Chapter XXIII
XXIII
and the horizons bruise with muted but supercolossal orange flashes that demarcate tracts of mutilated tree trunks, en masse they look like creeping squads of gnarled gnomes, most of them prune black but a few broken open to sapwood so shocking white they look like combat nurses in unblemished dresses, standing in the foggy rain, plotting amputations,
and when Bagger, aching for sleep, finally turns over for comfort, reluctant as he is to let the angel out of his sight, he finds himself staring into the eyes of the horse head, not a fun jolt, Veck laying just a few feet away, while Popkin snores from beneath the gun’s front wheels,
and Bagger, once his fright cools, hesitates to ask Veck to take the damn thing off, it’s the only thing yet to soothe Veck’s shakes, he’s acting almost normal if that’s a word you can apply to a guy wearing a severed horse head, but Bagger’s never going to get any shut-eye with that thing ogling him, plus the flesh is starting to ripen, so he hisses, “Veck, take that damn thing off,”
and as much dignity as Veck has shown, he’s not to the point of disobeying reasonable requests from fellow doughboys, and his hands creep upward and slide the head off until it rests beside the P3, revealing a face that lacks any equine tranquility, brown eyes darting, cheeks pinching,
and right as Bagger closes his eyes, Veck whispers, “Bagger,” and Bagger ignores it, but then it’s “Hey, Bagger,” and Bagger grinds his jaws and glares a warning at Veck, though it’s hard not to feel for the guy, sweaty despite the cold, wide awake like someone who thinks the world is out to get him, and in Veck’s case it probably is,
and Veck licks cracked lips and says, “She’s granting wishes,” and Bagger flips the bird, thinking of those porterhouse steaks she didn’t deliver, but Veck says, “You’re telling me you didn’t wish to be saved when that minnie dropped, you and the boy?
,” to which Bagger only stares because he can’t remember, and Veck says, “And Goodspeed. She took care of Goodspeed, right? You saying none of us didn’t wish Goodspeed gone?
,” and Bagger keeps staring, for as little as he cares about unity, it still feels dicey to admit you wished a fellow soldier dead,
and Veck rolls onto his back and sighs dreamily, as if indulging in a velvet starscape instead of the oily underbelly of a 155mm gun, and repeats with smug anticipation, “She’s granting wishes,” and Bagger resists asking the follow-up Veck is begging for, but the silence is too absolute, the kind you only get when a whole forest is erased by war, so he hisses, “Fine, tell me your stupid wish already,”
and Veck, patient bastard, draws an inhale so long it might have traveled the full length of a horse’s snout, his eyes bright as flaming petrol but strobed by that pesky facial tick, and with a hush he replies, “If you asked before France, I would’ve said my family, I wished good on my family, something like that.
But after all I seen?,” and he shakes his head once, a crack of neck, a crunch of soot, “No, sir. What I’d wish now is for revenge,”
and Bagger knows he best be vigilant after hearing such an oath from a Negro, but Veck only burps, and his eyes water, and he’s briefly handsome, and he says, “What they say about the 368th is all lies,” a claim that makes Bagger uncomfortable, so he replies, “No one says shit, we’re busy fucking up a war if you didn’t notice,” but Veck ignores him, it’s clear he’s heard the same slanders as Bagger,
and Veck says, “They set us up to fail. We shoulda known. We were dumb not to. It’s just we were treated all right at Camp Meade.
Frenchies were good to us, too, treated us square.
But then they carved us out of the 92nd and strung us between the 77th and the French, no idea who’s leading who.
When H-hour came, they pushed us into woods nobody’d bothered to shell.
Still had all its barbed wire. We didn’t have wire cutters.
We didn’t have maps. We had to use what lanes we could.
Made us sitting ducks. We were turning into puddles.
Damn right we ran, no different than the 43rd running today, except the 43rd will get a second chance.
You’re in the 368th, one chance is all you get,”
and Bagger feels like he’s being blamed and it pisses him off, because hell, he’s got a goddamn angel two feet to his right, a goddamn living miracle who wouldn’t be here if not for his goddamn American heroism, it’s not fair he should be pissed off about jack shit,
and so he says, “Well, Veck, you said yourself you shoulda known. No one put a gun to your head and made you volunteer,” though the second Bagger says it, he pictures the Selective Service form he was forced to sign and the tiny text printed in the lower left, If person is of African descent, tear this corner, how all those little corners must have collected on the floor like spent cartridges,
and Veck breathes low, and steady as a river, “You want better for your family, you got to prove you are better, then maybe they give you what they ought to gave in the first place,” and Bagger wants to ask who they are, but is afraid he’ll end up being blamed again, and even more afraid he deserves that blame, maybe it’s best to calm this private down,
and so he asks, “You got a big litter of kids at home or what?,”
and Veck’s face crimps like he’s hit with a hurled pebble, the worst tick Bagger’s seen yet, but he manages a reply, “Got a wife and a little girl, Naomi. Loves everything. Animals, especially. You saw her yourself,” a crazy offhand claim that makes Bagger’s incredulity soften to pity, the man’s falling apart, wearing a horse head is saner than seeing a phantom Naomi ghosting about the Argonne,
and Veck continues, normal as can be, “Guy like me, you got to prove everything. Prove you deserve to work the job you work. Prove the pay you get should be as much as the next guy. Prove you deserve a home. When men break your windows, prove to the police they should go after them, not you. Prove to the bosses you’re better than the other guys that look like you, but don’t let those other guys know you said it or you’re going to lose some teeth,”
and Bagger says, “Like dogs fighting,” and Veck laughs, “You think we’re dogs?
