The World's Largest Man (4 page)

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 classmates, 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.

It was my first time to kill a thing.

Nobody even asked me how it felt.

I'll tell you how it felt: Go outside and shoot the first bird you see, but shoot it in the wrong place, so it's not dead, and then go pick it up and throw it at the side of your house a few
times until every happy thought dies inside of you, and then crush its tiny head with your shoe. How does that feel?

W
e gathered on the sidewalk in front of our classrooms, and there was much talk of the weekend's hunting. The boys pulled their shirtsleeves up, revealing their bruises, purple and pink and yellow, a visible record of conquest. The bigger the gun, the wider the bruise, the better the hunting, the better the huntsman.

“Mine's bigger,” one said.

“That's a girl one.”

“Mine's as big as a hamburger.”

“A hamburger for babies.”

Tom and all the other boys, the boys I would come to know and be deeply fond of in those distant years, they were all showing their proud new tattooed contusions, and they turned to me.

Had I hunted, they wanted to know.

I had, sure.

Had I killed anything?

Sure, yes.

I stood on the sidewalk waiting for our teacher to let us in the classroom and every eye in the fourth and fifth and sixth grades, it seemed, was on me. My black eye intrigued them, the scar on my nose.

“You been in a fight,” they said.

I said nothing. I let them think it.

“Let's see your bruise,” they said.

There had been a small one yesterday. Surely it was gone now. I looked down, lifted the sleeve on my little polo. Nothing. Tender flesh.

So I lifted higher, and there it was, yellow and red and purple
and six inches across and spreading to my chest, mostly as a result of my wild and reckless shooting. A bruise the color of the bird itself, and just as big.

“Dang,” they said. “What kind of gun you got?”

“A twelve-gauge.”

“Must be like a bazooka,” said another.

“That's some Rambo shit right there.”

“Hell yeah,” I said, like it was something I said all the time.

I
stayed at Puckett for several more years, made friends, felt very much at home.

The boys, they invited me to their farms to kill shit with them.

The girls, they agreed to go with me, and we went nowhere together, in love.

The teachers were kind, even though they occasionally hit us with what I assumed were canoe oars.

I went to Puckett, and then to another school up the road, and almost died only a handful of times. Eventually, I was allowed to graduate, when I delivered what is still largely regarded as the worst speech ever made in the state of Mississippi by someone who was not visibly drunk. I was salutatorian. This, in a state that consistently ranks lowest in test scores, where children have frequently mastered childbirth before long division, and where the ability to read often gets one labeled as “uppity” or “probably an exchange student,” was no real feat.

But I was proud. I had done it. And they had taught me so many lessons, things you can't learn in the city, like how to kill shit, and what happens if you don't get baptized, and how to love the sinner but not the sin, and how you even have to love the people who love the horses. Every child deserves an education like that.

K
illing birds, that was easy. Birds were small, and only the beginning of a campaign of slaughter through the animal kingdom that would come to define my new life. The woods held creatures larger than birds, such as turkeys, for example, which many considered a bird, and which I considered a friend, but which I was told should be considered an enemy.

“When are the turkeys killed?” I asked, hoping I could make plans to have liver failure on that day.

“That's a long way off,” Pop said.

What about all the guns, I wondered, and all the camouflage he'd laid out for us to wear?

“Tomorrow's Doe Day, boy,” he said, holding up my gun for inspection. “You best get ready to kill something got more legs than a dang turkey.”

“Okay,” I said, lying.

I had hoped my butchery of the dove would have filled my quota for ritual murder, but it was explained that anybody can kill a stupid bird. If you wanted to be a man, they said, you had to kill something that could kill you, if it got angry enough. I was ten years old now and preferred to focus on hunting more
acceptable wildlife, such as Twinkies. I did not feel equipped to hunt things with fur, which, unlike Hostess products, can become enraged when shot.

My brother and I were told to lay out our clothes and gear for Pop's review, which, as I would soon learn, we would be doing every Friday night between the airing of
A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving
and the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. While our nation celebrated the season of all things holy and bright, my brother and I were forced to continue waking up before dawn, dress up like a pair of Japanese yew trees, and hide in the woods until we lost all feeling in our extremities, at which time we were instructed to start shooting things.

Bird was very much looking forward to it.

“It's gonna be some monsters out there,” he said.

“Monsters?”

“Great big ones.”

Pop inspected the blade of my small knife, my box of shotgun shells. He plunged his hands into the bulging pockets of my coat.

“What's this?” he said, pulling out a handful of candy.

Candy, I thought, would help the time pass, and might bring me some small happiness in the dark. The woods, before dawn, were a terrifying place.

“Those are Jolly Ranchers, sir,” I said.

“Jolly
what
?” he said. He did not like the idea of things being jolly.

I explained that it was a delicious fruit-flavored candy.

