A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel

THE FINGER

UNTIL THE SUMMER of , I felt that I couldn't wait to grow up and be treated with the kind of respect imagined adults were routinely offered and adamantly thought they deserved-I couldn't wait to wallow in the freedom and the privileges I imagined grown-ups enjoyed. Until that summer, my long apprenticeship to maturity struck me as arduous and humiliating; Randy White had confiscated my fake draft card, and I wasn't yet old enough to buy beer-I wasn't independent enough to merit my own place to live, I wasn't earning enough to afford my own car, and I wasn't something enough to persuade a woman to bestow her sexual favors upon me. Not one woman had I ever persuaded! Until the summer of ', thought that childhood and adolescence were a purgatory without apparent end; I thought that youth, in a word, '' sucked.'' But Owen Meany, who believed he knew when and how he was going to die, was in no hurry to grow up. And as to my calling the period of our youth a "purgatory," Owen said simply, "THERE IS NO PURGATORY-THAT'S A CATHOLIC INVENTION. THERE'S LIFE ON EARTH, THERE'S HEAVEN-AND THERE'S HELL."

"I think life on earth is hell," I said.

"I HOPE YOU HAVE A NICE SUMMER," Owen said. It was the first summer we spent apart. I suppose I should be

grateful for that summer, because it afforded me my first glimpse of what my life without Owen would be like-you might say, it prepared me. By the end of the summer of , Owen Meany had made me afraid of what the next phase was going to be. I didn't want to grow up anymore; what I wanted was for Owen and me to go on being kids for the rest of our lives-sometimes Canon Mackie tells me, rather ungenerously, that I have succeeded. Canon Campbell, God Rest His Soul, used to tell me that being a kid for the rest of my life was a perfectly honorable aspiration. I spent that summer of ' in Sawyer Depot, working for my Uncle Alfred. After what had happened to Owen, I didn't want to work for the Gravesend Academy Admissions Office and give guided tours of the school-not anymore. The Eastman Lumber Company offered me a good job. It was tiring, outdoor work; but I got to spend my time with Noah and Simon-and there were parties on Loveless Lake almost every night, and swimming and waterskiing on Loveless Lake nearly every day, after work, and every weekend. Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha welcomed me into the family; they gave me Hester's room for the summer. Hester was keeping her school-year apartment in Durham, working as a waitress in one of those sandy, lobster-house restaurants ... I think it was in Kittery or Portsmouth. After she got off work, she and Owen would cruise ' 'the strip'' at Hampton Beach in the tomato-red pickup. Hester's school-year roommates were elsewhere for the summer, and Hester and Owen spent every night in her Durham apartment, alone. They were "living together as man and wife"-that was the disapproving and frosty way Aunt Martha put it, when she discussed it at all, which was rarely. Despite the fact that Owen and Hester were living together as man and wife, Noah and Simon and I could never be sure if they were actually "doing it." Simon was sure that Hester could not live without doing it, Noah somehow felt that Owen and Hester had done it-but that, for some special reason, they had stopped. I had the strangest feeling that anything between them was possible: that they did it and had always done it with abandon; that they had never done it, but that they might be doing something even worse-or better-and that the real bond between them (whether they "did it" or not) was even more passionate and far sadder than sex. I felt cut off from Owen-I was working with wood and smelling a cool, northern air that was scented with trees; he was working with granite and feeling the sun beat down on the unshaded quarry, inhaling the rock dust and smelling the dynamite. Chain saws were relatively new then; the Eastman Company used them for their logging operations, but very selectively- they were heavy and cumbersome, not nearly so light and powerful as they are today. In those days, we brought the logs out of the woods by horse and crawler tractor, and the timber was often cut by crosscut saws and axes. We loaded the logs onto the trucks by hand, using peaveys or cant dogs; nowadays, Noah and Simon have shown me, they use self-loading trucks, grapple skidders, and chippers. Even the sawmill has changed; there's no more sawdust! But in ', we debarked the logs at the mill and sawed them into various grades and sizes of lumber, and all that bark and sawdust was wasted; nowadays, Noah and Simon refer to that stuff as "wood-fired waste" or even "energy"-they use it to make their own electricity!

"How's that for progress?" Simon is always saying. Now we're the grown-ups we were in such a hurry to become; now we can drink all the beer we want, with no one asking us for proof of our age. Noah and Simon have their own houses-their own wives and children-and they do an admirable job of looking after old Uncle Alfred and my Aunt Martha, who is still a lovely woman, although she's quite gray; she looks much the way Grandmother looked to me in the summer of '. Uncle Alfred's had two bypass operations, but he's doing fine. The Eastman Company has provided him and my Aunt Martha with a good and long life. My aunt manifests only the most occasional vestige of her old interest in who my actual father is or was; last Christmas, in Sawyer Depot, she managed to get me alone for a second and she said, "Do you still not know? You can tell me. I'll bet you know! How could you not have found out something-in all this time?"

I put my finger to my lips, as if I were going to tell her something that I didn't want Uncle Alfred or Dan or Noah or Simon to hear. Aunt Martha grew very attentive-her eyes sparkling, her smile widening with mischief and conspiracy.

"Dan Needham is the best father a boy could have," I whispered to her.

"I know-Dan is wonderful," Aunt Martha said impatiently; this was not what she wanted to hear. And what do Noah and Simon and I still talk about-after all these years? We talk about what Owen "knew" or thought he

knew; and we talk about Hester. We'll talk about Hester in our graves!

"Hester the Molested" Simon says.

"Who would have thought any of it possibleT' Noah asks. And every Christmas, Uncle Alfred or Aunt Martha will say: "I believe that Hester will be home for Christmas next year-that's what she says."

And Noah and Simon will say: "That's what she always says."

I suppose that Hester is my aunt and uncle's only unhappi-ness. Even in the summer of ', I felt this was true. They treated her differently from the way they treated Noah and Simon, and she made them pay for it; how angry they made her! She took her anger away from Sawyer Depot and everywhere she went she found other things and people to fuel her colossal anger. I don't think Owen was angry, not exactly. But they shared a sense of some unfairness; there was an atmosphere of injustice that enveloped them both. Owen felt that God had assigned him a role that he was powerless to change; Owen's sense of his own destiny-his belief that he was on a mission-robbed him of his capacity for fun. In the summer of ', he was only twenty; but from the moment he was told that Jack Kennedy was "diddling" Marilyn Monroe, he stopped doing anything for pleasure. Hester was just plain pissed off; she just didn't give a shit. They were such a depressing couple! But in the summer of ', I thought my Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred were a perfect couple; and yet they depressed me because of how happy they were. In their happiness they reminded me of the brief time my mother and Dan Needham had been together-and how happy they'd been, too. Meanwhile, that summer, I couldn't manage to have a successful date. Noah and Simon did everything they could for me. They introduced me to every girl on Loveless Lake. It was a summer of wet bathing suits drying from the radio aerial of Noah's car-and the closest I came to sex was the view I had of the crotches of various girls' bathing suits, snapping in the wind that whipped past Noah's car. It was a convertible, a black-and-white ' Chevy, the kind of car that had fins. Noah would let me take it to the drive-in, if and when I managed to get a date.

"How was the movie?" Noah would always ask me-when I brought the car home, always much too early.

"He looks like he saw every minute of it," Simon would say-and I had. I saw eveiry minute of every movie I took every girl to. And more's the shame: Noah and Simon created countless opportunities for me to be alone with various dates at the Eastman boathouse. At night, that boathouse had the reputation of a cheap motel; but all I ever managed was a long game of darts, or sometimes my date and I would sit on the dock, withholding any comment on the spectacle of the hard and distant stars until (finally) Noah or Simon would arrive to rescue us from our awkward torment. I started feeling afraid-for no reason I could understand. Georgian Bay: July , -it's a shame you can buy The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star in Pointe au Baril Station; but, thank God, they don't carry The New York Times! The island in Georgian Bay that has been in Katherine Reeling's family since -when Ratherine's grandfather reputedly won it in a poker game-is about a fifteen-minute boat ride from Pointe au Baril Station; the island is in the vicinity of Burnt Island and Hearts Content Island and Peesay Point. I think it's called Gibson Island or Ormsby Island- there are both Gibsons and Ormsbys in Ratherine's family; I believe that Gibson was Ratherine's maiden name, but I forget. Anyway, there are a bunch of notched cedarwood cottages on the island, which is not served by electric power but is comfortably and efficiently supplied with propane gas-the refrigerators, the hot-water heater, the stoves, and the lamps are all run on propane; the tanks of gas are delivered to the island by boat. The island has its own septic system, which is a subject often discussed by the hordes of Reelings and Gibsons and Ormsbys who empty themselves into it-and who are fearful of the system's eventual rebellion. I would not have wanted to visit the Reelings-or the Gibsons, or the Ormsbys-on their island before the septic system was installed; but that period of unlighted encounters with spiders in outhouses, and various late-night frights in the privy-world, is another favorite topic of discussion among the families who share the island each summer. I have heard, many times, the story of Uncle Bulwer Ormsby who was attacked by an owl in the privy-which had no door, "the better to air it out!" the Reelings and the Gibsons and the Ormsbys all claimed. Uncle Bulwer was pecked on top of his head during

a fortunate hiatus in what should have been a most private action, and he was so fearful of the attacking owl that he fled the privy with his pants down at his ankles, and did even greater injury to himself-greater than the owl's injury-by running headfirst into a pine tree. And every year that I've visited the island, there are the familiar disputes regarding what kind of owl it was-or even if it was an owl. Katherine's husband, Charlie Keeling, says it was probably a horsefly or a moth. Others say it was surely a screech owl-for they are known to be fierce in the defense of their nests, even to the extent of attacking humans. Others say that a screech owl's range does not extend to Georgian Bay, and that it was surely a merlin-a pigeon hawk; they are very aggressive and are often mistaken for the smaller owls at night. The company of Katherine's large and friendly family is comforting to me. The conversations tend toward legendary occurrences on the island-many of which include acts of bravery or cowardice from the old outhouse or privy period of their lives. Disputed encounters with nature are also popular; my days here are most enjoyably spent in identifying species of bird and mammal and fish and reptile and, unfortunately, insect-almost none of which is well known to me. Was that an otter or a mink or a muskrat? Was that a loon or a duck or a scoter? Does it sting or bite, or is it poisonous? These distinctions are punctuated by more direct questions to the children. Did you flush, turn off the gas, close the screen door, leave the water running (the pump is run by a gasoline engine)-and did you hang up your bathing suit and towel where they will dry? It is remindful to me of my Loveless Lake days-without the agony of dating; and Loveless Lake is a dinky pond compared to Georgian Bay. Even in the summer of ', Loveless Lake was overrun by motorboats-and in those days, many summer cottages flushed their toilets directly into the lake. The so-called great outdoors is so much greater and so much nicer in Canada than it ever was-in my time-in New Hampshire. But pine pitch on your fingers is the same everywhere; and the kids with their hair damp all day, and their wet bathing suits, and someone always with a skinned knee, or a splinter, and the sound of bare feet on a dock . . . and the quarreling, all the quarreling. I love it; for a short time, it is very soothing. I can almost imagine that I have had a life very different from the life I have had. One can learn much through the thin walls of summer houses. For example, I once heard Charlie Keeling tell Katherine that I was a "nonpracticing homosexual."

"What does that mean?" Katherine asked him. I held my breath, I strained to hear Charlie's answer-for years I've wanted to know what it means to be a "nonpracticing homosexual."

"You know what I mean, Katherine," Charlie said.

"You mean he doesn't do it," Katherine said.

"I believe he doesn't," Charlie said.

"But when he thinks about doing it, he thinks about doing it with men?" Katherine asked.

"I believe he doesn't think about it, at all," Charlie answered.

"Then in what way is he 'homosexual,' Charlie?" Katherine asked. Charlie sighed; in summer houses, one can even hear the sighs.

"He's not unattractive," Charlie said. "He doesn't have a girlfriend. Has he ever had a girlfriend?"

"I fail to see how this makes him gay," Katherine said. "He doesn't seem gay, not to me."

"I didn't say he was gay," Charlie said. "A nonpracticing homosexual doesn't always know what he is."

So that's what it means to be a "nonpracticing homosexual," I thought: it means I don't know what I am! Every day there is a discussion of what we will eat-and who will take the boat, or one of the boats, to the station to fetch the food and the vitals. The shopping list is profoundly basic. gasoline

batteries Band-Aids

corn (if any) insect repellent hamburg and buns (lots) eggs

milk flour

butter beer (lots) fruit (if any)

bacon tomatoes clothespins (for Prue) N lemons live bait I let the younger children show me how they have learned to drive the boat. I let Charlie Keeling take me fishing; I really enjoy fishing for smallmouth bass-one day a year. I lend a hand to whatever the most pressing project on the island is: the Ormsbys need to rebuild their deck; the Gibsons are replacing shingles on the boathouse roof. Every day, I volunteer to be the one to go to the station; shopping for a large family is a treat for me-for such a short time. I take a kid or two with me-for the pleasure of driving the boat would be wasted on me. And I always share my room with one of the Keeling children-or, rather, the child is required to share his room with me. I fall asleep listening to the astonishing complexity of a child breathing in his sleep-of a loon crying out on the dark water, of the waves lapping the rocks onshore. And in the morning, long before the child stirs, I hear the gulls and I think about the tomato-red pickup cruising the coastal road between Hampton Beach and Rye Harbor; I hear the raucous, embattled crows, whose shrill disputations and harangues remind me that I have awakened in the real world-in the world I know-after all. For a moment, until the crows commence their harsh bickering, I can imagine that here, on Georgian Bay, I have found what was once called The New World-all over again, I have stumbled ashore on the undamaged land that Watahan-towet sold to my ancestor. For in Georgian Bay it is possible to imagine North America as it was-before the United States began the murderous deceptions and the unthinking carelessness that have all but spoiled it! Then I hear the crows. They bring me back to the world with their sounds of mayhem. I try not to think about Owen. I try to talk with Charlie Keeling about otters.

"They have a long, flattened tail-the tail lies horizontally on the water," Charlie told me.

"I see," I said. We were sitting on the rocks, on that part of the shoreline where one of the children said he'd seen a muskrat.

"It was an otter," Charlie told the child.

"You didn't see it, Dad," another of the children said. So Charlie and I decided to wait the creature out. A lot of freshwater clamshells marked the entrance to the animal's cave in the rocks onshore.

"An otter is a lot faster in the water than a muskrat," Charlie told me.

"I see," I said. We sat for an hour or two, and Charlie told me how the water level of Georgian Bay-and of all of Lake Huron-was changing; every year, it changes. He said he was worried that the acid rain-from the United States-was starting to kill the lake, beginning, as it always does (he said), with the bottom of the food chain.

"I see," I said.

"The weeds have changed, the algae have changed, you can't catch the pike you used to-and one otter hasn't killed all these clams!" he said, indicating the shells.

"I see," I said. Then, when Charlie was peeing-in "the bush," as Canadians say-an animal about the size of a small beagle, with a flattened sort of head and dark-brown fur, swam out from the shore.

"Charlie!" I called. The animal dove; it did not come up again. One of the children was instantly beside me.

"What was it?" the child asked.

"I don't know," said.

"Did it have a flattened tail?" Charlie called from the bush.

"It had a flattened sort of head," I said.

"That's a muskrat," one of the children said.

"You didn't see it," said his sister.

"What kind of tail did it have?" Charlie called.

"I didn't see its tail," I admitted.

"It was that fast, huh?" Charlie asked me-emerging from the bush, zipping up his fly.

"It was pretty fast, I guess," I said.

"It was an otter," he said. (I am tempted to say it was a "nonpracticing homosexual," but I don't).

"See the duck?" a little girl asked me.

"That was no duck, you fool," her brother said.

"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 . 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"- 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, . 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, peaveys 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. Maybe it was the Kennedys, I thought. It made me feel afraid; at first, that summer, it was something vague that had made me feel afraid. Now something concrete made me feel afraid-but my fear itself was still vague: what could Marilyn Monroe's death ever have to do with me!

"IT HAS TO DO WITH ALL OF US," said Owen Meany, when I called him that night. "SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR

WHOLE COUNTRY-NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER THAN SHE SEEMED. AND SHE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING-I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD. LOOK AT THE MEN IN HER LIFE-JOE DIMAG-GIO, ARTHUR MILLER, MAYBE THE KENNEDYS. LOOK AT HOW GOOD THEY SEEMl LOOK AT HOW DESIRABLE SHE WAS! THAT'S WHAT SHE WAS: SHE WAS DESIRABLE. SHE WAS FUNNY AND SEXY-AND SHE WAS VULNERABLE, TOO. SHE WAS NEVER QUITE HAPPY, SHE WAS ALWAYS A LITTLE OVERWEIGHT. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY," he repeated; he was on a roll. I could hear Hester playing her guitar in the background, as if she were trying to improvise a folk song from everything he said. "AND THOSE MEN," he said. "THOSE FAMOUS, POWERFUL MEN-DID THEY REALLY LOVE HER? DID THEY TAKE CARE OF HER? IF SHE WAS EVER WITH THE KENNEDYS, THEY COULDN'T HAVE LOVED HER-THEY WERE JUST USING HER, THEY WERE JUST BEING CARELESS AND TREATING THEMSELVES TO A THRILL. THAT'S WHAT POWERFUL MEN DO TO THIS COUNTRY-IT'S A BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, BREATHLESS COUNTRY, AND POWERFUL MEN USE IT TO TREAT THEMSELVES TO A THRILL! THEY SAY THEY LOVE IT BUT THEY DON'T MEAN IT. THEY SAY THINGS TO MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR GOOD-THEY MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR MORAL. THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT KENNEDY WAS: A MORALIST. BUT HE WAS JUST GIVING US A SNOW JOB, HE WAS JUST BEING A GOOD SEDUCER. I THOUGHT HE WAS A SAVIOR. I THOUGHT HE WANTED TO USE HIS POWER TO DO GOOD. BUT PEOPLE WILL SAY AND DO ANYTHING JUST TO GET THE POWER; THEN THEY'LL USE THE POWER JUST TO GET A THRILL. MARILYN MONROE WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR THE BEST MAN-MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST INTEGRITY, MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST ABILITY TO DO GOOD. AND SHE WAS SEDUCED, OVER AND OVER AGAIN-SHE GOT FOOLED, SHE WAS TRICKED, SHE GOT USED, SHE WAS USED UP. JUST LIKE THE COUNTRY. THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOR. THE COUN- TRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY'RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US. THAT'S WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU AND ME," said Owen Meany. "WE'RE GOING TO BE USED."

