A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
erican flag--the flag itself was not any larger than the palm of her hand--but at the same time, she frowned upon all the ruckus; she frequently reprimanded the children who rode their bicycles across her lawn, and she shouted at the dogs to stop their fool barking.
I often watched the parade pass by, too; but after my mother died, Owen Meany and I never followed the parade on our bicycles--for the final destination of the band and the marchers was the cemetery on Linden Street. From 80 Front Street, we could hear the guns saluting the dead heroes; it was the habit in Gravesend to conclude a Memorial Day parade and a Veterans Day parade and an Independence Day parade with manly gunfire over the graves that knew too much quiet all the other days of the year.
It was no different on July 4, 1968--except that Owen Meany was in Arizona, possibly watching or even participating in a parade at Fort Huachuca; I didn't know what Owen was doing. Dan Needham and I had enjoyed a late breakfast with my grandmother, and we'd all taken our coffee out on the front doorstep to wait for the parade; by the sound of it, coming nearer, it was passing the Main Academy Building--gathering force, bicyclists, and dogs. Dan and I sat on the stone doorstep, but my grandmother chose to stand; sitting on a doorstep would not have measured up to Harriet Wheelwright's high standards for women of her age and position.
If I was thinking anything--if I was thinking at all--I was considering that my life had become a kind of doorstep-sitting, watching parades pass by. I was not working that summer; I would not be working that fall. With my Master's degree in hand, I had enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Massachusetts; I didn't really know what I wanted to study, I didn't even know if I wanted to rent a room or an apartment in Amherst, but I was scheduled to be a full-time graduate student there. I never thought about it. So that I could carry the fullest possible course load, I wasn't planning to teach for at least a year--not even part-time, not even one course. Naturally, Grandmother was bankrolling my studies, and that further contributed to my sense of myself as a doorstep-sitter. I wasn't doing anything; there wasn't anything I had to do.
Hester was in the same boat. That Fourth of July night, we sat on the grass border of the Swasey Parkway and watched the fireworks display over the Squamscott--Gravesend maintained a Town Fireworks Board, and every Fourth of July the members who knew their rocketry and bombs set up the fireworks on the docks of the academy boathouse. The townspeople lined the Swasey Parkway, all along the grassy riverbank, and the bombs burst in the air, and the rockets flared--they hissed when they fell into the dirty river. There had been a small, ecological protest lately; someone said that the fireworks disturbed the birds that nested in the tidal marsh on the riverbank opposite the Swasey Parkway. But in a dispute between herons and patriots, the herons are not generally favored to win; the bombardment proceeded, as planned--the night sky was brilliantly set afire, and the explosions gratified us all.
An occasional white light spread like a newly invented liquid across the dark surface of the Squamscott, reflecting there so brightly that the darkened stores and offices of the town, and the huge building that housed the town's foul textile mills, sprang up in silhouette--a town created instantly by the explosions. The many empty windows of the textile mills bounced back this light--the building's vast size and emptiness suggested an industry so self-possessed that it functioned completely without a human labor force.
"If Owen won't marry me, I'll never marry anyone," Hester told me between flashes and blasts. "If he won't give me babies, no one's ever gonna give me babies."
One of the demolition experts on the dock was none other than that old dynamiter Mr. Meany. Something like an exploding star showered over the black river.
"That one looks like sperm," Hester said sullenly. I was not expert enough on sperm to challenge Hester's imagery; fireworks that looked "like sperm" seemed highly unlikely if not far-fetched to me--but what did I know?
Hester was so morose, I didn't want to spend the night in Durham with her. It was a not-quite-comfortable summer night, but there was a breeze. I drove to 80 Front Street and watched the eleven o'clock news with Grandmother; she had lately taken an interest in a terrible local channel on which the news detailed the grim statistics of a few highway fatalities and made no mention of the war in Vietnam; and there was a "human interest" story about a bad child who'd blinded a poor dog with a firecracker.
"Merciful Heavens!" Grandmother said.
When she went to bed, I tuned in to The Late Show--one channel was showing a so-called Creature Feature, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, an old favorite of Owen's; another channel featured Mother Is a Freshman, in which Loretta Young is a widow attending college with her teenage daughter; but my favorite, An American in Paris, was on a third channel. I could watch Gene Kelly dance all night; in between the songs and dances, I switched back to the channel where the prehistoric monster was mashing Manhattan, or I wandered out to the kitchen to get myself another beer.
