Chapter XXXIX
XXXIX
and with Uncle Sam roaring, no way in hell can Bagger maze the path back to Reis’s bunker, but again the kid proves he’s a born runner, he weaves around and between the legs of fighting men, and nuzzles deep into clay when shells rock the earth, and jumps straight through fires crepitating with scorching oil, and climbs half-buried corpses whose limbs extend like branches,
and Bagger focuses on Arno’s dervish body through blood, sweat, smoke, and soot, he can’t risk taking his eyes off the kid because Bagger defeated him in Rochambeau, too, same as the others, only he can’t remember what symbol he threw to beat Arno, and if he can’t picture the symbol, he can’t predict what kind of death is barreling toward the kid at locomotive speed,
and he collides with Arno, maybe that’s how the kid dies, a blow to the back of the head, but being thrown to his knees doesn’t stop Arno from pointing, and Bagger will be damned, there’s the stairwell to Reis’s dugout not ten feet away, behind a scrim of dirt thickening from embeddeding bullets,
and Bagger grabs the kid by the scruff and shouts, “Stay here!,” which makes the kid glower like he could kill Bagger for pulling this shit again, there’s no keeping the kid back a second time, nor is there time to argue it, so Bagger bolts ahead and nearly somersaults down the stairwell, the stairs took a direct hit and are a pile of matchsticks, but enough solid wood clings to the left side for Bagger to prance down, metal cleats pinging rusty nails,
and the gas curtain’s on fire, so Bagger tears it down and stomps it into the dirt, then scans the dugout, blinking in the dark, it’s chaos, all four walls tilted inward, the map table knelt with a broken leg, the map itself crumpled and doused in ink, the wee wooden blocks scattered just like the companies they represent,
and Bagger kicks aside rolling wine bottles and ducks beneath the drooping wooden ceiling that drains muddy water like Popkin’s drool, but the place is vacant, “No,” he says, there’s no stopping Arno’s death if he can’t find the angel and demand she stop it, “No!,” and he hurls aside Reis’s chair, “No!,” and spikes the cuckoo clock, somehow still going thuck, boot-heeling it to splinters, “No! No! No! No!,”
and Arno’s lost it, too, he’s wrestling a wooden trunk like it’s a bear, and Bagger crabs over to join in, eager for something to punish, only to realize Arno’s trying to wrench the lock off, knuckles bloodied from the effort, and the kid’s insight gusts through him, the trunk’s plenty big enough for a woman, and Bagger presses his ear to a dowel and blocks out the war to listen,
and there’s the verseless chorus, Save me,
and this time, the words invoke Bishop Bagger, who once preached how angels pulled double duty as God’s protectors, flanking God in a space called the Mercy Seat, a site of unfathomable terror, where only the truest hearts dared plead for mercy, a higher-stakes gamble than anything proffered aboard a riverboat, but what bothered Bagger as a child was the notion hidden inside the story, the notion that God needed protecting, which, by extension, posited that God could be hurt, even killed,
and hold on, now, if Bagger’s been drafted to protect God’s protector, simple logic holds that he, then, is the most powerful of all, maybe all humans have the valence to overthrow their creator and establish a better world, all they have to do is join together to topple God’s ramparts, which might mean war is God’s defensive tactic, slabs of meat earth’s factions can tussle over while the Mercy Seat goes unchallenged,
and so Bagger elbows the kid aside and kicks the lock from the bottom, drives his heel into it from the top, up, down, up, down, while the dugout walls teeter and the girders overhead shit soil, and the lock yields whine by whine, black steel unplugging from pale wood, and then tubes of brilliant light shoot through new holes, and Arno eeks and undoes the hasps, and Bagger fumbles for the slats and hurls off the lid,
and let there be light, and let there be blue cape, and let there be red dress, and let there be halo, and also that sulky comma between the angel’s eyebrows, as if it took Bagger longer to rescue her than she would have preferred, and Bagger apologizes, “Ma’am,” and begins to unpack her, tougher than it looks, it’s barbaric how Reis smushed her inside,
and then she’s in his arms, where she belongs, she fits so well, and Bagger tucks her face into his chest, tenting her precious light, yet feels no canine jealousy when Arno encircles her by the waist, tears slipping, lips tapping a pattern that looks like Mommy, Mommy, and despite the prospect of another shell burying them alive, Bagger allows himself a few seconds to dream, one family lost, one family found, perfect for this broken shard of time,
