Love and Other Ways of Dying (11 page)

Jack Hooker’s son is the man who goes to Texas and Kentucky and wherever else and buys these animals—British Whites and Herefords, Charolais and Simmentals and Black Anguses. Huge, lowing creatures. Twelve hundred pounds off the hoof.
Some of them have the face of Christ himself. Drink seven gallons of clear water a day, eat corn and hay. Creatures of habit. Like us. Pick out a spot in the yard and never leave it. Pick a place at the trough to eat and always come back to it. Rub up against the same exact cows every day. Get in their way and you might take a horn. Some of the cattle get sold to the Japanese. Those folks have a slightly different standard for their meat, says Jack Hooker’s son. Like theirs with a little more fat. Sometimes they come over to Kansas, to the yards, and handpick the ones they want, cameras looped around their necks. They’re the picture-takingest people, says Jack Hooker’s son, chuckling at the thought.

In the late afternoon, go up to the ridge with Jack Hooker and his son. On a rise at the edge of the yard. Blinding sun and blackflies, but they don’t seem to touch the Hookers. They just stand there, the two of them, looking down on it all. Have you ever looked on miles and miles of cattle in a cast of orange light? Four thousand of them. Big, lumbering, beautiful things—mentality of a five-year-old. Have you ever seen the way the light plays on a herd, the way clouds come rolling in from California, and every one of them turns a different color? Looks like a museum painting of the Old West. Something behind glass.

Purdy, purdy sight, says Jack Hooker.

That’s right, says his son. They’re breathing in unison, and then Jack looks at you looking at the cows, then looks back at the cows himself and says to no one in particular, Don’t get more real than that, does it?

It’s been a long day at the Astro Motel. Bev’s black man had a visit from his wife and child, or girlfriend and child, or whatever they are, and the three of them frolicked in the pool to escape the 100-degree heat. The white man in 109 saw them out there
splashing around and came in and said to Bev Hooker, I see you let your help in the pool. Thought this was an American place. Both Bev and Jack know they have a problem now—they can’t afford to offend their few paying customers—and Bev has suggested that they raise her black man’s rates if he’s going to have outsiders come visit and use the pool. It’s only fair, right? Or am I prejudiced? she wonders. Don’t think I am, but am I? Problem is this, says Jack, settling her: You let one in, then they just keep coming. Most colored folk make a lot of noise, he says. But now this man, he’s a good man.

Sent Bev to bed with tornado warnings on the radio. Told her they’d work it all out tomorrow. Sleep well, Momma, he said. Now he’s on the night watch. If someone comes in at midnight, one o’clock in the morning, he’ll open the door and give him a bed. It won’t matter what race or color, won’t matter what he thinks about him in the bright noon of day, because he knows what it’s like to be tired, knows what it’s like to be without shelter on a stormy night. There are dead hogs hanging in the trees; there are kids spooking. When guests come through the front door of the Astro Motel, Jack Hooker will hand them the keys to one of his rooms and welcome them. Whoever they are, they’ll sleep under the same roof as Jack Hooker tonight.

But no one comes. Wind starts up and blows the rain sideways, so fierce it feels like some kind of Old Testament storm. Cars keep passing, but no one stops. On their way to other motels. The bullet holes in the window have pooled with darkness now, and everything reflects back. Can’t see the outside world, just hear it roaring. Look at Jack Hooker now, in the haunted lobby of the Astro Motel. Can you see him looking at himself? Do you see what he sees? Just a man—a man who hates and knows he is hated—turned ashen in the lobby light, standing with his calloused hands at his side, waiting and watching.

Meanwhile, behind the desk over at the Thunderbird,
Donna registers a trucker, a short, speedy white guy, and hands him the keys to 228. Clean room, she says, smiling. If you have problem, you come back and talk to me. Got ice machine right over there, too. You sleep well, okay? Al Bundy is on TV, and Donna laughs with the laugh track. She is wearing another one of Dwayne Price’s short-sleeved shirts. Kids in bed. Boun in his room, watching a movie. Look at this weather, she says excitedly. Tonight, I bet we full.

