The World's Largest Man (22 page)

“Suspected Burglar Dead, Head Missing.”

“Man Gunned Down by Area Nut Who Feared Bear Invasion.”

My wife kissed me on the forehead, went to bed. On the coffee table lay my tools: a headlamp, more ammo, car keys in case I needed to give chase to wounded enemies, and a copy of
Absalom, Absalom!
in case I had any lingering questions about human frailty.

N
obody came that night. Instead, other people came.

“What can we do?” a friend asked.

This was a family who wanted to help, and they had money, and they were too kind, and if I didn't come up with something, I knew they'd take it upon themselves to invent their own solutions, sending over a team to surround my home with trained baboons and moats of boiling sulfur.

“I guess we could use some motion lights,” I said.

Before I knew it, a barrel-chested electrician was standing in my driveway, asking where I wanted the lights. “I can put them anywhere,” he said. “The corners, the trees, the roof.” He was wearing a serious man's tool belt and appeared to be considering the installation of motion-sensor lighting on my forehead.

“Just put them all over, I guess.”

This is exactly what he did.

When I drove home from work that night, it appeared from the end of the street that our house was on fire, and I was reminded of scripture: “And the light shineth in the darkness, and the wicked shall flee, for the 240-degree swiveling security lights doth illuminate the cul-de-sac in heavenly brightness.” Pulling into my driveway, I felt very blessed, like one of those people who get to meet Jesus, mostly because I was now blind.

“I love the lights,” I said to a bird in the flower bed, mistaking it for a family member.

Other friends tried to help, bringing food and hugs. It was unnerving. Late one night, everyone asleep but me, I heard the crunch of gravel and prepared to shoot the maker of this sound, gun in hand, until I saw out the window that it was merely a friend who was attempting to place a bottle of Shiraz on our porch, something to make us feel better.

“Oh, hi,” she said, when I came outside, without the gun.

Savannahians were Gun Nuts but also Wine Nuts, and I was glad. I thanked her. Later, having drunk the wine, I slept.

T
he next morning, my wife announced another new change.

“We're getting a dog,” she said.

In my father's house, having indoor pets was always a sign of moral decay, assumed to be clear evidence of mental illness and possibly drug addiction. If you wanted to get an animal into his house, you had to tell my father that you intended to eat it. But less than forty-eight hours later, my family and I were at a large concrete building full of dogs.

“We're getting a dog!” our children said.

They were looking for a cuddly one, while I looked for a pet that had been trained by Germans to remove human hands.

“Which one do you think will protect us more?” my wife whispered.

“An alligator,” I said.

We narrowed it down to a black Lab and a docile German shepherd with a strange growth on its anus. I liked the idea of the German shepherd. These dogs have one look, and the look says, “Can I chew upon your genital region?”

“But everybody loves Labs,” my wife said.

Which is how, a week after the burglary, I had a hundred-pound black Lab named Gus sleeping on my couch, sitting in my chair, and watching me urinate.

“If someone tries to break in, are you sure he'll bark?” I asked my wife.

So far, the only security he provided was filling the yard with heaps of his malodorous dung, which could've been used to build a wall around our house. He didn't stay in the living room, where the invaders might enter. Instead, he watched me sleep. I would wake up to heavy breathing and find the dog staring at me with murder on his mind, like Billy Bob Thornton in
Sling Blade
.

I was angry. Angry that I had this dog, angry that some
criminal was now using my laptop, angry that his family had failed to nurture in him a sense of rightness and hope, angry that I wished to hit him in the face with a brick, angry that I'd lost my library card, that it's so much work to get a library card, that the people who give out library cards are in many ways the real criminals of this story, and that if they came into my house, I would ask my dog to eat them. But he won't eat them. He won't do anything but get real close and breathe his hobo breath on them until they stop loving every dog they've ever cared about.

I woke up. The big black dog was staring at me.

“At least you're all okay,” friends would say.

