Chapter XX
XX
and because fairies don’t recognize straight lines, those feeble attempts to tame a planet reliant on disorder to tender magic, the men’s trek through Bois de Fays is a vine of arboreal improvisation, hills too treacherous, underbrush too thick, rosettes of thorns to be avoided, sharp ravines not worth fording, and areas razed so treeless they are avoided by soldiers as rabbits avoid an open dell, and in such black hash, Bagger can’t sustain a consistent direction, only platoon leaders are issued compasses,
and sallies from the timber are unavoidable, first they end up in a ghost village, each obliterated building honored by a chimney headstone, dead dogs everywhere, fetid with the stench of cordite and rot, and then they end up back in fungal trenches, one so bygone it’s staffed by Huns chewed to skeletons by rats and maggots, cobwebbed figureheads of futility pointing future generations down the same useless paths,
and it’s only the combat jolts to the west that keep Bagger’s squad from digging foxholes, any Jerry who witnessed the angel’s radiance is unlikely to halt in pursuit of it, so onward they march, between reels of brand-new barbed wire, around a spiral staircase to nowhere, past an observation post disguised as a haggard sycamore,
and though all marches aggravate, this one’s especially shit, for Bagger’s the de facto leader now, how the fucking fuck did that fucking happen, for the first time in his life he’s dying for an authority figure, his goddamn kingdom for an asshole to shout, do it this way, do it faster, do it better, Bagger can’t get the men to form a simple skirmish line to find the best avenue of advance, of course he can’t, he won’t let whoever has the angel out of his sight,
and because the angel hasn’t proven she has the ability, or maybe the desire, to walk, the men keep carrying her, and each fellow goes about it different, Popkin’s drooly, lascivious stare, Veck hulking his arms like he’s protecting a baby, Arno mooning like he’d rather the angel carried him, while Goodspeed, by Bagger’s recollection, had carried the angel like she was a slot machine that would never quit paying out, all of which makes Bagger wonder how he holds the angel, all he’s certain of is that he knows her and she’s inspiring something inside him,
and when a man isn’t carrying the angel, his anxiety extrudes like pus, Popkin so desperate for tobacco he takes a dead maple leaf, strips it, tucks the shreds into his lip, and ptooeys unsatisfactory green spit before perpetuating the cycle, wood ferns, pine needles, club-moss, finally birch twigs, and Bagger is cursed to glance at Popkin right when the lummox spits out the woody bolus, along with two of his eroded teeth,
and Arno, in his angst, picks lice like it’s his first day in France, they all have lice, bred in every seam of every item of clothing, little fuckers that suck blood all day, all night, a microscopic war raging beneath the bigger one, and Arno slaps, and pinches, and runs matches over seams to hear the buggers pop, until Bagger smacks the back of the kid’s head to remind him he’s only making it worse,
and Bagger’s compulsion is worse, he’s got it in his head that every dead Jerry they pass might be faking it, there’s countless stories of dirty Fritzes doing just that, so Bagger’s taken it on himself to stab each corpse, and because he and Arno lost their bayonets in the trench collapse, he scrounges up an old pitchfork and pitchforks every carcass he sees, doughboys included, who can say they aren’t Jerrys in disguise, and soon the squishing stab is the beat of his struggling heart,
and it’s Veck whose reaction to the angel is the most disquieting, only a few miles into the march Bagger noticed Veck studying an old bay nag pulled apart by shrapnel, nothing unusual there, last Bagger heard, the going estimate was seven million horses killed in the war, a number that makes him believe that, should the war birth ghosts, they will be of the nickering, neighing sort,
and Veck shooed flies and picked up the horse’s severed head, then reached into the open neck and began extracting its contents, the pale trachea, the brainstem like a malformed fetus, the huge red salmon of a tongue, handfuls of purple muscle and gray cartilage, all the while Veck, suppressing a smile like he was preparing a gift,
and when it was Veck’s turn to carry the angel, he completed his work by avulsing the horse’s eyeballs and putting its head over his own head, over his actual fucking head like a mask, the bay’s ears flapping with Veck’s chuckles, and though Bagger was anxious handing the angel to a man in a horse head, Veck exuded such uncommon frivolity that Bagger laid her in his arms and watched him wobble his horse head at her, making neighs, shoulders shaking with laughter, to which the angel returned her cryptic smile,
and so the strange band footslogs, drained and starved, across a pitted, plundered country, one man, one beast, one boy, one centaur, and one angel, pitchforking corpses, chewing up the world, drinking only from puddles with frogs, actual amphibial frogs, not Frenchmen, because frogs don’t wallow in poison water, unless they, too, have death wishes, and only occasionally do these puddles bob with kerosene globules, which taste bad but make Bagger feel like a machine, keep rolling along, keep rolling,
and it’s in these hours and through these travails that the haloed woman entrenches her sorcery of compassion, which solidifies the men’s devotion to making her belong to them, no, to him, only him, like when Popkin says he’d smother his mother for a real smoke and there, a minute later, centered on a chunk of sandstone right in their path, lays a pack of Lucky Strikes, spiffy in cellophane,
and when Arno gets a nail through his tattered boot sole and gasps and goes pale as Bagger pulls it out, two inches of rusty iron slicked with blood, and Arno hugs the angel’s leg as Bagger removes the boot to assess the wound, only to find there is no wound at all, not even a scratch, the blood source whisked away on angel feathers,
and when Veck comes across dead kittens, the whole litter mashed by a wartime wheel, all that feeble sweetness mangled, eggy little organs expelled from each yowling mouth, it’s too much for Veck to take and he dabs at the horse head’s eye holes like they are the eyes that are crying, until one of the kittens, dead thirty seconds before, Bagger swears it, wobbles up on foal legs, shakes itself of filth and gore, and scampers away,
and despite these maybe-miracles performed on each man’s behalf, never does the angel alter in comportment, except once, five hours into their hegira, when Popkin hurls a rock at a field mouse and hits it, and woofs with victory, and dangles the mouse by its tail over his mouth, impatient for its demise so he can chew it whole, and Bagger glances down to find big tears rolling down the angel’s cheeks, so heartbroken at the pest’s murder that Bagger catches his breath, no, he’s not a machine after all,