Chapter XVIII
XVIII
and he sobs, “She knows,” and, fuck, how Bagger hates it, he’s worked so hard to excise emotion from his life, it’s why he kept Marie-Louise, whom he might have loved, at wisecrack length, why he needles fellow soldiers so hard, because anger’s easier to handle than grief, so he scoffs, “Veck, she doesn’t know us from five big shits,” but it tastes like a lie, if this woman fell from the sky, if she radiates light, if she can move men through the air, if she is an angel, then she has a direct line to God, and God knows all, even the Bishop believed that at the end,
and Veck blubbers, “She knows what we’ve done!
We need to beg! Beg for mercy!” and Bagger’s next wisecrack dissolves in the acid hitching up his throat, making Uncle Sam dance, for though Bagger has stewed plenty over his own pitiful plight, he’s rarely pondered the larger wrongdoing in which they are all embroiled, men of every creed mowed down like Iowa corn,
and he thinks of The Son of Tarzan, Korak’s jungle years spent murdering natives left and right, Arno hooting happily after each kill, except now the slaughter seems pointless to Bagger, Korak killed because he felt like killing, that’s it, a pattern picked up by the rest of the world, and isn’t it possible the angel was shot down while serving a summons to the human race, subpoenaed to defend the Korak-like crimes they mistook as valor,
and Goodspeed ignores Veck and says, “I know a man in New York, tours the continent selling medicines, he’s a friend, a personal friend, and showing off this thing?
This angel? He could go big with this. If she floated someone over the audience?
Gentlemen! There would be no opera house he couldn’t fill.
We strike a deal with him, we’re set up for life,”
and Bagger glances at the angel, she’s watching, though it’s unclear if she’s comprehending, then he squints at the beady-eyed private and asks, “How do you propose getting her out of France?”
and Goodspeed’s too aroused to be fazed, he pivots on an underwater heel and appeals to Popkin, which makes sense to Bagger, you get Popkin on your side, hell, maybe you can do whatever you want, and Goodspeed says, “Well, I met a guy here too! French doctor, down in Nancy, I sold him an engraved German bayonet, he wanted to go into business right there. And business is what we’ve got!
Nancy’s, what, fifty miles south? We make this deal and we’re European princes! ,”
and Popkin squirms his brains and says, “You’ll cut us out,” and Goodspeed acts offended, “I will not,” and Bagger says, “Don’t buy it, Popkin, Vincent the Vulture doesn’t cut anyone square,” and the lummox glowers at Goodspeed and asks, “You’d split us equal?
,” to which Goodspeed’s eyes shine with alarm, “Well, come on. It’s my plan, my contacts.
Naturally I’d maintain a controlling interest. That’s only fair,”
and Popkin’s ox nostrils flare and his moose lips curl to display apple-stem teeth and scarlet gums, and he says, “Nuh-huh. No way you get more than us,” and Bagger’s briefly grateful to Popkin until the lummox splashes through black water, bends over the angel, and orders, “Get up, you’re coming with me,” and when the angel only blinks over Arno’s dozing head, Popkin fixes his Springfield’s sight on the woman’s face, an action so profane Bagger goes numb, Popkin’s forefinger’s too pudgy, it’ll squeeze the trigger, and the lummox grunts, “Get up, I mean it,”
and, Veck, though, Veck reacts like his weapon is strung to Popkin’s weapon, when the Springfield levels at the angel, the P3 lance splashes upward from the water, and clocks the underside of the rifle barrel, knocking it aside, and then, more or less, hell breaks loose, Popkin bleats in dumb fury and kicks Veck’s sternum, but Veck traps the boot and both of them go down into trench scum, mud lapping over Arno and the angel,
and Popkin presses his knees into Veck’s shoulders, pinning him, and pushes Veck’s face underwater by the forehead, and Veck’s neck stretches into a root system of strained jugulars as inky bubbles of air fight through ooze while his hands rip at Popkin’s puttees,
and yet Bagger holds still, holds tight, holding’s what he does in battle, no reason to get involved, no fucking reason at all,
and the bubbles get smaller, and Veck’s hands go wilder, sightless attacks, the guy’s going to drown in six lousy inches of water, Bagger’s seen it happen, boys too injured or too exhausted to lift their faces from puddles, and Bagger glances at Arno and sees the kid’s eyelids flutter, he’s going to wake up, he’s going to look up, and he’s going to see the real Cyril Bagger, a coward unfit for reading stories of selfless heroes,
and so what the hell, Bagger lurches and bends an elbow around the tree trunk of Popkin’s neck, and the beast bellows and twists like a saddled rhinoceros, and Bagger’s collarbone gets crunched against a discarded helmet, pain in bright pinwheels, and he’s slammed into the water, his turn to drown, and he grapples through the gumbo of lost slickers, boots, pipes, pocket watches, bandages, rats, not a single good bludgeon among them,
