Fat Man and Little Boy

by Mike Meginnis

  “Fuck you,” Little Boy wails.

  “Quiet,” rasps Fat Man, pinching together Little Boy’s cheeks to keep him from speaking. “When will you be my good little brother? When will you listen to me? When will you do as I tell you? Not because you fear me but because you see the wisdom of my requests?”

  He wraps one arm around his brother, still squeezing shut his mouth with the other hand. Little Boy is buffeted by the waves of his bigger brother’s body—he is smothered, and he can feel all the oxygen leaving him in fits and starts, rushes and wheezes. Fat Man wraps the other arm around and squeezes him close. Little Boy smothers. He pulls his head out for air.

  “Quiet,” hisses Little Boy, through flesh and flesh and flesh. “The widow.”

  “The widow,” growls Fat Man. He hugs his brother, smoothes his blond mess into place.

  “You’re the one said you would spank me if I didn’t do as I was told.”

  “You’re the one crying out for a beating, complaining about your age, claiming the right to wallow and drool. You are thirteen now, if I’m your elder brother. You are a teenage boy and growing if I’m a man.”

  Little Boy begins to bawl his best baby impression. Fat Man pushes him away. Little Boy kicks viciously in the leaving.

  “Go on, cry it out. Get up tomorrow ready to work.”

  They look at each other across the wrinkled sheets. Fat Man wraps himself anew in the covers. Their warmth is still leaving their bodies, and they haven’t any wood to start a fire. So as they drowse they creep nearer. Until the boy is in the man’s hands again, and arms and arms and skin and skin and skin. Enough life between them to sweat—to drip, and kick the covers.

  Little Boy beats the sun by an hour. He slips from the bed, gathers his clothing, and creeps through their cabin, stepping outside the door to change in the cold, dewy morning. Grass grows beneath his feet as he weaves between the new blue cabins. Sometimes weeds grow also: dandelions and clover.

  He takes his bicycle from the utility cabin. There is a light fog on the air. His skin beads with moisture as he pedals through it. He rolls over mud and grass and pavement, past white busts of the marshal and shops not yet opened. Church bells sound. The sun’s coming.

  He jumps off the bike at a bakery. The bike clatters to its side, scraping his calf on its way to the street. He stands it back up and lowers the kickstand. The bakery’s just opened. When he opens the door a burst of warm air, smell of flour and of jam, cheerful ring of eager little bell, a glass display, a man kneading dough at the counter. The display is piled with braided breads, flaky crescent rolls, split-top loaves, and pastries.

  The bell rings a second time as the door closes and cold air dissipates. The baker sees Little Boy. He has a big neatly combed mustache and big red-ringed watery eyes that swim and shimmer. “Hello,” says the baker, in French. “I don’t think I know you, little boy.”

  Little Boy tilts his head and shows his teeth. He points at the display.

  “Hello? What is your name?” The baker reaches out his floury hand. “I am Mr. Girard. A pleasure to meet you.”

  “Hello,” says Little Boy, ignoring the hand. He points at the display. He understands the baker reasonably well, though mostly from context.

  “Do you want something to eat?”

  Little Boy nods. He points at the display again, and then at his mouth. He smiles.

  “Which ones do you want?”

  Little Boy indicates a raspberry pastry and one filled with sweet cheese. The baker takes them from behind the glass and wraps them in wax paper. As he thumbs the creases creased, he tells the little boy how much they cost. Little Boy pretends incomprehension, trying to pass off paying half the price as a misunderstanding. The baker insists, counting out coins from his own pocket to show how it’s done. Little Boy relents and follows his example. He glances out the window.

  There is a girl passing by with strong, lean calves peeking out beneath her skirt. Her ankles are pretty knots of muscle and bone. Her dark hair bobs in the breeze.

  Little Boy smiles for the baker, takes his pastries in their brown paper bag, and begins to leave.

  “Wait,” says the baker. “Are you mute or something? Where are you from?”

