Fat Man and Little Boy (6 page)

“This is love?” says Little Boy.

“Who knows what pigs feel?” What he means to say is, Yes.

The daughter weeps. The mother is crying now too. They hear one savage chop as the father embeds his knife in the block's corner and then nothing, footsteps, nothing, wailing, wailing.

The father comes out with a baby. It is a soft thing, unfinished like the pigs, and seems to have too little skin—the elbows won't straighten; the toes curl in, and express themselves mostly as lumps in footflesh; the chin tucks into the collarbone. The fingers flex and squeeze like hungry claws. The father puts the baby in Fat Man's hands. He says, “Somehow this is your fault.” For a moment Fat Man thinks he might know what was said.

The baby grabs Fat Man by the lapels of his suit and pulls. It burbles stupidly, its throat raw from crying, too weak now for the life ahead. Spit bubbles in the corners of its mouth. Its eyes are like wet marbles.

Fat Man burbles at the baby. He gives it one of his fingers to clutch.

“It doesn't look quite right,” says Little Boy.

“Maybe this is how Japanese babies look when they're fresh from the oven.”

“It makes me think of the pigs.”

“I can't think who would be the father,” says Fat Man. “I haven't seen her with any men, other than her own father.”

“And you,” says Little Boy.

“I hardly count.”

The father returns to the wailing house.

Little Boy pats the baby's tummy. There is something familiar in the child's dumb gaze.

The next time the father comes out, there's a second baby in his hands. This one is smaller, grayer, and still. He hands the body to Little Boy. The head falls back from the body, exposing what is like a neck. The eyes are closed, the mouth half open.

The father watches him hold the baby and waits, as if expecting Little Boy to say something. As if Little Boy will confess to the murder. Little Boy shrugs. So does Fat Man.

“Are the women all right?” asks Fat Man.

The father goes back into his home. The brother bombs are left to watch their babies.

Fat Man's child alive and Little Boy's dead.

Little Boy says, “I don't think mine is breathing.” He concentrates on the face of the baby, watching for the slightest hint of motion. “Why'd he give me this one?”

Inside the home the family is quiet like dead things are quiet.

FAT MAN EXPLODES

Inside the home it is dark. There are the ripe smells of open bodies. The women must be in what is like the kitchen. They have left their pail, which brims with things that came from inside them. Fat Man sets his baby in a blanket. Little Boy is still trying to read the dead thing in his hands. The kitchen wall slides open. The father stands naked in shadow, half-butchered pigs piled on the table behind him, an iron cleaver in his hand. His bones show through his skin like actors behind curtains. His penis is long and thin like some sickly root. They cannot see his eyes.

“How did you do this?” he asks them.

Little Boy clutches the stillborn against his chest as if the father is a hungry thing. Fat Man might know what's being asked. He might recognize the words.

The father says, “Before you came, before the Americans, everything was fine. How did you put babies inside them?”

Fat Man says, “What?” He asks in Japanese.

The father advances on the brother bombs. “How did you do it to my pigs? How are you to blame?”

Fat Man understands “how.” He understands “blame.”

There is motion in the dark. The daughter cradles her mother's rubber body behind the table. The mother is breathing like she does not mean to do it.

Fat Man searches for a weapon. Little Boy trembles and crawls behind his brother. “Help me brother! Save me!”

The naked father lunges. He sinks the cleaver into Fat Man's shoulder. Blood sprays the wall. The father pulls the knife loose, and Fat Man is screaming, he lashes out at the air. The father wipes the blood from his eyes with the back of his hand—it smears, a sticky stripe. His left eye is stuck closed and the right is spiderwebbed with angry veins. They breathe into each other's noses and mouths, they taste the sour inside each other, they hear the rush of air. Fat Man is still screaming. He is squeezing his shoulder when he should be fighting back.

Little Boy has fallen to his side. The baby rolls like an empty jar. Little Boy knows what it's like to explode. It's like this. He is going to explode. He can feel the awful, acid heat inside him between icy bones and sizzling skin. He feels the vertigo of expansion—the giddy over-filling of a straining bright balloon.

He is a bomb again, he is a bomb again, he is a bomb exploding.

Fat Man falls on his back, the naked father is on him. The naked father cleaves the ground beside his ear.

“The baby,” shouts Fat Man as he claws the father's face and peels of skin bunch up beneath his nails.

Little Boy puts his thumb in his mouth. It soothes him. The expanding inside does not expand, but pulsates, hot and cold, too much and too little, in and out, boy and bomb and boy and bomb. He sucks his thumb.