Well, how about this? Your people are rats.
Look around, Bagger. Don’t see a whole lot of dogs, do you?
Rats, though, they everywhere. They ought to call it War of the Rats,” and Bagger blinks, “Did you just call me a rat?” but the insolent bastard has moved on,
and Veck’s whisper is the shiver of stirred syringes, “Soon as white boys started shipping out, they started hiring us for you all’s old jobs,” and goddamn it, there it is again, the blame, “Who’s you all?
” Bagger challenges, and Veck, haughty bastard, replies, “The rats,” before continuing, “And there were riots. They chased us out of a factory with guns. Forty dead men that look just like me. A fellow starts doubting the point of fighting for a country who won’t fight for him,” and Bagger goes so cold the only warmth inside him is Uncle Sam,
and Bagger asks, “That’s who you propose revenging on?
The whole damn country?” and the answer is a shush of fabric and an uncrinkling of paper, then the slog of Veck reading aloud in the dark, “ ‘Can you go into a restaurant where white people dine? Can you get a seat in the theater where white people sit? Now, this is all different in Germany, where they do like colored people, where they treat them as gentlemen and as white people, and quite a number of colored people have fine positions in business in Berlin and other German cities,’ ”
and Bagger can’t believe his fucking ears, “Jerry air-drops that shit just to stir you people up,” he says, but as soon as he says it, he feels off, he’s never defended the U.S.
Army in his life, the only side he’s ever fought for is the side of Cyril Bagger, which sort of puts him in league with Ben Veck, them versus the institutions that made them pick sides in the first place, when one need only look at this genocided forest to know they failed, not as an army but as a species,
and it’s whiplash to consider the end of the world alongside the new beginning the angel augurs, and Bagger pictures France’s deepest craters cracking open to unleash new varieties of predators, pig-faced superwolves out to avenge their earthside cousins who lost everything when humans bombed the holy fuck out of their habitat, superwolves that even now pad toward the howitzer camp, snorting, growling, wait, no, that’s just Popkin snoring,
and so Bagger buries the speculation of what wish he’d ask of the angel, the same way he’s buried hundreds of American doughboys, and his final shovel-pat on the grave is diverting Veck with flattery, “Well, shit, Veck, Lady Liberty must think you’ve got something going for you, else they wouldn’t have attached your sorry ass to the illustrious 43rd,”
and though the compliment comes out less complimentary than intended, the spark in Veck’s eyes blooms like P3 fire, and he smiles, teeth so bright they don’t need the angel’s light, and he says, “Don’t reckon I’ll ever forget seeing little Arno come into Marbache waving a letter he wouldn’t give to nobody but the captain.
So dunked in mud we didn’t know if he was friend or foe or what,”
and Veck goes dreamy again and, still goddamn handsome, says, “When I heard the order, all I thought was how proud Naomi would be when I told her Major General Reis chose me,”
and there it is again, the pride of being selected all that’s keeping Veck going, proof that he’s valued in France as he never was in the U.S.
, and the truth is, right now Bagger needs Veck to keep that pride going, what with Arno reverting to the child he is and Popkin not to be trusted, so Bagger rolls over in his funk hole and replies softly, “Naomi will be as proud as a flipping peacock,”
and exactly when Cyril Bagger became such a delicate fucking listener he’s got no idea, maybe the extra ear is to blame, the ear that got splatted onto his cheek all those hours ago, maybe it took root and sprouted an eardrum, maybe it carried the worst curse in the book, the curse of giving a shit, and before Bagger can decide if that’s baloney, a bomb of exhaustion hits like the last three shells didn’t, he’s pounded into the ground, gone like a gasp, only not rapidly enough to elude Veck’s final whisper, as faithful and haunted and sweet and deranged as anything Bagger’s ever heard,
and what Veck says is, “Oh, she is. She’s proud. Aren’t you, Naomi, baby?,” as if the little girl is right there beside the field gun, screened by fog, laughing into her hand, a clever stowaway bemused by her own overseas trick,