Fat Man and Little Boy

by Mike Meginnis

  “He’s never ridden on a bicycle before,” says Fat Man.

  “Never?”

  Fat Man almost admits he’s never ridden one either before realizing how strange that would sound.

  “His parents were very poor, the same as me,” he explains. “Here, Matthew. Try again.” He props up the bike, holds it by the handlebar and the back end of the seat.

  Little Boy hoists himself up cautiously.

  “That’s the way,” says Rosie. “You look smart perched up there, Matthew.”

  Fat Man lets the other two get out ahead before he mounts his own bike, carefully observing Rosie’s example—even Little Boy’s—for clues. As they pedal out of town he sees two police walking the far side of the street. These are not their police: not Mr. Bruce, not Rousseau. So his escape is clean. He needn’t shiver as they pass.

  They ride like this: Little Boy goes first to set the pace because he is the slowest, then Rosie. Fat Man guards their rear. Here he is well-positioned to watch her pedal. The steady rise and fall of her ankles, the same of her hindquarters as wide and flat as the disc of the moon, the flag-like flicker of the loose ends of her copper hair drawn back and tied up tight.

  When they come to a hotel the widow lets the staff think them a family so they can share a room. She sleeps on the bed. Little Boy sleeps on the floor until one night Fat Man suggests it might not be indecent for widow and child to share, and she agrees on the condition they lie in opposite directions. Fat Man therefore has the floor to himself, which makes him remember Japan. He swaddles himself in what sheets the bed can spare and rests his head on woolen towels. One night he comes back from using the bathroom, padding softly, and finds himself looking down on them in their bed like a rejected father. There is a little color on her wide, full lips. A little red. A little pink beneath her eyes, perhaps natural, perhaps applied and dithered by hand. Unfurled on her pillow, her hair is limp and slightly curled. There is a calm in her body. Fat Man contrasts his beating heart, his heaving acid tummy. Yet again, he is seized by the urge to thrash himself until his ribs break and his contents spill out on the floor.

  He goes to his swaddling, his towel-pillow, and covers up as best he can.

  Everywhere they are haunted by the marshal, Pétain, his bust, his white head—his smooth, featureless eyes. One farm has mounted his head on a pike, hanging red rags from his interrupted neck to suggest the severance to come. In a restaurant, a row of Pétains holds hats for customers.

  They ride through a small town with a chocolate factory that makes everything smell wonderful when it rains. Fat Man wants to eat the town, the people, their things.

  They see Camp Gurs far away, far across a rat-gray field of mud. Dozens of triangular huts, yards and yards of barbed wire fence—some stripped, most still threaded. There are signs of trucks and men at work. Tracks in the mud. No fires though, and no movement among the ramshackle.

  FAT MAN WORKS

  WITH HIS HANDS

  There are about four hundred cabins divided into square clusters of thirty, each cabin’s foundation occupying twenty-five square meters of ground. They are built from thin, cheap cardboard-like wood, which has been covered with variously colored fabrics and pasted with tar to seal out the constant rain. The tar does not work; rot develops, slowly eating the fabrics with heavy molds. The roofs leak. Three out of four cabins are knocked down easily with sledgehammers, leaving only the strongest, safest one hundred structures. Furthermore, they destroy the triangular support beams that lie on either side of the stronger structures, holding up the cabins with bits of scaffolding on the inside. Around these squalid cabins the men lay white and slate-blue bricks, and build them new wooden roofs over the old ones. They cut out windows and inlay the squares with glass so thick it looks like the ocean—glass so thick you can see waves in its surface, and ripples, and the grainy impurities suspended within. A single wooden beam is fitted to each wall inside, waist-high, and slid into grooves within the bricks, so that nothing collapses inside. They set down wood flooring, and thick green carpets over that. Each hut is given a stove to keep it warm. Otherwise the interiors remain untouched wherever possible. Rosie calls it restoration. Outside the new cabins are charming, oddly featureless freestanding brick buildings the color of mountains. Inside they are historical artifacts: educations in the standard of living enjoyed by those in concentration camps. She says, “It is important that in building new history for ourselves we do not forget the old. We could do that anywhere. Here, we can also remember, even as we rebuild.”

