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Fat Man and Little Boy Page 7
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Page 7
The mother and the daughter watch with the same pinched, illegible expression. From Little Boy’s new height, the bulge of their stomachs is apparent. Little Boy remembers and it fills him with terror. He knows what it is to be born. How it hurts, then and after.
Fat Man calls to the farmer, the mother, their daughter, “Help me. Can you take them away?”
No one knows what he’s saying. The piglets crowd and oink for his love. They call for Little Boy, who now balances atop the highest crossboard on the fence, feet and shaking hands, precarious. No one comes to help them or seems to understand their fear. The pigs exhaust themselves. Some go to sleep or collapse, squealing. Some of them may die. When the herd has thinned, Fat Man and Little Boy run for the house, pursued by several of the more robust piggies.
They stay for midday meal. The births have made them guests—the mother refuses their money. The farmer brings in a butchered sow from outside. Peeking through the doorway, Little Boy assures the still panicked and nearly tearful Fat Man that the piglets are all asleep or suckling with their mothers or those mothers still living.
Fat Man collapses against the wall. He heaves. He says, “The way they look at us.”
“I saw it,” says Little Boy.
“They know,” says Fat Man.
“What can pigs know?”
“They see us. What we are.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” says Little Boy. But he saw it too.
The mother cooks the pork. It smells the way a burning person does.
“Do you recognize that smell?” asks Fat Man, sweating through his shirt.
“No,” lies Little Boy. “I don’t.”
The sun comes down low. The pigs raise a ruckus as if calling for a meal, though they have been fed today. The father, the mother, the daughter go outside. There are mutters thereafter but no discernible words, no sounds of swine.
Little Boy goes outside first. Fat Man reluctantly follows. The women’s hands worry the timber. They scratch against the grain. It makes a sound like grinding teeth. Fat Man and Little Boy join them at the fence.
The father looks up from his sow. His hands are full of blood like oil. There’s a gray-pink thing like a worm with knots on its sides half-submerged in the blood. He places the worm on a tumorous pile of like worms and wipes his hand in the muck among tens of other red streaks. Blood floats on muck surface like oil on water. The father puts his hand inside the pig. He pulls out another pink, knotty worm.
Fat Man says, “She’s dead.”
They are all dead or dying, all the sows and all the new babies. The newborn shoats have given up their suckling but do still nuzzle their mothers as if to urge them back to life. The hogs stand indifferent. They are still like gelatin is still. They stare into the middle-distance with puckered eyes and wait for someone to feed them, casting shadows in various of the cardinal directions. Some east, some west. As if the sun’s come down close, has deigned to walk among them in the pen. The father hums a sad song. The women are crying. All their pigs are dead, or will be soon, except the hogs.
What good are hogs alone, Little Boy wonders.
He sees his brother’s face in a hog’s face. Neither of the brothers has ever looked directly into a mirror. Little Boy’s face might be the same. Fat Man may not know his own resemblance to the hogs. Or he might guess.
The father’s pulling red-tinged strings of mucus from between his fingers and flicking-flinging them away. He begins to pile the sows’ corpses, dropping them one by one onto something like a wheelbarrow, a flat wooden platform perched on two tin legs and a tin wheel.
The daughter shrieks. There’s a growing wet stain on the back of her blue robe. Briny water trickles from between her legs. The mother assaults her with questions while the daughter fights a swoon. Her water has broken.
The mother says, “Come inside, or you’ll give the pigs a meal.” She takes her daughter by the hand and rushes her into the house.
The piglets that live have begun to crowd the brother bombs, again oinking at their ankles.
“The pigs must think you are their fathers,” says the father, laughing a sour laugh. The sound dies in his throat. A darkness passes over his face. He understands something that he did not before. The hog shadows grow longer; the animals themselves do not move. The piglets oink and squeal. The father turns away from the brothers. They don’t know what he said. They don’t know what he understands.
