Fat Man and Little Boy (8 page)

THE LANGUAGE

Little Boy knows little French. He likes it this way. He is sweeping the restaurant's floors. Conversation hangs shimmering over his head like thick, moonlit fog over a highway, or orbiting planets. He makes no effort to discern the meaning or mood of these exchanges, and because the restaurant grows busier as the day advances there is little risk of differentiating prattle from chatter, verb from adverb, idle talk from debate. There is only the continuous rattle, an eternal phoneme, spit-flecked.

If he should find himself sweeping next to some confiding, sweet-whispering old lady, her skin spotted with after-marks of hungry rations, her teeth patchy and many gone, her hair thin beneath the tightly tied emerald-green kerchief she wears like a disguise. If he should find himself sweeping beside her, and she should put some treat in his mouth, thumbing it past his lips and his own aching hungry teeth. If this should happen, then that's okay, and who cares why, or what she whispers in his ear, or how she calls him, or whether he is rude because he doesn't answer, or whether she expects an answer or does not.

About one in four people leave something behind when they leave a restaurant. One in three times it's only some food they meant to take home. One in three times it's an object of small value. One in three times it's a bit of cash, or something of real value: a good watch, a set of cufflinks, a gold chain, or some such. The first category can be eaten. The second and third can be pawned.

When someone leaves Little Boy does what he can. This means cleaning and thieving—what he can do is often both. If someone sees him they don't say a thing, and if they did say a thing he wouldn't know they said it, and so he could stare back at them blank and blameless as a tea light. What could they say?

He doesn't know what they could say.

If it's food he's taking from their table then it isn't really stealing, since the alternative is throwing it out. He brings it to Fat Man or he eats it himself. If it can be pawned, he puts it in his pocket, or brings it to Fat Man if it's too large. These are his brother's instructions.

A couple calls him to the table, or seems to call him. They wave at him. They're young and he's wearing an eye patch. She's always touching him with one hand or both. They're married or young lovers. They speak French like they are blowing smoke rings. Little Boy nods when they want him to nod. The girl musses Little Boy's hair. Her sleeves are ruffled, as is her dress. The girl tweaks his cheek. He giggles, perhaps coos. This must be what it's like for babies before adults make them learn to listen and speak. His own sounds are part of the language cloud apart from Little Boy himself; he can hardly feel them in his throat, can hardly hear them at all.

He feels happy like a baby. He feels simple and empty, like Hiroshima without all the people and rubble. The young couple is looking away from him so he drifts away from them and sweeps a corner of the floor. To live without language is like living in the time before Fat Man, when nobody knew who he was, or what. If he wasn't happy then it wasn't the silence that made him that way. It was the environment and what destroyed it. No one could be happy in a place like that.

Here and now he is happy.

If in his happiness he should hum some tuneless tune, then what harm amidst insensible French? Which itself is not wholly unlike the sounds of scales played on a flute—the flutter of the air's escape, the soft, soft fingers fingering. He bobs his head. He sweeps the floor. His arms are numb.

He wants to piss himself he's so happy.

When the owner gives him bread he holds it through his yellowed cuffs so the mold will grow more slowly. He drinks the milk like shooting hard liquor, swallowing faster than it can spoil, tasting nothing but a hint of fat.

When the night is thick and the tables are full Albert comes, without Francine. Little Boy goes to him, nods while Albert speaks to him, and if Albert is cruel then Little Boy doesn't know or understand. Albert smokes and reads a novel. He kicks up his feet on the table. For a while he seems to talk to Little Boy about what he is reading, or not what he is reading, and then they are done talking.

Little Boy sweeps the floor. He sneaks a bite of cheese from an abandoned plate. He takes a crumpled bill forgotten at an empty table. He knows, as he knows whenever he steals, Fat Man will be pleased with him. Perhaps if they exchange more money they can exchange fewer words.

 

That night Fat Man counts out the cash and the pawnable items, passing them from one soft black palm to the other and then piling them in a cloth sack.

“What a good little thief you've become.”

Little Boy shrugs. His cheeks throb like an oven's coil.

“It's circumstances. Are we supposed to go on wearing these clothes? People can barely look at us.”

“They can look at me just fine,” says Little Boy. “They think I'm cute.”

