Free The World's Largest Man by Harrison Scott Key

sedan of lies.

CHAPTER 6
The Boy Who Got Stuck in a Tree
    I t was very exciting, learning that my father was a liar. At least, to his employer, which I understood to be a sin, but a special kind of sin that is required when your employer is a horse’s ass. My father, I reasoned, must be more complex than previously believed. Perhaps there were “things” occurring in his head, such as “thoughts” and “ideas.” I wished he’d share them, but he almost never did. He was a simple man who did not ask questions, which made him so complicated, whereas I often asked too many questions and felt very complicated, which I felt made me seem simple.
    â€œDo you like your job?” I said, once.
    â€œLike?” Pop said. The word seemed to disorient him.
    â€œYou’ll go to college one day,” he said. “And you can pick your own job.”
    â€œI will?”
    â€œYou got a head for it,” he said. “But you got to get that paper.”
    â€œPaper?” I said.
    â€œDiploma,” he said.
    â€œYessir.”
    â€œJust keep reading them books,” he said.
    But books were full of stories and stories were full of lies and lies hurt Jesus’s feelings, so I didn’t know what to think. I blamed my family. They were the ones who taught me so much about telling stories, and how not to do it, and then, in inspired moments of surprise, how to tell one so good you forgot what day it was, and I liked forgetting what day it was, so I made certain life choices that would allow me to get paid to forget what day it was and teach others to forget what day it was, which is, after all, what I think heaven probably is: the whole world, forgetting what day it is. You have to, I bet, with an endless supply of them.
    I especially love telling stories on holidays. It’s a good time to remind myself of why I love my family, and why I live in another state. We told a lot of stories on a recent Thanksgiving, my father and me sitting at the table over breakfast, remembering what it was like back then, when I was so small and full of potential, and he was so large and full of ideas of how to shoot things.
    â€œMorning,” I said.
    â€œMorning,” he said.
    We sat there in silence for a good five minutes. I had a book, just like in the old days, but I was no longer embarrassed and did not feel it necessary to carry it in my underwear.
    But should I open it? Opening it would have been an admission of failure, evidence that nothing had changed, that We Could Not Communicate. He sat there and stared at the wall. He had a great talent for sitting and staring at nothing. I’d seen him stare like that so many times over the years—in church pews, bleachers, trucks, but mostly on deer stands.
    â€œBe a good day to hunt,” I said.
    â€œYep.”
    I enjoy talking about hunting about as much as I enjoy talking about new technologies in women’s hosiery, but I have very few subjects that I can discuss with my father, and those subjects are: Football, Weather, Money, Children, Children Today, Beating Children Today, and Hunting. We had not hunted together with any regularity in twenty years, and this, I knew, was a hurtful thing to him. So we talked about hunting. And like a great big mossy boulder that had been given a good nudge, Pop came alive and rolled down a hill of stories.
    We talked a good two hours. These were harmless stories, about cold days and elusive deer and the happy memories that I am sure Pop thinks we must share. But we do not share them, not really, largely as a result of something that happened in the woods on December 16, 1988. I made sure not to tell that story.
    By midmorning, our storytelling had grown repetitive and the rolling boulder of my father came to a flat place and stopped. He stood up, and went into the living room, and turned on one of those hunting programs called Buck Blasters or Chasing Tail or Ted Nugent’s American