The World's Largest Man

by Harrison Scott Key

  Our cul-de-sac emptied out onto a quiet, lazy boulevard and a glennish copse of approximately five acres. This park was usually empty, surrounded by homes with one bathroom and driveways paved mostly with dirt. It was a park for children, but also the occasional armed robbery and what looked to be, in my headlights one evening, a prom date–slash–youth breeding experiment.

  “Be careful,” Mom said, on the phone, warning us about all the things in the city that might kill her grandchildren, such as farmers’ markets. It was hard for her, our being so far away. Without her guidance, we might do something careless, like put one of the babies in the microwave or allow one of them to be asphyxiated in the night by plastic grocery sacks that had become sentient and homicidal.

  On their first visit, she saw something troubling in a neighbor’s garage.

  “Oh no,” she said, sounding upset. “Look!”

  I fully expected to see a Burmese python swallowing a small baby.

  “What?”

  “That.” She pointed to a small refrigerator. “One of the babies could get in there and die.”

  I explained that the youngest could not yet walk and that the other was so scared of clouds and gravity that she would not leave the house without a Secret Service detail and a diaper over her head. She could barely look out the mail slot without hyperventilating.

  Mom seemed as crazy as ever for suggesting it, but she had an uneasy feeling. You could see it in her face.

  Not long after, I had my own uneasy feeling.

  It was August of our second year in Savannah, about eight in the morning, the world’s color strangely muted, the picture dimmed. Our end of the street is adumbrated in live oak and sweet gum trees, but there was something more, some ecliptic phenomena, that arrested everything in gray-blue half-light, like somebody put in the wrong bulb. It was supposed to be a day like every other. I’d left in the dark, had stared at a cup of coffee and tried to get it to tell me secrets about what to write about that day, and I stared and stared, and maybe wrote a line and loved it, then erased it and planned a botched suicide attempt about which I would tell nobody, but which would hopefully inform my work in new and meaningful ways, and now my work was done and I was driving home, to dress for my day job and pretend to be normal for the rest of the day.

  The world should’ve been waking up, but on that late summer morning, everything looked asleep, even the police car idling at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, and I saw that the neighborhood was not asleep, but heaving with held breath.

  I passed the policeman, turned onto my short, stubby street. I worried about hitting one of the pets who lived there, lazing across the cracks of the old pavement like lions at the zoo. It would be easy to hit one of the cats. They are petulant and troubled. They don’t move.

  I pulled in, parked, tramped across my sandy driveway, through the unlatched gate. When I opened the door, I expected my daughter to be standing there, as she always was in those days.

  “You came back!” she would say, running to me.

  It was hard not to wonder at how much joy the world can bear. One minute, you entertain thoughts of Ending It All. The next, a small human buries her little baby Medusa head in your lap because your arrival has brought her new and everlasting joy. You spend your whole life walking into rooms and the world couldn’t care less, people barely look up from their salads, and then suddenly there’s this person, these people, tiny though they be, who find you more interesting than almost any food product. They grapple you, tug your pants, want you to come with them to see things, pictures, clothes, toys, forts, bowel movements, anything. They have made them for you, and want you to see.

  But when I opened the door that morning, none of that happened. Nobody came running. My wife was standing there in the middle of the floor, not looking good.

  “They found her in the park,” she said.

  “Found who?”

  Everything got loud and superheated and accelerated backward and forward. What had happened? I stared at my pale wife staring back at me, telling me that our two-year-old daughter was gone, and the past unfurled like an old carpet with hateful baby snakes in it and the future like an unread, black-edged scroll.

  I heard the newborn in the other room crying and saw the toddler in between my wife’s legs, hiding, bright-eyed and not scared at all, but the look on my wife’s face hadn’t changed.

  What had happened?

  “The police came,” my wife said. “There was a man in the house.”

  “Who?”

  “The police.”

  “Who was in the house?”

  “The police.”

  She had been up much of the night before, nursing the new little baby, barely a month old, and so she had been sleeping extra-hard, extra-deep when she had been pulled up from the dark by the sound.

  “A burglar,” she thought. “A home invader.”

  I still didn’t understand, and then I understood.

  “The man was yelling into the house. It was the police,” she said. She did not even stop to put on clothes, stumbling into the living room toward the sound of the man through the fog of a tired mother’s sleep. A tall, uniformed officer stood on the porch, looking through the wide-open front door, holding our toddler.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “She got out? How long was she gone? Did someone take her?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “She never gets out. She’s too scared.”

  “I know.”

  I sat down, not on the furniture, because that seemed too casual to fully contain the white-hot fear that heaved my bones, so I sat on the floor, where I thought I could catch my breath, as I remember seeing my mother do when news hit her too hard and we would laugh.

  “Did you leave the door unlocked?” my wife said.

  Yes, of course, of course.

  Of course.

  My daughter ran to me, and I held her.

  When you’ve always laughed at people for worrying that a family member might die, you don’t know what to do when, of a midsummer’s morning, it’s you who can see nothing but a dark hole inside you with death at the bottom.

