Fat Man and Little Boy (4 page)

A BAG OF RICE

They find a home. It is a flimsy-seeming thing. Damp rags flutter yellowed on a line of cord stretched nearly taut between a pole and a tree branch. If there were a sun they would dry by its light. Little Boy looks up to his little brother. Fat Man wears a tired, bearlike expression, fists clenched, head seeping down into neck and chest like a mudslide.

“There must be food inside that home,” Fat Man says, “but there are also living people.”

“If I give you some money,” says Little Boy, “can you go inside and get the food?”

“I thought you would get the food. You're supposed to be my big brother. You have to take care of me.”

“I'm just a little boy. I'm scared to go inside.”

“But I'm even younger than you,” Fat Man pleads. “What if they know I left you out here? What if they come out here to get you because they know you're really in charge? What if they're angry because you sent your little brother?”

Little Boy strokes the fat man's gut. “You need to be brave and do as I say.”

“I'll go in if you come with me. You don't want to be out here alone if the soldier comes, or the man who had our cash case before we did. He might not be dead. We never saw his body.”

“I'll hide,” says Little Boy.

“Come on,” says Fat Man. “You're coming.”

With a grip that hurts, he grabs Little Boy by the shoulder. They march to the home and knock on the door. It rattles. A woman cracks open the door, draped in purple robe and white sash. Her eyes take them in without comment. She has seen stranger things than white men in mismatched clothes. She does not move to welcome them.

Little Boy elbows his brother, whispering, “Go on. Food.”

“I don't know Japanese,” says Fat Man, as if this has just occurred to him.

“Mime it.”

Fat Man looks down at Little Boy and back at the woman. Jagged white patches of her scalp shine through thinning hair. Fat Man brings his hand to his mouth as if cupping a handful of rice and eats from his palm. He nods to the Japanese woman, repeats the action. She does it back—and also, by way of an offer, pretends to drink a cup of water. Fat Man smiles and nods.

Little Boy fans out a small handful of bills. She snatches one from his hand; one of the white crescents of her long, dead nails nicks his skin. She peers into the face of Lincoln, perhaps imagining a name for the face (not Roosevelt, not Truman) before settling on the numbers in each corner. The rate of exchange is a mystery. What does the woman think the bill is worth? She secrets away the bill inside her robe and leads the brothers inside.

There is a shirtless man lying motionless on a bed mat; he glistens with sweat and his skin is blotched purple. At eye-level, he has a small potted tree with sweet green leaves like flower petals. One arm extends to touch the pot. The other's wrapped around his face, which is obscured from mustache to hairline. His lips part and whistle softly with each breath. A second man, a soldier, is propped up against the wall, his machine gun wrapped in both arms and framed by crossed ankles, like a strut supporting his body. A helmet falls over his eyes. He has a patchy beard, and his shoulders and chest are dusted with fallen hairs. His hands are bloody at their knuckles. He is also purple-blotched.

Fat Man squeezes too hard. Little Boy shrugs off his brother.

“That's him,” whispers Fat Man.

The woman sets up a small stove, fills a pot with water.

“Your soldier?” says Little Boy.

“I think so.” Fat Man folds his hands together and begins twiddling furiously. His stomach rumbles. The woman gives both of them a cup of water. Little Boy hands her another bill. They chug the water, wipe their mouths with the backs of their hands. The woman brings them more. This time Little Boy does not give her more money. If she wishes to protest she does not have the words.

“We should go,” says Little Boy.

“But I'm hungry.”

“We can get food somewhere else.”

Fat Man whispers, harshly, “You already gave her the money.”

“We have more.”

The sitting soldier starts. The woman looks at him. She looks at the brothers, clamping her hand shut in front of her mouth.

“It means shut up,” says Little Boy out the side of his mouth.

“I know what it means,” says Fat Man.

They wait. The water comes to a boil. The woman pours in rice. Little Boy cranks his arm in circles, motioning for more. She glares, relents, adds more—and more water. Now she must bring it back to a boil. The brothers stand hapless at the door, swaying on their tired knees. There is a red radio in the corner with several batteries scattered beside it. They might be spent or waiting for their chance.

“Do you think they're loaded?” whispers Fat Man. “The guns?”

“Shut up,” whispers Little Boy.

“I never actually saw them fire. All this time I've just been assuming.”

“It's the safe assumption,” says Little Boy. He pinches his brother's thigh. Fat Man grits his teeth, thumps Little Boy on the back of his head. The woman in the purple robe stares at them. A lock of gray-streaked hair falls from her scalp.

