The World's Largest Man (20 page)

“Howdy,” I said, walking over to say hello.

In a frightening burst, a barking animal rushed from the piles of refuse in his carport, a wiener dog, a long turd of a pet the color of a bratwurst, and it barked with fury: deep, amplified, angry barks. I had always believed small dogs were sent by
God as a judgment to his people and greatly desired to see this one fall into a deep hole or be swept out to sea. The dog stuck its head through a gap in the pickets and barked again. It came through the fence. It coughed. It yakked. It vomited.

The dog was now eating its own vomit six inches from my shoes, on my land.

“I fed him a sirloin,” Jimmy said, proudly.

“He appears to be eating it again,” I said.

P
art of me kept wanting to hate them, maybe because it was in my bones to be in a blood feud with such people, but then I would beat back the dogs of my Scotch-Irish bellicosity and try to be a better man.

Sure, Jimmy didn't appear to own any shirts. Sure, he'd transformed the corner lot of our cul-de-sac into a sort of Hurricane Katrina–themed terrarium, rolls of sodden carpet leaning against trees, velour recliners exposed to the elements, dead sticks of furniture lazing in the sun like poisoned cows. Sure, he was a liar, lying about all sorts of things, like how he was an entrepreneur or how he could get me a backhoe.

“Why would I need a backhoe?” I asked.

“To dig shit up,” he said. “It's always shit needs to be dug up.”

He pointed around my yard at various shit that was in the ground.

I did like the way Jimmy talked. It reminded me of home. It was hard to describe, something like the sound of a distant chainsaw pinched in a knot of pine. Was it possible to construct something like mutual respect, if not outright friendship, with this man?

He explained what he was going to do to Old Man Winter's cottage.

“We gonna make it a beauty parlor,” he said.

Stunned, I nodded and drifted off into a nightmarish reverie where the cul-de-sac overflowed with large, loud women and their skyward hair, pouring out the front door of Old Man Winter's home underneath a sign that read “Tina's Kut n' Kurl” or perhaps “The Mane Event.” Like
Steel Magnolias
, except where all the women carried knives. Jimmy said his construction plans involved destroying most of the sixty-year-old azaleas and dogwoods that remained the property's last redeeming features.

“Can you believe it?” I said to my wife later. “A beauty parlor.”

She had no time for beauty parlors. “That dog attacked our children,” she said.

“When?”

“Just now.”

I found the middle child, then three years old, in the bedroom, lying motionless like a wounded soldier and covered excessively in
Dora the Explorer
bandages.

“It tried to eat me,” she said.

L
ove thy neighbor as thyself. What does it even mean? Does it mean you're supposed to make friends with a man who has been seen on top of his roof waving borrowed lawn-care tools angrily at low-flying aircraft? Does it mean you smile when he informs you proudly of the roll of chicken wire he found by the highway, and how he intends to use this chicken wire to build a play area for his youngest son, because “kids like to climb shit,” but instead chooses to build what appears to be a large sculptural installation, in which various birds and wildlife become trapped? How many children is his dog allowed to eat before you're allowed to stop loving him? How many times
is he allowed to ask if you like the Steve Miller Band before you're allowed to beat him to death with his own dog?

“I should shoot that animal,” I said to my wife.

“Don't be ridiculous,” the wife said. “You should shoot
him
.”

I had already started trying to get my parents to move to Savannah. Maybe even to this neighborhood, if we stayed. How fun it would be, where my mother could be near her grandchildren and Pop could say fun things to my wife's friends about their thighs. But I could not move them here, not to this.

“We have to move,” I said to my wife.

There were a few more Jimmy Crack Corns in the neighborhood already, and more coming. The writing was on the wall. It was a shame. Such a nice little house. Maybe Old Man Winter's family would wise up and sell and stem this tide. Maybe somebody would buy it. Nice yard. Great trees. The best trees in the whole neighborhood.

Give it time, I told myself. This guy's just trying to scratch out a life here, just like you. We at least still had those gorgeous trees. A few mornings later, we woke to the sound of a chainsaw.

D
ear Lord,” I said.

“Is that
legal
?” someone said.

We were standing in the street, trying not to stare at the rape of the natural world currently taking place in Old Man Winter's yard, where Jimmy Crack Corn was clear-cutting and burning the dogwoods.

The trees were on fire.

“What's he
doing
?” someone said.

“Destroying property values,” another neighbor said.

Events had taken a bad turn. Jimmy Crack Corn and Tina
Turner had started asking people for money. The story was, they'd lost their debit card and just needed a little cash.

“For what, do you think?”

“For crack,” my wife said.

“For chainsaws,” a neighbor said.

They lost their debit card a lot.

It was Tina who did the asking, their thinking, perhaps, that it would be easier to give money to the future valedictorian of the region's most prestigious college of beauty than to a man who operated his nipples like a pair of important toggle switches. The other neighbors were angry about this, but I tried to withhold judgment. They had asked just about everyone on the sac, and we knew they were coming for us.

“Look at him,” a neighbor said.

He had felled two or three dogwoods already and had started pulling azaleas out of the earth with his truck, leaving nothing but a row of divots like shallow baby graves. The corpses were heaped on hazardous bonfires in the yard, around the stumps of the fallen trees, on which Jimmy had also dumped clothes and other garbage.

“Somebody should say something,” they said.

Everybody looked at me.

“You live next to him,” they said. “You're the one who talks to him.”

W
hat would my father do, I wondered? After Bird and I had left home for good, he and Mom had moved from the country into the paved environs of Brandon, Mississippi, where Pop quickly installed himself as president of his homeowners' association. He had rules about where you could put a boat, putting up fences, how tall the grass could be. For example, it was not the kind of place you could just spray down an old bookcase
with lighter fluid and set it on fire in your yard, as I'd seen Jimmy do.

“The power's gone to his head,” Mom had said.

Pop had been a suzerain king of the Pecan Ridge subdivision, ensuring clean, tasteful homes by patrolling the streets with his four-wheeler, menacing his constituents, waving documents in the air, threatening legal action if they did not roll up their garden hoses properly. He hired neighborhood youth to work on defunct properties and launched a beautification program with proceeds from the association, sometimes paying out of his own pocket. Every time I visited, he had poor young men, shirtless and overheated, doing his bidding.

“Those are his slaves,” Mom said.

“They get paid,” Pop said, although he didn't seem happy about it.

Is that how you loved your neighbor, by enforcing a sort of fascist purity on the land and its people, keeping property values and blood pressure high? There didn't seem to be any radical Nazarene love in Pop. He was all Pilate, or Mussolini, or some other Roman. Which would I be? Should I speak harshly with J.C.C., or would I try to love him, and was there a difference?

T
he next day, Jimmy was back at it with the chainsaw.

“Beer?” I said.

“It's hot as a motherfucker,” he said.

We chatted: about life, and weather, and why he decided to destroy the trees.

“They were all so pretty,” I said.

“Yeah, they pretty
dead
, now. Ha ha!” he said.

He looked happy, destroying nature.

I finished my beer and departed, but not without hope. Those beers, I decided, were the right approach. Pitchforks and angry mobs and legal documents weren't the way to get Jimmy C.C. to change.

“It's him,” my wife said late one night, seeing his shadow through the window on the door. “Do not give him drug money.”

“What if they need food?” I said.

He needed fifty dollars, he said. For supplies.

I wanted to say yes, to give freely. I also wanted to say no, because I had a mortgage, while Jimmy Crack Corn was a shiftless, freeloading job-lot whose only vocation appeared to be arson.

“What kinds of supplies?” I asked.

He told me a heart-wrenching tale with many incongruous references to banks, checks, paydays, President Obama, University of Georgia football, and the murder of his father during a home invasion not too far from here sometime during the Johnson administration.

“Wow,” I said, explaining that I carried no cash, in this modern age. “You know, it's all debit this, debit that.”

He left.

I was torn. Here was a man living in a free house who had farmed out most of his children to various scorned lovers and distant kin and who spent his jobless days setting the cul-de-sac on fire and his nights preparing for the South American tour of
Stomp
while my wife contemplated murder under a threadbare comforter. It was time for a confrontation, not a friendly one.

I planned it out.

I would say, Hey, man. Are you okay?

Why do you keep lying about money!

Stop burning your garbage. This is not a Cormac McCarthy novel!

If you build a beauty parlor here, I will beat you to death with a shovel!

But it would be fine if you burned the dog!

My wife took to locking the screen door on the porch, to prevent them from knocking at midnight, but they found a way around that, too.

“They are knocking on the window, the window!” my wife said.

I steeled myself.

It was time.

“Tell him,” my wife said. “No more.”

I opened the door, and there was no him to tell, but a her: Lady Thunderdome. She stepped into the bright rhombus of porch light and related a sad tale about—actually, this is quite amazing—a lost debit card.

“For what?” I said.

“For diapers,” she said.

Thirty seconds later, I was shoving into her hands the legal tender of Huggies, which I offered in lieu of U.S. currency. She seemed disappointed, inspecting the diapers a bit too closely, assessing their potential as barter goods.

She marched back into the night, vacating the porchlight rhombus, which cut across the yard, and showed me a shadow that looked a lot like my father's, and I wasn't sure if I liked it.

I
n the story of the Good Samaritan, a lawyer asks how to inherit eternal life, and Jesus gets the man to recite what he knows about loving God and one's neighbor, and then the lawyer says, Yeah, but who's my neighbor? So J.C. tells the story of the man from Jerusalem who got his ass whipped on the highway, and the people who should've helped him—the
people who came from his part of town, say—did not help him. The one who helped him was a man from a whole other town, practically a hotbed of terrorism or a Canadian, and the Canadian terrorist did first aid and put the hurt Jew on his burro and took him to a safe place and found people to take care of the man.

The Bleeding Ass-Whipped Jew, that's your neighbor, said J.C. Now go be a Canadian Terrorist First Responder.

Were Jimmy Crack Corn and Tina Turner by the proverbial roadside, their asses whipped? Was I really capable of behaving like a Canadian? In the story, the guy's hurt and about to die. Jimmy C.C. was not about to die. If anybody was going to die, it would be one of my people, from the falling timber and the furniture fires and the vomiting sausage beast.

“Hey,” Jimmy C.C. said one night, at my door again. He had that hangdog look, the money-asking sag about the shoulders. He needed maybe twenty dollars, he said.

“I'll give you two hundred,” I said.

“Shit,” he said.

“To paint my fence,” I said.

He paused, pondering this strange idea of exchanging labor for money.

Y
ou paint your fence?” Pop said, on a visit.

“Paid the neighbor to.”

“Good,” he said. “Yeah, that's real good.”

And then, they disappeared, sort of. Somebody had gotten word that J.C.C. was working construction on a contract for the U.S. Army, while others said he'd come by asking for money and mentioned something about going away for a while, to do electrical work at a hospital or install Sheetrock at a university or burn all the trees on the
Yucatán Peninsula. The story changed a lot, but one thing was certain: Things were quieter.

Their injured cars remained, four in all, furred in thickening coats of pollen and ash, but it was a haunted house. Cody and the Fake Gray Baby were scarcer, too. Rumors spread. They would be evicted, kicked out, a splinter in the Old Man Winter family tree. Strange cars had been seen. A crime scene van, on a Sunday morning. Crimes against humanity or specific people, it was unclear.

Weeds choked up through the baby graves. Remnants of azalea root stems shot up springlike, green as new money. The concrete column of a birdbath jutted into the sky, bathless. The black sooty heaps of garbage remained cancerous, threatening to darken everything. The few surviving dogwoods did bloom. We would have to postpone selling. The sac was a mess.

But my wife calmed down. She had been lately moved by an encounter with a Filipino missionary who visited our church and who spoke of maggots in her cupboards and children in need of shoes.