The World's Largest Man (25 page)

“It's my muscles,” I said.

“What's wrong with them?”

“Apparently I don't have any.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

“So I guess you have to start working out.”

“I already walk.”

“Walking is
not
hard,” she said.

“It is if you don't have any muscles.”

You could tell she did not think any of this was very serious, that it was nothing compared to having an angry biped scraping the inner walls of one's pelvis.

“I have a prescription,” I said, holding it up as evidence.

She took it. “This is just Aleve,” she said.

“I have to get physical therapy,” I said. This was no joke, I explained. There might be war veterans there, and others who have overcome impossible odds and been featured in local newspapers for their demonstrations of courage. She gave me a look that suggested the newspaper industry had no interest in my story.

I went to physical therapy and believed myself to be in the
wrong location, as the room looked like something from the earlier scenes of
Awakenings
, when everyone is drooling, and I noted that many of the patients were old enough to have been veterans in any number of nineteenth-century wars. My therapy consisted of being rolled around like a ball of frozen dough, after which they attached me to a car battery.

“I didn't know we still electrocuted people like this,” I said to my therapist, who said nothing. As the energy pinched and washed through my core, I thought of how emasculating it was, needing to be electrified so that I might regain the ability to walk upright.

I
guess we all knew that Pop would eventually get old and stop being so big and strong and start being very small and weak, and it happened. One day you look up and the legend really is a legend, meaning: not really true. Something shut down, and he went into the hospital one way and came out another. He was shorter, it seemed, feeble. You see something like that, you just want to go into the backyard and heave for a while. It's life's way of reminding you that the man will die one day, and so will you, and it will be nothing but sad.

Mom became his nurse, with her diary of his sodium intake and medications and the procedural steps, written in her sweet schoolteacher's cursive, for the transtelephonic monitoring of the defibrillator that lived somewhere under his collarbone.

“Your father's old,” she whispered to me, when he had trouble keeping up with us while we did some Christmas shopping.

“I'll stay with him,” she said, and they sat down on a bench together, and she patted him on his leg, while he stared at his feet. There was still fire in the old eyes, though. He could still worry her, and he liked knowing it. He still fished, alone. Got on a boat. Fell into Pelahatchie Bay. Barely got out.

“Your father fell into the lake again,” she said on the phone.

“Oh, good,” I said, thinking, Oh, bad.

“It took his defibrillator a good minute to get him going,” she said.

It's maybe the last manly thing he's got left, his ability to make his wife crazy, to worry her. And it made me feel better, knowing he still could. She was right: He was old. She was old, too. It was good, watching them be old together, watching the love get stronger when the body got weaker.

W
hen my own electroshock therapy was done, I put my clothes on and hobbled out to my scooter and drove home.

“How was it?” my wife asked, as I positioned myself on all fours on the bed, attempting to practice one of the therapeutic poses suggested by Dr. America. The wrinkled man in the picture appeared to be imitating a male dog in the act of urination, and I could not get it right.

“They electrocuted me,” I said, lifting my right leg into the air.

“Oh, I used to get that done all the time in ballet,” she said. “It always felt good. Warm, like a massage.”

“Of course.”

The woman gave no quarter to any of my disease-based fantasies, and demanded to know why I was acting like a dog.

“I'm strengthening my core,” I said.

“Please, not on the bed.”

In time, after I suggested having her bathe me, she assented that yes, it was possible, perhaps, that I might be in something resembling pain. She did her duty, opening my beers for me, assisting me into the rocking chair, as though I were a tribal elder, where the children poked me with wooden spoons to see if I was alive. She even presented me with a gift.

“What's that?” I said.

“A cane.”

“How sweet.”

“You're an old-timer now!” my five-year-old said, taking the cane from my lap and wielding it like a broadsword. She held it high over my head, about to put me out of my misery.

“Yeah,” the three-year-old said. “You're our grandfather now.”

I watched Princess Grace going about her day, preparing dinner, carrying out the garbage I could no longer carry, seeing to the needs of the younglings. The woman has looked twenty years old since she was fifteen and still did. I always seemed much too old for her, with my premature baldness and high Gold Toe socks and love of pudding. And now, as in all May-September marriages that last, she had become my nurse.

