“You didn’t see it—it dove!” the girl said.
“It was a female something,” someone else said.
“Oh, what do you know?” another child said.
“I didn’t see anything,” I said.
“Look over there—just keep looking,” Charlie Keeling said to me. “It has to come up for air,” he explained. “It’s probably a pintail or a mallard or a blue-winged teal—if it’s a female,” he said.
The pines smell wonderful, and the lichen on the rocks smell wonderful, and even the smell of fresh water is wonderful—or is it, really, the smell of some organic rot that is carrying on, just under the surface of all that water? I don’t know what makes a lake smell that way, but it’s wonderful. I could ask the Keeling family to tell me why the lake smells that way, but I prefer the silence—just the breeze that’s almost constant in the pines, the lap of the waves, and the gulls’ cries, and the shrieks of the terns.
“That’s a Caspian tern,” one of the Keeling boys said to me. “See the long red bill, see the black feet?”
“I see,” I said. But I wasn’t paying attention to the tern; I was remembering the letter I wrote to Owen Meany in the summer of 1962. Dan Needham had told me that he had seen Owen one Sunday in the Gravesend Academy gym. Dan said that Owen had the basketball, but he wasn’t shooting; he was standing at the foul line, just looking up at the basket—he wasn’t even dribbling the ball, and he wouldn’t take a shot. Dan said it was the strangest thing.
“He was just standing there,” Dan said. “I must have watched him for five minutes, and he didn’t move a muscle—he just held the ball and stared at the basket. He’s so small, you know, the basket must look like it’s a mile away.”
“He was probably thinking about the shot,” I told Dan.
“Well, I didn’t bother him,” Dan said. “Whatever he was thinking about, he was concentrating so hard he didn’t see me—I didn’t even say hello. I don’t think he would have heard me, anyway,” Dan said.
Hearing about him made me even miss practicing that stupid shot; and so I wrote to him, just casually—since when would a twenty-year-old actually come out and say he missed his best friend?
“Dear Owen,” I wrote him. “What are you up to? It’s kind of boring here. I like the work in the woods best—I mean, the logging. Except there are deer flies. The work at the sawmill, and in the lumberyards, is much hotter—but there are no deer flies. Uncle Alfred insists that Loveless Lake is ‘potable’—he says we have swallowed so much of it, we would be dead if it weren’t. But Noah says there’s much more piss and shit in it than there is in the ocean. I miss the beach—how’s the beach this summer? Maybe next summer your father would give me a job in the quarries?”
He wrote back; he didn’t bother to begin with the usual “Dear John”—The Voice had his own style, nothing fancy, strictly capitals.
“ARE YOU CRAZY?” Owen wrote me. “YOU WANT TO WORK IN THE QUARRIES? YOU THINK IT’S HOT IN A LUMBERYARD? MY FATHER DOESN’T DO A LOT OF HIRING—AND I’M SURE HE WON’T PAY YOU AS MUCH AS YOUR UNCLE ALFRED. IT SOUNDS TO ME LIKE YOU HAVEN’T MET THE RIGHT GIRL UP THERE.”
“So how’s Hester?” I asked him, when I wrote him back. “Be sure to tell her that I love her room—that’ll piss her off! I don’t suppose she’s been helping you practice the shot—if you lose your touch, that’ll be too bad. You were so close to doing it in under three seconds.”
He wrote back immediately: “UNDER THREE SECONDS IS DEFINITELY POSSIBLE. I HAVEN’T BEEN PRACTICING BUT THINKING ABOUT IT IS ALMOST AS GOOD. MY FATHER WILL HIRE YOU NEXT SUMMER—IT WON’T BE TOO BAD IF YOU START OUT SLOWLY, MAYBE IN THE MONUMENT SHOP. BY THE WAY, THE BEACH HAS BEEN GREAT—LOTS OF GOOD-LOOKING GIRLS AROUND, AND CAROLINE O’DAY HAS BEEN ASKING ABOUT YOU. YOU OUGHT TO SEE HOW SHE LOOKS WHEN SHE’S NOT WEARING HER ST. MICHAEL’S UNIFORM. SAW DAN ON HIS BICYCLE—HE SHOULD LOSE A LITTLE WEIGHT. AND HESTER AND I SPENT AN EVENING WITH YOUR GRANDMOTHER; WE WATCHED THE IDIOT BOX, OF COURSE, AND YOU SHOULD HAVE HEARD YOUR GRANDMOTHER ON THE SUBJECT OF THE GENEVA CONFERENCE—SHE SAID SHE’D BELIEVE IN THE ‘NEUTRALITY’ OF LAOS WHEN THE SOVIETS DECIDED TO RELOCATE … ON THE MOON! SHE SAID SHE’D BELIEVE IN THE GENEVA ACCORDS WHEN THERE WAS NOTHING BUT PARROTS AND MONKEYS MOVING ALONG THE HO CHI MINH TRAIL! I WON’T REPEAT WHAT HESTER SAID ABOUT YOU USING HER ROOM—IT’S THE SAME THING SHE SAYS ABOUT HER MOTHER AND FATHER AND NOAH AND SIMON AND ALL THE GIRLS ON LOVELESS LAKE, SO PERHAPS YOU’RE FAMILIAR WITH THE EXPRESSION.”
