The guy sets down Maggie, who bites her lip and grinds the toe of her shoe into the pavement. She might cry. Rosie comes out the door. She says, “Is there a reason you’re man-handling my daughter?”
The galoot says he works at the restaurant. That’s all he’s got. He goes back inside. Rosie lifts up her little girl. Little Boy rubs Maggie’s back.
“We’ll leave as soon as Daddy comes out of the bathroom,” says Rosie.
They jaywalk across the street when traffic slows. A homeless man sits on the nearest bench, at the very edge, inviting anybody who wants to sit with him to go ahead. Rosie prefers to stand.
Little Boy says he’ll get Fat Man.
The galoot glares at him from the kitchen as he passes.
He knocks on the bathroom door. “Are you okay in there?”
Fat Man says he’s fine. “I’ll come out soon.”
“Rosie wants to go to the hotel.”
“My bowels appreciate the update. Why can’t you people ever let me use the bathroom in peace?”
Little Boy leaves Atomic Burger. He crosses the street back. Rosie has persuaded the homeless man to leave the bench. She sits there with Maggie, the little girl now very tired, yawning, blinking often, one eyelid lagging the other in a sort of drunken wink. Little Boy asks to hold her. Rosie lets him do it. She adjusts her hat to better block the sun, and looks at her watch, and waits for her husband.
“He’ll be along soon,” says Little Boy.
“You can’t rush genius,” she says.
There is a billboard advertising the services of a Madame Masumi, “Consultant to the Stars.” Pictured thereon, a beautiful Oriental spirit medium, but without a wooden box or peacock feathers: instead many necklaces of beads in various sizes and colors, many gold and silver bracelets, hair entwined with crow feathers, a small sort of purple turban, someone’s idea of a Japanese sorcerer’s robe. The faintest suggestion of cleavage. There is a number you can call. Little Boy asks Rosie does she see the billboard.
“It doesn’t look like her at all,” says Rosie.
Little Boy agrees it can’t be her.
Fat Man sits on the toilet, unwrapping the bandage that holds in the gun. It was, he realizes, unnecessary to hide the gun. No one has put a hand in his pocket. Maggie has not wiped snot on his pant leg. Nobody would have felt it. No one’s gotten close enough to have the chance. They are farther from his body than he thinks.
The gun has been hurting him. He peels off the medical tape and rolls it into a ball, which he drops in the waste basket. He extracts the gun from his folds. Somehow it’s still cool to the touch. He checks the chambers: still empty. He groans as he squeezes his insides, as he cradles the gun in his sticky, pulsing fingers. If someone tries to hurt his family he can scare them away. If someone tries to come for him he can scare them away. If the police come because they’ve heard who he is, he can scare them away. It’s only if he has to fire the gun that he’s in trouble. He should be in prison. He should have stayed and let them take him away.
He stands up, rests the gun on the back of the john, peels toilet paper and wraps it all around his hand. He looks in the bowl to see what he’s done.
There is a thick, black shit in the shape of a bomb shell. It looks too round and perfect to have come from inside his body. The ends taper smoothly. When he flushes it spins on one end for a long time, like a lazy top, refusing to sink.
He thinks, “There I am.”
He thinks, “There I go.”
He thinks, “That’s me.”
He tucks the gun under his belt, the handle sticking out at an angle but invisible beneath his untucked shirt, the hammer like a silver tooth digging into his hip.
Seeing a movie in Hollywood is like going to church. Everyone dresses up. The ushers guide you to a place where you’ll feel welcome or at least out of the way. The room swells with talk until the show starts, and then everybody shuts up. The audience’s eyes fill up with hope and need while the music blares and then, when the talking starts, they settle in. This one will be like the others. But you’ve got to respect it. The ritual of the movie is more important than the movie.
