Chapter XL
XL
and stop,
and what stops is the whole shebang, war’s babel severed sharply enough to produce a pop as dry as a desert thunderclap, leaving Bagger gasping in the hush, all movement stopped, too, everything fixed in upheaval, one arm-length board fallen from the ceiling just hanging there midair, clods of dirt, too, suspended like fruit from an earthen tree, even smoke hovers like giant cobwebs intricate in turmoil and mystification,
and Reis, too, has stopped, body petrified, the last strike of his walking stick undelivered, and cautiously, suspiciously, Bagger lowers the Colt and tiptoes around Reis, it’s like the man’s trapped in amber, regal face fatted into rolls of arterial sausage, red eyes protuberant and glassy, the ribbons of spit between his jaws turned into translucent stalagmites and his coughed beads of spit strung up like floating pearls,
and Bagger’s eye catches something else and he looks straight up and finds the entire dugout roof in mid-downfall, a vortex of lumber and clay and soil and roots that, ten feet up, peeks into the outer world, Bagger spies a fringe of barbed wire up there, the sideways wheel of a wagon, a puffy artillery streak like a keloid scar, and a red aircraft faraway and perfectly still,
and Bagger shivers with the awe of cheated death, the men down here oblivious to the cave-in about to bury them,
and he shuffles away from the overhead hole, better safe than sorry, and turns to Lewis Arno, in hopes the kid will blink back at him in shared wonder, but Arno’s as deadlocked as Reis, teeth bared in frozen agony, each cut and bruise on his head, neck, shoulders, and arms more hideous as a still life, the flaps of skin, the exposed collarbone, the kid was being ripped apart,
and only then does Bagger notice the angel is gone,
and he whirls, he’s lost her again, but no, she’s behind him, standing on her own two feet and watching him, everything coy, amused, or dreamy about her turned as sharp as an entrenching tool, her arms dangled like readied weapons, chin lowered, chest forward, lioness ribs expanding, legs in the stance of a dauntless boxer,
and the silence stretches thin, her disappointment, his anxious panting, the pressure building, until abruptly the angel moves, striding at him, so much poise and vigor that Bagger recoils, he can’t help it, he’s a low beast and she’s the huntress, look at the rolling strut of her hips under the red dress, the flick of the blue cape off her swinging elbows, she looks like she could end this war by simply glaring into the faces of the kaiser, Ludendorff, Hindenburg, the whole Reichstag lot, until they begged for clemency,
and this reveals to Bagger the upsetting truth, that every quality the angel has so far displayed, the meekness and mildness, the lameness and languor, has been an act, and she stops in front of him, and he withers, he can’t hold her gaze, even though he’s held her, carried her, slept beside her, all he can do now is look at her feet, remarkably clean for this landscape of offal and ooze,
and Bagger covers his face with his hands, one floppy of finger, the other clinging to the pistol, and doubles over enough to feel the remnants of his left eye drip out, which tells him all of this is real,
and he whimpers, “I didn’t know,” and her skeptical grunt turns Bagger back into the whippersnapper scolded before the congregation for horseplaying in a pew, and his face, ablaze in injury, burns blacker in disgrace, he’s bowing now, begging, “I mean, I knew, I knew you were, I knew you had, I knew you could,” but he’s unable to finish a thought, thoughts don’t matter in this oblivion of pure sensation,
and when Bagger dares peek again, the angel has him trapped in the same glare, but she’s also holding out her right hand, palm up, and he doesn’t know what else to do, so he places his left hand there, the three busted fingers dangling in three different directions, and it does, in fact, hurt when she folds her hand over his, it’s all goddamn real,
and then they are rising, that’s real, too, Bagger looks down and the floorboards, jumbled with detritus and laked with blood, grow smaller and smaller, so he looks up and finds that he and the angel are moving through the hole in the roof, into the cold loam channel blasted out by some explosive, the stony subsoil, the greasy clay, the weeping mud, it’s strangely gratifying to understand the trenches at the level of the rats that own them,
and then Bagger is born unto a battleground turned epic diorama, a square mile of toy soldiers staged in poses more disturbing than can be purchased at the store, bayonets through chests, bodies dragging satchels of their own guts, tiny faces etched in horror, as well as giant bags of smoke as motionless as mountain buttes, mortars hanging like coconuts, rounds of machine-gun bullets gathered midair like strands of fish eggs,
and right below Bagger, the boys of the 2nd Battalion are arranged like mannequins, look, there’s Sergeant DiStefano, an ersatz stretcher bearer tilting at the field hospital, neck cords like rope, there’s Captain Greisz, dragging an absconder trenchward at such velocity that neither of his boots touch dirt, there’s Major Chester, battalion honcho, mouth ovaled against a telephone, photo-flashed in the act of taking a bullet to the heart, the ejected blood like the petals of a red flower that only grows in doomed flesh,
and Bagger wants to snap off one of his broken fingers and plug Chester’s hole, but he and the angel keep rising through constellations of detonated dirt clods, high enough to see the enemy trench to the north, the supply trains and big guns to the south, the wales and fissures carved through a France not only dead but disfigured by autopsy, all morticians halted in unnatural armistice,
and then gasping shock, a massive bloodbeast beside him in the sky, wingspan so vast that Bagger ducks, but the angel tightens her grip, so Bagger clings back and realizes it’s the triplane he saw from three thousand feet down, black Iron Cross painted on the cherry-red chassis, the golden propeller halted and yet the thing doesn’t fall, nor does the pilot, clad in leather cap and goggles, bearing down on his gun, bullets from which are so solidly situated in air that birds could perch on them,
and still they rise, getting colder now, the Colt an icicle in his hand, Bagger afraid the angel doesn’t know he needs air to breathe but equally afraid to tell her, with that expression of hers, with her hair and cape whipping, not to mention that they are fucking flying, all signs that she’s done with his bullshit and is liable to drop his ass if he says a word,
and they rise until, another hundred feet up, the angel reclines and their path goes obtuse, and like that, Bagger spots the largest object he’s encountered in his life, seems impossible to have missed it before, but Bagger cuts himself slack, his father had a portrait of Christ in his study and once asked little Cyril if he could see Christ’s temptation, and he studied the portrait and said no, so the Bishop repositioned him to the side so he could see the red worked into the thickness of paint, visible only from an angle, Bagger’s only true moment of religious marvel,
and it’s like that, suddenly Bagger can see a great fold in the air, a pocket stitched into the sky, one that grows in size as they approach, big as a mountain, big as the Alps, big as France, and this close, Bagger can discern only a soft, fleshy edge, and his heart accelerates, and his cock stiffens, the fold is labial, it’s soft and warm, and he gives in to it, back in Marie-Louise’s bed but shrunken to weevil size, and in they go,
and, sure enough, he’s been here before,