The World's Largest Man (18 page)

“Actually, I never did,” Mom said.

“You done it yourself,” Pop said. “You was smart like that.”

“THAT'S NOT TRUE,” my wife said from the toilet. “THEY'RE LYING.”

Were they? I followed the odor of memory, and it sent me back to 1978, a time for
Grease
and inflation and a new trend known as airplane hijacking. There was a party at our house, I remember. We had guests. The Bee Gees were there, on the stereo, wafting through the air, wanting to know how deep our love was. Also wafting through the air: an odor. The Brothers Gibb sang about feeling something and not wanting that feeling to go. I was only three and didn't understand who the Bee Gees were singing this to, but found that it was a fine expression of the love I felt for my feces, because I did not want them to go, either.

“And it's me you need to show,” they sang. “How deep is your love?”

To whom were they singing this song? Even at the age of three, I felt confident that they were not singing to their feces, as one should probably not address one's own excrement in any form, except to flush it, which was a problem, because while the song had distracted me, my feces had decided to make an illegal border crossing.

Something bad had happened. I locked the door. I was not sure what I could do, there in my room, with a locked door. My only real option was to bury myself in the toy box and hope that my family moved to a new house. Mom knocked.

“What are you doing in there?” she said, rattling the knob.

“I'm in here, pooping on myself,” was not an option. So
I did what anybody does when a frantic person is trying to knock down a locked door while you're emptying your bowels: I climbed out the window.

Throughout the house and pouring out the windows, I could hear the Bee Gees asking again, how deep was our love? They really wanted to know, they said. They were living in a world of fools, they said. Breaking them down, they said.

I hit the hot grass and looked both ways. Should I run away? Should I dig a hole to China, as I'd heard was possible? Should I dig a hole for my stool, which jangled in my shorts like a smuggled gem?

I knew what to do. I would check the mail.

“What have you done?” they'd say.

“Look!” I could say. “The new Sears catalog!”

After walking in the midsummer heat, I knew it was going to take more than toilet paper to clean me. It might take a garden hose, perhaps some sort of heated cauldron, perhaps all three of the Brothers Gibb working in harmony. I walked back into the house, past our guests, down the hall. I wrapped my brown underwear in the mail and knew to place them somewhere innocuous, such as behind the television. Nobody would suspect a thing. They would just think Mom was making her goulash.

I
t was all coming back to me now, how hard it had been to know what to do with my own bowels. My parents were clearly approaching senility. You have to, I guess. You have to forget about how hard everything was, such as the pooping, which I was already wanting to forget. Otherwise, you hate your children forever, and I did not want to hate my children forever, and I am sure my wife didn't, either.

What we needed were not Skittles and enemas. What we needed was patience.

“Patience,” I said to my wife.

“Patience?” she said. “Patience?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where she pooped this morning?”

“No.”

“The floor.”

“The floor?”

“The mothereffing floor.”

How deep, I wanted to know, was our love?

T
he child was sending us a message. The message was: “Cleanup on aisle two.”

Let me tell you something. Poop smells bad wherever it is, but when it's just lying there on the floor like a dead squirrel it does a whole other thing to your nose. It gets into your brain, makes you want to hurt people. It infected my wife's brain, made her crazy. She'd get this wild look in her eye, surrounded by various anal creams and ointments, suppositories and laxatives, fibrous hardeners and softeners, rubber gloves and trash bags and spray bottles of antibacterial cleansers and bleach and gasoline, towels, buckets, mops, masks, anger.

“Are you okay?” I would ask.

“Do you smell something?” she would say. “ I smell something.”

“I think it's you,” I would say. “You haven't showered in three days.”

“I'm waiting for her stinky. I know it's coming.”

She would be looking out the window, up into the sky, as though it were coming by air. When it finally did drop, I would offer to clean it up, but the wife refused, entering the bedroom with her gear and closing the door and alternately
retching, gagging, cursing her offspring, gagging, cursing her own gag reflex, and then retching some more.

