The World's Largest Man

by Harrison Scott Key

  “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.

  We 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.

  “I used to read,” he said, as he set his heft down in the seat of the car at one courthouse.

  “What did you read about?” I said.

  “Mussolini,” he said. “He was an eye-talian. In the war.”

  This was encouraging. Up until then, I was pretty sure Pop only read the Rankin County News and telephone bills. I had never seen him read a real book. I had recently read The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler, and I saw the shimmer of a real conversation out there on the road ahead.

  “Did you like it?” I said. “The book?”

  “It wasn’t one of them kind you read,” he said.

  “It was longer, you mean?” I said. “Like history?”

  “No,” he said. “I mean maybe it was a TV show.”

  I fell asleep against the car door. And, as I slept, I had a vision. I saw Pop, standing on the highway. He was in the Holy Land, but it was still Mississippi, but with a purple Syrian sky. And then Jesus came out of the air like a Shoney’s Big Boy.

  And as Pop journeyed, he came near Coldwater, Mississippi, on the road to Memphis: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven. And Pop fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, “My son, my son, why dost thou persecute me?”

  And Pop, squat and dwarflike, trembling and astonished, said, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”

  And the Lord said unto him, “Arise, and go to junior college, and drop out after the last football game. At the appointed time, it shall be told thee what thou must do. It will likely involve asphalt products. I knoweth it does not sound like promising work, but it may include a company car.”

  And just like that, the Big Boy Jesus went back to paradises yet unknown.

  I woke up.

  Pop had looked so alien in the dream, with hair and strange clothing, his pockets filled with papers and pencils. It was him, but different. Or perhaps it was me, but older. I rubbed my eyes. We were home. While I slept, he had purchased a sack of tomatoes.

  I have little doubt that Pop could have hurled Clyde across the road like a broke-down lawn mower, but he did not. Pop had no education and had labored long and hard to a salaried position. If he tried to pull off Clyde’s genitals with his bare hands, he would be shuffled back down the Great Chain of Being and end up shoveling rocks on a Department of Transportation road crew, where he’d started this long vocational march.

  And he made very little money, but twice as much as he should have made, given his education, making him a gelding to Clyde, beholden and enslaved, as all working men one day become. Clyde, apparently, knew this. He did not like Pop. He needled and bedeviled and provoked my father. I do not know how he did this—only that he did it. I overheard my father narrating stories of things Clyde had said in the company of colleagues and clients, hurtful things that demanded vengeance. Maybe Clyde mocked Pop’s rural laxity with forms of the verb to be. Maybe he mocked Pop’s high scores at golf, a popular game in the asphalt industry, or mocked my father’s bowlegged cowboy walk. I do not know.

  But I know he did this at hotels and motels, during conventions of the Mississippi Road Builders’ Association. And worst, at these conventions in midcentury Gulf Coast hotels, Clyde did this in the company of men. These men would ordinarily have shown Pop a great deal of respect, I am sure, knowing that at any moment he was prepared to coldcock them with a Gideon Bible. But with Clyde in the room, Pop was passive and sterile, the butt of the joke. I could see it in my mind. I could imagine it.

  Clyde was the only man in the world, it seemed, who could hurt my father, and I gathered that Pop was only biding his time until he could return the favor.

  It was still summer when Pop crawled under the company car with a pair of pliers and a roll of duct tape. “Fear No Man,” the paper had said.

  “Hand me that Phillips head,” he said.

  If he couldn’t beat Clyde to death with a metal chair, as I was about to learn, he could at least detach the odometer from the Caprice Classic.

  Pop wedged himself underneath the car, despite the fact that it was only a foot off the ground, and this was significantly less than the diameter of his head. What a glorious head! He could have stored all the Great Books of the Western World in that enormous fleshy Death Star head.

  I asked him what we were doing.

  “Fixing the car,” he said.

  “What’s wrong with it?” I said.

  “Nothing yet.”

  He invited me to crawl under the car and assist. I did, and my sensitive moral thermostat ticked this way, tocked the other. Pop did not fix cars. When he crawled under them, it was usually to extract a mangled cat from the fan belt housing. He used my small, bookish hands to find the odometer cable. It was black, and similar to a cable on the family’s disabled exercise bike, purchased by Pop after his heart exploded during a duck-hunting trip a few years before, when he attempted to lift an aluminum boat over his head. The bike’s cable ran from the front wheel to an odometer on the handlebars, where one could assess how many imaginary miles one had pedaled at that imaginary speed. The car’s odometer cable, though, ran from the front wheel to somewhere underneath the dashboard.

  “Yank it,” he said.

  “Yank what?” I said.

  “The wire, boy. Don’t be a dummy.” My soft and uncalloused conscience understood now. Pop reached up, and with a bearish paw, pulled the cable from its housing. “Like that,” he said.

