The World's Largest Man

by Harrison Scott Key

  “This is home,” he said, on that first day in Mississippi.

  We were standing on the back porch, and briefly, I allowed myself to be impressed by the vastness of pasture off to my right, big as ten Superdomes.

  Okay, I thought, that part is kind of pretty. Maybe, a little.

  It had been a long drive from Memphis, and we hadn’t even stopped once for gas, and so it seemed the most natural thing in the world to unzip my tiny little Toughskins jeans and urinate.

  “The heck you doing, boy?” Pop said.

  “Using the bathroom.”

  “That ain’t a bad idea,” he said.

  “I got to drain my lizard, too,” Bird said, and joined us.

  I couldn’t have known that everything was about to change, that unholy phantasms of agricultural posturing were gunning for us, that Mississippi was going to have its way with me. All I cared about right then was draining my lizard, watering the grass of our new farm, while Mom watched from the back door and remembered wanting daughters.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Secret Race of Giants

  Where are we going to go to school?” I asked Mom.

  We had moved in September, and so far had seen nothing resembling a school, or really any buildings besides our house that were not intended for the worship of God or the slaughter of livestock. I am sure my father hadn’t given much thought to the school system where he’d bought our new home. To him, school was school. You went to the one closest to your mailbox, whichever one that was. There was no talk of private schools, of test scores and rankings. His thinking was, Why in the hell would you pay to go to a school where everyone was probably a pussy?

  My thinking was: because I am pretty sure I am a pussy.

  “You boys going to Puckett,” Pop finally said, a few days after we settled in.

  Puckett. Strange name. It sounded like a curse word, or the sound you’d make if you were stabbed underwater. I stood in front of the mirror and said the name aloud three times, to see if a demon appeared.

  Puckett. Puckett. Puckett.

  No demon.

  I felt better.

  The long trip there was filled with hope, through miles of verdant glens smelling of chlorophyll and Christian charity. I ignored the occasional sign of economic hardship, the homes and trailers where there appeared to be an excess of chickens roosting in derelict sedans. Ten miles later, we saw it: low and flat like a military barracks, its bleached brick the color of creamed corn. It looked like a dystopian outpost, the sort of place where one might see a wild dog in the road, eating a baby.

  In the office, we waited while a pleasant woman with a golden bouffant the shape and luminescence of a Fabergé egg clutched a Smith Corona at her desk. Hers was old hair, harking back to a more innocent time, before Nixon and low ceilings, when women had been forced to use their hairdos for the ensnaring of moths and small birds.

  The door opened and in walked a tall boy, tall as a man, sinewy and lean with scabs across his dirty, streaked arms, followed by a teacher.

  “Sit!” the teacher said, and walked out.

  “Sit down, Willie,” the hair lady said.

  Willie sat.

  A sour stink suffused the room. Sort of like garbage, if it was wrapped in a decorative sack made from the soiled underwear of lumberjacks. My nose shuddered. I would come to know it as the odor of poverty, a new sensation to my delicate suburban nostrils, a tangy olfactory assault wrought by those whose homes did not have running water. I tried, briefly, to pity this large student, but found that his odor had incapacitated the parts of my brain that controlled both language and compassion.

  Another woman entered, smiling, a mannish lady with thick forearms and short gray hair. The principal. She looked at Willie.

  “I hope you’re not still stabbing people with your pencil, son. I thought we talked about that. What are pencils for?”

  “Eating,” he said.

  She turned to us, introduced herself.

  I could not take my eyes off Willie, who could not take his eyes off my pants. I’d worn parachute pants, snug nylon trousers appropriated from distant breakdancing cultures, with many zippers, designed to make one look as much as possible like a duffel bag.

  I shouldn’t have worn those pants.

  “Let’s find you a class,” the principal said, leading me to the door. I clutched Mom’s hand and performed a quick mental calculation concerning the difficulty of reattaching myself to the wall of her uterus.