“Breathe through your mouth,” I said, from the safety of the hallway. “Let me know if you need some help.” I explained that I would be at the airport, leaving the country.

If the floor was unavailable, the child would poop in the bathtub. The wife would scream. The child would scream. I would run into the kitchen and return with a weapon.

“What's that?” she said.

“A slotted spoon,” I said. “It's perfect.”

“But what about English peas?” she said.

“I hate English peas.”

And so I would use the slotted serving spoon to fish out the intruder, while my wife disinfected the tub with the diligence of a serial murderer, scrubbing and boiling bath toys with a dangerous fire in her eyes. She wanted to boil everything: the toys, the house, our daughter.

“You would make a great murderer,” I said.

Sometimes, my wife was not a murderer, but a midwife.

I would get calls at work.

“It's been a week. A
week
,” my wife said.

In the background, I could hear the child, alternately laughing at Bugs Bunny and then screaming in horror at her impacted bowels.

“Ha ha, Mommy! Look at Daffy Duck!” she said. And then: “Ahhhh! Help! Ahhhh!”

“Is someone sawing her legs off?” I asked.

“It's been like this all day,” she said.

The kid's dung had hardened into the density of an adobe brick, and she would lie on the floor, in my wife's arms, as though in labor, pushing, pushing, screaming, sweating, the baby turd beginning to crown, and then pouring forth into the world, a little Baby Turd Jesus.

Sometimes, it would be big. Very big.

“How does that even fit inside her?” I said.

“That's at least a foot long,” my wife said.

I had seen adult ferrets smaller than that.

“We should name it,” I said.

“We should take a picture of it.”

She got out her camera. We put a dollar bill beside it, for scale. So future generations would know. So we would never forget what happened here.

S
easons passed, more babies were born. There were now two little girls. And then three. It was crazy how they just kept on coming, but I guess there was just so much screaming and crying and disinfecting going on, it's quite possible my wife and I had sex without even knowing it. Soon all three were giving birth to adult ferrets in and around our house and their clothing. We stopped caring. We had to. In time, my wife voluntarily disarmed, reducing her arsenal to one product: the Fleet Pedia-Lax Liquid Glycerin Suppository with Child Rectal Applicator. If it sounds like a machine designed to destroy families, it is.

My wife called it Special Cream, while I simply called it what it was: the Ass Grenade. If ever you have been walking by our house and heard what sounds like the interrogation of terrorist detainees by rogue federal agents, fear not. There were no terrorists here. It was only my wife, sitting on top of one of my naked children on the floor of the bathroom, injecting a medicinal payload into its tailpipe and lying about how it won't hurt a bit.

“You should work for the government,” I said. “Any government.”

The Fleet box featured a happy penguin, with great big distended penguin eyeballs, as though he had just sat upon his
own rectal applicator. In the right light, the penguin looked upset, possibly wrathful. My children knew and learned to fear this penguin, and very likely all other flightless birds.

And then one day, it just happened. Just like that.

The oldest one, she did it. No screaming. No crying.

I had stolen a quiet moment away from my family in the bathtub, which was the only place in our small house where one could read a book without being molested with questions about tornadoes or sharks, and the child, now five years old, really more of a kid, entered.

“Hi, Dad,” she said.

“Hello,” I said.

She closed the shower curtain between us. I continued to read. I was in the middle of
Heart of Darkness
, reading of the savage horror of it all. I heard the kid mount the toilet, and then a gentle grunt, then something more painful, a horse passing a kidney stone.

“Wow,” I said, trying not to breathe from behind the veil. “You did it.”

“Don't talk to me,” she said.

“Thank you for doing it so closely to my face.”

“Mom!” she said, sounding far too old. “Come wipe me.”

My wife entered, wiped. I lay down quietly behind the screen, Conrad's young Marlow on the strange waters of a new land. The kid left. I pulled back the curtain.

I loved that woman. She was a beast of a mother, fearless. Our family's own Kurtz.

“Hi,” I said to my wife.

“I'd love to have just one day,” my wife said. “Just one day where I didn't get someone else's shit on my hands.”