  “Yes,” says Fat Man. “You’ve got to remember everything.”

  He remembers how it was to explode.

  At first he tries to help the men. They are squat, broad beasts of burden, often shirtless, and their skin trembles with the shifting and straining of strange muscles. Their bodies are ridged with hair and layered with small pouting folds of fat. They have fierce, broken noses, cauliflower ears, gappy crooked teeth, and knotty, gnarled hands. They have a way of speaking all at once so he cannot really hear or understand them. Still he tries to earn his wage by their sides. He wields a sledgehammer, smashing cabins designated for destruction. It is blissful to destroy something, wonderful to knock out the support beams, to watch it collapse all around. They tell him he is too slow with the hammer, he is inefficient, he swings too wildly. He does not doubt them. So he gives up on destruction and he tries to lay bricks. He can’t get them to rest straight atop each other. He spreads the mortar too thickly. His work looks childish and unsound beside theirs. The men tell him he is no mason. He agrees.

  He gives up on bricks and tries to dig pits for the new outhouses. He cannot dig the pits as fast as the men can. He gets in their way. His shovel bumps into their shovels like a blind, nosing thing. He overturns their dirt back into the hole, and throws dirt on another man, who nearly pushes him into the pit. They say he cannot help them dig.

  At night they warm themselves by the fires they build with broken cabin wood, drinking whiskey and cheap wine; they rub their chests and arms, mutter to each other under the crackling, and look askance at each other, at the fat man. They do this until the small hours and then they go separately to the large tents they share. Fat Man cannot share Rosie’s cabin, the first to be completed, so he finds a place in the tents. Sometimes there’s a blanket he can use. Sometimes there isn’t.

  He tries stripping barbed wire from those fences that remain. This requires tan work gloves and wire cutters, which he borrows. He cuts the spiny wire at the point equidistant between two posts. He spools the wire around his left hand until he comes to the post, where he cuts it again. He drops the ball in the mud—an iron tumbleweed. He wrenches the fence post forward and back like a lever until he can bend it to the ground and pull it free by the root. He’s slow at this as well. The other men gather their measures of wire in smooth, careless motions as they walk—and yes, some bleed, but it’s good and right to bleed. They uproot fence posts in three brute efforts: grunt, grunt, huhhn. They clear dozens of yards of fence in the time a single measure takes him. That night he starts a rumor that he isn’t being paid as well as they are, so they will not resent him as the American’s fat pet. Because of the rumor, it takes two more days of plodding work before Rosie comes to him, presumably at their request.

  He is wrapping his glove in barbed wire. She puts her hand on his back. He is shirtless, having drenched his undershirt long ago. He turns to face her. His pants are streaked outside, swampy inside, and the sweat trickles down into his socks and fills his shoes. A grime of dust on his belly and arms, disrupted by the shape of his hands where he has rested them or tried to clear the dirt away. She is clean, wearing a new dress and smart canary-yellow hat, perhaps the barest hint of scent. She has a canary-yellow shawl to match the hat. “You’ve been working hard,” she says.

  He wheezes like a dying horse.

  “That’s very kind of you,” says Rosie. “But I did
n’t hire you for this kind of labor. I have builders. I have masons and sledgehammer men. You are more delicate than these brutes, John. You will work very hard for me, I know, but you can do something else. While they build, for instance, you can search the cabins.” Rosie studies her palm, and the glowing film of Fat Man’s sweat spread on it.

  “Why search the cabins?” says Fat Man, hoarsely. “Squatters all the way out here? Wild animals?”

  “You needn’t go armed, if that’s the question.” She wipes her hand clean on her dress. The stain fades quickly, but it is a stain. “The conditions here were deplorable. However, the rules apparently were not so tight compared to those of many prisons. The poor prisoners were segregated by sex, as in other camps, but they were still allowed to make art, to socialize, even to put on plays. In fact, they had a playhouse.” She points out a cabin several lots away, across standing fences and those still coming down, past half-naked working men the color of mud. “I want you to go in there and find anything that ought to be preserved, before the men get in and trample everything.”

