Chapter XXVI
XXVI
and then he explodes in sobs, not Bagger, not Popkin, but the overlooked third character, the old husband, and the soldiers break their face-off to watch the old man limp at the ambulance, mustache spread broadly above over the outlandish diameter of his sudden smile, mouse tail flapping from his teeth, blubbering in disbelief,
and the scamper is so unexpected that the old man makes it all the way to the ambulance, hands grasping inches from the angel’s hair, but at the end of the day, he’s only an old man, and Popkin redirects the rifle a few inches, nothing simpler, and shoots, no visible burst of light because the angel’s light absorbs it,
and the back of the husband’s skull explodes open like a broken egg, raindrops going red as they are impregnated with blood, while the cobblestone is splattered by brains like thrown mustard,
and though the report is loud, Bagger knows from experience that rain dampens gunshots too much for the farmer’s wife, wherever she is, to hear and come running and discover her husband, the last person she has left in the world, dead, and it’s a good thing she doesn’t, the man’s body tips backward and falls, the fractured skull splooshing as it shatters against stone,
and the whole thing takes three seconds, the first two of which Bagger spends immobile with shock, but that third second is all he needs, he darts forward, wraps his arms around Popkin’s shins, and pulls, the lummox’s boots sliding off the slick truck bed and into the air, which punts the angel to the ground as Popkin’s shoulder blades slam to the bumper, both his helmet and the Springfield knocked aside, clattering off cobblestone,
and Bagger drives the meatier man to the hard road, and how strange it is, he thinks, that he’s finally engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and it’s not even with a Hun Heinie Boche Fritz Jerry Squarehead,
and Popkin gobbles in startlement and pain, and Bagger wants that rifle, but he’s afraid he’ll die if he turns away, so he rolls to his knees and rabbit punches Popkin in the nose, blood bursting fast and short like a stomped tomato, Popkin blinking, stupid and childlike, but when Bagger unleashes a second fist, the lummox’s big hand springs up and catches it like a baseball in a mitt, then grips that fist like the head of a gearshift and flings Bagger all the way off,
and Bagger rolls and rolls, each cobblestone a clawing crustacean until he brakes himself and pushes to all fours only to be hurled back down, Popkin’s full weight on him, the smothering mode of combat he used against Ben Veck and Frenchy Franchouillard,
and Bagger’s nose is smashed flat to the road, lips split between teeth and stone, breath vacuumed out, he’s emptied and gasping, the lummox’s weight like grave soil, the big belly a bag of wet cement, the hard-on like a revolver jabbing Bagger’s kidney,
and there’s a fist to the back of Bagger’s head, he hears the skin of his forehead pop open against cobblestone, then a fist to his left side, ribs squealing, lungs beneath spasming from the blood loss of ruptured vessels, and then the goddamn animal bites him, right on the scalp like a bat, and over his own confounded blat Bagger hears Popkin rasp, “You don’t touch my girl, you don’t ever touch my Effie,”
and Bagger believes he could talk his way out of this friendly fire if his mouth wasn’t full of blood, he’ll be dead before he can get out a single word, so he reaches behind him with both hands, and though Popkin slaps away the first, the other finds a rogue puff of hair on Popkin’s head and yanks it,
and the lummox honks like a goose and tries to pull away, hard, riding Bagger like a sled before Bagger’s hand makes a tarantula hop from Popkin’s tuft of hair to the scalp itself,
and the chemical gas scar tissue feels like it’s always looked, a custard that has formed a delicate skin, seeded with scabs where Popkin scratched, and that’s what Bagger does, he scratches, all five fingers pierce the filmy skin and drag along the skull like the plows of Iowa cropfields,
and when the fingers submerge in hot quags of blood, Popkin goes rigid, orgasmic in agony, and his punches stop, and his breathing arrests as he tries to vocalize his pain, and Bagger digs a boot toe between two cobblestones and heaves, and the lummox tips like a paper boat and goes down with a thwack,