She comes around to the front of the desk and tidies. Puts away the photo albums of His image. Goes to the aquarium, where she begins to feed the fish. Look at this woman Donna. She is now on her tiptoes, reaching her hand into a tank full of rosy barb and tigerfish. Can you see her? Clear water flows somewhere in the earth beneath her feet, and she has her hand in the aquarium, among the psychedelic fish, so that part of her is in the water, too. Can you feel how cool it is? Can you see how clear? Outside, the wind is ripping her American flags, and there are more cars pulling into her parking lot, an endless wave of refugees washing out of the storm tonight. Look at Donna, Bout Sinhpraseut. She is smiling, feeding the fish. There are people with money coming to her door. She lets them in.

O
NE DAY WHILE LOITERING AT MY
desk, I happened upon a news-wire story about a giant. The story was of the variety that appears from time to time, offering a brief snapshot of the oldest/smallest/fattest person on earth, a genre in which I take a keen interest. But there was something else about this one. The giant was reported to be thirty-three years old, residing in a small village with no plumbing in a very poor region of Ukraine. He lived with his mother and sister, who happened to be tiny. How he’d gotten so huge wasn’t entirely known, because the giant wasn’t interested in seeing doctors anymore. Something inside him had been broken or left open, like a faucet, pulsing out hormones as if his body presumed that it still belonged to that of a proliferating pubescent boy. This apparently was the result of an operation he’d had as a child. Under the knife that saved him from a blood clot in his brain, his pituitary gland had been nicked. Now he was more than eight feet tall—and still growing.

In the article, the giant was pictured sitting at his small
dining-room table, reaching up to change a lightbulb at a height that a normal-sized person couldn’t have reached standing. Another picture captured the giant in an unguarded moment, staring in astonishment at his hand, as if he’d just picked an exotic, oversized starfish from a coral reef. Near the end of the article, he said something that killed me. He said that his happiest hours were spent in his garden, because only the apples and beets don’t care what size you are.

Beyond my admittedly voyeuristic interest in the facts of the giant’s life—his huge hands, his constant search for clothes that fit, the way he traveled by horse and cart—that one comment brought with it the intimation of something heartbreaking and even a bit holy. It began a story:
Once upon a time, there was a giant who kept growing.
… And yet this was a real life. And what kind of life was it when you had to find solace among fruits and vegetables? Maybe he was an angel. Turned out of heaven, or thrown down to save the world. What other explanation could there be?

In the days and weeks after I’d read the article, the giant came back to me as I stood in the kitchen making dinner (did he use an oversized spatula to make oversized pancakes?) and while bathing my kids (how did he bathe if he couldn’t fit in a shower or tub?). He returned to me in the lulls, while I was brushing my teeth or driving among a trance of red taillights. Maybe I cracked an egg when he did, and maybe I didn’t and just believed I had.

Fall arrived. The leaves changed. I didn’t forget about the giant; no, he’d only become more insistent. He was out there, and stuck inside me, too. Why? It made no sense, really. It was almost irresponsible. I was a father of two, and we had another on the way. I loved my wife, even more as her belly grew, as the cells split inside, but a part of me—my old self or soul or me-ness—had been subsumed by this new family of ours. I’d wanted it to
happen, of course, invited it with eager if naïve willingness, but then there were moments when, perhaps like all parents, I found myself sunk down, overwhelmed, uncertain. Having children was its own kind of proliferation. You suddenly found yourself at the center of something that was growing wildly around you, all kudzu and blossom. Extra hands and feet and voices getting louder, a world of spoon-fed mush, babbling ditties, and dirty diapers telescoping into flung chicken legs, the all-purpose use of the word
No!
, and creative wiping. Sometimes I felt unable to form an adult sentence. Except this one:

It was time to see the giant.

I broke the idea gently to my wife, Sara, expecting the worst. Some guys take their getaways at a ballgame or Las Vegas. In my line of work, you can enable some of your most mysterious urges if only an editor says yes—and mine already had.