“Gimme one,” he said. I did. “These wrappers make too much noise,” he said, fingering the clear plastic wrapping. “Out there tomorrow, you just need to open it in your pants. So you don't cause a racket. Can't kill nothing with a racket.”

I did not understand how to open candy in my pants. It
seemed like it would take more dexterity than I possessed and possibly a third hand located in the crotch area.

I
n my family, every little boy dreamed of Doe Day, the one day every year when the Mississippi Legislature invited children under the age of sixteen to shoot females of the cagey and elusive whitetail. As such, Doe Day had religious import for the rural youth of our land, affording as it did a sort of swinging door into the halls of manhood. It was a provincial rite, like the Poy Sang Long of Myanmar, the Vision Quest of the Lakota Sioux, the Bar Mitzvah of Long Island. Like the Quinceañera, Doe Day involved colorful costumes and a great deal of knifing things. Like the deb balls taking place that same month in Jackson, it involved a great deal of pageantry, blood, and weeping.

It was explained to us, as children, that it was not generally chivalrous to kill female deer, but that it was required once a year as a population management tool. There was simply not enough food for all the deer, our fathers explained. They painted horrid pictures of maddened whitetail hordes—hungry, desperate, overrunning villages, stealing and eating children like Bavarian gypsies. It would not be pretty, and it was up to the children of Mississippi to thin out the growing herds in a single day, lest our state suffer a catastrophe of Malthusian dimension.

Why females, you ask. They were easier to kill than males, the spikes and bucks, and the sooner a boy killed a large animal, the closer he got to taking on all the glorious accouterments of rural manhood, such as joining the volunteer fire department and, after a long hard fight, graduating from high school. It was a lot to live up to.

If I can just shoot one of these things, I thought to myself, I will be a hero.

This ambition, though, was complicated.

By fear.

Of the woods.

And the monsters who lived there.

P
op woke us at approximately 4:30 a.m. These were the unhappiest moments of my childhood. The hour seemed excessive for a year as progressive as 1985. We did not live in a developing nation, where rebel armies and tribal carnage might necessitate getting up so early, say, to keep your sister from getting assaulted. My half sister did not even live with us. She lived in Memphis, which no longer had a rebel army.

We dressed and drove a few miles to borrowed land on which we'd been given special dispensation to hunt, a dark and forgotten corner of the legendary Alton's Creek Hunting Club.

All of us had heard stories of the monster bucks on Alton's Creek land. It was run by a syndicate of farming brothers who had several manly sons, and also several manly daughters. The deer of Alton's Creek, like the hunters themselves, were monstrous. Pop had seen this for himself on slow drives down silty and cool dirt roads that ran through club property like seams on an old, fine coat. We'd stepped out of the truck and seen the tracks of more than one buck, the loveliest impression a man can find in the earth, in the shape of an inverted heart, cloven in two.

These tracks had a phantasmal quality, as though they mapped the trail of a ghost, had heard the sibilance of some forest secret. Pop saw enough tracks to convince him that we should make friends with the family of farming brothers, and we did, and they allotted us hunting rights on a small tract on the northernmost edge of their club. We suspected this was not the best hunting parcel in their portfolio, but at the very least,
Pop was sure there'd be females there, something for his boys to shoot on Doe Day.

W
e pulled off the blacktop onto a sunken dirt track and set out on foot, walking through the cold November dark until our heads steamed in the ray of Pop's old chrome flashlight.

“Here,” Pop said, stopping.

This is where Bird would be hunting.

Woods as dark and old as those could be full of all kinds of violence: cougars, wild hogs, Independent Baptists. Oh, I knew it was possible. I knew
Bulfinch's Mythology
and Edith Hamilton's oeuvre like the books of the Bible and was still young enough to cling to threads of hope with regard to St. Nicholas and leprechauns. When St. Peter said the Devil prowled like a lion, seeking whom he may devour, I believed him. And now I was in the woods, dark and wild, triangulated between Satan the jungle cat and any other feral thing that might come ambling along. This corner of Rankin County was not heavily populated. We had moved here only a year before, and who knew what creatures called this place home? It might be a goblin, or a basilisk, or some kind of temperate leviathan, or simply a cabin-dwelling libertarian who did not believe in dentistry.

I waited, in the black cold, for Pop to get Bird settled and come back to me. The canopy of trees disallowed moonlight and stars, and it was just me and my gun. Something up the trail caterwauled. An owl hooted. The woods were a gaping maw.

Pop emerged from the dark, and we walked on. After a time, we came to a bend in the trail and Pop led me off the path and down a thickly wooded hill. “Right here,” he said. “Clear them leaves, sit up against this tree, and don't get up till I come for you.”

“When?”

“Later.”

