The World's Largest Man (12 page)

I sat behind him in English. We'd never had bad blood. The teacher was not in the room, and he was focusing intently on a piece of paper, drawing with a pencil.

“What are you drawing?” I said, trying to be friendly.

“A picture of your mom,” he said.

He held it up. It looked like a manatee wearing a wig.

It was even more hurtful because Mom had, in fact, been his teacher only a few years before. He knew my mother. He knew that she didn't at all look like an aquatic mammal. And you know, maybe it was my hormones, or a bad reaction to the cafeteria food, but I sincerely believed a polite request to stop drawing pictures of my mother would be just the moment of human decency that Tommy required in what must've been a troubled and turbulent life.

And besides, if you just sit there and let someone draw a picture of your mother like that, while other people see it happening, many of them staring, leaning in, lusting for blood and circuses, including several pretty girls, then what would stop others from doing the same, turning every family member into an illustrated monster?

“That's not very nice, drawing a picture of my mom like that,” I said.

“Really?” he said, putting down his pencil.

“Really.”

I had never noticed how large Tommy was. Did he have a gland problem?

“You don't like my picture?” he said.

“I just wish you would stop drawing it,” I said. “Please.”

Pop had said to say
please
, but the way it came out, it sounded more like a taunt, more like, Could you remove my head with your bare hands,
please
?

Tommy grabbed my neck with his left hand, lifted me out of my desk, and drew back his right in a fist. He stood there like a cocked pistol, his fist pulled back, vibrating with desire.

“I'll knock hell from you, boy!” he said.

I tried to look casual, as though I'd woken up that day having planned to be choked in public. I looked like someone
waiting to be seated at a restaurant who just happened to have an enraged hand attached to his throat.

“Just try and hit me!” he said.

But I couldn't really talk.

“Just try and hit me and you'll see, boy!”

I tried to communicate with my eyes, making them friendly, but also deeply sad at the brokenness of the world, perhaps how the Lord's eyes looked to Pilate. If my eyes were saying anything to Tommy, it was something like, “puppies” or “flowers” or “Christmas.”

He let me go. We sat down. The teacher came in. Nobody said a thing.

Later, I slipped out of study hall and walked to my mother's classroom. I had no plans to tell her what happened—it's just, I thought it'd be nice to go somewhere in the building where nobody wanted to see how far my windpipe could bend. Her door was closed, and I peeked in to watch my sweet mother teaching those children, who now seemed so young, so eager, their eyes wide as spring flowers. Mom's back was to the door, and I saw her doing something I'd never seen before: screaming. Actually, it was more like shrieking. She shrieked at her students.

“Chester! Terrence! Billy! I said sit! You people are animals!”

She went on, about how they should be lashed to a post in the hot sun and then whipped with a rubber hose, and how she would do it if they wouldn't send her to prison, and she really seemed like she would do it, like she had been given some drug that made her crazy. I'd never heard Mom speak this way to anybody. From what I could see, the students were perfectly behaved and perfectly horrified at the bloodthirsty woman in front of them.

Was everybody at this institution deranged, including my
own mother? I'd come to school here in part because she seemed the sanest person in my life and because it felt wise to spend as much time around her as possible, where we could discuss films and literature on the long ride to McLaurin, and here she was, secretly a lunatic. She never screamed at home. She sounded dangerous, as violent as Pop and Bird and everybody else.

I ducked my head out of the window and went back to study hall.

I
t was a year before anyone tried to knock hell from me again, and this time it was no classmate, but a full-grown adult.

“Hello?” I said, into the phone.

“Is this the little shit's been talking shit?” the voice on the line said.

“Who is this?” I said.

“I'm Tom Bishop, motherfucker.”

He said it like
motherfucker
was an actual credential, as if he were identifying himself: Tom Bishop, Licensed Motherfucker.

“I'll make you bleed, son,” he said.

My heart quaked in its little tin casing. What had I done to enrage Mr. Bishop?

