The World's Largest Man

by Harrison Scott Key

  “Let’s go,” Mom would say, and in minutes we’d be at another Promised Land, the Brandon Public Library, where Mom showed me how to obtain a library card and books on magic, which made her a kind of wizard. On the way home, she’d let me read aloud, especially when whatever I’d checked out was funny, and we’d laugh like drunk schoolteachers, and like Kafka says will happen, the sea inside me unfroze. I was the daughter she never had, and I knew it, and she knew it, and I was beginning to think Pop knew it, too. But I trusted him. I was his boy, and I knew that if he wanted me to do something, then it must be the right thing for me to be doing, and sometimes it meant work, and sometimes it meant play, and sometimes it meant bloodshed.

  I would have to get up. On that day, my inner seas would remain frozen.

  Pop turned on the light.

  On my floor lay a host of flannel and chamois and canvas, my allies against the cold, but also the enemies of my dignity. By the time I got everything on, I would be prevented from performing necessary bodily functions, such as relieving my bladder, or actually being able to touch the place where I believed my bladder to be located.

  First, the socks. Cotton. Why cotton? Because we did not understand what people who read Outside magazine understood, that cotton will absorb your sweat and then use it against you. Good socks cost good money, and Pop had more important things to spend our money on, such as prosthetic feet, since our original feet had frozen and fallen off.

  Next, I pulled on a pair of waffled long underwear, also of cotton, and then a cotton union suit, and then two pairs of sweatpants with an excess of fabric in the groin region, so that it looked like I might be concealing a fruitcake near my genitals, followed by multiple sweatshirts and a chamois shirt that had once belonged to Pop and had been given to me because too many hot dryings had abbreviated its length and now it could only be tucked in with the aid of duct tape and bungee cords, thus compelling me to pull my sweats up even higher until my chin appeared to be wearing the pants.

  Over these pants, of course, I wore more pants.

  Then I stuffed the whole of myself inside a pair of hand-me-down coveralls, lined in a material resembling industrial furniture pads, so that when finished, I looked like the world’s largest camouflage throw pillow. My boots were in the den, next to the woodstove. Putting them on would be difficult, now that I could no longer bend at the waist. Even walking to the den would be problematic. Rolling would be easier, or blacking out and having medical personnel drag me on a litter.

  Bird was already in the den, sharpening his knife, while Pop danced and sang by the stove. Slaughtering always put him in the best mood. While singing, he would goose Mom in the bottom, and she would attempt to blind him with a spatula, and then he would sing some more. It was an odd thing to have to see at four in the morning, your mother defending herself against your father with baking utensils. But I couldn’t look away, because I had lost the privilege of turning my head.

  Mom presented me with a sausage biscuit in a napkin.

  “What are you going to do today?” I asked.

  “Oh, go to town, I guess, get some groceries.”

  I’m sure she could tell I wanted to go with her, and that I knew I couldn’t. She knew I had to go.

  “Don’t forget the Hershey’s,” I said.

  “My baby,” she said.

  But her baby would not be coming back.

  The place we drove toward in the dark was County Line Hunting Club, at the edge of the Bienville National Forest, a camp we’d joined a year or two before. The camp house was no gentleman’s hideaway. It was a double-wide trailer, dog pens, a grand old Confederate flag that looked like it had been chewed by aphids and a pack of abused coyotes, the smell of old blood and rotting carcasses; it might have been a kind of romantic hideaway, if you had kidnapped your lover and planned on turning her hide into a lamp. Yet its woods were lovely, nine square miles of hardwood bottomland and hillocks of pine. Men with names like Foots still trapped on this land, and shot muskets. It was unclear why some of these men used such primitive firearms, but my thinking was that anybody named after a body part could probably shoot any sort of gun he wanted.

  In the front seat, Pop and Bird strategized about the day’s hunt, while I attempted to sleep. “I believe you may get one today,” Pop said to me.