She empties the rice into a brown cloth sack. Fat Man takes the sack from her. She motions for them to leave. When they hesitate, she hoists an invisible rifle and fires off several rounds, heaving from the recoil of each shell. She mimes pushing a helmet up from over her eyes to better see her kills.

“I wanted meat,” moans Fat Man. “All my life so far it's always been rice. I need something else. Something
filling.
”

Little Boy rolls his eyes. He holds out the rice in one hand, demonstrative, and then his other hand, empty. He motions with it for something else, something more. He takes a ten-dollar bill from his pocket. The woman shakes her head, crosses her arms, waits for them to leave.

“Please,” says Fat Man. He rubs his tummy. Speaks slowly, as if she'll better understand. “I am
so,
hungry
.”

“Shut up,” says Little Boy. He pockets the bill, hands his brother the rice, and tugs him by the elbow. The sitting soldier snorts. His head lolls forward and his helmet drops off. It hits his kneecap and thuds on the ground. His eyes shoot open. He squeezes the gun with his whole body. He sees the white boy, the white man—his prisoner—and nearly falls on his face trying to lift the gun. He calls out. The man with the potted tree shudders awake. In his panic he knocks over the little tree.

There is a moment where the man with the potted tree looks merely startled. He wears the blankness of confusion. Then a malice enters his body. He looks on the brothers with hatred—knowing hatred, as if they are old enemies.

“Run!” screams Little Boy.

Fat Man knocks the sliding door crooked as he forces his way through.

The soldier and the shirtless man follow, both hollering weakly. Just outside the doorway, the soldier raises his gun and shoots. The bullets whistle past. Dirt bursts around their feet and then farther out.

Their pursuers stumble and bark at them. “Assholes,” screams the soldier, demonstrating his obscene English. “Bastards.” Another shot. The shirtless man falls to his knees and throws up.

The brother bombs plunge into the woods, Fat Man heaving like a panicked ape, Little Boy whipped by thin branches, loose roots, string trees. They run blind, surrounded by sinister rustling, leaves crunching underfoot. Soon rain begins to fall, making the whole forest seem to swarm with lives, with sick Japanese, with raging soldiers. Sometimes they hear a distant curse. They fall and scrape their knees. They stop to breathe when Fat Man says that he can't make it, he won't make it. A twig snaps. They're running again.

They come to an abandoned farm, now lousy with rotten gourds and collapsed melons. This could have happened many ways, but Little Boy chooses to believe the family collapsed when the men were called to fight the Yanks.

“I can't run anymore,” heaves Fat Man. “I'm going to throw up. I'm so thirsty.”

“One thing at a time,” says Little Boy. “First we hide and hope they don't kill us.” He surveys the land. There is a shelter, but someone may still live there, and the spot is too obvious. Little Boy spies a slightly raised patch of dirt, a very small hill, crowned with dead vegetables and wild grass. He leads his brother there. Fat Man hobbles, clutching at his lungs through his chest as if to arrest their labors.

“Lie down in the muck,” says Little Boy.

Rain is pelting them loudly. Fat Man does as he is told—belly up like a dead tuna.

Little Boy kicks mud on his brother, and gourds and so on. “Lie very still,” he says. He lies down as well, on his belly, head-to-toes with Fat Man, the rice bag clutched under his chest. He wallows. He watches the woods where they came from.

“Your suit,” says Fat Man, horrified.

“It'll wash out, or I'll buy a new one.”

Little Boy listens for gunfire. He waits for the soldier. His broth­er's breathing calms, and slows. Soon they are breathing to­geth­er. Their bodies swelling and diminishing, touching and shying away. The brother bombs take great care in their breathing.

The soldier and the husband all purple-blotched are searching the field, shooting anything that moves. The soldier has the gun. The husband serves as a spotter, his shouts followed by three rounds. The mud accepts the bullets. They are far off but not so far.

Little Boy tries to count the shots. He doesn't know how many bullets the soldier has. It can't be too many.

“Here!” calls the husband, very close to them. Not in English, but they know. Three rounds into the dirt. Nothing. The soldier swears. The husband coughs. He sways into Fat Man's view, standing over the brothers, his dirty heels at eye level. The husband coughs.

A dry rustle—some bird or rodent. The husband points in its direction, coughing into the back of his hand. Three rounds into the dirt.