I was in the kitchen when the phone rang; it was after midnight, and Owen was so respectful of my grandmother's sleep that he never called 80 Front Street at an hour when he might awaken her. At first I thought that the different time zone--in Arizona--had confused him; but I knew he would have called Hester in Durham and Dan in Waterhouse Hall before he found me at my grandmother's, and I was sure that Hester or Dan, or both of them, would have told him how late it was.
"I HOPE I DIDN'T WAKE UP YOUR GRANDMOTHER!" he said.
"The phone only rang once--I'm in the kitchen," I told him. "What's up?"
"YOU MUST APOLOGIZE TO HER FOR ME--IN THE MORNING," Owen said. "BE SURE TO TELL HER I'M VERY SORRY--BUT IT'S A KIND OF EMERGENCY."
"What's up?" I asked him.
"THERE'S BEEN A BODY MISPLACED IN CALIFORNIA--THEY THOUGHT IT GOT LOST IN VIETNAM, BUT IT JUST TURNED UP IN OAKLAND. IT HAPPENS EVERY TIME THERE'S A HOLIDAY--SOMEONE GOES TO SLEEP AT THE SWITCH. IT'S STANDARD ARMY--THEY GIVE ME TWO HOURS TO PACK A BAG AND THE NEXT THING I KNOW, I'M IN CALIFORNIA. I'M SUPPOSED TO TAKE A COMMUTER PLANE TO TUCSON, I'VE GOT A CONNECTION WITH A COMMERCIAL FLIGHT TO OAKLAND--FIRST THING TOMORROW MORNING. THEY'VE GOT ME BOOKED ON A FLIGHT FROM SAN FRANCISCO BACK TO PHOENIX THE NEXT DAY. THE BODY BELONGS IN PHOENIX--THE GUY WAS A WARRANT OFFICER, A HELICOPTER PILOT. THAT USUALLY MEANS HE CRASHED AND BURNED UP--YOU HEAR 'HELICOPTER,' YOU CAN COUNT ON A CLOSED CASKET.
"CAN YOU MEET ME IN PHOENIX?" he asked me.
"Can I meet you in Phoenix? Why?" I asked him.
"WHY NOT?" Owen said. "YOU DON'T HAVE ANY PLANS, DO YOU?"
"Well, no," I admitted.
"YOU CAN AFFORD THE FLIGHT, CAN'T YOU?" he asked me.
"Well, yes," I admitted. Then he told me the flight information--he knew exactly when my plane left Boston, and when my plane arrived in Phoenix; I'd arrive a little earlier than his flight with the body from San Francisco, but I wouldn't have to wait long. I could just meet his plane, and after that, we'd stick together; he'd already booked us into a motel--"WITH AIR CONDITIONING, GOOD TV, A GREAT POOL. WE'LL HAVE A BLAST!" Owen assured me; he'd already arranged everything.
The proposed funeral was all fouled up because the body was already two days late. Relatives of the deceased warrant officer--family members from Modesto and Yuma--had been delayed in Phoenix for what must have seemed forever. Arrangements with the funeral parlor had been made and canceled and made again; Owen knew the mortician and the minister--"THEY'RE REAL ASSHOLES: DYING IS JUST A BUSINESS TO THEM, AND WHEN THINGS DON'T COME OFF ON SCHEDULE, THEY BITCH AND MOAN ABOUT THE MILITARY AND MAKE THINGS WORSE FOR THE POOR FAMILY."
Apparently the family had planned a kind of "picnic wake"; the wake was now in its third day. Owen was pretty sure that all he'd have to do was deliver the body to the mortuary; the survivor assistance officer--a ROTC professor at Arizona State University, a major whom Owen also knew--had warned Owen that the family was so pissed off at the Army that they probably wouldn't want a military escort at the funeral.
