Читать книгу Fat Man and Little Boy - Mike Meginnis - Страница 8

THE SOLDIER’S BODY

It is not long before they find the shorter soldier’s body face-down in the shattered fragments of a limestone statue. The dashed pieces suggest that the statue was a furry creature, perhaps with a mane and clawed feet. The shorter soldier’s gun is gone. His left arm is folded under him. The right arm points outward, three o’clock. The purple blotches have expanded through his skin; they have multiplied. Fat Man squats for a closer look. Little Boy turns his back on the body.

The taller soldier is nowhere in sight.

Fat Man says, “He had a limp. He tried to hide it.”

“Why hide a limp from you?” says Little Boy.

Fat Man says he doesn’t know. He says he thinks the soldiers were afraid. He says, “They found me wandering and locked me up. They can’t have known what I did. I think I was supposed to be a hostage, or a war criminal. They never answered my questions.”

“They didn’t speak English.”

“They didn’t even try,” says Fat Man. He rocks on his heels, balancing with his hands on the ground. Chill air lifts the loose threads of his robe. “I kept asking and they didn’t even try.”

“What were you asking?”

Maggots come to the surface of the body. A spider crawls from its ear.

“I wanted to know where I was. Then I wanted to know why they were keeping me. Then I wanted to know how things had changed outside. I wanted to know if the fire was done, how many people died, how many survived. I wanted to know if they were ill. Why the short one was limping. I wanted to know their names. I wanted to know what they thought of me. What they were going to do with me. What they called me. Was I alone. Was there anyone who wanted to see me. I wanted to know if I could do something.”

“Like what?” says Little Boy.

The maggots eat of the short soldier’s neck, they sprout in his hands. They squirm barely perceived beneath the soldier’s heavy jacket. Between the fingers, worms writhe. The spider crawls over the body.

“Like help,” says Fat Man. “Like could I do some work for them, could I fix things, make them better. Could I do something to make them like me more.”

The soldier’s body begins to sag beneath its uniform. The skin is riddled with holes. The hungry things favor the purple blotches, eating them first.

Little Boy says they should leave the body. He says today is a bad day to be an American standing over a dead Japanese.

Fat Man says, “Soon there won’t be a body.”

Little Boy asks Fat Man what he means. Fat Man points and asks if it is normal for a body to decay so quickly. Another spider crawls from the ear, which so far the maggots and the worms have left intact. They have focused on the cheeks, what is visible of the shoulder, and everything beneath the soldier’s clothes—perhaps cartilage is difficult. More worms rise to the surface of the dirt. The uniform itself, now damp from inside with blood, begins to grow a cotton mold.

“Yes,” says Little Boy, “this is normal.”

“Are you sure?”

“We should go.”

Instead Little Boy folds his legs beneath him. He scoots up close to watch. Fat Man feels a warmth rising from the body and the things that grow inside it. His legs begin to ache from squatting. His hands as well, from the weight he leans on them.

“The taller soldier might come back.”

Little Boy says, “Then we should go.”

They do not go. The body becomes bones. The maggots become flies. These land on the two brothers, skitter and buzz their wings, but do not fly, keeping to the skin.

Fat Man says, “They itch!”

“Swat them.”

“Won’t they fly away and land somewhere else?”

“They won’t.” Little Boy squashes several on his left hand with his right. They do not try to move away. They become black smears.

Fat Man falls back on his ass, sore feet briefly rising up into the air and then settling back in. He holds out his left palm. There are two flies walking a slow circuit from thumb tip to pinky finger. His right hand casts a shadow over the flies. They perhaps twitch or tremble, but otherwise stay where they are—become still, in fact, where before they were crawling. Like closing an alligator’s jaws, he lowers his hand. What is left of the flies, he scrapes off on the ground, and proceeds to remove the others from his face and neck and calves, one by one, pinching them dead, flicking away their corpses.

“Good job,” says Little Boy, encouraging his little brother as he kills his own flies too. “That’s the way.”

The bones stripped clean. The uniform a mold-fuzzed tatter. The worms creep toward the brother bombs, who stand up, step back. Little Boy puts his hand on Fat Man’s stomach, pushes him back farther, to keep him safe.

Fat Man asks, “What are we?”

Little Boy says they are brothers. “Only brothers. Always brothers.”

Now there are more flies.

A cloud of them looms over the brothers—the only brothers, the always brothers.

Little Boy says, “We should run.”

Fat Man has already started. He can barely find the strength, but what’s left is enough. The cloud of flies follows them, sending dizzy scouts, which the brothers swat, or fail to swat—they flail, the flies dive and buzz around their ears and eyes. As if to say, “Look at me!” As if to say, “Listen!” They need to be heard.

“Does this often happen also?” pants Fat Man.

Little Boy says, “Sometimes this happens.” He is running with less speed than he could so as not to leave behind Fat Man, who is doing his best. He’s panting and clutching at his chest.

Now Little Boy jogs backward, the better to see the swarm, which lilts as one fly lilts, now several feet lower, now several higher, now right, now left, some stragglers and some who go ahead, and here and there colliding—a tipsy weave. A seethe. Always angled so their eyes are on the brothers—compound eyes, like black jewels. Specks on specks.

Little Boy trips on something unseen, some piece of rubble, and tumbles. Fat Man stops to yank him up. The buzz of the flies is momentarily damped by a whistling gust of wind. Everything is quiet. The ground is covered in a fine gray powder, some smashed statue or wall. The powder, kicked up by the gust, enters their nostrils, burns in their throats.

Fat Man tries to catch his breath. Little Boy watches, helpless, as the swarm descends on his brother. They crowd his eyes and ears, his mouth—some seem to fly, quite intentionally, inside him—and crawl on his hands, his neck, under his collar, beneath his robe. He flaps his arms like useless wings.

“Brother!” calls Little Boy.

He picks up a road sign—something yellow, he doesn’t know what it means—and uses it to crush the flies on Fat Man, flogging his brother. Fat Man might tell him to stop if he could speak through the flies. Now the flies remember Little Boy and crawl over him also. He can barely see his brother’s shadow through the swarm. Reaches in, finds his brother’s wrist, and yanks. “Run!” he screams, tasting a fly. Fat Man struggles out again.

The flies have gotten old. They’re going gray. As the brothers flee, the swarm begins to fall. Landing in small puddles, in cups and bowls (some broken, some intact among the ruins of what were once homes), on cars with melted tires, on roads. Each fall punctuated by a sound, a small brittle dry snap, like the crackle of a fire: for every fly, the sound of one spark. Some pelt their backs and bounce away. Some land beneath their feet just as they’re stepping.

They slow again as the flies die all around them.

They breathe.

Fat Man chews what they left in his cheeks without seeming to know that he chews. Little Boy ignores the crunching sound.

There were families here once. The brothers can tell from the books that lie here and there in the streets, like bodies.

They can tell from the bodies.