Fat Man and Little Boy (5 page)

A PORTRAIT OF
BROTHERS

It takes them several weeks to find a forger. The way they do it is Little Boy talks to American soldiers about fake passports while behind him Fat Man watches silently. The soldiers assume Fat Man is using Little Boy to make himself look innocent. But Little Boy's thinking is that this looks the most natural. As the older brother, he should take charge. Fat Man wonders several times why they always seem to talk to him when ostensibly answering Little Boy's questions. Little Boy says it's because he's taller. “They don't have to crane their necks that way,” he says, his voice thick with disdain: what lazy brutes, these soldiers.

There are also whole days where they talk to no one but each other, where they lie in the dirt and breathe. Fat Man tries to talk about the fire, about birth, about the tree. Little Boy doesn't want to hear it. He says that's all over. He says, “Little boys don't have to think about such things.”

Some days the farmer's family feeds them salted pork. The farmer's family never speaks in their presence. The brother bombs whisper when they enter the home. Some days they do not visit the farm to buy food at all, which Fat Man takes to mean the money's running thin. Most days Fat Man wants to leave.

The police still wake them up sometimes, holding hands. They don't say anything. Only watch the brothers and after some time leave. They look thinner every day. Little Boy won't leave the farm, won't say why. The brothers find new sleeping spots around the property. The policemen find them. One time the brothers found the policemen sifting through the leaves where they had slept the night before. One of them found a small something—the brothers couldn't see what. He showed it to the other and put it in his breast pocket.

One day Little Boy talks to the right soldier. The soldier whispers into Fat Man's ear what to do, where to go, who to see.

Their forger is a GI who goes by Ralph. They meet him at his post outside a former munitions plant, which is being repurposed to make washing machines and refrigerators. He wears his helmet at a rakish angle. They know him by the red handkerchief tied around the end of his gun's barrel. He knows the brothers are coming. When he sees their tentative approach he closes the distance to offer his hand. “Hello,” he laughs. “You the ones want the passports?”

They follow him back to his post, where he stands with another soldier who doesn't bother pretending to do anything but listen in.

Ralph says, “So?”

“We heard you could help,” Little Boy says. He attempts a commanding tone. It comes out of his mouth slantwise, like it doesn't want to go. “What's it going to cost to get documentation that says we're two American brothers?”

“Not too much,” says Ralph. “Got to wonder why you'd go with such a cockamamie story though.”

“We don't look American to you?” says Little Boy. “How many Japanese you know his size?” He raps his brother on the gut.

“Looks like a sumo to me,” says Ralph. “But you ought to go as whatever you really are. Father and son, uncle and nephew, two strangers passing in the night. Not that it matters for passport purposes. They don't exactly come in matching pairs you know.”

Little Boy fumes. “He really is my little brother! Can't you see it?” He holds Fat Man's hand to show how close they are.

“I heard you were weird ones,” says Ralph. He slaps his knee but doesn't laugh. “Listen, if you'll drop the routine for a minute I can help you, and not just with passports. I can get you American ID if you want it, cheap liquor, American food, Japanese hash.” He puts his hand beside his mouth to shield it from Little Boy, mouths to Fat Man, “Women. Pussy.”

“We only need the passports,” says Little Boy.

Fat Man says, “We're going to France to start over with a clean slate and forget about everything.”

Little Boy scowls. His brother didn't have to say that, not any of it.

“All right,” says Ralph. “What we'll do, I'll take your picture. Then I'll give the film to my man and he'll put it together for us. You pay me half now, the rest while you're picking your jaw up off the floor from how good he is.”

“You're not the forger?” says Fat Man.

“I'm the vendor. Forger's a little yellow craftsman I keep holed up at home all day.”

“How much?” says Little Boy.

The vendor musses the little boy's hair. “Hundred-fifty each,” he says to Fat Man.

“We don't have that much,” says Little Boy.

The vendor twists up his mouth in the corner: You serious?

“We can do two hundred flat.”

The vendor waits to see if the boy means it. When he's seen the boy means it, he laughs.

“Fine,” says Fat Man. “One-fifty now, one-fifty when we see the job. Pay the man, Brother.”

Little Boy glares up at him. Fat Man grabs him by his ear and tugs a little. He growls, “I said pay up.”

Little Boy tears up. He thumbs the money bill by bill from his jacket pocket. Fat Man lets go of his ear. Little Boy rubs it, sullen. He curses beneath his breath.