But I was not okay.

A
nd then, a miracle.

I was reaching into my briefcase one night, this piece of luggage I'd found empty in the yard, this bag I'd cleaned like it was filled with radiation, and there it was, right there, just sitting there, in a pocket that I'd scoured a hundred times. My wallet.

Everything was in it.

What I felt was not so much elation as pure wonder. The discovery created a kind of euphoria, an empowering buzz that felt like righteousness and light. What was happening? Was this a gift, some eddy in space and time, a message? I put down the wallet and walked outside and looked up at the heavens. I paced. I prayed. I tripped the motion lights.

P
eace returned, the invasion over. I stopped patrolling my house at night. When people came over for dinner, I did not ask if they wanted to see my gun. When I went for walks, I did
not put it in my pants. It was too big, and would have made walking unpleasant.

I knew: I cannot live like this, patrolling my house at night with a loaded weapon, fully dressed, preparing to shoot the people who bring us gifts. And so I took the slugs out, and put the shotgun back under the bed, and I started sleeping naked again, and I got rid of the dog.

“Where did Gus go?” the children asked.

“To the gas chambers,” I said.

What we did was, we returned him. I'd kept the receipt.

I tried not to pick sides between the Gun Nuts and the Non–Gun Nuts. I'd always tried to avoid extremism of any kind, as it was my understanding that passionate beliefs could lead to excessive voting and the alienation of people whose cooking I enjoy.

We moved the girls to a safer room of the house, and prayed more, and worried less, and slept better.

And then I heard a noise. This was no midnight Shiraz delivery noise. This was a thud, several thuds, at 4 a.m. I groped for the shotgun under the bed.

“This is it,” I said.

They had come back for the other computer, the TV, the Apple products, our very lives. We were all going to die. I found the slugs. I pressed them into the chamber, one, two, quiet as Little Tommy Tittlemouse. I crouched in the hallway. Looking down, I considered the tactical advantages of my nakedness. Usually, when I enter a room naked, my wife runs out screaming. Would it scare a burglar, too? Perhaps. Still, I worried. It would not play well with a jury of my peers.

“What was Mr. Key wearing when he shot you?” the prosecutor asks.

“Nothing but, but—” the defendant says, choking up.

“It's okay, this is a safe place.”

“Just—just the socks.”

“You must have feared for your life.”

Another thunk.

I squinted and noted, also, that my eyeglasses were in the very living room that was quietly being ransacked.

“Naked, Blind Man Shoots Wife in Living Room,” the headline would read.

I inched forward, turned off the safety.

I pumped the gun, loudly, hoping to scare them back out the way they'd come, and then I heard more rustling, more knocking about, coming from a bedroom. My four-year-old opened her door, saw the gun, and started to cry. Cover blown, it was time to act. I ran into the living room, gun ready to blaze.

My wife woke, came out, turned on a light.

“What are you—” she said.

“I thought—” I said. I nodded to the four-year-old. “I guess she dropped a cup or something?”

The four-year-old cried harder, and I looked in the enormous mirror that hung on our living room wall and was shocked at what I saw: a real-live Angry White Man. In nothing but his socks. Holding a giant gun. Like some kind of nut.

W
hen a man stares at his naked body in a giant mirror, it's hard to have illusions. About his safety, about his mental state, about what this world is capable of doing to his children and his wife.

“You need a pistol,” Pop said.

And he was wrong. I just needed an alarm system, and a faith to remember that blessed were the peacemakers, that we had already conquered death, that our motion lights would sear the corneas of any invaders. And as they stumbled into our house, blinded and groping, there would be a new sound, a
beeping, because I purchased an alarm system that I could not afford, which had the added benefit of ensuring there was no money in my home to steal, which seemed the ultimate defense.

I knew it could happen again, that someone might come into my house at night without knocking, even if only to look at my lovely spatulas, and that I might end up doing my best to ensure none of the invader's organs will be usable by any hospitals, that I might not stop to ask about how much love he needs or wants or never got, or if he liked my laptop and its superior functionality. I might have to shoot first and ask questions later.

