The World's Largest Man (8 page)

It would be an easy shot, as they were not moving.

So, my first deer would be a woman. Okay, I guess. That was fine. This is what he wanted. I put the bead of my iron sights where the heart was.

Bang.

I pulled up and looked with both eyes. The deer had not moved.

Two hundred yards was far.

Bang.

More nothing.

Bang.

Additional nothing. Three murderous shots and they hadn't moved. It was like they hadn't even heard the gun. Were they deaf? Was I shooting a family of disabled animals? Was that even legal? I looked at Pop, who gave me a thumbs-up.

I put the gun to my shoulder again. I was fine with missing, really. They were so far away. Pop would understand.

But no. They just stood there. Daring me to do the thing that everybody said would make me a man. But I didn't want to be a man. I could settle for being a child forever, or maybe a woman, or a librarian, or anything that didn't have to kill things.

Five rounds left, one bullet for each stage of grief.

Bang. Denial. My gun was broken.

Bang. Anger. I hate my family, and I hate these deer, even if they are deaf.

Bang. Bargaining. Okay, Jesus. Remember how I said I would become a preacher if you let me kill a deer today? I'll do you one better. Not only will I stop touching my penis, except to wash it and dry it, which I think you are probably okay with, but I will become a missionary to some dangerous and alien land, like Java, or Atlanta. Yes. I will serve you. Just please let me explode this deer's head off its body. Also, I will be nicer to old people. Amen.

The deer had moved a little, but continued to graze, unperturbed. Two shots left.

Bang, another miss. Depression. I should do us all a favor and turn this gun on myself, although I would probably just miss.

One shot left. What would this come to? Would I have to charge at them with a stick? Would Pop come down and hand
me his gun? In that moment, if I thought it'd have made him proud, I would have thrown a grenade at a whole damned family of deer.

Now Bird had found us. He had heard the shooting. He watched.

One more. Make it count.

A short, naked tree stood nearby. It looked dead. I walked to it, and placed my rifle in the crotch of a low branch. I aimed. Help me, Jesus.

Bang.

I
stood ten yards away from the larger deer. It was still breathing. I'd hit her in the gut, but she was not dead. Bird and Pop stood behind me, watching. This was my kill. Becoming a man was complicated, filled with decisions. Such as: Do I just stand here and let it suffer?

“Shoot it again,” Bird said.

Pop said nothing. He merely surveyed the fact of what was happening.

But I couldn't do it. How close do you stand to it? Do you put the barrel against its head? I had to work up the courage. This was supposed to be the easy part. It was lying right there. I usually kept one or two rounds in a pocket, just in case. I found one. It was wet. Could I use it? Should I? Would it misfire? Explode? Blind me?

While I was vocalizing some of these questions, my brother shot the deer in the head.

And that's when we saw the other deer, the baby one.

A yearling. The saddest part is how it just stood there, watching, almost leaning into the clearing where we all stood, as though it wanted to run to its mother, but didn't know if it had permission.

For some reason that I'm not sure I know even now, this only embarrassed me further. I had killed this animal's mother. I tried to tell myself that the fawn was not thinking about its dead mother, that when it went to bed that night, deep down in some secret thicket, it would not feel alone for the first time in its life. And that is what made me sad, and I was embarrassed that I was sad, which made the moment even sadder.

Was I reading too much into the animal? Had I read too much into every animal? What was it with me and animals? Why was I reading a book about talking rabbits? Why did my mother give me books that made me feel feelings, and why did my father give me guns that made me hurt the feelings of animals, by wounding them, and their mothers? Even then, I felt there was great portent in this particular moment, that something important had or was happening in real time, and that it had something to do with me and this deer and its mother and my mother and my father. The air around us all was burdened with meaning.

The small deer turned its head, and that's when I saw that the right side of its face was mostly gone. Its muzzle was split in two, bleeding, its teeth and jawbone exposed, the flesh of its jaw a haze of gore. I had done this. But how? Was this the ghoulish result of the final bullet, ricocheting off some dead tree? It would take a long time for this animal to die. It would starve. Get an infection. Die of shock. Never grow up.

It turned and walked away, slowly, into the Cutover, and was gone.

T
hat was the last time I went hunting, or rather, the last time I tried to shoot anything. For five more years, I would get up on so many mornings in November and December and January in the coldest part of night, only this time I made sure to bring
books. I read without ceasing, Tolkien and Verne and Dickens and Twain and Poe and Hemingway and Steinbeck, and then moved on to the weird stuff, the Asimov and Koontz and King and
Dune
and
Clan of the Cave Bear
, yet another book given to me by Mom, about a Cro-Magnon girl who wanders the wilderness and is adopted by a violent clan of Neanderthals with a limited vocal apparatus, which reminded me of so many of my brother's friends.

These stories were hearty distractions from the horror.

Pop knew. It was our agreement. I would not resist the hunting, and he would not resist the reading, and every deer season, as if by miracle, my standardized test scores would improve, bringing me closer to such time as I might get my paper, as he occasionally reminded me was how not to be a slave to lesser men.

It was that day, I think, when I finally stopped trying to be like my father and my brother and be a different kind of man, the kind who was more like a woman, which is to say my mother. Yes, the kind of man who only climbed trees if being chased by a lion.

Besides, I'd killed a deer. I'd done my part. Really, I'd killed two. There had been no fanfare. Pop had taken no pictures, sent them to no magazines, put them up on no general store walls. They didn't even make me drink the blood. I hardly remember the gutting.

I just kept reading and didn't think about it.

When I finally did go to college, Pop kept asking me to come home and hunt, and I had all sorts of new excuses: that I needed to study, or work, or was planning to have blood in my stool this weekend and couldn't make it. Eventually, he stopped asking.

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.

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.

D
eath 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.

U
p 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 get 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.

W
hen 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.

T
om 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.

H
ey, 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.