It’s another Hanway brothers film. This one about a detective looking for a man who killed three girls. It unfolds like a slow-motion chase scene. The audience sees the killer shoot someone who is sobbing off screen. That somebody shrieks and abruptly stops crying. The killer handles several pieces of evidence that will give him away. Detective Jack Miller—the Hanway brothers, Able and Baker—comes onto the scene a moment later, handles the same evidence, deduces the location of the killer, and follows him to a casino, where the crook is gambling, until he leaves for the hotel bar, and then the detective comes to the casino, and asks after the crook, and deduces the crook is headed for the hotel bar, where the crook drinks a martini. The crook drinks a little while and then leaves out the back way, leaving several clues, which the detective draws together so that he finds out where the crook lives, and he goes there, only to find the crook has already emptied the place, and just left for the coast. The detective follows, meeting a beautiful woman on the way. The beautiful woman gets kidnapped by the crook just as the detective is catching up to him. Then there’s an actual chase scene through town, the crook in a taxi, the detective in a borrowed police car, over a bridge, across a river, into the back streets, the crook wiping sweat from his brow, the dame taunting him. He’ll never make it, Detective Jack Miller is hot on his tail. He should turn himself in. What did he kill those girls for anyway, didn’t he know he’d be caught? He has to be caught, justice demands it. Just as the detective is pulling up right behind him, bumper to bumper, the crook swerves the wrong way and wraps his car around a tree. The detective cries as he pulls the dame’s limp body from the back of the car, her hair blowing in the wind, the car burning behind them, the fire climbing the tree, making the whole thing burn, palm leaves and all. But it turns out the dame is fine. She’s alive. Everything is fine. They kiss. Which brother is she kissing? Is it Able? Is it Baker?
Fat Man holds his wife’s hand. Rosie rests her head on his shoulder. Maggie and Little Boy whisper all the way through, Maggie struggling with the plot, Little Boy pretending similar confusion.
The house lights come up, star-shaped glowing glows. Everyone leaves, families holding hands to keep from getting separated in the crowd. Fat Man realizes when they are all gone that he is still there, with his family, who are waiting for him to let go of the arm rests and breathe again.
His wife whispers in his ear. He doesn’t know what. Little Boy and Maggie stand at a distance, holding hands.
In the hotel, Fat Man hides the gun behind their toilet. He’ll get it back next morning.
He dreams of handcuffs squeezing off his hands.
He dreams of the electric chair.
He dreams of wrapping his car around a tree.
He dreams of what it’s like to explode.
They go shopping. The store is three stories high. Escalators. Rosie directs Fat Man and the children to the third floor. Sunglasses for everyone. A pair shaped like stars for Maggie. Cheap-looking, costly, plastic yellow frames. A blocky pair of squares for Little Boy, green frames, almost too big for his head, though they do veil the weird bulge of his eyes. Blue and pink for Fat Man and Rosie, in that order, normal shapes. They need Coppertone sunscreen, the very newest in skin-protecting technology. They are a fair-skinned family. The little girl on the bottle looks coyly over her shoulder as the dog pulls down her swimsuit bottoms.
Fat Man notices the children have disappeared.
“They’re playing hide and seek again,” says Rosie. “Go find them before they get kidnapped.”
Fat Man stumbles through the store, feeling drunk. There’s so much merchandise. He turns a corner, confronts a wall of bags and luggage: umbrella bags, buffalo-bound luggage, fitted bags with clasped lips, luggage like upholst
ery, tobacco pouches, bags for athletic equipment, purses. He careens right, only to be confronted by a rack of shoes and slippers, laces in various states of undress, tongues hanging out, soft shoes with fur around their mouths and little red bows, shoes with nonfunctioning buckles, and at the aisle’s end emerging to a display of lighters, lighters endorsed by various brands and baseball teams, matches too, and tins of lighter fluid, to see them is to plan a barbecue, feel the pieces sliding into place, wonder where they keep the meat.
Down the escalator. Walking against the stairs, going the wrong way. He’s so wide people have to back down and let him exit before they can get back on, rolling their eyes. He nearly collides with a rack of children’s scuba gear, and avoiding that finds the lamp aisle: lamps shaped like dogs, lamps shaped like cats, lamps shaped like rearing horses, lamps shaped like bouquets of flowers with a lampshade held above them on an incidental metal rod, lamps with pipe racks for bases, pipe racks loaded with demonstrative pipes and pipe supplies.