“When Francine asks us where we got the money you can say it's from begging.”

They lie together in the quiet. It's not quiet enough. Francine and her husband are arguing upstairs. Little Boy doesn't ask his brother if he understands. He curls up more tightly in his blanket. His tongue feels fat from speaking and he'd like to stop now.

As if to cover for something embarrassing, Fat Man pipes up again. “Have you learned any new words yet?”

Little Boy doesn't answer.

“Matthew,” says Fat Man, “have you learned any new words?”

“No.”

“How do we say that in our French?”

Little Boy shakes his head.

“It's
non
. Just no with another n. That one's easy.”

Francine shouts something at her husband. Something about babies, thinks Little Boy. He doesn't want to know that word. He covers his head with a pillow.

“What about cheese?” says Fat Man. “How do we say cheese here?”

Little Boy says, “No.”

“
Fromage
. It's fromage. We've been over this a thousand times. You'll never learn if you don't even try.”

Little Boy pretends to snore.

“Some women would count themselves blessed to live childless,” growls Albert. The ceiling seems to sing along. “Some women would call it a curse to feed their mouths, to suckle them while they grow their sharp little teeth.”

“Zzzz,” says Little Boy, like an engine.

Francine makes them breakfast. When she leans over the table to serve up sausages Little Boy watches her stomach for any telltale bulges. He sees Fat Man is doing the same. They've also learned to watch the breasts for any growth, and legs and feet for swelling. They know about morning sickness and the things women eat.

Francine isn't showing. But she will. Fat Man says later what Little Boy is thinking now: she's going to be a big one, ripe and swollen like the best, most juicy pear. As for Albert, he suspects nothing. He sits with his bare feet on the table, reading the paper until breakfast is served. His nails have not been trimmed in weeks. If he still wears his gun, now he at least secrets it away somewhere. There is a bulge in his gray suit jacket this morning, which makes the cloth hang heavy from his thin, handsome body. He talks to Francine about something Little Boy wills himself not to understand. She is hunched over the stove. The words roll off her shoulders and down the long, hard curve of her back. She waves him away with a limp motion of her wrist.

“There's an Oriental spirit medium coming through town in two weeks,” says Francine. “I hear she's quite lovely. Maybe we should see her when she comes.”

There's a little blonde girl at the restaurant that day, there with her mother on holiday. Maybe her birthday. The girl eats cake and other sweet things. Her mother seems to be there to watch her eat. Little Boy sweeps a spiral around their table until he is sweeping beside them. Today the language is like a hundred balloons floating overhead and bobbing up against the ceiling. Little Boy smiles at the little girl. He's pulled his suit jacket closed and buttoned it to hide the yellow filth of his shirt. It doesn't fool her. She won't show her teeth. It occurs to him his teeth are all the wrong color.

There's a pile of dust and pocket lint and bits of crust and crumbs pushed together where he left them by the wall. He nudges newly collected debris—picking up a brass key that fell from someone's pocket, tucking it in his—and adds it all together. He sweeps up all of it in his dustpan and empties it out in the kitchen dustbin. He looks at the blonde girl with her mother in the dining room. She's babbling at her mother. Today all the language is like vomit sloshing ankle-deep on the floor.

Now Albert comes into the restaurant, a friend by his side. They sit at his usual table and light cigarettes. They tap out their ashes at the same time—it looks as if the orange lit ends are kissing in the blue ceramic tray. The friend is tall and wears a gray flannel suit with a blue tie. His cheeks are lousy with burst veins. His eyes bulge unpleasantly. He sees Little Boy staring and calls him over. He touches Little Boy on his shoulder, on his tummy, through the boy's threadbare suit. He musses his hair and tweaks his nose. There is laughter in his eyes, his mouth is partly open, Little Boy can see his bumpy tongue between his skewed white teeth, peeking out like an inmate. Albert is droning softly in his friend's ear, and Albert's friend nods slowly, accepting each word. His mouth is tight at the corners. His Adam's apple rises and falls like a hand-cranked elevator. He won't stop touching Little Boy's hair. Little Boy walks away, and if they object, if they don't like the way he leaves them to their own, then he cannot hear them say it, or does not know he hears.