  “Remember,” Mom said. “You’re very special. You have talent.”

  The only talent I needed, in a school full of Willies, apparently, was the ability to digest my school supplies.

  I met my teacher and my new fourth-grade class, and noted with concern that many students were dressed like Native Americans. I was instructed to sit behind a child in the back wearing an actual headdress. I searched for clues that I had accidentally been enrolled in the Mississippi Sanatorium for Children Who Must Wear Costumes to Feel Not Crazy or perhaps that I had died and was now in hell.

  Recess came quickly.

  In Memphis, recess took place in a canopied glen, the centerpiece a playground constructed of artisanal hardware and swarthy timbers salvaged from a sunken colonial schooner. This new playground was rather Dalíesque, though, a grassless pasture of hard dirt, its sparse equipment of weathered iron apparently welded on-site from the remains of expired locomotives.

  Many of the students were enormous, tall, thick, with long orangutan arms and sideburns, and this included many of the girls, who, in a far corner of the playground, appeared to be stoning a boy roughly my size.

  “I got a gun,” said a voice behind me.

  I turned around and there stood a young man wearing no costume at all, save the badge on his flannel shirt.

  “Today’s Western Day,” he said. “Then it’s Nerd Day.” A Surrealist nightmare unspooled in my imagination: Cat Day, Vegetable Day, Infectious Disease Day.

  It was homecoming week, he explained.

  “You and me should be friends,” he said. “You could come over to my house and watch my brother soup up his car. He can soup up all kinds a shit.”

  “Soup?” I said.

  “Ain’t you ever souped up nothing?”

  This boy was Tom, my first friend. He was short and stumpy, like me.

  “Where you from?” he said.

  “Memphis.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Everybody here is really big.”

  “See that dude?” he said, nodding toward Willie, who was now lurching around and menacing classmates. “He’s seventeen. He’s been in sixth grade for like a million years. He’s poor as shit and has a huge pecker.”

  I wondered if I should say anything about Willie’s odor.

  I zipped and unzipped one of the many pockets on my trousers. They were expensive pants. I’d cried many tears to convince Mom to buy them. Her reluctance had troubled me, made me think we might be poor.

  But we had water, and a phone, and regular penises, like normal people.

  “He sort of smells funny,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know. He had sex with a horse.”

  I knew it was wrong to be cruel to the poor. I’d learned this in Vacation Bible School. I wanted to pity Willie and the others who had no phones and lived in barns and might actually have no parents, but I found it hard to have compassion on someone who touched innocent farm animals with his penis.

  “Hey, you got a gun?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “Lots.”

  Technically, it was true. My father had guns. It was understood that, one day, he would put them in my hands.

  That fall, others wanted to know, too. Did I have a gun? What kind? Was mine as big as theirs? What had I killed with it? Did I want to see their bruises, caused by their guns, because they were so big?

  “Ain’t you ever hunt doves?” they said.

  “No.”

  They explained that basically, a dove wa
s a grayish bird that flew real fast and tasted like chicken but was smaller, and more delicious, because you had killed it with your own hands.

  “With your hands?” I said.

  “With a gun,” they said.

  I missed my old school, where all we did was watch television and then talk about it.

  If things were strange at school, they were stranger at home.

  For one, my toys began to vanish. The stuffed animals, the Hot Wheels, the Darth Vader Carry Case with its army of figurines. I searched the house for these items, but casually, as though I were dusting. For every toy that disappeared, Pop was close behind with something that had recently been bleeding. A duck here, a fish there, the head of a noble whitetail extending from the wall as though stuck between this and some happier dimension. Soon, there was a new animal on my wall: a mallard that Pop had plucked from the sky.

  “Why is there a duck in my room?” I asked Mom.

  “Your father thought you would want it,” she said.

  My parachute pants were getting tighter, and beside them in the closet appeared a number of strange new garments that can best be described as “army issue.” For Christmas that year, I received gloves, boots, overalls, a floppy green hat, a bandolier.

