A prayer for Owen Meany (88 page)

"BUT YOU NEVER KNOW," Owen told me. "WE'LL JUST
HANG AROUND, SORT OF PLAY IT BY EAR-EITHER WAY, I CAN GET A COUPLE OF FREE DAYS
OUT OF IT. WHEN THERE'S BEEN A FUCK-UP LIKE THIS, THERE'S NEVER ANY PROBLEM
WITH ME GETTING A COUPLE OF DAYS AWAY FROM THE POST. I JUST NOTIFY THE ARMY
THAT I'M STICKING AROUND PHOENIX-'AT THE REQUEST OF THE FAMILY,' IS HOW I PUT
IT. SOMETIMES, IT'S EVEN TRUE-LOTS OF TIMES, THE FAMILY WANTS YOU TO STICK
AROUND. THE POINT IS, I'LL HAVE LOTS OF FREE TIME AND WE CAN JUST HANG OUT
TOGETHER. LIKE I TOLD YOU, THE MOTEL HAS A GREAT SWIMMING POOL; AND IF IT'S NOT
TOO HOT, WE CAN PLAY SOME TENNIS."

"I don't play tennis," I reminded him.

"WE DON'T HAVE TO PLAY TENNIS," Owen said. It seemed
to me to be a long way to go for only a couple of days. I also thought that the
details of the body-escorting business-as they might pertain to this particular
body-were more than a little uncertain, if not altogether vague. But there was
no doubt that Owen had his heart set on my meeting him in Phoenix, and he
sounded even more agitated than usual. I thought he might need the company; we
hadn't seen each other since Christmas. After all, I'd never been to
Arizona-and, I admit, at the time I was curious to see something of the
so-called body escorting. It didn't occur to me that July was not the best
season to be in Phoenix-but what did / know?

"Sure, let's do it-it sounds like fun," I told him.

"YOU'RE MY BEST FRIEND," said Owen Meany-his voice
breaking a little. I assumed it was the telephone; I thought we had a bad
connection. That was the day they made desecrating the U.S. flag a federal
crime. Owen Meany spent the night of July , , in Oakland, California, where he
was given a billet in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters; on the morning of July ,
Owen left quarters at the Oakland Army Depot-noting, in his diary, "THE
ENLISTED MEN ON FAR EAST LEVY ARE RE-

        
 
QUIRED TO LINE UP AT A NUMBERED DOOR, WHERE
THEY ARE ISSUED JUNGLE FATIGUES, AND OTHER CRAP. THE RECRUITS ARE GIVEN STEAK
DINNERS BEFORE BEGINNING THEIR FLIGHT TO VIETNAM. I'VE SEEN THIS PLACE TOO MANY
TIMES: THE SPARS AND CRANES AND THE TIN WAREHOUSE ROOFS, AND THE GULLS GLIDING
OVER THE AIRPLANE HANGARS-AND ALL THE NEW RECRUITS, ON THEIR WAY OVER THERE,
AND THE BODIES COMING HOME. SO MANY GREEN DUFFEL BAGS ON THE SIDEWALKS. DO THE
RECRUITS KNOW THE CONTENTS OF THOSE GRAY PLYWOOD BOXES?"

Owen noted in his diary that he was issued, as usual, the
triangular cardboard box, in which the correctly prefolded flag was
packaged-"WHO THINKS UP THESE THINGS? DOES THE PERSON WHO MAKES THE
CARDBOARD BOX KNOW WHAT IT'S FORT' He was issued the usual funeral forms and
the usual black armband-he lied to a clerk about dropping his armband in a
urinal, in order to be issued another one; he wanted me to have a black
armband, too, so that I would look ACCEPTABLY OFFICIAL. About the time my plane
left Boston, Owen Meany was identifying a plywood container in the baggage area
of the San Francisco airport. From the air, flying over Phoenix, you notice the
nothingness first of all. It resembles a tan- and cocoa-colored moon, except
that there are vast splotches of green-golf courses and the other pampered land
where irrigation systems have been installed. From my Geology course, I knew
that everything below me had once been a shallow ocean; and at dusk, when I
flew into Phoenix, the shadows on the rocks were a tropical-sea purple, and the
tumbleweeds were aquamarine- so that I could actually imagine the ocean that
once was there. In truth, Phoenix still resembled a shallow sea, marred by the
fake greens and blues of swimming pools. Some ten or twenty miles in the
distance, a jagged ridge of reddish, tea-colored mountains were here and there
capped with waxy deposits of limestone-to a New Englander, they looked like
dirty snow. But it was far too hot for snow. Although, at dusk, the sun had
lost its intensity, the dry heat shimmered above the tarmac; despite a breeze,
the heat persisted with furnacelike generation. After the heat, I noticed the
palm trees-all the beautiful, towering palm trees. Owen's plane, like the body
he was escorting home, was late. I waited with the men in their guayabera
shirts and huara-ches, and their cowboy boots; the women, from petite to
massive, appeared immodestly content in short shorts and halter tops, their
rubber thongs slapping the hard floors of the Phoenix airport, which was
optimistically called the Sky Harbor. Both the men and women were irrepressibly
fond of the local silver-and-turquoise jewelry. There was a game room, where a
young, sunburned soldier was tilting a pinball machine with a kind of steadfast
resentment. The first men's room I found was locked and labeled "Temporarily
Out of Order"; but the paper sign was so yellowed, it looked like an old
announcement. After a search that transported me through widely varying degrees
of air-conditioned coolness, I found a makeshift men's room, which was labeled
"Men's Temporary Facilities."