"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 FUCKUP 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 PHOENFX--'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 I 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 5, 1968, in Oakland, California, where he was given a billet in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters; on the morning of July 6, Owen left quarters at the Oakland Army Depot--noting, in his diary, "THE ENLISTED MEN ON FAR EAST LEVY ARE REQUIRED 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 FOR?" 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 huaraches, 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 that 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 a 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 shared 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. Becaus
I often watched the parade pass by, too; but after my mother died, Owen Meany and I never followed the parade on our bicycles--for the final destination of the band and the marchers was the cemetery on Linden Street. From 80 Front Street, we could hear the guns saluting the dead heroes; it was the habit in Gravesend to conclude a Memorial Day parade and a Veterans Day parade and an Independence Day parade with manly gunfire over the graves that knew too much quiet all the other days of the year.
It was no different on July 4, 1968--except that Owen Meany was in Arizona, possibly watching or even participating in a parade at Fort Huachuca; I didn't know what Owen was doing. Dan Needham and I had enjoyed a late breakfast with my grandmother, and we'd all taken our coffee out on the front doorstep to wait for the parade; by the sound of it, coming nearer, it was passing the Main Academy Building--gathering force, bicyclists, and dogs. Dan and I sat on the stone doorstep, but my grandmother chose to stand; sitting on a doorstep would not have measured up to Harriet Wheelwright's high standards for women of her age and position.
If I was thinking anything--if I was thinking at all--I was considering that my life had become a kind of doorstep-sitting, watching parades pass by. I was not working that summer; I would not be working that fall. With my Master's degree in hand, I had enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Massachusetts; I didn't really know what I wanted to study, I didn't even know if I wanted to rent a room or an apartment in Amherst, but I was scheduled to be a full-time graduate student there. I never thought about it. So that I could carry the fullest possible course load, I wasn't planning to teach for at least a year--not even part-time, not even one course. Naturally, Grandmother was bankrolling my studies, and that further contributed to my sense of myself as a doorstep-sitter. I wasn't doing anything; there wasn't anything I had to do.
Hester was in the same boat. That Fourth of July night, we sat on the grass border of the Swasey Parkway and watched the fireworks display over the Squamscott--Gravesend maintained a Town Fireworks Board, and every Fourth of July the members who knew their rocketry and bombs set up the fireworks on the docks of the academy boathouse. The townspeople lined the Swasey Parkway, all along the grassy riverbank, and the bombs burst in the air, and the rockets flared--they hissed when they fell into the dirty river. There had been a small, ecological protest lately; someone said that the fireworks disturbed the birds that nested in the tidal marsh on the riverbank opposite the Swasey Parkway. But in a dispute between herons and patriots, the herons are not generally favored to win; the bombardment proceeded, as planned--the night sky was brilliantly set afire, and the explosions gratified us all.
An occasional white light spread like a newly invented liquid across the dark surface of the Squamscott, reflecting there so brightly that the darkened stores and offices of the town, and the huge building that housed the town's foul textile mills, sprang up in silhouette--a town created instantly by the explosions. The many empty windows of the textile mills bounced back this light--the building's vast size and emptiness suggested an industry so self-possessed that it functioned completely without a human labor force.
"If Owen won't marry me, I'll never marry anyone," Hester told me between flashes and blasts. "If he won't give me babies, no one's ever gonna give me babies."
One of the demolition experts on the dock was none other than that old dynamiter Mr. Meany. Something like an exploding star showered over the black river.
"That one looks like sperm," Hester said sullenly. I was not expert enough on sperm to challenge Hester's imagery; fireworks that looked "like sperm" seemed highly unlikely if not far-fetched to me--but what did I know?
Hester was so morose, I didn't want to spend the night in Durham with her. It was a not-quite-comfortable summer night, but there was a breeze. I drove to 80 Front Street and watched the eleven o'clock news with Grandmother; she had lately taken an interest in a terrible local channel on which the news detailed the grim statistics of a few highway fatalities and made no mention of the war in Vietnam; and there was a "human interest" story about a bad child who'd blinded a poor dog with a firecracker.
"Merciful Heavens!" Grandmother said.
When she went to bed, I tuned in to The Late Show--one channel was showing a so-called Creature Feature, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, an old favorite of Owen's; another channel featured Mother Is a Freshman, in which Loretta Young is a widow attending college with her teenage daughter; but my favorite, An American in Paris, was on a third channel. I could watch Gene Kelly dance all night; in between the songs and dances, I switched back to the channel where the prehistoric monster was mashing Manhattan, or I wandered out to the kitchen to get myself another beer.