“She's a good old gal, I reckon,” Pop would say about Mom, and he said it more and more as he got older and fell into many lakes and waterways across the southeastern United States, and you could see a gratitude in him that you hadn't seen before, that had been dormant. “She takes care of me,” he'd say, in front of her, smiling, and I thought: Yes, that is what you need. Someone who keeps a covenant made ten or forty years ago, even when we are old. My wife was my nurse now, and I'd have my turn to be hers, when a plague of migraines descended and would not leave. I'd bring her warm rags and keep the lights low and duct-tape the children to the walls to keep them from making too much noise. Yes, those days would come, but for now, it was me who suffered, hobbling through the days.

It's difficult to know how long this would go on, whether my core would ever be strengthened by the Congress of the Urinating Dog. But I did not care. It was pleasing to watch my child bride make good on her promises.

“Is this what it will be like when we're old?” I asked.

“You
are
old,” she said, as the grandchildren flogged one another with my cane.

“Tell me you love me,” I said.

“You love me,” my wife said.

“I do, I do.”

C
all me, 911,” my wife's text said.

I checked my email.

“Call me, 911,” said her email.

I was at the college, in a meeting.

Also, a missed call from my mother.

“Hello?”

“Your dad's unresponsive,” my wife said. “Come home.”

I hung up, turned to the people in my meeting.

“I'm leaving.”

“You're leaving?”

“I'm leaving.”

I left.

U
nresponsive
. What a strange word. My father had been unresponsive for seventy-one years. He responded to nothing, because nothing impressed him—not spaceflight, nor magic, nor Bach chorales, nor the Olympic Games, nor social media platforms.

“Pop, when are you going to get on Facebook?” I said, often.

“Face who?”

“Book.”

“Book?”

He did not respond to books, either, unless they were being read during church, to which he responded by taking my arm in the vise grip of his earthmover hands and squeezing hard enough to weaken my vocabulary.

He was responsive to food and women and babies, whom he rocked with a mighty gift, and he was responsive to the acting of Charles Bronson, because he responded to the idea of a man shooting whatever he wanted to, and he responded to innovations in fishing lure technology, but not really any other kind of technology, such as the iPhone.

“You seen what this thang can do?” he said, when he got it.

I expected he'd show me some app that would tell him the location of the nearest escaped convict or Red Lobster. He pushed a button.

“Looka here,” he said.

It was the compass feature. That impressed him. He liked knowing where he was.

H
e was unresponsive in other ways, too, such as the time when I was five and he fell into his raisin bran. I was sitting on the floor of the bathroom, putting on my tennis shoes for school, when I heard my mother cry out. I dashed to the kitchen, and saw Pop facedown on the table while Bird looked on with sleepy eyes and Mom lifted his head out of the bowl.

The ambulance arrived.

He woke up.

“I ain't going to no damn hospital,” he said.

The next year, he had his heart attack.

Mom, fearing as she did another family member being
ripped from her arms and swept up to heaven, called these moments “episodes,” as though Pop were a really great television show. Over the next thirty years, he had many episodes, with great reviews, many cliffhangers. I found him on deer stands, looking dead. Was he asleep? Should I wake him? Fire a warning shot? Would it frighten him, and send him plummeting off the high stand to the earth, killing him? I was too young to be killing my father. It wasn't time for that, not yet.

“Pop,” I'd whisper, from the ground below.

I'd have to get a stick, throw it at his face.

This long-running TV drama remained captivating, terrifying. He kept leaving, and kept almost dying, and kept coming back. He'd black out, run his truck off the road, nearly die, which was fine, according to him.

“It was time to sell that truck anyhow,” he'd say.

He was very responsive to new trucks.

“Goddang, boy,” he said on the phone last deer season. “I fell out the dang deer stand.”

“Maybe you should stop hunting by yourself,” I said.

To this, he was unresponsive.

T
hose blackouts were a rehearsal for his last great performance, the one he wouldn't wake up from. And frankly, we were all a little surprised that he'd lived this long, given how many times he told women he was pretty sure they'd gained weight. He had always been so big himself, and now he was shrunken, withered.

