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—the
y 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.