and pain shatters across Bagger’s face,
and he’s on his back with no memory of getting there, vision hot and knotted like his face is cinched in barbed wire, and he feels foolish until agony shrills from his cheekbone like a scream, he brings both hands, empty of anything angelic, to his face, and finds slippery blood and a soft, weeping tear in his cheek, his pinkie tip slides inside it, could be a bullet hole, could be he’s been shot in the fucking face,
and he rolls to all fours and a liter of liquid shifts in his mouth, and, aghast, he opens wide and a gallon of blood dumps to the floor, along with three teeth, cracking hard and rolling funny like his weighted dice, except these bones roll from the toss of a player even sneakier,
and hawking and spitting, Bagger looks up at a looming Lyon Reis, devolved into the negative of a French mime, his face blacked with soot but red eyes still stabbing, stabbing, and he’s got the walking stick, the gold plating gone marmalade with Bagger’s blood, in the grip of his right hand, his new right hand, and Bagger, unable to speak through blood soup, holds up a hand to ask the major general to wait,
and Reis does not wait, he strikes again with the wonder weapon of his right arm, all the gears of his body finally working in factory synchrony, and the stick cutlasses through air too fast for Bagger to track, he only hears the whistle and feels the wind quiver his eyelids, one second Bagger’s outstretched hand is whole and a blink later, his index, middle, and ring finger are snapped flat against the back of his hand, three metacarpals poked through the skin, all smaller bones demolished,
and somewhere Arno’s snarling like a little mutt, but Bagger’s lost inside white wallops of pain and doesn’t see when Reis swings the golden stick a third time, only hears the same whistle again and feels the same breeze, and on instinct retracts his demolished hand into his chest, one more hit will rip the fingers clean off,
and so he takes the blow in the eye and that’s it, the lamp goes out, sure as a shattered bulb, his left eye gone, the pain a strange electricity in the fat of his brain, though worse is the crisp, alien feel of air inside an open socket and the syrupy crawl of vitreous humor down his face, some of it dribbling into the hole Reis knocked through his cheek, all of which tells Bagger that this is how he dies, the eggshell obliteration of every single piece of his body,
and Bagger waits, but the final strike doesn’t come, so he spends time choking, the imbroglio of his sinuses full of blood, he gags and strangles and retches, and tries to catch it, like Father Muensterman once palmed his puke, but the vile potage ends up in his finger wounds, now he’s dying of his own poison, if he hasn’t been poison all along, a lying, cheating, stealing, walking bottle of arsenic,
and his ears pick up the sounds of a struggle, he wants to know what kind, but must first relearn how to see, his field of view is halved, all depth flattened into a sketch by an artist obsessed with the color brown, and there, brushed into the background, two familiar figures frolic,
and the first is Arno, spider-monkeyed around the angel, trying to keep hold of her through his full weight, and the second is Reis, who has the angel by her wrist and is pulling her with madness and might, he’s liable to detach the angel’s arm from its socket, while his other arm, the new one, bludgeons the kid with the walking stick, the red leeches of welts erupting across Arno’s skin, his hair raspberry with blood, blood fluming from a forehead gash, blood spouting from an ear, the kid’s about to be killed, no third chances for Lazarus,
and yet the heroic brat doesn’t let up, he levers a boot heel into a floorboard crevice and leans the opposite direction, a tug-of-rope for the fate of the world,
and all the while, Reis squeals, “Minerva is mine!,”
and Bagger plants his good hand into his own jellied blood, curls a leg under him, and sways, or else it’s the dugout swaying, about to collapse, and he pistons his thighs, by some miracle his legs still working, and he’s up, somehow up, forehead batting the boards that dangle from the ceiling, salty spit eddying in the chasm of his three lost teeth, each gasp crackling like a straw at the bottom of a drink,
and Bagger’s bones sling back into their sockets like he’s made of pool cues and billiard balls, his left foot lands and the world slants leftward, same routine on his right, like he’s on the observation deck of the Lusitania, trying to reach his father in time to save him, and if there wasn’t a war lusting overhead, Reis would hear the hiss of Bagger’s sliding feet and the splat of his sleeting blood, but as it is, he closes the distance unnoticed,
and there on the floor, right behind the tug-of-ropers, lies the Model 1911 Colt .