The husband has an awful coughing fit. Something wet comes out of him. The soldier stops shooting for a moment. He joins the husband and holds him like a brother. The husband vomits on the soldier. There was not much in him. Now, less. He collapses, his body landing with a great whumph only feet from the brothers. His hand, a pale claw between them, twitches once, and then is done but for the slightest pulse of blood beneath the skin. He is dying of what killed the short soldier, which is something in the air, a mystery. Rain shivers on his skin. Death calms the hand.

The soldier's legs are weak. He coughs as the husband coughed. He hacks.

He says, “This isn't how he dies.” He shoots the husband through throat and face. Blood foams. “This is how he dies.”

He says, “We will not wait for the Americans to do what we can do ourselves.”

He says, “This is how I die.”

He pushes the butt of his rifle into the mud. He kneels before it and slides the barrel past his teeth. Balancing on his left knee, he raises his bare right foot, presses his right knee to the rifle. He puts his toe on the trigger. One round. Flesh and chips of bone. The body falls.

Little Boy darts up on his feet. He runs away to throw up what's inside him. Fat Man wipes the rot and mud from his face and shoulders, chest and gut. Little Boy still has the food, but he will come back, and then they can eat. Rain drums on Fat Man as if he were a tarpaulin. Two bodies grow cold nearby. He feels at home here. He looks up at the clouds. He is like the bodies, he thinks, but he is also the home of a terrible hunger. That is the chief difference.

They hardly notice anymore the rot of the bodies. Busy little white worms tunneling the flesh, other bugs as well—spiders on their faces, flies on their extremities. This time the soft meat of their cheeks will be the first to go, and then their eyes. The skin between their thumbs and forefingers. The pink beneath their nails. The soles of their feet.

The brother bombs leave them like this. Eat rice from their bag with dirty hands. Open their mouths and tilt their heads back to drink rain.

Little Boy says, “What did you do to that soldier?”

Fat Man, incredulous: “What did
I
do? What did
we
do.”

Little Boy, blank: “What did we do?”

Fat Man doesn't say. Doesn't know how. They walk together.

They will walk for days. They will huddle for warmth. They will say few words. They will be brothers.

OCCUPATION

Several weeks have passed. Fat Man kneels at the table. Little Boy sits with his legs outstretched beneath it, cash case in his lap. He carries the money now. He still refuses to count what's left. He eats fish and sticky rice. Fat Man sucks noodles from a black ceramic bowl. They eat quickly, almost frantically, for fear of what will happen to their food if they do not. During recent meals there have been growths inside their dishes: molds, scum, and other rot. They are discussing ways to leave Japan. Little Boy thinks they might steal a fighter plane. His ideas are more and more impractical. Fat Man maintains that they can take a boat. He says that would be easiest.

American soldiers drink sake and wave their dollars. They tease and pinch the woman who serves them their food. She tucks her chin into her neck and hides her face behind a veil of hair. Fat Man asks her for another bowl of noodles. He waves his dollar too. She takes it as she passes and tucks it in her sleeve. He gulps down the broth.

“However we get there, we should decide where we're going,” says Little Boy. “What do you think of America?”

“Whatever you say,” says Fat Man.

“Whatever I say?”

“If we go to America, we'll have to watch the parades.”

“I like parades,” says Little Boy. “Or, I think I do. Little boys like them.”

“But what if they find us?” says Fat Man.

Little Boy asks what he means. Fat Man says he means Americans. He means what if they find out. “Bombs aren't supposed to
make
people,” he whispers. The server sets a bowl of noodles in front of Fat Man and leaves without acknowledgment. The soldiers are calling her Charlene. They call her to their table; they want more. Fat Man continues, screening his mouth with his hand, “It's like sex. Little bullet gets shot at a uranium egg. Egg bursts open and all hell breaks loose. Something big comes out of something so little. It sounds like a baby.”

Little Boy picks up the fish bit with his fingers and drops it down his gullet. “I do feel like a baby,” he says.

“Babies can't speak at first. They can't eat solid foods. And they don't know what we know,” says Fat Man.

When he was born Little Boy remembered it all. He knew what the scientists said to him as they stroked his shell, thinking no one could hear them. He remembered what it was to live as potential. Now he doesn't know. He only feels he used to. Here everything is strange. He can't absorb it. Japan is another kind of absence.

“Where can we go?” says Fat Man.

One of the soldiers, one with thin bristles of black hair and a forehead etched with many lines though he is young, calls Charlene to his side of the table. She comes. He's got a ten-dollar bill in his hand, ragged and half-torn down its middle, pale as new grass and leaf stems. He waves it underneath her nose as if scenting a bloodhound. The soldier presses the money to his cheek and smells it himself. He drags it down the side of his face, across his neck, over his collar bone, his uniform. He drags it over his left nipple, down his stomach, across his left hip, and down, to the center, between his legs. He hangs it from his open zipper, half exposed, half obscured. This looks like something he has practiced, a routine.