The father wheels the piled sow bodies to the home, where he takes them on his shoulders and carries them through the door. As the paper door slides closed Little Boy glimpses mother and daughter inside the home. Mother sets down a short, broad wooden bucket. The daughter watches her, shakes her head, and whispers painful secrets. She clutches her robe—gathered up in her fists so that her strong young thighs the color of moon are exposed—and presses it between her legs as if to staunch the flow. The mother comes to the door. She closes it, glaring at the brother bombs. The daughter is staring into the wooden bucket, and then she is bisected by the closing door, and then she is gone.
Little Boy looks at the pile of unfinished pigs in the muck and muck and muck of the pen. They are weird lumps of raw, misshapen meat, almost certainly inedible. He wonders, Do they have bones?
He says to Fat Man, “Carry me,” and, before his brother can object, leaps into his arms. Fat Man stumbles back a little. He tries his best not to kick any babies as he walks them toward the house. The oinklings follow. The hogs lie down in the filth; several loll onto their sides.
The mother sits behind the daughter. The daughter, now naked, squats over the pail, her heels butting up against either side, her legs already trembling. Her breasts are painful-looking—sharp, high fistfuls that seem to be ever and constantly squeezed, even now, by the hands that made them. A thin red stream like razor wire falls between her legs, though it does not seem to fall but rather to hold fast, like a measure of yarn connecting her body to the water below. In the water the red is murk. Marbles clarity with unclarity.
The mother is massaging her daughter’s abdomen. She pushes and prods with her fingers, and the flesh turns ivory white where she presses, and pink around the white, like burning film. The mother’s legs splay out around the daughter. They can see the hard, cracked skin lined with dirt on the soles of her feet. They cannot see the mother’s face.
They can hear the mother screaming at them. They do not know what she says.
They know exactly what she means. “GET OUT!” she is saying. “GET OUT!” They cannot see the father, but hear him in the room like a kitchen, butchering sow bodies.
The red yarn between the daughter’s legs is cut. Droplets fall, then nothing.
Fat Man closes the door. The brother bombs sit down among adoring piglets.
They sit against the house. The piglets are curled up against them asleep, or they are sitting in their laps, or they are sniffing all about their shoes. There is one sitting on the cash case. If they are awake they are looking at the brother bombs, contemplating their vastness through puckered piggy eyes. Inside the home the daughter cries for mercy. It’s been maybe an hour. Little Boy circles his finger in the dirt. He draws clouds.
“Do you think they knew she was pregnant?” says Little Boy.
“I’m not sure she knew,” says Fat Man.
Little Boy holds his tongue. She knew something. He thinks of his hand on her stomach, her hand pressing his, the heat of her body, and the ruckus inside. He remembers the mother squatting on the toilet as her daughter squats now in what is like the living room. He remembers the frenzy of the pigs, their midnight meal, a feast of night soil. It all must be connected but the only connection he can find is that he saw all of these things. They listen to the rising symphony of crickets, to the farrowing daughter, the butchering father.
Fat Man lifts a baby pig to look in its eyes. “Do you think she’ll be all
right?”
Little Boy doesn’t answer.
“Why do the little pigs know who we are and not the big ones?” says Fat Man. “And if they know us, then why do they love us?” He sets down his pig and looks at his black palms. “How can they love us?”
“This is love?” says Little Boy.
“Who knows what pigs feel?” What he means to say is, Yes.
The daughter weeps. The mother is crying now too. They hear one savage chop as the father embeds his knife in the block’s corner and then nothing, footsteps, nothing, wailing, wailing.
The father comes out with a baby. It is a soft thing, unfinished like the pigs, and seems to have too little skin—the elbows won’t straighten; the toes curl in, and express themselves mostly as lumps in footflesh; the chin tucks into the collarbone. The fingers flex and squeeze like hungry claws. The father puts the baby in Fat Man’s hands. He says, “Somehow this is your fault.” For a moment Fat Man thinks he might know what was said.
