Chapter XXXVII
XXXVII
and once again the lanterns are as steady as potted flowers, the angel’s light a sunny canopy in the underground box, and Bagger’s canine panting is overcome only by Reis’s, the major general viscous with sweat, face a slick mask of bug-eyed incredulity as he slowly, slowly takes the right arm held away from his body like a torch and brings it nearer, his look of terror lightening, smoothing, going slack,
and, for the first time in his life, Lyon Reis makes a fist with his right hand, and wrist bones gristle, knuckles pop, veins extrude, tendons articulate, and Reis is breathless as he opens the fist and stares into the empty palm as if it holds the universe, and it just might,
and Reis’s head snaps up hard enough to fling sweat, and he stares at the angel with a garbled expression that might break into anything, shock or disgust or rapture, and after a pregnant second, his face delivers the most unsettling possibility of all,
and it’s a grin, a sinuous, gleeful grin that taints Reis’s eyes with a jubilant jaundice, this man Bagger believed was incapable of anything but embittered scoffs, a bubbly giggle that percolates into a toddler peal, a spill of broken glass, so sharp Bagger flinches away,
and Reis giggles, “You,” glancing at Bagger before returning his admiration to his refurbished hand, and it’s the hand he talks to now, “You have brought me this incredible gift,”
and as rare as it was for Bagger to be in a frontal trench when an officer rang the gas klaxon, he still viscerally feels the routine, the reflex fumbling for his mask, the worry that gas will sperm its way into his crevices, and that’s what Bagger hears now, clang clang clang, he brought the angel here for a reason, to help the army if not the world, but there’s no hint of any of that in the word Reis emphasized most, the word me,
and something, maybe Bagger’s heart, tells him to abort, snatch up the angel and race up the stairs, find a trench ladder, run away, he was a goddamn idiot to bring a being like this to man like this, but Bagger deliberates the extra second it takes Reis to approach the table, thread his newly muscled arm beneath the angel’s neck and lift her into the crook of his capable elbow,
and Reis tries to suppress his gaiety, being a combat visionary requires sobriety, after all, and he says, “From the start of this war, men have spoken of wonder weapons. Planes phased with interrupter gear to fire through propellors. U-boats that hunt like sea serpents. Tanks that spit bullets like dragons spit fire. No one saw chlorine gas coming before the Germans opened those cylinders at Ypres. As no one, Private Gravedigger, will see the coming of this, the most wondrous weapon of all. My Minerva,”
and Bagger’s gut cramps, he’s made a blunder all right, the worst blunder of his life, if not the worst blunder of the war, and he stutters, “She’s, no, sir, she’s a healer, I told you what she can, listen, sir, she could end it, she could end the entire,”
and it’s pathetic how Reis talks right over him, he became Private Gravedigger again the moment he handed over this miracle in flesh, and the major general talks to himself now, himself or a full house of imagined admirers, “General Pershing just described to me how the Great War crawls toward its end. A matter of weeks, sayeth our vaunted leader, if not days. The Germans are pushed to the Heights of the Meuse. The Hindenburg Line will shatter and they will be chased all the way to Luxembourg. The world about to phoenix from the ashes will belong to the Allies, and America will soar highest of all,”
and Reis bends to the angel, a Valentino pose, though Bagger wonders if the real target of his adoration is his naked right arm, and he says, “And yet Pershing wishes to replace me. Wishes the ruination of my career. For what purpose? Humiliation. Duly, duly, General Pershing, I am humiliated. Only how great, I ask, can a war be that lasts but four years? Look to the Peloponnesian War. The Punic Wars. The six hundred years of the Crusades! Those were wars. Wars given space for proper prosecution. Never again will I be offered a war. This is my only chance. To show them how they underestimated Lyon Reis. Oh, I shall show them. I will let them pin their medal upon me before I make them kneel,”
and it’s baffling how Bagger’s mind ties it all together, but it does, he need only picture the medal Reis desires, the five-pointed star around a woman in golden profile, hair flowing from beneath her helmet, a likeness Bagger recognizes thanks to a bit of schoolhouse trivia,
and it’s Minerva, goddess of war, who is imprinted on the Medal of Honor, the only woman Reis has ever lusted after, finally that gap over his heart can be filled, and maybe his actual heart as well, filled with black blood, the commingled grout of good and evil,
and Bagger wonders if this consummation would have been better left to Goodspeed, the angel as freakshow capitalism, or Popkin, the angel as a body upon which men could demonstrate domination, or Veck, the angel employed to scorch the earth of injustice, an apocalyptic turn, but preferable to the rule of one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, so long as all is Major General Reis,
and Reis laughs, full-throated, the laugh of a groom swirling his bride in post-nuptial waltz, which is exactly what happens next, he lifts the angel, glorying in his right arm’s effortless might, and away he whirls, his Colt .
