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 in 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 IT 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 REAL! THE DATE LOOKED THE MOST REAL, BUT I DON'T KNOW--I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE.
"I'M NOT AFRAID, BUT I'M VERY NERVOUS. AT FIRST, I DIDN'T LIKE KNOWING--NOW I DON'T LIKE NOT KNOWING! GOD IS TESTING ME," wrote Owen Meany.
There was much more; he was confused. He'd cut off my finger to keep me out of Vietnam; in his view, he'd attempted to physically remove me from his dream. But although he'd kept me out of the war, it was apparent--from his diary--that I'd remained in the dream. He could keep me out of Vietnam, he could cut off my finger; but he couldn't get me out of his dream, and that worried him. If he was going to die, he knew I had to be there--he didn't know why. But if he'd cut off my finger to save my life, it was a contradiction that he'd invited me to Arizona. God had promised him that nothing bad would happen to me; Owen Meany clung to that belief.
"MAYBE IT REALLY IS 'JUST A DREAM'!" he repeated. "MAYBE THE DATE IS JUST A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION! BUT IT WAS WRITTEN IN STONE--IT IS 'WRITTEN IN STONE'!" he added; he meant, of course, that he'd already carved the date of his death on his own gravestone. But now he was confused; now he wasn't so sure.
"HOW COULD THERE BE VIETNAMESE CHILDREN IN ARIZONA?" Owen asked himself; he even asked God a question. "MY GOD--IF I DON'T SAVE ALL THOSE CHILDREN, HOW COULD YOU HAVE PUT ME THROUGH ALL THIS?" Later, he added: "I MUST TRUST IN THE LORD."
And just before the plane touched down in Phoenix, he made this hasty observation from the air: "HERE I AM AGAIN--I'M ABOVE EVERYTHING. THE PALM TREES ARE VERY STRAIGHT AND TALL--I'M HIGH ABOVE THE PALM TREES. THE SKY AND THE PALM TREES ARE SO BEAUTIFUL."
He was the first off the plane, his uniform a startlingly crisp challenge to the heat, his black armband identifying his mission, his green duffel bag in one hand--the triangular cardboard box in the other. He walked straight to the baggage compartment of the plane; although I couldn't hear his voice, I could see he was giving orders to the baggage handlers and the forklift operator--I'm sure he was telling them to keep the head of the body higher than the feet, so that fluid would not escape through the orifices. Owen rendered a salute as the body in the plywood box was lowered from the plane. When the forklift driver had the crate secured, Owen hopped on one of the tines of the fork--he rode thus, the short distance across the runway to the waiting hearse, like the figurehead on the prow of a ship.
I walked across the tarmac toward the family, who had not moved--only their eyes followed Owen Meany and the body in the box. They stood paralyzed by their anger; but the major stepped smartly forward to greet Owen; the chauffeur opened the tailgate of the long, silver-gray hearse; and the mortician became the unctuous delegate of death--the busybody it was his nature to be.
Owen hopped lightly off the forklift; he dropped his duffel bag to the tarmac and cracked open the triangular cardboard box. With the major's help, Owen unfolded the flag--it was difficult to manage in the strong wind. Suddenly, more runway lights were turned on, and the flag swelled and snapped brightly against the dark sky; rather clumsily, Owen and the major finally covered the crate with the flag. Once the body was slid into the hearse, the flag on top of the container lay still, and the family--like a large, ungainly animal--approached the hearse and Owen Meany.
That was when I noticed that the hugely tall boy was not wearing a pair of workmen's overalls--he was wearing jungle fatigues--and what I had mistaken for splotches of grease or oil were in fact the camouflage markings. The fatigues looked authentic, but the boy was clearly not old enough to "serve" and he was hardly in a proper uniform--on his big feet, he wore a scuffed and filthy pair of basketball shoes, "high tops"; and his matted, shoulder-length hair certainly wasn't Army regulation. It was not a carpenter's belt he wore; it was a kind of cartridge belt, with what appeared to be live ammo, actual loaded shells--at least, some of the cartridge sleeves in the belt were stuffed with bullets--and from various loops and hooks and straps, attached to this belt, certain things were hanging ... neither a mechanic's tools, nor the equipment that is standard for a telephone repairman. The towering boy carried some authentic-looking Army equipment: an entrenching tool, a machete, a bayonet--although the sheath for the bayonet did not look like Army issue, not to me; it was made of a shiny material in a Day-Glo-green color, and embossed upon it was the traditional skull and crossbones in Day-Glo orange.
The pregnant girl, whom I took to be the tall monster's sister, could not have been older than sixteen or seventeen; she began to sob--then she made a fist and bit into the big knuckle at the base of her index finger, to stop herself from crying.
"Fuck!" the mother cried out. The slow-moving man who appeared to be her husband folded and unfolded his beefy arms, and--spontaneously, upon the mother's utterance--the specter in jungle fatigues tipped his head back and spat another sizable, mud-colored trajectory.
"Would you stop doing that?" the pregnant girl asked him.
"Fuck you," he said.