  “What’s this for?” I said to Bird.

  “Shotgun shells,” he said.

  “For why?”

  “For killing shit.”

  Bird seemed pretty excited about killing shit. He had never had the chance to kill much shit in the city.

  In the city, I had been my best self. I had done many things well. I sent and received many love notes, for example, asking girls to “go with me,” and they agreed, and we went. Where? Technically, nowhere. What was important was that we had agreed to go nowhere together, which was a testament to the strength of our love. But in Puckett, it was not so easy. Many of the girls in my new school were very pretty. After a few months, I got up enough courage to hand one a note.

  “What’s this?” she said. She was blond, small.

  “It’s a note,” I said, and hustled off. The next day, at recess, I found her waiting for me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She grabbed where she must have thought my nipple was and twisted with great power. Immediately, my areola sent a distress signal to the prefrontal cortex along the lines of “Go on without me” and “Tell my family I love them.”

  “We don’t go with boys like you,” she said, and ran off, disappeared behind a tree, presumably to feed on small woodland creatures.

  Boys like me? What did she mean?

  In Memphis, I had been praised for my intelligence, my mastery of facts and spelling, but in Puckett new kinds of intelligence were desired, involving gunpowder and animal husbandry and the books of the King James Bible. Everything I’d done well before didn’t matter.

  There, I’d been a rider of BMX, a winner of trophies, unafraid to wreck and bleed. Here, everybody had scabs and scars and wounds far greater than mine. There were boys with leg braces, missing teeth, rickets, broken hands from animal attacks. There was a boy with a dent in his head deep enough to catch rainwater.

  “What happened to him?” I asked Tom.

  Tom didn’t even look up.

  “Hatchet fight.”

  A year after starting at the new school, I had my first real chance to show these classmates that I was as tough as them, or could at least fake it. It was Labor Day weekend, the opening day of dove season.

  I had never really given much thought to what it might be like to kill a thing. Unlike most men in my family, I found it quite easy to romanticize animals, attributing to them deep human feeling. At the grocery store, I felt a strong desire to pray for the lobsters in the tank. I worried about them. At the very least, I felt, they must be extremely bored.

  The day before the hunt, Pop came home from work bearing gifts, handing Bird and me each a camouflage vest with a tag that read, “Now with deeper, spill-proof game pouch to prevent seepage.”

  I had no desire to be around the seeping of things and could not imagine wearing clothing that promoted it. Dead things were one thing, but wearing dead things that had the potential to seep their deadness onto you was something new.

  Pop took us into the pasture to practice shooting. To me, he gave a 12-gauge, a large gun for a boy my size. I did not know what gauges were, but felt 12 might be too many.

  Pop hurled clay doves in low arcs, instructed us to shoot at them. I aimed, pulled the trigger. The kick was unexpected. I fell down, and my eye started bleeding, as did my nose.

  Bird was better. He was very committed to the warrior lifestyle, and he hated himself for not having enlisted to fight in Vietnam, despite the fact that he was a newborn at the time. His gift for weaponry, unlike mine, neared the level of art and would have won him respect from any number of warring Native American peoples, whereas I tended to shoot more creatively, like an enraged Hells Angel at an Oakland riot.

  “Good,” Pop said.

  When we woke up the next morning, it was still dark, because, according to Pop, the early bird really did get the worm, although in this instance he also got murdered. I dressed in clothes Pop laid out for me, camouflage everything: pants and a T-shirt and cowboy boots and the anti-seepage vest. I looked like a shrub with a head.

  So much had changed. I had come to Mississippi in clothing designed primarily for dancing, and now was wearing clothing engineered for the transport of dead birds.

  We loaded up, and many miles later came to rest at the tail of a queue of trucks that wormed off the blacktop and into a wide, flat glen where two men stood with a bucket apiece, doing head counts and taking money.

  “Watch out for the crazies,” Pop said.

  “Who are the crazies?” I asked.

