“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 th
ink 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.
HOTEL GURS
WHAT FRANCINE KNOWS
Francine lies awake in bed, pretending to know where her husband is now. She pretends to know he is with another woman. She pretends to know they’re sitting together outside an abandoned café, her husband and the other woman—a blonde—and that he brought them cheeses and melon chunks to share in the dark, seated on chairs he took off a tabletop and set down for them. He makes two flirtatious jokes before forgetting to charm the other woman, before resuming the comfort of his usual half-sullen silence, the silence that makes him pout so pretty. The one that makes his eyes seem to float in his skull like paper lanterns on the water. He pours wine for himself and neglects to offer her any. She has to pour it if she wants it. He’s smoking between chews. It would be rude if it were anybody else.
She pretends her husband will not be home tonight. If she weren’t sure of this, she would have to watch the door, or, more discreetly, the wall opposite the door, for changes of light. She would wait for a wedge of yellow to open, and his shadow. Now she doesn’t have to wait, because she is certain. Instead she clenches closed her eyes.
Her hard heart wavers. She is no longer certain. So she changes the story. Now he is sharing a hotel room with this other woman, who is a brunette, who is also married, whose husband is away on business—scrabbling for a piece of the new action, the foreign investors, large Americans. They are making raucous love to each other. He presses her face and breasts to the cool thick window, through the curtains, but he tells her to imagine he’s drawn the curtains. And it’s light out. And everyone can see her. They can see the way she moans, the way her nipples press flat against the glass, like veal medallions.
When she comes he comes too. He doesn’t pull out, doesn’t spray the brunette’s back, doesn’t watch it trickle down her thighs, but pushes deeper in her; damn the consequences; damn him, he’s coming. He grits his teeth the way he does. They squeak, he’s sucked them dry. Francine’s sure of it, lying in bed.
She’s sure of it. She reaches down between her legs, then stops, thinks better.
“It shouldn’t bother me if he doesn’t want to do it inside me,” she says to herself, fortified by her confidence that even now her husband’s clever sperm are striving for this other married woman’s eggs.
Francine is thirsty. She climbs out of bed and puts her feet in their blue slippers. She goes to the kitchen for a glass of water. There’s a faint chill on the air like an unwelcome secret. She tips back the glass, finishes the water in one gulp, and licks the dewy moisture from her lips. Her husband never believed in marriage, as he acknowledged on the night of his proposal. He asked her anyway, during all the excitement, when people did these things. But clearly children are out of the question.
She pours herself another glass of water and walks back to bed. Should he come home early, Francine doesn’t want to seem to have been waiting up. She isn’t waiting for anybody. She only woke up thirsty.
Francine reflects that her husband would not leave her alone all night simply for sex. “He’s more discreet than that,” she whispers to her glass. She revises her confidence again. Her husband is still in a hotel, but now it’s more expensive, and yet no one’s having fun. He sits up in the bed, back to the headboard, married brunette head in his lap. He’s just paid for her abortion, so he strokes her hair and twists the ends between his fingers. The brunette rubs her stomach very slowly and wonders how it would be to feel a kicking thing inside her. He whispers drowsily how everything will be all right, like drooling honey in her ear. He’s drooling honey, that’s his fault, but the brunette doesn’t turn her head to block the flow. They’ll spend the night together. He’ll leave early in the morning while she pretends to sleep, buy them a sweet breakfast and chocolates, and carry the food back to the hotel in a small brown basket. This might be the end of their affair, or not.
Francine won’t know about that until circumstances call again for certitude, for deciding for herself what she can’t know and won’t ask.
Francine has finished her water. She rolls a cigarette. She puts it between her lips and chews the paper without chewing hard enough to break it. That feels like breaking skin. When she can’t wait anymore she strikes a match and lights it. She breathes deeply and blows smoke through her nose. She’s n
ever been like the leisure-soaked, cold-blooded women who can drag out a cigarette for nearly an hour, lace an evening, threading wisps of smoke through conversation. She huffs and puffs, Francine. She pauses only to cough. The taste still tickles her throat.
It must be a stranger knocking at her door. It must be a small stranger: the door makes a small sound. Francine finishes her cigarette and drops the stub in the trash before going to the door. On second thought, she brings a large knife with her. The small hand knocks again. Put-pat. She peeps through the peephole. There’s the top of a dirty blond head in the hole and a thin white hand drawn back, waiting, shaking. It looks like a girl’s hand, if the girl chewed her nails and her knuckles were knobby and pale. The hand moves as if to knock again and then falls out of sight, defeated. The dirty blond head turns away.
Francine opens the door. There is the blond boy sucking his thumbnail. He shivers pointedly. A fat man steps into view, a real behemoth. He shivers too. When he opens his fat mouth and hazards a greeting in clumsy, fat French, she knows he’s American. He holds out his hands open-palmed, showing her they’re empty, except for a charred blackness and a floppy blue hat that hangs from his fingers.
“Don’t worry,” she says, “I know some English. Come in, come in.” She waves them in with her hands and steps back from the doorway, like guiding toddlers. She leaves the knife on the kitchen counter. They follow her inside. The little one rubs his hands on his pink cheeks. He sucks his thumbnail and bites at what spare rind is left.
She tells them to sit at the dinner table and they do. She asks them what they’d like to drink. They both say water. The fat one asks her does she have something they could eat—a crust of bread, or some old fruit perhaps. He says it’s been a day since they’ve eaten. She says yes, there is bread. The man and the boy are looking at each other across the table as if it’s been more than a day since they’ve done that as well, as if they’re surprised to see what they see.
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