Fat Man and Little Boy (28 page)

“Which one?”

“The basic one.”

“You want cheese, ma'am?”

“Why not?”

Little Boy orders for himself and Maggie. The waitress gives them crayons from a crayon box she carries. They draw on the blank white undersides of their paper placemats. She does a picture of Dorian and Pierrot, which is all she's drawn since she met them. Rosie says it's just a way of processing her feelings. She says Maggie is a deeply feeling girl. The brothers always look like they're in pain the way she draws them. They seem to try to push each other away, their heads tilted as if pulling, and one of them is always crying, though it changes which is which. The only detail that ever looks quite right is the egg-shaped gap between their necks, inside which gap she always draws a little moon, just as she saw it then. The rest is sort of a mess.

Fat Man watches the salt and pepper shakers like it's the only way he can keep them from talking.

Someone else comes in. A couple teenagers. The girl is pretty. The bell rings again. Charlene tells them to sit where they like. She'll be with them shortly.

There's a pain in Fat Man's gut that won't go away, though he knows what he can do about it. There's a gun there, Masumi's—empty, cold, and hard. He's been wearing it taped up in his own folds to hide it from his family, who use his pockets freely, who wipe their snot on his pants, who make him carry things for them, but who don't touch him otherwise now. He used medical tape—the kind that sticks to skin, secreted in the line that bisects his stomach like a sideways ass, wrapping bandages around the point of division. It makes him walk a little funny but discomfort suits a man of his girth. It seems right that he should waddle, that he should rest a hand on his gut as if to hold something in place, seeming now to suffer an ulcer, seeming now to adjust a hopeless girdle. When Fat Man left the country he couldn't bear to leave the gun. While he taped and bandaged it up inside himself, Rosie knocked on the bathroom door, asked him what in hell he was doing that was taking so long. He said it was a number two. She said to hurry it up then. He said, “You can't hurry genius.”

Now the kids are asking for more paper. Rosie takes some from the notebook she keeps in her purse for this purpose, tearing out three sheets each for Little Boy and Maggie. The kids snatch them from her hands.

Fat Man asks Rosie how it feels being back in the USA. She says she doesn't feel like she's back. “It all seems so new. Some of that is I've never been to the west coast. Some of that is I haven't been back since the war. Some of it is they're a bunch of brats here and I'd like to wail on them a while.”

“I could go for some wailing,” says Fat Man.

“Or whaling!” shouts Little Boy, making a big fat gut on himself in the air with his hands. Maggie giggles. Fat Man kicks him underneath the table.

“That was uncalled for,” says Little Boy.

“What did you do?”says Rosie.

“Nothing,” says Fat Man.

“Nothing,” says Little Boy.

Little Boy salts his fries basket. He pours ketchup. He asks Maggie would she like anything on hers. She shakes her head nuh-uh. They knock their feet together sideways underneath the table. The soles of his shoes make a nice cloppy sound against the soles of hers.

He cuts her grilled cheese in half down the diagonal because the kitchen didn't bother and because that's what she likes. He asks her if she wants her crusts. She says yes. Rosie has been teaching her to clean her plate so she can get big and tall. Little Boy doesn't see the urgency in that. All the pretty girls are short.

Maggie scrapes off the scabbed cheese goo where it dripped from the sandwich onto her plate and sucks it off her finger. Little Boy eats his fries. He asks where they'll go for the rest of the day. He asks if they'll see a movie. Rosie says they can see the people who make the movies instead. Fat Man says that they can see a movie if they want. They'll be here for weeks, after all. Little Boy says can they go to the beach. Fat Man says that can wait until tomorrow. Little Boy says can they tour the homes of the stars. Fat Man says they can do that in a few days.

Little Boy says he promised Maggie a tour of the homes of the stars first thing.

Fat Man says he shouldn't promise things he can't deliver.

Maggie is still picking the cheese from her plate.

Little Boy nudges her with his elbow. “I bet you can't eat your sandwich before I eat my hamburger.”

She wolfs it down, finishes before everybody, gets cheese on her cheek.

Little Boy napkins it off.

She says, “Can I ride in the plane?”

“I haven't got any quarters,” says Fat Man. “It's not so fun anyway.”

“I'll get some change if you give me a dollar,” says Little Boy. “I can take her outside.”

Rosie opens her purse.

Fat Man closes it and says, “I don't want her playing with that kind of toy. They warp young minds. Look at these kids.”

He motions at the Hollywood children. One of them has climbed up on a table. The kid wears a cowboy hat and a T-shirt with a sewn-on picture of a bucking bronco. He pretends to shoot with gun-fingers. “Pow pow! Pow! Pow pow pow!” His mother tries to pull him down by the cuff of his pants. She begs him to behave. He stomps on her fingers.

