times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Whereupon, Dan would grip the dashboard and tremble while a dynamite truck hurtled past us. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me the most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come. Owen, too, was fond of that passage. When we saw Dan's production of Julius Caesar, later that summer, I had passed my driver's test;-yet, in the evenings, when Owen and I would drive down to the boardwalk and the casino at Hampton Beach together, we took the tomato-red pickup and Owen always drove. I paid for the gas. Those summer nights of were the first nights I remember feeling 'grown up'; we'd drive half an hour from Gravesend for the fleeting privilege of inching along a crowded, gaudy strip of beachfront, looking at girls who rarely looked at us. Sometimes, they looked at the truck. We could drive along this strip only two or three times before a cop would motion us over to the side of the street, examine Owen's driver's license-in disbelief-and then suggest that we find a place to park the truck and resume our looking at girls on foot, on either the boardwalk or on the sidewalk that threaded the arcades. Walking with Owen Meany at Hampton Beach was ill-advised; he was so strikingly small, he was teased and roughed up by the delinquent young men who tilted the pinball machines and swaggered in the heated vicinity of the girls in their cotton-candy-colored clothes. And the girls, who rarely returned our glances when we were secure in the Meany Granite Company pickup, took very long (and giggling) looks at Owen when we were on foot. When he was walking, Owen didn't dare look at the girls. Therefore, when a cop would, inevitably, advise us to park the track and pursue our interests 'on foot,' Owen and I would drive back to Gravesend. Or we would drive to a popular daytime beach-Little Boar's Head, which was beautifully empty at night. We'd sit on the sea wall, and feel the cool air off the ocean, and watch the phosphorescence sparkle in the surf. Or we would drive to Rye Harbor and sit on the breakwater, and watch the small boats slapping on the ruffled, pondlike surface; the breakwater itself had been built with the slag-the broken slabs-from the Meany Granite Quarry.
'THEREFORE, I HAVE A RIGHT TO SIT HERE,' Owen always said; no one, of course, ever challenged our being there. Even though the girls ignored us that summer, that was when I noticed that Owen was attractive to women-not only to my mother. It is difficult to say how he was attractive, or why; but even when he was sixteen, even when he was especially shy or awkward, he looked like someone who had earned what grasp of the world he had. I might have been particularly conscious of this aspect of him because he had truly earned so much more than / had. It was not just that he was a better student, or a better driver, or so philosophically sure of himself; here was someone I had grown up with, and had grown used to teasing-I had picked him up over my head and passed him back and forth, I had derided his smallness as surely as the other children had-and yet, suddenly, by the time he was sixteen, he appeared in command. He was more in command of himself than the rest of us, he was more in command of us than the rest of us-and with women, even with those girls who giggled when they looked at him, you sensed how compelled they were to touch him. And by the end of the summer of ', he had something astonishing for a sixteen-year-old-in those days before all this ardent and cosmetic weightlifting, he had muscles! To be sure, he was tiny, but he was fiercely strong, and his sinewy strength was as visible as the strength of a whippet; although he was frighteningly lean, there was already something very adult about his muscular development-and why not? After all, he'd spent the summer working with granite. I hadn't even been working. In June, he'd started as a stonecutter; he spent most of the working day in the monument shop, cutting with the grain,
WITH THE RIFT, as he called it-using the wedge and feathers. By the middle of the month, his father had taught him how to saw against the grain; the sawyers cut up the bigger slabs, and they finished the gravestones with what was called a diamond wheel-a circular blade, impregnated with diamonds. By July, he was working in the quarries-he was often the signalman, but his father apprenticed him to the other quarrymen: the channel bar drillers, the derrickman, the dynamiters. It seemed to me that he spent most of the month of August in a single, remote pit-one hundred and seventy-five feet deep, a football field in diameter. He and the other men were lowered to work in a grout bucket-'grout' is waste, the rubble of broken rock that is raised from the pit all day long. At the end of the day, they bring up the men in the bucket. Granite is a dense, heavy stone; it weighs close to two hundred pounds per cubic foot. Ironically-even though they worked with the diamond wheel-most of the sawyers had all their fingers; but none of the quarrymen had all their fingers; only Mr. Meany had all his.
'I'LL KEEP ALL MINE, TOO,' Owen said. 'YOU'VE GOT TO BE MORE THAN QUICK, YOU'VE GOT TO FEEL WHEN THE ROCK'S GOING TO MOVE BEFORE IT MOVES-YOU'VE GOT TO MOVE BEFORE THE ROCK MOVES.'
Just the slightest fuzz grew on his upper lip; nowhere else did his face show traces of a beard, and the faint moustache was so downy and such a pale-gray color that I first mistook it for pulverized granite, the familiar rock dust that clung to him. Yet his face-his nose, the sockets for his eyes, his cheekbones, and the contours of his jaw-had the gaunt definition that one sees in the faces of sixteen-year-olds only when they are starving. By September, he was smoking a pack of Camels a day. In the yellow glow of the dashboard lights, when we went out driving in the pickup at night, I would catch a glimpse of his profile with the cigarette dangling from his lips; his face had a permanent adult quality. Those mothers' breasts he'd once unfavorably compared to my mother's breasts were beneath his interest now, although Barb Wiggin's were still TOO BIG, Mrs. Webster's were still TOO LOW, and Mrs. Merrill's only VERY FUNNY. While Ginger Brinker-Smith, as a younger mother, had claimed our attention, we now (for the most part) coolly assessed our peers. THE TWO CAROLINES-Caroline Perkins and Caroline O'Day-appealed to us, although the breasts of Caroline O'Day were devalued, in Owen's view, by her Catholicism. Maureen Early's bosom was judged to be PERKY; Hannah Abbot's breasts were SMALL BUT SHAPELY; Irene Babson, who had given Owen the shivers as long ago as when my mother's bosom was under review, was now so out of control as to be SIMPLY SCARY. Deborah Perry, Lucy Dearborn, Betsy Bickford, Sarah Tilton, Polly Famum-to their names, and to the contours of their young breasts, Owen Meany would inhale a Camel deeply. The summer wind rushed through the rolled-down window of the pickup; when he exhaled, slowly, through his