Georgian Bay: July , -The Toronto Star says that President Reagan "actually led the first efforts to conceal essential details of his secret arms-for-hostages program and keep it alive after it became public." The Toronto Star added that "the President subsequently made misleading statements about the arms sales"-on four separate occasions'. Owen used to say that the most disturbing thing about the antiwar movement-against the Vietnam War-was that he suspected self-interest motivated many of the protesters; he thought that if the issue of many of the protesters being drafted was removed from the issue of the war, there would be very little protest at all. Look at the United States today. Are they drafting young Americans to fight in Nicaragua? No; not yet. Are masses of young Americans outraged at the Reagan administration's shoddy and deceitful behavior? Ho hum; not hardly. I know what Owen Meany would say about that; I know what he did say-and it still applies.

"THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN GET AMERICANS TO NOTICE ANYTHING IS TO TAX THEM OR DRAFT THEM OR KILL THEM," Owen said. He said that once-when Hester proposed abolishing the draft. "IF YOU ABOLISH THE DRAFT," said Owen Meany, "MOST AMERICANS WILL SIMPLY STOP CARING ABOUT WHAT WE'RE DOING IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD."

I saw a mink run under the boathouse today; it had such a slender body, it was only slightly larger than a weasel-with a weasel's undulating movement. It had such a thick, glossy coat of fur, I was instantly reminded of Larry Lish's mother. Where is she now? I wondered. I know where Larry Lish is; he's a well-known journalist in New York-"an investigative reporter" is what he's called. I've read a few of his pieces; they're not bad-he was always clever-and I notice that he's acquired a necessary quality in his voice ("necessary," I think, if a journalist is going to make a name for himself, and gain an audience, and so forth). Larry Lish has become particularly self-righteous, and the quality in

his voice that I call "necessary" is a tone of moral indignation. Larry Lish has become a moralist-imagine that! I wonder what his mother has become. If she got the right guy to marry her-before it was too late-maybe Mitzy Lish has become a moralist, too! In the fall of ' when Owen Meany and I began our life as freshmen at the University of New Hampshire, we enjoyed certain advantages that set us apart from our lowly, less-experienced peers. We were not subject to dormitory rules because we lived at home-we were commuters from Graves-end and were permitted to park our own means of transportation on campus, which other freshmen were not allowed to do. I divided my at-home time between Dan and my grandmother; this had an added advantage, in that when there was a late-night university party in Durham, I could tell Dan I was staying with my grandmother and tell Grandmother I was staying with Dan-and never come home! Owen was not required to be home at any special time; considering that he spent every night of the summer at Hester's apartment, I was surprised that he was going through the motions of living at home at all. Hester's roommates were back, however; if Owen stayed at Hester's, there was no question regarding the bed in which he spent the night-whether he and Hester "did it" or not, they were at least familiar with the intimate proximity that Hester's queen-size mattress forced upon them. But once our classes began, Owen didn't sleep at Hester's apartment more than once or twice a week. Our other advantages over our fellow freshmen were several. We had suffered the academic rigors of Gravesend Academy; the course work at the University of New Hampshire was very easy in comparison. I benefited greatly from this, because-as Owen had taught me-I chiefly needed to give myself more time to do the work assigned. So much less work was assigned than what I had learned to expect from the academy that-for once-I had ample time. I got good grades, almost easily; and for the first time-although this took two or three years-I began to think of myself as "smart." But the relatively undemanding expectations of the university had quite a different effect on Owen Meany. He could do everything he was asked without half trying, and this made him lazy. He quickly fell into a habit of getting no better grades than he needed to satisfy his ROTC "schol- arship"; to my surprise, his best grades were always in the ROTC courses-in so-called Military Science. We took many of the same classes; in English and History, I actually got better grades than Owen-had become indifferent about his writing!

"I AM DEVELOPING A MINIMALIST'S STYLE," he told our English teacher, who'd complained that Owen never expanded a single point in any of his papers; he never employed more than one example for each point he made. "FIRST YOU TELL ME I CAN'T WRITE USING ONLY CAPITAL LETTERS, NOW YOU WANT ME TO 'ELABORATE'-TO BE MORE 'EXPANSIVE.' IS THAT CONSISTENT?" he asked our English teacher. "MAYBE YOU WANT ME TO CHANGE MY PERSONALITY, TOO?"

If, at Gravesend Academy, had persuaded the majority of the faculty that his eccentricities and peculiarities were not only his individual rights but were inseparable from his generally acknowledged brilliance, the more diverse but also more specialized faculty at the University of New Hampshire were not interested in "the whole boy," not at all; they were not even a community, the university faculty, and they shared no general opinion that Owen Meany was brilliant, they expressed no general concern that his individual rights needed protection, and they had no tolerance for eccentricities and peculiarities. The classes they taught were for no student's special development; their interests were the subject themselves-their passions were for the politics of the university, or of their own departments within it-and their overall view of us students was that we should conform ourselves to their methods of their disciplines of study. Owen Meany, who had been so conspicuous-all my life-was easily overlooked at the University of New Hampshire. He was in none of his classes as distinguished as the tomato-red pickup, which was so readily distinguishable among the many economy-model cars that most parents bought for most students who had their own cars-my grandmother had bought me a Volkswagen Beetle; in the campus parking lots, there were so many VWs of the same year and navy-blue color that I could identify mine only by its license plate or by the familiarity of whatever I had left on the back seat. And although Owen and I first counted Hester's friendship as an advantage, her friendship was another means by which

Owen Meany became lost in Durham; Hester had a lot of friends among the seniors in what was our first year. These seniors were the people Owen and I hung out with; we didn't have to make any friends among the freshmen-and when Hester and her friends graduated, Owen and I didn't have any friends. As for whatever had made me feel afraid in the summer of '-whatever that fear was, it was replaced by a kind of solitariness, a feeling of being oddly set apart, but without loneliness; the loneliness would come later. And as for fear, you would have thought the Cuban Missile Crisis-that October-would have sufficed; you would have thought that would have scared the shit out of us, as people in New Hampshire are a/ways untruthfully claiming. But Owen said to Hester and me, and to a bunch of hangers-on in Hester's apartment, "DON'T BE AFRAID. THIS IS NO BIG DEAL, THIS IS JUST A BIT OF NUCLEAR BLUFFING-NOTHING HAPPENS AS A RESULT OF THIS. BELIEVE ME. I KNOW."

What he meant was that he believed he "knew" what would happen to him; that it wasn't missiles that would get him- neither the Soviets' nor ours-and that, whatever "it" was, it didn't happen in October, .

"How do you know nothing's going to happen?" someone asked him. It was the guy who hung around Hester's apartment as if he were waiting for Owen Meany to drop dead. He kept encouraging Hester to read The Alexandria Quartet-especially Justine and Clea, which this guy claimed he had read four or five times. Hester wasn't much of a reader, and I had read only Justine. Owen Meany had read the whole quartet and had told Hester and me not to bother with the last three novels.

"IT'S JUST MORE OF THE SAME, AND NOT SO WELL DONE," Owen said. "ONE BOOK ABOUT HAVING SEX IN A FOREIGN ATMOSPHERE IS ENOUGH."

"What do you know about 'sex in a foreign atmosphere'?" the quartet-lover had asked Owen. Owen had not answered the guy. He surely knew the guy was a rival for Hester's affections; he also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.

"Hey!" the guy shouted at Owen. "I'm talking to you. What makes you think you know there's not going to be a war?"

"OH, THERE'S GOING TO BE A WAR, ALL RIGHT," said Owen Meany. "BUT NOT NOW-NOT OVER CUBA. EITHER KHRUSHCHEV WILL PULL THE MISSILES OUT OF CUBA OR KENNEDY WILL OFFER HIM SOMETHING TO HELP HIM SAVE FACE."

"This little man knows everything," the guy said.

"Don't you call him 'little,' " Hester said. "He's got the biggest penis ever. If there's a bigger one, I don't want to know about it," Hester said.

"THERE'S NO NEED TO BE CRUDE," said Owen Meany. That was the last we ever saw of the guy who wanted Hester to read The Alexandria Quartet. I will confess that in the showers in the Gravesend Academy gym-after practicing the shot-I had noticed that Owen's doink was especially large; at least, it was disproportionately large. Compared to the rest of him, it was huge\ My cousin Simon, whose doink was rather small-perhaps owing to Hester's childhood violence upon it-once claimed that small doinks grew much, much bigger when they were erect; big doinks, Simon said, never grew much when they got hard. I confess: I don't know-I have no doink theory as adamant or hopeful as Simon's. The only time I saw Owen Meany with an erection, he was wrapped in swaddling clothes-he was only an eleven-year-old Baby Jesus; and although his hard-on was highly inappropriate, it didn't strike me as astonishing. As for the shot, Owen and I were guilty of lack of practice; by the end of our freshman year, by the summer of - when we were twenty-one, the legal drinking age at last!-we had trouble sinking the shot in under five seconds. We had to work at it all summer-just to get back to where we had been, just to break four seconds again. It was the summer the Buddhists in Vietnam were demonstrating-they were setting themselves on fire. It was the summer when Owen said, "WHAT'S A CATHOLIC DOING AS PRESIDENT OF A COUNTRY OF BUDDHISTS?" It was the summer when President Diem was not long for this world; President John F. Kennedy was not long for this world, either. And it was the first summer I went to work for Meany Granite. It was my illusion that I worked for Mr. Meany; it was his illusion, too. It had been amply demonstrated to me-who bossed whom, in that family. I should have known, from the start, that Owen was in charge.

"MY FATHER WANTS TO START YOU OUT IN THE

MONUMENT SHOP," he told me. "YOU BEGIN WITH AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE FINISHED PRODUCT-IN THIS BUSINESS, IT'S EASIER TO BEGIN WITH THE FINE-TUNING. IT'S GETTING THE STUFF OUT OF THE GROUND THAT CAN BE TRICKY. I HOPE YOU DON'T THINK I'M CONDESCENDING, BUT WORKING WITH GRANITE IS A LOT LIKE WRITING A TERM PAPER-IT'S THE FIRST DRAFT THAT CAN KILL YOU. ONCE YOU GET THE GOOD STUFF INTO THE SHOP, THE FINE WORK IS EASY: CUTTING THE STONE, EDGING THE LETTERS-YOU'VE JUST GOT TO BE FUSSY. IT'S ALL SMOOTHING AND POLISHING-YOU'VE GOT TO GO SLOWLY.

"DON'T BE IN A HURRY TO WORK IN THE QUARRIES. AT THE MONUMENT-END, AT LEAST THE SIZE AND WEIGHT OF THE STONE ARE MANAGEABLE- YOU'RE WORKING WITH SMALLER TOOLS AND A SMALLER PRODUCT. AND IN THE SHOP, EVERY DAY IS DIFFERENT; YOU NEVER KNOW HOW BUSY YOU'LL BE-MOST PEOPLE DON'T DIE ON SCHEDULE, MOST FAMILIES DON'T ORDER GRAVESTONES IN ADVANCE."

I don't doubt that he was genuinely concerned for my safety, and I know he knew everything about granite; it was wise to develop a feeling for the stone-on a smaller, more refined scale-before one encountered the intimidating size and weight of it in the quarry. All the quarrymen-the signalman, the derrickman, the channel bar drillers, and the dynamiters-and even the sawyers who had to handle the rock before it was cut down to monument size ... a// the men who worked at the quarries were afforded a less generous margin for error than those of us who worked in the monument shop. Even so, I thought there was more than caution motivating Owen to keep me working in the monument shop for the entire summer of '. For one thing, I wanted muscles; and the physical work in the monument shop was a lot less strenuous than being a logger for my Uncle Alfred. For another thing, I envied Owen his tan-he worked in the quarries, unless it was raining; on rainy days, he worked in the shop with me. And we called him in from the quarries whenever there was a customer placing an order for a gravestone; Owen insisted that he be the one to handle that-and when the order was not placed by a funeral home, when the customer was a family member or a close Mend of the deceased, we were all grateful that Owen wanted to handle it. He was very good at that part of it-very respectful of grief, very tactful (while at the same time he managed to be very specific). I don't mean that this was simply a matter of spelling the name correctly and double-checking the date of birth, and the date of death; I mean that the personality of the deceased was discussed, in depth-Owen sought nothing less than a PROPER monument, a COMPATIBLE monument. The aesthetics of the deceased were taken into consideration; the size, shape, and color of the stone were only the rough drafts of the business; Owen wanted to know the tastes of those mourners who would be viewing the gravestone more than once. I never saw a customer who was displeased with the final product; unfortunately-for the enterprises of Meany Granite-I never saw very many customers, either.

"DON'T BE VAIN," Owen told me, when I complained about the length of my apprenticeship in the monument shop. "IF YOU'RE STANDING IN THE BOTTOM OF A QUARRY, THINKING ABOUT WHAT KIND OF TAN YOU'RE GETTING-OR YOUR STUPID MUSCLES- YOU'RE GOING TO END UP UNDER TEN TONS OF GRANITE. BESIDES, MY FATHER THINKS YOU'RE DOING A GREAT JOB WITH THE GRAVESTONES."

But I don't think Mr. Meany ever noticed the work I was doing with the monuments; it was August before I even saw Mr. Meany in the shop, and he looked surprised to see me-but he always said the same thing, whenever and wherever he saw me. "Why, it's Johnny Wheelwright!" he'd always say. And when it wasn't raining-or when Owen wasn't talking directly to a customer-the only other time that Owen was in the shop was when there was an especially difficult piece of stonecutting assigned, a particularly complicated gravestone, a demanding shape, lots of tight curves and sharp angles, and so forth. And the typical Gravesend families were plain and dour in the face of death; we had few calls for elaborate coping, even fewer for archways with dosserets, and not one for angels sliding down barber poles. That was too bad, because to see Owen at work with the diamond wheel was to witness state-of-the-art monument-making. There was no one as precise with the diamond wheel as Owen Meany.

A diamond wheel is similar to a radial-arm saw, a wood saw familiar to me from my uncle's mill; a diamond wheel is a table saw but the blade is not part of the table-the blade, which is a diamond-impregnated wheel, is lowered to the table in a gantry. The wheel blade is about two feet in diameter and studded (or "tipped") with diamond segments-these are pieces of diamond, only a half inch long, only a quarter inch wide. When the blade is lowered onto the granite, it cuts through the stone at a preset angle into a waiting block of wood. It is a very sharp blade, it makes a very exact and smooth cut; it is perfect for making the precise, polished edges on the tops and sides of gravestones-like a scalpel, it makes no mistakes, or only the user's mistakes. By comparison to other saws in the granite business, it is so fine and delicate a tool that it isn't even called a saw-it is always called "the diamond wheel." It passes through granite with so little resistance that its sound is far less snarly than many wood saws of the power type; a diamond wheel makes a single, high-pitched scream-very plaintive. Owen Meany said: "A DIAMOND WHEEL MAKES A GRAVESTONE SOUND AS IF THE STONE ITSELF IS MOURNING."

Think of how much time he spent in that creepy monument shop on Water Street, the unfinished lettering of the names of the dead surrounding him-is it any wonder that he SAW his own name and the date of his death on Scrooge's grave? No; it's a wonder he didn't SEE such horrors every day! And when he put on those crazy-looking safety goggles and lowered the diamond wheel into cutting position, the terribly consistent scream of that blade must have reminded him of the "permanent scream," which was his own unchanging voice-to use Mr. McSwiney's term for it. After my summer in the monument shop, I could appreciate what might have appealed to Owen Meany about the quiet of churches, the peace of prayer, the easy cadence of hymns and litanies-and even the simplistic, athletic ritual of practicing the shot. As for the rest of the summer of -when the Buddhists in Vietnam were torching themselves, and time was running out on the Kennedys-Hester was working as a lobster-house waitress again.

"So much for a B.A. in Music," she said. At least I could appreciate what Owen Meany meant, when he said of Randy White: "I'D LIKE TO GET HIM UNDER THE DIAMOND WHEEL-ALL I'D NEED IS JUST A FEW SECONDS. I'D LIKE TO PUT HIS DOINK UNDER THE DIAMOND WHEEL," Owen said. As for doinks-as for mine, in particular-I had another slow summer. The Catholic Church had reason to be proud of the insurmountable virtue of Caroline O'Day, with or without her St. Michael's uniform-and of the virtue of countless others, any church could be proud; they were all virtuous with me. I felt someone's bare breast, briefly-only once, and it was an accident-one warm night when we went swimming off the beach at Little Boar's Head and the phosphorescence, in my opinion, was especially seductive. The girl was a musical friend of Hester's, and in the tomato-red pickup, on the ride back to Durham, Hester volunteered to be the one to sit on my lap, because my date was so displeased by my awkward, amateurish advances.

"Here, you sit in the middle, I'll sit on him," Hester told her friend. "I've felt his silly hard-on before, and it doesn't bother me."

"THERE'S NO NEED TO BE CRUDE," said Owen Meany. And so I rode from Little Boar's Head to Durham with Hester on my lap-once again, humiliated by my hard-on. I thought that just a few seconds under the diamond wheel would certainly suffice for me; and if someone were to put my doink under the wheel, I considered that it would be no great loss. I was twenty-one and I was still a Joseph; I was a Joseph then, and I'm just a Joseph now. Georgian Bay: July , -why can't I just enjoy all the nature up here? I coaxed one of the Keeling kids to take me in one of the boats to Pointe au Baril Station. Miraculously, no one on the island needed anything from the station: not an egg, not a scrap of meal, or a bar of soap; not even any live bait. I was the only one who needed anything; I "needed" a newspaper, I'm ashamed to say. Needing to know the news- it's such a weakness, it's worse than many other addictions, it's an especially debilitating illness. The Toronto Star said the White House was so frustrated by both Congress and the Pentagon that a small, special-forces group within the military was established; and that actual, active-duty American troops fired rockets and machine guns at Nicaraguan soldiers-all this was unknown to the Congress or the Pentagon. Why aren't Americans as disgusted by them-

selves-as fed up with themselves-as everyone else is? All their lip service to democracy, all their blatantly undemocratic behavior! I've got to stop reading about this whole silly business! All these headlines can turn your mind to mush- headlines that within a year will seem most unmemorable; and if memorable, merely quaint. I live in Canada, I have a Canadian passport-why should I waste my time caring what the Americans are doing, especially when they don't care themselves? I'm going to try to interest myself in something more cosmic-in something more universal, although I suppose that a total lack of integrity in government is "universal," isn't it? There was another story in The Toronto Star, more appropriate to the paradisiacal view of the universe one can enjoy from Georgian Bay. It was a story about black holes: scientists say that black holes could engulf two whole galaxies! The story was about the potential "collapse of the star system"-what could be more important than that! Listen to this: "Black holes are concentrations of matter so dense they have collapsed upon themselves. Nothing, not even light, can escape their intense gravitational pull." Imagine mat! Not even light-my God! I announced this news to the Keeling family; but one of the middle children-a sort of science-prize student-responded to me rather rudely.