Charlene shakes her head slowly. She goes into the kitchen and does not come out until the soldiers have overturned the table and left. Little Boy leaves what he thinks the food was worth. No one here says what anything will cost.

Outside, after their meal, Fat Man begins to walk home, crunching fallen yellow leaves beneath his leather shoes; Little Boy stands still just beyond the closed door, bending in on himself and rubbing his knees forlornly, watching his brother's back. This is the third time this has happened today. The last two times, Fat Man has gone on walking and Little Boy has scurried belatedly to catch up. This time the boy shows more resolve. There are twenty feet between them now and he is still rubbing his knees. Twenty-five feet, then thirty.

Fat Man turns around and asks him what's wrong.

“My legs hurt,” whines Little Boy. “My feet still hurt. They're still healing from the glass.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

Little Boy reaches up with open arms as if the fat man were close enough to touch. “Carry me?”

Fat Man says he doesn't want to carry Little Boy.

“This is what good little brothers do. They carry their big brothers when they hurt.”

Fat Man relents. He takes his little older brother on his back and carries him down the paved road, which becomes a dirt road shaded by trees. Little Boy clings to him around his neck, sometimes strangling him to the point where Fat Man makes a coughing sound that means “loosen up,” which Little Boy does, until his arms draw closed again. He breathes hot and loud on Fat Man's neck and ear, his legs dangling and kicking at the air and sometimes Fat Man.

“What do you think we're here for?” says Fat Man.

Little Boy doesn't answer. He is listening to the air. Crickets sing in the trees.

They come to a farm. Night is falling. There is a man in a pigpen tending to the grunting things. They are like tumors of the landscape, soft and gray and pink. They move but not often. Fat Man and Little Boy watch them. Fat Man says, “I feel for the pigs.”

Little Boy says, “I feel for the one who cleans up after them.”

A woman comes out of the home and leans against the pen's fence to speak to her husband. Her hair is a thick black strand. Her face is a slope; they cannot see her eyes. She's younger than she looks.

Little Boy says, “We'll spend the night on their land. Tomorrow they can feed us.”

It is raining very lightly. It feels good. Little Boy is awake, watching the fabric weigh down and cling to his little brother's upturned back. They are sleeping or not sleeping across the road from the farm, under partial shelter of tall trees. They hid the cash case under piled leaves.

The woman comes out of the home and slides shut the door. She goes into the outhouse, which is beside the pigpen.

Little Boy creeps up to the outhouse. It's a shanty thing built from spare timber and irregular nails. He steps up close so that his bare toes touch the outhouse wall, finds a gap with his hands, bends to press his eye against the peephole. She is squatting on a platform raised on a box that stands over the hole. Her robe hangs from a hook on the door. There is no roof on the outhouse. Moonlight on her body, moonlight on her thighs, moonlight on her ribs. On high, hard breasts. Muscles underneath her skin, muscles that he didn't know existed. The pigs snort and snicker in their pen. He can hear her shit fall thickly. It runs down a chute at the bottom of the hole, out the back of the outhouse, and into the pigs' trough.

Moonlight on her body as the pigs crowd the trough, eating her night soil. They belch and squeal. She grunts back at them and squeezes more. They eat it all. Moonlight on the pigs hunched over their meal. Moonlight on the meal.

He can smell her, a green smell, a smell in the pit of his stomach.

She wipes herself with her hand. Little Boy grips himself between his legs, squeezes the softness. Nothing happens there. As she wraps herself in her robe, he rushes back to his resting place beside his brother, running under cover of pig ruckus. She goes back to the house. As she slides open the door she looks across the road and seems to see the brothers through the dark. “You don't see me,” whispers Little Boy. The woman goes inside.

When Fat Man wakes there are two policemen standing over them. A tall one, a short one. Fat Man shakes Little Boy's arm.

The policemen wear the expression of hatred the dead soldiers wore for some days, the expression that the dead husband who slept with a potted tree wore for less than an hour.

Little Boy jumps to his feet. He is smeared all over with mud. Fat Man slept on his face: only his front is so dirty, his back side rinsed by the rainfall.

Little Boy says, “We haven't done anything.”

The policemen's skin is purple-blotched like the soldiers' but it seems to be healing. They are very thin. The tall one has a beard and the short one has no beard. They may be brothers because they hold hands. They say nothing.