45 flapping in its holster, the angel’s blue cape rising like a petticoat at a barn dance, Reis’s leather-gloved paw swallowing the angel’s fine-boned fingers as they spin across the dugout,
and Bagger would not have believed one arm more or less could result in such a change, but the evidence is in a three-step sway as steady as the cuckoo’s pendulum, Bagger’s a fine enough waltzer, it helps pass the time on riverboats, but Reis is poetry, a dashing master of the chassé, hover corte, hairpin, oversway, and developpé, and what’s more, dancing for two, manhandling the angel into each position and kicking her feet to where they ought to be,
and Reis talks as he dances, “End the war? No, no. Prolong it. Lengthen it. Draw it out as one does a waltz, until the only cartridges we have left are scrounged from the dead, the only food our own boiled belts, until the Reichstag has our armies inside its closing fist and all hope is lost,” which Reis illustrates by bending his torso in the feminine lily, a position of yielded conquest,
and it’s only to pivot on the next one-count, reversing positions, the angel dipped low, halo scraping dirt, “Only then do I reveal my hand,” Reis crows, “the wonder weapon I alone wield, and with which I win the war and save the world,” and he kisses her, hard, as the position might suggest, and the angel doesn’t resist, forcing Bagger to wonder if she might accept this plot, even consent to it, and his viscera festers in jealousy, all the times he rescued this ungrateful bitch,
and yet if Bagger could speak, if Reis would allow it, if the angel would accept it, he would plead, Don’t do anything he says, he’s talking about sabotaging the war, turning a victory that’s weeks away into years more of gruesome attrition, the deaths of millions, all so he can be the hero rewarded with his country’s highest honor, though even that might not be high enough, emperor of the world will be the only role he accepts with a wonder weapon such as you loaded at his side,
and Reis disconnects the kiss, the angel’s face marred with the profanity of a sleazy smudge, and swings her around, only this time he miscalculates, either his right arm has some learning to do or the angel is upset by the kiss and no longer playing along, either way, she’s slung too far and the inexperienced Reis overcompensates, and they end up colliding, the tasteful distance between them collapsed, hip bones crashing,
and Reis hisses and pulls away, and the angel drops to the floor like a haversack, and Reis holds his right hand before him, it has suffered its first big-boy wound, a nick on the palm, a check mark of blood wrought by an angelic fingernail, perhaps, though who knows, maybe it was something beyond an earthbound man’s perception,
and Reis pants from the dancing and chuckles at the cut before bringing it to his lips and sucking it clean, harder and wetter than the kiss, and he gives the angel a jailer’s leer, “So the lady has claws, does she? Tut-tut. I was hoping we could be friendly. It is of no consequence. The Adversary will learn to be friendly,” and the way he says the word, Adversary, feels truer than anything said about the angel thus far,
and that’s because she’s lovely, and unassuming, and perfect, and yet, and yet, and yet, just look at the blood in her wake,
and Reis checks Bagger for the first time in minutes, making Bagger realize that he hissed, too, at the dancers’ collision, and Reis frowns, displeased to find an observer to the bloodshed of man and virgin, the wrong one deflowered, and directs his eyes at the stairs and says, “I am obliged, Private Gravedigger. Your contribution to the Allied effort will be remembered. That will be all,”
and now Bagger knows what Arno felt when dismissed at the dugout entrance, You hear me, little puke?
, the sensation of being cloven from a family you helped create, but what else can Bagger do, he’s the one who brought the angel here, he can hardly attack Reis, a division commander with two strapping arms, and besides, Bagger’s thirsty, starving, and needs to sleep for a million years, which is exactly how long it might take for Reis’s new world order to come and go,
and so Bagger salutes, and wonders how he ended up weaker leaving the dugout than when he entered, Cyril Bagger used to be a man, or so he believes, but now he’s something else, and he stretches his neck to try and see the angel one last time, but she, in her cape-and-dress puddle, faces the other way, having given up on him, same as everyone else,