Fat Man and Little Boy

by Mike Meginnis

  “Shh,” said Fat Man. “Shh-shh-sh. Thank you for calling me. We’ll set all this right, I’m sure of it. We’ll do as you say. We’ll run. I won’t tell you where. That would just make things look worse than they already do.” He calmed and soothed her while the waiter, hoping to receive his money from the gentleman rather than through the post, listened with wide eyes and prying ears. Fat Man shot him several contemptuous glances, to which the waiter was either oblivious or inured.

  He drove home planning to let himself be arrested. This was, after all, what he had wanted, even planned. They would put him away for as long as the law said he deserved for as close as they could come to the number of killings he had in some sense committed. But now that the ax was falling he feared for his neck. When he came in the door of his cabin and saw Rosie playing marbles with their daughter he said, “We’re going to Hollywood!” big and happy as he could, waving his arms in wild circles.

  When she asked him why he said they deserved it. When she asked him why again he said he wanted to see where magic was made. He had grown to love the cinema more than almost anything. His interests had expanded from films featuring the Hanway twins to a series of noirs, detective films, and gangster flicks. Rosie called them his tough-guy pictures. There was something to it. Fat Man had skipped adolescence for a cushy adulthood. He had never set a proper goal, never known for sure what he wanted, had always been soft, and was now at his softest: grotesquely overweight, a doting father, and an exceedingly grateful husband. Some nights he would sit up late thanking Rosie for loving him, wrapping himself around her, spooning her insistently. She found it alternately adorable and infuriating.

  After dinner, Rosie asked him if it was the police that made him want to go to Hollywood. He asked her what made her think that. She told him a letter had come for him while he was gone. The envelope was a large brown one of the sort used to mail documents. It was heavy. There must have been a lot of paper inside. There was no return address.

  “Open it,” she said.

  He made to leave with the letter.

  “Open it in front of me.”

  Inside, a thick sheaf of papers bound by a straining yellow rubber band. He broke the rubber band with a yank of his hooked fingers. The papers were typewritten, the words crowding each other, not even single-spaced but overlapping slightly, so that p’s, y’s, and g’s intersected uppercase letters, so that l’s impaled what was above them. He understood, after some study, that these were names: the names of women. He flipped through the pages. There were so many, all with dates appended, going back and back, from now to several years before Fat Man and Little Boy even came to France.

  “You never talk about your life before meeting me,” said Rosie.

  “There’s nothing worth saying,” said Fat Man.

  “You never told me why they won’t leave you alone.”

  “They’re confused.”

  “Who are all these women?”

  “Dead women.”

  “We’ll go to California. Whatever you’ve done, I want you safe.”

  Tickets were bought. They stayed in a Paris hotel under false names while they waited for their flight. They told the staff they would be visiting Rosie’s family. Maggie was promised she would see where the movies were made, and Little Boy understood without being told that they would be fugitives for a while. Fat Man took Rosie out for dinner. They had the duck.

  She asked him, “Did you do what they say you did?”

  “No, not what they say.”

  She asked him why he looked so guilty all the time.

  He said he didn’t look guilty. He said he looked afraid.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Losing you.”

  Now the rest of the Something-Burger sign comes into view. It reads ATOMIC BURGER, the glowing red text emblazoned on a neon-green rocket, launching from the joint at an angle. The windows are painted with cartoon mushroom clouds rising from cartoon burgers and shakes, low prices markered in yellow at landfall. Outside the door there’s a brightly-colored toy plane the kids can ride in for a quarter. A little girl sits in the cockpit, pretending to machine-gun her brother.

  “Christ,” says Fat Man. He turns to Little Boy, still holding Maggie’s hand, and Rosie, who adjusts her hat to better block the sun.

  “What?” she says. “You don’t want to go anymore?”

  “Well it’s in pretty bad taste, don’t you think?”

  “What is?”

  He waves at the sign. “Atomic Burger. Why not just call it ‘We killed several hundred thousand innocent Japanese Burger’?”

  “I guess,” says Rosie, still adjusting the brim of her hat. “I mean, I can tell you exactly why you wouldn’t do that, but I see your point. But I don’t think they mean it that way. It’s about the future.”