“You want her acting like that?” says Fat Man.

Little Boy says, “You wouldn't be a brat, would you Magnolia.”

Maggie shakes her head.

Little Boy says, “Come on, we'll play in it without the quarter. The best part is sitting in the cockpit anyway.” He leads her out by the hand. He hoists her up into the cockpit. When he looks in the window he sees Fat Man is looking out at them, watching so closely. Like he doesn't trust Little Boy with his daughter. He ought to. Little Boy knows her best. Little Boy takes care of her all the time. Little Boy knows how to make her laugh.

Little Boy named her, for God's sake. He loves her more than anybody.

He stands behind the plane, hands planted on each wing. There are four fat springs underneath the plane, attaching it to the base, and in their center a hydraulic mechanism to make the plane bounce for a paying customer. Little Boy can tilt and jostle it a little if he puts his back into it. “Now you're shooting them down,” says Little Boy. “Fire the machine guns, Magnolia.”

“Budda budda budda!” she shouts.

He bounces the plane. “Now they hang left. Swoop with them.”

“Eeeeaaaauuurrrrrrhh.”

He tilts it left as hard as he can, lifting the right wing, pushing on the left one's end.

“There's so many of them, coming at you from all directions.” He pokes her all over with his fingers, makes her giggle, pokes her under her arms, between her ribs, in her tummy, belly button, back of her neck, behind her ears, saying pow pow pow, pow pow pow.

“No, nooo, no, I dodge them.”

“You can't dodge them all. Your engines are failing.”

“I fix the engines,” says Maggie. “I'm a mechanic.”

“Japan comes into view!”

“Japan?”

He turns the plane left, twists it to the right, pushes hard to quake it, she's laughing and scared all at once.

“Budda budda budda budda!” she shrieks.

“You only have a short window of opportunity to drop the bomb and win the war.”

“Drop the bomb?” says Maggie.

“No, no, not yet. You've got to wait till you're over the target.”

Maggie hunkers down. She squeezes the wheel. “I'm ready.”

“Not yet,” says Little Boy, husky, low in his throat. He wipes sweat from his forehead. “Not yet.”

“I'm ready!”

“Give it another second. Be patient. Calm. You only get one chance.” His body hums inside. His guts clench and loosen. Stomach burns. The feeling of free fall. Weightless. Turning mid-air like a pinwheel. The moment before impact. Heat. Light. Thunder. White-out. White.

“Now,” shouts Little Boy. He sticks his fingers in his mouth and whistles, starting high, then falling by gradations as the bomb falls away. He shouts, “KABLAM!” and simulates a rumbling in his throat and in the wings, jumping with both feet as high as he can and stomping, shaking the plane hard, making Maggie's teeth chatter. She laughs and laughs and laughs. “Now fly away. Go, go, go, before they catch you. Don't let them see your face.”

“They'll never catch me.”

“You're free!” he says. “You're free!”

He looks back inside and his eyes catch his brother's. Fat Man is pale. He sweats. He turns and says something to Rosie, who quickly scoots out of the booth. Fat Man climbs out and walks, stiff, a little crooked, toward the back, hand sliding along the wall as if for guidance.

A man in an apron exits the restaurant. The bell rings inside. He has a mole on his chin with a long black hair, and his nose is raw and red. He puts his hand on the plane's nose. “You're supposed to pay for that,” he says. “You see the quarter slot? That's where you put your money.”

“I haven't got any money,” says Little Boy.

“Then I'm taking her out.” The man in the apron lifts her from the cockpit by her arms. “Go find your parents and ask 'em for quarters if you wanna play.”

“Take your fucking hands off my cousin,” says Little Boy, “or I'll tear your balls out with my teeth.”

The guy sets down Maggie, who bites her lip and grinds the toe of her shoe into the pavement. She might cry. Rosie comes out the door. She says, “Is there a reason you're man-handling my daughter?”

The galoot says he works at the restaurant. That's all he's got. He goes back inside. Rosie lifts up her little girl. Little Boy rubs Maggie's back.

“We'll leave as soon as Daddy comes out of the bathroom,” says Rosie.

They jaywalk across the street when traffic slows. A homeless man sits on the nearest bench, at the very edge, inviting anybody who wants to sit with him to go ahead. Rosie prefers to stand.

Little Boy says he'll get Fat Man.

The galoot glares at him from the kitchen as he passes.

He knocks on the bathroom door. “Are you okay in there?”

Fat Man says he's fine. “I'll come out soon.”