“Why?” I will ask.

And if that guest is Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and if he is only coming to take us all to heaven, and if I accidentally fire into his diaphanous form, I am sure he will forgive me. “I thought you were someone else,” I will say.

And we will have some wine.

A
gun: That was the manly thing, right? Whatever that meant.

In our modern age, a man can be almost anything. He needn't be a hunter or a farmer or a bush pilot. He needn't even really be a man. There are many men walking around today who are actually orangutans, according to their wives.

In the South of my childhood, men worked, sweated, ate fried chicken, and had heart attacks. Women worked, too, and sweated, and brought things to the men, such as their chicken, and their defibrillators, because of the heart attacks, because of the chicken.

If I had to describe what, exactly, men did, according to my father, it would be: Outside Things. I don't think I ever saw him clean a dish. He didn't even know where the sink was. If you had thrown his keys in it, he would not have been able to find them. He would think you had made them invisible, that you were a witch. I grew up believing men could not do housework, that if you did, something bad might happen. One might grow an ovary.

About the only thing that could make my father do housework was a reliable tornado warning, which forced him inside
and often led him to vacuum, although what he did wasn't so much vacuuming as attempting to hurt the carpet's feelings. Eventually, the weather would clear and Pop ordered us outside, to do our Manly Outside Things, burning and hammering and such. It was like Separate But Equal, except Pop did not really have a place in his head for things that sounded like math.

It wasn't just Pop. It was the whole family.

Every Sunday, we would gather at the farm in Coldwater. These Sunday dinners are one of the load-bearing pillars of the first decade of my life, and I didn't think anything odd about them until I left home and told others.

It wasn't the food that was odd, having been grown on land one could see from the table, every sort of bean and tuber and leafy thing and many delicious meats, always fried, boiled, burned, but never microwaved. I once had a two-hour conversation with my grandmother about what a microwave was and spent most of the time failing to explain how the device was not a bomb.

No, the food was normal, but the service was not, because the men ate first.

“You did
what
?” people would say, when I told them this story.

“The men,” I'd repeat, “ate first.”

“How did that happen?”

Mostly with forks, I'd explain.

I
t's ready,” Grandmother Key would say.

And there we'd go, Grandfather Key, Pop, uncles, boy cousins, nephews, Bird, me. We'd eat with great pleasure, while the women sat in the living room, waiting, starving, planning our deaths, except for the one or two who stayed near the table, to serve us.

“To do
what
?” people would say.

“To serve the men,” I would say.

Pop's glass would be empty, and he would shake it, and the sound of the ice would bring one of the women running, usually his mother, sometimes his wife.

Occasionally, I'd look past the table and see a girl cousin staring at us from behind a piece of furniture, licking her lips while I ate my third pork chop. It was hard to know what she was thinking. Did she want some of this pork chop? Did she want to hurt me with it?

But there was never any complaint, nothing to suggest that this was not the habit of every American family in every home at that very moment.

There was a part of me that felt, yes, maybe it was weird.

And there was another part of me that felt, yes, maybe I would like some cake.

W
hen I left home, this story about Sunday dinners was one of my favorites to tell to my progressive friends. It upset them greatly, but they also loved it, for it confirmed what most of them already believed about certain parts of America. They always wondered how I could come from such a simian world and yet be so egalitarian and kind, which made me wonder how I'd ever given them that impression. After all, it was me, not my father, who'd met a coquettish redhead in my first semester of college and, within thirty minutes of knowing her, asked her to do my laundry.

She actually said yes. We even made a date for the weekend.

“And I need some things ironed, too,” I said, as she pushed her bicycle home, my laundry in a sack on her handlebars.

Two days later, she called.

“I'm not going to do your laundry,” she said, outraged.

