The World's Largest Man (5 page)

The first growl I heard was not from the foul gullet of a Cyclops or a Mothman. The low, visceral gurgling sounded like the rooting of some giant Calydonian Boar up the hill, behind me, the horrid scourge of Artemis, come to eat me.

Just my stomach. Clearly, I was hungry. It was time to go. The only way to make that happen was to fake a shooting—into the trees, perhaps—and send Pop running. I would say I missed. We would poke around in the leaves, dry as tinder, loud as fire, for blood. We would not find it, and given the lateness of the morning, we would leave the woods early. But as soon as I cocked the hammer of the world's smallest shotgun,
I realized I was not the only large mammal in the immediate vicinity. Something was just to my left and behind me, a haloed mass of fur on the edge of my vision. I stiffened like a cat. It was Sasquatch, come at last.

T
he beast came into view, without my having to turn. It was a very small doe, smaller than some dogs. Strangest of all, she was so close, nearly close enough to touch with my gun. She did not see me. My visible parts had become of a piece with the tree, my smells had become the smells of the earth. I was invisible.

Her head was down. She was a pretty animal, her features as delicate and lithe as a girl's. Her elegant legs, thin as saplings. Her face, demure as a lady planting bougainvillea. The coat, as blond and sheen as the walnut stock of my gun. She rose up and stamped her hooves back down again as she inched forward, from the corner of my eye into full view.

What came to mind was not Bambi, but rather Clarice, the Claymation doe of
Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer
. Clarice was literate, lovely, an ingénue, the Mia Farrow of stop-motion wildlife. And here she was.

She looked up and saw me.

“Hello,” I whispered.

I saw her, and she saw me see her, and she did not move.

I moved my gun a little, just to get it out of the way, so this natural communion might flower into something deeper, more memorable, and perhaps she noticed that I was holding, not an olive branch, but a machine designed for her destruction. After all, I was not Rudolph. If anything, I was the Abominable Snowman, the enemy, because my breeding suggested I was about to send Clarice way past the Island of Misfit Toys and on toward the Archipelago of Dead Things.

Still, she did not move, did not run, just lifted her head to look at the gun. She was comely enough to have stepped right out of Bulfinch. I knew this mythic wood was full of monsters, but it had never occurred to me that creatures of such precise symmetry, such unexpected grace and beneficence, might also be out here. What other Apollonian charms peopled this country, I could not guess. Fairies and wood nymphs, perhaps. Creek-bound mermaids. Junior high cheerleaders.

I raised my gun and cocked the heavy steel hammer without even remembering I'd done it. I knew: If I missed this deer, so close, a gift from the gods, then I would just have to go ahead and join the drill team and get a vagina. I brought the gun up to my face, set my eye down square with the barrel, like I'd been shown, looked down the polished blue-black steel of it to the end, to the bead, and through that to the animal itself. She looked right at me. Never before in the history of modern hunting had a game animal been so deserving of mercy and a happier life in a petting zoo.

You would be a lovely pet, I thought.

And then I aimed where the brains is, and pulled the trigger.

S
moke and fire inside my skull, and then: The doe was gone. The thin, dry air of November was all that was left of her. The last thing I'd seen on the other side of the gun's bead was her ear, like the petal of some candied flower.

I'd been taught to wait. If the deer was dead, she'd be twenty or thirty yards down the hollow. They can run a good piece when shot, a hole in their heads or hearts or lungs. After five minutes, I stood and looked. I stepped where she'd been, looked for blood, possibly an ear.

Then came Pop, down the hill.

“You get him?” he said.

“It was a her.”

“Was she a big one?”

“Just kind of a normal-size one,” I said. “Actually, real small.”

“How small?”

“Pretty small.”

“Was it a yearling?”

“You mean, a baby?”

“I mean, did it have spots,” he said.

“Maybe.”

“Well, shit.”

Oh, no, I thought. I've killed a baby deer.

“Where was you when you shot it?”

“I was there and it was here,” I said, pointing to two spots on the side of the hill, embarrassingly close. Pop studied the area. We enlarged our radius of ground. We came back together, quiet.

“I think you missed it,” he said.

I was embarrassed, terribly, and relieved, terribly.

“You aim for the heart?” he said.

“It was kind of more the head area,” I said. “She was up in my face.”

“Boy,” he said. “It don't get no easier than that.”

I didn't tell Pop what I knew. That the deer had to be dead, that it had been close enough to suffocate with a plastic grocery sack, that I did not miss, could never have missed. I got on my hands and knees and looked for blood that might have dried into the colors of the hillside. It had vanished: a ghost.

