Chapter XV
XV
and Bagger will never know if Arno guesses the thought in his head or if the kid’s simply a finer soldier, but the featherweight takes handfuls of Bagger’s drabs and muscles him to his hands and knees, the woman safe beneath him, and the kid’s screaming words Bagger can’t hear over the clack and cough and zing of lead sparking off barbed wire in gold doubloons that expose the terrain, mud knobbed with the chins, noses, and cheekbones of embedded corpses,
and when the woman’s head lolls, her citadel of light hinges west, carving across pitted landscapes, through skeletal barricades as well as actual skeletons, and into the bosks of the battle’s perimeter, and, as far as Bagger knows, straight down the longitudinal line, a new kind of engineer’s tape stretched through Bois de Romagne and Bois de Bas, erupting from the woods at Brest, spooking submarines in the Celtic Sea, a bridge of light all the way to Boston, a new border for a new world,
and just as Bagger accepts there’s no way to evade Jerry’s fire while carrying a human torch, Arno becomes a dressmaker’s assistant, he pulls the sleeves of the long blue cape over the woman’s arms, and tucks the hood over her head, dousing her phosphorescence,
and Arno, crazy kid, he’s got Bagger’s Springfield 1903 lodged into his shoulder, his piece-of-shit Chauchat forgotten, and waves for Bagger to make a run for it, but fuck that, Bagger’s not getting up, the kid’s going to get decapitated up there, but Arno starts firing at the German trench, one kid versus the entire Hun army, so what the fuck else is Bagger supposed to do, he braces the woman tight to his chest, right over his gas mask, and tries to stand, only to spring right up, the woman weighs no more than her dress and cape,
and Bagger runs, oh shit, and with his arms over the woman, his legs have to do all the work, oh shit, tendon-stretching strides, heels planted into muddy marsh, warped metal, mushy organs, crackling bones, oh shit, and he sees at his periphery the red starbursts of Jerry’s grenades and feels the hawkwind of the resulting shock waves, shit shit, feels fallen men claw at his shins, desperate for water, desperate for a bullet, hands that are really only rogue weeds, oh shit,
and he scrambles arcs around craters he can see and splashes through craters he can’t, shit shit, while Arno’s noises grow increasingly distant as the kid keeps stopping to shoot, oh shit, and all Bagger thinks is how he’s never checked his ammo, why would he, he never shoots any, but cartridges bloat in wet weather, his Springfield might blow up in Arno’s hands, shit shit shit,
and there, fifty yards off, is the long, toothless grin of the Allied trench, a shade darker than the sackcloth day, only first here’s a dead soldier propped against an oak stump, facing the Hun trench like a spectator, a bullet caught between his front teeth, the guts in his lap still wispy with steam, and Bagger thinks this is why they call U.S.
soldiers doughboys, you slit them open and their guts roll out like dough,
and Bagger looks at the dough too long, his right boot clips the corpse’s knee, and that’s it, his adrenalized dexterity is disrupted, he’s spun, the battlefield a carousel of yellow gun blasts, his legs cycling too fast, can’t extend his arms for balance, he’s a runaway wheel, not falling, not yet falling, not quite falling,
and then a factory-made product of destruction lands, well, somewhere, and the earth digests it with an earthquake, and Bagger finally falls, twisting so as not to crush the woman, a dive into cold, hard mud, the trench but a few arms’ lengths away, all Goodspeed or Popkin or Veck has to do is reach out and pull him in, if they haven’t murdered one another or skedaddled,
and Bagger’s heard men describe the whoosh of howitzers shot over their heads as they go over the top, both shit-your-pants scary and the apex of exhilaration, and here it is, oven-hot air singeing his neck, a shell with a German accent, yes, there’s the minnie scream, nothing like the woman’s shriek now that he hears it isolated, a barbarian noise, lionlike in solipsistic bloodthirst, its shadow a swelling, widening, black pool,
and, boy, it stings to have gotten so close to saving his own butt one last time, stings even more that he failed to protect this woman’s breathtaking light, but at least Uncle Sam’s gone quiet, happy and satisfied, at long, long last,
and then, so then, but then, it happens, a thing happens, a thing, it happens, how else to put it, Bagger knows he’ll never grasp it, the thing, which happens, the thing that’s like a pinch, like a thumb and forefinger pinch, taking him by the back of his olive drabs, same as a mama cat takes her kitten by the scruff, and he’s lifted, that’s the thing that happens, lifted right off the ground till he’s watching mud dribble ten feet down from his dangled limbs, and though one of his hands holds the woman’s hand, she’s above him, it’s like she’s pulling him into the air, they’re floating, and not only them, three rats and whole colonies of bugs, and who knows, maybe Arno, too, and then they are tossed, the lot of them, fifteen feet into the trench, and a second after this thing happens, the mortar lands, embeds, and detonates, the trench wall obliterated, but that’s not where Bagger is anymore, he’s way over here, inside a clay avalanche but alive, alive, what did Bagger tell you, he’s always been a lucky son of a bitch,