I wrote a letter to Caroline O’Day; she never answered me. It was August 1962. I remember one very hot day—humid, with a hazy sky; a thunderstorm was threatening, but it never came. It was very much like the day of my mother’s wedding, before the storm; it was what Owen Meany and I called typical Gravesend weather.
Noah and Simon and I were logging; the deer flies were driving us crazy, and there were mosquitoes, too. Simon was the easiest to drive crazy; of the three of us, the deer flies and mosquitoes liked Simon the best. Logging is most dangerous if you’re impatient; saws and axes, peavys and cant dogs—these tools belong in patient hands. Simon got a little sloppy and reckless with his cant dog—he chased after a deer fly with the hook end and speared himself in the calf. It was a deep gash, about three or four inches long—not serious; but he would require some stitches to close the wound, and a tetanus shot.
Noah and I were elated; even Simon, who had a high tolerance for pain, was pretty pleased—the injury meant we could all get out of the woods. We drove the Jeep out the logging road to Noah’s Chevy; we took the Chevy out on the highway, through Sawyer Depot and Conway, to the emergency entrance of the North Conway Hospital.
There’d been an automobile accident somewhere near the Maine border, so Simon rated a low priority in the emergency room; that was fine with all of us, because the longer it took for Simon to get his tetanus shot and his stitches, the longer we would be away from the deer flies and the mosquitoes and the heat. Simon even pretended not to
know if he was allergic to anything; Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred had to be called, and that took more time. Noah started flirting with one of the nurses; with any luck, Noah knew, we could fart around the whole rest of the day, and never go back to work.
One of the less-mangled victims of the auto accident sat in the waiting room with us. He was someone Noah and Simon knew vaguely—a type not uncommon in the north country, one of those ski bums who don’t seem to know what to do with themselves when there isn’t any snow. This was a guy who’d been drinking a bottle of beer when one car hit another; he’d been the driver of one of the cars, he said, and the bottleneck had broken in his mouth on impact—he had lacerations on the roof of his mouth, and his gums were slashed, and the broken neck of the bottle had pierced his cheek. He proudly showed us the lacerations inside his mouth, and the hole in his cheek—all the while mopping up his mouth and face with a blood-soaked wad of gauze, which he periodically wrung out in a blood-soaked towel. He was precisely the sort of north country lunatic who gave Hester great disdain for Sawyer Depot, and led her to maintain her residence in the college community of Durham year-round.
“Did you hear about Marilyn Monroe?” the ski bum asked us.
We were prepared for a dirty joke—an absolutely filthy joke. The ski bum’s smile was a bleeding gash in his face; his smile was the repulsive equal to his gaping wound in his cheek. He was lascivious, depraved—our much-appreciated holiday in the emergency room had taken a nasty turn. We tried to ignore him.
“Did you hear about Marilyn Monroe?” he asked us again. Suddenly, it didn’t sound like a joke. Maybe it’s about the Kennedys! I thought.
“No. What about her?” I said.
“She’s dead,” the ski bum said. He took such a sadistic pleasure in his announcement, his smile appeared to pump the blood out of his mouth and the hole in his cheek; I thought that he was as pleased by the shock value of what he had to say as he was thrilled by the spectacle of wringing his own blood from the sodden gauze pad into the sodden towel. Forever after, I would see his bleeding face whenever I imagined how Larry Lish and his mother must have responded to this news; how eagerly, how greedily they must have spread the word! “Have you heard? You mean, you haven’t heard!” The rapture of so much amateur conjecturing and surmising would flush their faces as irrepressibly as blood!
“How?” I asked the ski bum.
“An overdose,” he said; he sounded disappointed—as if he’d been hoping for something bloodier. “Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was suicide,” he said.