The slow-moving man was not as slow as I thought. He lashed out at the boy--it was a solidly thrown right jab that caught the kid flush on his cheek and dropped him, like Owen's duffel bag, to the tarmac.
"Don't you speak to your sister that way," the man said.
The boy, not moving, said: "Fuck you--she's not my sister, she's just my half sister!"
The mother said: "Don't speak to your father that way."
"He's not my father--you asshole," the boy said.
"Don't you call your mother an 'asshole'!" the man said; but when he stepped closer to the boy on the tarmac--as if he were positioning himself near enough to kick the boy--the boy rose unsteadily to his feet. He held the machete in one hand, the bayonet in the other.
"You're both assholes," the boy told the man and woman--and when his half sister commenced to cry again, he once more tipped back his head and spat the tobacco juice; he did not spit on her, but he spat in her general direction.
It was Owen Meany who spoke to him. "I LIKE THAT SHEATH--FOR THE BAYONET," Owen said. "DID YOU MAKE IT YOURSELF?"
As I had seen it happen before--with strangers--the whole, terrible family was frozen by Owen Meany's voice. The pregnant girl stopped crying; the father--who was not the tall boy's father--backed away from Owen, as if he were more afraid of The Voice than of either a bayonet or a machete, or both; the mother nervously patted her sticky hair, as if Owen had caused her to worry about her appearance. The top of Owen Meany's cap reached only as high as the tall boy's chest.
The boy said to him: "Who are you? You little twit."
"This is the casualty assistance officer," the major said. "This is Lieutenant Meany."
"I want to hear him say it," the boy said, not taking his eyes off Owen.
"I'M LIEUTENANT MEANY," Owen said; he offered to shake hands with the boy. "WHAT'S YOUR NAME?" But in order to shake hands with Owen, the boy would have had to sheathe at least one of his weapons; he appeared unwilling. He also didn't bother to tell Owen his name.
"What's the matter with your voice?" he asked Owen.
"NOTHING--WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU?" Owen asked him. "YOU WANT TO DRESS UP AND PLAY SOLDIER--DON'T YOU KNOW HOW TO SPEAK TO AN OFFICER?"
As a natural bully, the boy respected being bullied. "Yes, sir," he said snidely to Owen.
"PUT THOSE WEAPONS AWAY," Owen told him. "IS THAT YOUR BROTHER I JUST BROUGHT HOME?" Owen asked him.
"Yes, sir," the boy said.
"I'M SORRY YOUR BROTHER'S DEAD," said Owen Meany. "DON'T YOU WANT TO PAY SOME ATTENTION TO HIM?" Owen asked.
"Yes, sir," the boy said quietly; he looked at a loss about how to PAY SOME ATTENTION to his dead brother, and so he stared forlornly at the corner of the flag that was near enough to the open tailgate of the hearse to be occasionally moved by the wind.
Then Owen Meany circulated through the family, shaking hands, saying he was sorry; such a range of feelings flashed across the mother's face--she appeared contradictively stimulated to flirt with him and to kill him. The impassive father seemed to me to be the most disagreeably affected by Owen's unnatural size; the man's doughy countenance wavered between brute stupidity and contempt. The pregnant girl was stricken with shyness when Owen spoke to her.
"I'M SORRY ABOUT YOUR BROTHER," he said to her; he came up to her chin.
"My half brother," she mumbled. "But I still loved him!" she added. Her other half brother--the one who was alive--needed to ferociously restrain himself from spitting again. So they were a family torn in halves, or worse, I thought.
In the major's car--where Owen and I were first able to acknowledge each other, to hug each other, and to pat each other on our backs--the major explained the family to us.
"They're a mess, of course--they may all be criminally retarded," the major said. His name was Rawls--Hollywood would have loved him. In close-up, he looked fifty, a gruff old type; but he was only thirty-seven. He'd earned a battlefield commission during the final days of the Korean War; he'd completed a tour of duty in Vietnam as an infantry battalion executive officer. Major Rawls had enlisted in the Army in 1949, when he'd been eighteen. He'd served the Army for nineteen years; he'd fought in two wars; he'd been passed over for promotion to lieutenant colonel, and--at a time when all the good "field grade" officers were in Washington or Vietnam--he'd ended up as a ROTC professor for his twilight tour of duty.
If Major Rawls had earned a battlefield commission, he had earned his measure of cynicism, too; the major spoke in sustained, explosive bursts--like rounds of fire from an automatic weapon.
"They may all be fucking each other--I wouldn't be surprised about a family like this," Major Rawls said. "The brother is the chief wacko--he hangs around the airport all day, watching the planes, talking to the soldiers. He can't wait to be old enough to go to 'Nam. The only one in the family who might have been wackier than him is the one who's dead--this was his third fucking tour 'in country'! You should've seen him between tours--the whole fucking tribe lives in a trailer park, and the warrant officer just spent all his time looking in his neighbors' windows through a telescopic sight. You know what I mean--lining up everyone in the crosshairs! If he hadn't gone back to 'Nam, he'd have gone to jail.
