Fat Man and Little Boy

by Mike Meginnis

  Matthew’s desk begins to rattle. The seat’s hooves lift from the ground and clatter back, three always touching, but four never. Peter hisses from apparent pain. Matthew growls. He loses. His arm falls to the desk, his hand wrenched back at a ninety-degree angle from the wrist, something like elbow macaroni. He coughs like he’s been socked in the gut. A strand of spit hangs from his lip.

  “Good match,” says Peter. He peels Matthew’s good hand from the desk’s edge and shakes it once, then scoots his own back into place. Just in time: the teacher has entered. He writes on the chalkboard. The children are to copy what he writes. Peter writes it all down. Matthew, still smarting, massages his wrist and looks at Claire as if it were her fault, as he always does when the contests are over. His face is twisted by resentment. His bottom lip envelops its better, revealing the stupid narrow knot of muscle in his chin, tugging the skin of his neck upward and partly onto his face, where it puffs and swells. He is like a wounded frog.

  Claire turns away.

  Claire means to leave school alone. She feels a little woozy, slightly off. Peter and Matthew follow her out. They walk on either side of her, elbow-lengths away. Either could, speaking purely in terms of distance and practicality, touch her skin, take her hand, hold her elbow, stroke the nape of her neck. Some days she might want them to, or at least one of them. Today she would like neither. It might have been their fight that made her feel so ill. Something left their warring bodies and entered hers. She might throw up.

  “Your skin got really hot while we were arm-wrestling,” says Peter.

  “What?” says Matthew, in English.

  “Your skin,” says Peter. “It was incredibly hot. Are you okay?” He shows his palm. It’s still a little red—irritated by the heat, apparently, or even burnt. It might be the beginnings of a rash.

  Maybe what Claire has is catching. She rubs her tummy.

  “Are you feeling okay?” says Peter.

  “What?” says Matthew.

  “Not you.”

  He gets that. Matthew hangs his head, kicks a rock hard enough to send it flying.

  Claire says, “I’m fine. You two looked ridiculous, though. You’re going to hurt each other someday.”

  “I doubt it,” says Peter.

  Matthew says, “Do you want to ride bikes? Claire can ride on my handlebars. We can take her home and that way she’ll be safe.”

  It’s been days since Claire has heard him say this much to anyone. She imagines Matthew working through a French phrasebook for an evening, underlining useful conjugations, building the invitation in a separate notebook. Has he explored the possible avenues of this conversation thoroughly? What else might he be prepared to say on the subjects of bicycles, security, and Claire? Does he know the word for wheel yet?

  “I don’t want to do that,” says Claire. She waits for the what.

  “We should go somewhere else then,” says Peter.

  “I question the handlebars as a conveyance,” she says, wanting to go home but not with them. She waits for the what.

  “You can ride my bike,” says Peter. “I’ll run beside you.”

  “I want to take her home so she’ll be safe,” says Matthew, getting in front of the other two and turning to face them.

  “Safe from what?” says Claire.

  Peter nods. This is the way the boys agree. She needs to be safe.

  “Fuck that. I don’t want to be safe. Put me on your handlebars, Matthew, but don’t take me home.”

  Matthew says, “What?”

  They go to Half Hill. Half Hill is a tall one, rising from the earth like a wave, flattening to a reasonable plateau, and then cresting harshly, falling inward, revealing its soil: the dirt, the rocks inside, and sometimes the worms. This open side is also partly mossed and grassed in horizontal gradations. Explanations for Half Hill vary considerably, being almost purely the subject of schoolyard speculation. No one their age can remember. Some kids say it was the Germans with one of their big guns—a rail gun, even. Others say it was a bomber—German or American. Some kids say there was going to be a building there, one in a weird style, integrated with the hill, and so the builders dynamited half the hill. It was going to be a haberdashery or something. No one agrees, and none of the stories are especially plausible. But there stands the hill nonetheless.