At first, I wasn't sure I was in a men's room; it was a dark,
subterranean room with a huge industrial sink-I wondered if it was a urinal for
a giant. The actual urinal was hidden by a barrier of mops and pails, and a
single toilet stall had been erected in the middle of the room from such fresh
plywood that the carpentry odor almost effectively combated the gagging quality
of the disinfectant. There was a long mirror, leaned against a wall rather than
hung. It was about as "temporary" a men's room as I ever hoped to
see. The room-which was in its former life, I guessed, a storage closet; but
with a sink so mysteriously vast I couldn't imagine what was washed or soaked
in it-was absurdly high-ceilinged for such a small space; it was like a long,
thin room that an earthquake or an explosion had turned on its end. And the one
small window was so high, it was almost touching the ceiling, as if the room
were so deeply underground that the window had to be that high in order to
reach ground-level light-scant little of which could ever penetrate to the
faraway floor of the room. It was a transom-type window, but without a door
under it; as to how it was hinged, it was the casement-type, with such a deep
window ledge in front of it that a man could comfortably have sat there-except
that his head and shoulders would be scrunched by the ceiling. The lip of the
window ledge was far above the floor-maybe ten feet or more. It was that kind
of unreachable window that one opened and closed by the use

        
 
of a hook attached to a long pole-if one
opened and closed this window, at all; it certainly looked as if no one had
ever washed it. I peed in the small, cramped urinal; I kicked a mop in a pail;
I rattled the flimsy plywood of the "temporary" toilet stall. The
men's room was so makeshift, I wondered if anyone had bothered to hook up the
plumbing to the urinal or the toilet. The intimidating sink was so dirty I
chose not to touch the faucets-so I couldn't wash my hands. Besides: there was
no towel. Some "Sky Harbor," I thought-and wandered off, composing a
traveler's letter of complaint in my mind. It never occurred to me that there
might have been a perfectly clean and functioning men's room elsewhere in the
airport; maybe there was. Maybe where I had been was one of those sad places
for "Employees Only."