  Clyde would fire him if they found out, I knew. I prayed about it, there under the car. Should I say something? I should say something. I could not say something.

  Pop crawled back out, stood up, satisfied.

  I’d worried that Pop was going to take a tire iron to Clyde’s face, but in the end, my father had surprised me. He had an imagination after all, and what he’d imagined was how to turn a company car into a family car without Clyde, his boss, the man who signed his checks, ever knowing.

  Who was my father? I still did not know what was inside of him, but was starting to find out. He was my great Indian mound, full of bones and secrets. He could do things. Maybe one day, I’d learn to do those things, too. Maybe I had no interest in catching a bass and putting it on the wall, but maybe, just maybe, I could draw one, or write a story about one, and put it on the wall, or the shelf, or the dash of his car, for him to read, next to that sack of tomatoes.

  “Thanks, boy,” Pop said, handing me the tools to put up.

  I took them from his impressive hands and wanted to reach out, to hold him, climb up to him, ge
t inside, if not his head, at least his arms. Did I love him? I imagined him loving me, and it almost seemed real. You can be so close to a man for so many years, right there next to him in the car, and never know the worlds that turn inside him. You couldn’t find Pop in my encyclopedias, I knew that much. He was my star beast, belonging to an alien race, brought to the earth many years ago.

  Later that evening, we drove to Sunday night church. It was always a long, dreadful drive to evening worship, but these miles did not count. They were as imaginary as miles on that old exercise bike, as free as grace, a judgment to Clyde. He was behind us now, and we feared no man and rendered justice for all, rolling toward the house of God in our sedan of lies.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Boy Who Got Stuck in a Tree

  It was very exciting, learning that my father was a liar. At least, to his employer, which I understood to be a sin, but a special kind of sin that is required when your employer is a horse’s ass. My father, I reasoned, must be more complex than previously believed. Perhaps there were “things” occurring in his head, such as “thoughts” and “ideas.” I wished he’d share them, but he almost never did. He was a simple man who did not ask questions, which made him so complicated, whereas I often asked too many questions and felt very complicated, which I felt made me seem simple.

  “Do you like your job?” I said, once.

  “Like?” Pop said. The word seemed to disorient him.

  “You’ll go to college one day,” he said. “And you can pick your own job.”

  “I will?”

  “You got a head for it,” he said. “But you got to get that paper.”

  “Paper?” I said.

  “Diploma,” he said.

  “Yessir.”

  “Just keep reading them books,” he said.

  But books were full of stories and stories were full of lies and lies hurt Jesus’s feelings, so I didn’t know what to think. I blamed my family. They were the ones who taught me so much about telling stories, and how not to do it, and then, in inspired moments of surprise, how to tell one so good you forgot what day it was, and I liked forgetting what day it was, so I made certain life choices that would allow me to get paid to forget what day it was and teach others to forget what day it was, which is, after all, what I think heaven probably is: the whole world, forgetting what day it is. You have to, I bet, with an endless supply of them.

  I especially love telling stories on holidays. It’s a good time to remind myself of why I love my family, and why I live in another state. We told a lot of stories on a recent Thanksgiving, my father and me sitting at the table over breakfast, remembering what it was like back then, when I was so small and full of potential, and he was so large and full of ideas of how to shoot things.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “Morning,” he said.

  We sat there in silence for a good five minutes. I had a book, just like in the old days, but I was no longer embarrassed and did not feel it necessary to carry it in my underwear.

  But should I open it? Opening it would have been an admission of failure, evidence that nothing had changed, that We Could Not Communicate. He sat there and stared at the wall. He had a great talent for sitting and staring at nothing. I’d seen him stare like that so many times over the years—in church pews, bleachers, trucks, but mostly on deer stands.

  “Be a good day to hunt,” I said.

  “Yep.”

  I enjoy talking about hunting about as much as I enjoy talking about new technologies in women’s hosiery, but I have very few subjects that I can discuss with my father, and those subjects are: Football, Weather, Money, Children, Children Today, Beating Children Today, and Hunting. We had not hunted together with any regularity in twenty years, and this, I knew, was a hurtful thing to him. So we talked about hunting. And like a great big mossy boulder that had been given a good nudge, Pop came alive and rolled down a hill of stories.

  We talked a good two hours. These were harmless stories, about cold days and elusive deer and the happy memories that I am sure Pop thinks we must share. But we do not share them, not really, largely as a result of something that happened in the woods on December 16, 1988. I made sure not to tell that story.

  By midmorning, our storytelling had grown repetitive and the rolling boulder of my father came to a flat place and stopped. He stood up, and went into the living room, and turned on one of those hunting programs called Buck Blasters or Chasing Tail or Ted Nugent’s American Patriot Sasquatch Slaughter. I sat there and read my book, but I couldn’t stop thinking about all the slaughtering I’d seen over the years, and the last thing I’d seen slaughtered up close, back on that December day when I was thirteen.

