A prayer for Owen Meany (72 page)

"THE WAY THEY LOOK AT ME, I KNOW TWO

        
 
THINGS. I KNOW THAT I SAVED THEM-I DON'T KNOW
HOW. AND I KNOW THAT THEY'RE AFRAID FOR ME. BUT I DON'T SEE ME-I CAN'T TELL
WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME. THE CHILDREN'S FACES TELL ME SOMETHING IS WRONG.

"SUDDENLY, THE NUNS ARE THERE; PENGUINS ARE PEERING DOWN AT
ME-ONE OF THEM BENDS OVER ME. I CAN'T HEAR WHAT I SAY TO HER, BUT SHE APPEARS
TO UNDERSTAND ME-MAYBE SHE SPEAKS ENGLISH. IT'S NOT UNTIL SHE TAKES ME IN HER
ARMS THAT I SEE ALL THE BLOOD-HER WIMPLE IS BLOOD-STAINED. WHILE I'M LOOKING AT
THE NUN, HER WIMPLE CONTINUES TO BE SPLASHED WITH BLOOD-THE BLOOD SPATTERS HER
FACE, TOO, BUT SHE'S NOT AFRAID. THE FACES OF THE CHILDREN-LOOKING DOWN AT
ME-ARE FULL OF FEAR; BUT THE NUN WHO HOLDS ME IN HER ARMS IS VERY PEACEFUL.

"OF COURSE, IT'S MY BLOOD-SHE'S COVERED WITH MY BLOOD-BUT
SHE'S VERY CALM. WHEN I SEE SHE'S ABOUT TO MAKE THE SIGN OF THE CROSS OVER ME,
I REACH OUT TO TRY TO STOP HER. BUT I CAN'T STOP HER-IT'S AS IF I DON'T HAVE
ANY ARMS. THE NUN JUST SMILES AT ME. AFTER SHE'S MADE THE SIGN OF THE CROSS
OVER ME, I LEAVE ALL OF THEM-I JUST LEAVE. THEY ARE STILL EXACTLY WHERE THEY
WERE, LOOKING DOWN AT ME; BUT I'M NOT REALLY THERE. I'M LOOKING DOWN AT ME,
TOO. I LOOK LIKE I DID WHEN I WAS THE BABY JESUS-YOU REMEMBER THOSE STUPID
SWADDLING CLOTHES? THAT'S HOW I LOOK WHEN I LEAVE ME.

"BUT NOW ALL THE PEOPLE ARE GROWING SMALLER-NOT JUST ME,
BUT THE NUNS AND THE CHILDREN, TOO. I'M QUITE FAR ABOVE THEM, BUT THEY NEVER
LOOK UP; THEY KEEP LOOKING DOWN AT WHAT USED TO BE ME. AND SOON I'M ABOVE
EVERYTHING; THE PALM TREES ARE VERY STRAIGHT AND TALL, BUT SOON I'M HIGH ABOVE
THE PALM TREES, TOO. THE SKY AND THE PALM TREES ARE SO BEAUTIFUL, BUT IT'S VERY
HOT-THE AIR IS HOTTER THAN ANY PLACE I'VE EVER BEEN. I KNOW I'M NOT IN NEW
HAMPSHIRE."

I didn't say anything; he put his diary back in Hester's
bedroom, he stirred the tomato sauce, he looked under the lid of the water pot
to see if the water was near to boiling. Then he went and knocked on the
bathroom door; it was quiet in there.

"I'll be out in a minute," Hester said. Owen returned
to the kitchen and sat down at the table with me.

"It's just a dream, Owen," I said to him. He folded
his hands and regarded me patiently. I remembered that time he untied the
safety rope when we'd been swimming in the old quarry. I remembered how angry
he was-when we hadn't immediately jumped in the water to save him.

"YOU LET ME DROWN!" he'd said. "YOU DIDN'T DO
ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I'M ALREADY DEAD!" he'd told us.
"REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE."

"Owen," I said. "Given your sensitive feelings
for Catholics, why wouldn't you dream that a nun was your own special Angel of
Death?"

He looked down at his hands folded on top of the table; we could
hear Hester's bath emptying.

"It's just a dream," I repeated; he shrugged. There
was in his attitude toward me that same mild pity and mild contempt I had seen
before-when The Flying Yankee had passed over the Maiden Hill trestle bridge,
precisely as Owen and I had passed under it, and I'd called this a
"coincidence."

Hester came out of the bathroom wrapped in a pale-yellow towel,
carrying her clothes. She went into the bedroom without looking at us; she shut
the door, and we could hear her shaking the chest of drawers, the coat hangers
protesting her roughness in the closet.

"Owen," I said. "You're very original, but the
dream is a stereotype-the dream is stupid. You're going in the Army, there's a
war in Vietnam-do you think you'd have a dream about saving American children?
And, naturally, there would be palm trees-what would you expect? Igloos?"

Hester came out of the bedroom in fresh clothes; she was roughly
toweling her hair dry. Her clothes were almost an exact exchange for what she'd
worn before-she wore a different pair of blue jeans and a different,
ill-fitting turtleneck jersey; the extent to which Hester ever changed her
clothes was a change from black to navy blue, or vice versa.