Fat Man hits the father with the cash case. The father carves a corner from his ear. His blows are wild. Fat Man hits him with the suitcase again, and again: flat, dull thuds. Until a golden corner finds the father's temple.

The body now is like the stillborn baby, but so heavy. Fat Man holds the suitcase in both hands and brings it down like a guillotine, smashing the father's head against his own breast. The skull gives. Warmth flows over his chest. Fat Man knows that he is screaming, has known from the start. He means to continue.

Little Boy is safe. He opens his eyes and unclamps his teeth from around his thumb. He has fouled himself. In this dark the stillborn's body looks like pink-blue sand dunes sloping toward oblivion. The limbs are all wrong, the head all crushed, like the father's now.

Fat Man pushes the father's body from his body. Their blood is everywhere and looks identical.

“What did you do to him?” says Little Boy.

“What did you do to
him
?” says Fat Man, indicating the stillborn.

“I nearly exploded,” says Little Boy. “I was so scared.”

Little Boy puts his blanket over the stillborn and takes the still-living baby from his brother's bed. The baby has been wailing; now it stops. To stare at Little Boy with moony, tired, porcine eyes.

“I did explode,” says Fat Man.

The women are asleep in the kitchen. For the first time, the brother bombs see the sleeping mats the family hid beneath the table. Little Boy places the living baby down with the daughter, its mother. Fat Man goes through their food stores. He takes their rice bag and their small portable stove. He takes their stores of pork and drops them in the rice sack.

Little Boy says, “I don't think we should do this. We just killed their father.”

“You talk as if he didn't try to kill me first,” growls Fat Man. “Besides, I'm starving. Every time I asked for seconds she just stared at me. As if she couldn't work out what this meant.” Fat Man holds out two fingers insistently—two, two, two.

Little Boy rubs his eyes. The newborn watches them silently. It's trying to read them, as Little Boy tried to read its stillborn brother.

“Would you even care if I died?” says Fat Man. His brother answers with a glare. Fat Man clenches his hand. “You hid behind me. You were supposed to protect me and you hid behind me instead. How can you question me?” The gash in his shoulder sings like an old brass bell. “You stink,” he says. “Take off those pants.”

“I told you not to take their food!”

The daughter stirs. She sees the bloody giant standing over her with her family's rice, her family's stove. She asks them, “Where are you going?”

“God damn it,” roars Fat Man, “I'm hungry! I'm hungry, and you're done telling me what to do.” He rubs his palm over his face. He leaves the room and comes back with the blood-covered suitcase. The daughter understands what she is seeing. She shakes her mother hard. Fat Man opens the briefcase and hauls out great honking wads of cash. He hurls it at the women. The mother wakes. Some bills stick to them, sticky with blood. The rest fall around them like green confetti.

They harp and twitter with inscrutable questions, accusations, threats, pleadings. The newborn cries. There are open pigs on the table between them, all viscera and threads of fat. “Why did you kill him?” shouts the daughter. The mother fights to keep her eyes open. “Why did you kill him?” the daughter screams, again, again.

When the cash case is maybe too low and the women have been thoroughly feathered with dollars, Fat Man sets off running. Little Boy follows, still stinking in his soiled pants, and crying for the stillborn.

They sleep this night by the road, in the brush. They should leave the scene but they are too tired.

In the morning Fat Man makes all the rice the stove can hold and roasts pork over the flame. Little Boy takes a handful. Fat Man eats the rest.

Little Boy is wearing his other pair of undershorts, his dress shirt, his tie, and blue suit jacket. He left behind his hat. Fat Man slept in his bloodied clothes, now festooned with small green leaves, yellow weed blossoms, and a crushed spider's legs. Between handfuls of rice he progressively disrobes himself—drops the jacket, opens his shirt, shrugs it off, pulls off his pants over his shoes. Shiny white grains of rice stick to his hands and face as he wolfs down the food.

“Why did he do that?” says Little Boy.

“I never claimed to understand the Japanese mind,” says Fat Man. He begins to dig at the dirt with his hands.

“Why was he naked?”

“Why am I naked?” says Fat Man. This is not strictly true—he still wears a too-small undershirt and a mostly-white pair of shorts, but so much of him spills out, and he is so pink, that the effect is very much that of a bare body. The shirt is red-stained on the shoulder, but not like the one he wore last night, which lies in the dirt, crusty and so red it's almost black. “Like us, he had very few clothes to his name. He didn't know who we were or who we knew—for all he could say, we had big, important friends with guns who would be coming by to check on us the next morning.” He rolls his sodden clothes into a heap and puts them in the shallow hole that he's been digging. “Had he done otherwise, he would have ruined his clothes, and there would have been evidence. This way, had he killed us, he would only need to take a bath.” A disquieting thought crosses his face like a crow's shadow. “And bury our bodies.”

