie. I’m warning you,”
and a new voice, saying, Save me,
and the words are so clear, Bagger assumes they come from a fellow Butcher Bird, a loiterer who played dead in No Man’s Land until it was safe to drag himself back to the line, but it’s not, the voice, Save me, comes from inside Bagger, the same way it did back when it first called to him, Bagger, which Bagger had thought had been Arno, but clearly he’d been wrong,
and Bagger searches himself, Save me, it’s nowhere he can pinpoint, Save me, if it was only in his head he’d ascribe it to the mortar blast, Save me, if it was only in his heart he’d reject it as maudlin bunk, Save me, but it comes from the center of who he is, like his every molecule has been halved with a shrieking mouth, Save me,
and Bagger’s going to fall, suddenly fall, so he hooks an elbow through a ladder rung, which swings him so he’s facing the duckboard shelf of Arno’s belongings, and there’s The Son of Tarzan, abandoned, unfinished, once a book, now a headstone, leaving Bagger to make the graveside conclusion that the voice is a ghost, or not-quite a ghost, a pre-ghost, Arno begging Bagger to be the man Uncle Sam wants him to be,
and though Bagger never reached The Son of Tarzan’s end, come on, there’s no doubting that Tarzan, Prince Greystoke, Lord of the Apes, will show up in time to save his son, Jack Clayton, aka Korak the Killer, the novel isn’t a novel at all, it’s a chapter-and-verse psalmbook that has been training Bagger better than any Camp Winn drill sergeant, to be Tarzan, finally Tarzan,
and so he does it, just goddamn does it, starts stripping himself of the same impedimenta Arno did, but with none of the bedtime fastidiousness, off comes the shovel, the mess kit, all of it except the gas mask, each piece hurled like a punch, the lighter items lodging into sticky clay, the heavier items splooshing into the ratty moat, and Bagger pauses only once to open the red leather Bible and inhale its strength before cramming it back into his pack and putting that pack on his back, he’ll bring the Bible and the Bible alone,
and Popkin sputters, “The fuck. Where you going? Where’s that fucker going?
” and Goodspeed cries, “Stay down, you stupid asshole!” and Veck, in a multioctave splinter, begs, “Bagger, don’t,” but none of them give a shit, they only know that, if Bagger goes over the top, the cowardice they have hidden away will break through the dam and engulf them,
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,