Tom was in his twenties, I knew. I'd only ever met him once, at a football game. All I remember is that he had a mustache and looked very young and was also a pedophile. He was dating one of my classmates, a girl named Casey.

Everybody liked Casey. Some months before, I'd accidentally touched Casey's nether regions. It was a totally consensual accident, on a school bus, where a boy can become disoriented and find his hands inside someone else's underwear without even knowing what happened. Our relationship was intense, passionate, and lasted about three minutes. These days, Casey
was into much older guys, the kind with tattoos and children. Hence, Tom, who'd heard of my brief sojourn to Casey's underworld and needed to ensure I would not be going back. He had nothing to fear. Everybody wanted to be in her panties, and I had long ago decided to find a less crowded pair of underwear.

“I know where to find you,” he said.

“You don't understand,” I said. “That was a one-time thing.”

“Good, then I'll only have to whip your ass one time.”

“But—”

“I'll see you up at the school.”

That night, I couldn't sleep. Would saying
please
really make this madman stop? “Please stop hitting me with that crowbar,” I imagined myself saying. I prayed for anything to keep me from school, a fungus, a meteor. If Jesus really didn't want me to fight, then why couldn't he help out by liquefying my internal organs?

I wanted to fight, I did. But I knew instinctively that I was a Man of Peace, and if necessary, a Man of Climbing Trees to Get Away. I was not afraid to climb a tree. That didn't make me a coward. For example, there could be snakes in the tree.

T
he next day.

Homeroom, nothing.

First period, nothing.

In the hallway, I worried: Will I see him? Will he really come?

Second, third, fourth period, no sign.

Nothing will make you question your life choices like waiting to die. There were so many things I hadn't done yet. Go to prom. Go to New York. Find a sword.

During break, instead of going outside, I went to the library, my old sanctuary, under the guise of studying for a chemistry exam in the following period. The class was hard, and the teacher, Mrs. Nutt, demanded real effort. If anyone liked me less than Tom Bishop did, it was Mrs. Nutt, a small, sturdy matron with magnificently bulbous hair who made no effort to hide her belief that I was born of Satan.

I sat in the library and tried to think about Mrs. Nutt's chemistry, but found the specter of Tom Bishop's promise too real. I looked out the window, and there he was, skulking through the crowd with murder on his mind.

Ohno ohno ohno ohno.

I noted with surprise that he was very short. I hadn't remembered this. Weren't the short ones more violent? He was clearly capable of disfiguring me, although it might require the use of a footstool.

The bell rang. I gathered my courage and walked to Mrs. Nutt's classroom. I sat down. Other students came in, took their seats. No sign of Tom Bishop.

And then: Tom Bishop.

Heads turned. Whispers. People knew.

My heart murmured: fight-fight, fight-fight, fight-fight.

He smiled, nodded at me to join him in the hallway. I froze. It strikes me now how odd this was, that a grown man with no children in the school, other than the one he was making love to in the back of his truck, could walk in and just start challenging its students to duels. Had we no supervision?

I tried to remember Pop's lessons. Something about being nice, then being insane. I briefly considered going right to the insane part, heading Tom off at the pass, but how would I know the precise time to start throwing furniture at his groin? I looked desperately at Mrs. Nutt, for what, I don't know. Maybe she kept some sort of weapon in her hair?

“Hey, boy,” Tom Bishop said from the doorway.

“Hello!” I said, as though attempting to sell him life insurance.

He beckoned with a finger. The class held its breath. They knew.

I was about to stand.

“Young man?” Mrs. Nutt said.

Was she talking to me? No, she was talking to Tom Bishop. He stared, bewildered, at the woman with the golden topiary on her head.

“Unless you plan to recite the periodic table,” she said, “you may now leave.”

In an instant, he withered into a nothing, a sad little imp. He looked around, unsure how to reclaim his virility. Mrs. Nutt walked over to him, looked him in the eye, and gently, sweetly, closed the door in his small, confused face.