and Bagger army-crawls, hips wagging to dispel arms that don’t even try to stop him, and he crouches, all he can manage, his vision swirls and muddies, there’s blood in his eyes, it’s coming from the cold sting on the top of his head, Popkin’s bite, and Bagger staggers in an oval, wanting the Springfield but everything’s reeling, until Popkin finally unleashes a long, guttural groan,
and Popkin’s on all fours now, he’ll be lethal in seconds, so Bagger stumbles half-blind into the rain, hoping to find the rifle by blundering into it, though, hell, at this point he’d take the wife’s dead cat, and he does kick something dead, but it’s only the husband, his open mouth so full of rain only the floating tip of the mouse tail is visible, and if Bagger can see that, his vision must be sharpening, he plants his feet, yes, the Springfield’s under the ambulance,
and it’s too late, Popkin’s up, fists gyring like two filled buckets, groan broadening into a woolly mammoth roar, and he tilts his head to find Bagger, blood cascading down the lummox’s face but quickly thinned by rain, achieving permanence only at his uniform’s collar, the red ring of a diabolical jester,
and Popkin charges Bagger, boot after leaden boot, and Bagger backs up, trying to think through the ringing pain, but there’s no time, so he runs, but he can’t run far, he can’t leave the angel, so he runs toward the closest structure, a single standing wall, two stories high with iron bars over the upper windows, a former jail, how darling, as if any of the village’s past malefactors could rate alongside this fratricidal dolt,
and Popkin closes in, inevitable as a combine, and Bagger tries to lift a brick but his balance is funky and, fuck, it drops from his numb fingers, he’s going to have to fight, finally, and right fucking now,
and when he puts up his dukes, it feels as silly as he always imagined, and Popkin must think the same, his loose, spitty maw bends up at the corners, he’s so close Bagger can see the trench system of his scalp, Bagger must have raked it to the bone, and if that didn’t stop the lummox, he can’t imagine what will,
and Popkin swings an arm like an elephant tusk, clumsy, easy to block, but also really fucking heavy, Bagger is walloped sideways, barely staying upright across the rubble, and Popkin lumbers after him at a heavyweight’s pace, eyes leaking blood, mouth gouting the same, and Bagger drearily accepts he has no plan but to take the brawler’s hits and hope for the bell,
and it only takes until Popkin’s second punch, which launches Bagger against the jailhouse wall, which crunches unhappily and haws like it might fall, for Bagger to realize no bell can save him, the lummox will never tire, he’s not even the lummox anymore, he’s one of the landships that staved like barges through the Western Front’s mud,
and Bagger wonders if this landship runs on angel fuel,
and it’s then, with knuckles cracking inside tire-sized fists and trench-mouth slime sheeting from busted lips, that Popkin takes a step that puts the angel’s light directly over his shoulder, and rain and light combine as they always have and form rainbows, rainbows like Bagger’s never seen, arcing east, ribboning west, stair-stepping one to the other, an infinite quilt of colors that’s the most beautiful thing imaginable, and it’s strictly for him, Popkin can’t see it and the old husband is dead,
and Bagger suddenly feels dry, and clean, and refreshed, and it’s funny how these pleasant feelings clamp a metal ring over his ankle, it hurts but he loves it, too, which tells him she’s the gaff, the angel’s the gaff, and that claw digging into his tenderest flesh tells him that this here is a cockfight, and he’s seen enough cockfights to know little cockerels, properly gaffed, can tear apart the biggest roosters,
and Bagger fins his hand, so much quicker than the rooster, and shoots it outward, gaff, right into Popkin’s left eye, and Popkin wails, and jerks away, and heaves one of his anvil fists, but he’s off-center and it whiffs past Bagger close enough to flutter his nose hairs, and Bagger fins his other hand and pecks his fingers into Popkin’s right eye, gaff, another wail, and Popkin’s hands cycle in small punches near his face, trying to keep Bagger away,