  What did the policeman say, I wanted to know.

  He got a call, she said. A baby in the park.

  “Where?”

  “The tennis courts.”

  “Who called?”

  “We don’t know,” she said, still dazed, looking off. She was already in the first-person plural, the mode of the newspaper, the authorities, reports, notices, obits.

  “He said something about a school bus driver,” my wife said. Maybe the bus driver saw her, called it in? I am spiritually assaulted at the thought of her walking, or being carried by some unknown entity, across that wide street where school buses lurch and race and have crushed more cats and squirrels and birds than I want to imagine.

  The idea of this child, alone in a fallen world, in a park with dogs and owls and used condoms and discarded brassieres, alone with no shoulders to climb—it was a sickening thought. I would not eat for two days.

  Kids die all the time.

  “Did you go to the park?” I asked my daughter.

  “Yeah,” she said, almost embarrassed. Her eyes were dreamy and make-believe.

  “What happened at the park?” I said.

  “I got on a school bus, and the man was there and the blanket.”

  “What did you do on the school bus?”

  “I cried and cried,” she said.

  “How did the policeman know where we lived?” I asked my wife.

  “The lady who lived across from the tennis courts,” she said.

  She was a short little lady, round and squat as an egg, the kind who comes outside when she sees police cars.

  Sitting there holding my child, and rocking a little bit and trying not to scare her and going ahead and deciding that maybe I would have to lose my shit later at work, in the bathroom so nobody could see, and feeling the great deep chasm inside me that had been reveale
d through this terrible story that wasn’t terrible in fact but only in potential—this was the moment when I finally felt like a father.

  It was a long time before I could tell anyone that story. I still haven’t told Mom.

  Something very large had happened in my heart, and I did not understand it, something too big to be removed through the mouth, in a story. Sometimes, it came out of my eyes. Everywhere I looked, I saw things that wanted to kill my daughters: cars, heat waves, large birds of prey. I tried to remind myself that God didn’t make the world to kill us, but he did seem to make it easy for somebody else to do it, and I didn’t get it.

  Is this what it felt like to be my mother? In the days and weeks after it happened, when it all settled down into something low in the valley of the shadow of memory, I couldn’t help but think of her.

  She’d lost so much in her life: a father who’d left when she was five; a brother who died too young; then her own mother, who died in a bed in Greenwood, Mississippi, with nobody there to help but her. My mother had no family but us, and every time we left the house for some river, some woods, she didn’t know if she’d lose us, too, and frankly, she almost did, many times. She was the brave one. Not us.

  I’d always thought it was the things that could kill you that made you a man, that made you alive. What really makes you alive is love.

  Nowadays, I still throw my kids up into the general area of the ceiling fan, and I put them in a boat and take them into the Atlantic Ocean, and I let them sit on the counter while I do the most dangerous thing known to humankind, preparing uncooked chicken.

  But I do lock my door now, because one day, all of us will look up and see the door open and know that we might never see our children again.

  We’ll never really know why she went, how she got out there, whether something took her, a home invader with a heart of gold, or whether she went alone, tried to climb up into the baby swing on the playground or padded across the park toward the place where the city turns on the sprinkler in the summer or cried and called for us or wondered at the wide gray world and just stood there, smiling, with her little bunny rabbit.

  I’d always thought it was Reader’s Digest that made Mom crazy. Then I remembered: Those stories had happy endings. People almost never died. They were tales of survivors. What they were, were stories about her.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Ballad of Jimmy Crack Corn

  There’s just something about knowing your daughter could have been killed in a neighborhood that makes you fall in love with a place. After all, she hadn’t died. Could the neighborhood somehow be responsible for her not dying, and if so, how do you thank a neighborhood? By continuing to live there and love one’s neighbors? And what if, as soon as you’d moved there, you had begun making plans to move away, mostly because of the neighbors, whom you did not love?

  It was easy to love our closest neighbors, the two or three families from whom we borrowed eggs and ladders, but just beyond the mouth of the cul-de-sac were graver dangers we hadn’t noticed until it was too late: Renters. Not the good kind who grow their own flowers and poison their weeds, but the kind who poison their flowers and grow their own weed. The housing market was a goner, and the renters poured in two by two, and it was not long before their homes started to look as though pornographic films and ritual murders were being filmed inside: the venetian blinds tattered, a front door that appeared to have been clawed at by a large mammal, strange garbage by the roadside: empty boxes of Milwaukee’s Best, cartons of latex gloves, discarded tubs of what appeared to be monitor lizard food. These lizard people were up to no good, one feared.

  “Where do you live?” people asked me. That’s a popular question anywhere, but especially in an old city like Savannah, the answer sure to give the asker clues as to how comfortable you are with your children having friends who have witnessed a murder or know what a bail bondsman is.

  On their first visit to the city, my father grimaced at every home in our neighborhood: The tall grass, the weedy flower beds, the sunken roofs, the disturbing shortage of American trucks. This was an unfit place for his boy. His boy, after all, was a doctor.