I wandered in the air-conditioned coolness of the airport;
occasionally, I stepped outside-just to feel the amazing, stifling heat mat was
so unknown in New Hampshire. The insistent breeze must have been coming off the
desert, for it was not a wind I'd ever felt before, and I've never felt it
since. It was a dry, hot wind that caused the men's loose-fitting guayabera
shirts to flap like flags. I was standing outside the airport, in the hot wind,
when I saw the family of the dead warrant officer, they were also waiting for
Owen Meany's plane. Because I was a Wheelwright-and, therefore, a New England
snob-I'd assumed that Phoenix was largely composed of Mormons and Baptists and
Republicans; but the warrant officer's kinfolk were not what I'd expected. The
first thing that I thought was wrong with this family was that they didn't
appear to belong together, or even to be related to each other. About a half
dozen of them were standing in the desert wind beside a silver-gray hearse; and
although they were grouped fairly close together, they did not resemble a
family portrait so much as they appeared to be the hastily assembled employees
of a small, disorderly company. An Army officer was standing with them-he would
have been the major Owen said he'd done business with before, the ROTC
professor from Arizona State University. He was a compact, fit-looking man
whose athletic restlessness reminded me of Randy White; and he wore sunglasses
of the goggle style that pilots favor. His indeterminate age-he could have been
thirty or forty-five-was, in part, the result of the muscular rigidity of his
body; and his bristling skull was so closely shaved, the stubble of his hair
could have been either a whitish blond or & whitish gray. I tried to
identify the others. I thought I spotted the director of the funeral home-the
mortician, or his delegate. He was a tall, thin, pasty presence in a starched,
white shirt with long, pointed collars-and the only member of the odd group who
wore a dark suit and tie. Then there was a bulky man in a chauffeur's uniform,
who stood outside the group, and smoked incessantly. The family itself was
inscrutable-except for the clear possession of a snared but unequal rage, which
appeared to manifest itself the least in a slope-shouldered, slow-looking man
in a short-sleeved shirt with a string tie. I took him for the father. His
wife-the presumed mother of the deceased- twitched and trembled beside this
man, who appeared to me to be both unmovable and unmoved. In contrast, the
woman could not relax; her fingers picked at her clothes, and she poked at her
hair-which was piled mountainously high and was as sticky-looking as a cone of
cotton candy. And in the desert sunset, the woman's hair was nearly as pink as
cotton candy, too. Perhaps it was the third day of the "picnic wake"
that had wrecked her face and left her with only minimal consciousness and
control of her hands. From time to time, she would clench her fists and utter
an oath that the desert wind, and my considerable distance from the family
gathering, did not permit me to hear; yet the effect of the oath was
instantaneous upon the boy and girl whom I guessed were the surviving siblings.
The daughter flinched at the mother's violent outbursts-as if the mother had
made these utterances directly to her, which I thought was not the case; or as
if in tandem with the oaths she uttered, the mother had managed to lash the
daughter with a whip I couldn't see. At each oath, the daughter shook and cringed-once
or twice, she even covered her ears. Because she wore a wrinkled cotton dress
that was too small for her, when the wind pressed hard against her, I could see
that she was pregnant-although she looked barely old enough to be pregnant, and
she was not with any man I would have guessed was the father of her unborn
child. I took the boy who stood beside her to be her brother-and a younger
brother to both the dead warrant officer and his pregnant sister. He was a
gawky-tall, bony-faced boy, who was scary-looking because of what loomed as his
potential size. I thought he could not have been older than fourteen or
fifteen; but

        
 
although he was thin, he carried great, broad
bones upon his gangling frame-he had such strong-looking hands and such an
oversized head that I thought he could have put on a hundred pounds without
even slightly altering his exterior dimensions. With an additional hundred
pounds, he would have been huge and frightening; in some way, I thought, he
looked like a man who had recently lost a hundred pounds-and, at the same time,
he appeared to have within him the capacity to gain it all back overnight. The
overgrown boy towered over everyone else-he sawed hi the wind like the vastly
tall palms that lined the entrance to the Phoenix Sky Harbor terminal-and his
rage was the most manifest, his anger (like his body) appeared to be a monster
that had lots of room to grow. When his mother spoke, the boy tipped his head
back and spat-a sizable and mud-colored trajectory. It shocked me that, at his
age, his parents allowed him to chew tobacco! Then he turned and stared at the
mother, head-on, until she turned away from him, still fidgeting with her
hands. The boy wore a greasy pair of what looked to me (from my distant
perspective) to be workmen's overalls, and some serious tools hung in loops
from something like a carpenter's belt-only the tools more closely resembled
the hardware of a car mechanic or a telephone repairman; perhaps the boy had an
after-school job, and he'd come directly from this job to meet his brother's
body at the airport. If this was the most intimate welcoming party from the
warrant officer's family, it gave me the shivers to think of the even less
presentable members of kin who might still be making merry at the three-day-long
"picnic wake." When I looked at this tribe, I thought that I wouldn't
have wanted Owen Meany's job-not for a million dollars. No one seemed to know
in which direction to look for the plane. I trusted the major and the
mortician; they were the only two people who stared off in the same direction,
and I knew that this wasn't the first body they had been on hand to welcome
home. And so I looked in the direction they looked. Although the sun had set,
vivid streaks of vermilion-colored light traced the enormous sky, and through
one of these streaks of light I saw Owen's plane descending-as if, wherever
Owen Meany went, some kind of light always attended him. All the way from San
Francisco to Phoenix, Owen was writing in his diary; he wrote pages and pages-he
knew he didn't have much time.

"THERE'S SO MUCH I KNOW," he wrote, "BUT I DON'T
KNOW EVERYTHING. ONLY GOD KNOWS EVERYTHING. THERE ISN'T TIME FOR ME TO GET TO
VIETNAM. I THOUGHT I KNEW I WAS GOING THERE. I THOUGHT I KNEW THE DATE, TOO.
BUT IF I'M RIGHT ABOUT THE DATE, THEN I'M WRONG ABOUT FT HAPPENING IN VIETNAM.
AND IF I'M RIGHT ABOUT VIETNAM, THEN I'M WRONG ABOUT THE DATE. IT'S POSSIBLE
THAT IT REALLY IS 'JUST A DREAM'-BUT IT SEEMS SO REALl THE DATE LOOKED THE MOST
REAL, BUT I DON'T KNOW-I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE.