The World's Largest Man Read Online Free Page B

demon.
    I felt better.
    The long trip there was filled with hope, through miles of verdant glens smelling of chlorophyll and Christian charity. I ignored the occasional sign of economic hardship, the homes and trailers where there appeared to be an excess of chickens roosting in derelict sedans. Ten miles later, we saw it: low and flat like a military barracks, its bleached brick the color of creamed corn. It looked like a dystopian outpost, the sort of place where one might see a wild dog in the road, eating a baby.
    I n the office, we waited while a pleasant woman with a golden bouffant the shape and luminescence of a Fabergé egg clutched a Smith Corona at her desk. Hers was old hair, harking back to a more innocent time, before Nixon and low ceilings, when women had been forced to use their hairdos for the ensnaring of moths and small birds.
    The door opened and in walked a tall boy, tall as a man, sinewy and lean with scabs across his dirty, streaked arms, followed by a teacher.
    â€œSit!” the teacher said, and walked out.
    â€œSit down, Willie,” the hair lady said.
    Willie sat.
    A sour stink suffused the room. Sort of like garbage, if it was wrapped in a decorative sack made from the soiled underwear of lumberjacks. My nose shuddered. I would come to know it as the odor of poverty, a new sensation to my delicate suburban nostrils, a tangy olfactory assault wrought by those whose homes did not have running water. I tried, briefly, to pity this large student, but found that his odor had incapacitated the parts of my brain that controlled both language and compassion.
    Another woman entered, smiling, a mannish lady with thick forearms and short gray hair. The principal. She looked at Willie.
    â€œI hope you’re not still stabbing people with your pencil, son. I thought we talked about that. What are pencils for?”
    â€œEating,” he said.
    She turned to us, introduced herself.
    I could not take my eyes off Willie, who could not take his eyes off my pants. I’d worn parachute pants, snug nylon trousers appropriated from distant breakdancing cultures, with many zippers, designed to make one look as much as possible like a duffel bag.
    I shouldn’t have worn those pants.
    â€œLet’s find you a class,” the principal said, leading me to the door. I clutched Mom’s hand and performed a quick mental calculation concerning the difficulty of reattaching myself to the wall of her uterus.
    â€œRemember,” Mom said. “You’re very special. You have talent.”
    The only talent I needed, in a school full of Willies, apparently, was the ability to digest my school supplies.
    I met my teacher and my new fourth-grade class, and noted with concern that many students were dressed like Native Americans. I was instructed to sit behind a child in the back wearing an actual headdress. I searched for clues that I had accidentally been enrolled in the Mississippi Sanatorium for Children Who Must Wear Costumes to Feel Not Crazy or perhaps that I had died and was now in hell.
    Recess came quickly.
    In Memphis, recess took place in a canopied glen, the centerpiece a playground constructed of artisanal hardware andswarthy timbers salvaged from a sunken colonial schooner. This new playground was rather Dalíesque, though, a grassless pasture of hard dirt, its sparse equipment of weathered iron apparently welded on-site from the remains of expired locomotives.
    Many of the students were enormous, tall, thick, with long orangutan arms and sideburns, and this included many of the girls, who, in a far corner of the playground, appeared to be stoning a boy roughly my size.
    â€œI got a gun,” said a voice behind me.
    I turned around and there stood a young man wearing no costume at all, save the badge on his flannel shirt.
    â€œToday’s Western Day,” he said. “Then it’s Nerd Day.” A Surrealist nightmare unspooled in my imagination: Cat Day, Vegetable Day,