There'd been an especially bad episode not long ago, back in Mississippi, when he'd been unresponsive in his big chair while Mom screamed and hit and slapped and cried at him to wake up, which he finally did.

“What the hell is wrong with you, woman?” he said.

“I thought you were—” Mom said.

“Tired.”

“Yes.”

It was time to get them to Savannah, I knew. Mom could not scream at him all by herself. The show seemed to be in its final season, moving toward a final memorable episode that could really only end in one way. It would not be easy, asking Pop to leave the only land he'd ever loved, the lakes and rivers and woods he knew so well, his heart's terrain. He would wilt. The very move might kill him. They said his heart was at 20 percent.

“The girls sure would like you to come to their Christmas program,” I said on the phone, hoping to convince him that there was no longer anything for him in his ancestral homeland, even though it was a lie. Everything was there, except his three granddaughters.

“We'll see,” he said.

I couldn't say the thing I wanted to say, which was: I'd spent a life leaving him and had finally decided I wanted him back. I wanted to turn corners in my own town and see him.

I
t wasn't just his health that kept him from coming. It was money. Lucre was his tragic flaw, specifically his inability to not be an idiot with it. Sometimes his idiocy was selfish, such as buying a fishing rod that would've paid for that crown Mom needed, or perhaps forty fishing rods, and sometimes his idiocy was unselfish, such as giving a mortgage payment to a home for orphaned children. Nothing put him in a good mood like having money and nothing put him in a foul mood like sitting in his big chair wondering what in the hell he'd spent it on. He'd never had a budget. It was all in his head, he said, except when it wasn't.

“Hey, where's check number two thirty-seven?” he'd say.

“I don't know,” Mom would say.

“Well you better damn well remember,” he'd say, trying to reconcile various bank statements with the tale of magical realism told in the checkbook ledger. This was back before online banking, when the only way to tell how much money you had in the bank was to send a peregrine falcon to town and then wait two weeks for it to come back.

And they would fight.

“You think you can just buy anything!” Mom would say, her voice yodeling and high. “We don't need another lawn mower!” She would keep on and on about the new lawn mower, or the new rifle, the new rod, the new anything, until, growing tremulous, she would collapse, low and pitiful. “All I need is a perm,” she would say, weeping now, her sad hair losing its curl in front of our eyes.

I prayed hardest on these days, when I was a young boy, kept my eyes closed tight until it was daylight. When I grew up, I vowed, I would have a job that paid for things. I would be master of my money. I would not have two lawn mowers, or one lawn mower, or even a lawn. I would have no hobbies, which required checks, and I would have a wife who did not require perms, even if it meant she had no hair.

L
awsuits. Bankruptcies. Repossessions. Boats he didn't need, because he already had other boats he didn't need, because he'd already won a boat in a bass tournament, which he sold, to use that money for a bigger boat. The bigger boats needed bigger garages, and bigger garages are always attached to bigger houses, because they almost never attach them to smaller houses, and so the mortgages grew in size and number, which meant the banks grew in size and number, and so did his blood
pressure, especially when the banks came and took some of the boats away.

“Can't win for losing,” he'd say.

“Stop buying things you don't need,” I wanted to say, and often did, as I got older.

I wanted to move him to a place where his days could be occupied by his granddaughters, who did not require large garages. The move would call his bluff. He'd have to sell everything: the lawn mowers, the boats, the gun safe, the four-wheeler. They wouldn't fit in the apartment I had found.

“I found you a place here,” I said.

But he did not want to die in a city, you could tell. He wanted to die somewhere quiet, somewhere you could drown alone, fall out of a tree, be gored in peace. And he didn't have the money, and this embarrassed him. He'd worked like a mule all his life, and all he had to show for it was a few guns, a few rods, and sixteen lawn mowers.

“Listen, Pop,” I said. “I'll pay for it.”

Money: He always responded to that.

T
he day they moved in, I stood with him outside his new apartment. It was a little sad, knowing he would never again live in a freestanding house, this born homesteader. But there was a nice lagoon he could see from his little porch. It wasn't Mississippi, but it was hot and green, like home.

There was great beauty in Savannah, of course, the Spanish moss that visitors gathered like the hair of Jesus, but there were also men in ponytails walking little poodles, and it made me even sadder knowing I had made my father live near men with such dogs.