  “This is my son, Dr. Key,” Pop had begun saying to his cousins at family funerals.

  “How impressive!” they’d say, preparing to invite me to study their growths. “And what kind of doctor are you?”

  “I’m an English teacher.”

  “What kind, you say?”

  “I treat people who are having trouble with their colons.”

  “Oh.”

  “And semicolons.”

  “Oh! I see!” they’d say, more confused, looking around for assistance.

  My wife would intervene.

  “He’s not the kind of doctor who helps people,” she would say.

  “I thought you said he was a doctor,” they’d say to Pop.

  “A professor!” he’d declare with visible pride.

  Professors were supposed to live in big old houses in places where American flags and wisteria whipped in the tastefully scented wind, and it would have been too difficult to explain to Pop that those days were over, that universities were indeed lovely places to work but the salaries for people who scanned sonnets for fun was somewhat less than for those who scanned tumors.

  Had he really worked that hard to give his boy a life in a place where everything was smaller: the bathrooms, the dogs, the guns? The house was so tiny that I’d had to put my drums on the back porch, which pleased my wife, because she believed they’d be easier for someone to steal, but I didn’t like it, and neither did Pop. Playing drums was strange enough; keeping them on your back porch was just trashy. Born in 1942, right there in between the Depression babies and the boomers, Pop came from a generation where everything got bigger and better every day in every way, and that included your income and your square footage and your prospects and your BMI. I wanted to show him that a smaller house didn’t necessarily mean a smaller life, that I thought it would be good for my offspring to grow up in a place where the children didn’t all look alike and they could learn the virtue of humility and what sorts of trees to climb when chased by marginalized dogs.

  “It’s a starter home,” I explained.

  “Yeah, good,” he said.

  Humble people come from places like this, I thought, in addition to felons. Things were looking up. Houses had been flipped, flower boxes mounted, picket fences installed. For every discarded Magnum Lubricated Condom, there was the sudden appearance of a jogging stroller.

  On the corner lot of our street lived a sweet man, a blind veteran we called Old Man Winter because he was old and grizzled and when he spoke you could sort of feel the shiver of death, and also because we could not remember his name. He usually wandered in the street, gathering tennis balls knocked over the fence from the small public courts the city had installed to attract the sort of people who might not keep lizards. Old Man Winter gathered these balls, which were the last remaining objects he could see besides the sun, and handed them out to the squirrels, who he believed were our children.

  “What’s your name, again?” I asked him, often.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Your name.”

  “Tennis balls,” he said, handing me one.

  “Your name.”

  “Tennis balls!” he said, pointing.

  He would sit in the shade of his trees on a lawn chair and tell me about the trees, bigger than any dogwoods I’d ever seen, which he explained had been purchased by his dead wife in the mists of prehistory from a mail-order catalog, which he spoke about with great awe.

  “It was a book full of trees,” he’d say.

  “Amazing,” I’d say.

  In spring, these dogwoods bloomed bright white like an earthbound cloud bank that made it almost seem like heaven, so pretty you thought you wanted to find a way to live there forever, because you’d always wanted to live in a place where people planted things that would outlive them, because real be
auty took a lifetime.

  He was a good man, and the neighborhood had others like him, GI Bill homesteaders who had made it a pretty place, but they were dying.

  Then came the day that every homeowner knows too well, the day when you see a naked man fighting with the shrubbery. We pulled into the cul-de-sac, and we saw him in Old Man Winter’s yard.

  “Is that man naked?” my wife said.

  We parked, tried not to stare, but before I could get inside the house, the naked man was standing behind me.

  “I got a flare,” he said.

  I turned around and was pleased to note that he was not naked after all, just wearing flesh-colored shorts designed for a toddler.

  “A flare!” he said again.

  “A flour!” the large woman behind him said, holding sheets of paper.

  They had come right up into my yard, opening the gate of my little picket fence as if it were their very own, a small but telling detail.

  “A flyer?” I said.

  “You bet,” he said. “I can do it all: trim, chop, lop, rake, cut.”

  “He can do it all,” the large woman said.

  The man was what my father would describe as “squirrelly.” Like a squirrel, he jerked, stiffened, shuddered in fleshy paroxysms the way most people do when filled with Holy Ghost Power. Unlike a squirrel, he seemed overly concerned with rubbing himself in general and his nipples in particular. He was muscular, his abs defined, what my brother would’ve described as “ripped.” He also appeared high on the drugs, perhaps of the Moon Rock variety, or whatever the youth call it these days. Kibbles ’n Bits? I had seen this sort of human before, but could not remember where. Maybe a TV show: Divorce Court? People’s Court? Cops?

  The woman behind the naked man explained that she was Old Man Winter’s granddaughter. She was a big gal, and the eye was drawn to her hair, which could best be described as Thunderdome-era Tina Turner. It was red, and it swelled up and out from her skull, a rare and deadly tropical flower.