"Yeah," he said, "but all the black holes are about two million light-years away from Earth."

And I thought: That is about as far away from Earth as Owen Meany is; that is about as far away from Earth as I would like to be. And where is JFK today? How far away is he? On November , , Owen Meany and I were in my room at Front Street, studying for a Geology exam. I was angry with Owen for manipulating me into taking Geology, the true nature of which was concealed-at the University of New Hampshire-in the curriculum catalog under the hippie-inspired title of Earth Science. Owen had misled me into thinking that the course would be an easy means of satisfying a part of our science requirement-he knew all about rocks, he assured me, and the rest of the course would concern itself with fossils. "IT'LL BE NEAT TO KNOW ALL ABOUT THE DINOSAURS!" Owen had said; he seduced me. We spent less than a week with the dinosaurs-and far less time with fossils than we spent learning the horrible names of the ages of the earth. And it turned out that Owen Meany didn't know a metamorphic schist from an igneous intrusion-unless the latter was granite. On November , , had just confused the Paleocene epoch with the Pleistocene, and I was further confused by the difference between an epoch and an era.

"The Cenozoic is an era, right?" I asked him.

"WHO CARES?" said Owen Meany. "YOU CAN FORGET THAT PART. AND YOU CAN FORGET ABOUT ANYTHING AS BROAD AS THE TERTIARY OR THE QUATERNARY-THAT'S TOO BROAD, TOO. WHAT YOU'VE GOT TO KNOW IS MORE SPECIFIC, YOU'VE GOT TO KNOW WHAT CHARACTERIZED AN EPOCH- FOR EXAMPLE, WHICH EPOCH IS CHARACTERIZED BY THE TRIUMPH OF BIRDS AND PLACENTAL MAMMALS?"

"Jesus, how'd I ever let you talk me into this?" I said.

"PAY ATTENTION," said Owen Meany. "THERE ARE WAYS TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING. THE WAY TO REMEMBER PLEISTOCENE IS TO REMEMBER THAT THIS EPOCH WAS CHARACTERIZED BY THE APPEARANCE OF MAN AND WIDESPREAD GLACIAL ICE-REMEMBER THE ICE, IT RHYMES WITH PLEIS IN PLEISTOCENE."

"Jesus Christ!" I said.

"I'M JUST TRYING TO HELP YOU REMEMBER," Owen said. "IF YOU'RE CONFUSING THE BLOSSOMING OF BIRDS AND PLACENTAL MAMMALS WITH THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF MAN, YOU'RE ABOUT SIXTY MILLION YEARS OFF-YOU'RE MAKING A PRETTY BIG MISTAKE!"

"The biggest mistake I made was to take Geology!" I said. Suddenly, Ethel was in my room; we hadn't heard her knock or open the door-I don't remember ever seeing Ethel in my room before (or since).

"Your grandmother wishes to see you in the TV room," Ethel said.

"IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE TV?" Owen asked her.

"Something is wrong with the president," Ethel said. When we found out what was wrong with Kennedy-when we saw him shot, and, later, when we learned he was dead-

Owen Meany said, "IF WE FIRST APPEAR IN THE PLEISTOCENE, I THINK THIS IS WHEN WE DISAPPEAR-I GUESS A MILLION YEARS OF MAN IS ENOUGH."

What we witnessed with the death of Kennedy was the triumph of television; what we saw with his assassination, and with his funeral, was the beginning of television's dominance of our culture-for television is at its most solemnly self-serving and at its mesmerizing best when it is depicting the untimely deaths of the chosen and the golden. It is as witness to the butchery of heroes in their prime-and of all holy-seeming innocents-that television achieves its deplorable greatness. The blood on Mrs. Kennedy's clothes and her wrecked face under her veil; the fatherless children; LBJ taking the oath of office; and brother Bobby-looking so very much the next in line.

"IF BOBBY WAS NEXT IN LINE FOR MARILYN MONROE, WHAT ELSE IS HE NEXT IN LINE FOR?" said Owen Meany. Not even five years later, when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, Hester would say, "Television gives good disaster." I suppose this was nothing but a more vernacular version of my grandmother's observation of the effect of TV on old people: that watching it would hasten their deaths. If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something-just by staying alive. At Front Street, that November of ', my grandmother and Owen Meany and I watched the president be killed for hours; for days we watched him be killed and re-killed, again and again.

"I GET THE POINT," said Owen Meany. "IF SOME MANIAC MURDERS YOU, YOU'RE AN INSTANT HERO-EVEN IF ALL YOU WERE DOING IS RIDING IN A MOTORCADE!"

"I wish some maniac would murder me," my grandmother said.

"MISSUS WHEELWRIGHT! WHAT DO YOU MEAN?" Owen said.

"I mean, why can't some maniac murder someone old-like me?" Grandmother said. "I'd rather be murdered by a maniac than have to leave my home-and that's what will happen to me," she said. "Maybe Dan, maybe Martha-maybe you,"

she said accusingly to me. "One of you, or all of you-either way, you're going to force me to leave this house. You're going to put me in a place with a bunch of old people who are crazy," Grandmother said. "And I'd rather be murdered by a maniac instead-that's all I mean. One day, Ethel won't be able to manage-one day, it will take a hundred Ethels just to clean up the mess I make!" my grandmother said. "One day, not even you will want to watch television with me," she said to Owen. "One day," she said to me, "you'll come to visit me and I won't even know who you are. Why doesn't someone train the maniacs to murder old people and leave the young people alone? What a waster" she cried. A lot of people were saying this about the death of President Kennedy-with a slightly different meaning, of course. "I'm going to be an incontinent idiot," my grandmother said; she looked directly at Owen Meany. "Wouldn't you rather be murdered by a maniac?" she asked him.

"IF IT WOULD DO ANY GOOD-YES, I WOULD," said Owen Meany.

"I think we've been watching too much television," I said.

"There's no remedy for that," my grandmother said. But after the murder of President Kennedy, it seemed to me that there was "no remedy" for Owen Meany, either; he succumbed to a state of mind that he would not discuss with me-he went into a visible decline in communication. I would often see the tomato-red pickup parked behind the vestry of Kurd's Church; Owen had kept in touch with the Rev. Lewis Merrill, whose silent and extended prayer for Owen had gained him much respect among the faculty and students at Graves-end. Pastor Merrill had always been "liked"; but before his prayer he had lacked respect. I'm sure that Owen, too, was grateful for Mr. MerriH's gesture-even if the gesture had been a struggle, and not of the minister's own initiative. But after JFK's death, Owen appeared to see more of the Rev. Mr. Merrill; and Owen wouldn't tell me what they talked about. Maybe they talked about Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys. They talked about "the dream," I suppose; but I had not yet been successful in coaxing that dream out of Owen Meany.

"What's this I hear about a dream you keep having?" I asked him once.

"I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'VE HEARD," he said. And shortly before that New Year's Eve, I asked Hester if she knew anything about any dream. Hester had had a few

drinks; she was getting into her throwing-up mood, but she was rarely caught off-guard. She eyed me suspiciously.

"What do you know about it?" she asked me.

"I just know that he has a dream-and that it bothers him," I added.

"I know that it bothers me," she said. "It wakes me up-when he has it. And I don't like to look at him when he's having it, or after it's over. Don't ask me what it's about!" she said. "I can tell you one thing: you don't want to know."

And occasionally I saw the tomato-red pickup parked at St. Michael's-not at the school, but by the curb at the rectory for St. Michael's Catholic ChurcM I figured he was talking to Father Findley; maybe because Kennedy had been a Catholic, maybe because some kind of ongoing dialogue with Father Findley had actually been required of Owen-in lieu of his being obliged to compensate the Catholic Church for the damage done to Mary Magdalene.

"How's it going with Father Findley?" I asked him once.

"I BELIEVE HE MEANS WELL," Owen said cautiously. "BUT THERE'S A FUNDAMENTAL LEAP OF FAITH THAT ALL HIS TRAINING-ALL THAT CATHOLIC BACKGROUND-SIMPLY CANNOT ALLOW HIM TO MAKE. I DON'T THINK HE'LL EVER UNDERSTAND THE MAGNITUDE . . . THE UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE ..." Then he stopped talking.

"Yes?" I said. "You were saying . . . 'the unspeakable outrage' . . . was that to your parents, do you mean?"

"FATHER FINDLEY SIMPLY CANNOT GRASP HOW THEY HAVE BEEN MADE TO SUFFER," said Owen Meany.

"Oh," I said. "I see." I was joking, of course! But either my humor eluded him, or else Owen Meany had no intention of making himself any clearer on this point.

"But you like Father Findley?" I asked. "I mean, sort of ... 'he means well,' you say. You enjoy talking to him- I guess."

"IT TURNS OUT IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO RESTORE MARY MAGDALENE EXACTLY AS SHE WAS-I MEAN, THE STATUE," he said. "MY FATHER KNOWS A COMPANY THAT MAKES SAINTS, AND OTHER HOLY FIGURES-I MEAN, GRANITE, YOU KNOW," he said. "BUT THEIR PRICES ARE RIDICULOUS. FATHER FIND-LEY'S BEEN VERY PATIENT. I'M GETTING HIM GOOD GRANITE-AND SOMEONE WHO SCULPTS THESE SAINTS A LITTLE CHEAPER, AND MAKES THEM A LITTLE MORE PERSONALLY . . . YOU KNOW, NOT ALWAYS EXACTLY THE SAME GESTURE OF SUPPLICATION, SO THAT THEY DON'T ALWAYS LOOK LIKE BEGGARS. I'VE TOLD FATHER FINDLEY THAT I CAN MAKE HIM A MUCH BETTER PEDESTAL THAN THE ONE HE'S GOT, AND I'VE BEEN TRYING TO CONVINCE HIM TO GET RID OF THAT STUPID ARCHWAY- BF SHE DOESN'T LOOK LIKE A GOALIE IN A GOAL, MAYBE KIDS WON'T ALWAYS BE TAKING SHOTS AT HER. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN."

"It's been almost two years!" I said. "I didn't know you were still involved in replacing Mary Magdalene-I didn't know you were ever this involved," I added.

"WELL, SOMEONE'S GOT TO TAKE CHARGE," he said. "FATHER FINDLEY DID ME A FAVOR-I DON'T LIKE TO SEE THESE GRANITE GUYS TAKING ADVANTAGE OF HIM. SOMEONE NEEDS A SAINT OR A HOLY FIGURE IN A HURRY, AND WHAT DO THEY DO? THEY MAKE YOU PAY FOR IT, OR THEY MAKE YOU WAIT FOREVER-THEY FIGURE THEY'VE GOT YOU BY THE BALLS. AND WHO CAN AFFORD MARBLE! I'M JUST TRYING TO RETURN A FAVOR."

And was he asking Father Findley about the dream? I wondered. It bothered me that he was seeing someone I didn't even know-and maybe talking to this person about things he wouldn't discuss with me. I suppose that bothered me about Hester, too-and even the Rev. Lewis Merrill began to irritate me. I didn't run into him very often-although he was a regular in attendance at the rehearsals and performances of The Gravesend Players-but whenever I did run into him, he looked at me as if he knew something special about me (as if Owen had been talking about me to him, as if/ were in Owen's damn dream, or so I imagined). In my opinion, was not a very exciting year. General Greene replaced General Shoup; Owen told me lots of military news-as a good ROTC student, he prided himself on knowing these things. President Johnson ordered the withdrawal of American dependents from South Vietnam.

"THIS ISN'T GENERALLY AN OPTIMISTIC SIGN," said Owen Meany. If the majority of his professors at the University of New Hampshire found Owen less than brilliant,

his professors of Military Science were completely charmed. It was the year when Admiral Sharp replaced Admiral Felt, when General Westmoreland replaced General Harkins, when General Wheeler replaced General Taylor, when General Johnson replaced General Wheeler-when General Taylor replaced Henry Cabot Lodge as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam.

"LOTS OF STUFF IS IN THE WORKS," said Owen Meany. It was the year of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which prompted Owen to ask: "DOES THAT MEAN THE PRESIDENT CAN DECLARE A WAR WITHOUT DECLARING IT?" It was the year when Owen's grade-point average fell below mine; but in Military Science, his grades were perfect. Even the summer of ' was uninspired-except for the completion of the replacement Mary Magdalene, which was firmly set upon Owen Meany's formidable pedestal in the St Michael's schoolyard, more than two years after the attack upon her predecessor.

"YOU'RE SO UNOBSERVANT," Owen told me. "THE GOALIE'S BEEN OUT OF THE GOAL FOR TWO YEARS, AND YOU HAVEN'T EVEN NOTICED!"

What I noticed straightaway was that he'd talked Father Findley into removing the goal. The whitewashed stone archway was gone; so was the notion of whitewash. The new Mary Magdalene was granite-gray, gravestone-gray, a color Owen Meany called NATURAL. Her face, like her color, was slightly downcast, almost apologetic; and her arms were not outstretched in obvious supplication-rather, she clasped her hands together at her slight breast, her hands just barely emerging from the sleeves of her robe, which shapelessly draped her body to her small, bare, plain-gray feet. She seemed altogether too demure for a former prostitute-and too withholding of any gesture for a saint. Yet she radiated a certain compliance; she looked as easy to get along with as my mother. And the pedestal upon which Owen had stood her-in contrast to Mary's own rough finish (granite is never as smooth as marble)-was highly polished, exquisitely beveled; Owen had cut some very fine edges with the diamond wheel, creating the impression that Mary Magdalene either stood upon or was rising from her grave.

"WHAT DO YOU THINK?" Owen asked Hester and me. "FATHER FINDLEY WAS VERY PLEASED."

"It's sick-it's all sick," said Hester. "It's just death and more death-that's all it is with you, Owen."

"HESTER'S SO SENSITIVE," Owen said.

"I like it better than the other one," I ventured cautiously.

"THERE'S NO COMPARISON!" said Owen Meany.

"I like the pedestal," I said. "It's almost as if she's . . . well, you know . . . stepping out of her own grave."

Owen nodded vigorously. "YOU HAVE A GOOD EYE," he said. "THAT'S EXACTLY THE EFFECT I WANTED. THAT'S WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A SAINT, ISN'T IT? A SAINT SHOULD BE AN EMBLEM OF IMMORTALITY!"

"What a lot of shitl" said Hester. It was an uninspired year for Hester, too; here she was, a college graduate, still living in her squalid apartment in her old college town, still waitressing in the lobster-house restaurant in Kittery or Portsmouth. I had never eaten there, but Owen said it was nice enough-on the harbor, a little overquaint with the seafood theme (lobster pots and buoys and anchors and mooring ropes were prevalent in the decor). The problem was, Hester hated lobster-she called them "insects of the sea," and she washed her hair every night with lemon juice because she thought her hair smelled fishy. I think that her late hours (she waitressed only at night) were in part responsible for Owen Meany's decline as a student; he was loyal about picking her up-and it seemed to me that she worked most nights. Hester had her own driver's license and her own car-actually, it was Noah's old ' Chevy-but she hated to drive; that Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha had given her a hand-me-down might have had something to do with it. In Owen's view, the ' Chevy was in better shape than his tomato-red pickup; but Hester knew it had been secondhand when the Eastmans gave it to Noah, who had passed it to Simon, who'd had a minor accident with it before he'd handed it down to Hester. But by picking up Hester after work, Owen Meany rarely got back to Hester's apartment before one o'clock in the morning; Hester was so keyed up after waitressing that she wasn't ready to go to bed before two-first, she had to wash her hair, which further woke her up; and then she needed to complain. Often someone had insulted her; sometimes it had been a customer who'd tried to pick her up-and failing that, had left her a rotten tip. And the other waitresses were "woefully unaware," Hester said; what they were unaware of, she wouldn't say-but they often insulted Hester, too. And if Owen Meany didn't

spend the night in her apartment-if he drove home to Gravesend-he sometimes didn't get to bed before three. Hester slept all morning; but Owen had morning classes- or, in the summer, he was at work very early in the quarries. Sometimes he looked like a tired, old man to me-a tired, old, married man. I tried to nag him into taking more of an interest in his studies; but, increasingly, he spoke of school as something to get out of.

"WHEN I GET OUT OF HERE," he said, "I'VE GOT MY ACTIVE DUTY TO SERVE, AND I DON'T WANT TO SERVE IT AT A DESK-WHO WANTS TO BE IN THE ARMY FOR THE PAPERWORK!"

"Who wants to be in the Army at all!" I asked him. "You ought to sit at a desk a little more often than you do-the way you're going to college, you might as well be in the Army already. I don't understand you-with your natural ability, you ought to be sailing through this place with the highest honors."

"IT DID ME A LOT OF GOOD TO SAIL THROUGH GRAVESEND ACADEMY WITH THE HIGHEST HONORS, DIDN'T IT?" he said.

"Maybe if you weren't a stupid Geology major, you could be a little more enthusiastic about your courses," I told him.

"GEOLOGY IS EASY FOR ME," Owen said. "AT LEAST, I ALREADY KNOW~ SOMETHING ABOUT ROCKS."

"You didn't used to do things just because they were easy,'' I said. He shrugged. Remember when people "dropped out"- remember that? Owen Meany was the first person I ever saw "drop out." Hester, of course, was born "dropped out"; maybe Owen got the idea from Hester, but I think he was more original than that. He was original, and stubborn. I was stubborn, too; twenty-two-year-olds are stubborn. Owen tried to keep me working in the monument shop the whole summer of '. I said that one whole summer in the monument shop was enough-either he would let me work in the quarries or I would quit.

"IT'S FOR YOUR OWN GOOD," he said. "IT'S THE BEST WORK IN THE BUSINESS-AND THE EASIEST."

"So maybe I don't want what's 'easiest,' " I said. "So maybe you should let me decide what's 'best.' "

"GO AHEAD AND QUIT," he said.

"Fine," I said. "I guess I should speak to your father."

"MY FATHER DIDN'T HIRE YOU," said Owen Meany. Naturally, I didn't quit; but I matched his stubbornness sufficiently-I hinted that I was losing my interest in practicing the shot. In the summer of ', Owen Meany resembled a dropout-in many ways-but his fervor for practicing the shot had reappeared. We compromised: I apprenticed myself to the diamond wheel until August; and that August-when the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy were attacked in the Tonkin Gulf-Owen set me to work as a signalman in the quarries. When it rained, he let me work with the sawyers, and by the end of die summer he apprenticed me to the channel-bar drillers.