Later, of course, meant lunch. We would eat bologna and cheddar cut with our hunting knives and sit on the side of the road for an hour or so, then come right back out here until dark. I would be out here all day, sitting, waiting, vegetating, turning numb with cold, losing the higher faculties of language, doing my best to imitate the world's most apathetic tree fungus. The sitting was bad enough, but the thought of eating bologna was enough to stick the barrel of the gun in my mouth. It was a hellish meat, the flesh of Satan's horses, a sausage infused with alien gases and the tears of abandoned children.

Pop walked away, and I turned to see the cold firefly of his flashlight bounce up the hill, through the trees, into the black hole of woods. I was alone, in the dark, so small, so young, and carrying a firearm. This did not seem wise. According to my mother, I could barely keep my penis from urinating all over the toilet seat. It troubled her, and she complained to my father.

“You got bad aim, boy,” Pop said. “Piss goes in the commode.”

“If he can't hit the toilet,” she said, “Lord knows he won't know where to point a gun.”

“It's different,” Pop said.

“He'll shoot himself in the head,” Mom said.

“Maybe so, but it's different.”

I
cannot explain my general fear of the woods. When you sit there, in the dark, you hear things. The distant crack of twig and trunk, body and bone. The flittering of unseen wings. The nasty lamentations of bipedal creatures that defy taxonomy. A couple of years before, one of my uncles had fooled me into
staying up with him one night to watch
American Werewolf in London
, a picture guaranteed to make any child fear dogs, Europe, and the sudden appearance of unwanted back hair. I was not happy about it.

“Why aren't you laughing?” he said.

“Because I'm over here pooping on myself,” I wanted to say.

For a young boy sitting in an empty deciduous vale as old as myth and cloaked in nothing but gray moonlight, werewolves did not seem out of the question.

Also, Sasquatches.

When I was four, one of my aunts had forced me to sit on her lap while listening to the soundtrack of
Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot
on a record player. This classic seventies film was groundbreaking in its portrayal of the inner lives of large, West Coast–based primates, but I was not a fan. Bigfoot's personal soundtrack was a symphonic blend of a rehashed
Jaws
theme mashed up with the terrifying call of Sasquatch himself, which sounded like a tornado siren mating with a box fan.

“Do you hear the Bigfoot?” my aunt would say.

“That's the sound of my urine pooling on the floor,” I wanted to say.

These and related torments made me skittish and liable to shoot anything. Every distant howl was a werewolf. Every thud, a lumbering Sasquatch, on his way to disembowel me before his next recording session. Is this how I'd have to spend every weekend from now until adulthood, when I could escape to somewhere safer and more fun, such as college, or prison? That morning, Mom had said something about going to town, to the library, while we were out hunting. She was a teacher at a different school, but she taught children my age. She must have understood my brain and heart and developmental condition much more profoundly than Pop did, and which sorts of activities could help me be successful at life, such as reading,
perhaps in a library, surrounded by books and warm chairs and no trace of werewolves or bologna.

Oh, to be with Mom. We would have a quiet breakfast of something that did not need to be murdered, and then we would go to town, where I could check out mystery books and would have the option of soiling, or not soiling, myself, depending on my mood.

But I had a penis, and that meant I had to be out here, with the monsters.

F
inally, the void of Genesis divided itself into the black of the trees and the chrome of a clear dawn. I could finally see the gun in my lap, my only defense against the creeping things of the earth. For some reason, Pop had not let me take the 12-gauge of our dove hunt and instead equipped me with a .410 single-shot, technically the weakest shotgun in the history of gunpowder. The largest thing it could kill was an adult field mouse, and only if the mouse was very close and very still: duct-taped, for example, to a nearby tree. The gun's only real purpose was to give the mothers of very young boys something to pray about on the weekends. Which is to say, if handled with care, a .410 could blow just enough brains out one side of your head to make it uncomfortable. Mom voiced concern about my handling this gun, or any gun, but Pop always explained that being accidentally shot in the face was just a part of growing up in the country.

The night before Doe Day, Pop had shown me photographs of deer.

“Behind and above the shoulder,” he said, pointing with a finger as thick as the barrel of a real man's gun.

“I say shoot it in the head,” Bird said.

“Shut up, boy,” Pop said.

I liked Bird's idea. In movies about Vietnam and cocaine, which were the only kinds of movies Pop would let us watch, people were always getting shot in the head, and it seemed pretty effective.

“The head seems pretty good,” I said.

“No, look here,” he said. “Shoot the heart. Behind the shoulder, and above.”

“But the head seems good, too.”

“That's where the brains is,” Bird said.

“The head ain't no count,” Pop said. “It's too small. Hard to hit.”

“I still think the head is where the brains is,” Bird said, as though it were a revelation, a bit of news.

I
sat in my little dirt nest like a timid ovenbird. The sky was bright now, but the woods were still woods, still full of Minotaurs, and me, forced to wait on Pop, without even a bit of string to get back to the truck. All morning, I heard the distant, deep boom of rifle and shotgun, miles away in every direction, the sounds of late autumn. These were the men of Alton's Creek, harvesting their game.