and every stab into his ankle is the angel cheering him on, an odd thing, really, brutality celebrated by a heavenly being, but damn if it’s not more bracing than any bugle, Bagger rears back, his eyesight as level as a German blockhouse, and kicks Popkin in the balls, probably so gonorrheal they burst, and Popkin moos with groping rage while the rainbows scintillate like fish scales, Private Bagger unbound, unstoppable,
and Popkin keeps swiping but Bagger dances around him, the rainbows out of sight now but that’s all right, he watches Popkin clobber the freestanding wall, left, right, left, right, leaving feathers of blood, the wall beginning to bend like leather, and here, several feet from the wall, the jail-yard rubble is smaller, easier to wield, and Bagger grins as he bends to pick up a rock, wait, no, there’s a better rock, it’s got a nice sharp edge to it,
and it’s that flare of greed that does him in, as Popkin, full of animal surprises, kicks backward like a horse, a boot heel connecting with the underside of Bagger’s chin, and his jaws clap shut onto his tongue, slicing off a narrow ribbon, and Bagger’s head rockets back, he’s thrown for a literal loop, wholly airborne, and lands on cobblestone straight as a board, head, shoulders, hips, and ankles all hitting at once, his own ghost ejected from his nostrils,
and with his skeleton too numb to move, that’s all she fucking wrote, Popkin unfolds to full height, Bagger’s got no feeling in his hands, and Popkin turns, Bagger can’t speak, and Popkin opens eyes, filled with blood, opens a mouth, filled with blood, extends two arms, filled with blood, interlaces his fingers into a swingable mace, filled with blood, raises the joined fist over his head, filled with blood, and flexes his whole body, filled with blood, to deliver the death blow to Bagger, shortly to be filled with blood,
and I’m sorry, Bagger thinks to the angel, I’m sorry, Bagger thinks to Arno, he’ll never get to be someone else’s gaff, which makes him surprisingly sad,
and the least he can do is not look away as he’s done before, so Bagger opens his eyes to stare death down, it might take several dozen blows before shards of Bagger’s skull puncture his brain, and that’s how he notices a caliginous shadow, darker than the rain, pulling toward Popkin as a nightmaring child pulls close a blankie,
and it’s the wall, it’s tipping,
and Bagger balls his body up and covers his head as bricks hiss and growl and boom and finally sing, a crashing chorus by some vainglorious German maestro, and Bagger feels the shadow splash over him, as cold as cannonballing into a lake, and like a cannonball he rolls away as the falling bricks begin to explode, the wall delivering jailhouse justice even in final collapse, stone turned shrapnel that Bagger absorbs, still rolling,
and the time when loud noises were merely loud is so far in the past Bagger has to strain to recall them, the landslide hiss of half-ton lots of coal dumped in metal carts, the nerve-chiseling peals of streetcars along corroded tracks, the marrow-deep thunderclaps of garment factory manglers, the choking shotguns of backfiring Model Ts, while here in France, each truck and gun and shell and angel howls, a race to the finish line of deafness,
and somewhere inside it, Bagger hears the dice-bag scrunch of two hundred bones obliterating in unison,
and only after the last pebbles whisper into their favored crannies can Bagger think again, and his big idea is to open his stupid eyes, which he does, and he sees a raft of rain arrows fired from a sagittarii of holy archers, a soggy debauch of dead roads and buildings and humans, and a foothill of brick that fell so close it coated Bagger in a pale dust that the rain is turning to grime,
and thick tongues of blood extend from the foothill ten feet in every direction, Hugh Popkin reduced to a red rose pressed between the pages of Effie Inez Barbeau’s diary, he’s deader than anyone’s ever been dead, and Bagger is caught off guard by the sympathetic thought that old Effie Weffie might at long last feel affection for her lovelorn lummox,