  The probability was high. It was Doe Day again, the annual day when I was statistically most likely to disappoint my father, and Pop expected fewer hunters in the woods today, even the grizzled musketeers who lived on the land. He didn’t say why. Perhaps there was a Klan rally, or a Dentists Without Borders in the area. But yet again, I had legal sanction to shoot pretty much anything that moved.

  “You know you’ll have to drink its blood,” Bird said. “Since it’s your first.”

  Bird was always reminding me of this. We’d recently seen perhaps the most important film of our youth: Red Dawn, a coming-of-age tale about how Patrick Swayze fights communism with his hair. There’s a scene where one of the young American guerilla fighters slays his first deer, and they sit around the dead thing.

  “You’ve got to do it, it’s the spirit of the deer,” Swayze says, filling a mug with blood from somewhere deep in the carcass.

  “When you drink it, you’ll be a real hunter,” says Charlie Sheen.

  Swayze hands the mug of blood to the young deerslayer, and reluctantly, the boy drinks. It’s important to remember, as they’re doing this, that they’ve all got tree branches attached to their heads.

  Then Sheen says, “You know, my dad said that once you do that, there’s going to be something different about you. Always.”

  Yeah, what would be different was that he would never speak again, due to the thirty hours of uninterrupted vomiting.

  In a film full of harrowing scenes, this was the one that kept me up at night. Would they really make me do it? Soon, our headlights illuminated a dark hole in the trees. We got out, loaded up, said goodbye in clouds of illuminated breath.

  “See you boys back here at lunch,” Pop said.

  My stand was old, and its platform small: basically a kitchen chair nailed to a tree three stories up. I did not worry so much about falling, owing to the excess of padding around my internal organs. It was going to take something much more aggressive than gravity to penetrate my costume.

  I put a round in the chamber, in the dark. My gun was a .30-30 lever-action, a short, sturdy rifle that held eight rounds. I had come so far from the .410 single-shot of my first days in the woods. Now I had the opportunity to miss eight times in a row.

  I looked into the sky and could see nothing but Orion, my old hunting buddy, through striations of black canopy. We were doomed to hunt forever, he and I.

  I sat there.

  And I sat there.

  And I sat there some more.

  In one terrible instant, that terrible thing happened, the single most tragic experience of my, and just about any, childhood: boredom.

  All childhoods are full of it. For some, it is the great crucible of imagination, those long, lonely days bereft of various entertainment technologies, freeing a youngster to wander in the undiscovered country of his own unfettered mind, where he can learn to enjoy reading and creativity while slowly going insane. They say going insane is fun, but they are lying. You hear things. You see things. You look at your watch. It is 6:45 a.m. It is dark. You decide to think. And you think some more. And then you think about what you thought, and then you think about looking at your watch, which you do, which still reads 6:45 a.m. Haven’t you been thinking for longer than less than a minute?

  What time is it?

  6:46 a.m.

  Only five more hours! Five hours was nothing. I was wearing so many clothes, it would likely take three hours just to take a bowel movement. Which left two hours, which seemed like about how long it would take to chew off my own tongue.

  Finally, it was daylight.

  Could I see anything? Brown trees. Orange leaves. Purple sky.


  Did my father ever get bored? It was his greatest skill, this ability to sit and stare and wait. It wasn’t a listless stare, pathetic and melancholy. He looked more like a farm animal in a pasture, just sort of existing, and it was hard to know what might be going on inside his large baseball cap. His brain must have been huge, or perhaps there were other items in there, such as an old tractor transmission. Did he have thoughts about his thoughts? Did he ever experience that moment where you realize you’re you, and you’re realizing you’re exactly you and not anybody else? Or did he just think:

  Tree. That is a tree.

  Pie. I like pie.

  Sit. I like to sit.

  I wished I could think like that. My mind raced, ran off without me, looked around, saw that it was alone, returned to find me, but got lost, and we became separated for hours.

  Time: 6:47 a.m.

  It was officially day.