Out the window, we saw him leave.

I
was ashamed. I couldn't be a child forever.

The opportunity for redemption came, of course, during English. What was it about the study of literature that made people so angry? We were reading through
Romeo and Juliet
, a play that has been enraging readers for four hundred years. I was a little older, a little larger. I had more anger now, simmering as I was with hormones, like the young men in our play.

A boy in the front row was snickering in my direction.

I did not like the look of him. He was not a bad kid, as far as I knew, but he was strange-looking, with a great deal of body hair in places that seemed wrong. His hairline was so low that it looked like his eyes were on the top of his head. You had the feeling that nomadic peoples could have used his back for evening prayer. I found myself angered by his hair.

He snickered some more.

“What are you laughing at?” I said.

“Him,” he said, pointing at the young man next to me, a friend of mine, Thomas, who looked a little rough that morning.

“He's laughing at you,” I said to my friend.

Thomas shrugged. He was very good at shrugging, his way of demonstrating a practiced apathy to the world. Yes, my friend Thomas needed defending.

“Hey,” I said to the boy. “Please stop laughing at my friend.”

He laughed some more.

“I asked you nicely,” I said. “Please stop laughing.”

He kept laughing, couldn't stop.

“I asked nice,” I said.

How could somebody with so much hair just go laughing like that?

I stood up.

“Coldcock him!” someone said.

Encouraged by the bloodlust of my classmates, but worried that the teacher might return at any minute, and remembering that I was supposed to be a model student, with regard for our nation's laws and school policies, and that my mother was employed at this institution and that I might require its administrators to write various recommendation letters on my behalf to entities that might help extract me from the miasma of the life that so many who lived here might never escape, including the Laughing Wolfboy, and Tommy, and most definitely Tom Bishop, who'd shown that he couldn't even leave after he'd already left, I made a decision: We would not fight. Not here.

“After school,” I said. “At the field house.”

It was on.

M
y secret worry was that perhaps this boy was a badass, had
been rehearsing his own Wolf Technique or Chewbacca Punch for months in the privacy of his bedroom.

“I'm doing this for you,” I said to Thomas, while we waited by the field house. He shrugged. He didn't care. I was starting to want to kick his ass, too. A few audience members gathered, friends from the baseball team.

“I can't wait to see this,” one said.

It was a lovely autumn day. Here he came, walking down the hill from the band room.

“Why don't
you
fight him?” I said to Thomas, who was now reading a novel about robots on the back of a nearby truck. I wore khaki pants and moccasins and a pink polo. Could I risk ruining these good clothes? These were not the clothes of a fighter. These were the clothes of someone who longs to windsurf.

We faced off.

“Well,” I said.

“Well,” my opponent said. “Here I am.”

We stared.

“You were being a freaking jerk,” I said.

“I wasn't even laughing at
you
,” he said.

“I ought to punch you in the face.”

“I'll hit you back.”

“Yeah, well! I'll hit you again!”

We were just a couple of badass motherfuckers.

Bystanders grew bored, drifted back to their barbells, so I decided to up the ante by making fun of his girlfriend, who was widely known to suffer a disfiguring underbite and a slightly lazy eye, so that you never really knew if she was looking at you, which, in Wolfboy's case, was probably ideal. I said many things about her that I immediately regretted, at one point comparing her face to a piece of construction equipment and her eye to a planet that had been knocked out of orbit. At this, he broke. He was not far from tears, as though he, too, knew
that her face resembled a backhoe and he was only now coming to terms with that.

This was my Shame Technique.

Only then could I see: I was his Tommy, his Tom Bishop, a sad little animal threatening to hurt others for no good reason. Wolfboy wasn't the monster. The monster was me.

Is this what Jesus wanted? Punching people in the face seemed more humane than what I was doing. The things I'd said about his girlfriend, his father, his single eyebrow. It did not feel great.