It was good for me. I am grateful for the obvious lessons, of patience, and quietude, and reverence for a wild and unruly creation, and how to locate your own genitalia whenever they are hiding under thirty layers of flannel, and how to be a writer, which also involves getting up very early, and sitting, and staring, and going slowly insane.
I sometimes wonder, Will I be able to give my children adventures like those? On Saturday mornings these days, the darkest and scariest place we go is the public library, which, if you’ve been to some of the public libraries in my town, is a lot less safe than it sounds.
And if they complain, I will tell them: “At least I didn’t make you cut out deer anuses.”
Sometimes, the old urge rises within. I will step outside on a gloriously cold morning before sunrise, briefcase and book in hand, the stars laughably bright, Orion standing at the ready, a song in my blood. Today the deer will be moving, I think to myself, and I think about those two wonderful men off in the woods—Bird chewing peyote buttons and taking deer scalps, Pop sitting and staring out into the Cutover. I almost wish I was there with them. But these stories aren’t going to write themselves.
On the way home from that Thanksgiving, when Pop and I had told and retold all our great hunting stories, we were speeding along the highway, green and brown falling away on both sides, and I found myself scanning the fields for ghosts. And I saw them.
“Deer!” I said, pointing.
“Deers!” my children said.
“Where?” said my wife.
But it was too late: We had passed them. My wife and children are too slow. They don’t understand. You must look quickly, or they are gone.
CHAPTER 8
Every Creeping Thing
I had always thought the world was made up of two kinds of people: the Hunter People, who liked to kill and eat things, and the Animal People, who whispered to horses and brought their dogs to cancer wards and let goats live in their houses. But what I’d learned is that I was neither. I didn’t have the stomach to kill, but I also probably didn’t have the stomach to let a goat live in my house, even if it had cancer. I was a new kind of person, a third kind: not Hunter People, not Animal People. I was Scared People.
Nevertheless, I was blessed to grow up in a place where animals were everywhere, eager to be your friend. I frolicked with many species. Frolic might not be the right word. What I did was more like running away screaming. Sometimes it was just running, other times it was just screaming, and sometimes it was just standing there and letting my bowels do the running for me.
It wasn’t just movies about werewolves and yetis that made me this way. It was also my mother, who played Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf on the hi-fi, which I believe taught me to associate classical music with predators. But there was an artist far more sinister than the Russian composer: Marlin Perkins, of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, a man whose TV show taught me that the Lord’s manifold creation was best appreciated by those armed with tranquilizer rifles. The show and others like it, say, Marty Stouffer’s Wild America, pulled no punches in the animal attack department, with its cascading sequences of violence: snake-on-rat, gator-on-bear, ram-on-ram, raccoon-on-toad, lynx-on-pheasant, cougar-on-elk, cougar-on-bunny, eagle-on-bunny, wolf-on-bunny, basically everything murdering bunnies in the most hateful ways possible.
In Mississippi, it was easy to feel like a bunny.
It’s not that I was overly afraid, or even phobic, at least no more than the average human might be. The problem was, Mississippi is not filled with average humans.
Death was all around, and not just at the deer camp: Vast roadside morgues and mounds of torn flesh on the highway, black and brown and red and dead. Hitting them was not fun, although one had the feeling it was fun for some, those rural drivers who learned to operate their motor vehicles by watching Smokey and the Bandit and footage of early NASCAR tragedies.
One spring night, on a slow country road, we came upon a bunny.
“Stop!” Mom said.
“Don’t hit it!” I said.
And Pop, usually the type to hit a thing on purpose, slammed on the brakes.
It sounded like someone had thrown a golf ball at the bumper. Had we hit it? Also, did you know that rabbits can scream? They do. So do mothers and children.
“Oh, no,” Mom said.
Pop drove on.
I looked out the back window to see if I could see it, but all I saw was a big fat dairy moon covering the black woods in milk. Out there, the beauty and the violence were all mixed up.
Like the time I saw the many-pointed buck swimming across the Coldwater River one January day, perhaps the most sublime scene I have ever witnessed, and how my cousin steered his boat that way so he could stab it in the neck with a knife. It would not have been my first inclination to engage the creature in such brutal gang warfare, but then, I assumed that this was what you did in Mississippi, perhaps because there were so few actual gangs.
Or the time, in the middle of a varsity football game one night, when a squirrel ran across the end zone, and a barred owl the size of a harrier jet materialized out of the autumnal ether, its whiteness blazing like an angel under the lights of the field, and all of us gasped at the beauty and the horror that such a thing could descend from blackness unbidden. It gutted the squirrel right there in front of us, and the crowd cheered.
Or the time we found a nest of newborn field mice inside an old tractor seat, still blind and hairless, and how my father dumped them into a garbage fire in the yard. This sort of thing never happened in the city, where small animals, when found by children, were generally given names and a dish of water. Sometimes, I thought, having a small pet might make me less skittish, something small and soft, maybe a whole family of small soft things, and there they were, on fire.
I felt like I needed some way to connect to these animals that didn’t involve death, something that might redeem the killing, or help draw me into a deeper spiritual understanding of it, to see it the way Bird saw it, as a natural process, a communion with wildness.
The place really was a zoo: the blue herons, gray bats, greenheads, copperheads, red foxes, white appaloosas, and the cows, the very many cows, an ocean of beef. Much of it was lovely to behold from the safety of a school bus, but these things could hurt you, the alligators who lurked at the margins of our swimming holes, the only lifeguard an indifferent kingfish with no certifications to speak of, the snakes that fell out of trees into the boats that we’d hoped would keep us safe, the panthers and rumors of panthers and bears and odors of bears.
“There aren’t really bears here,” Mom would say. “Are there?”
And then there’d be some story in Mississippi Game & Fish about a bear seen on a highway, and it’d be, like, great. It was chilling to know there were things that could kill you walking the woods or slinking through the water we played in, but also a little sublime. It added voltage to a walk in the woods.
Boys rode bulls, girls showed sheep, and everyone had a little fur and blood on their hands. If someone invited you to spend the night, by breakfast they’d be expecting you to do something to a hog.
My fears were not irrational. I’d heard stories.
“A razorback just about got my uncle this weekend,” a friend would say.
What was a razorback, I wondered? Some kind of bird?
But no, I learned that it was a wild hog, and that wild hogs did not usually fly, unless they were dropped from airplanes. I also learned that they had tusks, and that it was not uncommon for them to attack humans, usually during the rut, and that this usually happened in the woods, where we spent most of our playtime, which was upsetting, because I did not generally like to play in places that were full of angry sex monsters.
Up the road, there was a nice boy who’d been made retarded by a horse. They said it had kicked him in the head, and one thing was clear: He could no longer talk right.
“My hurts,” he would say.
“Where did you ge
t hurt?”
“Ouch,” he would say, pointing to a cloud.
“No,” we’d say. “Where on your body.”
“Ice cream,” he’d say.
“You got hurt in your ice cream?”
“Mmm,” he’d say.
The animals could hurt you in all sorts of ways, hurt your body, hurt your mind, make your soul pucker, as mine did the day I saw the dead bull.
He’d bent down to drink from a waterhole and his forelegs had sunk too deep in the mud. We found him bloated, dead many days. The boys whose farm it was lit into action, one fetching a heavy chain, another a tractor, another a gun. A gun seemed odd. I watched them wrap the chain around its hind legs, while the oldest boy stood on the levee and took aim at the bull’s head.
“Snakes,” somebody said.
The tractor did its work, and the ghoulish head rose from the water, its eyes missing, its wide nostrils wider, dripping, and filled with the heads of many white snakes.
When you see a thing so horrid, you have to cuss, even if you don’t cuss.
“Oh, shit,” someone said.
“Goddang.”
“Motherfucker.”
Snakes poured from the mouth and eyes and nose, white snakes, a color we’d never seen a snake be. The boy with the rifle started shooting at them, and more guns were fetched, and I watched more things die and be dead.
Later, we doused the bull in diesel and set it on fire.
There were stories of coyotes who had to be fought out of chicken houses with aluminum bats, of deer who’d turned hunters blind with their antlers, of turkey buzzards that would throw up digested carrion on you if you got too close. Why did nobody seem upset by any of this, by a world where the birds would just up and vomit on you?
My father, of course, was raised on a dairy and courted several young ladies who resembled mules, and he obviously wanted me to have similar experiences. He made arrangements for Bird and me, seizing the moment if an elderly farmer had fallen ill. “Wake up, boys,” he would say before dawn. “You got to go feed Mr. May’s cows. He’s got the walking pneumonia again.”
He was always on the phone, searching for some sick farmer who’d had a blood clot or lost his balance and been mangled by a baler. Dutifully, we’d go and do whatever needed to be done, praying that God would stop afflicting the farmers of our community with arterial plaque and vertigo.
Then one day, Pop hit the jackpot. He’d found a permanent job for me on a real farm with real animals. Perhaps, I thought, they would allow me to work with the gentler livestock, piglets or baby lambs or maybe a small and affectionate cabbage.
When I arrived, I met my only coworker, Tom, a boy I knew from school. Tom had always been a large boy, perhaps enjoyed a ham hock or two, and was now likely visible from space. I made a mental note that if any animals attacked, I might seek protection by climbing to the top of him and awaiting rescue by helicopter.
“You any good with animals?” he asked me that first day.
“Like how?” I said.
“Like can you ride a horse?”
“No.”
“Ever worked with hogs?”
“I wouldn’t say I’ve worked with them,” I said. “I know what they look like.”
“Can you feed them?”
“Would I have some kind of a stick or a pole?” I asked.
He had a chew in his mouth. He spit. We talked. Occasionally, I spit, too, and for a minute there, we were a couple of genuine spitting machines. He was installing new emergency flashing lights on his truck, he explained, because he had designs on being a member of the Cato Volunteer Fire Department.
“You ever put out a fire?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he said, with a look that suggested he might start his own fire if one didn’t immediately present itself.
Tom gave me simple tasks, things that could be done by any village idiot, such as mowing the grass. I did find myself quite close to the animals, but always on the safe side of the fence. It was nice to be close to an animal that you hadn’t necessarily shot in the face. Animals are so much more pleasant when they’re not dying.
“Sweet horsey,” I would say, gently, cautiously, pulling up a fat dandelion to feed the beast. It wasn’t so bad. They smelled a little, but it wasn’t their fault. Mostly, I just watched them. They had favorite spots, favorite foods, best friends. They were complicated things, got in bad moods, and sometimes they got in good moods, and that’s when they had a great deal of sex.
There were a couple of horses whose courtship had its own delightful choreography, which involved the mare staring at the stallion for about an hour, which I thought must have something to do with the stallion’s giant penis.
Tom didn’t talk much, but animal sex always got him going. He’d come over to the fence and point out some act of lovemaking to see what I thought about it.
“You ever seen a hog pecker?” he said one day.
There’s just no good answer to a question like that, so I said, “Sure.”
“Then you know it looks just like yours,” he said.
I looked down at where mine usually was and tried not to think about it.
“But a boar, see, theirs is like a corkscrew.” He made a screwy motion with his finger, as though his digit had temporarily transformed into a real boar pecker and he was some sort of wizard. And in a way, he was.
Hey, dude!” Tom said.
He called out from the dangerous side of the fence, in the midst of about ten thousand cows. Fat or not, he was clearly more man than I. He would do anything to an animal. He would grab a cow teat and spray you. He would pick up a snake and kiss it. I once saw him masturbate a dog, like he was showing me a new magic trick.
“You want to see something cool?” he said.
“Something cool” could have meant anything: porn, a two-headed snake, porn involving a two-headed snake. Suddenly, a sonic horror filled the countryside, like a distant bagpiper being slowly fed into the world’s largest garbage disposal. Was that an animal? That couldn’t be an animal. It was the kind of sound one normally ran away from, while shouting that we were all going to die.
“I need your help,” he said.
Before I knew it, I was over the fence and rounding the barn with him, and there she was, the thing that made the noise, a brown cow. From across the fence, from the road, these cows, they looked small. But this cow was not small. It was the size of a starter home. It was really two cows, I suppose, if you counted the one inside her, trying to get out.
“You got to keep the cow from busting out of the gate,” Tom told me.
Whatever was inside her was large and angular and possibly a dining room table. I got a little dizzy. Tom stuck his hand inside the cow, which made her scream some more.
“Hold that gate,” he said. “And don’t let her get out!”
A gate, that was easy. I could hold a gate. I could hold all kinds of things. My hands, for example, over my face, to keep out whatever demonic odors were currently trying to melt my nose bones. The smell was regal in its unpleasantness, a rich goulash that stabbed at the underbelly of the brain, the odor of an animal that had never bathed and left uncovered stool samples in its bedroom every day. And now, people were in its bedroom, attempting to pull things out of its anus, which made it angry, and so it did what any reasonable animal would do: It urinated on us.
Tom did not acknowledge the Niagara of nitrogenous fluid now covering our shoes and legs, nor any of the other viscous liquids pouring out of her. Instead, he considered how best to tie the cow to the wall, explaining that she might become high-spirited and want to run away, which could kill her and the calf, which, he explained, was not ideal.
“All I got’s this twine,” he said. “You think it’ll hold her?”
My first thought was, I think this cow needs some privacy. My second thought was, What’s that in my shoes? My third thought was, Oh, that’s just cow urine! It was around this time that I decided to stop thinking.
> Thirty minutes later, after I’d achieved a pleasant cataleptic trance and had rededicated my life to serving widows and the fatherless, it occurred to me that if holding the gate was necessary, then Tom was clearly expecting the cow to burst through it. I stood there holding the broken gate shut and wondered what my father and brother would do if a cow charged at them. They would probably punch it in the face and try to put some mustard on it. I wanted to ask Tom how we could quiet the beast, but he was too busy prying around inside its birth canal, a procedure proven to upset almost any species.
The cow looked at me. It was a hurtful look.
What was it thinking? It struck me that I’d never thought to ask.
I tried to let it know things would be okay, that we were trying to help, that it wasn’t our fault, that I was sorry, to it and every other animal I’d ever met, sorry for running, for screaming, for shooting it in the face, for letting it get burned alive, for letting it get hit by a truck and eaten by a buzzard and thrown up on a stranger.
What I wanted to say was, I like you, I do, I’m just scared of you.
“I can feel something!” Tom said.
At this point, he seemed to be trying to fit his whole body inside the animal’s vagina. He went deeper, and began to pull, and then asked me to pull him, and both of us began to cry out in what I guessed were sympathetic labor pains, while the cow cried loudest of all, and we all seemed to be praying and pulling until the cow threw Tom into a wall, broke its meager twine noose, and got ready to run.
“The gate!” Tom said.
Our eyes met one last time.
This was my moment to make a stand, to let the animal kingdom know I was not afraid.
She lowered her head, and blood poured out of the back of her, and I could not let her run, and so I threw myself between her and the gate, and she charged, and I closed my eyes and did what needed to be done, which was, to climb the wall like a kitten.
The World's Largest Man Page 9