He looks for Little Boy and Maggie in cosmetics, gathering uncomfortable glances like flies to flypaper, tucking in his chin, hands in his pockets, no harm meant here. Women can dye anything. They can pencil their eyes. They can paint their skin, and powder, to cover, obscure. He walks out into nylons. They don’t like him here any better. Goes to menswear. Finds ties piled like bodies. Finds a thousand argyle shirts, sweaters, vests, socks: dress socks and casual. Crosses the store, into sporting goods. A pile of boxed basketballs, laced or laceless. A pyramid of free weights. Racquets. Fishing rods and tackle. Fisherman hats. Those vests. Those rubber pants. Weird hooks with many snares. They could catch six fish at once. Vast spools of line. And here dog toys. It’s enough to make you weep. Chew toys you can’t imagine. Jerky for the animals. Biscuits, special cookies, bags of different-pastel-colored tennis balls. For playing catch.
In toys trains, electric or push. Toy guns. Solid metal model planes. Wooden horses. Horse heads on sticks. Plaster mammy pushing baby in stroller. X-ray glasses. Candy cigarettes. Spy decoder rings.
He finds them with the swimwear. Rosie too. She holds shorts like a circus tent up against him to test if they’ll fit.
He scolds the children. “Don’t you ever run away from me. Don’t you ever dare. You could get lost in here. Don’t you see you could get lost?”
“We’ll need nose plugs,” says Rosie. “Do you think that you can find us a four-pack?”
They leave the chiming row of registers loaded down with one full bag of stuff they meant to buy and several more filled with things they never planned on. As they approach the exit Fat Man feels the eyes of two security guards settle on his bulk. One guard fat, one guard small. One guard with a soup-catcher mustache. One guard clean-shaven. One guard with his shirt’s buttons aligned in a perfect column. One guard with his buttons all askew. One guard with mirrored sunglasses. A second guard with mirrored sunglasses. As they turn slightly inward to watch the Fat Man’s body, as they realign their shoes to point at his shoes, do their faces harden? Do they shift behind the sunglasses? Do their eyes narrow? Do their lips curl in contempt? As did those of the soldiers, as did the police, as did the once police? Do they reach for guns? Do they have guns? As Fat Man draws nearer the door, the small guard pulls his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose. He seems to have two pairs of eyes. One pair outraged and the other opaque.
Fat Man says, “Is there something the matter?”
“We’ve got to search you, sir,” says the fat guard. “Men of your girth often hide store items in their clothing, thinking we won’t notice. Frankly, sir, you look suspicious.”
“Now wait just a minute,” says Rosie.
Fat Man hides behind her. He holds up their bags in front of himself. Maggie pulls her mother’s skirt.
“My husband hasn’t stolen anything. I was with him the whole time we were in there,” Rosie says, though this is not true.
“With all due respect, ma’am,” says the small guard, “who are you supposed to be that you think we give a damn?”
“Is she somebody famous?” asks the fat one.
The small one shakes his head. He circles Rosie. Fat Man wonders what they’ll do with him if they find the gun. What Rosie would think. He’s straining to breathe. The artificial coolness of the air is stifling now in a way he never noticed before. He circles Rosie too, careful to keep the thin one on her other side.
“Sir,” says the fat one, approaching Fat Man from behind, “it looks suspicious when you try to avoid us. You’re upsetting your daughter. Don’t make her cry.”
Rosie says, “John, maybe you should let them do it so we can go. When they find you’re not a thief we can go to their supervisor.”
“Don’t let them touch me,” says Fat Man. He wheezes. “They hate me.”
Both guards reach for him from either side of Rosie. He drops the bags, spilling their contents, and pushes out his hands to stop them, to keep them at arm’s length.
“How’d your hands get like that?” says the fat guard, taking Fat Man’s left hand.
“Is it ink?” says the small guard, who takes the right hand.
Some crackle between all their fingers, which the guards do not seem to feel. The fat one’s eyes are still hidden. The small one’s eyes are wet and pink as if he’s been rubbing them too often.