"Owen," I said. "You can't believe that God wants
you to go to Vietnam for the purpose of making yourself available to rescue
these characters in a dreaml"

He neither nodded nor shrugged; he sat very still looking at his
hands folded on top of the table.

"That's exactly what he believes-you've hit the nail on the
head," Hester said. She gripped the damp, pale-yellow towel and rolled it tightly
into what we used to call a "rat's tail." She snapped the towel very
close to Owen Meany's face, but Owen didn't move. "That's it, isn't it?
You asshole!" she yelled at him. She snapped the towel again-then she
unrolled it and ran at him, wrapping the towel around his head. "You think
God wants you to go to Vietnam-don't you?'' she screamed at him. She wrestled
him out of his chair-she held his head in the towel in a headlock and she lay
on her side across his chest, pinning him to the kitchen floor, while she began
to pound him in the face with the fist of her free hand. He kicked his feet, he
tried to grab for her hair; but Hester must have outweighed Owen Meany by at
least thirty pounds, and she appeared to be hitting him as hard as she could. When
I saw the blood seep through the pale-yellow towel, I grabbed Hester around her
waist and tried to pull her off him. It wasn't easy; I had to get my hands on
her throat and threaten to strangle her before she stopped hitting him and
tried to hit me. She was very strong, and she was hysterical; she tried to
demonstrate her headlock on me, but Owen got the towel off his head and tackled
Hester at her ankles. Then it was his turn to attempt to get her off me. Owen's
nose was bleeding and his lower lip, which was split and puffy, was bleeding,
too; but together we managed to take control of her. Owen sat on the backs of
her legs, and I kneeled between her shoulder blades and pulled her arms down
flush to her sides; this still left her free to thrash her head all around-she
tried to bite me, and when she couldn't, she began to bang her face on the
kitchen floor until her nose was bleeding.

"You don't love me, Owen!" Hester screamed. "If
you loved me, you wouldn't go-not for all the goddamn children in the world!
You wouldn't go if you loved me!"

Owen and I stayed on top of her until she started to cry, and
she stopped banging her face on the floor.

"YOU BETTER GO," Owen said to me.

"No, you better go, Owen," Hester said to him. "You
better get the fuck out of here!"

And so he took his diary from Hester's bedroom, and we left
together. It was a warm spring night. I followed the tomato-red pickup to the
coast; I knew where he was going. I was sure that he wanted to sit on the breakwater
at Rye Harbor. The breakwater was made of the slag-the broken slabs-from the
Meany Granite Quarry; Owen always felt he had a right to sit there. From the
breakwater, you got a pretty view of the tiny harbor; in the spring, not that
many boats were in the water-it didn't quite feel like summer, which was the
time of year when we usually sat there. But this summer would be different,
anyway. Because I was teaching ninth-grade Expository Writing at Gravesend
Academy in the fall, I wasn't going to work this summer. Even a part-time job
at Gravesend Academy would more than compensate for my graduate-school
expenses; even a part-time job-for the whole school year-was worth more than
another summer working for Meany Granite. Besides: my grandmother had given me
a little money, and Owen would be in the Army. He had treated himself to thirty
days between his graduation and the beginning of his active duty as a second
lieutenant. We'd talked about taking a trip together. Except for his Basic
Training-at Fort Knox or Fort Bragg-Owen had never been out of New England; I'd
never been out of New England, either.

"Both of you should go to Canada," Hester had told us.
"And you should stay there!"

The salt water rushed in and out of the breakwater; pools of
water were trapped in the rocks below the high-tide mark. Owen stuck his face
in one of these tide pools; his nose had stopped bleeding, but his lip was
split quite deeply-it continued to bleed-and there was a sizable swelling above
one of his eyebrows. He had two black eyes, one very much blacker than the
other and so puffy that the eye was closed to a slit.

"YOU THINK VIETNAM IS DANGEROUS," he said. "YOU
OUGHT TO TRY LIVING WITH HESTERl"

But he was so exasperating! How could anyone live with Owen
Meany and, knowing what he thought he knew, not be moved to beat the shit out
of him? We sat on the breakwater until it grew dark and the mosquitoes began to
bother us.

"Are you hungry?" I asked him. He pointed to his lower
lip, which was still bleeding. "I

        
 
DON'T THINK I CAN EAT ANYTHING," he
said, "BUT I'LL GO WITH YOU."

We went to one of those clam-shack restaurants on "the
strip." I ate a lot of fried clams and Owen sipped a beer- through a
straw. The waitress knew us-she was a University of New Hampshire girl.

"You better get some stitches in that lip before it falls
off," she told Owen. We drove-Owen in the tomato-red pickup, and I
followed him in my Volkswagen-to the emergency room of the Gravesend Hospital.
It was a slow night-not the summer, and not a weekend-so we didn't have to wait
long. There was a hassle concerning how he intended to pay for his treatment.

"SUPPOSE I CAN'T PAY?" he asked. "DOES THAT MEAN
YOU DON'T TREAT ME?"