  Nobody wants to hear a hunting story that goes like this: “I went to the woods, and I saw a deer, and I shot him, and it was amazing.” No, the best hunting stories are full of surprise twists and sudden reversals, such as, “I went into the woods and shot my brother, but then I learned that he was not my real brother.”

  The surprise twists in my stories mostly revolved around how I would shoot at things, and they would almost never die. This can be frustrating, not only to the hunter, but also to the animal, who might now be missing an essential part of its body. It may sound cruel and unfeeling and perhaps even upsetting to the reader. And to that, I would say: It is even more upsetting when it was you who did the maiming. You should try it sometime. It builds character, mostly through nightmares.

  This was funny at first, my inability to kill anything very well, a sort of family joke. Ha ha, the boy missed, they would say, every Christmas. They laughed, I laughed. It was all good family fun. Occasionally, I prayed that God would send a gang of jackals into our Christmas dinner to murder them all, but mostly I just smiled.

  Ha ha, you got me. And the jackals will get you.

  Growing up in the country, it seemed like every little general store had Polaroids of slaughtered things over the register. Magazines and newspapers carried black-and-white photos of young boys posing with their very first slaughters. Most of these boys were in elementary school when they’d done it for the first time. And if you looked closely, you could tell: Some of them were girls.

  Girls!

  Who’d killed deer!

  People like to say places like Mississippi are bad for girls. Oppressive, they say. But I’ve still never met a girl down here who wasn’t encouraged to kill something, should she have a taste for it, as many did. All the feminists I knew as a child owned guns and knew how to remove the liver from an animal with a knife, which earned them a great deal of respect from men, since those men also had livers capable of being removed by those same knives.

  If girls could do it, why couldn’t I?

  Other boys my age had done so much, already had wives and children of their own. Did I have a bad eye? Nerves? Palsy? Or worse, perhaps I was in possession of an overactive conscience or had some genetic defect that made me have emotions about animals?

  “Don’t worry, you’ll get one,” Pop said.

  That’s sort of what I was afraid of.

  The day I finally got one, that cold December day, started at 4 a.m. When Pop turned on my light, I had been dreaming. Of what? Of a childhood that didn’t involve waking at 4 a.m., mostly.

  “Roll out,” he said.

  I had so many questions. What day was it? What time was it? Why couldn’t I have been born with no arms? I knew, though, even if I had no arms, Pop would have found a way for me to hunt, rigging complicated pulley systems into trees and hoisting me up in a sack, then dropping me on the animals with a knife in each foot.

  This day would be a cold one. “Arctic blasts,” the weatherman had said, illustrated by what appeared to be an angry cloud vomiting ice crystals across the southern states. “Your plants will die,” he said, and I briefly considered how great it might be to be a plant.

  Should I play sick? I’d done it before. I’d faked fevers and nausea on many a brisk morning, but you can only fake illness fo
r so long before your mother believes you’ve had a bad blood transfusion and are now dying of AIDS. Although the idea of spending a quiet, comfortable day in quarantine sounded nice. Sometimes, I claimed to have vertigo or ingrown toenails, and occasionally both at the same time, which I demonstrated, on the eve of a big hunt, by limping and running into walls. But Pop wasn’t fooled. He must have known what was in my heart, where I really wanted to be. It wasn’t Disney World, or the zoo, or even a well-heated infectious disease facility. What I wanted was to be with my mother at our little sanctuary, a special place that none of the men in my family even knew existed. We even had a secret name for it. We called it the “grocery store.” How shall I describe this Elysium of wondrous delights? Ours was called the Jitney Jungle—in Brandon, many miles away.

  I was not encouraged, generally, to go grocery shopping with Mom, because Pop knew that if you sent your sons to the grocery store too much, they might learn how to locate water chestnuts, which could lead down a dark path toward vegetarian stir-fry and the wearing of aprons and eventually marrying someone named Cecil. What Pop couldn’t have known is that my special time with Mom at the store was much like hunting, in that she allowed me to seek out items and bring them to her.

  “Find me some Hershey’s Syrup in a can,” she’d say. “And some Borden’s.”

  Borden’s was our ice cream, and it came in a bucket the size of an aboveground pool. How could hunting deer ever compare to hunting vanilla ice cream, which is generally docile and will let you pour syrup on it without running away?

  I hunted every item with the skill of a Choctaw huntsman with a taste for lists and couponing: Chef Boyardee, Pop-Tarts, Fritos, Hostess Frosted Donettes. I studied this place, learned its secrets, luxuriated in its odors, the brightly illuminated freezer section, the heavenly splendor of the candy aisle, where I crouched low and fondled engorged bags of M&Ms with erotic tenderness, and the metallic pungency of the butcher’s counter, where the meat had been relieved of its more disturbing qualities, such as the eyes, which had a way of searching you out with pity.