What had happened to the sweet girl? Had she been studying Marxism? She explained that it was presumptuous of me to expect her to put a crease in my khakis. How dare you, was her tone. I could hear a woman in the background, feeding her lines.

She explained that my whites would be in the lobby of my dormitory, unwashed, and hung up the phone. Wow. I'd learned my lesson. From now on, I vowed, I would only ask female relatives to do my laundry.

T
wo months later, I met the woman I'd marry.

She was fifteen, and I was eighteen, and she was visiting my school, a placed called Belhaven, where since the nineteenth century, Presbyterian youth have gone to feel bad about lusting for other Presbyterian youth. I had a few classes with her older sister, who was about as warm to me as Vladimir Putin to a wounded elk, but I liked the looks of the younger one.

So, we met, and nothing happened for ten years.

She did not speak to me because, according to her, I was “weird.”

I did not speak to her because, according to bystanders, she kept “running away.”

Word on the street was, she liked soccer players, which I felt was a cry for help. She also cried for help when I would try to speak to her, which was another cry for help.

Then, a decade later, I came home from graduate school one weekend to find her sharing an apartment with a good friend. There we were, my friend and me, sitting on the porch, and this young woman just walks up, bums a cigarette, gives me a little grin, and goes inside.

“I'm going to marry her,” I said to my friend. I could not explain why I'd said that.

A few days later, I saw her at a wedding.

At the reception, we talked.

At the party after the reception, we talked more.

My plan was to talk to her until her brain stopped working properly and then ask her to marry me. We did a lot of laughing. Nobody had told me how funny she was. How could somebody that gorgeous be so funny? She had clearly been exposed to gamma rays in her youth. It wasn't fair.

I told her about all my failures in writing, and she told me about all her failures with soccer players, and by the time I took her home, I was in love. I'd always thought I'd fall for a tortured poetess, but she was my opposite in every way. Unlike me, she had no interest in books or canoes or live music or talking about her every psychological state until those around her fell asleep or attempted to escape through a window. On paper, this was not going to work.

W
hen fall came, I knew it was time to do something I'd never done with a girlfriend: take her to Coldwater for Thanksgiving. On the way there, our first real road trip, she taught me a great way to pass the time in the car called the Penis Game, where you replace any word in a traffic sign or billboard with
penis
.

“Do Not Block Penis!” she said, pointing to a traffic sign.

“Are you okay?”

“Penis Parking Only!” she said.

We spent the next two hours this way, laughing, dying.

“Penis Five Miles Ahead!”

“Number One Penis in Mississippi!”

Soon we laughed ourselves out. I could live forever with a woman who understood the value of a word like
penis
. As we got closer to Coldwater, I decided it was time to explain how we did things at Thanksgiving.

“The thing is,” I said, “the men eat first.”

“I don't get it.”

“You know, we'll say a blessing, and then you go to the living room and wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“To eat.”

“And what are you doing while I'm waiting?” she said.

“Eating,” I said.

I tried to explain that it had something to do with farming, the men needing to eat quickly so as to excuse themselves to see to the few chores, the Outside Things, but this explanation had no legs.

“That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,” she said.

“It is,” I said. “It is so stupid.”

Silence. Quiet.

“Penis for Senate!” I said, pointing, but she didn't laugh.

A
few minutes after we arrived, all the men took their places around the table, and so did I. And my girlfriend followed me to the table.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Sitting down.”

She pulled out a chair.

“Maybe you'd like to sit in the living room?” I said.

She gave me a little grin and sat down.

My grandfather and my father looked at her, and then looked at me, while I looked into the mashed potatoes, to see if Jesus was in there.

A clearing of the throat.

“Let's pray,” Grandfather Key said.

And we ate. That's when I knew I would marry her. And of course, I did. You know that already.

T
he first time I remember our discussing who should do what, the cooking and the cleaning and the housework, we were in the kitchen of our first apartment.

“Why haven't you taken the garbage out?” she asked.