Two French policemen, one short and one thin, come into the café. Little Boy pretends not to recognize them. They seem, for one glorious moment, not to recognize him either. They do not meet his eyes or say a word to him, do not acknowledge his familiar face. Maybe they have forgotten, or maybe these are other police who only look very similar; he is too afraid to study them openly, to confirm they are or are not who he thinks.

They go to Albert's table. They tell Albert something to the effect of he is under arrest. Or maybe they are only asking him to go with them: they do not cuff his hands. He seems to have known they would come for him. He may have told his friend, who does not seem to be distressed. As they are leaving, the short one—Mr. Bruce—turns to Little Boy and winks.

Little Boy goes to see Fat Man. He doesn't tell about the police because he doesn't want to make his brother mad. Fat Man will find out soon enough. They share a lunch of bread and cheese. The cheese grows a slow, strangely colored mold as they eat it. When they want another bite they scrape away this second skin.

Fat Man says, “It feels good to be working again.” The sink is full with filth, and maggots squirm therein. “Would you like to see the Oriental spirit medium when she comes?”

Little Boy nods.

“Of course if she begins to look too authentic we shall have to leave. We've got a lot of ghosts to think about.”

THE CRIME

“Albert won't be joining us this morning,” says Francine.

What she means, thinks Fat Man, is that he'll be with the police. Again. “I wonder why they don't arrest him already. Or declare the matter concluded.” They speak French together, as they have taken to doing since he inserted himself in a domestic dispute between mister and missus. Little Boy moves food around his plate.

“Her husband won't accept it was an accident,” says Francine. She joins them at the table, as she never does when Albert's home. “Not that I blame him. And not that I think it excuses everything. But it was an accident, John.”

“I know. Man won't even load his gun. Besides, those cops are twits.” He puts his hand like a fat pancake over her small, cool hand, which trembles and jerks beneath his. Not from romantic fervor, he knows, but perhaps because he disgusts her. Why not? His tits are bigger than hers.

She extracts her hand to hold the fork. Not without a certain glancing piquant eye contact as her flesh withdraws from his, nor without embarrassment at the moist suction applied by his skin. But women think they have to be tender.

He excuses himself to the bathroom. The waste runs like crude oil. His body is like a tarp draped over the emptiness it leaves. He feels numb and tired, the way it feels to bleed.

He watches himself wash his hands. His reflection looms in the mirror, swollen and hunched like a caterpillar worrying a leaf. The soap froth slicks him. He rinses and dries on his new gray wool sweater, leaving greasy-looking streaks on the breast and gut. He had hoped that fresh clothes would make him feel better, new again, alive. The folds at the corners of his eyes droop; they threaten to fall away like flower petals.

He squeezes his tits and pushes them together. He claws his cheeks until they are marked with red streaks the way his sweater's streaked with damp.

“Not me,” he says to the mirror. “It wasn't me.”

He says it until he believes.

When he comes back to the kitchen he sees Little Boy's collar is askew. He straightens it and does the top button. Francine has left, her plate half-scraped into the garbage. It pains Fat Man to see such waste.

Everyone wants to know more about the Oriental spirit medium. She'll come tonight, she'll do a show, it will be at 7:30. This much is known. The rest is all rumor. She is said to wear many scarves and paper charms, but little else. She is said to be the most beautiful Oriental anyone has ever seen. She is said to be cursed or a genuine devil. They say during her last performance she made a table float several inches off the ground. They say she keeps a dead boy bound to her by his ankle, though no one can see or hear him. They say she talks to snakes. They say that everything talks to her—not only spirits, but rocks and trees, picture frames and pitchers, cookie jars and sugar bags.

Jacques relates all of this as he tells everything, as if it were a wild joke. He interrupts himself often to laugh. Fat Man smiles back at him—even when he tries, the boss doesn't give him an opening to speak. He still assumes that Fat Man has no French, yet he does speak to him (natters, really, at the speed of a rock slide) as though he'll understand. Jacques has taken to visiting him every day. Fat Man thinks it must be like visiting the zoo.

He is careful to work very hard when the owner comes calling. He uses his fingernails if he has to. They're black underneath.