"NEXT SUMMER, I'LL LET YOU TRY THE DERRICK," he said. "NEXT AUGUST, I'LL GIVE YOU A LITTLE DYNAMITE LESSON-WHEN I GET BACK FROM BASIC TRAINING."

Just before we began our junior year at the University of New Hampshire-just before the students returned to Graves-end Academy, and to all the nation's other schools and universities-Owen Meany slam-dunked the basketball in the Gravesend Academy gym in under three seconds. I suggested that the retarded janitor might have started the official scorer's clock a little late; but Owen insisted that we had sunk the shot in record time-he said that the clock had been accurate, that our success was official.

"I COULD FEEL THE DIFFERENCE-IN THE AIR," he said excitedly. "EVERYTHING WAS JUST A LITTLE QUICKER, A LITTLE MORE SPONTANEOUS."

"Now I suppose you'll tell me that under two seconds is possible," I said. He was dribbling the ball-crazily, in a frenzy, like a speeded-up film of one of the Harlem Globetrotters. I didn't think he'd heard me.

"I suppose you think that under two seconds is possible!" I shouted. He stopped dribbling. "DON'T BE RIDICULOUS," he said. "THREE SECONDS IS FAST ENOUGH."

I was surprised. "I thought the idea was to see how fast we can get. We can always get faster," I said.

"THE IDEA IS TO BE FAST ENOUGH," he said. "THE TRICK IS, CAN WE DO IT IN UNDER THREE SECONDS EVERY TIME! THAT'S THE IDEA."

So we kept practicing. When there were students in the

Gravesend Academy gym, we went to the playground at St. Michael's. We had no one to time us-we had nothing resembling the official scorer's clock in the gym, and Hester was unwilling to participate in our practices; she was no substitute for the retarded janitor. And the rusty hoop of the basket was a little crooked, and the net long gone-and the macadam of the playground was so broken up, we couldn't even dribble the ball; but we could still practice. Owen said he could FEEL when we were dunking the shot in under three seconds. And although there was no retarded janitor to cheer us on, the nuns in the saltbox at the far end of the playground often noticed us; sometimes, they even waved, and Owen Meany would wave back-although he said that nuns still gave him the shivers. And always Mary Magdalene watched over us; we could feel her silent encouragement. When it snowed, Owen would brush her off. It snowed early that fall-long before Thanksgiving. I remember practicing the shot with my ski hat and my gloves on; but Owen Meany would always do it bare-handed. And in the afternoons, when it grew dark early, the lights in the nuns' house would be lit before we finished practicing. Mary Magdalene would turn a darker shade of gray; she would almost disappear in the shadows. Once, when it was almost too dark to see the basket, I caught just a glimpse of her-standing at the edge of total darkness. I imagined that she resembled mat Owen thought he had seen at my mother's bed. I said this to him, and he looked at Mary Magdalene; blowing on his cold, bare hands, he looked at her very intently.

"NO, THERE'S NOT REALLY ANY RESEMBLANCE," he said. "THAT ANGEL WAS VERY BUSY-SHE WAS MOVING, ALWAYS MOVING. ESPECIALLY, HER HANDS -SHE KEPT REACHING OUT WITH HER HANDS."

It was the first I'd heard that had been moving- about what a busy angel he thought he'd seen.

"You never said it was moving," I said.

"IT WAS MOVING, ALL RIGHT," said Owen Meany. "THAT'S WHY I NEVER HAD ANY DOUBT. IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN THE DUMMY BECAUSE IT WAS MOVING," he said. "AND DSf ALL THESE YEARS THAT I'VE HAD THE DUMMY, THE DUMMY HAS NEVER MOVED."

Since when, I wondered, did Owen Meany ever have ANY DOUBT? And how often had he stared at my mother's dressmaker's dummy? He expected it to move, I thought. When it was so dark at the St. Michael's playground that we couldn't see the basket, we couldn't see Mary Magdalene, either. What Owen liked best was to practice the shot until we lost Mary Magdalene in the darkness. Then he would stand under the basket with me and say, "CAN YOU SEE HER?"

"Not anymore," I'd say.

"YOU CAN'T SEE HER, BUT YOU KNOW SHE'S STILL THERE-RIGHT?" he would say.

"Of course she's still there!" I'd say.

"YOU'RE SURE?" he'd ask me.

"Of course I'm sure!" I'd say.

"BUT YOU CANT SEE HER," he'd say-very teasingly. "HOW DO YOU KNOW SHE'S STILL THERE IF YOU CAN'T ACTUALLY SEE HER?"

"Because I know she's still there-because I know she couldn't have gone anywhere-because I just knowl" I would say. And one cold, late-fall day-it was November or even early December, Johnson had defeated Goldwater for the presidency; Khrushchev had been replaced by Brezhnev and Kosygin; five Americans had been killed in a Viet Cong attack on the air base at Bien Hoa-I was especially exasperated by this game he played about not seeing Mary Magdalene but still knowing she was there.

"YOU HAVE NO DOUBT SHE'S THERE?" he nagged at me.

"Of course I have no doubt!" I said.

"BUT YOU CAN'T SEE HER-YOU COULD BE WRONG," he said.

"No, I'm not wrong-she's there, I know she's there!" I yelled at him.

"YOU ABSOLUTELY KNOW SHE'S THERE-EVEN THOUGH YOU CAN'T SEE HER?" he asked me.

"Yes!" I screamed.

"WELL, NOW YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT GOD," said Owen Meany. "I CAN'T SEE HIM-BUT I ABSOLUTELY KNOW HE IS THERE!"

Georgian Bay: My , -Katherine told me today that I should make an effort to not read any newspapers. She saw how The Globe and Mail ruined my day-and it is so

gorgeous, so peaceful on this island, on all this water; it's such a shame to not relax here, to not take the opportunity to think more tranquilly, more reflectively. Katharine wants only the best for me; I know she's right-I should give up the news, just give it up. You can't understand anything by reading the news, anyway. If someone ever presumed to teach Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy or Robertson Davies to my Bishop Strachan students with die same, shallow, superficial understanding that I'm sure / possess of world affairs-or, even, American wrongdoing-I would be outraged. I am a good enough English teacher to know that my grasp of American misadventures-even in Vietnam, not to mention Nicaragua-is shallow and superficial. Whoever acquired any real or substantive intelligence from reading newspapers! I'm sure I have no in-depth comprehension of American villainy; yet I can't leave the news alone! You'd think I might profit from my experience with ice cream. If I have ice cream in my freezer, I'll eat it-I'll eat all of it, all at once. Therefore, I've learned not to buy ice cream. Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat. The island library, to be kind, is full of field guides-to everything I never knew enough about; I mean, real things, not "issues." I could study pine needles, or bird identification- there are even categories for studying the latter: in-flight movement, perching silhouettes, feeding and mating cries. It's fascinating-I suppose. And with all this water around, I could certainly take more than one day to go fishing with Charlie; I know it disappoints him that I'm not more interested in fishing. And Katherine has pointed out to me that it's been a long time since she and I have talked about our respective beliefs-the shared and private articles of our faith. I used to talk about this for hours with her-and with Canon Campbell, before her. Now I'm ashamed to tell Katherine how many Sunday services I've skipped. Katherine's right. I'm going to try to give up the news. The Globe and Mail said today that the Nicaraguan contras have executed prisoners; the contras are being investigated for " major cases of human-rights abuse"-and these same filthy contras are the "moral equivalent of our founding fathers," President Reagan says! Meanwhile, the spiritual leader of Iran, the ayatollah, urged all Moslems to "crush America's teeth in its mouth"; this sounds like just the guy the Americans should sell arms to-right? The United States simply isn't making sense. I agree with Katherine. Time to fish; time to observe the flatness of that small, aquatic mammal's tail-is it an otter or is it a muskrat? Time to find out. And out there, where the water of the bay turns blue-green and then to the color of a bruise, is that a loon or a coot I see diving there? Time to see; time to forget about the rest. And it's "high time"-as Canon Mackie is always saying-for me to try to be a Canadian! When I first came to Canada, I thought it was going to be easy to be a Canadian; like so many stupid Americans, I pictured Canada as simply some northern, colder, possibly more provincial region of the United States-I imagined it would be like moving to Maine, or Minnesota. It was a surprise to discover that Toronto wasn't as snowy and cold as New Hampshire-and not nearly as provincial, either. It was more of a surprise to discover how different Canadians were-they were so polite! Naturally, I started out apologizing. "I'm not really a draft dodger," I would say; but most Canadians didn't care what I was. "I'm not here tor evade the draft," I would explain. "I would certainly classify myself as antiwar," I said inthosedays. "I'm comfortable with the term'war resister,' " I told everyone, "but I don't need to dodge or evade the draft-that's not why I'm here."

But most Canadians didn't care why I'd come; they didn't ask any questions. It was , probably the midpoint of Vietnam "resisters" coming to Canada; most Canadians were sympathetic-they thought the war in Vietnam was stupid and wrong, too. In , you needed fifty points to become a landed immigrant; landed immigrants could apply for Canadian citizenship, for which they'd be eligible in five years. Earning my fifty "points" was easy for me; I had a B.A. cum laude, and a Master's degree in English-with Owen Meany's help, I'd written my Master's thesis on Thomas Hardy. I'd also had two years' teaching experience; while I was in graduate school at the University of New Hampshire, I taught part-time at Gravesend Academy-Expository Writing for ninth graders. Dan Needham and Mr. Early had recommended me for the job. In , one out of every nine Canadians was an immigrant; and the Vietnam "resisters" were better-educated and more employable than most immigrants in Canada. That year the so-called Union of American Exiles was organized; compared

to Hester-and her SDS friends, those so-called Students for a Democratic Society-the few guys I knew in the Union of American Exiles were a pretty tame lot. I was used to rioters; Hester was big on riots then. That was the year she was arrested in Chicago. Hester had her nose broken while rioting at the site of the Democratic Party's national convention. She said a policeman mashed her face against the sliding side door of a van; but Hester would have been disappointed to return from Chicago with all her bones intact. The Americans I ran into in Toronto-even the AMEX organizers, even the deserters- were a whole lot more reasonable than Hester and many other Americans I had known "at home."

There was a general misunderstanding about the so-called deserters; the deserters I knew were politically mild. I never met one who'd actually been in Vietnam; I never met one who was even scheduled to go. They were just guys who'd been drafted and had hated the service; some of mem had even enlisted. Only a few of them told me that they'd deserted because it had shamed them to maintain any association with that insupportable war; as for a couple of the ones who told me that-I had the feeling that then- stories weren't true, that they were only saying they'd deserted because the war was "insupportable"; they'd learned that this was politically acceptable to say. And there was another, general misunderstanding at that time: contrary to popular belief, coming to Canada was not a very shrewd way to beat the draft; there were better and easier ways to "beat" it-I'll tell you about one, later. But coming to Canada-either as a draft dodger or as a deserter, or even for my own, more complicated reasons-was a very forceful political statement. Remember that? Remember when what you did was a kind of "statement"? I remember one of the AMEX guys telling me that "resistance as exile was the ultimate judgment." How I agreed with him! How self-important it seemed: to be making "the ultimate judgment."

The truth is, I never had to suffer. When I first came to Toronto in ', I met a few confused and troubled young Americans; I was a little older than most of them-and they certainly seemed no more confused or troubled than many of the Americans I had known at home. Unlike Buzzy Thurston, for example, they had not driven their cars head-on into a bridge abutment in an effort to beat the draft. Unlike Harry Hoyt, they had not been bitten to death by a Russell's viper while waiting for their turn with a Vietnamese whore. And to my surprise, the Canadians I met actually liked me. And with my graduate degree-and even my junior teaching experience at such a prestigious school as Gravesend Academy-I was instantly respectable and almost immediately employed. The distinction I hastened to make, to almost every Canadian I met, was probably a waste of time; that I wasn't there as a draft dodger or a deserter didn't really matter very much to the Canadians. It mattered to the Americans I met, and I didn't like how they responded: that I was in Canada by choice, that I was not a fugitive, and that I didn't have to be in Toronto-in my view, this made my commitment more serious; but in their view I was less desperate and, therefore, less serious. It's true: we Wheelwrights have rarely suffered. And unlike most of those other Americans, I also had the church; don't underestimate the church-its healing power, and the comforting way it can set you apart. My first week in Toronto, I had an interview at Upper Canada College; the whole school made me feel that I'd never left Gravesend Academy! They didn't have an opening in their English Department, but they assured me that my vitae was "most laudable" and that I'd have no trouble finding a job. They were so helpful, they sent me the short distance down Lonsdale Road to Grace Church on-the-Hill; Canon Campbell, they said, was especially interested in helping Americans. Indeed he was. When the canon asked me what my church was, I said, "I guess I'm an Episcopalian."

"You guess!" he said. I explained that I'd not attended an actual service in the Episcopal Church since the famous Nativity of '; thinking of Hurd's Church and Pastor Merrill's rather lapsed Congregationalism, I said, "I guess I'm sort of nondenominational."

"Well, we'll fix thatl" Canon Campbell said. He gave me my first Anglican prayer book, my first Canadian prayer book; it is The Book of Common Prayer that I still use. It was as simple as that: joining a church, becoming an Anglican. I wouldn't call any of it suffering. And so the first Canadians I knew were churchgoers-an almost universally helpful lot, and much less confused and troubled than the few Americans I'd met in Toronto (and most Americans I had known at home). These Grace Church on-the-Hill Anglicans were conservative; "conservative"-

about certain matters of propriety, especially-is perfectly all right with us Wheelwrights. About such matters, New Eng-landers have more in common with Canadians than we have with New Yorkersl For example, I quickly learned to prefer the positions stated by the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme to those more abrasive stances of the Union of American Exiles. The Toronto Anti-Draft Programme favored "assimilation into mainstream Canadian life"; they considered the Union of American Exiles "too political"-by which they meant, too activist, too rnilitantly anti-United States. Possibly, the Union of American Exiles was contaminated by their open dealings with deserters. The object of the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme was to get Americans "assimilated" quickly; they reasoned that we Americans should begin the process of our assimilation by dropping the subject of the United States. At the beginning, this seemed so reasonable-and so easy- to me. Within a year of my arrival, even the Union of American Exiles showed signs of "assimilation." The acronym AMEX changed in meaning from American Exile to American Expatriate. Doesn't that sound more agreeable to the aim of "assimilation into mainstream Canadian life"? I thought so. When some of those Grace Church on-the-Hill Anglicans asked me what I thought of Prime Minister Pearson's "old point of view"-that the deserters (as opposed to the war resistors) were in a category of U.S. citizens to be discouraged from coming to Canada-I actually said I agreed! Even though-as I've admitted-I'd never met a harsh deserter, not one. The ones I met were "in a category of citizens" that any country could have used and even appreciated. And when it was aired in the Twenty-eighth Parliament-in -that U.S. deserters were being turned back at the border because they were "persons who were likely to become public charges," I never actually said-to any of my Canadian Mends-that I suspected these deserters were no more likely to become "public charges" than / was likely to become such a charge. By then, Canon Campbell had introduced me to old Teddybear Kilgore, who had hired me to teach at Bishop Strachan. We Wheelwrights have always benefited from our connections. Owen Meany didn't have any connections. It was never easy for him to fit in. I think I know what he would have said to that bullshit that was printed in The Toronto Daily Star; at the time, I thought that bullshit was so right-on-target that I cut it out of the newspaper and taped it to my refrigerator door-December , . It was in response to the AMEX published statement of the "first five priorities" for American expatriates (the fifth being "to try to fit into Canadian life"). To quote The Toronto Daily Star: "Unless the young Americans for whom AMEX speaks revise their priorities and put Number Five first, they risk arousing a growing hostility and suspicion among Canadians." I never doubted that mis was true. But I know what Owen Meany would have said about that. "THAT SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING AN AMERICAN WOULD SAY!'' Owen Meany would have said. "THE 'FIRST PRIORITY' IN EVERY YOUNG AMERICAN'S LIFE IS TO TRY TO FIT INTO AMERICAN LIFE. DOESN'T THE STUPID TORONTO DAILY STAR KNOW WHO THESE YOUNG AMERICANS IN CANADA ARE! THESE ARE AMERICANS WHO LEFT THEIR COUNTRY BECAUSE THEY COULDN'T AND DIDN'T WANT TO 'FIT IN.' NOW THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO MAKE IT THEIR 'FIRST PRIORITY' TO 'FIT IN' HERE? BOY-THAT MAKES A LOT OF SENSE; THAT'S REALLY BRILLIANT. THAT'S WORTH ONE OF THOSE STUPID JOURNALISM AWARDSl"

But I didn't complain; I didn't bitch about anything-not then. I thought I'd heard Hester "bitch" enough for a lifetime. Remember the War Measures Act? I didn't say a word; I" agreed with everything. So what if civil liberties were suspended for six months? So what that there could be searches without warrants? So what if people could be detained without counsel for up to ninety days? All the action was happening in Montreal. If Hester had been in Toronto then, not even Hester would have been arrested! I just kept quiet; I was cultivating my Canadian friendships, and most of my friends thought that Trudeau could do no wrong, that he was a prince. Even my dear old friend Canon Campbell made a rather empty remark to me-but I would never challenge him. Canon Campbell said: "Trudeau is our Kennedy, you know." I was glad that Canon Campbell didn't say "Trudeau is our Kennedy" to Owen Meany; I think I know what Owen would have said.

"OH, YOU MEAN TRUDEAU DIDDLED MARILYN MONROE?" Owen Meany would have said. But I didn't come to Canada to be a smart-ass American; and Canon Campbell told me that most smart-ass Canadians tend to

move to the United States. I didn't want to be one of those people who are critical of everything. In the seventies, there were a lot of complaining Americans in Toronto; some of them complained about Canada, too-Canada sold the United States over five hundred million dollars' worth of ammunition and other war supplies, these complainers said.

"Is that Canadian or U.S. dollars?" I would ask. I was very cool; I wasn't going to jump into anything. In short, I was doing my best to be a Canadian; I wasn't ranting my head off about the goddamn U.S. this or the motherfucking U.S. thatl And when I was told that, by , Canada-"per capita"- was earning more money as an international arms exporter than any other nation in the world, I said, "Really? That's very interesting!"