  “The future,” says Fat Man, shaking his head.

  She sighs. “Look, we can go somewhere else, you’re the one who said he’s starving.”

  But Fat Man feels a pull. He turns to Little Boy for help. Little Boy looks back blankly. “No, no, it’s okay. Come on. I’m overreacting. You know how sensitive I get.”

  “I suppose,” says his wife.

  They go to Atomic Burger. The little girl in the toy plane machine-guns them as they go through the double doors. A bell rings; Fat Man jumps. A waitress tells them to sit anywhere they like. Her paper hat is shaped and painted like a boat—a destroyer. She wears a sort of futuristic stewardess uniform, a long blue skirt and short-sleeved jacket with neon green fringe, the rocket logo replicated on her right breast—a name tag: Charlene. All that and a pair of yellow vinyl cowboy boots. Rosie tugs him gently by his elbow to a booth. Little Boy and Maggie sit on one side, the grown-ups on the other. The kids kick their feet. Fat Man passes out the menus. The cover is a drawing of a droopy-faced dog piloting the plane outside, wearing flight goggles and a helmet. A small pink paper advertisement disguised as a coupon but offering no discount falls out of the menus when they open, inviting the reader to a used car lot five miles away, where the deals are wild and crazy and the cars all look new.

  Fat Man presses his hand to his gut and adjusts it. “Smells good in here,” he says.

  Grease and salt, fried potatoes, grill sizzle. The place is full of brat kids picking their noses, shouting at their parents, speaking over each other, ordering the chicken tenders, chewing gum long past the point of its flavor’s exhaustion, tugging at the waitresses’ skirts, demanding attention. They wipe their snot off underneath the tables in full view of their parents, who are too harried to stop them, or alternately do not care. One bounces a little blue ball off the ground, or the window, or the table, and back into his hand. Two of them, brother and sister, run through the joint laughing like fools, taking turns chasing. A waitress asks them to go to their parents. They say they haven’t got any. The brother, meanwhile, puts his gum in sister’s blonde frizz.

  There is a pretty half-Asian waitress with a sullen expression clearing a table with a ketchup handprint on it. There is a dark birthmark on her calf the shape of an amoeba. She wipes away the red handprint. She drops the sodden towel on her cart. She rights the fallen salt shaker. She scrapes the salt off the edge of the table into a cupped hand, and shakes this onto a plate on the cart. She licks her thumb’s end. She goes into the kitchen, walking in this closed-off way, knees rubbing together under the skirt. She does not feel Fat Man’s eyes. Little Boy doesn’t notice.

  Rosie asks the kids what they’re having. Little Boy wants the Double Nuclear Burger with Cheese. He says Maggie would like the Nuked Cheese Sammich best, please. Maggie nods—that sounds pretty good. Fat Man can’t decide between the Atom Burger (basic model, bacon optional) and The Burger of the Future (onion rings, peppercorn mayo). There is also the one with the mushrooms. Fat Man can’t remember how he feels about mushrooms. Rosie rarely buys them, but that o
nly suggests that she doesn’t like them.

  The air conditioning unit runs loud, seeming to beat against itself. But it’s still so damned hot. The waitress Charlene comes and asks them for their order, chewing on her pen’s cap. Fat Man decides on The Burger of the Future. Rosie asks for a salad. She’s told there aren’t any salads. She asks for the chicken; she’s told there aren’t any chickens, unless she wants the chicken tenders, but those are more for kids—very small, shaped like airplanes, sort of silly. The breading has a lot of sugar in it. Okay she’ll have the burger then.

  “Which one?”

  “The basic one.”

  “You want cheese, ma’am?”

  “Why not?”

  Little Boy orders for himself and Maggie. The waitress gives them crayons from a crayon box she carries. They draw on the blank white undersides of their paper placemats. She does a picture of Dorian and Pierrot, which is all she’s drawn since she met them. Rosie says it’s just a way of processing her feelings. She says Maggie is a deeply feeling girl. The brothers always look like they’re in pain the way she draws them. They seem to try to push each other away, their heads tilted as if pulling, and one of them is always crying, though it changes which is which. The only detail that ever looks quite right is the egg-shaped gap between their necks, inside which gap she always draws a little moon, just as she saw it then. The rest is sort of a mess.

