The World's Largest Man (7 page)

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.

M
y 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.

S
till, 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.

S
o 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.

G
od 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 being 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.

“Cherokee didn't need no fucking hunting license,” he'd say.

What was the Trail of Tears like, I wanted to ask. Had that been hard, watching all his people die of the measles? But also, I wanted to believe. It was a story our grandmother had told us about being descended from a Cherokee chieftain, a version of the same fairy tale told to most poor whites and blacks across the South, a way of making us feel better about genocide and gambling. I'd heard that such blood could earn me a college scholarship, which I believed was my passage out of this alien land, while Bird used this story to explain his preternatural desire to learn things about animals by smelling their feces.

“What are you doing?” he said, while I was still in the tree.

“Unloading my gun,” I said. One did not merely shimmy down from three stories up with a loaded gun on his back. One took precautions.

We'd both attended a hunter's safety course that summer, mandated by law. Pop and Bird were nonplussed. What could some game warden with a college degree in wildlife management teach us about the sporting life? It was an insult to them. But I liked it. I was curious as to what other men might teach me, particularly men who may have written books on such matters, or at least men who had read those books, or perhaps any book.

I learned, for example, that it was preferable to shoot a deer in the heart, and not from a moving vehicle, or the window of one's home. I also learned first aid, in case the massive deer we'd just shot was actually a family member, and that it was best not to strap a dead deer to the hood of one's truck, a common sight at our club, as the heat of the engine had been known to cook the deer, which would bloat the carcass, which would prevent the hunter from actually seeing the road in front of him, which might result in the additional slaughter of animals and people.
I also learned about the horrors of hypothermia and how one might grow disoriented and fall into a river and never be heard from again, and how to build a fire so as not to die from exposure, and how, in order not to fall out of a tree, one might tie oneself to said tree with a rope or harness, as though one were about to be launched into space.

Pop nodded in general approval of these lessons, though I suspect that, to him, tying oneself to trees seemed a bit womanish.

“Let's
go
,” Bird said.

“Where to?”

He turned and stared into the trees, as though he had heard something I didn't, perhaps deer, or distant gunfire, or merely the ancient spirits in his head.

He walked. I followed.

I
was not to ask questions. We were still in the woods, still hunting. He crept forward noiselessly on the roadbed, gun drawn, while I trailed behind. This is what he called “stalking.”

Pop did not approve of stalking, but Bird didn't care.

Stalking deer is not unlike stalking a human, in that both involve mobility, concealment, and a mild psychosis brought on by the inability to experience human love. I kept accidentally snapping twigs, making Bird turn and scowl.

“Watch where you step.”

It was hard to explain that my excess of garments prevented me from actually controlling the movements of my legs.

“Don't be such an idiot,” he said.

“Yes, okay, sorry.”

He was fearless. He would just hit people. He would laugh big bellowing laughs that frightened small animals. He would blow a snot rocket right there in the middle of a baseball field, a jet of
mucus erupting from a single nostril with enough force to clear his sinuses and disorient the batter. He was a badass. He had balls. Literally. He had shown them to me. They were enormous.

Would mine ever be that big, I wondered? What did it feel like to be a man?

He looked so good in his hunting outfit. Jeans. Field jacket. Tall. Thin. Like a J.Crew model, if they wore bowie knives. How could he get away with wearing so few clothes? Was he simply unafraid of the cold? Or did he lack the necessary nerve endings? And why did he insist on smelling everything?

Bird was led by native spirits, but what led me?

Suddenly, he pulled up his gun and shot into the woods. But I had seen nothing.

“It was a deer,” he said.

It may also have been a hallucination. He wanted deer that badly. You had the feeling he would just punch a deer in the face if he got the chance.

That's when we saw it.

A
ctually, all we could see were its handlebars.

Bird's three-wheeler had fallen in a deep mud hole cut by a pulpwood truck and was now mostly underwater. This is what he wanted me for. His plan was for me to get in and push, since I had fat rubber boots, while he would help from dry ground, where it would be easier to laugh.

“It's too cold,” I said. I was thinking of our hypothermia lesson. They had showed us an instructional video, but the man in the video, he died.

“Just stand in the shallow part,” Bird said.

I guess I was tired of seeming like a big fat baby, or maybe the air temperature had briefly frozen my brain. Whatever it was, I stepped in.

What happened next would likely be described by medical professionals as “drowning.” The water was five feet deep where I'd gone in, and I went under. I sort of bobbed and floundered there for a second, like a buoy, owing to the many layers of clothing, which proved astonishingly impermeable to water.

I managed to scramble and hurl myself onto the edge of the pool, that carpet of pine needles that served as my own private Normandy. When the mud drained from my ears, I could hear Bird laughing the loudest laugh that had ever been laughed outside of a mental hospital, so loud that any nearby deer would have mistaken it for a distant car accident involving cattle.