I found a few pieces of short, stiff white hair, the kind you might find around a deer's eyes, in its ears.

“I think I shot off its ear,” I said.

“Son, do you see an ear around here?”

The door into manhood had swung wide, and I had not gone through it.

“Let's go,” Pop said.

On our way to the truck, the woods were a different place. The old ancient terror was gone now, as dissipated into the ether as the sound of a gunshot two counties over. It was just trees and hollows and leaves and mud. It no longer seemed appropriate to be afraid. After all, I had a gun. If anything, the werewolves and Sasquatches and deer should be afraid of me. Hell, I was shooting off their ears. With enough practice, I could eventually shoot them somewhere more vital, like the legs, so they couldn't run, or the face, so they couldn't see where they were going.

It was time to grow up, to see the woods not as the setting for some terrific malevolence, but home. These deer weren't made of clay. They were made of meat, and meat's what's for dinner, and I loved dinner very much, even more than candy.

We fetched Bird and slogged to the truck and headed out to Styron's General Store, to purchase ungodly amounts of bologna, which was unfortunately what was for lunch on that day.

On our way, we came to a knot of trucks on the side of the road, and Pop pulled over. It was the broad-shouldered brothers and sons of Alton's Creek Hunting Club. They were gathered around a pickup, looking down at something that lay hidden there. From my seat, I saw it: a buck of such heft, such immensity, with a rack of antlers as thick and tangled as briarroot. They held it up for us to see, and we admired it, the awful beauty of it.

“I told you they was monsters in here,” Pop said, as we drove away.

M
ississippi had its share of monsters, in its woods, and its waters, and its Walmarts, that much was clear, but what impoverished, war-ravaged land didn't? The land and its people held many secrets. Was that really an Indian mound? Was there really a secret cabin by that creek back there? How was the earth so fertile? How were the women so fertile? And also the girls? Since they seemed to get pregnant so young, and disappear? What had happened to them, and their babies, and their lovers?

There was one great mystery, more terrifying than Sasquatch, larger than the bulging Indian mounds, and right inside our house: my father. Who, it should be noted, was actually not larger than an Indian mound, but who, like many Native American burial sites, was rumored to contain bones. Who was this man, who'd dragged me away from all happy things?

The facts of him were unremarkable. He was a salesman. That was his job, the thing someone paid him to do. But he did not look like a salesman. He was not stooped and pathetic like Willy Loman, or toothy and garrulous like the men who sold cars and furniture on our television. He was more like a large granite slab with eyeglasses and a heart condition.

His gut was an oaken cask, his chest meaty and wide, like two Thanksgiving birds yoked together with chicken wire. The man had Popeye arms, and his head was large and round, hard enough to be its own helmet.

In his work, touring the villages of rural Mississippi to sling asphalt bids at county supervisors, he was tieless in his shirtsleeves and brown Sansabelt slacks. Pop did not even need a belt. He was that much of a man.

H
e wore steel taps on the soles of his shoes, and every step he took across the linoleum had the grave sound of military judgment, like a man on a horse clopping up behind you with bad news. In the right pocket of his Sansabelts, next to the money clip, he carried a small pocketknife, as men of his generation often did. He did not carry it for show. I have stood by his side as he refused to pay certain prices for automotive repair and have heard him threaten to remove a mechanic's scrotum and testes and feed them to our dog.

I felt it was wrong to force our dog to consume the scrotums of the service industry, but I was too young to reason with my father. He was a fortress: You couldn't get in.

At Ole Miss football games, I watched him point a beastly finger, thick and square as a ham hock, at drunken rednecks and tell them to cease their tomfoolery, and then I watched them cease it, silenced like the raging waters of the Sea of Galilee.

How could you question a man who'd done such a thing, or who had threatened to engage in armed duels on bass boats?

“Good morning to you!” the other fisherman said, during one nice, serene Saturday morning on Pelahatchie Bay. “You all catching anything?”

“Why don't you move?” Pop said, as he believed this was our fishing hole.

“Pardon?”

“Why don't you scoot on out of here?”

“I believe I was here first, good sir,” the cordial fisherman said.

“I got a twenty-two pistol says you ought to get your candy ass on up the river.”

The man trolled away.

Pop pushed other men around, but he didn't speak like an angry man, which perhaps made him more frightening. He might say he was going to pull off your arm and beat you to death with it, but he'd say it in a charming way that made you want to let him. He spent his life crushing the souls of other men with this violent charm, me included. But there was one man Pop could not crush. That was Clyde, his boss.

