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 mat 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 & 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 snared 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. Because she wore a wrinkled cotton dress that was too small for her, when the wind pressed hard against her, I could see that she was pregnant-although she looked barely old enough to be pregnant, and she was not with any man I would have guessed was the father of her unborn child. I took the boy who stood beside her to be her brother-and a younger brother to both the dead warrant officer and his pregnant sister. He was a gawky-tall, bony-faced boy, who was scary-looking because of what loomed as his potential size. I thought he could not have been older than fourteen or fifteen; but
although he was thin, he carried great, broad bones upon his gangling frame-he had such strong-looking hands and such an oversized head that I thought he could have put on a hundred pounds without even slightly altering his exterior dimensions. With an additional hundred pounds, he would have been huge and frightening; in some way, I thought, he looked like a man who had recently lost a hundred pounds-and, at the same time, he appeared to have within him the capacity to gain it all back overnight. The overgrown boy towered over everyone else-he sawed hi the wind like the vastly tall palms that lined the entrance to the Phoenix Sky Harbor terminal-and his rage was the most manifest, his anger (like his body) appeared to be a monster