45 that Reis wears on his belt, incredibly it has fallen free, perhaps bungled while trying to point it at Arno, a black steel beauty, the slide already pulled back, the recoil spring tight, aching to empty its seven-cartridge mag,
and Bagger doesn’t believe the gun’s really there, must be a trick of one-eyed vision, until he drops to a knee and picks it up, ice cold, scapula smooth, redolent of mulled wine, and anchor heavy, it’s a struggle to lift with a sprained right wrist, but also a palpable joy, the textured butt in perfect union with his calloused palm, the half-moon trigger another match for the crease in his index finger, and the Colt’s steel freeze creeps up his hand’s bones, wrist bones, and onward, a whole new arm to rival Reis’s,
and quickly the steel undergirds Bagger’s whole body, he’s no man anymore and he’s sure as hell not made of dough, he’s a .45-caliber tool built for a single purpose,
and he rises without pain because he’s solid metal, and finds Reis has nearly taken full possession of the angel, Arno’s a mallard color, warted in bruises, bathed in blood, yet still clinging to the angel’s legs, prepared to die before giving her up,
and Bagger wonders if he’ll be able to line the V of the .
45’s sight with only one eye, but at this range aim shouldn’t matter, he extends his arm and points the Colt at the back of Reis’s skull, not two feet away, and Bagger feels a grin, October air burning through the hole in his cheek, into the abscess of his missing teeth, he’s eager, it turns out, for the symphony of broken bone and splattered brains,
and echoes of his promise pelt him like attacking gulls, You must promise, oh fuck, never to take another’s life, fuck fuck, for as long as you live, the angel said.
If you fail in this promise, fuck this, a catastrophe beyond imagination, not fucking now, will consume your entire world, and Bagger’s grin wilts into a toddler’s frown, it’s not fair, the vow must be voided, a few strikes more and Arno will be killed,
and with his single-eyed vision screwing into black vignette, Bagger bellows in a voice mangled into unintelligibility, but of course the angel understands all, “HELP ME! PLEASE! I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO!,” a cry not too different, after all, from Save me,
and the reply comes from the Argonne and beyond, the world and its peaceable creatures, not quite extinct, the lion’s roar, the wolf’s bay, the robin’s call, the puma’s growl, the frog’s croak, the dolphin’s click, the bee’s buzz, the elephant’s trumpet, the grasshopper’s rasp, the snake’s rattle, the monkey’s chatter, the antelope’s grunt, the alligator’s hiss, the bat’s squeak, the cicada’s chirp, the deer’s bleat, the donkey’s bray, the hawk’s screech, the elk’s bugle, the goose’s honk, the horse’s nicker, the lemur’s whoop, the leopard’s snarl, the mosquito’s whine, the owl’s hoot, the pig’s snort, the pigeon’s coo, the raven’s caw, the seal’s bark, the songbird’s warble, the turkey’s gobble, the boar’s grumble, the zebra’s yip, the whale’s song, and the chicken’s buck, oh, the emphasis of the chicken, prodded by the sharpest of gaffs,
and together, you could call it a shriek,