"Both brothers have a different father--a dead one, not this clown," Major Rawls informed us. "This clown's the father of that unfortunate girl--I can't tell you who knocked her up, but I've got a feeling it was a family affair. My odds are on the warrant officer--I think he had sighted her in his crosshairs, too. You know what I mean? Maybe both brothers were banging her," Major Rawls said. "But I think the younger one is too crazy to get it up--he just can't wait to be old enough to kill people," the major said.
"Now the mother--she's not just in space, she's in fucking orbit," Major Rawls said. "And wait till you get to the wake--wait till you meet the rest of the family! I tell you--they shouldn't've sent the brother home from 'Nam, not even in a box. What they should've done is send his whole fucking family over there! Might be the only way to win the fucking war--if you know what I mean," Major Rawls said.
We were following the silver-gray hearse, which the chauffeur drove ploddingly along a highway called Black Canyon. Then we turned onto something called Camelback Road. In the wind, the palm trees sawed over us; on the Bermuda grass, in one neighborhood, some old people sat in metal lawn chairs--as hot as it was, even at night, the old people wore sweaters, and they waved to us. They must have been crazy.
Owen Meany had introduced me to Major Rawls as his BEST FRIEND.
"MAJOR RAWLS--THIS IS MY BEST FRIEND, JOHN WHEELWRIGHT. HE'S COME ALL THE WAY FROM NEW HAMPSHIRE!" Owen had said.
"That's better than coming from Vietnam. It's nice to meet you, John," Major Rawls had said; he had a crushing handshake and he drove his car as if every other driver on the road had already done something to offend him.
"Wait till you see the fucking funeral parlor!" the major said to me.
"IT'S A KIND OF SHOPPING-MALL MORTUARY," Owen said, and Major Rawls liked that--he laughed.
"It's a fucking 'shopping-mall' mortician!" Rawls said.
"THEY HAVE REMOVABLE CROSSES IN THE CHAPEL," Owen informed me. "THEY CAN SWITCH CROSSES, DEPENDING ON THE DENOMINATION OF THE SERVICE--THEY'VE GOT A CRUCIFIX WITH AN ESPECIALLY LIFELIKE CHRIST HANGING ON IT, FOR THE CATHOLICS. THEY'VE GOT A PLAIN WOODEN CROSS FOR THE PLAIN, PROTESTANT TYPES. THEY'VE EVEN GOT A FANCY CROSS WITH JEWELS IN IT, FOR THE IN-BETWEENS," Owen said.
"What are 'in-betweens'?" I asked Owen Meany.
"That's what we've got on our hands here," Major Rawls said. "We've got fucking Baptists--they're fucking 'in-betweens,' all right," he said. "You remember that asshole minister, Meany?" Major Rawls asked Owen.
"YOU MEAN THE BAPTIST THE MORTUARY USES? OF COURSE I DO!" Owen said.
"Just wait till you meet him!" Major Rawls said to me.
"I can't wait," I said.
Owen made me put on the extra black armband. "DON'T WORRY," he told me. "WE'LL HAVE A LOT OF FREE TIME."
"Do you guys want dates?" Major Rawls asked us. "I know some hot coeds," he said.
"I KNOW YOU DO," Owen said. "BUT NO THANKS--WE'RE JUST GOING TO HANG OUT."
"I'll show you where the porn shop is," Major Rawls offered.
"NO THANKS," Ow
en said. "WE JUST WANT TO RELAX."
"What are you--a couple of fags?" the major asked--he laughed at his joke.
"MAYBE WE ARE," said Owen Meany, and Major Rawls laughed again.
"Your friend's the funniest little fucker in the Army," the major said.
It actually was a kind of shopping-mall mortuary, surrounded by an unfathomable inappropriateness for a funeral home. In the style of a Mexican hacienda, the mortuary--and its chapel with the changeable crosses--formed one of several L-joints in a long, interconnected series of pink-and white-stuccoed buildings. Immediately adjacent to the mortuary itself was an ice-cream shop; adjoined to the chapel was a pet shop--the windowfront displayed an arrangement of snakes, which were on sale.
"It's no fucking wonder the warrant officer wanted to go back to 'Nam," Major Rawls said.
Before the oily mortician could inquire who I was--or ask on whose authority I was permitted to view the contents of the plywood container--Owen Meany introduced me.
"THIS IS MISTER WHEELWRIGHT--OUR BODY EXPERT," Owen said. "THIS IS INTELLIGENCE BUSINESS," Owen told the mortician. "I MUST ASK YOU NOT TO DISCUSS THIS."
"Oh no--never!" the mortician said; clearly, he didn't know what there was--or might be--to DISCUSS. Major Rawls rolled his eyes and concealed a dry laughter by pretending to cough. A carpeted hall led to a room that smelled like a chemistry lab, where two inappropriately cheerful attendants were loosening the screws on the transfer case--another man stacked the plywood against a far wall. He was finishing an ice-cream cone, so he clumsily stacked the wood with his free hand. It took four people to lift the heavy coffin--perhaps twenty-gauge steel--onto the mortuary's chrome dolly. Major Rawls spun three catches that looked like those fancy wheel locks on certain sports cars.
Owen Meany opened the lid and peered inside. After a while, he turned to Rawls. "IS IT HIM?" he asked the major.