Fat Man and Little Boy (13 page)

THE BABIES

Fat Man is watering the milk when their first guest comes to stay. Fat Man pours half the big glass jug into an empty. White threads split down the sides, weaving pooling liquid at the bottom. He pours a pail of water down its mouth and watches the milk multiply. He lowers the pail into the well and draws it back up; fills the other jug. It gleams a bluish white in the failing light, smooth and sweet as pearls.

“Water,” rasps someone. At first, Fat Man thinks the well is speaking. He peers over the edge, expecting a disembodied claw to hang from the rim, attached to a wrist, dangling and all corroded to nothing by shadow. Instead he spies a crunchy mop of colorless hair on the well's opposite side, at rest against the stone. “Water,” says the mop. It tilts a little to the side.

“Are you thirsty?” says Fat Man, stupidly. He caps the jugs and circles the well, hands out as if to approach a wild dog or a cornered raccoon.

“Been waiting,” says the someone. After a long pause, “All day.”

She is a heap of rag and bone, skin the color of dishwater, dirt mustache, eyes all crusted, limp arms she can't lift. She opens her mouth and shows him her tongue. Dry split down the middle, coarse as tree bark, half white. Her teeth rotting and soft, some of them misshapen. Gums receding like candle wax recedes.

“I'm sorry,” says Fat Man. He lowers the pail and draws the water. He has no cup. He cups his hands and pours it down her throat. She sputters a little.

“Thank you,” she says. “Very kind.” The water pools in the hollows of her collar bone, stains her blouse-rags in a spreading circle. He pours another handful in her mouth. “Very kind, very kind.”

There is mold forming on her chin. Fat Man yanks away his hands. It slows and stops. He thinks of the fog blotches that form on a window around the mouth and nostrils, growing out from the center and then retracting sharply when the breathing stops. The mold likewise shivers in, the weakest outcroppings falling away, dead chalk spores that float on the pools between her fine bones. Japanese souls, he thinks, claiming her body for their own.

“What's your name?”

She looks down at the sprawl of her legs, and seems to lose herself in the snarls and tangles of loose fabric, the spurs of her bare ankles, the leather wrappings on her long feet.

“I thought so,” says Fat Man, taking a pen from his pocket and scraping the mold from her chin with the point. It falls like old snakeskin. “Bet you're cold out here, aren't you?”

He hoists her up on his shoulder. He is big but not strong. She weighs about as much as Little Boy, though she is not so warm.

“What doing?” she says. He takes the milk jugs underneath his arms. “Where?”

“There's a place I know you can sleep the night,” says Fat Man. It should take about that long for her to die.

 

Fat Man hides her in the cabin where he keeps his Jewish things. The bed is clear, the sheets are mussed—sometimes he sleeps here. He lays her down, pulls up the blue blanket to her chin. The tramp makes a sticky sound in her throat. He thinks she's going to throw up.

“Do you want milk?” he asks her. “Milk? Num num?”

She nods.

“I'll get you some. Do you like it here?”

The tramp's eyes roll around the room, glancing at the collection. There is a dressmaker's dummy. There is a hat on that dummy, feathered, soft-brimmed. There are shoes hanging on the walls.

“I built this cabin,” says Fat Man, bustling around, searching for a proper cup. “Not really, I guess. But I found these things and brought them here.” There are no proper cups. They are small brass mugs, droopy cusps down-curled by the heat of hungry mouths, pinched and distended. It seems wrong for her to touch these artifacts, especially the ruined ones. He touches each one he examines, touches the toes of his shoes to the other shoes that litter the floor, as if a small crowd, scattered, facing in various directions, a careful, criss-crossed network of vision. He runs his hand through the crude wigs. Smells the shirts that hang on a rack. “What do you think the odds are you're Jewish?”

“Milk,” she says.

“What is your name?”

He finds a squat white clay cup, brown inside, with thicker beads of paint dried hard to the surface. He pours the milk inside. It separates briefly in the pouring, not wholly—a pale swirl in a paler stream, becoming white again in the mug, though with a thin sheen layer on the surface, skim water.

“Here,” he says, and he puts his hand beneath her pillow, lifting her head. He pours the milk into her mouth, careful not to touch her skin.

“Ahh,” she sighs.

“You can sleep if you want to,” says Fat Man. “I'll come back to see you tomorrow. I'll bring you food.”

She further eyes the collection. He worries she will take the clothing for herself while he is gone, for warmth. He cannot bring himself to forbid it; he is doing the same.

“This is a sacred place,” he says. “You should be safe. Don't worry if you hear anything strange. It happens sometimes.”

“Thank you,” she says. “Anne.”

“You're welcome Anne,” says Fat Man. He takes the watered-down milk. He stands a while in the doorway, framed by the dim walls and the sky another darker shade of blue, and then he goes.

Little Boy waits for his brother in their cabin. He is seated at their little table, an empty glass before him. Some time ago he indicated, by the tilt and quiver of his chin, the flaring of his nostrils, that he might like some milk. He has been asking for a lot of milk, frequently when it is too late, when there isn't any more. Thus the water in the milk, to thin it. Fat Man fills the glass and pours one for himself. If Little Boy sees the water in the swirl he doesn't say anything.

If he would like something to eat tonight with his milk he doesn't say anything.

If he has some grievance to air, some close-clutched anger, he doesn't share that either. Only sits across from Fat Man, arms folded on the wooden tabletop, lips curled, eyes opaque, milky as the water, watery as the milk. His hair uncombed, his fingernails filthy—black crescents at his fingertips. He sips his milk and scowls at the window.

Fat Man dines on bread and cheese, holding his food through a napkin to slow the growth of molds, scraping them where they still come. He drinks the water milk. He talks to Little Boy about his day, describing unloading the supplies that came—the friendly little napkins with “Hotel Gurs” printed on their corners, the silverware case, the new sheets, spare pillows, the sweets that they'll give away in the office, and the beginnings of an international library to be established beside the museum cabin, where borrowing books will be free, though anyone can purchase any volume they want. The inevitable marginal notes will, as Rosie sees it, add value—a reminder that readers are members of a community. There are Japanese books and German books and French, of course, and English, with illustrated dictionaries and several foreign-language encyclopedias.

“I've been thinking of learning Japanese,” Fat Man says. “What do you think?”

Little Boy's eyes widen, take on a spark of life. Then he remembers to blank. Fat Man is only being provocative.

Fat Man finishes his meal. Sloshes what's left in his cup; even half-empty it nearly spills over. “Dogs are still circling the place, trying to catch a nose of our food I imagine. Rosie says loud noise will scare them off, so I holler and rattle my keys, but they always come back.”

Little Boy lays his head down on the table. Sometimes he sleeps this way, drooling, until Fat Man can't take it anymore and tucks him into bed. Sometimes he lets his urine go, lets it pool on the seat and run down the legs, drippling on the floor for his brother to clean up.

“It was just a girl,” says Fat Man. “Do you know what people put themselves through for girls? Do you want to be like them? You could starve to death this way. If I left you outside tonight—if I picked you up, opened the door, and dropped you off there, you would have to get up, or you could die of exposure. Or if I waited long enough to bring you back in, you would die from thirst. People do that for girls. They start fights, start wars, start books, go off to culinary school.”

Little Boy begins to drool on the table.

“I know it's not just the girl. You won't say it but I can tell what's going on in your head, at least some of the time.” He goes on, in his meant-to-be-educational household mixture of English and French, describing what he imagines his brother keeps balled up in his mind like a fist: the memory of the Japanese family, the babies, the piglets, the fires, their trees; the times they've run, the entropy or growth that touches everything they touch—the little fires that light on every wick they handle, hungry maggots; their poverty, their loneliness, each other; the way the fat man hits him; the bed they share and the chill that makes them hold each other underneath the blankets; Fat Man's secrets—his cabin hidey-hole, his run of the grounds.

There is also the matter of Little Boy's wage as a hotel employee, which he earns by small tasks and regular cleaning of the communal areas, their own cabin, and Rosie's. Outraged by his brother's squandering of money on candies and toys, Fat Man asked Rosie to entrust him with Little Boy's wage to save or spend on his behalf. With their earnings they can feed themselves if that's all they do, and put a little aside for illness and new shoes. Her argument is that since she lodges them they do not want. Little Boy does not indicate by any quiver or angle of his chin that he understands the budget. Sometimes he tries to wheedle sweets. So far no such luck.

The last straw was Fat Man's agreement, as his Uncle John, that Little Boy should go to school next year, where he will learn French and times tables, little gleanings of natural science, and they will train his handwriting.

Fat Man has grown increasingly concerned about what will happen if Little Boy goes to school. It has also occurred to him that girls of Little Boy's purported age can sometimes bear children, and that it would be wrong and dangerous to inflict this on them. He has tried to speak to Rosie of school again, but there is no reasonable explanation that he can share with her for why his brother shouldn't go. He has tried to tell her what a strange boy his nephew Matthew is, how little he speaks, how nervous he has become since his parents' death, but she refuses to draw the natural conclusion: school can wait.

School, then, for Little Boy, or they must go hungry again. Surely Rosie would not employ an uncle who neglects his nephew's education. As for the threat of pregnancy, that will need a solution.

“I know it's been rough,” says Fat Man. “I know how hard you worked to find me. I know you get lonely, though I am still your brother, and though I am still here for you. But I need you to help me so we won't get in trouble. I need you to be a little boy, not a baby. I need you to help me make money, and save, so we can take care of ourselves. We need to get some guests for the hotel, or we're going to be in trouble. We won't be able to keep guests if you act like this. It's going to creep them out.”

Little Boy drools on the table.

Fat Man says that's exactly what he means. He says, “I'm not going to tuck you in tonight,” though they both know he will when it gets cold. They both know that before long he will undress Little Boy and put him in his pajamas. They both know that he will roll up Little Boy in the sheets and the blanket, and himself, and he will hold his brother.

CATHEDRAL

Little Boy is being a baby. This is his second time. The first time, he was in a shell. It was like an egg. They built him in New Mexico, built him special, and they were very careful, which is different from how most babies happen. Most of the time people make the baby and they don't know what it is—who the baby will be—for ten, maybe twenty years after. It wasn't like that with him. They knew what they were getting. The question was how much. There was the small chance—about two percent, they estimated—he would incinerate the atmosphere. Or would be a dud. But most likely there would be a terrible explosion, which could have different effects depending on where it happened, meaning civilian deaths or military deaths, infrastructure destroyed or machinery, factories or weapons, planes, etc. He would be defined in terms of what he exploded, and they could decide that too with some confidence. American bombers had a lot of practice. Little Boy, if asked by his brother, would say he does not remember this time. So would Fat Man, though with less vehemence.

So there he was in his shell, more or less defined, only waiting to come out and be. They liked to touch him. They moved him around. He didn't have any way of feeling or hearing any of this through his shell. But he unfelt them. He unheard them. The shadows of their touch, the negations of their voices. He didn't understand what they said, precisely, but there were many languages, soft voices, harsh voices. They laughed nervous laughs. They whispered.

He was clenched the whole time. Cold. Waiting to explode. Not wanting it, not precisely, only knowing or feeling, or unknowing and unfeeling, that he would, wherever whenever they dropped him.

Now, the second time he is a baby, his name is Matthew. Fat Man gets used to it after the first month. Sometimes he forgets the Little Boy baby's around. He starts talking to himself the way they did when Little Boy was a baby the first time, only now he can hear it with his ears, which are a part of his new shell—the little boy shell with its little boy ears. Fat Man will say things like, “God I'm tremendous,” or, “I think I'm growing again.” He stands in the middle of the room holding his flab out in front of him like pulling balls of dough from a loaf's worth. He looks at himself that way for a long time. After a while he puts his clothes back on and leaves to work. Little Boy won't move until Fat Man comes back. Or, if he does move, Little Boy will still move back into the same place before Fat Man comes back, so it's like he never moved. Fat Man comes back stinking from work, or with new books under his arms, borrowed from the widow's library, or with bread and milk for Little Boy, and wedges of melon, or a half-dozen eggs.

One day Fat Man puts a grape in Little Boy's mouth, but Little Boy stops chewing halfway through. The chewing is too much to ask. Little Boy is so tired, all the time tired. He is sad about this girl, or maybe all the girls. So he's working his jaw and it feels like a rusty gate, about as heavy, and so halfway through he gives up. It goes partway down his throat, gets caught there, and at first Fat Man doesn't realize—he thinks Little Boy swallowed—so he puts another one inside. It rolls down Little Boy's tongue and sticks in his throat on top of the other.

Fat Man figures it out when Little Boy turns blue. Fat Man flails, shouts, “What in hell are you doing?” In his panic he squeezes Little Boy's throat, crushing the grapes so they go down.

The next day Little Boy has six bruises around his neck shaped like Fat Man's fingers. They feel tremendous. Fat Man resolves to mash up everything he feeds Little Boy or to cut it up small. He softens Little Boy's bread in milk or water. He works Little Boy's mouth to make him chew, and shoves the food down his throat with a finger if he has to. By the summer's end he has Little Boy on a mostly liquid diet consisting of water, milk, broth, and the things he can dissolve inside them.

Little Boy's favorite thing is to lie back on his chair, almost but not quite falling out, mouth open, and wait for Fat Man to pour his dinner down inside him, where it glows in his belly. Glows, and seems to grow.

Fat Man kisses him sometimes on his head after a meal, if he thinks Little Boy has tried to be less difficult. But Little Boy never tries. He doesn't want to make things easy. If his body falls into such a position as facilitates the meal, then he will let it stay there. If he won't make it better then he can't make it worse. This is one of the rules.

Another rule is he can't be a baby when Rosie's around. He doesn't have to talk or even think when she's near but he does have to clean. He has to do his job so he can earn his money, which goes directly to his brother, who can spend it however he wants. Little Boy never sees it.

Little Boy makes Fat Man clean him. The way he does this is he lets himself get more and more dirty until the widow asks Fat Man why he doesn't make Matthew bathe. That night Fat Man rolls up his shirt sleeves to his elbows, strips down Little Boy, and scrubs him raw. Pours buckets and buckets over Little Boy's head. He has to hold up his smaller brother with one arm under his armpits or Little Boy will slide under.

He pushes Little Boy beneath the water, ostensibly to clean him. He keeps Little Boy down there a while. Little Boy likes it, and anyway the rule is he cannot help himself.

Fat Man pulls up Little Boy by his hair, by the roots, and Little Boy's scalp burns, and he cries. He shouts, “WAAAAH.”

“WAAAAAH.”

Fat Man shouts back at him and splashes his face with buckets and buckets of water.

They continue in this way a while.

Fat Man takes to making Little Boy wear a big white cloth diaper, safety-pinned at the corners so Little Boy fouls nothing else when he fouls himself.

Some nights Little Boy gets hungry, or wets himself, and then he cries and cries, sometimes for hours on end. WAAAAH. WAAAAH. WAAAAH. He doesn't kick or thrash, doesn't roll around on the floor, is otherwise perfectly still. After a little while Fat Man will lose his patience, will get up in his face and start to scream back. He kneels over Little Boy, on all fours, and puts his face in Little Boy's, all his bulk hanging over all Little Boy's slight, and screams and screams. Little Boy cries, and Fat Man screams, WAAAAH, AAAAAH, WAAAAH, AAAAAH, and so on, all night, until their throats are raw and their faces are beaded with spit and tears.

The next day Fat Man gives Little Boy banana mash mixed with milk and sugar, which he thinks is Little Boy's favorite.

Little Boy does like it.

One night, while Fat Man and Little Boy sit at the table, Fat Man says, “You'll never believe what I found. Look. It's a little picture book.” A small sheaf of papers with holes punched in the left margin, red yarn threaded through the holes.

“There's Mickey Mouse inside it. He comes to Camp Gurs.”

Little Boy lets his head slump onto the book, pinning it to the table. Fat Man yanks up his brother's head by the hair and pulls the book loose.

“I found it in the playhouse. One of the Jews made it. See, in this cartoon, Mickey is a Jew. They tell him so. He didn't know about it until they told him, just as they told us who we really are.”

Little Boy's nose-down on the table now, but Fat Man keeps turning the pages as if he were reading along.

“Things were very unfair for them. They had to ask the commandant of the prison for everything, the way we have to ask Rosie. It was worse for them, of course. I don't mean to compare. They had to be smart or people would take their food. They had eggs, but not many. They had bread. They had to make their own clothes. You can see how badly Mickey wants to be free.” Fat Man turns another page. “Isn't the art wonderful? In the end, Mickey remembers he's a cartoon, and so he erases himself. Then he's free. He goes to America.”

Fat Man tears up. It's on his voice the way whiskey stink is on a drunk, the way syrup smells on pancakes, the way cyanide smells of almonds. “I don't know why anyone would want to go to America.”

He jerks up Little Boy's head. A string of drool dangles from his lips, the only thing that keeps Fat Man from shoving the book in Little Boy's face. “This is important,” Fat Man snarls. “This is probably the most important thing that ever happened. You know what happened to the man who drew this? They loaded him up on a train, with all his friends, and they took him away to die. It was awful. It was the worst thing that ever happened and it started here. There's nothing to compare in all of human history.”

He holds Little Boy's head by the chin and his hair so that they're facing one another. Little Boy's eyes are rolled down in his head, looking now at the open book on its last page, a picture of what seems to be New York, the lines wavy and childish, bustling against each other, elbowing for room. Fat Man looms at the top of his vision like a big fish bobbing for air. Little Boy sees that Fat Man has dressed himself in new clothing, and he understands that it was borrowed from the Jews that used to live here. Fat Man's stretching the fabric thin—Little Boy can see his flesh through his white cotton shirt, and his gut peeks out at the bottom like a pale orange wedge.

Fat Man says, “Do you want to know where you live or don't you? Do you care about anything but yourself? You can live and die inside your body, hard and cold and meaningless as a bomb that never went off, a yolk asleep inside a shell, or you can listen to me when I speak, hear what I'm saying, and live in other people, too, and feel for them and know them. Or you can live in ignorance. You can rest your head on the table and drool. You can be nobody if you want. You can be a vegetable.”

But Little Boy isn't any of those things. He's a baby. He wants to know if people scream at babies for their lack of politics. Do they shout at a yolk to make it a chicken? Little Boy is runny and yellow inside.

“You're a coward! Lay about all day. Least I'm up and moving. You'll never see me stand still long. When you grow up you'll see you can't be a lump, not if you want to eat. You'll see you've got to work. You know how hard the Jews worked? Just for an egg?”

Fat Man wipes sweat from his brow with a dead Jew's sleeve. He leaves a stain like a caterpillar coiled on a leaf.

“I tell myself I won't hit you anymore. I tell you I won't, but you're so selfish. Living in a graveyard and you won't take time to look at the monuments, won't read the epitaphs. The prisoners carved them themselves. Maintained the grounds too. The way I do. It was part of their work.”

He scoots back his chair from the table and scoops up his brother. Whenever Fat Man holds him, Little Boy knows that Fat Man knows he is a baby. Sometimes he even coos. Not tonight. Fat Man is going to hurt him, he knows it, and the goo goo ga ga shit will only make it worse—he might throw Little Boy in the creek.

He carries Little Boy to a faraway cabin. He brings him through the threshold like a bride or a cripple. There are one thousand pieces of junk: rulers, cups, shoes, coats, hats, folded laundry, bowls, spoons. There is a woman in the bed, surrounded by the baubles, certain watercolor paintings, and costume jewelry. She reminds Little Boy of things he's never seen, stories that he's never heard. A queen buried with her treasures.

The queen is very thin, her skin filthy. Her hair is stiff curls, sticking out at every angle, a wispy crown, colorless and many-colored—brown becoming gray, never really being brown, never really being gray, becoming blonde, not blonde, becoming white, not white, not black, nothing. Nothing becoming nothing, and becoming, and becoming nothing.

Then there are her eyes. She looks at the brothers, and Little Boy can only assume she sees.

“Look at her there, lying like a dead bird. Do you want to be like that?”

She closes her eyes.

“I feed her too. I feed her and then I come home and I feed you. I've been thinking, maybe I should leave you here. It would be more convenient. Do you want that? Do you want to lie here like a dead bird too?”

Fat Man sets down Little Boy on the floor, beside the bed, like an offering.

“When I come back tomorrow morning, maybe you'll have made a good decision.”

He takes a hat from the rack on his way out. A black hat with a wide brim. He closes the door. Now Little Boy's alone with her. He hears her shifting in the sheets.

It turns cold. He stays still, feeling his soft shell all around him like a cathedral, echoing with him. As long as he's back on the floor when Fat Man returns it will be like he never moved.

He finds his feet and climbs up in the bed. His body is small again. He wraps himself in the blanket with the woman. In doing so he pulls a little from her, revealing naked arms and the drape of her shirt. The tops of her arms bristle with grass. There is a mass beneath her shirt as well, more grass. Out of her shirt's torn collar, a growing flower winds toward the ceiling. The blossom blooms. Red petals like ruby quartz. Her eyes are open. She's looking at the flower. He can only assume she sees. Leaves budding, and thorns. Not a rose. Clover on the collar bone.

Fat Man finds her that way the next morning. Still alive. He prunes the flower, trims the grass, and pulls loose the bloodied-red roots where he can. Little Boy's on the floor the way he was left. Still awake, becoming a cathedral.

What a little boy needs is a mother. What a fat man wants is a wife. What a homeless woman needs is a home. What this one needs is a warm place to die. What this one needs is a bath and a bed.

One night Fat Man bathes her.

One night she dies.

Does not become a mother or a wife.

No queen, but a body.

The brothers watch, transfixed, as her body becomes hair. Becomes mold. Becomes maggots. Becomes bones. Becomes spiders. Becomes flowers.

Becomes a seed.

See the brothers through the secret cabin's thick blue window like a square of still water. See the strange light she casts on the brothers. See the way they watch her. See the way their hair stands on end. See that Little Boy is sitting up: sitting like a little boy.