“I like it when you cuss.”

“Shit,” she said.

“Let it out,” I said.

“Shit,” she said.

“Actually,” I said, “in this house, we call it
stinky
.”

Nobody tells you this about marriage. That you will love your wife, and she will love you back, and you will journey together on the Greyhound of your shared life to the ends of dark continents only you can know, and your love will bring life into the world, a new person, buses full of people who share your name and imperfections and who will love you, and hug you, and shit on your floor, and in your garden, and in the same bathtub where you choose to read the works of Joseph Conrad, because it's the only bathroom in the house, and you're all in it together, the bathroom, the bus, the cruising yawl of Nellie up the Congo or whatever this thing is supposed to be, this life, and all you have at the end of it is a question:

How deep is your love? I really need to learn, because we're living in a world of fools, breaking us down, when they all should let us be.

T
hroughout my life, I've always known that if either of my parents was mentally ill, it was my father, although, to be fair, my mother had her own psychiatric health concerns. She was nervy, fretful about spectral dangers others could not see, dwelling alone inside a magical realm where children's clothing was designed to burst into flames and gangs of electrified toasters roved the countryside, seeking to jump into bathtubs full of her loved ones.

People like to think that we live in anxious times, what with all the concern over apocalyptic peanut jihads and whatnot, but the 1970s and '80s had their own unique fears, such as nuclear meltdowns and the teeth of Jimmy Carter. One of the big fads back then was child abduction. Everybody was doing it. This was before you could dial 911, when if something bad happened, your only options were dialing the operator or going outside to scream while being murdered with a lawn dart.

We humored her, allowed her to search our Halloween candy.

“I have to check your chocolate,” she would say.

“For why?”

“For straight pins and razors.”

The world wanted to hurt her children. She knew it, could smell it, could taste it in our candy, which she ate.

When Bird was five or six, back when we were still living in Memphis, he was kidnapped.

“He went to the bus stop one morning, like he always did, to wait for the school bus,” Mom says when she tells this story. “It was right down the street. I remember looking out the window and seeing him there, the sweet little towheaded thing, so small, all by himself.”

A few minutes later, she looked out again and he was gone.

She ran outside, panicked. Others came out of their homes.

“Have you seen my baby?” she said. “My baby!”

Soon, she'd marshaled the whole neighborhood, mothers in house shoes carrying confused infants, milk bottles dropped, family pets running wildly through the streets to locate her firstborn. She called the police, lost it, fell to the earth, an exposed nerve on the lawn, wailing. Her child could not be found. He would never be seen again.

“We found your boy,” an officer said, later that day, grave. They told her the bad news. He had been found. At school.

How did he get to school, you might be wondering.

The bus.

Which is what happens when you take your son to the bus stop to go to school.

Mom tells this story so we will understand why she worries, but to us it was just a story about how she was no saner than our father.

I
n the eighties, when the prevailing wisdom was that American cities were full of gangs, drugs, homeless people who raped
joggers, joggers who raped the homeless, and Satanists who sat around sacrificing children and playing Dungeons & Dragons, the narrative of many a film was “moving out to the country” to get away from all the danger. But we knew what the movies did not: that the country was much worse. We had no Satanists, but we did have tractors and hay balers, which I am pretty sure killed more children during that same period than Satan ever could.

Drownings, snakebites, sharpened hatchets, antler impalings, alligators, hunting accidents, runaway pulpwood trucks barreling down gravel roads: Every week, we had a new disfiguring injury to report. A friend whose face had been melted off by an exploding backhoe battery; a boy whose hand had been blown away while cleaning his gun; another one who'd been accidentally shot in the stomach by his brother; a family duck dog killed by a nest of moccasins, the slick wet chocolate scales coming up from the holes in creation to feast on us all.

We got bored, we did things. We climbed on top of our houses and jumped into trees. We built boats from buckets and tried to cross uncrossable rivers.

S
houldn't they wear helmets?” Mom asked Pop, when he bought us our three-wheelers with money he didn't have, so that we'd have a new way to die.

