Chapter X
X
and what they can’t know, can’t begin to imagine, is that Rochambeau was Bagger’s first grift, he took it up around the time parishioners began breaking from his father’s church, an overdue exodus, as Bishop Bagger had gone hardshell following the death of Bagger’s mother, who’d always been the one to focus on fellowship, he said, and without her, the Bishop got lost inside the cave system of his intellect, learned Hebrew even, and passed his uneasy revelations onto his flock, forgetting that flocks don’t want truth, truth is too much to take on a Sunday morn,
and the only invulnerables were the church’s children, too bored by preachments to care, and like millennia of brats before them, they turned to games, Rochambeau reigning supreme in pew play, pocket money changing hands in silent tournaments with no child achieving supremacy, and because Cyril Bagger, the Bishop’s son, had no pennies to wager, he spent months studying matches that seemed based on predicting what your foe would predict that you predict, a chain of prognostication no one could sustain for long,
and Bagger’s eureka was how a player’s reactions to success or failure gave away the store, and so one day, after mapping current trends inside a hymnal, Bagger entered a Rochambeau round-robin on a five-cent loan, which he paid back at triple interest, and proudly, for if Bishop Bagger was going to set fire to their lives for things as stupid as belief and ideals, young Cyril Bagger would need to start looking out for himself,
and that’s why Bagger, beneath the carbonation of gunfire and digestive upset of falling shells, humbly suggests to his fellow doughboys how to arrange their little contest, imagine if you will the pentagon shape of the Medal of Honor ribbon Reis has all but forfeited, and draw a line between each point, a five-pointed star, which is to say each player plays every other player once, zero points for a loss, one point for a win, math even the lummox can handle,
and Bagger sighs woefully, “At least this will be fast,” and the men, these chumps, these stools, these patsies, think they smell blood and draw close, there’s nothing like war to habituate you to physical proximity, forever are you jostled by wet, cold, filthy male bodies, the group lurches within inches of Bagger, hands out, fingers flexing to work out the bone chill,
and it begins without ceremony, Bagger and Veck, the former feigning nerves, the latter swallowing the bait, his lantern eyes irising to pinpricks, an intimidation tactic that is Bagger’s best clue, for while it’s true naive players lead with rock forty percent of the time, it was Veck who suggested Rochambeau, so he’s not naive, or doesn’t consider himself to be, but Bagger also knows paper is the classic first choice of players who fancy themselves clever,
and Veck raises his fist, the call to arms, and Bagger mirrors it, and together they drum the beat, one, eyes locked, two, breath held, three, Bagger lets insight flood through the seams of his skull, Veck’s too smart for paper, but no way does he go for scissors, on no planet does a man who’s been through what Veck has been through choose the fussy, fallible gadget of scissors when it’s been rocks thrown at him all his life,
and so it goes, Veck with rock, Bagger with paper, and weight leaps from Bagger’s back like a gargoyle, the hardest round now behind him, he can forget about Ben Veck forever, good riddance, quickly he logs Popkin’s result, paper, and Goodspeed’s result, scissors, and the absurdity wallops him, they are five soldiers, lost in forsaken craterlands, wedged into a collapsing crevasse, playing a child’s game beneath falling ash while earth convulses around them,
and it’s no more absurd than the opposite, world leaders in play costumes of braids, buckles, aiguillettes, pompons, tufts, cords, plates, and sashes, in playpens of castles and state rooms, pushing wooden blocks around a game map, a magic trick that shoves millions of men across actual battlefields, it’s really the same game, rock crushes kaiser, paper covers tsar, the scissors of the Entente snips Europe into new configurations,
and Popkin comes at Bagger like a hellbeast, purple-ringed eyes, nostrils pink and crusted, face a flaky agglomeration of red clay, brown blood, black mud, and orange tobacco, everything shellacked with sweat, the lummox gasping like a fish, a furor that makes it easy for Bagger to see the future, one, human nature is to replace a losing weapon, two, but Popkin will overthink it to the extent he can think at all, three,
and Popkin’s scissor is dispatched by Bagger’s rock, the lummox goes down fuming while Bagger eyes the other matches, Arno faring poorly, Goodspeed cruising until Veck beats him, prompting the Vulture to check over his shoulder in hopes he might accuse the Negro of cheating, but Bagger won’t have it, he reaches through the pyre of men’s arms, grabs Goodspeed, and pulls him over, Goodspeed wily enough to know he’s being cornswoggled, one, crying, “You can get into their heads, Bagger, but not mine, not mine!,” two, but it’s not Bagger getting into the Vulture’s head, it’s the shriek, three,
and it’s Goodspeed, paper, and Bagger, scissors, and while Goodspeed spits gum, Bagger watches Veck dispatch both Popkin, who bellows like a bear, and Arno, who looks betrayed by the flamethrower operator he once escorted from the 368th to the 43rd, with whom he shared his cup of corn meal mush and kidney beans when Veck’s shaking hands dropped his own cup, for whom he pilfered a piece of chalk so Veck could write his wife’s name on the P3 fuel tank, dozens of small testaments of affection,
and amid the clerical brouhaha of proclaimed wins and unjust losses, the kid pouts at his winless fist, as futile as his Chauchat, before looking up at Bagger with naked vulnerability, for that’s the only duel left, Bagger versus Arno, and if Bagger wins, that’s it, it’ll be the kid, not Popkin, going over the top alone, and Bagger, like those apocryphal cannibalistic lifeboaters, will have no choice but to live with it, same as he lives with everything else,