and then Veck rises like a kraken, mud glopping from his open maw and sluicing down his chin like black merlot, his jaw twitching like never before, enough to rip open his cheek, and as he launches at Popkin, one of his boots plants onto Lewis Arno’s knee,
and Arno wails himself awake as Veck cannonballs helmet-first into the lummox’s kidney, Popkin ejecting brown batter, but even with the P3, Veck’s an underweight foe, and Popkin finds undermud purchase and slings Veck toward, well, Bagger doesn’t see, because Bagger’s juking toward Arno, the kid’s clutching his knee as Bagger loops him by the armpit and dives both of them into the safety of a cold clay wall,
and Bagger knows his noises, the snap of a rifle strap across rain-sogged drabs, the metallic joggle of a bolt handle, either Popkin or Veck has gained the upper hand, and when a soldier out here gains an upper hand, two things reliably follow, the cough of a cartridge and the whine of death, and Bagger wraps himself around Arno while noting he could have just run, just left the kid behind, maybe it’s the influence of the,
and before he can finish the thought, Arno points and yells, “There!,” and Bagger orients his eyes into the needling sheets of rain, there will be no outfoxing a third trench mortar, its grim reaper finger selects you to die and you die, and Bagger’s luck has run up a tab his flesh is overdue in paying,
and so he’s surprised to instead see Goodspeed spidering off the top of a trench ladder, the only ladder in sight, and rolling onto an elevated island of incinerated turf, while Bagger and the others tussled like Korak and the baboons, Goodspeed just took the fuck off, but that was the Vulture for you, three steps ahead and always hoarding the most valuable treasure,
and though Goodspeed isn’t strong, the angel has a canteen weight, and with a final heave, he shifts her from the ladder into his lap, and Bagger’s so dumbfounded that Arno weasels away, vaults the trench water, and grabs for the angel’s dangling ankle, begging Goodspeed too softly for Bagger to hear, a useless effort, Goodspeed simply lifts the angel up out of the kid’s reach,
and Veck, reptilian with mud, sputters, “She’s not yours,” and Popkin, hacking foul water, says, “I’m warning you, Goodspeed, don’t you fucking leave us,” and for a few seconds Goodspeed looks cooperative, as if ready to tell them they can all reconnect post-armistice, where he will parse out their earnings, all promises kept,
and then, ah, fuck it, Goodspeed drops his mask of dopey earnestness and lets a long, wicked grin eel outward, so long it threatens to detach everything above his jaw, and with the angel draped over his thighs as if for a spanking, he takes hold of the ladder and lifts it out of the trench, easy as can be,
and like that, the rest are cut off, and Bagger hustles in hopes he can leap and snag the lowest rung, but everyone else is closer, and Arno jumps, and Veck jumps, and Popkin jumps, the tallest but still a foot shy, and Goodspeed watches from above in giggling delight, the same way, Bagger wagers, he watches a rabbit suffering in a snare, and if Bagger hadn’t lost his rifle in the trench-side miracle, he’d spray Goodspeed with blazing lead, though Popkin, a more frequent firer, knows better than to bother, Goodspeed could roll out of view in half a second,
and knowing he’s beyond their reach, Goodspeed untwists his lizard body and stands before a brass sky flowered with explosions, chuckling so hard it sounds like hiccups, the angel limp as a bath towel in his arms, and he gazes down at her, chuckling, chuckling, and with two fingers pinches the robe hood and lifts it entirely off her head,
and maybe it’s the low angle, maybe it’s the smoke saturated in dusk’s amber, but the light coming from the angel’s face is now joined by something else, floating a few inches off the crown of her head, a golden ring as faint as dust, and if there was any doubt in Bagger’s mind, that doubt is gunned down, the ring is a halo, a fucking halo, the woman’s an angel, all right, a proper angel,
and Goodspeed lords down through his pince-nez, tips his helmet, and says, “Bon voyage, boys! I’d like to say we’ll meet again, but we all know that’s not in the cards. Not even the kind of cards you deal, Bagger! You’ll see my Theda again, though,”
and Bagger notices he calls her Theda,
and Goodspeed continues, “You’ll see her in newspapers and film reels, and maybe in person, too, if you can save up the scratch to buy a ticket.
If you do, rest easy that a hefty portion of the ticket price went to good old Private Goodspeed.
Though I’ll have dropped the rank by then.
Sir Goodspeed. Lord Goodspeed. Has a nice ring, don’t it?
I’d say look me up, but that’s assuming any of you surv,”
and there’s a great flash of light like the sudden death of the sun, a noise so loud it’s silence, it’s that third minenwerfer Bagger has been expecting, fired by Jerry, who, after Goodspeed uncovered the light beam of the angel’s face, had a direct target to shoot at, and the shell lands just north of the trench, a near miss, but it’s followed by a wallop of sweltering wind that squalls a blue blur of shrapnel over the trench top, and with a swift, moist snick, Vincent the Vulture Goodspeed is cut in half just below his ribs, neat as a holiday fruitcake,