Fat Man tells Little Boy to ask them what they want.

“How am I supposed to do that?” says Little Boy.

The policemen look at the brothers.

“Are you brothers?” says Fat Man.

The policemen shake their heads. It isn't clear whether they mean to say they are not brothers or mean to say they disapprove of these two who are.

“Is this about the money?” says Fat Man.

“Don't talk about the money,” hisses Little Boy. He flicks his brother's ear.

The policemen go on shaking their heads.

“We're leaving soon,” says Fat Man. “We promise.”

The short policeman says, in Japanese, “We are watching you.” He says, “We know you are wrong.”

The policemen leave them, hand in hand. The tall one has a limp.

“I don't know what he said,” says Little Boy. “What did they say?”

“I think it was a threat.”

Little Boy tells him not to worry. Little Boy says he'll take care of everything.

“How are your feet today?” says Fat Man. He does not want to carry his big brother today, as his own legs ache terribly. What he wants is to rest, to sleep under that family's roof. Not because it is difficult to sleep outside but because it is so easy—to sleep, and to sleep through whatever happens, such as the approach of two police who may be brothers or may not be, who may recognize them, who may suspect them of some crime.

“They hurt,” says Little Boy. “I could barely sleep.”

Little Boy says it's time for breakfast. The pigs watch them as they approach the home. A man is kneeling in the pen, examining a sow's corpse. The man does not know they are there, or knows but does not care. As Fat Man's gaze lingers on the sow's body a maggot surfaces between its teats. The man startles. He flicks away the little worm.

Little Boy lets them into the home. Inside mother and daughter eat rice with their fingers. They are quiet like dead things are quiet. When they see the brothers they do not startle or speak. They look at their food. The daughter tightly gathers the fabric that covers her breasts, the better to cover her skin.

Little Boy says, “Here.” He offers the mother a dollar. She shakes her head and motions for her daughter to leave the table. Her daughter goes. Little Boy says, “Here.” He says, “Food.”

The mother looks to Fat Man as if for confirmation. Fat Man says, “Food.” He mimes eating with his fingers.

The mother takes the bill. She gives Little Boy her daughter's bowl and Fat Man her own. She goes to make more rice. They sit at the table to eat. The daughter watches from the next room through a partly open door. She is still quiet like a dead thing.

They use their fingers, quickly eating the rice to keep it from molding. Spores form beneath their touch, giving the remaining grains a bitter, musky, gamey flavor. This is getting worse. Neither has spoken to the other of it yet. Fat Man knows it is not normal. They cannot cover their bowls with their hands, as this would make the growth worse. The mother boils water for more rice.

They are quiet a long time. When the new rice is done Little Boy puts another dollar on the mother's leg. His skin brushes her skin; Fat Man hears it happen. With some reluctance, she gives him the rice. She seems to consider boiling more water, decides against it. Leaves the kitchen, taking her daughter by the hand. They go to another place, to be together, quiet like dead things.

The quiet gets to be too much for Fat Man. “What about France?”

“Why France?” says Little Boy.

“They were barely in the war, and the food is supposed to be good.”

“Does it always have to be food?”

“I think we were put here for a reason.” He stuffs handfuls of rice into his face, sullen as a fish.

“Uh huh?”

“I think we're supposed to help rebuild, now that the war is done.”

“Then we should go to Britain,” Little Boy says, finishing his rice.

“I don't want to go there.”

The father comes into the home, sees the brothers in his kitchen. He is shirtless, coated everywhere with pig muck, except for his feet and his hands, which he must have scraped clean in the grass outside. He is thinner than his wife, thinner than his daughter. He is a small man. He looks at the brothers a while.

It becomes clear they still will be sleeping outside. The father watches them until they go.

“Does it really have to be France?” says Little Boy, as the door closes behind them. They've grown accustomed to the idea no one understands them. English might as well be a code the way they use it.

“It doesn't have to be anywhere,” says Fat Man. “I'm as scared of leaving as I am of staying.”

“Take responsibility for yourself,” says Little Boy. “I can't play nurse to you forever. You have to make some of your own choices. We're going to France. It's your decision, and you'll live with it.”

“Then can we go by boat?” says Fat Man.

“No,” says Little Boy. “We're still hijacking a plane.” If he smirks it is a subtle smirk.

They bum around the farm for the rest of the day, planning their hijacking, contemplating the hogs. They pay for lunch and dinner inside the home—the father watches them eat as if they were livestock—and they find a place to sleep behind the farm, among trees, on a bed of leaves they press into the damp dirt with their shoes.