“Okay,” she said. I could sense her mind whirring. A political profile in D.C.? Sure. A story about some interesting person in Europe? Why not. A giant in Ukraine—
why
? And yet she was disconcertingly zen. Maybe she was already imagining some future day with friends, a hotel stay with room service and in-house salt glows, what the Romans called quid pro quo and others call me-time.

So I packed a bag, said my goodbyes to the children—it never hurts any less—and made a beeline for the airport. There I strode straight up to the counter like a black-market arms dealer and bought a ticket to Kiev, the old-fashioned way. It may rank as one of the most pleasing things I’ve ever done. Maybe I was already imagining a fable in which some essential truth is revealed. Or maybe, under the guise of work, I was just hoping to escape, for a moment, what I was growing into and return to who I’d been. Either way, hadn’t I earned a little me-time with a Ukrainian giant?

There was only one road leading to the giant—a ribbon of battered, unlined pavement wide enough for exactly two and a half cars. Landing in Kiev, I was able to pick up a translator and a driver whose beat-up black Audi smelled like the inside of a gas tank. Before leaving the city, we stopped and bought a cake. Somehow cake seemed like the right sort of gift for a giant, lest, as giants sometimes did in fairy tales, he mistook me for a delectable morsel.

We drove west toward Poland and Slovakia, through all the small villages inhabited by all the small and average-sized human beings of the country. The people here—the babushkas and the hunched old men—looked as if they might have been out meandering on this same road three hundred years ago. Ancient and ruddy-faced, they wore old wool hats and sat on the hard benches of their carts, driving their horses, hauling their beets to market, payloads of what looked to be purple hearts.

We followed the Teterev River, winding westward through flatlands, and knew we were close when we came upon a town called Chudnive, or “Miracle.” The giant allegedly lived nearby, in Podoliantsi, a tiny backwater of four hundred people, which sat on a vein of blue granite. We drifted off the highway near a rail yard, came over the tracks, which were lit by a string of indigo lights leading to Minsk, then skirted the edge of an endless field, finally turning right on a dirt road.

There was no
WELCOME TO PODOLIANTSI
sign, just a bunch of hens running loose and the smell of woodsmoke. It was dusk, without much light left in the sky, though the sun had come down under the gloom and momentarily lit the land crosswise, throwing long, spindly shadows, catching a nearby cloud, making it glow orange over the village until the last beams of light tipped
higher into space as the sun fell beneath the horizon line, like a spotlight suddenly diverted.

We asked directions to the giant’s house from a woman at a well drawing water, and without a word she blushed and pointed ahead to another dirt lane. We turned and stopped before a stone one-story with a blue-painted gate. Apple trees loomed everywhere over the house. When we got out of the car, my eyes were slow to adjust to the shadows. There was mostly silence, some wind blowing quietly out across the fields rustling some faraway trees, until a hinge squeaked loudly, which caused the air to exhale from my lungs and my heart to skim seven or eight beats. I could feel a thudding reverberation emanating up into my body from the earth.
What was I doing here again?
Suddenly, a voice sounded in the dark: It had its own special reverberation, too.

“Dobryi den,”
the giant said from behind the gate, among the trees. He didn’t boom it out in some fee-fi-fo-fum, but said it almost delicately, politely, so as not to startle anyone. He was behind the trees, and among them. Slowly, I could make out the low, interleaving branches and then some higher branches, with silver apples trembling there, on a level with the gutter of his stone house. And just above them, breaching, came the giant’s head. It was enormous, and he ducked down to come to our level.

“Dobryi den,”
he said again. Good day. As if he’d been waiting. He was smiling as he undid the gate, teeth like mah-jongg tiles. He was tall. The top of my head reached only to his elbows. And he was wide. On his own, he was a walking family of four. My hand instinctively shot out, and he hesitated, then took it. Hand in hand, mine vanished in his like a small goldfish. He seemed to measure its weight a moment, considered its smallness, then squeezed. Yes, ouch—without realizing it, trying to be gentle—very hard! His palm was too wide to clasp fingers
around. Meanwhile, he was crushing certain fine bones I didn’t realize I had. But I was doing what you do when you meet a real giant in a strange, faraway land: I was smiling like hell, nervously gesturing toward the cake in my other hand.