Someone said to me that most war resisters who returned to the United States couldn't take the Canadian climate; and what did I think of the seriousness of the war resistance if ' 'these people" could be deterred from their commitment by a little cold weather? I said it was colder in New Hampshire. And did I know why not so many black Americans had come to Canada? someone asked me. And the ones who come don't stay, someone else said. It's because the ghetto where they come from treats them nicer, said someone else. I didn't say a word. I was more of an Anglican than I ever was either a Congregationalist or an Episcopalian-or even a nondenomi-national, Kurd's Church whatever-l-wns. I was a participant at Grace Church on-the-Hill in a way that I had never been a participant before; and I was getting to be a good teacher, too. I was still young then; I was only twenty-six. And I didn't have a girlfriend when I started teaching all those BSS girls-and I never once looked at one of them in that way; not once, not even at the ones who had their schoolgirl crushes on me. Oh, there were quite a few years when those girls had their crushes on me-not anymore; not now, of course. But I still remember those pretty girls; some of them even asked me to attend their weddings! In those early years, when Canon Campbell was such a friend and an inspiration to me-when I carried my Book of Common Prayer, and my Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, everywhere I went!-I was a veritable card-carrying Canadian. Whenever I'd run into one of that AMEX crowd-and I didn't run into them often, not in Forest Hill-I wouldn't even talk about the United States, or Vietnam. I must have believed that my anger and my loneliness would simply go away-if I simply let them go. There were rallies; of course, there were protests. But I didn't attend; I didn't even hang out in Yorkville-that's how out of it I was! When "The Riverboat" was gone, I didn't mourn-or even sing old folk songs to myself. I'd heard enough of Hester singing folk songs. I cut my hair short then; I cut it short today. I've never had a beard. All those hippies, all those days of protest songs and "sexual freedom"; remember that? Owen Meany had sacrificed much more, he had suffered much more-I was not even remotely interested in other people's sacrifices or in what they imagined was their heroic suffering. They say there's no zeal like the zeal of the convert-and that's the kind of Anglican I was. They say there's no citizen as patriotic as the new immigrant-and there was no one who tried any harder to be "assimilated" than I tried. They say there's no teacher with such a desire for his subject as the novice possesses-and I taught those BSS girls to read and write their little middies off! In , there were , deserters from the U.S. armed forces; in , there were ,-that year, only , Americans were prosecuted for Selective Service violations. I wonder how many more were burning or had already burned their draft cards. What did I care? Burning your draft card, coming to Canada, getting your nose busted by a cop in Chicago-I never thought these gestures were heroic, not compared to Owen Meany's commitment. And by , more than forty thousand Americans had died in Vietnam; I don't imagine that a single one of them would have thought that draft-card burning or coming to Canada was especially "heroic"-nor would they have thought that getting arrested for rioting in Chicago was such a big fucking deal. And as for Gordon Lightfoot and Neil Young, as for Joni Mitchell and lan and Sylvia-I'd already heard Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and Hester. I'd even heard Hester sing "Four Strong Winds." She was always quite good with the guitar, she had her mother's pretty voice-although Aunt Martha's voice was not as pretty as my mother's-which was merely pretty, not strong enough, not developed. Hester could have

stood about five years of lessons from Graham McSwiney, but she didn't believe in being taught to sing. Singing was something "inside" her, she claimed.

"YOU MAKE IT SOUND LIKE A DISEASE," Owen told her; but he was her number-one supporter. When she was struggling to write her own songs, I know that Owen gave her some ideas; later she told me that he'd even written some songs for her. And in those days she looked like a folk singer-which is to say any old way she wanted, or like everyone else: a little dirty, a little worldly, a lot knocked-about. She looked hard-traveled, she looked as if she slept on a rug (with lots of men), she looked as if her hair smelled of lobster. I remember her singing "Four Strong Winds"-I remember this very vividly. I think I'll go out to Alberta, Weather's good there in the fall; I got some friends that I can go to workin' for.

"WHERE'S ALBERTA?" Owen Meany had asked her.

"In Canada, you asshole," Hester had said.

"THERE'S NO NEED TO BE CRUDE," Owen had told her. "IT'S A PRETTY SONG. IT MUST BE SAD TO GO TO CANADA."

It was . He was about to become a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army.

"You think it's 'sad' to go to Canada!" Hester screamed at him. "Where they're going to send you is a lot sadder."

"I DON'T WANT TO DIE WHERE IT'S COLD," said Owen Meany. What he meant was, he believed he knew that he would die where it was warm-very warm. On Christmas Eve, , two American servicemen were killed in Saigon when Viet Cong terrorists bombed the U.S. billets; one week later, on New Year's Eve, Hester threw up-perhaps she upchucked with special verve, because Owen Meany was prompted to take the power of Hester's puking as a sign.

"IT LOOKS LIKE IT'S GOING TO BE A BAD YEAR," Owen observed, while we watched Hester's spasms in the rose garden. Indeed, it was the year the war began in earnest; at least, it was the year when the average unobservant American began to notice that we had a problem in Vietnam. In February, the U.S. Air Force conducted Operation Flaming Dart-a "tactical air reprisal."

"What does that mean?" I asked Owen, who was doing so well in his studies of Military Science.

"THAT MEANS WE'RE BOMBING THE SHIT OUT OF TARGETS IN NORTH VIETNAM," he said. In March, the U.S. Air Force began Operation Rolling Thunder-"to interdict the flow of supplies to the south."

"What does that mean?" I asked Owen.

"THAT MEANS WE'RE BOMBING THE SHIT OUT OF TARGETS IN NORTH VIETNAM," said Owen Meany. That was the month when the first American combat troops landed in Vietnam; in April, President Johnson authorized the use of U.S. ground troops-"for offensive operations in South Vietnam."

"THAT MEANS, 'SEARCH AND DESTROY, SEARCH AND DESTROY,' " Owen said. In May, the U.S. Navy began Operation Market Time-"to detect and intercept surface traffic in South Vietnam coastal waters." Harry Hoyt was there; Harry was very happy in the Navy, his mother said.

"But what are they doing there?" I asked Owen.

"THEY'RE SEIZING AND DESTROYING ENEMY CRAFT," said Owen Meany. It was out of conversations he had been having with one of his professors of Military Science that he was prompted to observe: "THERE'S NO END TO THIS. WHAT WE'RE DEALING WITH IS GUERRILLA WARFARE. ARE WE PREPARED TO OBLITERATE THE WHOLE COUNTRY? YOU CAN CALL IT 'SEARCH AND DESTROY' OR 'SEIZE AND DESTROY'-EITHER WAY, IT'S DESTROY AND DESTROY. THERE'S NO GOOD WAY TO END IT."

I could not get over the idea of Harry Hoyt "seizing and destroying enemy craft"; he was such an idiot! He didn't even know how to play Little League baseball! I simply couldn't forgive him for the base on balls that led to Buzzy Thurston's easy grounder . . . that led to Owen Meany coming to the plate. If Harry had only struck out or hit the ball, everything might have turned out differently. But he was a walker.

"How could Harry Hoyt possibly be involved in 'seizing and destroying' anything!'" I asked Owen. "Harry isn't smart

enough to recognize an 'enemy craft' if one sailed right over his head!"

"HAS IT OCCURRED TO YOU THAT VIETNAM IS FULL OF HARRY HOYTS?" Owen asked. The professor of Military Science who had impressed Owen, and given him a sense of catastrophe about the tactical and strategic management of the war, was some crusty and critical old colonel of infantry-a physical-fitness nut who thought Owen was too small for the combat branches of the Army. I believe that Owen excelled in his Military Science courses in an effort to persuade this old thug that he could more than compensate for his size; Owen spent much after-class time chatting up the old buzzard-it was Owen's intention to be the honor graduate, the number-one graduate from his ROTC unit. With a number-one rating, Owen was sure, he would be assigned a "combat arms designator"-Infantry, Armor, or Artillery.

"I don't understand why you want a combat branch," I said to him.

"IF THERE'S A WAR AND I'M IN THE ARMY, I WANT TO BE IN THE WAR," he said. "I DON'T WANT TO SPEND THE WAR AT A DESK. LOOK AT IT THIS WAY: WE AGREE THAT HARRY HOYT IS AN IDIOT. WHO'S GOING TO KEEP THE HARRY HOYTS FROM GETTING THEIR HEADS BLOWN OFF?"

"Oh, so you want to be a herol" I told him. "If you were any smarter than Harry Hoyt, you'd be smart enough to spend the war at a deskl"

I began to think more highly of the colonel who thought Owen was too small for a combat branch. His name was Eiger, and I tried to talk to him once; in my view, I was doing Owen a favor.

"Colonel Eiger, sir," I said to him. Despite the liver spots on the backs of his hands and the roll of sun-wrecked skin that only slightly overlapped his tight, brown collar, he looked capable of about seventy-five fast push-ups on command. "I know that you know Owen Meany, sir," I said to him; he didn't speak-he waited for me to continue, chewing his gum so conservatively that you weren't sure he had any gum in his mouth at all; he might have been engaged in some highly disciplined pattern of exercises for his tongue. "I want you to know that I agree with you, sir," I said. "I don't think Owen Meany is suitable for combat." The colonel-although this was barely detectable-stopped chewing. "It's not just his size," I ventured. "I am his best friend, and even I have to question his stability-his emotional stability," I said.

"Thank you. That will be all," the colonel said.

"Thank you, sir," I said. It was May, ; I watched Owen closely-to see if he'd received any further discouragement from Colonel Eiger. Something must have happened-the colonel must have said something to him-because that was the spring when Owen Meany stopped smoking; he just gave it up, cold. He took up running! In two weeks, he was running five miles a day; he said his goal-by the end of the month-was to average six minutes per mile. And he took up beer.

"Why the beer?" I asked him.

"WHOEVER HEARD OF SOMEONE IN THE ARMY NOT DRINKING BEER?" he asked me. It sounded like something Colonel Eiger would have said to him; probably the colonel thought it was a further indication that Owen was a wimp-that he didn't drink. And so, by the time he left for Basic Training, he was in pretty good shape-all that running, even with the beer, was a favorable exchange for a pack a day. He admitted that he didn't like the running; but he'd developed a taste for beer. He never drank very much of it-I never saw him get drunk, not before Basic Training-but Hester remarked that the beer vastly improved his disposition.

"Nothing would make Owen exactly mellow," she said, "but believe me: the beer helps."

I felt funny working for Meany Granite when Owen wasn't there.

"I'M ONLY GONE FOR SIX WEEKS," he pointed out. "AND BESIDES: I FEEL BETTER KNOWING YOU'RE IN CHARGE OF THE MONUMENT SHOP. IF SOMEONE DIES, YOU'VE GOT THE PROPER MANNERS TO HANDLE THE ORDER FOR THE GRAVESTONE. I TRUST YOU TO HAVE THE RIGHT TOUCH."

"Good luck!" I said to him.

"DON'T EXPECT ME TO HAVE TIME TO WRITE- IT'S GOING TO BE PRETTY INTENSE," he said. "BASICALLY, I'VE GOT TO EXCEL IN THREE AREAS-ACADEMICS, LEADERSHIP, PHYSICAL FITNESS. FRANKLY, IN THE LATTER CATEGORY, I'M WORRIED ABOUT THE OBSTACLE COURSE-I HEAR THERE'S A

WALL, ABOUT TWELVE FEET. THAT MIGHT BE A LITTLE HIGH FOR ME."

Hester was singing; she refused to participate in a conversation about Basic Training; she said that if she heard Owen recite his preferred COMBAT BRANCHES one more time, she would throw up. I'll never forget what Hester was singing; it's a Canadian song, and-over the years-I've heard this song a hundred times. I guess it will always give me the shivers. If you were even just barely alive in the sixties, I'm sure you've heard the song that Hester sang, the song I remember so vividly. Four strong winds that blow lonely, Seven seas that run high, All those things that don't change come what may. But our good times are all gone, And I'm bound for movin' on, I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way. They sent him to Fort Knox, or maybe it was Fort Bragg; I forget-once I asked Hester if she remembered which place it was where Owen was sent for Basic Training.

"All I know is, he shouldn't have gone-he should have gone to Canada," Hester said. How often I have thought that! There are times when I catch myself looking for him-even expecting to see him. Once, in Winston Churchill Park, when there were children rough-housing-at least, moving quickly-I saw someone about his size, standing slightly to the side of whatever activity was consuming the others, looking a trifle tentative but very alert, certainly eager to try what the others were doing, but restraining himself, or else picking the exactly perfect moment to take charge. But Owen didn't come to Canada; he went to Fort Knox or Fort Bragg, where he failed the obstacle course. He was the best academically; he had the highest marks in leadership- whatever that is, and however the U.S. Army determines what it is. But he had been right about the wall; it was a little high for him-he simply couldn't get over it. He "failed to negotiate the wall"-that was how the Army put it. And since class rank in ROTC is composed of excellence in Academics, in Leadership, and in Physical Fitness, Owen Meany--just that simply-failed to get a number-one ranking; his choice of a "combat arms designator" was, therefore, not assured.

"But you're such a good jumper!" I told him. "Couldn't you just jump it-couldn't you grab hold of the top of the wall and haul yourself over it?"

"I COULDN'T REACH THE TOP OF THE WALL!" he said. "I AM A GOOD JUMPER, BUT I'M FUCKING FIVE FEET TALL! IT'S NOT LIKE PRACTICING THE SHOT, YOU KNOW-I'M NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE ANYONE BOOST ME UP!"

"I'm sorry," I said. "You've still got your whole senior year. Can't you work on Colonel Eiger? I'll bet you can convince him to give you what you want."

"I'VE GOT A NUMBER-TWO RANKING-DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND? IT'S BY THE BOOK. COLONEL EIGER LIKES ME-HE JUST DOESN'T THINK I'M FITl" He was so distracted by his failure, I didn't press him about giving me a dynamite lesson. I felt guilty for ever speaking to Colonel Eiger-Owen was so upset. But, at the same time, I didn't want him to get a combat-branch assignment. In the fall of ', when we returned to Durham for our senior year, there were already protests against U.S. policy in Vietnam; that October, there were protests in thirty or forty American cities-I think Hester attended about half of them. Typical of me, I felt unsure: I thought the protesters made more sense than anyone who remotely subscribed to "U.S. policy"; but I also thought that Hester and most of her friends were losers and jerks. Hester was already beginning to call herself a "socialist."

"OH, EXCUSE ME, I THOUGHT YOU WERE A WAITRESS'." Owen Meany said. "ARE YOU SHARING ALL YOUR TIPS WITH THE OTHER WAITRESSES?"

"Fuck you, Owen," Hester said. "I could call myself a Republican, and I'd still make more sense than you\"

I had to agree. At the very least, it was inconsistent of Owen Meany to want a combat-branch assignment; with the keen eye he had always had for spotting bullshit, why would he want to go to Vietnam? And the war, and the protests-they were just beginning; anyone could see that. On Christmas Day, President Johnson suspended Operation Rolling Thunder-no more bombing of North Vietnam, "to induce negotiations for peace." Was anyone fooled by that?

"MADE FOR TELEVISION!" said Owen Meany. So why

did he want to go there? Did he want to be a hero so badly that he would have gone anywhere! That fall he was told he was Adjutant General's Corps "material"; that was not what he wanted to hear-the Adjutant General's Corps was not a combat branch. He was appealing the decision; mistakes of this kind-regarding one's orders- were almost common, he claimed.

"I THINK COLONEL EIGER IS IN MY CORNER," Owen said. "AS FAR AS I'M CONCERNED, I'M STILL WAITING TO HEAR ABOUT A COMBAT BRANCH."

By New Year's Eve, -when Hester was making her usual statement in the rose garden at Front Street-only U.S. military personnel had been killed in action; it was just the beginning. I guess that figure did not include the death of Harry Hoyt; "in action" was not exactly how poor Harry was killed. It had been just like another base on balls for Harry Hoyt, I thought-snake-bit while waiting his turn with a whore, snake-bit while peeing under a tree.

"JUST LIKE DRAWING A WALK," said Owen Meany. "POOR HARRY."

"His poor mother," my grandmother said; she was moved to expand upon her thesis on dying. "I would rather be murdered by a maniac than bitten by a snake," she said. And so, in Gravesend, our first vision of death in Vietnam was not of that standard Viet Cong soldier in his sandals and black pajamas, with something that looked like a lampshade for a hat-and with the Soviet AK- assault rifle, using a .mm bullet, fired either single-shot or on full automatic. Rather, we turned to my grandmother's Wharton Encyclopedia of Venomous Snakes-which had already provided Owen and me with several nightmares, when we were children-and there we found our vision of the enemy in Southeast Asia: Russell's viper. Oh, it was so tempting to reduce the United States' misadventure in Vietnam to an enemy one could see\ Harry Hoyt's mother made up her mind that we were our enemy. Less than a month after the New Year-after we had resumed our bombing of North Vietnam and Operation Rolling Thunder was back on target-Mrs. Hoyt created her disturbance in the office of the Gravesend local draft board, choosing to use their bulletin board to advertise that she would give free draft-counseling advice in her home-sessions in how to evade the draft. She managed to advertise herself all around the university, in Durham, too-Hester told me that Mrs. Hoyt drew more of a crowd from the university community than she was able to summon among the locals in Gravesend. The university students were closer to being drafted than those Gravesend High School students who could manage to be accepted by even the lowliest college or university. In , two million Americans had so-called student deferments that protected them from the draft. In a year, this would be modified-to exclude graduate students; but those graduate students in their second year, or further along in their studies, would keep their exemptions. I would fall perfectly into the crack. When draft deferments for graduate students got the ax, I would be in my first year of graduate school; my draft deferment would get the ax, too. I would be summoned for a preinduction physical at my local Gravesend draft board, where I had every reason to expect I would be found fully acceptable for induction-what was called -A-fit to serve, and standing at the head of the line. That was the kind of thing that Mrs. Hoyt was attempting to prepare us for-as early as February, , she started warning the young people who would listen to her; she made contact with all of Harry's contemporaries in Gravesend.

"Johnny Wheelwright, you listen to me!" she said; she got me on the telephone at Front Street, and I was afraid of her. Even my grandmother thought that Mrs. Hoyt should be conducting herself "in a manner more suitable to mourning"; but Mrs. Hoyt was as mad as a hornet. She'd given Owen a lecture at the monument shop when she was picking out a stone for Harry!

"I don't want a cross," she told Owen. "A lot of good God ever did him!"

"YES, MA'AM," said Owen Meany.

"And I don't want one of those things that look like a stepping-stone-that's just like the military, to give you a grave that people can walk on!" Mrs. Hoyt said.

"I UNDERSTAND," Owen told her. Then she lit into him about his ROTC "obligation," about how he should do everything he could to end up with a "desk job"-if he knew what was good for him.