“Helmets?” he said. As we all knew, the only self-respecting men who wore helmets while operating motor vehicles were in outer space.

“They could be concussed,” Mom said.

“Hell, they done been concussed.”

This was back when all-terrain vehicles could only have three wheels, because of the Wheel Embargo. These were basically giant, high-powered tricycles designed for hunters, so
that you could go deep into the woods, far away from medical assistance. That's why we loved three-wheelers so much, because they could take you really far from hospitals, and far from the phones that would be necessary to call the hospitals to come get you, in case you were dying, because of the three-wheelers.

“Slow down!” the poor woman would yell from the back porch, while we motored off toward the veil of woods beyond.

“We can't hear you!” we would yell back.

It felt great, knowing that we were enriching Mom's prayer life so deeply.

I can remember riding in the back of a pickup truck down I-20 during the middle of December, something Mom made Pop promise he wouldn't do, and which he let us do anyway, the winter wind as brutal as clutching the wing of an airplane at forty thousand feet. I tucked myself between the wheel well and the cab and watched the sharp cold sky while my eyes followed the fractals of flocking blackbirds all the way down the highway.

It was dangerous, sure, and for that reason, special.

I will remember this, I remember thinking, and look: I did.

And what I also remember is that a thing was only worth doing if it frightened a woman who loved you—that, if it didn't, you weren't doing it right. It's how we knew we were becoming men.

“Watch out for falling icicles,” she'd say.

“Shit, woman,” was Pop's stock rebuttal. He'd laugh, we'd laugh, and she'd clutch her Bible. Didn't she know what joy we got out of running off to places where we might get killed? Did she know nothing of men?

It wasn't just our fault. Mom put herself through much of the agony she endured, mostly by reading a provocative magazine banned in many countries for its subversive messages.
It was called
Reader's Digest
, a title that never didn't make me think of the intestines.

What a great magazine, perfectly suited for mothers and grandmothers, with its light humor, word games, medical news, and stories about schoolchildren being mauled by bears.

“Watch out for live wires!” she said to us one morning, before we went fishing on the Pearl, a river not usually known for electrification.

I recalled a similar story in one of her recent issues of the
Digest
, a tale about a swimming pool that had somehow been filled with murderous levels of voltage or piranhas or lava, it was unclear. She bookmarked these stories, so that later, before bedtime, she could make her prayers as specific as possible. Only the Lord could keep her sons from ending up in one of that magazine's true-life stories, eaten by giant catfish at the bottom of a spillway or carried off by muscular fruit bats.

And then one day it actually happened.

I
t was a cold February day when Bird and I walked into those woods with our fishing poles. It was too cold to fish, but we went anyway, exploring new thickets and copses, hopping fences we hadn't permission to hop. We had asked if we could go, and Pop had said no, since that particular farmer who owned that particular land where a particular pond was to be found was a very particular kind of jackass and didn't want happy children on his property, and I don't know what came over us, but we went anyway, and we stayed gone for hours, tramping over hill and dale, giddy with discovery, not like Lewis and Clark, but more like a pair of dogs that had broken the leash and could not handle their freedom.

We wore ourselves out in our muddy peregrinations, became red-cheeked and filled with that electric joy that one finds
from great physical exertions in cold weather, and marched home across the pasture proud and tired but in high spirits like Don Pedro and Benedick arriving at Messina, home from war, while Mom ran through the pasture toward us.

“Hey, Mom!” we said, smiling.

She had already mustered search parties, called the authorities. Every man and boy in our community with boots had formed a dragnet across the countryside, searching for our bodies, our abductors. It didn't matter that both of us had knives big enough to have gotten us out of Cambodia alive. She wasn't having it.

She ordered Pop to beat us severely, and because he was as good a husband as he was a father, he did. He beat the living Hades out of us, he beat us because he saw how scared his wife had gotten, but his heart wasn't in it. He knew what she did not: We were just being like we'd always been taught to be. Reckless, wild, perfectly wild.

