Fat Man and Little Boy by Mike Meginnis Page B

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.
    â€œHow am I supposed to do that?” says Little Boy.
    The policemen look at the brothers.
    â€œAre 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.
    â€œIs this about the money?” says Fat Man.
    â€œDon’t talk about the money,” hisses Little Boy. He flicks his brother’s ear.
    The policemen go on shaking their heads.
    â€œWe’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.
    â€œI don’t know what he said,” says Little Boy. “What did they say?”
    â€œI think it was a threat.”
    Little Boy tells him not to worry. Little Boy says he’ll take care of everything.
    â€œHow 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