The World's Largest Man

by Harrison Scott Key

  “Noooo!” said Tom.

  The cow plowed over the earth where I’d stood and was gone, and Tom got up, went running after it. The stall was empty now, save for blood and shit and a dead calf, its legs bent back over it, a monstrosity.

  It’s a strange feeling, seeing a newborn thing dead. I climbed down from my high place, saw Tom in the pasture chasing the big cow. He caught up with her, pulled out the afterbirth with his bare hands, and I made a mental note to gouge out my own eyes when I had the chance. I turned to look at the dead calf, but it was gone, replaced by a thing that stood up on four legs.

  And I heard angels.

  I fell more in love with Mississippi on that day, seeing what it could do, what could happen there, all the beauty and life that could come from nothing, so violently, suddenly. And I think it was on that day that I began to love its people, too, the Toms of this wild place, who could reach deep into God’s animals and pull forth wonders unbidden, such as other animals. I miss that. I miss those people.

  I live in a city now, with completely different kinds of people, the kind who set up playdates for their dogs and allow seeing-eye goats to live in their houses. Which is fine. It feels safer, in many ways, raising our children in the city, where the birds have enough courtesy not to go throwing up on everybody and almost nobody sets their animals on fire.

  Just last week, we were watching one of those nature shows descended from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, but scrubbed of all the animal death. It was a story about a dog who made friends with an orangutan. The dog and the ape cuddled, played, rolled around like old pals. It gave me hope. It was also pretty weird.

  “Back in my day,” I explained to my children, “animals attacked one another on television.”

  “Cool,” they said.

  “And your grandfather made me work on a farm.”

  Young men today, they have no direction, nobody telling them what to do, and so what do they do? They go to college and ruin their lives. But every American boy deserves the opportunity to be trampled by a large animal, although I hear that this is now possible in many of our nation’s most progressive fraternities.

  I told my children these stories, about the snakes that came out of a cow and all the other things I saw and did and wished I had not done with animals.

  “Did that really happen?” they said.

  Maybe they’re right. Maybe it was all a dream. But I know this: I came out of it a new man, a man who appreciated creation a little more, and life, and health, and showers. The animals were kinder to me after that. It’s like they knew, and were grateful, or maybe it was the stick I carried.

  A few minutes after the calf was born and came back to life, Tom wanted to let the world know, so he cranked up the siren on his truck and let it sing. I guess he was just happy. And so was I. It was nice, seeing something not die. I can still hear that siren now, ringing the glad joys of creation in my ear, so many years later, which is about how long it took to get the smell of cattle urine off my shins.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Wishbone

  I was no child anymore, it seemed. I had seen things die and be dead and also undead, come back to life to flourish and fret others, once the beasts had grown large enough. I was getting larger, too. Too large in places, it seemed, not quite large enough in others. Junior high had come and gone, leaving in its wake nothing but questions, generally regarding my genitals, and how large I could expect them to be, or not be, at some point in the future.

  And yet, the years dragged their feet like tired children. When would I be grown, liberated of this man who made us work for free for people who hadn’t even asked us to, who made us pluck hot organs out of pendulous creatures, and who went into debt just to buy guns so that we could obtain meats that could easily have been purchased at the store, if we’d had any money in the bank, which we didn’t, owing to the many guns?

  He yelled, whipped, drove us like beasts, was out of his mind. Wanted us to have a life that might no longer be possible, and bent himself and his conscience every whichaway to make it happen. Whatever he did, he did it brutally, but for the most part he also did it honestly. Cheating required skills that Pop did not have, such as the ability to whisper and make at least one good friend. Pop didn’t have friends, which he believed were things meant for women and children, as were holidays and happiness. A real man didn’t need all that. All a man needed was a gun and a woodstove and maybe, if things got bad, a towel for the blood. He did not cheat unless it served some larger moral good, such as the rigging of the company car into a family car. But that had been justified in his moral calculus, which made it the opposite of cheating: It had been a duty.

  He was righteous, and crazy, and liable to explode, but he did not cheat.

  Except when he had no choice.

  It happened one cool November evening, with the hiss of fried pork chops and the pedantry of Jeopardy’s Alex Trebek wafting down the hall to my room, where I was staring into the mirror at my changing body. It was a glorious thing, this body, and I admired it, its pubescent blubber melting away and hair arriving in secret places with disturbing speed.

  “You’re a man now,” I said to the thing in the mirror. I flexed. What power.

  There was a knock at the door. I jumped onto the bed, covered myself in a pillow, turned my book over, feigned reading. “Come in.”

  It was Pop.

  There had been a great rift between us for months, ever since I’d stabbed the dagger of treason into his back by quitting the football team, and I had begun to worry that I was no longer a son to him, but a turncoat. Pop had been a football hero, then a coach, then my coach. My quitting was a tragedy, a royal abdication. I might as well have expressed an interest in joining the U.S. Men’s Knitting Team.

  Something had died between us.

  Then came this knock at the door.

  “What you doing under that pillow, boy?”

  “Reading.”

  “What about?”

  It was a slightly lusty Dean Koontz novel about a hermaphrodite whose sons possess the ability to telekinetically transport themselves through space and time, and so I said, “It’s about science.”