“That's what I thought,” says the vendor, counting the money. “Nobody goes to France without cash. Gotta buy some paintings, buy some cheese. Now there's one other thing. I'm gonna need your names. Of course they don't have to really be yours, so long as you can remember them when you're asked. If I could do it all again, I think I'd have them call me George. Like a king.”

Little Boy ignores the question; he's still biting back tears.

“I'm John,” says Fat Man.“This is Matthew. You were right. He's my little nephew.”

“Course he is,” says the vendor. “But I don't care.” Later, when it occurs to him they never offered a last name, he will choose one for them. He will wonder why he failed to ask. The forger will provide their heights, the colors of their eyes and hair, their dates and places of birth, and Fat Man's profession.

“Now let's take your picture. Then you and the tyke come back and see me in two days.”

The vendor assembles his camera and unfolds his tripod. He mounts the camera on the tripod, makes it spin, flashbulb and all. They've never seen a passport, they aren't sure how to be, so they pose there together, their backs to the trees. Fat Man stands behind Little Boy, places a meaty hand on his shoulder.

In his passport photograph Little Boy will stare at the camera while a soft, faceless behemoth in a blue suit towers behind him.

In his passport photograph, Fat Man will look down at Little Boy with something like warmth and affection. Fat Man's face will be partly hidden by the brim of his hat, which neither brother has thought to remove.

“Two days,” says the vendor. “Come back then with the rest of my money.”

Little Boy makes Fat Man carry him home. “Put me up on your shoulders,” he insists. They go this way for a while in peace, Fat Man's knees and spine straining but willing; he feels bad about undermining his brother in front of the vendor. This is meant to be a peace offering.

“Go faster,
Uncle
,” says Little Boy.

“No.”

“Go faster,” says Little Boy, using his heels as spurs.

They careen down an empty road. Fat Man's sides burn; he reaches back and slaps the boy's face. Little Boy grabs his brother's ears and pulls with both hands, hard. Fat Man roars, rears back. Now Little Boy hangs from Fat Man's ears, gripping tight to stay up. Fat Man thrashes. Slaps his brother on the back. Digs his fingers into the little boy's ribs. Hurls him off, so Little Boy falls to the ground, rolls onto his back. He groans. Fat Man stalks away, off the path into a forest of tall, thin trees. He squats among them, breathes deeply. The sullen slump of his back, the lump of his body, like a mushroom.

Little Boy sits up. To his brother's back he says, “We agreed I was in charge!”

He says, “We agreed I was your big brother!”

He says, “We never agreed on those names! You did that alone, without my permission!”

He stomps his foot. “You have to listen to me!”

He stomps his foot again. “Do you know how much money we've got? What you promised them means either we stow away on the boat or we stop eating immediately.”

He stomps his foot again.

He says, “What do you have to say for yourself,
John?
”

Fat Man turns around like an outsize baby who just learned to sit up. He looks his brother dead on, sees the snot that runs from Little Boy's nose, and the narrow thread of blood therein.

“I'm sorry, Brother,” he says. “Nobody believes it.”

Little Boy asks him who anybody is to tell them who they are. Who that rat bastard GI fraud artist was. Who anyone is to tell them how they should be. “You were no one when I found you,” he says. “You were a coward in a hole. I searched for you and I found you. I've taken care of you. Taken care of everything.”

“I'm only saying nobody believes it,” says Fat Man. “You know I've tried. But when people say big brother they don't seem to be thinking of age. They're talking about size. And anyway, I look older. Do you not like Matthew? We could call you something else. We could go back now and tell him your name is whatever you want it to be. You could be George, like he said.”

“I can see I've been too easy on you,” says Little Boy. Unsteadily, he climbs to his feet, and goes into the forest, where he pushes Fat Man by the shoulders. Fat Man, still sitting, rocks a little back, is otherwise unmoved.

“What are you doing?” Fat Man asks.

“Spanking you,” says Little Boy.

Fat Man laughs.

“I'm spanking you,” shrills Little Boy. “Bend over!”

Fat Man bends over. “Go ahead,” he says. “If it makes you feel better you can wail on me all you want.” Their positions suggest a father playing horsey with his son. Little Boy seems about to climb on. However, he inserts his knee beneath his brother's gut, kneeling a little to achieve the effect, as if he supports the lummox. Little Boy brings down his hand on Fat Man's left buttock. The sharp sound echoes in the trees. Fat Man feels nothing. Little Boy strikes him again.

