Fat Man and Little Boy (12 page)

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 didn'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.

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.

“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 has 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.”