I wanted to know why. One day, I decided to get a little closer to Pop, to see what I could see.

“Can I go to work with you tomorrow?”

Pop lowered his
Rankin County News,
a publication I would later value chiefly for its photographs of local virgins. Since 1848, the paper's motto has been “Fear No Man, and Render Justice to All.”

“Work?” he said. “With me?”

I told him I was bored. It was summer. Even with baseball and the long lists of chores that ensnared one in a Kafkaesque nightmare of yard work, there was very little to do. Our summer days were languorous rural protractions, punctuated by moments of terror and death. We took guns into the woods and shot things to see if they were alive. We found cold creeks, built dams from Yazoo clay, and did our best to drown one another. I hadn't planned anything very interesting for the next day. I was going to spend the morning sharpening my hatchet, which I had planned to spend the afternoon throwing at feral cats. A ride in Pop's company car would mean, at the very least, a buffet lunch.

“I reckon,” he said. “If you want to.”

P
op worked for Southland Oil Company, a small Mississippi firm that had poked a few dubious holes in the Delta and earned most of its money by turning crude into molten blacktop for the long, hot roads of our state. Pop was a traveling salesman for Southland. He sold the same roads he drove.

In the Southland company car, always the latest model of a Caprice Classic, Pop drove from one small town to the next, meeting county supervisors to discuss asphalt prices by the ton. He came home each night with little to show for his work but brown paper sacks full of tomatoes he bought off the backs of trucks in counties with names like Neshoba, Choctaw, Jefferson Davis. In the sun of a windowsill, Mom set out sheets of newspaper and placed the tomatoes on them, to ripen. Pop ate them all.

Sometimes, along with the tomatoes, he brought home the great unseen burden of Clyde. Clyde was a loud man, a dervish with a voice like gravel and gasoline, one who, I deduced from the discussions in the living room, came at you with everything. He was older than Pop, but tall and lean and with a full head of speckled black hair and a push-broom mustache. If Pop was a government mule, Clyde was a wild Appaloosa.

I did not understand my father's quarrel with Clyde—he didn't share such things with his children. But after we'd gone to bed, or out to play ball in the yard, Pop lumbered into the kitchen to discuss the subject with Mom. On occasion, we listened at open windows, around paneled corners. I could understand very little of it, only that Clyde was a motherfucking sonofabitch who mocked and derogated Pop's lack of formal schooling, and more. This, as one could imagine, made Pop want to rip off Clyde's head and take a shit down the hole in his neck.

“I'll kill him,” Pop said.

“Don't kill anybody,” Mom said.

“I'll do it,” he said. “I'll whip his ass. I'll knock that goddang mustache right off his face.”

“You'll be fired,” Mom said.

“I'll be a hero,” he said. “Then they'll make me the boss.” Pop was under the impression that modern companies functioned much like the animal kingdom.

I worried something might happen. He would do something rash. He'd been doing rash things for so long. It was his talent. His gift. He'd threaten to buy a new boat, and then bang: Evinrude shadows across the lawn. He'd threaten to whip one of us for asking too many questions about lunch, and so we'd ask a question about supper and he'd come out swinging.

Soon, he would do something to Clyde. I knew. I prayed. I wanted Jesus to help my father use the faculty of reason, or at least imagination, in dealing with this hateful man, or we'd all end up homeless, bereft of our baths and boats.

What would Pop do? A man of action always does something.

W
e left the house right after sunrise. Fearing I would need a way to pass the time, I had strategically placed a book in my pants. Out there in the country, I was always putting things in my pants, sometimes to hide them, such as books, and sometimes to warm them, such as my hands, and sometimes because I was bored. Boredom, I knew, was a dangerous thing. For some children, it led to experiments with sex, and drugs, and alcohol, and lighting one another on fire, sometimes with the alcohol. For some of us, the never-ending rural ennui led to destructive habits with literature. And so I took books everywhere, to places where reading was discouraged, such as church, and school, and I often found myself in
the principal's office having to explain my fascination with knowledge.

I blame my mother, who introduced me to the perverse habit of reading through the gateway drug of encyclopedias, which she begged my father to purchase from a man at the door, hoping to counterbalance our growing knowledge of firearms and axes and tractors with more peaceful, productive knowledge that could be found in the
World Book
, such as a list of the major exports of Bolivia, which she felt would help us in our lives, should we end up in Bolivia at some point in the future and need to barter for tungsten, which is just one major export of Bolivia.