"And I don't mean a desk job in Saigonl" she said to him. "Don't you dare be a participant in that genocide]" she told him. "Do you want to set fire to small Asian women and children?" she asked him.

"NO, MA'AM!" said Owen Meany.

To me, she said: "They're not going to let you be a graduate student in English. What do they care about English*? They barely speak it!"

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"You can't hide in graduate school-believe me, it won't work," said Mrs. Hoyt. "And unless you've got something wrong with you-I mean, physically-you're going to die in a rice paddy. Is there anything wrong with you?" she asked me.

"Not that I know of, ma'am," I said.

"Well, you ought to think of something," Mrs. Hoyt told me. "I know someone who does psychiatric counseling; he can coach you-he can make you seem crazy. But that's risky, and you've got to start now-you need time to develop a history, if you're going to convince anybody you're insane. It's no good just getting drunk and smearing dog shit in your hair the night before your physical-if you don't develop a mental history, it won't work to try to fake it."

That, however, is what Buzzy Thurston tried-and it worked. It worked a little too well. He didn't develop a "history" that was one day longer than two weeks; but even in that short time, he managed to force enough alcohol and drugs into his body to convince his body that it liked this form of abuse. To Mrs. Hoyt, Buzzy would be as much a victim of the war as her Harry; Buzzy would kill himself trying to stay out of Vietnam.

"Have you thought about the Peace Corps?" Mrs. Hoyt asked me. She said she'd counseled one young man-also an English major-to apply to the Peace Corps. He'd been accepted as an English teacher in Tanzania. It was a pity, she admitted, that the Red Chinese had sent about four hundred ' 'advisers'' to Tanzania in the summer of '; the Peace Corps, naturally, had withdrawn in a hurry. "Just think about it," Mrs. Hoyt said to me. "Even Tanzania is a better idea than Vietnam!"

I told her I'd think about it; but I thought I had so much time! Imagine this: you're a university senior, you're a virgin-do you believe it when someone tells you that you have to make up your mind between Vietnam and Tanzania?

"You better believe it," Hester told me. That was the year-, in February-when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began televised hearings on the war.

"I think you better talk to Mrs. Hoyt," my grandmother told me. "I don't want any grandson of mine to have anything to do with this mess."

"Listen to me, John," Dan Needham said., "This is not the time to do what Owen Meany does. This time Owen is making a mistake."

I told Dan that I was afraid I might be responsible for sabotaging Owen's desire for a "combat arms designator"; I confessed that I'd told Colonel Eiger that Owen's "emotional stability" was questionable, and that I'd agreed with the colonel that Owen was not suitable for a combat branch. I told Dan I felt guilty that I'd said these things "behind Owen's back."

"How can you feel 'guilty' for trying to save his life?" Dan asked me. Hester said the same thing, when I confessed to her that I had betrayed Owen to Colonel Eiger.

"How can you say you 'betrayed' him? If you love him, how could you want what he wants? He's crazy!'' Hester cried. "If the Army insists that he's not 'fit' for combat, I could even learn to love the fucking Army!"

But everyone was beginning to seem "crazy" to me. My grandmother just muttered away at the television-all day and all night. She was beginning to forget things and people-if she hadn't seen them on TV-and more appalling, she remembered everything she'd seen on television with a mindless, automatic accuracy. Even Dan Needham seemed crazy to me; for how many years could anyone maintain enthusiasm for amateur theatricals, in general-and for the question of which role in A Christmas Carol best suited Mr. Fish, in particular? And although I did not sympathize with the Gravesend Gas Works for firing Mrs. Hoyt as their receptionist, I thought Mrs. Hoyt was crazy, too. And those town "patriots" who were apprehended in the act of vandalizing Mrs. Hoyt's car and garage were even crazier than she was. And Rector Wiggin, and his wife, Barbara . . . they had always been crazy; now they were claiming that God "supported" the U.S. troops in Vietnam-their implication being mat to not support the presence of those troops was both anti-American and ungodly. Although the Rev. Lewis Merrill was-with Dan Needham- the principal spokesman for what amounted to the antiwar movement within Gravesend Academy, even Mr. Merrill looked crazy to me; for all his talk about peace, he wasn't making any progress with Owen Meany.

Of course, Owen was the craziest; I suppose it was always a toss-up between Owen and Hester, but regarding the subject of Owen wanting and actively seeking a combat-branch assignment, there was no doubt in my mind that Owen was the craziest.

"Why do you want to be a hero?" I asked him.

"YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND," he said.

"No, I don't," I admitted. It was the spring of our senior year, ; I'd already been accepted into the graduate school at the University of New Hampshire-for the next year, at least, I wouldn't be going anywhere; I had my -S deferment and was hanging on to it. Owen had already filled out his Officer Assignment Preference Statement-his DREAM SHEET, he called it. On his Personnel Action Form, he'd noted that he was "volunteering for oversea service." On both forms, he'd specified that he wanted to go to Vietnam: Infantry, Armor, or Artillery-in that order. He was not optimistic; with his number-two ranking in his ROTC unit, the Army was under no obligation to honor his choice. He admitted that no one had been very encouraging regarding his appeal to change his assignment from the Adjutant General's Corps to a combat branch-not even Colonel Eiger had encouraged him.

"THE ARMY OFFERS YOU THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE-THE SAME CHOICE AS EVERYONE ELSE," Owen said. While he was hoping to be reassigned, he would toss around all the bullshit phrases favored by the Department of the Army Headquarters: RANGER TRAINING, AIRBORNE TRAINING, SPECIAL FORCES TRAINING-one day when he said he wished he'd gone to JUMP SCHOOL, or to JUNGLE SCHOOL, Hester threw up.

"Why do you want to go-at all?" I screamed at him.

"I KNOW THAT I DO GO," he said. "IT'S NOT NECESSARILY A MATTER OF WANTING TO."

"Let me make sure I get this right," I said to him. "You 'know' that you go whereT'

"TO VIETNAM," he said.

"I see," I said.

"No, you don't 'see,' " Hester said. "Ask him how he 'knows' that he goes to Vietnam," she said.

"How do you know, Owen?" I asked him; I thought I knew how he knew-it was the dream, and it gave me the shivers. Owen and I were sitting in the wooden, straight-backed chairs in Hester's roach-infested kitchen. Hester was making a tomato sauce; she was not an exciting cook, and the kitchen retained the acidic, oniony odor of many of her previous tomato sauces. She wilted an onion in cheap olive oil in a cast-iron skillet; then she poured in a can of tomatoes. She added water-and basil, oregano, salt, red pepper, and sometimes a leftover bone from a pork chop or a lamb chop or a steak. She would reduce this mess to a volume that was less than the original can of tomatoes, and the consistency of paste. This glop she would dump over pasta, which had been boiled until it was much too soft. Occasionally, she would surprise us with a salad-the dressing for which was composed of too much vinegar and the same cheap olive oil she had employed in her assault of the onion. Sometimes, after dinner, we would listen to music on the living-room couch-or else Hester would sing something to Owen and me. But the couch was at present uninviting, the result of Hester taking pity on one of Durham's stray dogs; the mutt had demonstrated its gratitude by bestowing upon Hester's living-room couch an infestation of fleas. This was the life that Hester and I thought Owen valued too little.

"I DON'T WANT TO BE A HERO," said Owen Meany. "IT'S NOT THAT I WANT TO BE-IT'S THAT I AM A HERO. I KNOW THAT'S WHAT I'M SUPPOSED TO BE."

"How do you know?" I asked him.

"IT'S NOT THAT I WANT TO GO TO VIETNAM-IT'S WHERE I HAVE TO GO. IT'S WHERE I'M A HERO. I'VE GOT TO BE THERE," he said.

"Tell him how you 'know' this, you asshole!" Hester screamed at him.

"THE WAY YOU KNOW SOME THINGS-YOUR OBLIGATIONS, YOUR DESTINY OR YOUR FATE," he said. "THE WAY YOU KNOW WHAT GOD WANTS YOU TO DO."

"God wants you to go to Vietnam?" I asked him. Hester ran out of the kitchen and shut herself in the bathroom; she started running the water in the bathtub. "I'm not listening to this shit, Owen-not one more time, I told you!" she cried. When Owen got up from the kitchen table to turn the flame down under the tomato sauce, we could hear Hester being sick in the bathroom.

"It's this dream, isn't it?" I asked him. He stirred the tomato sauce as if he knew what he was doing. "Does Pastor

Merrill tell you that God wants you to go to Vietnam?" I asked him. "Does Father Findley tell you that?"

"THEY SAY IT'S JUST A DREAM," said Owen Meany.

"That's what / say-I don't even know what it is, but I say it's just a dream," I said.

"BUT YOU HAVE NO FAITH," he said. "THAT'S YOUR PROBLEM."

In the bathroom, Hester was sounding like New Year's Eve; the tomato sauce just simmered. Owen Meany could manifest a certain calmness that I had never quite liked; when he got like that when we were practicing the shot, I didn't want to touch him-when I passed him the ball, I felt uneasy; and when I had to put my hands on him, when I actually lifted him up, I always felt I was handling a creature that was not exactly, human, or not quite real. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had twisted in the air, in my hands, and bitten me; or if-after I'd lifted him-he'd just kept on flying.

"It's only a dream," I repeated.

"IT'S NOT YOUR DREAM," said Owen Meany.

"Don't be coy, don't play around with me," I told him.

"I'M NOT PLAYING AROUND," he said. "WOULD I REQUEST A COMBAT ASSIGNMENT IF I WERE PLAYING AROUND?"

I began again. "In this dream, you're a hero?" I asked him.

"I SAVE THE CHILDREN," said Owen Meany. "I SAVE LOTS OF CHILDREN."

"Children?" I said.

"IN THE DREAM," he said-"THEY'RE NOT SOLDIERS, THEY'RE CHILDREN."

"Vietnamese children?" I asked.

"THAT'S HOW I KNOW WHERE I AM-THEY'RE DEFINITELY VIETNAMESE CHILDREN, AND I SAVE THEM. I WOULDN'T GO TO ALL THIS TROUBLE IF I WAS SUPPOSED TO SAVE SOLDIERS!" he added.

"Owen, this is so childish," I said. "You can't believe that everything that pops into your head means something! You can't have a dream and believe that you 'know' what you're supposed to do!"

"THAT ISN'T EXACTLY WHAT FAITH IS," he said, turning his attention to the tomato sauce. ' 'I DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING THAT POPS INTO MY HEAD-FAITH IS A LITTLE MORE SELECTIVE THAN THAT."

Some dreams, I suppose, are MORE SELECTIVE, too. Under the big pot of water for the pasta, Owen turned the flame on-as if the sounds of Hester's dry heaves in the bathroom were an indication to him that her appetite would be returning soon. Then he went into Hester's bedroom and fetched his diary. He didn't show it to me; he simply found the part he was looking for, and he began to read to me. I didn't know I was hearing an edited version. The word "dream" was never mentioned in his writing, as if it were not a dream he was describing but rather something he had seen with much more certainty and authority than anything appearing to him in his sleep-as if he were describing an order of events he had absolutely witnessed. Yet he remained removed from what he saw, like someone watching through a window, and the tone of the writing was not at all as urgent as the tone so often employed by The Voice; rather, the certainty and authority that I heard reminded me of the plain, less-than-enthusiastic report of a documentary, which is the tone of voice of those undoubting parts of the Bible.

"I NEVER HEAR THE EXPLOSION. WHAT I HEAR IS THE AFTERMATH OF AN EXPLOSION. THERE IS A RINGING IN MY EARS, AND THOSE HIGH-PITCHED POPPING AND TICKING SOUNDS THAT A HOT ENGINE MAKES AFTER YOU SHUT IT OFF; AND PIECES OF THE SKY ARE FALLING, AND BITS OF WHITE-MAYBE PAPER, MAYBE PLASTER-ARE FLOATING DOWN LIKE SNOW. THERE ARE SILVERY SPARKLES IN THE AIR, TOO-MAYBE IT'S SHATTERED GLASS. THERE'S SMOKE, AND THE STINK OF BURNING; THERE'S NO FLAME, BUT EVERYTHING IS SMOLDERING.

"WE'RE ALL LYING ON THE FLOOR. I KNOW THE CHILDREN ARE ALL RIGHT BECAUSE-ONE BY ONE- THEY PICK THEMSELVES UP OFF THE FLOOR. IT MUST HAVE BEEN A LOUD EXPLOSION BECAUSE SOME OF THE CHILDREN ARE STILL HOLDING THEIR EARS; SOME OF THEIR EARS ARE BLEEDING. THE CHILDREN DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH, BUT THEIR VOICES ARE THE FIRST HUMAN SOUNDS TO FOLLOW THE EXPLOSION. THE YOUNGER ONES ARE CRYING; BUT THE OLDER ONES ARE DOING THEIR BEST TO BE COMFORTING -THEY'RE CHATTERING AWAY, THEY'RE REALLY BABBLING, BUT THIS IS REASSURING.

"THE WAY THEY LOOK AT ME, I KNOW TWO

THINGS. I KNOW THAT I SAVED THEM-I DON'T KNOW HOW. AND I KNOW THAT THEY'RE AFRAID FOR ME. BUT I DON'T SEE ME-I CAN'T TELL WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME. THE CHILDREN'S FACES TELL ME SOMETHING IS WRONG.

"SUDDENLY, THE NUNS ARE THERE; PENGUINS ARE PEERING DOWN AT ME-ONE OF THEM BENDS OVER ME. I CAN'T HEAR WHAT I SAY TO HER, BUT SHE APPEARS TO UNDERSTAND ME-MAYBE SHE SPEAKS ENGLISH. IT'S NOT UNTIL SHE TAKES ME IN HER ARMS THAT I SEE ALL THE BLOOD-HER WIMPLE IS BLOOD-STAINED. WHILE I'M LOOKING AT THE NUN, HER WIMPLE CONTINUES TO BE SPLASHED WITH BLOOD-THE BLOOD SPATTERS HER FACE, TOO, BUT SHE'S NOT AFRAID. THE FACES OF THE CHILDREN-LOOKING DOWN AT ME-ARE FULL OF FEAR; BUT THE NUN WHO HOLDS ME IN HER ARMS IS VERY PEACEFUL.

"OF COURSE, IT'S MY BLOOD-SHE'S COVERED WITH MY BLOOD-BUT SHE'S VERY CALM. WHEN I SEE SHE'S ABOUT TO MAKE THE SIGN OF THE CROSS OVER ME, I REACH OUT TO TRY TO STOP HER. BUT I CAN'T STOP HER-IT'S AS IF I DON'T HAVE ANY ARMS. THE NUN JUST SMILES AT ME. AFTER SHE'S MADE THE SIGN OF THE CROSS OVER ME, I LEAVE ALL OF THEM-I JUST LEAVE. THEY ARE STILL EXACTLY WHERE THEY WERE, LOOKING DOWN AT ME; BUT I'M NOT REALLY THERE. I'M LOOKING DOWN AT ME, TOO. I LOOK LIKE I DID WHEN I WAS THE BABY JESUS-YOU REMEMBER THOSE STUPID SWADDLING CLOTHES? THAT'S HOW I LOOK WHEN I LEAVE ME.

"BUT NOW ALL THE PEOPLE ARE GROWING SMALLER-NOT JUST ME, BUT THE NUNS AND THE CHILDREN, TOO. I'M QUITE FAR ABOVE THEM, BUT THEY NEVER LOOK UP; THEY KEEP LOOKING DOWN AT WHAT USED TO BE ME. AND SOON I'M ABOVE EVERYTHING; THE PALM TREES ARE VERY STRAIGHT AND TALL, BUT SOON I'M HIGH ABOVE THE PALM TREES, TOO. THE SKY AND THE PALM TREES ARE SO BEAUTIFUL, BUT IT'S VERY HOT-THE AIR IS HOTTER THAN ANY PLACE I'VE EVER BEEN. I KNOW I'M NOT IN NEW HAMPSHIRE."

I didn't say anything; he put his diary back in Hester's bedroom, he stirred the tomato sauce, he looked under the lid of the water pot to see if the water was near to boiling. Then he went and knocked on the bathroom door; it was quiet in there.

"I'll be out in a minute," Hester said. Owen returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table with me.

"It's just a dream, Owen," I said to him. He folded his hands and regarded me patiently. I remembered that time he untied the safety rope when we'd been swimming in the old quarry. I remembered how angry he was-when we hadn't immediately jumped in the water to save him.

"YOU LET ME DROWN!" he'd said. "YOU DIDN'T DO ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I'M ALREADY DEAD!" he'd told us. "REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE."

"Owen," I said. "Given your sensitive feelings for Catholics, why wouldn't you dream that a nun was your own special Angel of Death?"

He looked down at his hands folded on top of the table; we could hear Hester's bath emptying.

"It's just a dream," I repeated; he shrugged. There was in his attitude toward me that same mild pity and mild contempt I had seen before-when The Flying Yankee had passed over the Maiden Hill trestle bridge, precisely as Owen and I had passed under it, and I'd called this a "coincidence."

Hester came out of the bathroom wrapped in a pale-yellow towel, carrying her clothes. She went into the bedroom without looking at us; she shut the door, and we could hear her shaking the chest of drawers, the coat hangers protesting her roughness in the closet.

"Owen," I said. "You're very original, but the dream is a stereotype-the dream is stupid. You're going in the Army, there's a war in Vietnam-do you think you'd have a dream about saving American children? And, naturally, there would be palm trees-what would you expect? Igloos?"

Hester came out of the bedroom in fresh clothes; she was roughly toweling her hair dry. Her clothes were almost an exact exchange for what she'd worn before-she wore a different pair of blue jeans and a different, ill-fitting turtleneck jersey; the extent to which Hester ever changed her clothes was a change from black to navy blue, or vice versa.

"Owen," I said. "You can't believe that God wants you to go to Vietnam for the purpose of making yourself available to rescue these characters in a dreaml"

He neither nodded nor shrugged; he sat very still looking at his hands folded on top of the table.

