that had lots of room to grow. When his mother spoke, the boy tipped his head back and spat-a sizable and mud-colored trajectory. It shocked me that, at his age, his parents allowed him to chew tobacco! Then he turned and stared at the mother, head-on, until she turned away from him, still fidgeting with her hands. The boy wore a greasy pair of what looked to me (from my distant perspective) to be workmen's overalls, and some serious tools hung in loops from something like a carpenter's belt-only the tools more closely resembled the hardware of a car mechanic or a telephone repairman; perhaps the boy had an after-school job, and he'd come directly from this job to meet his brother's body at the airport. If this was the most intimate welcoming party from the warrant officer's family, it gave me the shivers to think of the even less presentable members of kin who might still be making merry at the three-day-long 'picnic wake.' When I looked at this tribe, I thought that I wouldn't have wanted Owen Meany's job-not for a million dollars. No one seemed to know in which direction to look for the plane. I trusted the major and the mortician; they were the only two people who stared off in the same direction, and I knew that this wasn't the first body they had been on hand to welcome home. And so I looked in the direction they looked. Although the sun had set, vivid streaks of vermilion-colored light traced the enormous sky, and through one of these streaks of light I saw Owen's plane descending-as if, wherever Owen Meany went, some kind of light always attended him. All the way from San Francisco to Phoenix, Owen was writing in his diary; he wrote pages and pages-he knew he didn't have much time.
'THERE'S SO MUCH I KNOW,' he wrote, 'BUT I DON'T KNOW EVERYTHING. ONLY GOD KNOWS EVERYTHING. THERE ISN'T TIME FOR ME TO GET TO VIETNAM. I THOUGHT I KNEW I WAS GOING THERE. I THOUGHT I KNEW THE DATE, TOO. BUT IF I'M RIGHT ABOUT THE DATE, THEN I'M WRONG ABOUT FT HAPPENING IN VIETNAM. AND IF I'M RIGHT ABOUT VIETNAM, THEN I'M WRONG ABOUT THE DATE. IT'S POSSIBLE THAT IT REALLY IS 'JUST A DREAM'-BUT IT SEEMS SO REALl THE DATE LOOKED THE MOST REAL, BUT I DON'T KNOW-I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE.
'I'M NOT AFRAID, BUT I'M VERY NERVOUS. AT FIRST, I DIDN'T LIKE KNOWING-NOW I DON'T LIKE NOT KNOWING! GOD IS TESTING ME,' wrote Owen Meany. There was much more; he was confused. He'd cut off my finger to keep me out of Vietnam; in his view, he'd attempted to physically remove me from his dream. But although he'd kept me out of the war, it was apparent-from his diary-that I'd remained in the dream. He could keep me out of Vietnam, he could cut off my finger; but he couldn't get me out of his dream, and that worried him. If he was going to die, he knew I had to be there-he didn't know why. But if he'd cut off my finger to save my life, it was a contradiction that he'd invited me to Arizona. God had promised him that nothing bad would happen to me; Owen Meany clung to that belief.
'MAYBE IT REALLY IS 'JUST A DREAM'!' he repeated. 'MAYBE THE DATE IS JUST A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION! BUT IT WAS WRITTEN IN STONE-IT IS 'WRITTEN IN STONE'!' he added; he meant, of course, that he'd already carved the date of his death on his own gravestone. But now he was confused; now he wasn't so sure.
'HOW COULD THERE BE VIETNAMESE CHILDREN IN ARIZONA!' Owen asked himself; he even asked God a question. 'MY GOD-IF I DON'T SAVE ALL THOSE CHILDREN, HOW COULD YOU HAVE PUT ME THROUGH ALL THIS?' Later, he added: 'I MUST TRUST IN THE LORD.'
And just before the plane touched down in Phoenix, he made this hasty observation from the air: 'HERE I AM AGAIN- I'M ABOVE EVERYTHING. THE PALM TREES ARE VERY STRAIGHT AND TALL-I'M HIGH ABOVE THE PALM TREES. THE SKY AND THE PALM TREES ARE SO BEAUTIFUL.'
He was the first off the plane, his uniform a startlingly crisp challenge to the heat, his black armband identifying his mission, his green duffel bag in one hand-the triangular cardboard box in the other. He walked straight to the baggage compartment of the plane; although I couldn't hear his voice, I could see he was giving orders to the baggage handlers and the forklift operator-I'm sure he was telling them to keep the head of the body higher than the feet, so that fluid would not escape through the orifices. Owen rendered a salute as the body in the plywood box was lowered from the plane. When the forklift driver had the crate secured, Owen hopped on one of the tines of the fork-he rode thus, the short distance across the runway to the waiting hearse, like the figurehead on the prow of a ship. I walked across the tarmac toward the family, who had not moved-only their eyes followed Owen Meany and the body in the box. They stood paralyzed by their anger; but the major stepped smartly forward to greet Owen; the chauffeur opened the tailgate of the long, silver-gray hearse; and the mortician became the unctuous delegate of death-the busybody it was his nature to be. Owen hopped lightly off the forklift; he dropped his duffel bag to the tarmac and cracked open the triangular cardboard box. With the major's help, Owen unfolded the flag-it was difficult to manage in the strong wind. Suddenly, more runway lights were turned on, and the flag swelled and snapped brightly against the dark sky; rather clumsily, Owen and the major finally covered the crate with the flag. Once the body was slid into the hearse, the flag on top of the container lay still, and the family-like a large, ungainly animal- approached the hearse and Owen Meany. That was when I noticed that the hugely tall boy was not wearing a pair of workmen's overalls-he was wearing jungle fatigues-and what I had mistaken for splotches of grease or oil were in fact the camouflage markings. The fatigues looked authentic, but the boy was clearly not old enough to 'serve'
and he was hardly in a proper uniform-on his big feet, he wore a scuffed and filthy pair of basketball shoes, 'high tops'; and his matted, shoulder-length hair certainly wasn't Army regulation. It was not a carpenter's belt he wore; it was a kind of cartridge belt, with what appeared to be live ammo, actual loaded shells-at least, some of the cartridge sleeves in the belt were stuffed with bullets-and from various loops and hooks and straps, attached to this belt, certain things were hanging ... neither a mechanic's tools, nor the equipment that is standard for a telephone repairman. The towering boy carried some authentic-looking Army equipment: an entrenching tool, a machete, a bayonet-although the sheath for the bayonet did not look like Army issue, not to me; it was made of a shiny material in a Day-Glo-green