  Fat Man watches the salt and pepper shakers like it’s the only way he can keep them from talking.

  Someone else comes in. A couple teenagers. The girl is pretty. The bell rings again. Charlene tells them to sit where they like. She’ll be with them shortly.

  There’s a pain in Fat Man’s gut that won’t go away, though he knows what he can do about it. There’s a gun there, Masumi’s—empty, cold, and hard. He’s been wearing it taped up in his own folds to hide it from his family, who use his pockets freely, who wipe their snot on his pants, who make him carry things for them, but who don’t touch him otherwise now. He used medical tape—the kind that sticks to skin, secreted in the line that bisects his stomach like a sideways ass, wrapping bandages around the point of division. It makes him walk a little funny but discomfort suits a man of his girth. It seems right that he should waddle, that he should rest a hand on his gut as if to hold something in place, seeming now to suffer an ulcer, seeming now to adjust a hopeless girdle. When Fat Man left the country he couldn’t bear to leave the gun. While he taped and bandaged it up inside himself, Rosie knocked on the bathroom door, asked him what in hell he was doing that was taking so long. He said it was a number two. She said to hurry it up then. He said, “You can’t hurry genius.”

  Now the kids are asking for more paper. Rosie takes some from the notebook she keeps in her purse for this purpose, tearing out three sheets each for Little Boy and Maggie. The kids snatch them from her hands.

  Fat Man asks Rosie how it feels being back in the USA. She says she doesn’t feel like she’s back. “It all seems so new. Some of that is I’ve never been to the west coast. Some of that is I haven’t been back since the war. Some of it is they’re a bunch of brats here and I’d like to wail on them a while.”

  “I could go for some wailing,” says Fat Man.

  “Or whaling!” shouts Little Boy, making a big fat gut on himself in the air with his hands. Maggie giggles. Fat Man kicks him underneath the table.

  “That was uncalled for,” says Little Boy.

  “What did you do?”says Rosie.

  “Nothing,” says Fat Man.

  “Nothing,” says Little Boy.

  Little Boy salts his fries basket. He pours ketchup. He asks Maggie would she like anything on hers. She shakes her head nuh-uh. They knock their feet together sideways underneath the table. The soles of his shoes make a nice cloppy sound against the soles of hers.

  He cuts her grilled cheese in half down the diagonal because the kitchen didn’t bother and because that’s what she likes. He asks her if she wants her crusts. She says yes. Rosie has been teaching her to clean her plate so she can get big and tall. Little Boy doesn’t see the urgency in that. All the pretty girls are short.

  Maggie scrapes off the scabbed cheese goo where it dripped from the sandwich onto her plate and sucks it off her finger. Little Boy eats his fries. He asks where they’ll go for the rest of the day. He asks if they’ll see a movie. Rosie says they can see the people who make the movies instead. Fat Man says that they can see a movie if they want. They’ll be here for weeks, after all. Little Boy says can they go to the beach. Fat Man says that can wait until tomorrow. Little Boy says can they tour the homes of the stars. Fat Man says they can do that in a few days.

  Little Boy says he promised Maggie a tour of the homes of the stars first thing.

  Fat Man says he shouldn’t promise things he can’t deliver.

  Maggie is still picking the cheese from her plate.

  Little Boy nudges her with his elbow. “I bet you can’t eat your sandwich before I eat my hamburger.”

  She wolfs it down, finishes before everybody, gets cheese on her cheek.

  Little Boy napkins it off.

  She says, “Can I ride in the plane?”

  “I haven’t got any quarters,” says Fat Man. “It’s not so fun anyway.”

  “I’ll get some change if you give me a dollar,” says Little Boy. “I can take her outside.”

  Rosie opens her purse.

  Fat Man closes it and says, “I don’t want her playing with that kind of toy. They warp young minds. Look at these kids.”