  “Neat,” he said. I could tell something was wrong, as my father was not generally enthusiastic about science. “I need you to do something,” he said. He was also not a big asker of things. “Fetch them old cleats you got and get dressed. We going to Pearl.”

  There was only one thing in Pearl worth going to on a Thursday night: a complex of dirt football fields as flat and red as a Mars plateau.

  “Why?” I said.

  “I need you to suit up.”

  He walked out.

  That was odd. Not because I preferred hermaphroditic literature to football, but because I was in high school, and Pop coached a peewee team. Let me say that again: He coached a team full of ten- and eleven-year-old fatlings, whose soft little necks had trouble holding up a helmet. My neck, along with the rest of me, was fully formed. I was fourteen.

  Was this a joke? Perhaps the old man was being funny. And then I remembered, my father did not tell jokes.

  The horn on the Dodge bellowed. I grabbed my cleats, ran toward the sound.

  Pop, they said, had been a beast on the grass, a true wonder in athletic contests, despite being as round and thick as a mastodon. They could say this because it was back when they had mastodons. The man had a head like a medicine ball, legs like Doric columns, shoulders like two HoneyBaked hams on either side of a very wide room. It was generally agreed that he would eventually play ball for Coach Vaught at Ole Miss or, at the very least, wrestle bears for a living. Then, during a fateful high school game versus Hernando, he broke one of the more necessary bones in his leg, and—just like that—the dream died. And so, since he would not be making any game-saving sacks or game-winning scores, he set himself to making something even better: a little man, just like him, who might fill those cleats and carry the mantle, live the unlived dream. No son of h
is would have a choice in the matter. The gravity and density of Pop’s DNA would be too much to ignore.

  It took him three marriages, but finally, he got him a boy.

  “Hot damn!” Pop said, that long-ago day, in a hospital just up the road from Graceland. He was excited, because he’d seen a pecker. He devoted the next eighteen years of his life to raising up the little thing attached to the pecker. The little thing, of course, was me.

  “It’ll make a man out of you,” he was always saying. Like the time he told me to saw a deer in half. He handed me a rusty bone saw old enough to have been used by Grant’s siege engineers at Vicksburg and told me to run it through the dead thing’s pelvis.

  “It’ll make a man out of you, boy!” he said, handing me the saw. “And don’t be sawing through his nuts, neither.”

  This is advice I’ve taken everywhere with me: Don’t be sawing through an animal’s nuts. Speaking of nuts, that’s what Pop was about football. It had everything required to make a boy into a man: brutality, blood, a concession stand.

  On the way to Pearl, we spoke little. I had so many questions, like “Do you really expect me to hit all those children?” and “Have you lost your mind?” We powered up Highway 18 in the Dodge, not even a radio station to break the tension. He stared ahead, as he always did, with the frozen gaze one typically associates with Arctic musk oxen.

  I was worried. I was not a big rulebreaker. I did not like the idea of flouting what was clearly league policy about age limits. Some of the boys who played up in Pearl, they were big. I might not stand out too much. But still. What if I was caught?

  “So—” I said.

  “I got you at fullback,” he said, looking straight ahead into the black.

  “Oh.”

  “We running the wishbone.”

  “Good.”

  I had no idea what the wishbone was. Some kind of formation. Also, a salad dressing. I suppose he could sense my wondering, because he soon explained that he was expecting only ten players to show and needed one more or else he’d have to forfeit. I suggested there’d be dozens of teams at the park and that he shouldn’t have a problem finding an eleventh from another squad, some boy of some eager father who wanted his boy to get more reps in.

  “Yeah, but you know the plays,” he said.

  “True, true.”

  I remembered none of the plays. Pop was always doing this, assuming I knew more than I knew about whatever game it was he’d ordered me to play. Overestimating my talent. Believing his DNA had won the battle with my mother’s and that I was like him in every athletic way, even though history had shown us both otherwise.

  When I was six, he mounted a basketball goal in our driveway, believing the angularity and velocity of the sport would at least teach me to juke, which would be of help in football later on. But juking, as well as dribbling and shooting, were somewhat problematic due to my enormous head, bequeathed to me by Pop through the miracle of genetics. He could manage his own enormous head fine, having the adult body to go with it, but I could not, and I worked hard to keep it from hurling toward the ground at dangerous speeds, which is what gravity desires to do to all enormous children’s heads. Invariably, one of our family basketball games would end with my feebly attempting some sort of layup, while Newtonian physics attempted to introduce my skull to the driveway. I would jump, and slip, and come crashing down headfirst onto the concrete.

  Mom would shriek and run to my aid, but not Pop.

  “My boy’s got a powerful head!” Pop would say.

  Next, he put me on a baseball team with boys three years older than me, hoping I’d rise to the challenge. Mercifully, they put me in right field, a clear signal to all that I was mentally disabled. On the rare occasion when a ball limped my way, I’d hurl it toward the infield and would be as shocked as everyone else to see it flying in the wrong direction, toward the heads of children on other fields. The parents shrieked, sought medical help, but not Pop.