“It’s just how they are,” Fat Man says. “Please don’t search me. Please let me go. I can’t stand to be touched.”
If they find his gun they’ll arrest him. They’ll ask him for ID. He’ll only have his passport. They’ll track him back to France, make some calls, learn he’s a fugitive. They’ll extradite him or lock him up here. The gun’s surface has warmed, is the same temperature as his body. It is harder than his body, though. If they pat him down they’ll feel it. He wants to take it back inside himself, to secret the gun in his folds.
He looks to Little Boy for help. Little Boy, however, is waiting by the door, as if none of this is happening, as if it will quite soon be settled.
Rosie says, “My husband is a good man. He doesn’t need to steal anything because he has everything he could want in life. He would never do that. If you search him, I’ll assault you both, and pull you down by your ears, and stomp on your heads, and make fools of us all until one of you manages to arrest me.” She smiles at them. “Do you want to do that, boys? To fight me and to lock me up? A woman? Here and now?”
They are still holding Fat Man’s hands.
She says, “Is that what you want?”
They are squeezing Fat Man’s hands. Can’t they feel the spark? They long to beat him down, he knows it. But do they know the cause? His crime? No one knows his crime. Not even Little Boy, who still waits at the door. Other customers are leaving the store, walking around this strange confusion of bodies, averting their eyes.
The guards release Fat Man’s hands. They look at their own hands—checking for ink stains, for signs of what they’ve touched.
“That’s what I thought,” says Rosie. She puts their purchases back in the bags, loads them onto Fat Man, and leads him out by his sleeve.
As his family rounds the corner, as Rosie mutters and smooths their daughter’s hair, Fat Man looks over his shoulder. He sees that the fat guard has followed.
The guard had to run to catch up. He is all out of breath; his shirt is coming untucked. His right hand is a fist but there is nothing of his former anger in him. His sunglasses fell off while he was running. His eyes are not unkind.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “You dropped this.” He opens his fist. There is a small rubber ball, orange, a toy for Little Boy, resting on his pink palm like a pearl in a clam.
Fat Man takes the ball and flings it into the street. It bounces off a taxi’s hood into the sun’s glare. “That’s not mine,” he lies. “You’ve wasted both your time and mine.”
Little Boy pours sand over Fat Man, asleep.
“Come on Magnolia,” he coaxes, whispering. “Help me bury him good.”
Rosie, reading, says, “Make sure to leave him air holes.”
Little Boy pats a layer down on Fat Man’s chest. Maggie practices writing her name in the layer. Little Boy does Fat Man’s gut. Maggie starts to build a castle on it, dumping her plastic bucket on the soft apex. The tower crumbles as he exhales a snore.
There are children running on the beach, kicking up jets of sand behind them. There are mothers holding sobbing babies.
Little Boy wants to lie down with his brother. They don’t do that anymore. He buries him instead.
There are waves licking the shore. There is driftwood. There are women laying out to tan. There are men rubbing them down with sun lotion. There is the sun. It’s quiet here.
Maggie stands with arms hanging limp at her sides, fists dangling at their ends, squinting up into the sky.
“Don’t do that,” says Little Boy, waving for her attention. “You’ll kill your eyes.”
The next day, the same beach. Rosie rubs down Fat Man with sun lotion, his skin like sheets beneath her hands. Folds and swirl, give and sway. The beach is mostly empty today. People don’t look at the fat man. They don’t want to see her rub the oil into him. The children are off playing.
Fat Man says, “It’s been a long time since I asked you if I was really what you wanted.”
“You always ask me this.”
“I’m not always on the lam when I ask you.”
Rosie sighs. “Are you my dream boat? The man I always hoped I’d be with someday? No. That was my first husband. He was my soul mate. It didn’t make me happy. I’ve told you all this. I’ve told you how I begged him not to go to war. I’ve told you how, when I heard that he was dead, I was as relieved as I was miserable. Sometimes the perfect thing is the wrong thing.”
“But do I make you happy?”
Fat Man and Little Boy Page 31