"That's exactly what he believes-you've hit the nail on the head," Hester said. She gripped the damp, pale-yellow towel and rolled it tightly into what we used to call a "rat's tail." She snapped the towel very close to Owen Meany's face, but Owen didn't move. "That's it, isn't it? You asshole!" she yelled at him. She snapped the towel again-then she unrolled it and ran at him, wrapping the towel around his head. "You think God wants you to go to Vietnam-don't you?'' she screamed at him. She wrestled him out of his chair-she held his head in the towel in a headlock and she lay on her side across his chest, pinning him to the kitchen floor, while she began to pound him in the face with the fist of her free hand. He kicked his feet, he tried to grab for her hair; but Hester must have outweighed Owen Meany by at least thirty pounds, and she appeared to be hitting him as hard as she could. When I saw the blood seep through the pale-yellow towel, I grabbed Hester around her waist and tried to pull her off him. It wasn't easy; I had to get my hands on her throat and threaten to strangle her before she stopped hitting him and tried to hit me. She was very strong, and she was hysterical; she tried to demonstrate her headlock on me, but Owen got the towel off his head and tackled Hester at her ankles. Then it was his turn to attempt to get her off me. Owen's nose was bleeding and his lower lip, which was split and puffy, was bleeding, too; but together we managed to take control of her. Owen sat on the backs of her legs, and I kneeled between her shoulder blades and pulled her arms down flush to her sides; this still left her free to thrash her head all around-she tried to bite me, and when she couldn't, she began to bang her face on the kitchen floor until her nose was bleeding.

"You don't love me, Owen!" Hester screamed. "If you loved me, you wouldn't go-not for all the goddamn children in the world! You wouldn't go if you loved me!"

Owen and I stayed on top of her until she started to cry, and she stopped banging her face on the floor.

"YOU BETTER GO," Owen said to me.

"No, you better go, Owen," Hester said to him. "You better get the fuck out of here!"

And so he took his diary from Hester's bedroom, and we left together. It was a warm spring night. I followed the tomato-red pickup to the coast; I knew where he was going. I was sure that he wanted to sit on the breakwater at Rye Harbor. The breakwater was made of the slag-the broken slabs-from the Meany Granite Quarry; Owen always felt he had a right to sit there. From the breakwater, you got a pretty view of the tiny harbor; in the spring, not that many boats were in the water-it didn't quite feel like summer, which was the time of year when we usually sat there. But this summer would be different, anyway. Because I was teaching ninth-grade Expository Writing at Gravesend Academy in the fall, I wasn't going to work this summer. Even a part-time job at Gravesend Academy would more than compensate for my graduate-school expenses; even a part-time job-for the whole school year-was worth more than another summer working for Meany Granite. Besides: my grandmother had given me a little money, and Owen would be in the Army. He had treated himself to thirty days between his graduation and the beginning of his active duty as a second lieutenant. We'd talked about taking a trip together. Except for his Basic Training-at Fort Knox or Fort Bragg-Owen had never been out of New England; I'd never been out of New England, either.

"Both of you should go to Canada," Hester had told us. "And you should stay there!"

The salt water rushed in and out of the breakwater; pools of water were trapped in the rocks below the high-tide mark. Owen stuck his face in one of these tide pools; his nose had stopped bleeding, but his lip was split quite deeply-it continued to bleed-and there was a sizable swelling above one of his eyebrows. He had two black eyes, one very much blacker than the other and so puffy that the eye was closed to a slit.

"YOU THINK VIETNAM IS DANGEROUS," he said. "YOU OUGHT TO TRY LIVING WITH HESTERl"

But he was so exasperating! How could anyone live with Owen Meany and, knowing what he thought he knew, not be moved to beat the shit out of him? We sat on the breakwater until it grew dark and the mosquitoes began to bother us.

"Are you hungry?" I asked him. He pointed to his lower lip, which was still bleeding. "I

DON'T THINK I CAN EAT ANYTHING," he said, "BUT I'LL GO WITH YOU."

We went to one of those clam-shack restaurants on "the strip." I ate a lot of fried clams and Owen sipped a beer- through a straw. The waitress knew us-she was a University of New Hampshire girl.

"You better get some stitches in that lip before it falls off," she told Owen. We drove-Owen in the tomato-red pickup, and I followed him in my Volkswagen-to the emergency room of the Gravesend Hospital. It was a slow night-not the summer, and not a weekend-so we didn't have to wait long. There was a hassle concerning how he intended to pay for his treatment.

"SUPPOSE I CAN'T PAY?" he asked. "DOES THAT MEAN YOU DON'T TREAT ME?"

I was surprised that he had no health insurance; apparently, there was no policy for coverage in his family and he hadn't even paid the small premium asked of students at the university for group benefits. Finally, I said that the hospital could send the bill to my grandmother; everyone knew who Harriet Wheelwright was-even the emergency-room receptionist- and, after a phone call to Grandmother, this method of payment was accepted.

"WHAT A COUNTRY!" said Owen Meany, while a nervous-looking young doctor-who was not an American- put four stitches in his lower lip. "AT LEAST WHEN I GET IN THE ARMY, I'LL HAVE SOME HEALTH INSURANCE!"

Owen said he was ashamed to take money from my grandmother-"SHE'S ALREADY GIVEN ME MORE THAN I DESERVED!" But when we arrived at Front Street, a different problem presented itself.

"Merciful Heavens, Owen!" my grandmother said. "You've been in afightl"

"I JUST FELL DOWNSTAIRS," he said.

"Don't you lie to me, Owen Meany!" Grandmother said.

"I WAS ATTACKED BY JUVENILE DELINQUENTS AT HAMPTON BEACH," Owen said.

"Don't you lie to me!" Grandmother repeated. I could see that Owen was struggling to ascertain the effect upon my grandmother of telling her that her granddaughter had beaten the shit out of him; Hester-except for her vomiting- was always relatively subdued around Grandmother. Owen pointed to me. "HE DID IT," Owen said.

"Merciful Heavens!" my grandmother said. "You should be ashamed of yourself!" she said to me.

"I didn't mean to," I said. "We weren't having a reed fight-we were just roughhousing."

"IT WAS DARK," said Owen Meany. "HE COULDN'T SEE ME VERY CLEARLY."

"You should still be ashamed of yourself!'' my grandmother said to me.

"Yes," I said. This little misunderstanding seemed to cheer up Owen. My grandmother commenced to wait on him, hand and foot-and Ethel was summoned and directed to concoct something nourishing for him in the blender: a fresh pineapple, a banana, some ice cream, some brewer's yeast. "Something the poor boy can drink through a straw!" my grandmother said.

"YOU CAN LEAVE OUT THE BREWER'S YEAST," said Owen Meany. After my grandmother went to bed, we sat up watching The Late Show and he teased me about my new reputation-as a bully. The movie on The Late Show was at least twenty years old-Betty Grable in Moon over Miami, The music, and the setting, made me think of the place called The Orange Grove and my mother performing as "The Lady in Red." I would probably never know any more about that, I thought.

"You remember the play you were going to write?" I asked Owen. "About the supper club-about 'The Lady in Red'?"

"SURE, I REMEMBER. YOU DIDN'T WANT ME TO DO FT," he said.

"I thought you might have done it, anyway," I said.

"I STARTED IT-A COUPLE OF TIMES," he said. "IT WAS HARDER THAN I THOUGHT-TO MAKE UP A STORY."

Carole Landis was in Moon over Miami, and Don Ameche; remember them? It's a story about husband-hunting in Florida. Just the glow of the television lit Owen's face when he said, "YOU'VE GOT TO LEARN TO FOLLOW THINGS THROUGH-IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU'VE GOT TO SEE IT ALL THE WAY TO THE END, YOU'VE GOT TO TRY TO FINISH IT. I'LL BET YOU NEVER EVEN LOOKED IN A BOSTON TELEPHONE DIRECTORY-FOR A BUSTER FREEBODY," he said.

"It's a made-up name," I said.

"IT'S THE ONLY NAME WE KNOW," Owen said.

"No, I didn't look it up," I said.

"YOU SEE?" he said. "THERE ACTUALLY ARE A FEW FREEBODYS-BUT NO 'BUSTER,' " he said.

"Maybe 'Buster' is just a nickname," I said-with more interest now.

"NONE OF THE FREEBODYS I SPOKE WITH HAD EVER HEARD OF A 'BUSTER,' " said Owen Meany. "AND THE OLD PEOPLE'S HOMES WON'T RELEASE A LIST OF NAMES-DO YOU KNOW WHY?" he asked me.

"Why?" I asked him.

"BECAUSE CRIMINALS COULD USE THE NAMES TO FIND OUT WHO'S NO LONGER LIVING AT HOME. IF THE SAME NAME IS STILL IN THE PHONE BOOK- AND IF THE HOUSE OR THE APARTMENT HASN'T BEEN REOCCUPIED-THEN THE CRIMINALS HAVE FOUND AN EASY PLACE TO ROB: NOBODY HOME. THAT'S WHY THE OLD PEOPLE'S HOMES DON'T GIVE OUT ANY NAMES," he said. "INTERESTING, HUH? IF IT'S TRUE," he added.

"You've been busy," I said; he shrugged.

"AND THE LISTINGS IN THE YELLOW PAGES- THOSE PLACES THAT OFFER 'LIVE MUSIC,' " he said. "NOT ONE OF THOSE PLACES IN ALL OF BOSTON HAS EVER HEARD OF A BIG BLACK BUSTER FREEBODY! IT WAS SO LONG AGO, BUSTER FREEBODY MUST BE DEAD."

"I'd hate to see your phone bill," I told him.

"I USED HESTER'S PHONE," he said.

"I'm surprised she didn't beat the shit out of you for that," I said.

"SHE DID," Owen said; he turned his face away from the glowing light of the TV. "I WOULDN'T TELL HER WHAT THE PHONE CALLS WERE ABOUT, AND SHE THOUGHT I HAD ANOTHER GIRLFRIEND."

"Why don't you have another girlfriend?" I asked him; he shrugged again.

"SHE DOESN'T BEAT ME UP ALL THE TIME," Owen said. What could I say? I didn't even have a girlfriend.

"We ought to think about our trip," I said to him. "We've got thirty days coming up-where do you want to go?"

"SOMEWHERE WARM," said Owen Meany.

"It's warm everywhere-in June," I reminded him.

"I'D LIKE TO GO WHERE THERE ARE PALM TREES," Owen said. We watched Moon over Miami for a while, in silence.

"We could drive to Florida," I said.

"NOT IN THE PICKUP," he said. "THE PICKUP WOULDN'T MAKE IT TO FLORIDA."

"We could take my Volkswagen," I said. "We could drive to California in the Beetle-no problem."

"BUT WHERE WOULD WE SLEEP?" Owen asked me. "I CAN'T AFFORD MOTELS."

"Grandmother would lend us the money," I said.

"I'VE TAKEN ENOUGH MONEY FROM YOUR GRANDMOTHER," he said.

"Well, / could lend you the money," I said.

"IT'S THE SAME MONEY," said Owen Meany.

"We could take a tent-and sleeping bags," I said. "We could camp out."

"I'VE THOUGHT OF THAT," he said. "IF WE CARRY A LOT OF CAMPING STUFF, WE'D BE BETTER OFF IN THE PICKUP-BUT THE PICKUP WOULD DIE ON US, ON A TRIP OF THAT DISTANCE."

Was there anything Owen Meany hadn't thought of before I'd thought of it? I wondered.

"WE DON'T HAVE TO GO WHERE THERE ARE PALM TREES-IT WAS JUST AN IDEA," Owen said. We weren't in the mood for Moon over Miami; a story about husband-hunting requires a special mood. Owen went out to the pickup and got his flashlight; then we walked up Front Street to Linden Street-past the Gravesend High School to the cemetery. The night was still warm, and not especially dark. As graves go, my mother's grave looked pretty nice. Grandmother had planted a border of crocuses and daffodils and tulips, so that even in the spring there was color; and Grandmother's touch with-roses was evident by the well-pruned rose bush that took very firm grasp of the trellis that stood like a comfortable headboard directly behind my mother's grave. Owen played the flashlight over the beveled edges of the gravestone; I'd seen better work with the diamond wheel-Owen's work was much, much better. But I never supposed that Owen had been old enough to fashion my mother's stone.

"MY FATHER WAS NEVER AN EXPERT WITH THE DIAMOND WHEEL," Owen observed.

Dan Needham had recently placed a fresh bouquet of spring flowers in front of the gravestone, but Owen and I could still manage to see the lettering of my mother's name-and the appropriate dates.

"If she were alive, she'd be forty-three!'' I said. "Imagine that."

"SHE'D STILL BE BEAUTIFUL!" said Owen Meany. When we were walking back along Linden Street, I was thinking that we could take a trip "Down East," as people in New Hampshire say-by which they mean, along the coast of Maine, all the way to Nova Scotia.

"Could the pickup make it to Nova Scotia?" I asked Owen. "Suppose we just took it easy, and drove along the coast of Maine-not in any hurry, not caring about when we arrived in Nova Scotia, not even caring if we ever arrived there-do you think the pickup could handle that?"

"I'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THAT," he said. "YES, I THINK WE COULD DO THAT-IF WE DIDN'T TRY TO DRIVE TOO MANY MILES IN ONE DAY. WITH THE PICKUP WE COULD CERTAINLY CARRY ALL THE CAMPING GEAR WE'D EVER NEED-WE COULD EVEN PITCH THE TENT IN THE BACK OF THE PICKUP, IF WE EVER HAD A PROBLEM FINDING DRY OR LEVEL GROUND. ..."

"That would be fun!" I said. "I've never been to Nova Scotia-I've never been very far into Maine."

On Front Street, we stopped to pet someone's cat.

"I'VE ALSO BEEN THINKING ABOUT SAWYER DEPOT," said Owen Meany.

"What about it?" I asked him.

"I'VE NEVER BEEN THERE, YOU KNOW," he said.

"It's not really very interesting in Sawyer Depot," I said cautiously. I didn't think my Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred would welcome Owen Meany into their home with open arms; and considering what had just happened with Hester, I wondered what attraction Sawyer Depot still had for Owen.

"I'D JUST LIKE TO SEE IT," he said. "I'VE HEARD SO MUCH ABOUT IT. EVEN IF THE EASTMANS WOULDN'T WANT ME IN THE HOUSE, PERHAPS YOU COULD SHOW ME LOVELESS LAKE-AND THE BOAT-HOUSE, AND MAYBE THE MOUNTAIN WHERE ALL OF YOU WENT SKIING. AND FIREWATER!" he said.

"Firewater's been dead for years!" I told him.

"OH," he said. My grandmother's driveway looked like a parking lot. There was Grandmother's old Cadillac, and my Volkswagen Beetle, and the dusty tomato-red pickup; and parked at the rear of the line was Hester's hand-me-down ' Chevy. She must have been out looking for Owen; and when she'd seen the pickup in Grandmother's driveway, she must have gone into Front Street to find him. We found her asleep on the couch; the only light that flashed over her was the ghastly, bone-colored glow from the TV, which she had turned to another channel-apparently, Hester hadn't been in the mood for Moon over Miami, either. She had fallen asleep watching Duchess of Idaho.

"HESTER HATES ESTHER WILLIAMS, UNLESS ESTHER IS UNDERWATER," said Owen Meany. He went and sat beside Hester on the couch; he touched her hair, then her cheek. I switched the channel; there was never just one Late Show-not anymore. Moon over Miami was over; something called The Late, Late Show had begun in its place-John Wayne, in Operation Pacific.

"HESTER HATES JOHN WAYNE," Owen said, and Hester woke up. John Wayne was in a submarine in World War Two; he was battling the Japanese.

"I'm not watching a war movie," Hester said; she turned on the lamp on the end table next to the couch-she examined the stitches in Owen's lip closely. "How many?" she asked him.

"FOUR," he told her. She kissed him very softly on his upper lip and on the tip of his nose, and on the corners of his mouth-being very careful not to kiss the stitches. "I'm sorry! I love you!" she whispered to him.

"I'M OKAY," said Owen Meany. I flicked through the channels until I found something interesting- Sherlock Holmes in Terror by Night, with Basil Rathbone.

"I can't remember if I've seen this one," Hester said.

"I know I've seen it, but I can't remember it," I said.

"IT'S THE ONE WITH THE JEWEL ON THE TRAIN-IT'S A PRETTY GOOD ONE," said Owen Meany. He curled up next to Hester on the couch; he laid his head against her bosom, and she cradled him in her arms. In a few minutes, he was fast asleep.

"Better turn the volume down," Hester whispered to me. When I looked at her-to see if I'd lowered the volume enough-she was crying.

"I think I'll go to bed," I told her quietly. "I've seen Sherlock Holmes a hundred times."

"We'll stay a while," Hester said. "Good night."

"He wants to go to Sawyer Depot," I told her.

"I know," she said. I lay in bed awake a long time. When I heard their voices in the driveway, I got up and went into my mother's empty bedroom; from the window there, I could see them. The curtains were never drawn in my mother's bedroom, in memory of how she had hated the darkness. It was almost dawn, and Hester and Owen were discussing how they would drive back to Durham.

"I'll follow you," Hester said.

"NO, I'LL FOLLOW YOU," he told her. Then I graduated from the University of New Hampshire-a B.A. in English, cum laude. Owen just plain graduated- Second Lieutenant Paul O. Meany, Jr., with a B.S. in Geology. He was not reassigned to a combat branch; he was ordered to report to Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, where he would undertake an eight- to ten-week course in Basic Administration for the Adjutant General's Corps. After that, the Army wanted him to report to a communications command in Arizona. Although the Army might later send him anywhere in the country-or even to Saigon-they were assigning him to a desk job.

"SECOND LIEUTENANTS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE PLATOON LEADERS'!" said Owen Meany. Naturally, Hester and I had to conceal how pleased we were. Even in Vietnam, the Adjutant General's Corps was not a branch with a high rate of casualties. We knew he wouldn't give up; every few months he would fill out another Personnel Action Form, requesting a new assignment-and he claimed that Colonel Eiger had provided him with the name and telephone number of someone in the Pentagon, a certain major who allegedly supervised the personnel files and assignments of the junior officers. Hester and I knew better than to ever underestimate Owen's powers of manipulation. But, for the moment, we thought he was safe; and the U.S. Army, I believed, was not as easy to manipulate as a children's Christmas pageant.

"What exactly does the Adjutant General's Corps doT' I asked him cautiously. But he wouldn't discuss it.

"THIS IS JUST AN INTERIM ASSIGNMENT," said Owen Meany. Dan and I had to laugh; it was funny to think of him suffering through a Basic Administration course in Indiana when what he had imagined for himself was jumping out of a helicopter and hacking his way through a jungle with his machete and his M-. Owen was angry, but he wasn't depressed; he was irritable, but he was determined. Then one evening I was walking through the Gravesend Academy campus and I saw the tomato-red pickup parked in the circular driveway from which poor Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen Beetle had been elevated to its moment in history. The headlights of the pickup were shining across the vast lawn in front of the Main Academy Building; the lawn was full of chairs. Rows upon rows of chairs, and the benches from The Great Hall, were spread out across the lawn-I would estimate that there was seating for five hundred people. It was that time of the year when Gravesend Academy hoped it wouldn't rain; the chairs and benches were assembled for the annual commencement. If it rained-to everyone's sorrow-there was no place large enough to hold the commencement, except the gym; not even The Great Hall would hold the crowd. Commencement had been outdoors the year I graduated- the year Owen should have graduated, the year he should have been our class valedictorian. Hester was sitting by herself in the cab of the pickup; she motioned to me to get in and sit beside her.