  “Anybody I shoot with this here,” he said, and fingered the small pistol on his hip. It was, as I recall, exactly the kind of thing a crazy would do.

  I noticed in the glare of headlights a handful of grown men drinking what appeared to be toxic levels of beer.

  Pop rolled down his window, stuck a few bills out.

  “We don’t want to hunt around no drunks,” Pop said to the man, who cracked open a container of beer so tall that I briefly mistook it for a can of Rust-Oleum.

  “Only rules is,” he said, “don’t be shooting nobody in the face.”

  “This doesn’t seem very safe,” I whispered to Bird, who was now applying black greasepaint to his face.

  “You think ’Nam was safe?” Bird said.

  On some level, we were all playing supporting roles in my brother’s larger Vietnam fantasy.

  Have you ever seen a wedding in an exotic place, like Palestine or Juarez, where there’s a lot of drinking and the shooting of guns wildly into the air in joyous celebration? That’s what dove hunting is like. It’s fun for most people. For me, it was more like the first ten minutes of Saving Private Ryan, the part when Tom Hanks is trying not to die.

  Detonations of smoke and light rippled down whole ranks of shooters, thundering across the pasture and down into my groin like a herd of angry horses intent on flushing the kidneys. When for a brief instant the din halted, I heard a dry rain in the branches overhead and found myself pelted in the face by what felt like handfuls of dry rice hurled through a particle accelerator.

  I was going to die.

  But I did not die. Instead, I missed. Many birds. Thousands, it seemed, while my father and brother slayed them with upsetting speed. Eventually, it got quiet. The birds were all dead or gone, the hunters blacked out from medical emergencies involving acute alcohol poisoning. All that was left was us and the heat and the late summer sun. Body fluids pooled in my boots. My pants, once so large, now seemed so tight. I was sweating in places where I didn’t even know I had skin.

  Tight pants always made me angry.

  I was angry at Bird, for believing he was in Cambodia, and I was angry at Pop, who insisted that we spend holidays shooting things, and I was angry at my classmat
es, who seemed to know more about the diameter of pellet spread at thirty yards while using a modified choke for upland bird hunting than, perhaps, how to spell the word diameter.

  Mostly I was angry at me, for not having killed anything. I wanted to kill. I wanted to be liked. And then, something happened.

  A cote of doves was crossing the pasture, flying fast and low through heat vapors right at me. Bird aimed, but waited. Pop held his hand up: Wait. Let your brother.

  They were mine.

  I aimed, and pulled the trigger, and one bird hit the dirt.

  “You got him!” Pop said.

  I got him.

  I walked out into the sea of clods and looked down at my tiny dead chicken. Shit, I thought. I had never thought “shit” before that moment. But shit was easy to think now.

  What was I supposed to do with it?

  “Put it in your sack!” Bird yelled across the vapors of noon.

  But the bird was not dead.

  This is the story of my hunting life, one that would unfurl over the next decade: the thing killed from afar is not killed and must be killed again, at close range, where you can see the opal wetness of its eyes seeing you back, close enough to feel you could learn something of the animal’s personality, take it home, give it a name, feed it, love it.

  “Just whop its head real hard,” Pop said.

  I picked up the bird as instructed, the small gray package of feathers and meat. Yet the dove was not gray, not at all, but many colors: clusters of white, pale yellow, black feathers, its head nearly pink under the sun, its chest mother-of-pearl, glinting dark purple if you let it catch the light. The dying animal looked at me.

  It quivered in my hand, shuddered, its head darting. Pop suggested I knock it against the tree, but how? Just throw it, like a ball? That’s the thing they never tell you about killing: It’s not easy. You have to commit.

  So I threw it at the tree, and the bird landed and flapped its wings as if to say, Try again, please. I hit it against the stock of my gun, and it flapped some more. Finally, I laid the dove across a root, pushed aside any lingering shame, said a prayer, and stepped on its little skull.