“What now?” says Little Boy.

Fat Man pushes dirt over his clothing and pats it down flat as he can. He sweeps loose brush over this, tears leaves from the nearest tree, and drops them on the mound.

“Now we go to town, we avoid soldiers, police, and Japanese in general. We buy some new clothes.” He shakes the cash case. It makes a nearly empty sound. “Cheaper ones. We wait for our passports and plan our escape.”

“They'll be looking for us,” says Little Boy.

The two policemen, tall and short, limping and not limping, come out the front door of the farmer's home. They see Fat Man and Little Boy but do not dwell on them. They walk down the road, away, away.

“They're leaving?” says Little Boy. “Did you know they were in there?”

“You're full of questions this morning,” says Fat Man. “You done being the big brother?”

“I don't understand what you're talking about,” says Little Boy. “Did they not see the bodies? Did they not know it was us?”

“They don't care,” says Fat Man. “You haven't figured it out? They don't care. They don't care, and you don't know anything.” He wipes the sticky rice from his face; leaves dirt trails on his cheeks. “Get up on my lap, Matthew,” he says. He pats his knee. He is kneeling.

“What?” says Little Boy.

“Come up here on my lap,” says Fat Man. Pats his knee again. “Come on.”

Little Boy climbs up. Fat Man grabs him by his scruff and forces him down on his belly, across his knee.

“You didn't protect me,” Fat Man says. “You were supposed to be my big brother. But nobody buys it. I'm the big brother now. And when we are with people, I'm your uncle.”

Fat Man begins to spank him. Little Boy feels each blow.

“Who is your big brother?”

“You are,” says Little Boy, choking back a sob.

They buy new clothes. They sleep behind the home of a man who makes luxury cars. Every morning he sees them waking up in their new clothes and their white skins and thinks they must be customers. They walk away without a word.

Fat Man pawns their fancy suitcase, having cleaned off the blood as best he could. It fetches a very good price. He buys another suitcase: same size, same shape, only gray, simple. They live on the pawn money. They buy their tickets to France.

Fat Man eats constantly. He buys rice and cooks it on his stolen portable stove.

Little Boy doesn't mention how his brother's getting fatter. Little Boy eats too-small helpings and burns inside. He makes prolonged eye contact with strange girls on the street. They stare back at him blankly. He finds a black felt hat on the road and he wears it, though it does not match his clothes. He makes Fat Man piggy-back him wherever they go. Because he is the big brother now, and sometimes the uncle. Fat Man never complains.

Nor does he talk anymore when he eats.

WHAT EVIDENCE
THEY LEFT

Fat Man sits in a small Japanese home, an open suitcase on the floor before him. This is the cash case. It is still clean on the outside. It still opens from the wrong side—the broken hinges, bending at the soft lock. On the other side of the cash case are the two policemen, one short and one tall, both quite starved and deadly thin. They have shown their credentials. They showed their credentials and indicated that Fat Man and Little Boy should come with them. “He's a child,” said Fat Man. He said this in Japanese. So they took Fat Man away from his brother. They left Little Boy alone.

Little Boy who asked Fat Man, “How do you know Japanese?”

Now the policemen are sitting on the floor on the other side of the open cash case. Its lock will only bend so far. They cannot see what's in the case, but they know. They put it there. There are inside perhaps a hundred dollars, clumped and clotted by dried blood. Some leaves the brothers may have laid on, now reduced to twiggy skeletons, also crushed. A small, gray mound of dirt or dust. The fat man's bloodied shirt. The father's knife. So surely they have seen the father, collected testimony from his wife, his daughter.

They do not ask the Fat Man any questions. Only look at him and wait for him to say what he will say.

They wait.

They only wait.

“My boat is going,” he says, slowly, with some effort. The way he learns he's learned a word is he says that word. He says, “I need to go also.”

“What did you do?” asks the tall policeman. “What are these?”

Fat Man shakes his head. He means to say he does not understand. He does not know what he understands until he answers. There is language. There is somewhere language. On the air or in him. Like a spider's web is snared somewhere on his body, but he can only see the trailing thread: there is language.

“We found the body,” says the short one. “We found his knife.”

“What did he do?” says the tall one.

Fat Man takes a twiggy leaf bone from the case and twists it between his fingers. He says, “No.”

He says, “I need to go.”

He lays the leaf's bone down in the cash case, now an evidence case. He looks at the knife. To see it makes his shoulder ache.