  “The game is simple,” says Peter, pacing before Claire and Matthew like a commanding officer, the flat side of Half Hill his backdrop. “You ride your bike up the hill as fast as you can. Then you ride as fast as you can over the flat part. That’s where you get most of the speed. Then you launch off the edge. You dismount the bike as you fall, and take the fall as well as you can.”

  “What’s the point?” asks Claire.

  “You wanted something unsafe. This is it. Totally unsafe. We could all die.”

  “You’ll wreck your bikes,” says Claire.

  Matthew says, “I will do it.”

  “Matthew, your bike is the only way you can get to school,” says Claire. “We live close enough to walk. Peter, you love your bike. You don’t want to hurt it, and Matthew can’t afford to destroy his.”

  “What?” says Matthew, fuming. “I’ll do it!”

  “It’s a calculated risk,” says Peter. “Look, I’ll go first and show you how.” He walks his bike to the foot of the hill and mounts it. “People do this all the time,” he insists. “It’s no big deal.”

  He pedals hard. Climbing the hill is obviously not the part where you pick up speed. It’s the part where you prove that you can bike uphill. The speed comes at the plateau—he hits an impressive pace, and, at the verge of the precipice, stands upright on the pedals. Claire’s stomach twists up inside itself like a towel being wrung. From their perspective, the bike rolls off into empty air, aligning with the clouds. Peter tilts sideways until he and the bike are parallel with the ground, at which point he retracts his legs, tucking them up in his gut. He lands with a thud and coughs for a minute. The coughs become laughter. His bike lies three feet away, angled by its pedal, front wheel swiveled and spinning, back wheel still.

  “I did it!” he shouts. He stumbles to his feet and checks the bike. “It’s fine. Now Matthew can try.”

  “I’ll do it,” says Matthew. Someone must have told him girls like boys who plan to do things. He doesn’t move from his spot at the foot of the hill, and it doesn’t look like he’s going to.

  “I’ll go with you,” Claire says. “I’ll ride on your handlebars.”

  Matthew stares at her blankly. It must be everything he wanted. They’ll be flying off a little cliff, though. Did Matthew want that? It may be he doesn’t know what she said. She boosts herself up onto the handlebars. He nearly falls, but Peter runs over, catches them, and holds them upright.

  He asks Claire if she really wants to do this and she nods without thinking. “I thought you would go separately. I thought you could both use his bike, because it’s more sturdy than mine.”

  She hates to see Peter crow when he’s won. She hates to see Matthew sit and shake and crimson. This is also, in her life as their captive, a precious opportunity to be less than safe. That’s enough in its own right.

  So she shouts, “Go Matthew!” and Peter, in a too-rare moment of kindness, pushes the bike, helping Matthew climb the hill, running alongside across the plateau, and barking a reminder for the both of them to jump. Matthew stands on the pedals. He breathes on her neck. She pushes off the handlebars.

  A long, sharp breath at the apex.

  They land entangled—Matthew with one leg beneath the bike, Claire with her arm trapped under Matthew’s torso, everyone crying. Peter comes down from the hill the long way. He tries to help them up. They hurt too much. Claire wrenches out her arm from beneath Matthew and rolls onto her side. Her mouth is bleeding. Her nose is bleeding. Her body hurts all over. Matthew is bleeding from his nose as well,
and his leg has been scraped badly. The bike’s right handlebar is bent to a weird angle. Peter is saying he’s sorry. He’s saying she shouldn’t have done it.

  She says, “It’s okay.”

  Matthew curses in English.

  She says, “I’ve got to pee. I’m going to go behind Half Hill. Peter, please don’t let Matthew look.”

  Matthew rolls onto his back and lets his mouth hang open as if he’s waiting for the sky to pour itself down his throat. He kicks once at the clouds. He says, “That was stupid.”

  Claire makes her way out of sight. She tastes her own copper, feels it running weirdly cold from her nose and down her cheeks, her neck. She draws up her skirts around her waist and pushes down her underwear. The grass tickles. She relieves herself. It soothes her stomach.

  Wait. There is a cloud in her underwear. Rust among the white. She puts her head between her knees to look a little closer. A smell she can’t identify.