Jacques leaves laughing. Fat Man opens up a pack of cigarettes he keeps on a shelf beside the sink and lights one. He watches the smoke rise, imagining it's a spirit, one that can talk to him.

He can't imagine what a spirit would say. What can they want? They have nothing. What can they need? They are nothing.

Jacques comes back to the dishwashing station. Fat Man twists his cigarette against a dinner roll and throws it away. There are two men behind Jacques. The two police, short and thin. Mr. Bruce, Mr. Rousseau.

“Will you come down and have a talk with us?” says the short one, in English. “It's in connection to your host, and the matter of a dead girl, among other things.”

“We've got you this time,” says the thin one.

They sit around a table in a room like a large closet. The walls are white bricks, and the white bricks pockmarked and cratered as if they've been nibbled. There is a bare, flickering light bulb hanging above them.

The short policeman, Mr. Bruce, has a coin-slot gap in his front teeth and glasses with thin, silver frames. Mr. Rousseau, the thin one, has long, greasy, clumpy sideburns like whiskers and a large pimple on the side of his nose. They examine Fat Man as if
he
were the bulging zit. They wear the faces worn by the soldiers and Japanese policemen tall and short.

“How are you doing, John?” asks the short one. “Are you well since last we met?”

This is his very subtle way of alluding to the fact they have met before, north of here, in another place, and perhaps implying he plans to develop their relationship; something like cowboys and Indians.

“Why are you here?” asks Fat Man. “Are you following me?”

“A pure coincidence,” says Mr. Rousseau.

“The purest,” says Mr. Bruce. “Of course we were interested to encounter you again, here, under such circumstances as these. So very much like the last time.”

“We wonder,” says Mr. Rousseau, stroking his left sideburn, “what you know about the murder.”

“The alleged murder,” says Mr. Bruce—an elaboration, not a correction. He merely enjoys the word.

“I understand the doctor made a mistake and the girl bled out. I guess she was a bleeder. I guess no one warned Albert, or the doctor, that she was.”

“Abortionist,” says Mr. Bruce. “We prefer to call him the abortionist, for the purposes of this case, since he was not practicing medicine at the time, but rather death.”

“You've brought Francine a lot of suffering by clinging to this tragedy like it was a crime,” says Fat Man. He wants his cigarettes. They are a new habit, but he can do nothing in half-measures. He wants a real big sandwich to eat while they talk at him, too, or a platter of cheeses. A tall, frosty mug.

“You know how they do an abortion?” says Mr. Rousseau. “They break the baby into chunks, and then the mother passes it out, usually into a toilet.” He gestures as if jiggling a handle.

Mr. Bruce says, “Imagine a sweet baby's arm dangling from your bleeding snatch.”

Fat Man says maybe they should arrest the abortionist then.

Mr. Bruce raises his hand as if to strike him. But the hand rises slowly, and then it returns to the table. “We'll deal with him. Why did you come here?”

“I wanted to start over,” says Fat Man.

“We mean here, as in now, this city.”

“I wanted work.”

“It wasn't because of us?”

“Me and Mr. Rousseau,” says Mr. Bruce, touching himself where he keeps his heart, “we hope you weren't fleeing any investigations.”

“It's hard to get work with two cops following you everywhere you go.”

“Do you remember Laurel,” says Mr. Bruce, “from Paris?”

“This again?” says Fat Man.

“Do you remember Laurel?”

“I remember Laurel,” says Fat Man.

They had worked together in a Parisian bakery. She died in labor because she was so small. The child died as well. The police, on seeing Fat Man and Little Boy, assumed the hard, hateful expression of the Japanese soldiers and policemen, and then some­how connected her death to Fat Man, terrorized Little Boy in an interrogation room very much like this one, but ul­ti­mate­ly came away empty-handed.

“We didn't have you then,” says Mr Bruce.

“We've got you now.”

“How do you have me?”

“We've got a pattern here, developing, as we speak,” says Mr. Bruce.

“What pattern?”

“Two sweet young girls bleeding to death out their cunts,” says Mr. Rousseau. “Both times your fault.”

“I never met Albert's girlfriend,” says Fat Man. His hands become fists on the table. “What you have are two unrelated, however terrible, events, and a ghoulish outlook on life. The only ones that see a pattern here are you.”