  He motions at the Hollywood children. One of them has climbed up on a table. The kid wears a cowboy hat and a T-shirt with a sewn-on picture of a bucking bronco. He pretends to shoot with gun-fingers. “Pow pow! Pow! Pow pow pow!” His mother tries to pull him down by the cuff of his pants. She begs him to behave. He stomps on her fingers.

  “You want her acting like that?” says Fat Man.

  Little Boy says, “You wouldn’t be a brat, would you Magnolia.”

  Maggie shakes her head.

  Little Boy says, “Come on, we’ll play in it without the quarter. The best part is sitting in the cockpit anyway.” He leads her out by the hand. He hoists her up into the cockpit. When he looks in the window he sees Fat Man is looking out at them, watching so closely. Like he doesn’t trust Little Boy with his daughter. He ought to. Little Boy knows her best. Little Boy takes care of her all the time. Little Boy knows how to make her laugh.

  Little Boy named her, for God’s sake. He loves her more than anybody.

  He stands behind the plane, hands planted on each wing. There are four fat springs underneath the plane, attaching it to the base, and in their center a hydraulic mechanism to make the plane bounce for a paying customer. Little Boy can tilt and jostle it a little if he puts his back into it. “Now you’re shooting them down,” says Little Boy. “Fire the machine guns, Magnolia.”

  “Budda budda budda!” she shouts.

  He bounces the plane. “Now they hang left. Swoop with them.”

  “Eeeeaaaauuurrrrrrhh.”

  He tilts it left as hard as he can, lifting the right wing, pushing on the left one’s end.

  “There’s so many of them, coming at you from all directions.” He pokes her all over with his fingers, makes her giggle, pokes her under her arms, between her ribs, in her tummy, belly button, back of her neck, behind her ears, saying pow pow pow, pow pow pow.

  “No, nooo, no, I dodge them.”

  “You can’t dodge them all. Your engines are failing.”

  “I fix the engines,” says Maggie. “I’m a mechanic.”

  “Japan comes into view!”

  “Japan?”

  He turns the plane left, twists it to the right, pushes hard to quake it, she’s laughing and scared all at once.

  “Budda budda budda budda!” she shrieks.

&nbs
p; “You only have a short window of opportunity to drop the bomb and win the war.”

  “Drop the bomb?” says Maggie.

  “No, no, not yet. You’ve got to wait till you’re over the target.”

  Maggie hunkers down. She squeezes the wheel. “I’m ready.”

  “Not yet,” says Little Boy, husky, low in his throat. He wipes sweat from his forehead. “Not yet.”

  “I’m ready!”

  “Give it another second. Be patient. Calm. You only get one chance.” His body hums inside. His guts clench and loosen. Stomach burns. The feeling of free fall. Weightless. Turning mid-air like a pinwheel. The moment before impact. Heat. Light. Thunder. White-out. White.

  “Now,” shouts Little Boy. He sticks his fingers in his mouth and whistles, starting high, then falling by gradations as the bomb falls away. He shouts, “KABLAM!” and simulates a rumbling in his throat and in the wings, jumping with both feet as high as he can and stomping, shaking the plane hard, making Maggie’s teeth chatter. She laughs and laughs and laughs. “Now fly away. Go, go, go, before they catch you. Don’t let them see your face.”

  “They’ll never catch me.”

  “You’re free!” he says. “You’re free!”

  He looks back inside and his eyes catch his brother’s. Fat Man is pale. He sweats. He turns and says something to Rosie, who quickly scoots out of the booth. Fat Man climbs out and walks, stiff, a little crooked, toward the back, hand sliding along the wall as if for guidance.

  A man in an apron exits the restaurant. The bell rings inside. He has a mole on his chin with a long black hair, and his nose is raw and red. He puts his hand on the plane’s nose. “You’re supposed to pay for that,” he says. “You see the quarter slot? That’s where you put your money.”

  “I haven’t got any money,” says Little Boy.

  “Then I’m taking her out.” The man in the apron lifts her from the cockpit by her arms. “Go find your parents and ask ’em for quarters if you wanna play.”

  “Take your fucking hands off my cousin,” says Little Boy, “or I’ll tear your balls out with my teeth.”