  “The boy’s got a powerful arm, don’t he!” he would say, sirens in the distance.

  As I got older, I filled out a little, foreshadowing my future girth and power, but still lacked hand-eye coordination, as well as eye-foot, foot-foot, and head-wall coordination. In games of Two-Hand Touch or the regrettably named Smear the Queer, to be sure, I struck people and objects with great frequency. Once, after scoring a touchdown, I broadsided my grandfather’s barn and knocked two planks loose. Cousins ran inside for something to soak up the blood, but not Pop.

  “Seems like he’s got him some powerful legs, too,” he said, while relatives pried me from the me-shaped hole.

  When I turned ten, Pop announced that I would play football. The time had come. Glory. It was an August afternoon when he took me outside, pulled from his trunk enough football equipment to make a house payment, and told me to put it on so he could hit me: shoulder pads, Puma cleats, a jockstrap large enough for a Viking warlord. I put it on, and he got down opposite me.

  “Say, Hut, hut,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Just say it.”

  Nothing’s quite as horrifying as watching your extra-large father—for all practical purposes the Incredible Hulk with a heart condition and comb-over—squat down, look you in the eyes, and ask you to ask him to hit you.

  “Hut, hut,” I said, and I soon found myself blessed with the gift of backward flight.

  “What are you doing to my baby?” Mom said, as I lay there, my nose bleeding, my life-force pooling into the dry, sandy ground.

  “That’s how a man hits,” he said.

  Pop had never been my coach before. He was safer in the bleachers, telling himself harmless lies about his boy. But coaching. Someone could get hurt. Me, for example.

  Pop poured everything into my teams, building squads that might array themselves around me and help carry me to some future exaltation. He did this by trolling the playgrounds and trailer parks of our community, filling the roster with previously unknown athletes, boys whose time in juvenile detention had precluded their involvement in youth sports. He made the acquaintance of other large men, who might have large offspring, and many did. He signed up poor black children, whose parents could not afford the registration fee, or the equipment, or the gas money to get to games, and he paid for them from his own pocket. Which is to say, we had a roster full of large, fast, hungry, and very grateful athletes. Also, we had no savings.

  “You spend too much on football,” Mom said.

  “It’s his future we talking about,” Pop said. “He’ll play college ball one day.”

  “I sure would like to take a vacation one day, or maybe get some new Sunday dresses.”

  “I sure would like you to cook us some dinner.”

  Was this how a husband was supposed to talk to a wife? I recognized a superior control in my mother, a Hoover Dam harnessing a righteous fury and turning it into a whole other thing. I could see a regal confluence of grace and power in her body and face when Pop spoke to her like this—was it a joke between them, or not a joke at all? When she looked at him, there was a willful weakness in her eyes, mouth, the closed lips, the unclenched jaw: Was it love, or pity, or a prayer?

  I was old enough to know she had options: She could have left him, for example, or poisoned him, which she had many opportunities to do, given that she controlled the means of production of the dinners he so deeply loved, but she wasn’t going to poison him and she wasn’t going to leave, because she’d been left once before—and so had he: twice. I’m sure she was starting to see why. It was a miracle he hadn’t been killed by a woman somewhere along the way, and I think Mom must have known it. She was his protector.

  “No other woman would put up with this,” she’d say.

  “Shit,” he’d say. “I’m a catch.”

  “And I ought to throw you back.”

  She stayed with him out of love and sacrifice: It would have been a cruel act to release my father back into the world, to devour more women. He was safer this
way, steamrolling her. She could take it. She didn’t mind lying down. It was a comfortable position, convenient for both napping and reading.

  And for ducking the volcanic power of the man, and he was a volcano. You just had to get out of his way, and that’s what Mom did. She loved the volcano, saw through his magma to something hurting underneath it. She did not run from the gaping maw, but stood there on its rim and cooked it a pan of cornbread, which the volcano liked very much, and helped calm it down.

  Nevertheless, the volcano had no money for new Sunday dresses for her, because of all the spending on football, and so she came up with a plan, which was to tutor local children for extra money in the afternoons at our dining room table, which meant the delaying of the making of the daily cornbread, which typically would’ve meant the volcano would bring desolation, but in fact was fine, because that meant Pop could keep us longer at football practice every evening and make us run more laps around the field. It worked out for everybody. Mom got a new dress or two, and Pop got his football team, and I got to spend more time getting concussions, which taught me a valuable lesson, which I have since forgotten, due to the many concussions.

  We won bowl trophies and whipped many teams across the county. Pop soon became a vaunted member of the fraternity of coaches, a real bootstraps kind of hero. And I am grateful for what he did. It was fun, all the healthy camaraderie, the sleepovers after games, the time spent with my mother in the hospital while suffering from mild brain-bleeding.

  I toughed it out, fought through phalanxes of giant corn-fed children, tried my hardest to do something right. I could barely understand the cryptic metaphors Pop used in his coaching.

  “Eat his lunch!” Pop would shout from the sidelines.

  “Eat his what?”

  “His lunch.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let me hear some leather pop!”

  “Leather?” I would say. It sounded like something he’d pried out of a dictionary of nineteenth-century hobo slang.