Mike Meginnis - Fat Man and Little Boy

Wait. There is a cloud in her underwear. Rust among the white. She puts her head between her knees to look a little closer. A smell she can’t identify.

The boys are crying on the other side of the hill. Soon they will begin to fight again. Either ruckus will cover for her crying. Her guts are awful knots. Her stupid little womb is bleeding.

Fat Man and Little Boy sit together in the library cabin, their chairs catty-corner, their knees almost touching. It’s the closest they’ve been in more than a month. Fat Man feels a charge passing between them. He does his best to ignore it. Little Boy kicks his feet as he pretends to read his grammar, lazily dragging a pencil across each line as if he is very slowly slitting someone’s throat. He whispers to himself. His nose has been bent to a new angle, his bottom lip scabbed, his shin wrapped in gauze, blood-soaked and browned, sticky-bound to the long scab the shape of Africa. He ought to change the bandages. His brother has resolved not to tell him this, not to mother Little Boy anymore if he can avoid it. They get along better this way.

Presently Fat Man is consulting a book on the etymology of names. He says, “Why oh why did I name myself John?”

“What’s wrong with John?” says Little Boy, closing the grammar without marking his place.

“It means ‘Yahweh is gracious.’” says Fat Man, indicating his entry in the book. “Yahweh as in God.”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with that. What does mine mean?”

“Let me see.” Fat Man flips to the M’s. “It means ‘Gift of Yahweh.’ Ugh. Yours is even worse.”

“They’re like the same thing.”

“Yours states specifically that you were given to the world by God, but does not specify a reason or an end. It’s the worst thing you could be called. It might equally describe the beginning of the future or the beginning of the end. In my case, I needn’t necessarily be a gift from God and there’s no ambiguity about who God is or what he’s like. He’s gracious. Kind.”

“But isn’t calling him gracious just another way of saying he likes to give gifts?” says Little Boy. He picks at his bandage, peeling it partly from his shin. He winces as the scab tears. A fresh trickle down his ankle and into his shoe stains his sock already fouled with sweat and mud. He dabs at the flow with his fingers.

“Jack, a diminutive of Jonathan, is a slang word for man.”

“So what? Put the book down,” says Little Boy, wiping his fingers clean on his short pants. “You’re being weird.”

“I’m not,” says Fat Man. “I’m enriching myself. Learning about this world of ours.”

“By looking up your own name?”

Fat Man hushes him. Though they are alone in the library apart from the newlyweds, who have proven resistant to learning any part of the English language that can’t be swung as at least a little bawdy, caution’s still in order.

“What are you really looking for?”

“Rosie.”

Little Boy asks him if he’s checked under “Rose.” He hasn’t. Rather than acknowledge his error, Fat Man turns to the proper page and reads aloud. Apparently the name originally comes from a German one meaning something like “famous kind.” Kind as in “type” or “sort.” Its similarity to the English word for the flower was a coincidence.

“So,” says Little Boy, “Rose means a rose.”

“What do you suppose Masumi means?”

“Japanese,” Little Boy grunts. It is not clear if he means to indicate the language as a language, as the origin of the name, or for that matter the origin of the person.

“He makes me nervous. Does he make you nervous? I don’t feel right around him. It prickles all over, the way he looks at you. At me, I mean. I itch the whole time we talk. Yesterday he sat beside me at lunch. We didn’t talk but I could feel him watching.”

“Everything makes you nervous.” Little Boy rubs his nose at the tip, rotating the bulb at the end, attempting to reset it. The angle is all wrong.

“We can’t all go flying off cliffs every time we get to feeling cagey,” says Fat Man. “But listen. You can help me relax, if you’re so concerned. In a couple days it’ll come time for you to go clean his room. He may ask you not to do it. Be persistent. Get in there if you can. See everything you can see. When you’re done, come directly to me and tell me what you’ve found.”

“I may clean his room,” says Little Boy, “but I won’t spy.”

Fat Man does not cuff his brother. Little Boy doesn’t wince. They share a moment of silence that acknowledges what it could have been.

“Do you still feel the calm?” says Fat Man.

“I feel the calm she gave us.”

“Do you feel it here?” Fat Man touches himself between his breasts.

“I feel it there,” says Little Boy, touching himself the same. “I feel it here, too.” He touches his gut.

“I don’t feel it there.” Fat Man looks down at himself. “One step at a time.”

“I’m glad you don’t hit me anymore,” says Little Boy.

“I’m glad you stay out of my reach.”

Little Boy leaves to clean the newlyweds’ cabin.

Fat Man sits beneath the tree that’s like a willow. He leans against the trunk. This seems to relax the branches—they wave about in the wind, only periodically reaching for him, stroking his face, his proffered hands. She makes him calm. She helps him breathe. He shuts his eyes. A coldness in his brain complements the thrumming warmth in his chest. The thrumming’s like a candle burning in a drum. He massages the fat that hangs from his arms, slowly, one arm at a time, as if to worry it away. The cabins cast long, angular shadows on the ground, narrow as the light afforded by an open door. They twist and blur as the sun rolls back behind the hills. The tree like a willow has kept its shadow still, as it sometimes keeps its branches, focused on Fat Man, like a negative spotlight, changing with his breathing but otherwise still, stoking the cool in his brain, a cool rag loaded with ice, pressed to a reopened wound. He focuses on the top of his hat, a felt black wide-brimmed one that once belonged to a Jew, and which sits on the grass between his knees, stuck with grass seeds and dandelion puffs. The tree shades his hat blacker, so from above it’s like an empty plate—a black, empty plate.

He lights a cigarette and holds it in his hand, knowing that his mouth can wait. He closes his eyes and thinks how nice some rain would be. He opens his eyes. Masumi is sitting beside him at a ninety-degree angle, facing outward. Their hands nearly touch.

“Hello Matthew,” says Masumi.

“John,” says Fat Man. “Matthew is my nephew.”

“My apologies.” He plucks a blade of grass and twists it. “You’re smoking.”

Fat Man considers his cigarette. “I was thinking about it.”

“What were you thinking about it?”

“I was thinking how I like the way they look more than I like the way they taste.” He puts it in his mouth.

“What are you thinking now?” Masumi pulls open his jacket, draws a flask out of its pocket. He cranes his neck to meet Fat Man’s eye.

“I’m thinking I was right.”

“You want a drink?” He uncaps the flask with a cheerful twist and pop.

“What’s it taste like?”

“You tell me.” He passes the flask.

Fat Man swigs. The air smells like sweet milk on the verge of curdle.

“Cigarettes. Everything tastes like cigarettes.”

“This is a strange tree,” says Masumi. “I’ve never seen one like it.”

“Why don’t you take off your hat? You can look at it the way I’m looking at mine.”

“What do you expect me to see in my hat?” Masumi takes a pull from the plum brandy.