  The question floats to the ceiling and settles there. Little Boy opens the door. The bell cheerfully retorts, and a second time behind him. The girl has already walked a fair distance. She is brisk and graceful, though she does not bother with the feminine niceties of the schoolgirl’s walk. Her ragged, yellow school books are not held primly underneath her chin in folded hands, but slung from her shoulder by one limp, swinging arm. Little Boy stuffs the pastry bag in his coat’s breast pocket and, running, mounts his bike. He flails to raise the kickstand with his heel. How old is she? He tries to count the years in her clothing, in the snappy rise and fall of her buttocks. He is pedaling toward her, wheels flecking mud on the pavement. He doesn’t know what to say. The only French that comes to mind is an apology. He wants to know how to say goodbye as well. He wants to know how to say, Are you finished with that? These are all the wrong words.

  She hears the bike coming. Pauses, mid-step, twisting on the toes of one foot and the heel of the other. He reaches into his coat for the pastries, fumbling to offer her one. She begins to greet him and then they are too close, and then his bike speckles her hem with dirt. Her eyes, and the roses in her cheeks, and the faint worry lines already framing her mouth. She is, he thinks, thirteen. Just like him.

  He passes her. Other children filter into the street, converging on one habitual procession. They all have the same school books, in various jackets and states of repair. He whips the bike into a hard turn, loops back, stippling the other side of her dress as well, and shouts his name: “John!”

  Wait, that’s not right.

  He whips back again. He calls out, “Matthew!”

  A fist meets his gut. He lets go the handlebars as if someone asked him to do it. His feet slip from the pedals. The back of his head meets the pavement, and the bike falls, and he swallows back stomach acids. A circular peach shadow descends on him, becomes an oval, becomes a head and shoulders. He focuses his eyes. A harelipped boy in cap and red blazer grimaces down at him, hiding all the teeth that he can hide. An ivory sliver and puffy red gums peek through his upper lip’s division.

  “Who are you?” he asks, leaning in to study Little Boy. “Why don’t you leave her alone, Yankee Doodle?”

  Other children gather around them laughing—smaller boys and girls, teenage youths. One of them is standing up his bike, no doubt to steal it. Little Boy scrambles to his feet, kicking the harelipped boy in the shoulder on his way. Walking feels like swimming. He makes for his bike, picking up the pastry bag as he wades. He wrenches his bike free. There, several dozen feet away, is the dark-haired girl with his mud on her skirt. She walks as if nothing has happened. Little Boy climbs up on the bike. He considers running her down. The harelipped boy, however, tugs on his jacket. He holds the bike in place with his left hand, by its back wheel. He coolly motions over his shoulder as if to say, Go back the way you came.

  Little Boy spits on him and rides away bawling.

  When he comes back to Hotel Gurs, Little Boy has eaten both his pastries. Raspberry and sweet cheese residues scab around the corners of his mouth. There is a harelipped boy set aflame in his heart, a weirdly handsome monster with tusks and massive fists. There is a harelipped boy, blond like him, but better: butter gold to Little Boy’s corn-silk white, forever pushing him from his bike. Making him dirty his clothes. There is a harelipped boy with a sharp little chin and cheekbones like the split tops of the baker’s bread. There is a harelipped boy, brutal and genuinely French—a harelipped boy who can see he is American just by looking, which isn’t even fair because he’s never even been to America, not really. There is a harelipped boy who would keep him from a dark-haired girl he only just met, whom he h
as never hurt.

  He puts away his bicycle in the utility cabin.

  Collapses sobbing against the blue brick wall. The sound becomes inarticulate, awful, like a baby bird begging, but lower, wetter. Fat Man follows it to him. He looms stupidly—another oval, another head-and-shoulders shadow. There is a harelipped boy.

  “What’s got you in a fit so early?”

  Little Boy sticks out his tongue.

  “Did you fall down somewhere?”

  Little Boy shakes his head.

  “What’s that sugar doing on your mouth?”

  Little Boy wipes his mouth.

  “A pastry,” says his brother, sniffing the little boy’s breath. “Two pastries!”

  The bawling continues.

  “With whose money did you buy them? That was our money. You didn’t even get me one. That’s really unfair, Matthew.”

  Little Boy croaks, “Carry me?”

  His brother raises his hand to slap him. Little Boy quiets himself, wipes the snot from underneath his nose, and ignores the tears still flowing down over his cheeks and ears.

  “Please, brother. Carry me home?”

  Fat Man sighs, hoisting his little brother. “All I’m saying is next time you have to share with me.”

  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 cab
in, 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.