  The boys are crying on the other side of the hill. Soon they will begin to fight again. Either ruckus will cover for her crying. Her guts are awful knots. Her stupid little womb is bleeding.

  WHO THEY ARE

  Fat Man and Little Boy sit together in the library cabin, their chairs catty-corner, their knees almost touching. It’s the closest they’ve been in more than a month. Fat Man feels a charge passing between them. He does his best to ignore it. Little Boy kicks his feet as he pretends to read his grammar, lazily dragging a pencil across each line as if he is very slowly slitting someone’s throat. He whispers to himself. His nose has been bent to a new angle, his bottom lip scabbed, his shin wrapped in gauze, blood-soaked and browned, sticky-bound to the long scab the shape of Africa. He ought to change the bandages. His brother has resolved not to tell him this, not to mother Little Boy anymore if he can avoid it. They get along better this way.

  Presently Fat Man is consulting a book on the etymology of names. He says, “Why oh why did I name myself John?”

  “What’s wrong with John?” says Little Boy, closing the grammar without marking his place.

  “It means ‘Yahweh is gracious.’” says Fat Man, indicating his entry in the book. “Yahweh as in God.”

  “I don’t see what’s wrong with that. What does mine mean?”

  “Let me see.” Fat Man flips to the M’s. “It means ‘Gift of Yahweh.’ Ugh. Yours is even worse.”

  “They’re like the same thing.”

  “Yours states specifically that you were given to the world by God, but does not specify a reason or an end. It’s the worst thing you could be called. It might equally describe the beginning of the future or the beginning of the end. In my case, I needn’t necessarily be a gift from God and there’s no ambiguity about who God is or what he’s like. He’s gracious. Kind.”

  “But isn’t calling him gracious just another way of saying he likes to give gifts?” says Little Boy. He picks at his bandage, peeling it partly from his shin. He winces as the scab tears. A fresh trickle down his ankle and into his shoe stains his sock already fouled with sweat and mud. He dabs at the flow with his fingers.

  “Jack, a diminutive of Jonathan, is a slang word for man.”

  “So what? Put the book down,” says Little Boy, wiping his fingers clean on his short pants. “You’re being weird.”

  “I’m not,” says Fat Man. “I’m enriching myself. Learning about this world of ours.”

  “By looking up your own name?”

  Fat Man hushes him. Though they are alone in the library apart from the newlyweds, who have proven resistant to learning any part of the English language that can’t be swung as at least a little bawdy, caution’s still in order.

  “What are you really looking for?”

  “Rosie.”

  Little Boy asks him if he’s checked under “Rose.” He hasn’t. Rather than acknowledge his error, Fat Man turns to the proper page and reads aloud. Apparently the name originally comes from a German one meaning something like “famous kind.” Kind as in “type” or “sort.” Its similarity to the English word for the flower was a coincidence.

  “So,” says Little Boy, “Rose means a rose.”

  “What do you suppose Masumi means?”

  “Japanese,” Little Boy grunts. It is not clear if he means to indicate the language as a language, as the origin of the name, or for that matter the origin of the person.

  “He makes me nervous. Does he make you nervous? I don’t feel right around him. It prickles all over, the way he looks at you. At me, I mean. I itch the whole time we talk. Yesterday he sat beside me at lunch. We didn’t talk but I could feel him watching.”

  “Everything makes you nervous.” Little Boy rubs his nose at the tip, rotating the bulb at the end, attempting to reset it. The angle is all wrong.

  “We can’t all go flying off cliffs every time we get to feeling cagey,” says Fat Man. “But listen. You can help me relax, if you’re so concerned. In a couple days it’ll come time for you to go clean his room. He may ask you not to do it. Be persistent. Get in there if you can. See everything you can see. When you’re done, come directly to me and tell me what you’ve found.”

  “I may clean his room,” says Little Boy, “but I won’t spy.”

  Fat Man does not cuff his brother. Little Boy doesn’t wince. They share a moment of silence that acknowledges what it could have been.

  “Do you still feel the calm?” says Fat Man.

  “I feel the calm she gave us.”