Again.

Again.

Fat Man holds in his laughter the best he can.

Little Boy goes frantic. He wails on him with both hands. Each impact produces a satisfying but meaningless sound, no pain, no catharsis.

When he's done Little Boy says, “There.”

He says, “I hope you've learned your lesson.”

He says, “I don't like doing that. But it's for the best.”

They walk home together. Fat Man expects Little Boy to demand another ride. But Little Boy knows better.

That night Fat Man counts the money. Makes a budget, accounting for the cost of their tickets to France. Tells Little Boy they've got enough money left for the passports, for their journey, for one meal a day.

Nothing more.

“When we get there,” says Fat Man, “we'll need jobs.”

Little Boy closes the cash case, snapping its ruined hinges into place. “You'll need a job,” he says. “Little boys don't work.”

They visit the squealing pigs.

They sleep in the mud.

THE PIG KNOTS

Little Boy wakes. He sees the farmer's daughter is stalking toward him and his snoring brother. He raises his hand in an awkward, fearful greeting. She grabs him by the scalp; she breathes words he cannot understand, words he can't answer. He can't see her eyes in the darkness. Only the long, sallow shadows cast by her brow, which creep into the gaunt valleys of her cheekbones. He can't see her teeth or her lips—only the divot underneath her nose like a teardrop, and the hole of her mouth.

He thinks she is asking him questions, that she's blaming him for something he's sure he didn't do, would never do. She holds him by the hair on the back of his head, pulling it harshly. She takes his hand in her hand. Her hateful grasp.

“How can this be?” she says, in Japanese. “I am a virgin.”

She pushes his hand against her stomach as if she means to pull him inside. Their sticky skin is touching, her belly, his fingers. He didn't think she was naked. Perhaps her robe is open. She says, “What have you done to me? What has America done?”

Then the drums begin. Wild-thrashing in her gut. She holds his hand in place until the thing inside her makes him sore. He digs with hard, dirty nails into the cold, taut swell of her belly. He means to draw blood but the heat doesn't come. It doesn't come.

Morning now. Little Boy finds Fat Man standing with the mother at the edge of the pigpen, leaning over the fence, her hands on a post. The wind tugs at her hair. She leans over the fence and watches. The father and his daughter kneel in pig shit, it is smeared all over their bodies. The sows birth lumpy little piglets into father's and daughter's waiting hands. They rinse the piglets with well water from a bucket, straining blood and mucus through their fingers. They tuck the newborns in the blankets. They roll them up together; they pile baby pigs for warmth.

The piglets seem only half-formed, pale and fetal.

The father instructs his daughter as they work. He lifts sow tails and points to the swollen, painful things beneath. He whispers to her how to care for new mothers, how to pull free their young. The mother pigs look bloated in some places and in other places thin. Their bellies are distended, their ribs protrude. Their skin is shiny and wet, overstretched—nearly transparent. They lie on their sides in their filth and their blood, panting for air, squealing pitiably. Little Boy thinks what it would be like to toss them in the river. To make them drown. There is something loathsome about them. Something he can't name. For the first time, the father acknowledges Fat Man and Little Boy. He says a word of greeting, lowering his eyes demurely as if it were
his
body sprouting new things. Little Boy says nothing. Fat Man imitates his word.

Little Boy leans in for a closer look at the piglets. They are very still and very quiet.

The father sees his interest. He takes a piglet from the rest and rolls it side to side in his hands as if molding dough. Fat Man understands that this is meant to keep the small thing warm. When the father hands it to him he rolls it in his hands too. His hands shake from repulsion; he struggles not to drop this dumb, half-made thing. The father hands another piglet to Little Boy.

These newborns are bald all over. Their faces sag with exhausted agony; their eyes have not opened; their ears are so thin that you can see the veins inside them. They are weak children—this one can barely move its hoof, can barely move its head. Its piggy nostrils flare and shrink. This animal is too thin to live. The joints are blueish, and its mouth hangs slack as if unhinged.

Fat Man leans in close. The flesh is so doughy, so pliable—it molds itself to his fingers as he rolls it in his hands.

Little Boy's piglet opens its eyes and it tilts its head to look back into Little Boy's eyes. There is perhaps a spark of recognition, some brief lucidity, and the child begins to keen. To sing for his attention, like a whisper, like a plea. Little Boy realizes he is dropping the piglet.

