The World's Largest Man

by Harrison Scott Key

  “Chester! Terrence! Billy! I said sit! You people are animals!”

  She went on, about how they should be lashed to a post in the hot sun and then whipped with a rubber hose, and how she would do it if they wouldn’t send her to prison, and she really seemed like she would do it, like she had been given some drug that made her crazy. I’d never heard Mom speak this way to anybody. From what I could see, the students were perfectly behaved and perfectly horrified at the bloodthirsty woman in front of them.

  Was everybody at this institution deranged, including my own mother? I’d come to school here in part because she seemed the sanest person in my life and because it felt wise to spend as much time around her as possible, where we could discuss films and literature on the long ride to McLaurin, and here she was, secretly a lunatic. She never screamed at home. She sounded dangerous, as violent as Pop and Bird and everybody else.

  I ducked my head out of the window and went back to study hall.

  It was a year before anyone tried to knock hell from me again, and this time it was no classmate, but a full-grown adult.

  “Hello?” I said, into the phone.

  “Is this the little shit’s been talking shit?” the voice on the line said.

  “Who is this?” I said.

  “I’m Tom Bishop, motherfucker.”

  He said it like motherfucker was an actual credential, as if he were identifying himself: Tom Bishop, Licensed Motherfucker.

  “I’ll make you bleed, son,” he said.

  My heart quaked in its little tin casing. What had I done to enrage Mr. Bishop?

  Tom was in his twenties, I knew. I’d only ever met him once, at a football game. All I remember is that he had a mustache and looked very young and was also a pedophile. He was dating one of my classmates, a girl named Casey.

  Everybody liked Casey. Some months before, I’d accidentally touched Casey’s nether regions. It was a totally consensual accident, on a school bus, where a boy can become disoriented and find his hands inside someone else’s underwear without even knowing what happened. Our relationship was intense, passionate, and lasted about three minutes. These days, Casey was into much older guys, the kind with tattoos and children. Hence, Tom, who’d heard of my brief sojourn to Casey’s underworld and needed to ensure I would not be going back. He had nothing to fear. Everybody wanted to be in her panties, and I had long ago decided to find a less crowded pair of underwear.

  “I know where to find you,” he said.

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “That was a one-time thing.”

  “Good, then I’ll only have to whip your ass one time.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll see you up at the school.”

  That night, I couldn’t sleep. Would saying please really make this madman stop? “Please stop hitting me with that crowbar,” I imagined myself saying. I prayed for anything to keep me from school, a fungus, a meteor. If Jesus really didn’t want me to fight, then why couldn’t he help out by liquefying my internal organs?

  I wanted to fight, I did. But I knew instinctively that I was a Man of Peace, and if necessary, a Man of Climbing Trees to Get Away. I was not afraid to climb a tree. That didn’t make me a coward. For example, there could be snakes in the tree.

  The next day.

  Homeroom, nothing.

  First period, nothing.

  In the hallway, I worried: Will I see him? Will he really come?

  Second, third, fourth period, no sign.

  Nothing will make you question your life choices like waiting to die. There were so many things I hadn’t done yet. Go to prom. Go to New York. Find a sword.

  During break, instead of going outside, I went to the library, my old sanctuary, under the guise of studying for a chemistry exam in the following period. The class was hard, and the teacher, Mrs. Nutt, demanded real effort. If anyone liked me less than Tom Bishop did, it was Mrs. Nutt, a small, sturdy matron with magnificently bulbous hair who made no effort to hide her belief that I was born of Satan.

  I sat in the library and tried to think about Mrs. Nutt’s chemistry, but found the specter of Tom Bishop’s promise too real. I looked out the window, and there he was, skulking through the crowd with murder on his mind.

  Ohno ohno ohno ohno.

  I noted with surprise that he was very short. I hadn’t remembered this. Weren’t the short ones more violent? He was clearly capable of disfiguring me, although it might require the use of a footstool.

  The bell rang. I gathered my courage and walked to Mrs. Nutt’s classroom. I sat down. Other students came in, took their seats. No sign of Tom Bishop.

  And then: Tom Bishop.

  Heads turned. Whispers. People knew.

  My heart murmured: fight-fight, fight-fight, fight-fight.

  He smiled, nodded at me to join him in the hallway. I froze. It strikes me now how odd this was, that a grown man with no children in the school, other than the one he was making love to in the back of his truck, could walk in and just start challenging its students to duels. Had we no supervision?

  I tried to remember Pop’s lessons. Something about being nice, then being insane. I briefly considered going right to the insane part, heading Tom off at the pass, but how would I know the precise time to start throwing furniture at his groin? I looked desperately at Mrs. Nutt, for what, I don’t know. Maybe she kept some sort of weapon in her hair?

  “Hey, boy,” Tom Bishop said from the doorway.

  “Hello!” I said, as though attempting to sell him life insurance.

  He beckoned with a finger. The class held its breath. They knew.

  I was about to stand.

  “Young man?” Mrs. Nutt said.

  Was she talking to me? No, she was talking to Tom Bishop. He stared, bewildered, at the woman with the golden topiary on her head.

  “Unless you plan to recite the periodic table,” she said, “you may now leave.”

  In an instant, he withered into a nothing, a sad little imp. He looked around, unsure how to reclaim his virility. Mrs. Nutt walked over to him, looked him in the eye, and gently, sweetly, closed the door in his small, confused face.

  Out the window, we saw him leave.

  I was ashamed. I couldn’t be a child forever.

  The opportunity for redemption came, of course, during English. What was it about the study of literature that made people so angry? We were reading through Romeo and Juliet, a play that has been enraging readers for four hundred years. I was a little older, a little larger. I had more anger now, simmering as I was with hormones, like the young men in our play.

  A boy in the front row was snickering in my direction.

  I did not like the look of him. He was not a bad kid, as far as I knew, but he was strange-looking, with a great deal of body hair in places that seemed wrong. His hairline was so low that it looked like his eyes were on the top of his head. You had the feeling that nomadic peoples could have used his back for evening prayer. I found myself angered by his hair.

  He snickered some more.

  “What are you laughing at?” I said.

  “Him,” he said, pointing at the young man next to me, a friend of mine, Thomas, who looked a little rough that morning.

  “He’s laughing at you,” I said to my friend.

  Thomas shrugged. He was very good at shrugging, his way of demonstrating a practiced apathy to the world. Yes, my friend Thomas needed defending.

  “Hey,” I said to the boy. “Please stop laughing at my friend.”

  He laughed some more.

  “I asked you nicely,” I said. “Please stop laughing.”

  He kept laughing, couldn’t stop.

  “I asked nice,” I said.

  How could somebody with so much hair just go laughing like that?

  I stood up.

  “Coldcock him!” someone said.

  Encouraged by the bloodlust of my classmates, but worried that the teacher might return at any minute, and remembering that I was supposed t
o be a model student, with regard for our nation’s laws and school policies, and that my mother was employed at this institution and that I might require its administrators to write various recommendation letters on my behalf to entities that might help extract me from the miasma of the life that so many who lived here might never escape, including the Laughing Wolfboy, and Tommy, and most definitely Tom Bishop, who’d shown that he couldn’t even leave after he’d already left, I made a decision: We would not fight. Not here.

  “After school,” I said. “At the field house.”

  It was on.

  My secret worry was that perhaps this boy was a badass, had been rehearsing his own Wolf Technique or Chewbacca Punch for months in the privacy of his bedroom.

  “I’m doing this for you,” I said to Thomas, while we waited by the field house. He shrugged. He didn’t care. I was starting to want to kick his ass, too. A few audience members gathered, friends from the baseball team.

  “I can’t wait to see this,” one said.