I was surprised that he had no health insurance; apparently,
there was no policy for coverage in his family and he hadn't even paid the
small premium asked of students at the university for group benefits. Finally,
I said that the hospital could send the bill to my grandmother; everyone knew
who Harriet Wheelwright was-even the emergency-room receptionist- and, after a
phone call to Grandmother, this method of payment was accepted.

"WHAT A COUNTRY!" said Owen Meany, while a
nervous-looking young doctor-who was not an American- put four stitches in his
lower lip. "AT LEAST WHEN I GET IN THE ARMY, I'LL HAVE SOME HEALTH
INSURANCE!"

Owen said he was ashamed to take money from my
grandmother-"SHE'S ALREADY GIVEN ME MORE THAN I DESERVED!" But when
we arrived at  Front Street, a different problem presented itself.

"Merciful Heavens, Owen!" my grandmother said.
"You've been in afightl"

"I JUST FELL DOWNSTAIRS," he said.

"Don't you lie to me, Owen Meany!" Grandmother said.

"I WAS ATTACKED BY JUVENILE DELINQUENTS AT HAMPTON
BEACH," Owen said.

"Don't you lie to me!" Grandmother repeated. I could
see that Owen was struggling to ascertain the effect upon my grandmother of
telling her that her granddaughter had beaten the shit out of him;
Hester-except for her vomiting- was always relatively subdued around
Grandmother. Owen pointed to me. "HE DID IT," Owen said.

"Merciful Heavens!" my grandmother said. "You
should be ashamed of yourself!" she said to me.

"I didn't mean to," I said. "We weren't having a
reed fight-we were just roughhousing."

"IT WAS DARK," said Owen Meany. "HE COULDN'T SEE
ME VERY CLEARLY."

"You should still be ashamed of yourself!'' my grandmother
said to me.

"Yes," I said. This little misunderstanding seemed to
cheer up Owen. My grandmother commenced to wait on him, hand and foot-and Ethel
was summoned and directed to concoct something nourishing for him in the
blender: a fresh pineapple, a banana, some ice cream, some brewer's yeast.
"Something the poor boy can drink through a straw!" my grandmother
said.

"YOU CAN LEAVE OUT THE BREWER'S YEAST," said Owen
Meany. After my grandmother went to bed, we sat up watching The Late Show and
he teased me about my new reputation-as a bully. The movie on The Late Show was
at least twenty years old-Betty Grable in Moon over Miami, The music, and the
setting, made me think of the place called The Orange Grove and my mother
performing as "The Lady in Red." I would probably never know any more
about that, I thought.

"You remember the play you were going to write?" I
asked Owen. "About the supper club-about 'The Lady in Red'?"

"SURE, I REMEMBER. YOU DIDN'T WANT ME TO DO FT," he
said.

"I thought you might have done it, anyway," I said.

"I STARTED IT-A COUPLE OF TIMES," he said. "IT
WAS HARDER THAN I THOUGHT-TO MAKE UP A STORY."

Carole Landis was in Moon over Miami, and Don Ameche; remember
them? It's a story about husband-hunting in Florida. Just the glow of the
television lit Owen's face when he said, "YOU'VE GOT TO LEARN TO FOLLOW
THINGS THROUGH-IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU'VE GOT TO SEE IT ALL THE WAY TO
THE END, YOU'VE GOT TO TRY TO FINISH IT. I'LL BET YOU NEVER EVEN LOOKED IN A
BOSTON TELEPHONE DIRECTORY-FOR A BUSTER FREEBODY," he said.

"It's a made-up name," I said.

"IT'S THE ONLY NAME WE KNOW," Owen said.

"No, I didn't look it up," I said.

"YOU SEE?" he said. "THERE ACTUALLY ARE A FEW
FREEBODYS-BUT NO 'BUSTER,' " he said.

"Maybe 'Buster' is just a nickname," I said-with more
interest now.

"NONE OF THE FREEBODYS I SPOKE WITH HAD EVER HEARD OF A
'BUSTER,' " said Owen Meany. "AND THE OLD PEOPLE'S HOMES WON'T
RELEASE A LIST OF NAMES-DO YOU KNOW WHY?" he asked me.

"Why?" I asked him.

"BECAUSE CRIMINALS COULD USE THE NAMES TO FIND OUT WHO'S NO
LONGER LIVING AT HOME. IF THE SAME NAME IS STILL IN THE PHONE BOOK- AND IF THE
HOUSE OR THE APARTMENT HASN'T BEEN REOCCUPIED-THEN THE CRIMINALS HAVE FOUND AN
EASY PLACE TO ROB: NOBODY HOME. THAT'S WHY THE OLD PEOPLE'S HOMES DON'T GIVE
OUT ANY NAMES," he said. "INTERESTING, HUH? IF IT'S TRUE," he
added.

"You've been busy," I said; he shrugged.

"AND THE LISTINGS IN THE YELLOW PAGES- THOSE PLACES THAT
OFFER 'LIVE MUSIC,' " he said. "NOT ONE OF THOSE PLACES IN ALL OF
BOSTON HAS EVER HEARD OF A BIG BLACK BUSTER FREEBODY! IT WAS SO LONG AGO,
BUSTER FREEBODY MUST BE DEAD."