I
f there was anything I learned out in the country, it was that the things that can kill you can make you alive, and that you are never more alive than when you are getting beaten by your father because your mother thought you were dead.

And while to the casual observer I may not have turned out much like my father, I came to see in the first years of my marriage that I have proudly carried on this tradition of scoffing at women who are concerned for my safety, as I did with the woman I would marry.

Sometime during our courtship, before we married, I set off on a hundred-mile canoe trip with a friend, deep into a gorge, very much in the spirit of the movie you are probably already thinking of, maintaining important verisimilitude by bringing along a stringed instrument and a complete lack of knowledge of the terrain or the ways of its people.

“You'll die,” my fiancée said. “I'll never see you again.”

“Shit, woman,” is not what I said, but I did tell her all about the bottomless caves into which we would swim and the cliffs off which we would dive, watching her turn pale. She did not want me to hurt myself, she said, and I felt again the powerful tonic of hearing such entreaties from a woman you love.

O
nce we were married, she became even more like my mother, which I made sure not to tell her.

“Don't throw the children at the ceiling fan,” she said one night, while I was throwing one of our children at the ceiling fan.

“But why?” I said.

Honestly, all I was doing was throwing our daughter up, higher and higher, and then catching her. We were nowhere near the fan, mostly because I'd already accidentally thrown her into it, without telling my wife, and the kid had been fine, mostly. “The fan is scary, which makes it more fun,” I said.

“She could die.”

“I've been thrown into many a fan, and look at me.”

What I didn't say was, I had very important reasons for throwing my child into the ceiling fan, and those reasons were that I wanted to see what would happen. This was my responsibility, as a man, to endanger the people I love in the service of knowledge that seems important at the time.

She asked me to stop it and all sorts of other silly things, such as to not let the baby stand on the counter and to keep the fireworks away from their faces and to lock the doors.

Lock the doors! Ridiculous!

She was complaining because, at the time, I left our house very early in the morning, so early that it was actually still night. I left early for many reasons, but mostly because I found
it so pleasant to leave my children in one building while I went to another building, usually to write stories like this one. It could be almost any building, preferably one that was far away, where the children could not find me.

When I would leave our house in the gloaming, tiptoeing quiet as Tom Tittlemouse with my briefcase, I just didn't think locking the door was important. It would make too much noise, all the keys. We had two babies in the house then, light sleepers. If I jangled a key, my wife might lose an hour of sleep, and in those days of everlasting infants, she coveted sleep even more than wine.

“Somebody could come in,” she said, about the locking.

“Silly woman!” I wanted to say.

It's not like this was Mogadishu. Nothing was trying to get into our house between five and seven in the morning. Home invaders, I explained to my wife, were generally not morning people. Lock my door? What was I afraid of?

Later, I told Pop about my wife's unreasonable suggestion that I lock our front door, and we laughed. These women! We are men! The world is full of danger, and we fear it not!

Those were heady days, before something came through the unlocked door.

T
he unlocked door was not in Mississippi, nor was the rest of the house, nor the people who lived there, given that we'd moved to the wild and reckless city of Savannah, Georgia, where anything was liable to happen, such as naps, picnics, and garden parties where people did things that were literally insane, like wear straw boater hats. A college offered me a job, paying me money to do things I had been doing for free for so long that it seemed silly to say no, so we went.

Our cul-de-sac emptied out onto a quiet, lazy boulevard
and a glennish copse of approximately five acres. This park was usually empty, surrounded by homes with one bathroom and driveways paved mostly with dirt. It was a park for children, but also the occasional armed robbery and what looked to be, in my headlights one evening, a prom date–slash–youth breeding experiment.

“Be careful,” Mom said, on the phone, warning us about all the things in the city that might kill her grandchildren, such as farmers' markets. It was hard for her, our being so far away. Without her guidance, we might do something careless, like put one of the babies in the microwave or allow one of them to be asphyxiated in the night by plastic grocery sacks that had become sentient and homicidal.

On their first visit, she saw something troubling in a neighbor's garage.

“Oh no,” she said, sounding upset. “Look!”