“Would you ever get a tiny dog like that?” I said.

“And watch it shit all day?” he said. “Shit no.”

The man with the ponytail waved at us. He seemed nice. Savannah had more than small dogs. We had big oceans, and he sort of liked that.

We got them moved in, got them settled, got them on a budget. Pop got him a bank in town, made friends with the tellers.

“I might would like to do some deep-sea fishing,” he said, that first day.

A month later, he'd be dead.

T
here we were, driving to the hospital at unsafe speeds. Savannah had always seemed a little foreign to me, more East Coast than Deep South, but so many of the great stories of my life were happening right here, including this hospital, where two of my children had been born, where I'd carried my wife when her migraines had reduced her to cursing at people, where the man who made me would die. This was home now.

We parked. We heard sirens.

Had we beaten the ambulance here?

It screamed in. We ran to it, but were stopped by a cyclone fence, some sort of construction barrier. I grabbed the fence, wanted to jump it.

“Stop,” my wife said.

“It's him,” I said.

The ambulance doors opened. It was twenty yards away. They pulled someone out.

“It's him.”

“No.”

“It's him.”

The thing on the gurney looked dead. White as a winter sky.

“It's not him,” she said, and dragged me inside.

I looked back.

It was him.

W
hy all of human history is so concerned with its fathers, I'll never know. The mothers are so much nicer. The mothers cook us food and mail us brownies and fold our underwear. A mother quest, that would be nice. Where are our mothers? They are at home, waiting for us to call. They made spaghetti. Our favorite. So we go home, and we eat the spaghetti, and let them wash our underwear, and then it's over. Mother quest. So nice.

A cousin quest would be fun. Where are our cousins? They are down by the river, and they've got beer!

Or a wife quest. Where is my wife? She is probably at the Walmart. She hates it so much.

Moms, cousins, uncles, wives, sisters, teachers, lovers, these are all fine things to write about, but it seems like so many of us are always coming back to our fathers—who don't really excel in folding underwear. What they excel in is the Fine Art of Being a Real Sonofabitch. Even the good ones. Sometimes the good ones are the best at being a sonofabitch. It's like being a sonofabitch is what they think fathers are supposed to be. The Bible is full of sonofabitch dads, and so is Faulkner and
Star Wars
and Shakespeare. You know Shakespeare's dad was a real piece of work. And so was yours, probably.

I
f this story's really a Father Quest, then it started in kindergarten,
on one of those days where all the dads are invited to eat lunch with their children and endure the humiliation of sitting in chairs that would ensure they could never again reproduce.

Pop said he'd be there.

I was pretty excited, because I'd been telling stories about him all year: How he was a big hunter and killed things and would soon allow me to kill things. How he fished the Red Man Tournament Trail and would soon allow me to put Red Man in my mouth, too. How he was generally Bigger and Better than Any Dad Anywhere and could probably beat up all the other dads.

“Yeah, but my dad has a tattoo of a dragon,” one boy said.

“My dad could beat up a dragon,” I said.

I have never, to this day, been so excited to see another human. My heart grows a size every time I think about how much I wanted to see him on that day, so they would know, so everyone would know how great he was.

Other fathers and grandfathers arrived. I was not impressed. These men were small. None of them would be carrying a knife, for example. Pop would have a knife. He would show it to everybody, if I asked. This was back when you could take a knife to a school, before people forgot that knives were not for stabbing people.

“Where's your dad?” my friends asked.

“Ha ha, he's not coming,” they said.

“He's coming,” I said.

Could they tell I was worried? I was worried.

The growing crowd of fathers spoke in kindly, vaguely interested tones to their offspring, in baby voices, not at all the way Pop talked to me, one man to another.

Soon, it was time to walk to lunch, and he was still not there.

Everyone lined up, but not me. I would wait.

He would come, I knew it. He must.

And I did what any little boy would do. I cried.

There was a knock on the classroom door.

It's him, I thought.

It wasn't him.

O
ur mothers, most of them, tell us who they are. They tell everything. Their hearts live on the outside of their bodies, because we are their hearts, and we are no longer inside their uteruses. But our fathers are always aliens. We were never inside them. Or maybe it's just me.