  It was a lovely autumn day. Here he came, walking down the hill from the band room.

  “Why don’t you fight him?” I said to Thomas, who was now reading a novel about robots on the back of a nearby truck. I wore khaki pants and moccasins and a pink polo. Could I risk ruining these good clothes? These were not the clothes of a fighter. These were the clothes of someone who longs to windsurf.

  We faced off.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Well,” my opponent said. “Here I am.”

  We stared.

  “You were being a freaking jerk,” I said.

  “I wasn’t even laughing at you,” he said.

  “I ought to punch you in the face.”

  “I’ll hit you back.”

  “Yeah, well! I’ll hit you again!”

  We were just a couple of badass motherfuckers.

  Bystanders grew bored, drifted back to their barbells, so I decided to up the ante by making fun of his girlfriend, who was widely known to suffer a disfiguring underbite and a slightly lazy eye, so that you never really knew if she was looking at you, which, in Wolfboy’s case, was probably ideal. I said many things about her that I immediately regretted, at one point comparing her face to a piece of construction equipment and her eye to a planet that had been knocked out of orbit. At this, he broke. He was not far from tears, as though he, too, knew that her face resembled a backhoe and he was only now coming to terms with that.

  This was my Shame Technique.

  Only then could I see: I was his Tommy, his Tom Bishop, a sad little animal threatening to hurt others for no good reason. Wolfboy wasn’t the monster. The monster was me.

  Is this what Jesus wanted? Punching people in the face seemed more humane than what I was doing. The things I’d said about his girlfriend, his father, his single eyebrow. It did not feel great.

  “I’m sorry I laughed at you and your friend,” he said.

  “I’m sorry I said that about your girlfriend,” I said.

  We shook hands. Nobody cheered. Nobody was even there.

  When you leave high school, you realize the world is not a Thunderdome, that you needn’t whip a man to be a man. What you need is intelligence, and hard work, and a scholarship, and a career, so that you can have money, so that you can buy a handgun.

  The river of my life changed at that school. I had learned so much about the democratic promises of universal education, for one, including the lesson that public schools are about the last places in our country, aside from the Doritos aisle at Walmart, where a perfectly reasonable and healthy human being can come into close contact with people who are actually insane. And that includes many of the teachers, and also my mother. There’s just no other explanation for their sweaters.

  I guess it’s no surprise that I would go on to become a teacher myself, and that I, too, like my mother, have a love for sweaters and a gift for screaming at children and announcing that I would like to hurt them with a length of rubber hose, were that permissible.

  But unlike my father or Tommy or Tom Bishop or all the other angry Toms of the world, I never really had an occasion to fight, at least not until I had a wife and children. I have three daughters, and I often find myself standing between them and some danger, some dog, some fire pit, a Great Wall of Father.

  “Will you protect us?” my daughters often ask. “If someone comes into our house?”

  “Of course,” I say, and I can feel the truth of it in my bones. I come from a long line of men who have whipped other men with riding crops, and I have whaled on many things, mostly drums. My daughters are sure I can hurt people, if the need arises. And I believe I could, if I had a folding chair.

  I just hope it doesn’t come to that, because I’m better at the turning of the cheeks. I’ve got an endless supply. Just try and hit me, and you’ll see.

  CHAPTER 12

  This Hurts You More than It Hurts You

  There’s some dispute about what actually happened that Saturday night in the heady days of my seventeenth year, whether it was assault and battery, or just assault, or just battery, but two things were for certain: My father hit me, and I was in my underwear.

  It would be the last time that he hit me.

  What I needed that night were pants. I have always needed pants. People have done nothing but ask me to put on pants since I first had legs. I was in my bedroom, preparing to go on a date with a girl I’ll call Lucy. Lucy had schooled me in the arts of love, had taught me so much about how to treat a woman, and one lesson she taught me was how important it was to wear pants. But that night all the good pants were in the laundry room, on the far end of the house, and so I sought them out with the use of my pantless legs.

  It was just us three in the house, Mom and Pop and me, Bird having long flown the nest for places where there were fewer societal restrictions against smoking marijuana in churches. It was quieter now, simpler. I had taken to bicycling country lanes in solitude, trying to breathe in the rich vapors of this place I knew I would soon be leaving. It was no longer necessary for Pop to coach me to do anything, and we saw much less of each other, even during deer season, my revulsion at the tedium of live-meat acquisition having driven me to seek refuge in SAT test preparations and the writing of poems that were so full of nonsense that many of my early readers would have happily rather watched me saw the heads off animals than be forced to read them.

  Pop and I had grown distant. He did not like what I was becoming, had become. I hadn’t fired my gun in two years, had barely fished, had forgotten how to tie a clinch knot, had quit the varsity baseball team in the year when I could have ruled the outfield, had I made the effort. There was a bitterness in his tight-lipped grin as I shared with him some dubious new enthusiasm: writing, cycling, the drums.

  Every son, I guess, wants his father to know: I am not like you.

  Some of our fathers are ministers, so we make sex with whores. Other fathers make sex with whores, so we become gynecologists. Or our fathers are witch doctors, so we become wizard doctors. This is the way of things. Fathers can accept it, or they can deny it, or they can do what mine did: get mad.

  He was mad about much: his life, his work, his money, his problems, and now, his boy, who was behaving like a homosexual and threatening to go to college with a bunch of Presbyterians, a word that wasn’t even in his Bible, and now his boy had taken to walking around the house in his underwear, and he could not abide it.

  Something was going to happen. There was a reckoning due. A great battle.

  “What’d I tell you about being in your underwear, son?” he said.

  They were watching television, he in his recliner, Mom under the afghan. I strolled past them casually in my briefs, as casually as a young man with no pants and a Kodiak bear for a father can.

  “Yessir, oops,” I said, still pantless, scampering now.

  It is difficult to explain how deeply my father hated his wife having to see his sons naked, or almost naked, but one suspected it was ro
oted in some anxiety over biblical curses and that old Oedipal tug that moves the ancient places of the heart. I thought nothing of my mother seeing my penis, the selfsame penis she had formed in her uterus and powdered for years afterward like it was some sort of little fancy man, much less seeing the profile of the little fancy man inside my underwear, which she washed and folded with such care.

  “I done told you one too many times,” Pop said, getting louder.

  “Sorry,” I said from the laundry room, when I heard his recliner squealing shut.

  As I dug around in baskets for the required garments, I heard Mom say, “No, don’t.” And I turned, and there stood Pop. I was as tall as him now, if not as large. Our eyes met. Then I looked down, and saw that he was holding a belt.

  The question every boy asks himself is this: Can I take my father? If push comes to shove, can I whip him? Huck asked it about Pap. Luke asked it about Darth. And now, as I stood there between a pile of whites and the dryer, what I asked was, Could I defend myself with an ironing board?

  I don’t remember the first time he did it. There was never a time when he wasn’t doing it. I suspect it started very young, when I was two or three.

  It’s called whipping, and it’s as far away from what’s called spanking as Mars from Uranus. Spankings were for little girls and puppies, a tender, halfhearted swat by a parent who didn’t really mean it. A man who merely spanked his children was probably a florist. No, Pop whipped us like a Mexican grandmother beats a rug, with stoic resolve, dispassionately, purposefully, constantly, and sometimes like a Mexican grandmother who smokes PCP and rules a cartel. It was his understanding that boys who were not beaten in a spirit of paternal affection ran the risk of growing up to become happy, overconfident handbag designers.

  “He that spareth his rod hateth his son,” says the Book of Proverbs, “but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” We heard this verse a great deal in church, a holy sanction for the beating. I pictured the writer of Proverbs with a quill in one hand and a large rod in the other, perhaps of bamboo, beating back the sons he so deeply loved.