“Rosie wants to go to the hotel.”

“My bowels appreciate the update. Why can't you people ever let me use the bathroom in peace?”

Little Boy leaves Atomic Burger. He crosses the street back. Rosie has persuaded the homeless man to leave the bench. She sits there with Maggie, the little girl now very tired, yawning, blinking often, one eyelid lagging the other in a sort of drunken wink. Little Boy asks to hold her. Rosie lets him do it. She adjusts her hat to better block the sun, and looks at her watch, and waits for her husband.

“He'll be along soon,” says Little Boy.

“You can't rush genius,” she says.

There is a billboard advertising the services of a Madame Masumi, “Consultant to the Stars.” Pictured thereon, a beautiful Oriental spirit medium, but without a wooden box or peacock feathers: instead many necklaces of beads in various sizes and colors, many gold and silver bracelets, hair entwined with crow feathers, a small sort of purple turban, someone's idea of a Japanese sorcerer's robe. The faintest suggestion of cleavage. There is a number you can call. Little Boy asks Rosie does she see the billboard.

“It doesn't look like her at all,” says Rosie.

Little Boy agrees it can't be her.

Fat Man sits on the toilet, unwrapping the bandage that holds in the gun. It was, he realizes, unnecessary to hide the gun. No one has put a hand in his pocket. Maggie has not wiped snot on his pant leg. Nobody would have felt it. No one's gotten close enough to have the chance. They are farther from his body than he thinks.

The gun has been hurting him. He peels off the medical tape and rolls it into a ball, which he drops in the waste basket. He extracts the gun from his folds. Somehow it's still cool to the touch. He checks the chambers: still empty. He groans as he squeezes his insides, as he cradles the gun in his sticky, pulsing fingers. If someone tries to hurt his family he can scare them away. If someone tries to come for him he can scare them away. If the police come because they've heard who he is, he can scare them away. It's only if he has to fire the gun that he's in trouble. He should be in prison. He should have stayed and let them take him away.

He stands up, rests the gun on the back of the john, peels toilet paper and wraps it all around his hand. He looks in the bowl to see what he's done.

There is a thick, black shit in the shape of a bomb shell. It looks too round and perfect to have come from inside his body. The ends taper smoothly. When he flushes it spins on one end for a long time, like a lazy top, refusing to sink.

He thinks, “There I am.”

He thinks, “There I go.”

He thinks, “That's me.”

He tucks the gun under his belt, the handle sticking out at an angle but invisible beneath his untucked shirt, the hammer like a silver tooth digging into his hip.

Seeing a movie in Hollywood is like going to church. Everyone dresses up. The ushers guide you to a place where you'll feel welcome or at least out of the way. The room swells with talk until the show starts, and then everybody shuts up. The audience's eyes fill up with hope and need while the music blares and then, when the talking starts, they settle in. This one will be like the others. But you've got to respect it. The ritual of the movie is more important than the movie.

It's another Hanway brothers film. This one about a detective looking for a man who killed three girls. It unfolds like a slow-motion chase scene. The audience sees the killer shoot someone who is sobbing off screen. That somebody shrieks and abruptly stops crying. The killer handles several pieces of evidence that will give him away. Detective Jack Miller—the Hanway brothers, Able and Baker—comes onto the scene a moment later, handles the same evidence, deduces the location of the killer, and follows him to a casino, where the crook is gambling, until he leaves for the hotel bar, and then the detective comes to the casino, and asks after the crook, and deduces the crook is headed for the hotel bar, where the crook drinks a martini. The crook drinks a little while and then leaves out the back way, leaving several clues, which the detective draws together so that he finds out where the crook lives, and he goes there, only to find the crook has already emptied the place, and just left for the coast. The detective follows, meeting a beautiful woman on the way. The beautiful woman gets kidnapped by the crook just as the detective is catching up to him. Then there's an actual chase scene through town, the crook in a taxi, the detective in a borrowed police car, over a bridge, across a river, into the back streets, the crook wiping sweat from his brow, the dame taunting him. He'll never make it, Detective Jack Miller is hot on his tail. He should turn himself in. What did he kill those girls for anyway, didn't he know he'd be caught? He has to be caught, justice demands it. Just as the detective is pulling up right behind him, bumper to bumper, the crook swerves the wrong way and wraps his car around a tree. The detective cries as he pulls the dame's limp body from the back of the car, her hair blowing in the wind, the car burning behind them, the fire climbing the tree, making the whole thing burn, palm leaves and all. But it turns out the dame is fine. She's alive. Everything is fine. They kiss. Which brother is she kissing? Is it Able? Is it Baker?