Nothing more.
“When we get there,” says Fat Man, “we’ll need jobs.”
Little Boy closes the cash case, snapping its ruined hinges into place. “You’ll need a job,” he says. “Little boys don’t work.”
They visit the squealing pigs.
They sleep in the mud.
THE PIG KNOTS
Little Boy wakes. He sees the farmer’s daughter is stalking toward him and his snoring brother. He raises his hand in an awkward, fearful greeting. She grabs him by the scalp; she breathes words he cannot understand, words he can’t answer. He can’t see her eyes in the darkness. Only the long, sallow shadows cast by her brow, which creep into the gaunt valleys of her cheekbones. He can’t see her teeth or her lips—only the divot underneath her nose like a teardrop, and the hole of her mouth.
He thinks she is asking him questions, that she’s blaming him for something he’s sure he didn’t do, would never do. She holds him by the hair on the back of his head, pulling it harshly. She takes his hand in her hand. Her hateful grasp.
“How can this be?” she says, in Japanese. “I am a virgin.”
She pushes his hand against her stomach as if she means to pull him inside. Their sticky skin is touching, her belly, his fingers. He didn’t think she was naked. Perhaps her robe is open. She says, “What have you done to me? What has America done?”
Then the drums begin. Wild-thrashing in her gut. She holds his hand in place until the thing inside her makes him sore. He digs with hard, dirty nails into the cold, taut swell of her belly. He means to draw blood but the heat doesn’t come. It doesn’t come.
Morning now. Little Boy finds Fat Man standing with the mother at the edge of the pigpen, leaning over the fence, her hands on a post. The wind tugs at her hair. She leans over the fence and watches. The father and his daughter kneel in pig shit, it is smeared all over their bodies. The sows birth lumpy little piglets into father’s and daughter’s waiting hands. They rinse the piglets with well water from a bucket, straining blood and mucus through their fingers. They tuck the newborns in the blankets. They roll them up together; they pile baby pigs for warmth.
The piglets seem only half-formed, pale and fetal.
The father instructs his daughter as they work. He lifts sow tails and points to the swollen, painful things beneath. He whispers to her how to care for new mothers, how to pull free their young. The mother pigs look bloated in some places and in other places thin. Their bellies are distended, their ribs protrude. Their skin is shiny and wet, overstretched—nearly transparent. They lie on their sides in their filth and their blood, panting for air, squealing pitiably. Little Boy thinks what it would be like to toss them in the river. To make them drown. There is something loathsome about them. Something he can’t name. For the first time, the father acknowledges Fat Man and Little Boy. He says a word of greeting, lowering his eyes demurely as if it were his body sprouting new things. Little Boy says nothing. Fat Man imitates his word.
Little Boy leans in for a closer look at the piglets. They are very still and very quiet.
The father sees his interest. He takes a piglet from the rest and rolls it side to side in his hands as if molding dough. Fat Man understands that this is meant to keep the small thing warm. When the father hands it to him he rolls it in his hands too. His hands shake from repulsion; he struggles not to drop this dumb, half-made thing. The father hands another piglet to Little Boy.
These newborns are bald all over. Their faces sag with exhausted agony; their eyes have not opened; their ears are so thin that you can see the veins inside them. They are weak children—this one can barely move its hoof, can barely move its head. Its piggy nostrils flare and shrink. This animal is too thin to live. The joints are blueish, and its mouth hangs slack as if unhinged.
Fat Man leans in close. The flesh is so doughy, so pliable—it molds itself to his fingers as he rolls it in his hands.
Little Boy’s piglet opens its eyes and it tilts its head to look back into Little Boy’s eyes. There is perhaps a spark of recognition, some brief lucidity, and the child begins to keen. To sing for his attention, like a whisper, like a plea. Little Boy realizes he is dropping the piglet.
Little Boy has dropped the piglet.
“Careful,” shouts Fat Man.
It’s on the ground, crumpled, barking for help. The father clucks to scold Little Boy; he shakes his head. He is whispering something about the right way to care for a piglet, and the wrong way. The dropped piglet stands up faltering, it sways on its knees and soft cloven hooves, it looks up at Little Boy.
Fat Man says, “He looks like you. He wants to be carried.”
It barks again. The father and the daughter are busy with the sows, there are still more babies coming out of their hindquarters, some of them have died from giving so much birth.
The other piled piglets come to in their blankets. They wriggle out of their folds and traipse across the pigpen, halting, dipping their noses in muck and muck and muck, dragging their soft white bellies, leaving shallow furrows in the muck and muck. They sneak under the fence. They are a swarm. They are crying for something, for hunger, for love, for anything. They crowd the brothers. They gnaw toothlessly at their shoes and pant legs, tugging with slow, zombie strength, weak and implacable, urgent and breakable. The piglet swarm begs their attention. They put their fore-hooves up on their shoes. They soil themselves in anticipation, though they have not eaten; it comes out a gray milk that leaks from underneath their tails. Fat Man holds his hands up against himself like a tyrannosaur. He wants to kick them away. Little Boy leaps up on the fence. The father sets a newborn down and it too begins to cross the pen, to slip beneath the crossboards of the fence, to join the throng around Fat Man’s ankles. It is a kind of worship. They look up and beg with their eyes for him to lift them, for him to hold them in his arms. They call for Little Boy to come down.
The mother and the daughter watch with the same pinched, illegible expression. From Little Boy’s new height, the bulge of their stomachs is apparent. Little Boy remembers and it fills him with terror. He knows what it is to be born. How it hurts, then and after.
Fat Man calls to the farmer, the mother, their daughter, “Help me. Can you take them away?”
No one knows what he’s saying. The piglets crowd and oink for his love. They call for Little Boy, who now balances atop the highest crossboard on the fence, feet and shaking hands, precarious. No one comes to help them or seems to understand their fear. The pigs exhaust themselves. Some go to sleep or collapse, squealing. Some of them may die. When the herd has thinned, Fat Man and Little Boy run for the house, pursued by several of the more robust piggies.
They stay for midday meal. The births have made them guests—the mother refuses their money. The farmer brings in a butchered sow from outside. Peeking through the doorway, Little Boy assures the still panicked and nearly tearful Fat Man that the piglets are all asleep or suckling with their mothers or those mothers still living.
Fat Man collapses against the wall. He heaves. He says, “The way they look at us.”
“I saw it,” says Little Boy.
“They know,” says Fat Man.
“What can pigs know?”
“They see us. What we are.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” says Little Boy. But he saw it too.
The mother cooks the pork. It smells the way a burning person does.
“Do you recognize that smell?” asks Fat Man, sweating through his shirt.
“No,” lies Little Boy. “I don’t.”
The sun comes down low. The pigs raise a ruckus as if calling for a meal, though they have been fed today. The father, the mother, the