  Fat Man wipes his brow and rubs his burning eyes. “What ought to be preserved?”

  “I guess that’s the question,” says Rosie. “I’m trusting you to know the difference between prop cups and prison mugs, playbills and toilet paper.”

  “Have you seen Matthew?”

  “He’s around here somewhere. I saw him at breakfast this morning. Maybe he found another little boy to play with. How old is he anyway?”

  The last time he was asked he said nine, and his brother didn’t like that very much. “Thirteen years.”

  “Oh,” says Rosie, vaguely. She tilts her head a little to the side. “You should feed him more. He’s a bit stunted, isn’t he?”

  Fat Man does not remind her that she sets the rations now.

  He washes himself at a stream before going into the playhouse. The dirt falls away from him in crusts and skeins. The water’s cool and sweet. The puckers of his nipples rise all raspberry-bumped.

  He goes in shirtless. The air is still. Motes of dust part like curtains around him, and curtains, and curtains. There, at the opposite end of the cabin, is the stage; planks of scavenged pinewood propped up on crates filled with rocks and potato sacks stuffed with straw. There are coat racks crowding the corners, hung with costumes: hats, vests, boas, a poncho, a paper crown, hand-sewn skirts, a felt beard and mustache, a trench coat, a pith helmet, a jacket. Dozens of prop shoes stand in close pairs around the coat racks, in overlapping circles, like cowed onlookers: cowboy boots, ruined beggar shoes, high heels, many sandals, children’s booties. Prop swords and canes bundled like firewood behind them, spears and crude standards. Flat cardboard trumpets. Hand-crafted wooden whistles. A cardboard fire set in the notches of brittle, long-dry logs at the brink of crumbling. A broken guitar.

  Fat Man walks through the scattered chairs where an audience once sat. Some are aligned in rough rows, others clustered as if to confer, and others overturned. A sock balled up on one, a pamphlet on another. A boot’s tongue, expelled. Several spoons.

  Fat Man can hear the gathered prisoners, the actors, the singers. Their rattle and laughter, clatter and applause. They laugh until they cry. They make filthy jokes at the commandant’s expense. Their voices reverberate in the cobwebs, in the deepest, most itching parts of his ears.

  He examines the pamphlet. The first page declares it a description of “those provisional compensations allowed the cast.” Leading male: 2 eggs, 2 bowls broth. Leading female: 2 eggs, 1 bowl milk, 1 bowl broth. Villain: 2 eggs, 1 loaf of bread. Director: 1 egg, 1 bowl milk, 1 bowl broth. Secondary characters: half a loaf of bread, 1 bowl of broth. Tertiary characters: 1 heel of bread. And so on.

  He drops the pamphlet and climbs up on the stage. It groans. He tests each plank before giving it his full weight. There are fabric backdrops hanging from the wall, all pinned up together at their corners and middles. The one on top is painted like a sunset. He lifts its corner.

  Behind that one a starry night.

  Behind that one a clear June day.

  Behind that one a forest.

  Behind that one a castle wall.

  Behind that one a blank white cloth, perhaps symbolizing a snowstorm, or the bleak perfection of paradise, or only an unfinished backdrop. He lets them fall back into place. The sun sets again.

  He shouts. The dust shivers. He does it again.

  He shivers too. It’s cold here.

  He goes to a coat rack and takes down a shirt from one of its many wooden bulbs. It is a simple cotton shirt, no collar, no buttons, no pockets. Only sleeves. It fits him nicely, which makes him suspect it was an element of a larger, more complicated costume; there was no one here stayed fat long enough to star in any play. He smells his sleeves, and the shirt’s breast. First the smell of time, of stale air and busy microbes. Behind that a chalky smoke smell: skunk tobacco. Behind that, the cotton itself. Hints of the man or men who wore this before him. These were real people that lived here.

  He takes an old black hat and smells inside it. Sharp sweat, hair clumped with filth. He fits it to his head. It shapes itself to serve his needs. It is creased and battered all over, as if it has been sat on many times.

  He takes a black costume vest. It smells of corrupted skin, sores, and pus.