I loved those encyclopedias, the closest thing we had to the Internet, despite our not knowing what the Internet was. The
World Book
was our rabbit hole into the world of ideas, and I am grateful to Mom for convincing Pop to take out a second mortgage to buy them, which is likely what he had to do, given their size and weight and gold-leaf pages. The lot of them must've weighed as much as the gun cabinet, and their prominence in our living room meant a great deal to Mom, and to me.

They were not cheap, and did not go unused. A boy could get as lost in them as the woods. In its twenty-one volumes, I learned about clouds, trees, Dwight Eisenhower, and Vasco da Gama, spent rainy days absorbing facts that would come in useful much later in life, such as the estimated temperature of the surface of Mercury, or a visual chart with the comparative sizes of various deers of the world. The smallest? The Key deer. I still remember that. It felt significant, having a deer with my last name.

These encyclopedias led to literacy, which led to the frequenting of book fairs and libraries, which led to competitive reading for the March of Dimes, which led to the Hardy Boys, and to Jules Verne, and ultimately to more lurid fiction that I did not show to my mother.

On the day I went to work with Pop, the book in my pants was a short novel by Robert Heinlein that can perhaps still be found at bookshops under the banner of “science fantasy.” If a book is a frigate, as Emily Dickinson says, then science fantasy is a castaway galleon for the freakish and diseased, and even as a boy, I always felt some measure of shame while reading books where the alien life-forms had large breasts. The
World Book
had no entries about such beings. I looked.

We drove and drove, into the morning sun, and then beside it, and then under it. We listened to FM country and AM talk. We did not speak, really. I couldn't think of anything to talk about. And then Pop launched into a declamation on fishing lures, his ideal topic for oral interchange.

“You seen that new Red Belly Devil Horse I got?” he said. “Now that's a jig, boy!”

I pretended to be asleep. I was unfamiliar with the new products of the freshwater fishing industry and found his fixation on largemouth bass upsetting.

Finally, I pretended to awaken and pulled the book from the warmth of my crotch.

“What you got there?” he said.

I was always coy about my books, afraid Pop would find them effeminate. In our family, the only books men read were in the Bible and you weren't supposed to do it for fun. You did it because Jesus would hurt you if you didn't. The only people I knew who read novels were women and girls. It was like being caught trying to put a sanitary napkin in my underwear. Only it was worse, because the name of the book was
The Star Beast
.

“What's it called?” he said.

“It's just a stupid book,” I said.

“Reading's good, I reckon.” He meant it in the same way that blood transfusions are good. They are necessary, perhaps, in times of great distress. “What's it about?”

It was difficult to share even the most basic narrative elements of the book without sounding like a girl, and I was not a girl. I was on the fence line of manhood. I was old enough to have already killed something that weighed more than me. A deer. A bear. A cousin. And I had failed. He was worried about me.

And now, the books.

I wanted to explain why I liked to read. How books helped me imagine realities alternative to this one, realities where children perhaps were allowed to read in peace. Imagination. Yes. That's why I read, surely. So I could imagine. Did Pop imagine? That's why I wanted inside of him. I had to know: Did he imagine me a disappointment? Was my apathy to the largemouth and large game and small game and ball games a sort of disease that he imagined he could cure?

“What's the book about?” Pop asked.

“It's just a stupid book about a star beast,” I said.

“A who?”

I read from the back cover: “It's a sentient creature belonging to an advanced alien race, brought back to the earth many years ago,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.

W
e drove down the highway, chasing its hot, molten ripples across the distant edge of the blacktop. This was his asphalt.

We drove and drove. He said, did, nothing. He simply stared at the road ahead. The July afternoon was hot and bright and then hot and wet and then bright again. I asked if we could roll down the windows, but he refused. The jet wash of air would have upset the sculpted flap of hair on his great big marble-slab head, kept in place by half a bottle of Vitalis Maximum Hold and a great deal of prayer. The windows stayed up, the hair stayed down.

I tried asking Pop about his work, but he offered little exposition. He asked even fewer questions of me. He was not a great fan of the interrogative sentence, unless it was some form of the question, “Did you see that deer?” We did not see any. It was hot. Deer don't like hot any more than we do.

We wheeled into the town squares of villages like Kosciusko, Philadelphia, Newton. Pop traveled to these rural seats of power to offer Southland's services in the building of roads and entreat public servants to buy his asphalt. I suppose they did. I do not know. He left me in the car, with the window cracked, like a dog.