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

Mom. On occasion, we listened at open windows, around paneled corners. I could understand very little of it, only that Clyde was a motherfucking sonofabitch who mocked and derogated Pop’s lack of formal schooling, and more. This, as one could imagine, made Pop want to rip off Clyde’s head and take a shit down the hole in his neck.
    â€œI’ll kill him,” Pop said.
    â€œDon’t kill anybody,” Mom said.
    â€œI’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll whip his ass. I’ll knock that goddang mustache right off his face.”
    â€œYou’ll be fired,” Mom said.
    â€œI’ll be a hero,” he said. “Then they’ll make me the boss.” Pop was under the impression that modern companies functioned much like the animal kingdom.
    I worried something might happen. He would do something rash. He’d been doing rash things for so long. It was his talent. His gift. He’d threaten to buy a new boat, and then bang: Evinrude shadows across the lawn. He’d threaten to whip one of us for asking too many questions about lunch, and so we’d ask a question about supper and he’d come out swinging.
    Soon, he would do something to Clyde. I knew. I prayed. I wanted Jesus to help my father use the faculty of reason, or at least imagination, in dealing with this hateful man, or we’d all end up homeless, bereft of our baths and boats.
    What would Pop do? A man of action always does something.
    W e left the house right after sunrise. Fearing I would need a way to pass the time, I had strategically placed a book in my pants. Out there in the country, I was always putting things in my pants, sometimes to hide them, such as books, and sometimes to warm them, such as my hands, and sometimes because I was bored. Boredom, I knew, was a dangerous thing. For some children, it led to experiments with sex, and drugs, and alcohol, and lighting one another on fire, sometimes with the alcohol. For some of us, the never-ending rural ennui led to destructive habits with literature. And so I took books everywhere, to places where reading was discouraged, such as church, and school, and I often found myself inthe principal’s office having to explain my fascination with knowledge.
    I blame my mother, who introduced me to the perverse habit of reading through the gateway drug of encyclopedias, which she begged my father to purchase from a man at the door, hoping to counterbalance our growing knowledge of firearms and axes and tractors with more peaceful, productive knowledge that could be found in the World Book , such as a list of the major exports of Bolivia, which she felt would help us in our lives, should we end up in Bolivia at some point in the future and need to barter for tungsten, which is just one major export of Bolivia.
    I loved those encyclopedias, the closest thing we had to the Internet, despite our not knowing what the Internet was. The World Book was our rabbit hole into the world of ideas, and I am grateful to Mom for convincing Pop to take out a second mortgage to buy them, which is likely what he had to do, given their size and weight and gold-leaf pages. The lot of them must’ve weighed as much as the gun cabinet, and their prominence in our living room meant a great deal to Mom, and to me.
    They were not cheap, and did not go unused. A boy could get as lost in them as the woods. In its twenty-one volumes, I learned about clouds, trees, Dwight Eisenhower, and Vasco da Gama, spent rainy days absorbing facts that would come in useful much later in life, such as the estimated temperature of the surface of Mercury, or a visual chart with the comparative sizes of various deers of the world. The smallest? The Key deer. I still remember that. It felt significant, having a deer with my last name.
    These encyclopedias led to literacy, which led to the frequenting of book fairs and libraries, which led to competitive reading for the March of Dimes, which led to the