  “Do you feel it here?” Fat Man touches himself between his breasts.

  “I feel it there,” says Little Boy, touching himself the same. “I feel it here, too.” He touches his gut.

  “I don’t feel it there.” Fat Man looks down at himself. “One step at a time.”

  “I’m glad you don’t hit me anymore,” says Little Boy.

  “I’m glad you stay out of my reach.”

  Little Boy leaves to clean the newlyweds’ cabin.

  Fat Man sits beneath the tree that’s like a willow. He leans against the trunk. This seems to relax the branches—they wave about in the wind, only periodically reaching for him, stroking his face, his proffered hands. She makes him calm. She helps him breathe. He shuts his eyes. A coldness in his brain complements the thrumming warmth in his chest. The thrumming’s like a candle burning in a drum. He massages the fat that hangs from his arms, slowly, one arm at a time, as if to worry it away. The cabins cast long, angular shadows on the ground, narrow as the light afforded by an open door. They twist and blur as the sun rolls back behind the hills. The tree like a willow has kept its shadow still, as it sometimes keeps its branches, focused on Fat Man, like a negative spotlight, changing with his breathing but otherwise still, stoking the cool in his brain, a cool rag loaded with ice, pressed to a reopened wound. He focuses on the top of his hat, a felt black wide-brimmed one that once belonged to a Jew, and which sits on the grass between his knees, stuck with grass seeds and dandelion puffs. The tree shades his hat blacker, so from above it’s like an empty plate—a black, empty plate.

  He lights a cigarette and holds it in his hand, knowing that his mouth can wait. He closes his eyes and thinks how nice some rain would be. He opens his eyes. Masumi is sitting beside him at a ninety-degree angle, facing outward. Their hands nearly touch.

  “Hello Matthew,” says Masumi.

  “John,” says Fat Man. “Matthew is my nephew.”

  “My apologies.” He plucks a blade of grass and twists it. “You’re smoking.”

  Fat Man considers his cigarette. “I was thinking about it.”

  “What were you thinking about it?”

  “I was thinking how I like the way they look more than I like the way they taste.” He puts it in his mouth.

  “What are you thinking now?” Masumi pulls open his jacket, draws a flask out of its pocket. He cranes his neck to meet Fat Man’s
eye.

  “I’m thinking I was right.”

  “You want a drink?” He uncaps the flask with a cheerful twist and pop.

  “What’s it taste like?”

  “You tell me.” He passes the flask.

  Fat Man swigs. The air smells like sweet milk on the verge of curdle.

  “Cigarettes. Everything tastes like cigarettes.”

  “This is a strange tree,” says Masumi. “I’ve never seen one like it.”

  “Why don’t you take off your hat? You can look at it the way I’m looking at mine.”

  “What do you expect me to see in my hat?” Masumi takes a pull from the plum brandy.

  “The tree looks like a willow to me.”

  “It has a strange aura. Do you believe in auras?”

  Fat Man sucks hard on his cigarette. “You want a smoke?”

  Glug glug, says the flask. “No.”

  “I should go inside,” says Fat Man. “It’s getting cold.”

  “With all that blubber?” snorts Masumi. “You’ll be fine. Tell me about the tree.”

  “It was here when we came.”

  “They let a pretty tree like this grow in a concentration camp?”

  “We like to think of it as a hotel.” Fat Man puts on his hat and curls up against the tree as if he means to go to sleep there, cigarette hanging from his lip, a small circle of spark bobbing in the dusk like a leaf on the water.

  “It was a camp first.”

  “Have you been to our museum?”

  “I have,” says Masumi. “It was strange how little it was haunted.”

  “I feel very haunted there.”

  “Why did you take a dead Jew’s hat?”

  Fat Man rolls onto his other side, facing away from Masumi. He does not like this man with his white suits, his sweet liquors, his soft, buzzy voice like something left too long in a can. The tree cannot reach him down here, so low to the ground, nearly wrapped in her roots, which is fine by him, he does not want to be comforted right now, he wants to hate. The coolness in his mind becomes numbness.