  I was officially insane.

  Still, there was something far more terrible about this whole enterprise, more tragic than boredom, and that was the horror of what we were actually expected to do to the animals.

  Was I the only one who became unsettled and swoonish at the sight of a large, inverted carcass hanging from a tree, its vital organs strewn about like children’s toys, the occasional pack of hunting dogs fighting over a lung, another one looking for a quiet place to enjoy the severed head? It happened all the time and nobody else seemed bothered. People just walked up to the bloody carcasses and carried on entirely normal conversations, as though a man wasn’t standing there squeezing deer feces out of a large intestine and small children weren’t playing football with a liver.

  I knew Pop would make me do it one day, when it was time, even though the sight of blood gave me the vapors, especially when it was pouring out of things. And I had heard stories about deer who took too long to die, who’d been shot in the eye and blinded and run into barbed wire, or shot in the gut, the green pasta of intestine spilling out while they ran, wrapping around the hind legs, causing the creature to tumble into a creek and drown.

  With my own eyes I’d seen a deer shot in the leg, stabbing at the earth with the other three like a hurt spider, and managing to get seventy-five yards in that condition, while my father offered to let me finish it off.

  The deer was alive. It looked at me. What a crime to shoot it in the neck, when all it really needed was a cast, maybe a hug.

  “Shoot it,” said Pop.

  But I didn’t, and he put his gun to the animal’s neck, while I pretended to see something of interest in the trees.

  And I also didn’t watch later, when we dressed it, which, if you’ve ever done it, you know, it’s pretty much the opposite of dressing.

  It hung by its hind legs, upside down, swinging by a thick cable as Bird cranked it higher and higher until its head was off the ground. Pop handed me his knife.

  “What do we do first?” he said.

  It had been drilled into me that the first and most important step in dressing a deer is to make sure it’s dead, because nothing will ruin the meat like watching it run away. I surveyed the hanging carcass and reasoned that, yes, it must be dead, owing to the hole in its skull. Next, with an economy of nips and one long vertical slice, Pop showed me how to peel the deer like a banana.

  “Like taking off a wet sock,” he said.

  Sure, I thought, if you had been born with the sock attached to your body.

  “Now what do we do?” he said, while we looked at the skinless, dripping deer.

  My first instinct was to suggest that I have a seizure and be hospitalized, but I thought, No, that’s probably not what he’s looking for. He handed me the knife, made a line with his finger, indicating that I should open up the body cavity so that its organs might spill out. The smell was hot and metallic and fecal.

  I cut, and then Pop took a hatchet and cracked its sternum in two and opened the deer up like a valise, revealing the horror inside: pretty much every organ ever invented. Yellow fat, blue stomach, green gut, pink lung, purple liver, and that heart, that meaty red heart, big as a baby’s head.

  “Now we got to cut out its butthole,” he said.

  All around America, children were cutting out paper snowflakes. Here in Mississippi, I was cutting out anuses.

  I was no man.

  So I kept shooting. I kept shooting, because that’s what Pop told me to do, and I kept missing, because something was wrong with me. It was like I didn’t want to hit the deer. Sure, the idea of gutting another one by myself was horrible, but I thought it would be different if I’d done the killing.

  But why did I keep missing, everybody wanted to know at every Thanksgiving and Christmas. And I explained: because it was dark, and the deer could not be seen, or it was raining, and the distance could not be known, or the deer had been running too fast.

  Three or four weeks before that December day, I’d shot at something.

  It had been run by a beagle. I’d heard the sound a mile off, grateful for the break in tedium. I was hunting a big wide-open swale of woods, a bank of fog over the whole little valley. The sound grew. The dog was coming this way.

  Today would be the day.

  Louder. Louder.

  Where was the deer?

  I watched, scanned, tried to pierce the fog, see through it. Then: There. Something.

  The tiny beagle came into view.

  Was it too late? Had the deer slipped by me undetected?

  Then: a deer.

  Six points.

