II

and Bagger wipes his face with his forearm and five pounds of matter plop off his head, his brains, he supposes, all that blood on his face was his after all, and because he’s become educated in what brains look like, he stares into his lap for confirmation but all he sees is yellow clay, there’s nothing more ordinary than yellow clay in the Argonne,

and while he’s staring at the claybrains, he notices a voice,

and the voice feels like part of the shriek, an undertone,

and Bagger knows undertones, he grew up enveloped in the poly-phony of the church’s old pipe organ, the Swell, the Choir, and the Great woven like flutes, strings, and reeds, but this undertone is from a yet uninvented keyboard calledvoice,

and the voice says,Bagger,

*   *   *

and it’s stimulating how the word seems to buzz from within his own flesh, that’s how it felt when standing beneath the sanctuary pipes, though Bishop Bagger would have told little Cyril that’s only guilt murmuring from inside you, a sentiment the adult Cyril Bagger refuses to buy, he’s worked too long to bury such weepy notions along with the hundreds of dead bodies,

and so he ignores the voice, it’s just his skeleton vibrating from the mortar strike, and takes a big, fetid inhale, all right, Bagger, your division’s on the march, not good, but otherwise things are as you left them, which is to say absolute shit, Jerry’s shells have slashed a half-mile cleft through the trench system’s doglegs so that front, support, and reserve trenches all reside under a fourth designation called smithereens,

and within those smithereens Bagger verifies that Company P indeed lingers, there’s Lieutenant Aquila’s gorilla limp, there’s Sergeant Rasch’s crow caw, but instead of slumped like mutts in post-battle stupor, Company P is on its feet, bumping like windup toys between fat tongues of displaced mud, and Bagger wonders if the shriek is driving them mad, too, damn sure something strange is afoot, and Bagger’s got to goose himself to life if he’s going to outfox it same as he’s outfoxed everything else,

*   *   *

and so he imagines General John. J. Pershing lording over him, demanding,Where are you, Private?, and he saying,France, sir!, and Pershing saying,More specifically, Private!, and he saying,Bois de Fays, sir, and bois is frog for woods, sir!, and Pershing saying,Very good, Private, and do these look like woods to you?, and he saying,No sir, but they might have been woods a few years ago, sir, before the giant trolls came through, and Pershing saying,And what were those trolls’ names, Private?, and he getting the gruff old army commander to crack a smile by saying,Marne, sir, Verdun, sir, Somme, sir, stomped the shit out of everything, sir,

and Bagger laughs, and it helps more than the Bible, hallelujah, hoist the flag and let her fly, Yankee Doodle, do or die, Private First Class Cyril Bagger feels more like lucky old Bagger again, the Hawkeye Hustler, the Sioux City Sharpie, the Council Bluffs Crossroader, the Dean of Dubuque, nicknames he earned from being banned from half the riverboats on the Mississippi, not that he doesn’t own a tackle box of disguises capable of getting him back on those boats the second he gets home,

and once he’s back in Iowa, he’ll rerun the same schemes, the flop, the ring reward, the pigeon drop, mine salting, pig-in-a-poke, the fake-counterfeiter, he’ll even do a classic melon drop just to prove he still can, hell, before the Army nabbed him, he even toyed with psychic boobery, finagled a metal rod to jut from a hidden leather cuff to make the table seem to rise beneath his hands, a total bust, though he knows the spiritualism con is a growth area, grievers make the best marks and postwar America’s going to be lousy with grievers,

and it’s this same sleight of hand that has kept him safe out here, that and a bacon can packed with domino