I was in the kitchen when the phone rang; it was after midnight, and Owen was so respectful of my grandmother's sleep that he never called 80 Front Street at an hour when he might awaken her. At first I thought that the different time zone--in Arizona--had confused him; but I knew he would have called Hester in Durham and Dan in Waterhouse Hall before he found me at my grandmother's, and I was sure that Hester or Dan, or both of them, would have told him how late it was.
"I HOPE I DIDN'T WAKE UP YOUR GRANDMOTHER!" he said.
"The phone only rang once--I'm in the kitchen," I told him. "What's up?"
"YOU MUST APOLOGIZE TO HER FOR ME--IN THE MORNING," Owen said. "BE SURE TO TELL HER I'M VERY SORRY--BUT IT'S A KIND OF EMERGENCY."
"What's up?" I asked him.
"THERE'S BEEN A BODY MISPLACED IN CALIFORNIA--THEY THOUGHT IT GOT LOST IN VIETNAM, BUT IT JUST TURNED UP IN OAKLAND. IT HAPPENS EVERY TIME THERE'S A HOLIDAY--SOMEONE GOES TO SLEEP AT THE SWITCH. IT'S STANDARD ARMY--THEY GIVE ME TWO HOURS TO PACK A BAG AND THE NEXT THING I KNOW, I'M IN CALIFORNIA. I'M SUPPOSED TO TAKE A COMMUTER PLANE TO TUCSON, I'VE GOT A CONNECTION WITH A COMMERCIAL FLIGHT TO OAKLAND--FIRST THING TOMORROW MORNING. THEY'VE GOT ME BOOKED ON A FLIGHT FROM SAN FRANCISCO BACK TO PHOENIX THE NEXT DAY. THE BODY BELONGS IN PHOENIX--THE GUY WAS A WARRANT OFFICER, A HELICOPTER PILOT. THAT USUALLY MEANS HE CRASHED AND BURNED UP--YOU HEAR 'HELICOPTER,' YOU CAN COUNT ON A CLOSED CASKET.
"CAN YOU MEET ME IN PHOENIX?" he asked me.
"Can I meet you in Phoenix? Why?" I asked him.
"WHY NOT?" Owen said. "YOU DON'T HAVE ANY PLANS, DO YOU?"
"Well, no," I admitted.
"YOU CAN AFFORD THE FLIGHT, CAN'T YOU?" he asked me.
"Well, yes," I admitted. Then he told me the flight information--he knew exactly when my plane left Boston, and when my plane arrived in Phoenix; I'd arrive a little earlier than his flight with the body from San Francisco, but I wouldn't have to wait long. I could just meet his plane, and after that, we'd stick together; he'd already booked us into a motel--"WITH AIR CONDITIONING, GOOD TV, A GREAT POOL. WE'LL HAVE A BLAST!" Owen assured me; he'd already arranged everything.
The proposed funeral was all fouled up because the body was already two days late. Relatives of the deceased warrant officer--family members from Modesto and Yuma--had been delayed in Phoenix for what must have seemed forever. Arrangements with the funeral parlor had been made and canceled and made again; Owen knew the mortician and the minister--"THEY'RE REAL ASSHOLES: DYING IS JUST A BUSINESS TO THEM, AND WHEN THINGS DON'T COME OFF ON SCHEDULE, THEY BITCH AND MOAN ABOUT THE MILITARY AND MAKE THINGS WORSE FOR THE POOR FAMILY."
Apparently the family had planned a kind of "picnic wake"; the wake was now in its third day. Owen was pretty sure that all he'd have to do was deliver the body to the mortuary; the survivor assistance officer--a ROTC professor at Arizona State University, a major whom Owen also knew--had warned Owen that the family was so pissed off at the Army that they probably wouldn't want a military escort at the funeral.
"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 FUCKUP 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 PHOENFX--'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 I 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 5, 1968, in Oakland, California, where he was given a billet in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters; on the morning of July 6, Owen left quarters at the Oakland Army Depot--noting, in his diary, "THE ENLISTED MEN ON FAR EAST LEVY ARE REQUIRED 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 FOR?" 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 huaraches, 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 that 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 a 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 shared 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. Becaus