  Oh!

  Oh!

  Oh!

  What do I do?

  The primal urge to slaughter came alive. We were not hunting Little Debbie Snack Cakes here. I could feel my heart beating inside my eye sockets. The deer was running, sort of picking its way through scrub and over deadfall, not frantic. In three seconds, it would be gone.

  Shell: Chambered.

  Gun: Raised.

  Safety: Off.

  It was coming right toward my stand. Could it be any easier?

  One hundred yards.

  Seventy-five yards.

  Fifty yards.

  Ready.

  Aim.

  Breathe.

  It dashed in a strange and unwelcome vector, toward a thicket to my right, and now it was running with every evolutionary advantage. There, in the moment between its gentle sauntering toward me and its startling rocketry away, I am not sure what happened. I fired wildly, desperately, and as soon as I pulled the trigger, I knew: It was gone.

  The last thing I saw was its flag of white tail vanishing into the woods, bright and erect, a warning to others that if they didn’t look now, they’d miss the idiot in the tree, who didn’t know a good thing when it was coming right at him. That tail I’d seen so many times, a friendly au revoir from the animal kingdom.

  Goodbye, the tail said.

  Goodbye, I said.

  That was then, and this was now.

  “Dear Jesus,” I prayed. “Help me.”

  Let the nightmare be over, I prayed. Let me kill something, and gut something, and maybe it can be over, and Pop will let me alone, or a miracle will happen, and I will learn to like it, perchance love it. It was a fervent prayer, long and filled with laborious King James pronouns, to awaken a more ancient Lord who liked seeing things die.

  I told God I would be willing to do anything to make it happen.

  “Just give me a sign, dear Lord, that you heard me,” I said.

  And I said amen. And then he sent me something much bigger than a sign.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Things They Slaughtered

  God sent me a sound.

  It started as a faraway whisper, the crash of a distant wave, then grew to a lurid swish, perhaps something in the leaves, some lumberjack kicking his way through a pile. And it was getting closer. So close now that I was pretty sure it was a herd of deer being run by a mute hound, or a bear, or two bears, hungry bears, or a moonshiner dragging the corpse of his adversary, possibly bein
g chased by the two hungry bears. Louder. So loud it was upsetting. Why could I not zero in on this sound? My chest was a tom-tom, my gun bounced in my hands.

  The animal must be quite large.

  It was right under my stand. I looked.

  An armadillo.

  The escape of butterflies into the bloodstream was at once electrifying, sickening. How had the armadillo gotten so close? I wanted to shoot it just for scaring me. If this was a sign, the sign said, “Pay better attention.”

  But wait. Another sound, more sinister, a sound that wanted to be heard, a stamping. Thunk. Bucks will do this during the rut, and it was the rut.

  Thunk.

  Behind me.

  I turned off the safety, put finger to trigger, pivoted, and saw it.

  A bird.

  Not just any bird, but my brother: Bird. He was very close, twenty feet away, and not even wearing his orange. This was his way of showing me he was a Hunting Ninja. It was also his way of potentially becoming a Dead Hunting Ninja.

  “I could’ve been a deer,” he said.

  “I could’ve shot you,” I said.

  “I’m sure you’d miss.”

  He was always doing this, sneaking up on me so he could insult me from close range. It was his primary way of communicating with those he loved. But that day his sudden appearance set in motion events that would change my life forever, and also change the life of at least one deer forever, a deer I would soon be shooting, which has a way of changing almost anything’s life.

  He said to get down.

  “Why?” I said.

  “It’s something wrong,” he said.

  I did what my brother said and climbed down, because while he may have lacked the ability to conjugate verbs, he would’ve known how to kill those verbs if they had been running through the forest. He was sixteen now, and he’d already killed his first, and his second, and third. Actually, there was no telling how many he’d killed. He obeyed so few hunting laws, largely as a result of his believing that he had Native American blood, which he believed absolved him from all state and federal hunting and drug statutes.