She pointed to an unfamiliar canlike object in the corner. It was in a part of the kitchen where I had often seen my wife, but I paid no attention to what she did there. She had all sorts of hobbies that I felt were not my business, such as collecting empty milk jugs, which I made sure to save for her.

“Stop it!” she said, as I put an empty jug into the fridge. “Why do you do that?”

“Is this a trick question?” I said.

She just stood there.

It was a game! The name of this game was “Where Does My Wife Want the Empty Milk Jug to Be?”

“What about the sink?” I said. “So you can clean it.”

“Why would I want to clean that?”

“You could fill it with rocks and make a shaker.”

I made a shaking motion with the empty jug, and she made a motion that seemed like she was going to kick my face through my brain.

She explained that what you do is, you throw it away.

“But the can is full,” I said.

And she explained what you do is, you empty the garbage.

She held up the bag with one hand and told me to take it out, which is what I did, hurrying back to the kitchen, eager to see her pull more fun things out of the can.

“Where'd you put it?” she said, of the garbage bag.

“The porch.”

“No.”

The bag of garbage, she explained, had to be transported to a larger can.

The beautiful woman with the shoulders and almond eyes, my own Sophia Loren, had become a garbage Nero. How had this happened? I felt the sting of a moral conviction deep in my young and ignorant heart, some friction between the way I thought of the world and how it actually worked. The sting was minor, almost forgettable, the kind of pain you can drown out with a beer and a good eight hours of sleep. It was nothing, I hoped.

That night, I thought about all the world's garbage being moved from smaller cans, to larger cans, to ever larger cans, until it got to the biggest can of all. Where was this can? Who emptied it? God? Does God have a wife? Or a husband? Or at least a maid?

T
he years, they roll on. You grow, you have children, maybe you fight about small things, like bath toys, which apparently are grown in the uterus when you have children. Like all our fights, the bath toy fight was really about the quality of our marriage, but saying, “I want to fight about our marriage!” is a silly way to start. It's better to begin with something provocative, like, “If you don't get rid of those bath toys, I am going to start peeing on them in the shower.”

Happy Meal toys, landfill fodder, Popsicle sticks gnawed into barbed lances, the rubber ducks and turtles that retain water for several hundred years, I hated them. They lived on the floor of our only bathroom, where, in olden times, homeowners were expected to stand.

“Do we really need all these toys?” I asked my wife.

“Do we really need
you
?” she said.

She still wasn't very good at expressing her feelings in words, but I deduced, through a complicated series of door-and cabinet-slammings, that her position was this: The toys
represented the necessary messiness of family life, the fragments of joy that she worked hard to provide for our children, and that my hatred of the toys was really a hatred of our life, and her efforts to make it a happy one.

And again, there came the old sting, rising up from down under, and I pushed it back down. They were just bath toys. I would've thrown them away myself, but bath toys are an Inside Thing, and men, as we all know, only do Outside Things. Besides, if I'd thrown them away, she'd only have fished them back out of the garbage, further confusing me about what should and should not be thrown away. The way the fight ended was, a special task force determined that I should insert my head into my rectum and die.

S
ometimes, we fought about sex, which we had to stop calling
a meeting
, because our children had a gift for metaphor, so we started calling it “the budget,” which made it sound so much more fun.

“Do you want to work on the budget?” I'd ask, while the TV hypnotized our children.

“We did the budget already this week,” my wife would say.

“We should review the spreadsheets.”

“I've seen the spreadsheets.”

“Some people make new spreadsheets every day.”

“Those people are not doing their budget right,” she said.

And then, if I decided to be hurt by this, we'd have a fight, and our kids would think it was about money, but it was never about money, unless it was about money, because sometimes it was about money. Like any healthy marriage, we both made gently terroristic demands of the other, and sometimes these demands resulted in fights, and sometimes they merely resulted in a quiet, respectful hatred. My wife's demands included: