Mike Meginnis - Fat Man and Little Boy

“Now,” shouts Little Boy. He sticks his fingers in his mouth and whistles, starting high, then falling by gradations as the bomb falls away. He shouts, “KABLAM!” and simulates a rumbling in his throat and in the wings, jumping with both feet as high as he can and stomping, shaking the plane hard, making Maggie’s teeth chatter. She laughs and laughs and laughs. “Now fly away. Go, go, go, before they catch you. Don’t let them see your face.”

“They’ll never catch me.”

“You’re free!” he says. “You’re free!”

He looks back inside and his eyes catch his brother’s. Fat Man is pale. He sweats. He turns and says something to Rosie, who quickly scoots out of the booth. Fat Man climbs out and walks, stiff, a little crooked, toward the back, hand sliding along the wall as if for guidance.

A man in an apron exits the restaurant. The bell rings inside. He has a mole on his chin with a long black hair, and his nose is raw and red. He puts his hand on the plane’s nose. “You’re supposed to pay for that,” he says. “You see the quarter slot? That’s where you put your money.”

“I haven’t got any money,” says Little Boy.

“Then I’m taking her out.” The man in the apron lifts her from the cockpit by her arms. “Go find your parents and ask ’em for quarters if you wanna play.”

“Take your fucking hands off my cousin,” says Little Boy, “or I’ll tear your balls out with my teeth.”

The guy sets down Maggie, who bites her lip and grinds the toe of her shoe into the pavement. She might cry. Rosie comes out the door. She says, “Is there a reason you’re man-handling my daughter?”

The galoot says he works at the restaurant. That’s all he’s got. He goes back inside. Rosie lifts up her little girl. Little Boy rubs Maggie’s back.

“We’ll leave as soon as Daddy comes out of the bathroom,” says Rosie.

They jaywalk across the street when traffic slows. A homeless man sits on the nearest bench, at the very edge, inviting anybody who wants to sit with him to go ahead. Rosie prefers to stand.

Little Boy says he’ll get Fat Man.

The galoot glares at him from the kitchen as he passes.

He knocks on the bathroom door. “Are you okay in there?”

Fat Man says he’s fine. “I’ll come out soon.”

“Rosie wants to go to the hotel.”

“My bowels appreciate the update. Why can’t you people ever let me use the bathroom in peace?”

Little Boy leaves Atomic Burger. He crosses the street back. Rosie has persuaded the homeless man to leave the bench. She sits there with Maggie, the little girl now very tired, yawning, blinking often, one eyelid lagging the other in a sort of drunken wink. Little Boy asks to hold her. Rosie lets him do it. She adjusts her hat to better block the sun, and looks at her watch, and waits for her husband.

“He’ll be along soon,” says Little Boy.

“You can’t rush genius,” she says.

There is a billboard advertising the services of a Madame Masumi, “Consultant to the Stars.” Pictured thereon, a beautiful Oriental spirit medium, but without a wooden box or peacock feathers: instead many necklaces of beads in various sizes and colors, many gold and silver bracelets, hair entwined with crow feathers, a small sort of purple turban, someone’s idea of a Japanese sorcerer’s robe. The faintest suggestion of cleavage. There is a number you can call. Little Boy asks Rosie does she see the billboard.

“It doesn’t look like her at all,” says Rosie.

Little Boy agrees it can’t be her.

Fat Man sits on the toilet, unwrapping the bandage that holds in the gun. It was, he realizes, unnecessary to hide the gun. No one has put a hand in his pocket. Maggie has not wiped snot on his pant leg. Nobody would have felt it. No one’s gotten close enough to have the chance. They are farther from his body than he thinks.

The gun has been hurting him. He peels off the medical tape and rolls it into a ball, which he drops in the waste basket. He extracts the gun from his folds. Somehow it’s still cool to the touch. He checks the chambers: still empty. He groans as he squeezes his insides, as he cradles the gun in his sticky, pulsing fingers. If someone tries to hurt his family he can scare them away. If someone tries to come for him he can scare them away. If the police come because they’ve heard who he is, he can scare them away. It’s only if he has to fire the gun that he’s in trouble. He should be in prison. He should have stayed and let them take him away.

He stands up, rests the gun on the back of the john, peels toilet paper and wraps it all around his hand. He looks in the bowl to see what he’s done.

There is a thick, black shit in the shape of a bomb shell. It looks too round and perfect to have come from inside his body. The ends taper smoothly. When he flushes it spins on one end for a long time, like a lazy top, refusing to sink.

He thinks, “There I am.”

He thinks, “There I go.”

He thinks, “That’s me.”

He tucks the gun under his belt, the handle sticking out at an angle but invisible beneath his untucked shirt, the hammer like a silver tooth digging into his hip.

Seeing a movie in Hollywood is like going to church. Everyone dresses up. The ushers guide you to a place where you’ll feel welcome or at least out of the way. The room swells with talk until the show starts, and then everybody shuts up. The audience’s eyes fill up with hope and need while the music blares and then, when the talking starts, they settle in. This one will be like the others. But you’ve got to respect it. The ritual of the movie is more important than the movie.

It’s another Hanway brothers film. This one about a detective looking for a man who killed three girls. It unfolds like a slow-motion chase scene. The audience sees the killer shoot someone who is sobbing off screen. That somebody shrieks and abruptly stops crying. The killer handles several pieces of evidence that will give him away. Detective Jack Miller—the Hanway brothers, Able and Baker—comes onto the scene a moment later, handles the same evidence, deduces the location of the killer, and follows him to a casino, where the crook is gambling, until he leaves for the hotel bar, and then the detective comes to the casino, and asks after the crook, and deduces the crook is headed for the hotel bar, where the crook drinks a martini. The crook drinks a little while and then leaves out the back way, leaving several clues, which the detective draws together so that he finds out where the crook lives, and he goes there, only to find the crook has already emptied the place, and just left for the coast. The detective follows, meeting a beautiful woman on the way. The beautiful woman gets kidnapped by the crook just as the detective is catching up to him. Then there’s an actual chase scene through town, the crook in a taxi, the detective in a borrowed police car, over a bridge, across a river, into the back streets, the crook wiping sweat from his brow, the dame taunting him. He’ll never make it, Detective Jack Miller is hot on his tail. He should turn himself in. What did he kill those girls for anyway, didn’t he know he’d be caught? He has to be caught, justice demands it. Just as the detective is pulling up right behind him, bumper to bumper, the crook swerves the wrong way and wraps his car around a tree. The detective cries as he pulls the dame’s limp body from the back of the car, her hair blowing in the wind, the car burning behind them, the fire climbing the tree, making the whole thing burn, palm leaves and all. But it turns out the dame is fine. She’s alive. Everything is fine. They kiss. Which brother is she kissing? Is it Able? Is it Baker?

Fat Man holds his wife’s hand. Rosie rests her head on his shoulder. Maggie and Little Boy whisper all the way through, Maggie struggling with the plot, Little Boy pretending similar confusion.