Mike Meginnis - Fat Man and Little Boy

“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.