The baby grabs Fat Man by the lapels of his suit and pulls. It burbles stupidly, its throat raw from crying, too weak now for the life ahead. Spit bubbles in the corners of its mouth. Its eyes are like wet marbles.
Fat Man burbles at the baby. He gives it one of his fingers to clutch.
“It doesn’t look quite right,” says Little Boy.
“Maybe this is how Japanese babies look when they’re fresh from the oven.”
“It makes me think of the pigs.”
“I can’t think who would be the father,” says Fat Man. “I haven’t seen her with any men, other than her own father.”
“And you,” says Little Boy.
“I hardly count.”
The father returns to the wailing house.
Little Boy pats the baby’s tummy. There is something familiar in the child’s dumb gaze.
The next time the father comes out, there’s a second baby in his hands. This one is smaller, grayer, and still. He hands the body to Little Boy. The head falls back from the body, exposing what is like a neck. The eyes are closed, the mouth half open.
The father watches him hold the baby and waits, as if expecting Little Boy to say something. As if Little Boy will confess to the murder. Little Boy shrugs. So does Fat Man.
“Are the women all right?” asks Fat Man.
The father goes back into his home. The brother bombs are left to watch their babies.
Fat Man’s child alive and Little Boy’s dead.
Little Boy says, “I don’t think mine is breathing.” He concentrates on the face of the baby, watching for the slightest hint of motion. “Why’d he give me this one?”
Inside the home the family is quiet like dead things are quiet.
FAT MAN EXPLODES
Inside the home it is dark. There are the ripe smells of open bodies. The women must be in what is like the kitchen. They have left their pail, which brims with things that came from inside them. Fat Man sets his baby in a blanket. Little Boy is still trying to read the dead thing in his hands. The kitchen wall slides open. The father stands naked in shadow, half-butchered pigs piled on the table behind him, an iron cleaver in his hand. His bones show through his skin like actors behind curtains. His penis is long and thin like some sickly root. They cannot see his eyes.
“How did you do this?” he asks them.
Little Boy clutches the stillborn against his chest as if the father is a hungry thing. Fat Man might know what’s being asked. He might recognize the words.
The father says, “Before you came, before the Americans, everything was fine. How did you put babies inside them?”
Fat Man says, “What?” He asks in Japanese.
The father advances on the brother bombs. “How did you do it to my pigs? How are you to blame?”
Fat Man understands “how.” He understands “blame.”
There is motion in the dark. The daughter cradles her mother’s rubber body behind the table. The mother is breathing like she does not mean to do it.
Fat Man searches for a weapon. Little Boy trembles and crawls behind his brother. “Help me brother! Save me!”
The naked father lunges. He sinks the cleaver into Fat Man’s shoulder. Blood sprays the wall. The father pulls the knife loose, and Fat Man is screaming, he lashes out at the air. The father wipes the blood from his eyes with the back of his hand—it smears, a sticky stripe. His left eye is stuck closed and the right is spiderwebbed with angry veins. They breathe into each other’s noses and mouths, they taste the sour inside each other, they hear the rush of air. Fat Man is still screaming. He is squeezing his shoulder when he should be fighting back.
Little Boy has fallen to his side. The baby rolls like an empty jar. Little Boy knows what it’s like to explode. It’s like this. He is going to explode. He can feel the awful, acid heat inside him between icy bones and sizzling skin. He feels the vertigo of expansion—the giddy over-filling of a straining bright balloon.
He is a bomb again, he is a bomb again, he is a bomb exploding.
Fat Man falls on his back, the naked father is on him. The naked father cleaves the ground beside his ear.
“The baby,” shouts Fat Man as he claws the father’s face and peels of skin bunch up beneath his nails.
Little Boy puts his thumb in his mouth. It soothes him. The expanding inside does not expand, but pulsates, hot and cold, too much and too little, in and out, boy and bomb and boy and bomb. He sucks his thumb.