  He takes a blue handkerchief in his fist and pushes his nose inside it. He breathes deeply. Of fresh history, of old Jew, of death, of abandonment, of hunger. He folds the cloth and puts it in his vest pocket. He tucks in a white fabric flower on the brim of his hat.

  It’s warm here.

  Rosie is overseeing the beginnings of a trench to drain rainwater. Fat Man touches her elbow. He tells her, “It’s all to be preserved.”

  “Everything?”

  “The whole playhouse. We’re keeping it just as it is. Everything stays.”

  “Now you see why I trust you? A sensitive, delicate man.” She turns her back on him to watch the trench.

  He wants to pull her elbow roughly. He wants to tell her there were people here before them and now they are dead. He wants her to mourn with him. He wants to make her smell the things he smelled. Of course she knows all about it. She knew before he did. He knows there is something terribly prurient about his new, borrowed costume, and the interest he’s taken in their absent corpses.

  He has found something sacred. He plans to worship a while.

  He walks away examining his black hands.

  HOME LIFE; HARELIP

  Fat Man and Little Boy don’t speak for two weeks, until all the builders are gone and they’ve moved into their cabin. It’s night and all their work is done. Fat Man has documented and preserved various artifacts in the playhouse-museum. Little Boy has swept a dozen cabins, cleaning away all traces of boot prints and masonry. They climb into bed together, each in his underwear. They share a bed because Rosie didn’t give anyone a second. Little Boy hogs the covers. Fat Man is too warm anyway—he kicks away what’s his.

  Outside it is quiet. The fences are uprooted, the communal toilets smashed to bits and trucked away. The new outhouses stand like coffins wedged upright in the dirt, moon stencils casting moonlit crescents on their back walls. The trenches have been dug, draining into the stream nearby, their nadirs still an inch deep with rainwater. The destroyed cabins are burnt, and narrow stone paths conjoin those remaining. The abandoned foundations will erode and smooth in time, until they have become like the rest of the thinly-grassed muddy fields. The restored cabins are empty, except for theirs and the widow’s, which are so massive they still feel empty—or haunted. Grass seeds have been planted. The brothers must be careful not to let Rosie notice the way the grass springs up beneath their feet wherever they walk. Their cabin is circumscribed by such blades, glittering like silverfish as they waver. The leaves and needles of tall trees sound like crashing waves. Crickets rub their wings together.

&n
bsp; As warmth rises from the earth and leaves the brothers’ bodies, they grow cold and colder.

  “Little Boy?” says Fat Man.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you awake?”

  “Yes,” says Little Boy.

  “You should know I told the widow you were thirteen.” A tickle of hot breath whispers across the back of Little Boy’s neck.

  “She believed you?” He rolls onto his side, to face away from his brother. In the periphery of his vision, the square of fogged moonlight hovers around their window like a stench.

  “That’s about how old you look.”

  Little Boy sighs. Fat Man paws at his back. Little Boy shrugs off Fat Man violently.

  “You didn’t like it when I said you were nine. How old do you want to be?”

  Little Boy rolls to face his brother, with the unfortunate consequence that they grow closer. They breathe each other’s bitter breathing. “I’m supposed to be a baby. I’m only a few months old. I should be on my back in a crib, staring up at the ceiling and forgetting for the hundredth time how my toes taste. I should be wallowing in my own mess, and people should be feeding me.”

  Fat Man touches Little Boy’s cheek. “I’m three days younger. You think I should be a baby too?”

  Little Boy swats away his hand. “We agreed you would be the older brother now.”

  “I didn’t know what I was in for.” Fat Man grasps Little Boy by the thin blond hair projecting from his upturned right temple, squeezes. “I didn’t know I was going to be dealing with a nasty little boy who disappears for weeks at a time when there’s work to be done. I didn’t know I was going to be your slave and permanent caretaker. As far as I can tell you’re not getting any older. Are you going to be like this forever? I made an effort to be a good little brother when it was my turn.” He pulls at Little Boy now with both arms, tries his best to force his brother closer. The boy thrashes, gnashes, claws.