The policemen study his face. For signs of guilt? For feeling? They must want to arrest him. To put him in prison. Yet he is American. There are rumors of American soldiers who travel in rape gangs. It's said they cut the telephone lines on one city block and move from home to home, raping wives and sisters, mothers and daughters. Some of the women they kill, but mostly they can't be bothered. There are no trials. If these men cannot be tried, then how can Fat Man? The wife and her daughter, if they have given testimony, may well have told the truth, in which case it was self-defense. If the mother and her daughter lied, then Fat Man is still an American—a well-fed one. One who wears a suit. Though it is always the same suit. He may have connections. Perhaps he knows MacArthur. Or so they may think. Or it may be they are waiting for Fat Man to implicate himself. To break down sobbing. It is not precisely guilt he feels for what he did, though on other days it has been guilt. To what could he confess? Not the pigs. Not the babies. But neither the father: the father least of all. His palms are black. Do they think this normal? Do they see it as a sign of guilt?

It may be the language barrier protects him. They do not know how to interrogate a person with so little Japanese. Are confused by the fact that he has any in the first place. They cannot accuse who they cannot interrogate. Or they empathize, perhaps. They imagine him on the witness stand, if there is a witness stand, if in Japan they have such a thing. They imagine the prodding questions of the prosecutor if there is a prosecutor, or a judge if there is only a judge. They imagine Fat Man listening dumbly, waiting for a word he knows. His pidgin responses. Unresponsive, even inappropriate, puzzling and puzzled. He might think they didn't care about his guilt if not for the hardness in their faces, if not for their resemblance to the dead soldiers, one short and one tall.

It may be these sickly men could not arrest him if they wanted. These do not carry guns. They have only truncheons. They are perhaps too weak to wield the truncheons. He could maybe crush them, or they may think that he could crush them, that there is no arresting him without the aid of others. He has seen so few other policemen in this city on the coast. They are watching him. He is looking back at them. He is looking at the evidence case. Perhaps they mean it as a gift. He could close the case, slide its hinges into place, and go—a memento. The sound of a knife in a suitcase, the sound of scabbed money. Some dirt. Luggage, only luggage. Only what he carries.

The tall one closes the evidence case. The hinges click into place.

Or it may be there's no point. Even assuming the possibility of arrest, of conviction. There were these bombs. Not here, but nearby. There were these bodies. The bodies are gone. There is no good count of these bodies. There were other bodies? What's a hog farmer's body? What's a stillborn baby? What are two crying women? Compared to two cities and all the bodies therein, now gone?

They cannot know he was the thing exploded. Or can they know? They cannot know.

Still there are his hands.

“Are you sorry?” asks the tall one. But Fat Man does not understand.

“I need to go,” says Fat Man. “The boat is going.” He realizes he can say “without me.” “Without me,” he says. “The boat.”

It occurs to him he can leave. The small Japanese home may be the home of the policemen. They do not seem at home here. But there are signs that someone lives here. Used dishes, an open book, a telephone in the corner, on the floor. A painting of mountains hanging on the wall. A sock, discarded. These things all could be theirs. This home is not a prison.

He stands. He leaves the small home. The policemen only watch. As he passes through the doorway, one of them—the tall or the short, he does not turn to see—reaches for his hand, and holds it. The policeman's skin is cold. His grip is tight. Not painful, but tight. Not a threat, but tight. Not angry, but tight. What the hand seems to say is, Wait. What the hand seems to say is, We can talk.

Fat Man pulls his hand loose. He goes.

Outside the home is Little Boy, who followed them here. He's been sitting on the ground, back propped against the home, waiting just beside the door. He might have heard it all or nothing. He says, “We need to get to the boat.”

“They have the cash case, and other things.”

“So we should go then,” says Little Boy, taking Fat Man's hand. “Do you know Japanese now?”

“No,” says Fat Man. What he means is that he only knows a little. What he means is that it was no use. What he means is he rejects the language. He rejects this country. He rejects the evidence case and everything within, not because it's wrong but because it's not enough.

They go to the dock. They wait in line to board their boat. They hold hands so as not to lose each other.

When they board the boat the Japanese policemen are there to watch them from the shore. Not to stop them or to wave. No goodbyes. Their faces are illegible from the deck. Their bones show through, but not their eyes. Their uniforms are clean and pressed. As the boat departs, the tall one collapses. The short one catches him in both arms, and for a long time they seem to kneel together. When it seems they will not, cannot stand, then they do stand, together, the short one hoisting the tall one up to his feet. When each is righted, they lace their fingers.

They too hold hands.