Little Boy has dropped the piglet.

“Careful,” shouts Fat Man.

It's on the ground, crumpled, barking for help. The father clucks to scold Little Boy; he shakes his head. He is whispering something about the right way to care for a piglet, and the wrong way. The dropped piglet stands up faltering, it sways on its knees and soft cloven hooves, it looks up at Little Boy.

Fat Man says, “He looks like you. He wants to be carried.”

It barks again. The father and the daughter are busy with the sows, there are still more babies coming out of their hindquarters, some of them have died from giving so much birth.

The other piled piglets come to in their blankets. They wriggle out of their folds and traipse across the pigpen, halting, dipping their noses in muck and muck and muck, dragging their soft white bellies, leaving shallow furrows in the muck and muck. They sneak under the fence. They are a swarm. They are crying for something, for hunger, for love, for
anything
. They crowd the brothers. They gnaw toothlessly at their shoes and pant legs, tugging with slow, zombie strength, weak and implacable, urgent and breakable. The piglet swarm begs their attention. They put their fore-hooves up on their shoes. They soil themselves in anticipation, though they have not eaten; it comes out a gray milk that leaks from underneath their tails. Fat Man holds his hands up against himself like a tyrannosaur. He wants to kick them away. Little Boy leaps up on the fence. The father sets a newborn down and it too begins to cross the pen, to slip beneath the crossboards of the fence, to join the throng around Fat Man's ankles. It is a kind of worship. They look up and beg with their eyes for him to lift them, for him to hold them in his arms. They call for Little Boy to come down.

The mother and the daughter watch with the same pinched, illegible expression. From Little Boy's new height, the bulge of their stomachs is apparent. Little Boy remembers and it fills him with terror. He knows what it is to be born. How it hurts, then and after.

Fat Man calls to the farmer, the mother, their daughter, “Help me. Can you take them away?”

No one knows what he's saying. The piglets crowd and oink for his love. They call for Little Boy, who now balances atop the highest crossboard on the fence, feet and shaking hands, precarious. No one comes to help them or seems to understand their fear. The pigs exhaust themselves. Some go to sleep or collapse, squealing. Some of them may die. When the herd has thinned, Fat Man and Little Boy run for the house, pursued by several of the more robust piggies.

They stay for midday meal. The births have made them guests—the mother refuses their money. The farmer brings in a butchered sow from outside. Peeking through the doorway, Little Boy assures the still panicked and nearly tearful Fat Man that the piglets are all asleep or suckling with their mothers or those mothers still living.

Fat Man collapses against the wall. He heaves. He says, “The way they look at us.”

“I saw it,” says Little Boy.

“They know,” says Fat Man.

“What can pigs know?”

“They
see
us. What we are.”

“You can't be sure of that,” says Little Boy. But he saw it too.

The mother cooks the pork. It smells the way a burning person does.

“Do you recognize that smell?” asks Fat Man, sweating through his shirt.

“No,” lies Little Boy. “I don't.”

The sun comes down low. The pigs raise a ruckus as if calling for a meal, though they have been fed today. The father, the mother, the daughter go outside. There are mutters thereafter but no discernible words, no sounds of swine.

Little Boy goes outside first. Fat Man reluctantly follows. The women's hands worry the timber. They scratch against the grain. It makes a sound like grinding teeth. Fat Man and Little Boy join them at the fence.

The father looks up from his sow. His hands are full of blood like oil. There's a gray-pink thing like a worm with knots on its sides half-submerged in the blood. He places the worm on a tumorous pile of like worms and wipes his hand in the muck among tens of other red streaks. Blood floats on muck surface like oil on water. The father puts his hand inside the pig. He pulls out another pink, knotty worm.

Fat Man says, “She's dead.”

They are all dead or dying, all the sows and all the new babies. The newborn shoats have given up their suckling but do still nuzzle their mothers as if to urge them back to life. The hogs stand indifferent. They are still like gelatin is still. They stare into the middle-distance with puckered eyes and wait for someone to feed them, casting shadows in various of the cardinal directions. Some east, some west. As if the sun's come down close, has deigned to walk among them in the pen. The father hums a sad song. The women are crying. All their pigs are dead, or will be soon, except the hogs.

What good are hogs alone, Little Boy wonders.