Fat Man hits the father with the cash case. The father carves a corner from his ear. His blows are wild. Fat Man hits him with the suitcase again, and again: flat, dull thuds. Until a golden corner finds the father’s temple.
The body now is like the stillborn baby, but so heavy. Fat Man holds the suitcase in both hands and brings it down like a guillotine, smashing the father’s head against his own breast. The skull gives. Warmth flows over his chest. Fat Man knows that he is screaming, has known from the start. He means to continue.
Little Boy is safe. He opens his eyes and unclamps his teeth from around his thumb. He has fouled himself. In this dark the stillborn’s body looks like pink-blue sand dunes sloping toward oblivion. The limbs are all wrong, the head all crushed, like the father’s now.
Fat Man pushes the father’s body from his body. Their blood is everywhere and looks identical.
“What did you do to him?” says Little Boy.
“What did you do to him?” says Fat Man, indicating the stillborn.
“I nearly exploded,” says Little Boy. “I was so scared.”
Little Boy puts his blanket over the stillborn and takes the still-living baby from his brother’s bed. The baby has been wailing; now it stops. To stare at Little Boy with moony, tired, porcine eyes.
“I did explode,” says Fat Man.
The women are asleep in the kitchen. For the first time, the brother bombs see the sleeping mats the family hid beneath the table. Little Boy places the living baby down with the daughter, its mother. Fat Man goes through their food stores. He takes their rice bag and their small portable stove. He takes their stores of pork and drops them in the rice sack.
Little Boy says, “I don’t think we should do this. We just killed their father.”
“You talk as if he didn’t try to kill me first,” growls Fat Man. “Besides, I’m starving. Every time I asked for seconds she just stared at me. As if she couldn’t work out what this meant.” Fat Man holds out two fingers insistently—two, two, two.
Little Boy rubs his eyes. The newborn watches them silently. It’s trying to read them, as Little Boy tried to read its stillborn brother.
“Would you even care if I died?” says Fat Man. His brother answers with a glare. Fat Man clenches his hand. “You hid behind me. You were supposed to protect me and you hid behind me instead. How can you question me?” The gash in his shoulder sings like an old brass bell. “You stin
k,” he says. “Take off those pants.”
“I told you not to take their food!”
The daughter stirs. She sees the bloody giant standing over her with her family’s rice, her family’s stove. She asks them, “Where are you going?”
“God damn it,” roars Fat Man, “I’m hungry! I’m hungry, and you’re done telling me what to do.” He rubs his palm over his face. He leaves the room and comes back with the blood-covered suitcase. The daughter understands what she is seeing. She shakes her mother hard. Fat Man opens the briefcase and hauls out great honking wads of cash. He hurls it at the women. The mother wakes. Some bills stick to them, sticky with blood. The rest fall around them like green confetti.
They harp and twitter with inscrutable questions, accusations, threats, pleadings. The newborn cries. There are open pigs on the table between them, all viscera and threads of fat. “Why did you kill him?” shouts the daughter. The mother fights to keep her eyes open. “Why did you kill him?” the daughter screams, again, again.
When the cash case is maybe too low and the women have been thoroughly feathered with dollars, Fat Man sets off running. Little Boy follows, still stinking in his soiled pants, and crying for the stillborn.
They sleep this night by the road, in the brush. They should leave the scene but they are too tired.
In the morning Fat Man makes all the rice the stove can hold and roasts pork over the flame. Little Boy takes a handful. Fat Man eats the rest.
Little Boy is wearing his other pair of undershorts, his dress shirt, his tie, and blue suit jacket. He left behind his hat. Fat Man slept in his bloodied clothes, now festooned with small green leaves, yellow weed blossoms, and a crushed spider’s legs. Between handfuls of rice he progressively disrobes himself—drops the jacket, opens his shirt, shrugs it off, pulls off his pants over his shoes. Shiny white grains of rice stick to his hands and face as he wolfs down the food.