Free The World's Largest Man by Harrison Scott Key Page B

occasionally both at the same time, which I demonstrated, on the eve of a big hunt, by limping and running into walls. ButPop wasn’t fooled. He must have known what was in my heart, where I really wanted to be. It wasn’t Disney World, or the zoo, or even a well-heated infectious disease facility. What I wanted was to be with my mother at our little sanctuary, a special place that none of the men in my family even knew existed. We even had a secret name for it. We called it the “grocery store.” How shall I describe this Elysium of wondrous delights? Ours was called the Jitney Jungle—in Brandon, many miles away.
    I was not encouraged, generally, to go grocery shopping with Mom, because Pop knew that if you sent your sons to the grocery store too much, they might learn how to locate water chestnuts, which could lead down a dark path toward vegetarian stir-fry and the wearing of aprons and eventually marrying someone named Cecil. What Pop couldn’t have known is that my special time with Mom at the store was much like hunting, in that she allowed me to seek out items and bring them to her.
    â€œFind me some Hershey’s Syrup in a can,” she’d say. “And some Borden’s.”
    Borden’s was our ice cream, and it came in a bucket the size of an aboveground pool. How could hunting deer ever compare to hunting vanilla ice cream, which is generally docile and will let you pour syrup on it without running away?
    I hunted every item with the skill of a Choctaw huntsman with a taste for lists and couponing: Chef Boyardee, Pop-Tarts, Fritos, Hostess Frosted Donettes. I studied this place, learned its secrets, luxuriated in its odors, the brightly illuminated freezer section, the heavenly splendor of the candy aisle, where I crouched low and fondled engorged bags of M&Ms with erotic tenderness, and the metallic pungency of the butcher’s counter, where the meat had been relieved of its more disturbing qualities, such as the eyes, which had a way of searching you out with pity.
    â€œLet’s go,” Mom would say, and in minutes we’d be at another Promised Land, the Brandon Public Library, where Mom showedme how to obtain a library card and books on magic, which made her a kind of wizard. On the way home, she’d let me read aloud, especially when whatever I’d checked out was funny, and we’d laugh like drunk schoolteachers, and like Kafka says will happen, the sea inside me unfroze. I was the daughter she never had, and I knew it, and she knew it, and I was beginning to think Pop knew it, too. But I trusted him. I was his boy, and I knew that if he wanted me to do something, then it must be the right thing for me to be doing, and sometimes it meant work, and sometimes it meant play, and sometimes it meant bloodshed.
    I would have to get up. On that day, my inner seas would remain frozen.
    Pop turned on the light.
    O n my floor lay a host of flannel and chamois and canvas, my allies against the cold, but also the enemies of my dignity. By the time I got everything on, I would be prevented from performing necessary bodily functions, such as relieving my bladder, or actually being able to touch the place where I believed my bladder to be located.
    First, the socks. Cotton. Why cotton? Because we did not understand what people who read Outside magazine understood, that cotton will absorb your sweat and then use it against you. Good socks cost good money, and Pop had more important things to spend our money on, such as prosthetic feet, since our original feet had frozen and fallen off.
    Next, I pulled on a pair of waffled long underwear, also of cotton, and then a cotton union suit, and then two pairs of sweatpants with an excess of fabric in the groin region, so that it looked like I might be concealing a fruitcake near my genitals, followed by multiple sweatshirts and a chamois shirt that had once belonged to Pop and had been given to me becausetoo many hot