He sees his brother's face in a hog's face. Neither of the brothers has ever looked directly into a mirror. Little Boy's face might be the same. Fat Man may not know his own resemblance to the hogs. Or he might guess.

The father's pulling red-tinged strings of mucus from between his fingers and flicking-flinging them away. He begins to pile the sows' corpses, dropping them one by one onto something like a wheelbarrow, a flat wooden platform perched on two tin legs and a tin wheel.

The daughter shrieks. There's a growing wet stain on the back of her blue robe. Briny water trickles from between her legs. The mother assaults her with questions while the daughter fights a swoon. Her water has broken.

The mother says, “Come inside, or you'll give the pigs a meal.” She takes her daughter by the hand and rushes her into the house.

The piglets that live have begun to crowd the brother bombs, again oinking at their ankles.

“The pigs must think you are their fathers,” says the father, laughing a sour laugh. The sound dies in his throat. A darkness passes over his face. He understands something that he did not before. The hog shadows grow longer; the animals themselves do not move. The piglets oink and squeal. The father turns away from the brothers. They don't know what he said. They don't know what he understands.

The father wheels the piled sow bodies to the home, where he takes them on his shoulders and carries them through the door. As the paper door slides closed Little Boy glimpses mother and daughter inside the home. Mother sets down a short, broad wooden bucket. The daughter watches her, shakes her head, and whispers painful secrets. She clutches her robe—gathered up in her fists so that her strong young thighs the color of moon are exposed—and presses it between her legs as if to staunch the flow. The mother comes to the door. She closes it, glaring at the brother bombs. The daughter is staring into the wooden bucket, and then she is bisected by the closing door, and then she is gone.

Little Boy looks at the pile of unfinished pigs in the muck and muck and muck of the pen. They are weird lumps of raw, misshapen meat, almost certainly inedible. He wonders, Do they have bones?

He says to Fat Man, “Carry me,” and, before his brother can object, leaps into his arms. Fat Man stumbles back a little. He tries his best not to kick any babies as he walks them toward the house. The oinklings follow. The hogs lie down in the filth; several loll onto their sides.

The mother sits behind the daughter. The daughter, now naked, squats over the pail, her heels butting up against either side, her legs already trembling. Her breasts are painful-looking—sharp, high fistfuls that seem to be ever and constantly squeezed, even now, by the hands that made them. A thin red stream like razor wire falls between her legs, though it does not seem to fall but rather to hold fast, like a measure of yarn connecting her body to the water below. In the water the red is murk. Marbles clarity with unclarity.

The mother is massaging her daughter's abdomen. She pushes and prods with her fingers, and the flesh turns ivory white where she presses, and pink around the white, like burning film. The mother's legs splay out around the daughter. They can see the hard, cracked skin lined with dirt on the soles of her feet. They cannot see the mother's face.

They can hear the mother screaming at them. They do not know what she says.

They know exactly what she means. “GET OUT!” she is saying. “GET OUT!” They cannot see the father, but hear him in the room like a kitchen, butchering sow bodies.

The red yarn between the daughter's legs is cut. Droplets fall, then nothing.

Fat Man closes the door. The brother bombs sit down among adoring piglets.

They sit against the house. The piglets are curled up against them asleep, or they are sitting in their laps, or they are sniffing all about their shoes. There is one sitting on the cash case. If they are awake they are looking at the brother bombs, contemplating their vastness through puckered piggy eyes. Inside the home the daughter cries for mercy. It's been maybe an hour. Little Boy circles his finger in the dirt. He draws clouds.

“Do you think they knew she was pregnant?” says Little Boy.

“I'm not sure she knew,” says Fat Man.

Little Boy holds his tongue. She knew
something
. He thinks of his hand on her stomach, her hand pressing his, the heat of her body, and the ruckus inside. He remembers the mother squatting on the toilet as her daughter squats now in what is like the living room. He remembers the frenzy of the pigs, their midnight meal, a feast of night soil. It all must be connected but the only connection he can find is that he saw all of these things. They listen to the rising symphony of crickets, to the farrowing daughter, the butchering father.

Fat Man lifts a baby pig to look in its eyes. “Do you think she'll be all right?”

Little Boy doesn't answer.

“Why do the little pigs know who we are and not the big ones?” says Fat Man. “And if they know us, then why do they love us?” He sets down his pig and looks at his black palms. “How can they love us?”