“You got a little wet,” Bird said.

I wanted to ask him: What does it feel like not to have a human heart? Is it fun?

My gun lay against a tree several yards away. I briefly considered the moral implications of fratricide. Nobody would know. Hunting accidents happen all the time. A gun can slip, fall, accidentally discharge six or seven times in one's brother's face.

I started to shake. Bird attempted to reach his handlebars from dry ground, while I lay there and tried to remember the various stages of hypothermia, which started at anxiety and ended in what I vaguely recalled as “feelings of unreality” and then “death.”

“You look a little pale,” Bird said.

“What color are my lips?”

“Green,” he said.

“I'm going to die.”

Thankfully, I was wearing cotton, which was very good at holding water next to the skin, speeding up the dying process. I began to disrobe, first my boots, then my coveralls, then various inner garments. My book fell out.

I had forgotten about my book.

I'd gotten the idea the previous hunting season, as a way to cure the endless boredom. I had been careful not to say anything. Pop would be upset. He'd said to keep reading books, but books had their place, and guns had theirs. Now they'd know why I hadn't killed anything. Literacy was to blame.

“What the crap is that?” Bird said, looking down at the wet paperback.

“A book,” I said, teeth chattering. “It's got all these words in it. You should get one.”

He was shocked. He might as well have discovered me carrying a gymnastics brochure. It was
Watership Down
, a book about communist rabbits who worship the sun.

“What's it about?”

“Hunting,” I said.

“Whatever,” he said.

“Don't tell Pop,” I said.

Most of my clothes were now in a pile, and my exposed skin burned. The man in the video said you could die in just an hour or two.

I needed to go. Where to, I didn't know.

T
he best thing about dying from exposure is that it gives you time to reflect. I walked deeper into the woods and thought a lot about my situation and my family and my brother and father and this ridiculous childhood. Why couldn't I have been born to a man who loved circuses, or museums? Where was my mother, at that moment? Strolling down the cereal aisle, I guessed, humming a happy song. In her hands, she would have the coupons I'd helped her clip the previous Sunday afternoon. She was my people. Her father loved movies. He'd run a film projector at the Joy, a movie house in Rolling Fork, Mississippi.
Every Saturday, he took Mom. She stayed there all day, watching westerns and monster movies and
Gone with the Wind
about a million times, which I guess is a kind of torture, but it sounded dreamy, sitting alone in the balcony while one's father sat a few feet away threading reels and smoking cigarettes and reading the funny papers. The Joy was her Jitney Jungle. Her father was to her what she had become to me.

Right about then, my book was beginning to chafe.

The feelings of unreality came quickly.

What I thought was, I should get back to my stand and just wait like nothing happened and maybe Pop won't notice that I've lost all my clothes. I walked, and walked: Up trails, around bends, through forks, taking rights, taking lefts: I saw visions of darting brown things. I found myself stopping for no reason, turning to look into the woods. Had I seen something move?

What in the hell was I doing?

What I was doing, I guessed, was hunting.

I looked for the sun, but the sun had wrapped itself in a warm envelopment of clouds. My face felt like the surface of a refrigerated ham. I came to understand how rabbits might worship it.

I could always start a fire, which the video had explained was a way to save my life and also burn down the forest. Since then, I'd taken to carrying matches, which I transported in a small black watertight film canister.

I found a small clearing by the trail and gathered twigs and leaves. I crouched, lit the pile. The fire caught and spread, a very successful fire, and I wondered: When does a fire in the forest become a forest fire? It was an interesting question. And if forest fires are wrong, why does this one feel so right? Is this what they meant by feelings of unreality?

He did what, they would say.

Started a fire, they would say. Because he thought he was going to die.

And they would laugh and laugh.

I put the fire out and kept moving.

I knew what I had to do.

I had to find my father.

I came to a fork, and went toward where I thought he might be.

I put a round in the chamber. Yes. I was hunting now.

P
op had said he was going to the Cutover, a desolation in the very center of these woods, a clearing approximately the size of Central Park and created, not by thoughtful urban designers, but by paper companies who took all the trees and left a bare gray landscape that looked like somewhere you'd find a mass grave or an art project about mass graves.

I walked along the edge of it for a hundred yards or so, and I saw him in a tree. And despite that I had lost my hunter's orange vest somewhere up the trail, he saw me. He waved. I waved back. But no, he wasn't waving. He was gesturing. Pointing at something out in the Cutover, something he wanted me to see.

I saw it. A deer. No. Two.

About two hundred yards away, grazing, heads down. Big one, small one. No antlers.

Seeing
anything
in the wild got the heart pounding. Spit fills the mouth. Blood heats. Intestines tumble. There was no question of my not shooting.