“The girlfriend's name is Marie,” says Mr. Bruce. “Marie Blanc. She was someone's wife as well.”

“I never met Mrs. Blanc.”

“Did you or did you not begin lodging with Albert on the night of the murder?”

“I did. We arrived while he was out, probably at more or less the same time he was watching Mrs. Blanc bleed out on the abortionist's table. His wife Francine will confirm this. So you see it's impossible for me to have been there myself, and so I couldn't have participated in any murder, assuming there was one, which I very much doubt. He threatened me with an empty gun that night, which tells you first what sort of terms we're on and secondly his ratio of bark to bite.”

“You said you needed work,” says Mr. Bruce. “Maybe you found it. We understand you're lodging with Albert rent-free. He doesn't seem the giving sort to me, does he Mr. Rousseau.”

“No he does not, Mr. Bruce.”

“What did you do for him?”

“Nothing,” says Fat Man. “His wife gave us the room.”

“How did you buy your fine new clothes?” says Mr. Rousseau.

“I wash dishes at a café.”

“You bought a new wardrobe on a week of dishwashing money?” says Mr. Bruce.

“Are you sure you weren't there when she died? Are you sure you didn't help?”

“I wasn't there, and I couldn't have helped. I am neither doctor nor abortionist.”

“He means you helped to kill her,” says Mr. Bruce.

“Based on what evidence?”

Though he knows he is innocent of the murder, and in fact believes that there has been no murder, his heart begins to burn as if the police are pouring in a boiling vegetable broth. He mops the sweat from his brow.

“The pattern,” says Mr. Bruce. “The pattern.”

“What do these two things have in common beyond vaginal bleeding?” thunders Fat Man, losing self control just long enough to regret it immediately.

“I'll tell you what they have in common,” says Mr. Rousseau. He puts his hands on John's shoulders, as if about to begin a massage. He kneads the excess flesh. “Neither of these girls was supposed to be pregnant. You say Laurel didn't even know she was. Well
no one
knew. Her parents insist she was a virgin. She wasn't known to be involved with any men. We only know she was your friend.”

“We didn't know each other long,” says Fat Man. “It was only a couple months, and then she was dead. I do miss her.”

“Did you fuck her?” says Mr. Bruce.

Mr. Rousseau sinks his fingers into Fat Man's shoulders.

Fat Man shakes his head. “She was lovely, sir, but young. Imagine me rolling over onto her small frame. Then I really would have killed her.”

“Like you would be the first heavy man to prefer the woman on top,” says Mr. Rousseau—a sexual position that had not yet occurred to Fat Man in his brief life. “We think you pricked her. We think you had a hand in her death, and so do her poor, mourning parents.”

“Having murdered once,” says Mr. Bruce, “perhaps you didn't plan to do it again. That is, until you needed work. Needed room and board and clothes to keep you warm. You met Albert. He said you could have a place to stay and some money and he would find you a job if you would help him with Mrs. Blanc. You said, ‘Shit, why not?' You got away with the last one, after all. So you did the girl and you worked with him and the abortionist to make it look like a mistake somehow, and now here we are, about to bring you in for good.”

“Do you know if we have the death penalty in France, John?” asks Mr. Rousseau, spitting out the fat man's name as if it is uniquely harsh, stupid, American.

“I hadn't thought to ask,” says Fat Man. “I don't suppose you'll tell me.”

“We'd rather let you think about it on your own,” says Mr. Bruce. “Reflect.”

“You know the problem with your theory,” says Fat Man, who is calming now, who is collecting himself, who sees his way out, “apart from the lack of any material evidence or witnesses, apart from the fact that it's very strictly a theory and so shall remain, is if he's got a cooperative doctor willing to help kill the girl and hide it, why in fuck does he need me?”

Mr. Bruce looks to Mr. Rousseau, and Rousseau to Bruce. They look back at Fat Man as if they hadn't thought to ask this question, or, perhaps more charitably, as if they thought he'd never ask it.

“We've got you now is the important thing,” says Mr. Bruce.

“Got you in our sights,” says Mr. Rousseau, squinting at Fat Man to drive home the point that they can see him.

“Is that all you've got for me today? I was hoping to see the spirit medium with my nephew.”