' 'Where is he?'' I asked her. She pointed into the path of the pickup truck's headlights. Beyond the rows upon rows of chairs and benches was a makeshift stage, draped with the Gravesend Academy banner and dotted with chairs for the dignitaries and the speakers; at the center of this stage was the podium, and at the podium was Owen Meany. He was looking out over the hundreds of empty seats-he appeared to be a little blinded by the pickup truck's headlights, but he needed the light in order to see his valedictory speech, which he was reading.

"He doesn't want anyone to hear it-he just wants to say it," Hester said. When he joined Hester and me in the cab of the pickup, I

said to him: "I would have liked to hear that. Won't you read it to us?"

"IT'S OVER," said Owen Meany. "IT'S JUST SOME OLD HISTORY."

And so we departed for the north country-for Sawyer Depot, and Loveless Lake. We took the pickup; we did not take Hester. I'm not sure if she wanted to come. She had made the effort to speak to her parents; Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha were always happy to see me, and they were polite-if not exactly warm-to Owen Meany. We spent the first night of our trip in the Eastmans' house in Sawyer Depot. I slept in Noah's bed; Noah was in the Peace Corps-I believe he was teaching Forestry, or "Forest Management," to Nigerians. Uncle Alfred referred to what Noah was doing as a' 'ticket''- Africa, or the Peace Corps, was Noah's "ticket out of Vietnam," Uncle Alfred said. That summer, Simon was running the sawmill; over the years, Simon had injured his knees so often-skiing-that Simon's knees were his ticket out of Vietnam.- Simon had a -F deferment; he was judged physically unfit for service. "Unless the country is invaded by aliens," Simon said, "good old Uncle Sam won't take me!"

Owen referred to his course in Basic Administration for the Adjutant General's Corps as TEMPORARY. Arizona would also be TEMPORARY, Owen said. Uncle Alfred was very respectful of Owen's desire to go to Vietnam, but Aunt Martha-over our elegant dinner-questioned the war's "morality."

"YES, I QUESTION THAT, TOO," said Owen Meany. "BUT I FEEL ONE HAS TO SEE SOMETHING FIRSTHAND TO BE SURE. I'M CERTAINLY INCLINED TO AGREE WITH KENNEDY'S ASSESSMENT OF THE VIETNAMESE PROBLEM-WAY BACK IN NINETEEN SIXTY-THREE. YOU MAY RECALL THAT THE PRESIDENT SAID: 'WE CAN HELP THEM, WE CAN GIVE THEM EQUIPMENT, WE CAN SEND OUR MEN OUT THERE AS ADVISERS, BUT THEY HAVE TO WIN IT, THE PEOPLE OF VIETNAM.' I THINK THAT POINT IS STILL VALID-AND IT'S CLEAR TO ALL OF US THAT THE 'PEOPLE OF VIETNAM' ARE NOT WINNING THE WAR. WE APPEAR TO BE TRYING TO WIN IT FOR THEM.

"BUT LET'S SUPPOSE, FOR A MOMENT, THAT WE BELIEVE IN THE STATED OBJECTIVES OF THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION'S VIETNAM POLICY- AND THAT WE SUPPORT THIS POLICY. WE AGREE TO RESIST COMMUNIST AGGRESSION IN SOUTH VIETNAM-WHETHER IT COMES FROM THE NORTH VIETNAMESE OR THE VIET CONG. WE SUPPORT THE IDEA OF SELF-DETERMINATION FOR SOUTH VIETNAM- AND WE WANT PEACE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. IF THESE ARE OUR OBJECTIVES-IF WE AGREE THAT THIS IS WHAT WE WANT-WHY ARE WE ESCALATING THE WAR?

"THERE DOESN'T APPEAR TO BE A GOVERNMENT IN SAIGON THAT CAN DO VERY WELL WITHOUT US. DO THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE PEOPLE EVEN LIKE THE MILITARY JUNTA OF MARSHAL KY? NATURALLY, HANOI AND THE VIET CONG WILL NOT NEGOTIATE FOR A PEACEFUL SETTLEMENT IF THEY THINK THEY CAN WIN THE WAR! THERE'S EVERY REASON FOR THE UNITED STATES TO KEEP ENOUGH OF OUR GROUND FORCES IN SOUTH VIETNAM TO PERSUADE HANOI AND THE VIET CONG THAT THEY COULD NEVER ACHIEVE A MILITARY VICTORY. BUT WHAT DOES IT ACCOMPLISH FOR US TO BOMB THE NORTH?

"SUPPOSING THAT WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY-THAT WE WANT SOUTH VIETNAM TO BE FREE TO GOVERN ITSELF-WE SHOULD BE PROTECTING SOUTH VIETNAM FROM ATTACK. BUT IT APPEARS THAT WE ARE ATTACKING THE WHOLE COUNTRY- FROM THE AIR! IF WE BOMB THE WHOLE COUNTRY TO BITS-TO PROTECT IT FROM COMMUNISM- WHAT KIND OF PROTECTION IS THAT?

"I THINK THAT'S THE PROBLEM," said Owen Meany, "BUT I'D LIKE TO SEE THE SITUATION FOR MYSELF."

My Uncle Alfred was speechless. My Aunt Martha said: "Yes, I see!" Both of them were impressed. I realized that a part of the reason why Owen had wanted to come to Sawyer Depot was to give himself an opportunity to impress Hester's parents. I'd heard Owen's Vietnam thesis before; it was not very original-I think it was borrowed from something Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had written or said-but Owen's delivery was impressive. I thought it was sad that Hester made so little effort to impress Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha, and that she was so unimpressed by them.

At bedtime, I could hear Owen babbling away to Aunt Martha-she had put him in Hester's room. Owen was inquiring about the specific teddy bears and dolls and figurines.

"AND HOW OLD WAS SHE WHEN SHE LIKED THIS ONE?'' he would ask Aunt Martha. "AND I SUPPOSE THAT THIS ONE DATES BACK TO THE FIREWATER ERA," he would say. Before I went to bed, Simon said to me appreciatively: "Owen's just as weird as ever! Isn't he great!"

I fell asleep remembering how Owen had first appeared to my cousins-that day in the attic at Front Street when we were contending over the sewing machine and Owen stood in the sun from the skylight that blazed through his ears. I remembered how he had appeared to all of us: like a descending angel-a tiny but fiery god, sent to adjudicate the errors of our ways. In the morning, Owen suggested that we move on to Loveless Lake. Simon advised us to use the boathouse as a base camp. When he got off work at the sawmill, Simon said, he would come take us waterskiing; we could sleep in the boathouse at night. There were a couple of comfortable couches that unfolded to make beds, and the boathouse had new screens on the windows. There were some kerosene lamps; there was an outhouse nearby, and a hand pump drew the lake water into a sink by the bar; there was a propane-gas stove, and some kettles for boiling water-for drinking. In those days, we were allowed to bathe (with soap!) in the lake. Owen and I agreed that it was cozier than camping in our tent; also, for me it was relaxing to get away from Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha-and the effort that Owen made to impress them. At the lake, we were left alone; Simon appeared only at the end of the day to take us waterskiing-he had a steady girlfriend, so we rarely saw him at night. We cooked hamburgers on a charcoal grill on the boatslip; we caught sunfish and perch off the dock-and smallmouth bass when we went out in the canoe. At night, Owen and I sat on the dock until the mosquitoes bothered us. Then we went into the boathouse and turned on the kerosene lamps and talked for a while, or read our books. I was trying to read Parade's End; I was just beginning it. Graduate students have serious reading ambitions, but they don't finish a lot of books they start; I wouldn't finish Parade's End until I was in my forties-when I tried it again. Owen was reading a Department of the Army field manual called Survival, Evasion, and Escape.

"I'LL READ YOU SOME OF MINE IF YOU READ ME SOME OF YOURS," Owen said.

"Okay," I said.

" 'SURVIVAL IS LARGELY A MATTER OF MENTAL OUTLOOK,' " he read.

"Sounds reasonable," I said.

"BUT LISTEN TO THIS," he said. "THIS IS ABOUT HOW TO GET ALONG WITH THE NATIVES." I couldn't help but imagine that the only "natives" Owen was going to have to ge.t along with were the residents of Indiana and Arizona. " 'RESPECT PERSONAL PROPERTY, ESPECIALLY THEIR WOMEN,' " he read.

"It doesn't say that!" I said.

"LISTEN TO THIS!" he said. " 'AVOID PHYSICAL CONTACT WITHOUT SEEMING TO DO SO.' "

We both thought that was a scream-although I didn't tell him that I was laughing, in part, because I was thinking about the "natives" of Indiana and Arizona.

"WANT TO HEAR HOW TO TAKE CARE OF YOUR FEET?" Owen asked me.

"Not really, "I said.

"HOW ABOUT 'PRECAUTION AGAINST MOSQUITO BITES'?" he asked. " 'SMEAR MUD ON YOUR FACE, ESPECIALLY BEFORE GOING TO BED,' " he read. We laughed hysterically for a while.

"HERE'S A PART ABOUT FOOD AND WATER," he said. " 'DO NOT DRINK URINE.' "

"This sounds like a field manual for children]" I said.

"THAT'S WHO MOST OF THE PEOPLE IN THE ARMY ARE," said Owen Meany.

"What a world!" I said.

"HERE'S SOME GOOD ADVICE ABOUT ESCAPING FROM A MOVING TRAIN," Owen said. " 'BEFORE JUMPING, MAKE SURE YOUR EXIT WILL BE MADE FROM THE APPROPRIATE SIDE, OR YOU MAY JUMP INTO THE PATH OF AN ONCOMING TRAIN.' "

"No shit!" I cried.

"LISTEN TO THIS," he said. " 'STRYCHNINE PLANTS GROW WILD THROUGHOUT THE TROPICS. THE LUSCIOUS-LOOKING WHITE OR YELLOW FRUIT IS ABUNDANT IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. THE FRUIT HAS AN

EXCEEDINGLY BITTER PULP, AND THE SEEDS CONTAIN A POWERFUL POISON.' "

I restrained myself from saying that I doubted any strychnine grew in Indiana or Arizona.

"HERE'S ANOTHER ENTRY IN THE 'NO KIDDING!' CATEGORY," Owen said. "THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT 'EVASION TECHNIQUES WHEN THERE IS LITTLE DISTINCTION BETWEEN FRIENDLY AND HOSTILE TERRITORY'-GET THIS: TT IS DIFFICULT TO DISTINGUISH THE INSURGENT FROM THE FRIENDLY POPULACE.' "

I couldn't help myself; I said: "I hope you don't run into that problem in Indiana or Arizona."

"LET'S HEAR SOMETHING FROM YOUR BOOK," he said, closing his field manual. I tried to explain about Mrs. Satterthwaite's daughter-that she was a woman who'd left her husband and child to run off with another man, and now she wanted her husband to take her back, although she hated him and intended to make him miserable. A friend of the family-a priest-is confiding to Mrs. Satterthwaite his opinion of how her daughter will, one day, respond to an infidelity of her husband's, which the priest believes is only to be expected. The priest believes that the daughter will "tear the house down"; that "the world will echo with her wrongs."

Here is the scene I read to Owen Meany:

" 'Do you mean to say,' Mrs. Satterthwaite said, 'that Sylvia would do anything vulgar?'

" 'Doesn't every woman who's had a man to torture for years when she loses him?' the priest asked. 'The more she's made an occupation of torturing him the less right she thinks she has to lose him.' "

"WHAT A WORLD!" said Owen Meany. There were more motorboats than loons on Loveless Lake; even at night, we heard more noise from engines than we heard from wildlife. We decided to drive north, through Dixville Notch, to Lake Francis; that was "real wilderness," Simon had told us. Indeed, the camping on Lake Francis, which is one of New Hampshire's northernmost lakes, was spectacular; but Owen Meany and I were not campers. On Lake Francis, the cries of the loons were so mournful that they frightened us; and the utter blackness of that empty lakeshore at night was terrifying. There was so much noise at night-insect, bird, and animal hoopla-that we couldn't sleep. One morning, we saw a moose.

"LET'S GO HOME, BEFORE WE SEE A BEAR," said Owen Meany. "BESIDES," he said, "I SHOULD SPEND A LITTLE TIME WITH HESTER."

But when we left Lake Francis, he turned the pickup north-toward Quebec.

"WE'RE VERY CLOSE TO CANADA," he said. "I WANT TO SEE IT."

At that particular border, there's little to see-just forests, for miles, and a thin road so beaten by the winter that it is bruised to the color of pencil lead and pockmarked with frost heaves. The border outpost-the customs house-was a cabin; the gate across the road was as flimsy and innocent-looking as the gate guarding a railroad crossing-in fact, it was raised. The Canadian customs officers at the border didn't pay any attention to us-although we parked the pickup truck about a hundred yards from the border, facing back toward the United States; then we lowered the tailgate of the truck and sat on it for a while, facing Canada. We sat there for half an hour before one of the Canadian customs officers walked a short distance in our direction and stood there, staring back at us. No traffic passed us in either direction, and the dark fir trees that towered on either side of the border indicated no special respect for national boundaries.

"I'M SURE IT'S A NICE COUNTRY TO LIVE IN," said Owen Meany, and we drove home to Gravesend. We had a modest going-away party for him at Front Street; Hester and Grandmother were a trifle teary, but the overall tone of our celebration was jolly. Dan Needham-our historian-delivered a lengthy and unresolved meditation on whether Fort Benjamin Harrison was named after William Henry Harrison's father or grandson; Dan offered a similarly unresolved speculation on the origins of "Hoosier," which we all knew was a nickname for a native of Indiana-but no one knew what else, if anything, a "Hoosier" was. Then we made Owen Meany stand in the dark inside the secret passageway, while Mr. Fish recited, too loudly, the passage that Owen had always admired from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

" 'Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once,' " Mr. Fish intoned.

"I KNOW! I KNOW! OPEN THE DOOR!" cried Owen Meany.

" 'Of all the wonders that I have yet heard,' " said Mr. Fish, " 'it seems to me the most strange that men should fear; seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.' "

"OKAY! OKAY! I'M NOT AFRAID-BUT THERE ARE COBWEBS IN HERE! OPEN THE DOOR!" Owen cried. Perhaps the darkness inspired him to insist that Hester and I follow him up to the attic. He wanted us to stand in the closet of Grandfather's clothes with him; but this time we were not playing game-we had no flashlight- and we were not in danger of having Hester grab our doinks. Owen just wanted us all to stand there for a moment, in the dark.

"Why are we doing this?" Hester asked.

"SSSHHH! FORM A CIRCLE, HOLD HANDS!" he commanded. We did as we were told; Hester's hand was much bigger than Owen's.

"Now what?" Hester asked.

"SSSHHH!" Owen said. We breathed in the mothballs; the old clothes stirred against themselves-the mechanisms of the old umbrellas were so rusty that the umbrellas, I was sure, could never be opened again; and the brims of the old hats were so dry that they would crack if anyone attempted to give shape to them. "DON'T BE AFRAID," said Owen Meany. That was all he had to say to us before he left for Indiana. Several weeks went by before Hester and I heard from him; I guess they kept him pretty busy at Fort Benjamin Harrison. I would see Hester sometimes at night, along "the strip" at Hampton Beach; usually, some guy was with her-rarely the same guy, and never anyone she bothered to introduce me to.

"Have you heard anything from him?" I would ask her.

"Nothing yet," she'd say. "Have you?"

When we heard from him, we heard together; his first letters weren't very special-he sounded more bored than overwhelmed. Hester and I probably put more effort into talking about those first letters than Owen had put into writing them. There was a major who'd taken a liking to him; Owen said that his writing and editorial work for The Grave had provided him with a better background for what the Army seemed to want of him than anything he'd learned in ROTC, or in Basic Training. Hester and I agreed that Owen sounded despondent. He said simply: "A GREAT DEAL HAS TO BE WRITTEN EVERYDAY."

The second month he'd been away, or thereabouts, his letters were perkier. He was more optimistic about his orders; he'd heard some good things about Fort Huachuca, Arizona. All the talk at Fort Benjamin Harrison told him that Fort Huachuca was a fortunate place to be; he'd be working in the Adjutant's Office of the Strategic Communications Command- he'd been told that the major general who was in charge was "flexible" on the subject of reassignments; the major general had been known to assist his junior officers with their requests for transfers. When I started graduate school in the fall of ', was still looking for an apartment in Durham-or even in Newmarket, between Durham and Gravesend. I was looking halfheartedly, but-at twenty-four-I knew I had to admit to myself that what Owen had told me was true: that I was too old to be living with my stepfather or my grandmother.

"Why don't you move in with me?" Hester said. "You'd have your own bedroom," she added-unnecessarily. When her two previous roommates had graduated, Hester had replaced only one of them; after all, Owen was there much of the time-Hester having only one roommate made it less awkward for Owen. When the one roommate had left to get married, Hester hadn't replaced her. My first anxiety about sharing an apartment with Hester was that Owen might disapprove.

"It was Owen's idea," Hester told me. "Didn't he write you about it?"

That letter came along, after he'd settled into Fort Huachuca.

"IF HESTER STILL DOESN'T HAVE A ROOMMATE, WHY DON'T YOU MOVE IN WITH HER?" he wrote. "THAT WAY, I COULD CALL YOU BOTH-COLLECT!-AT THE SAME NUMBER.

"YOU SHOULD SEE FORT HUACHUCA! SEVENTY-THREE THOUSAND ACRES! PRAIRIE GRASSLAND, ELEVATION ABOUT FIVE THOUSAND FEET- EVERYTHING IS YELLOW AND TAN, EXCEPT THE MOUNTAINS IN THE DISTANCE ARE BLUE AND PURPLE AND EVEN PINK. THERE'S A FISHING LAKE JUST BEHIND THE OFFICERS' CLUB! THERE ARE ALMOST TWENTY THOUSAND PERSONNEL HERE, BUT THE

FORT IS SO SPREAD OUT, YOU'D NEVER KNOW THEY WERE HERE-IT'S SIX MILES FROM THE WEST ENTRANCE OF THE FORT TO THE AIRFIELD, AND ANOTHER MILE TO THE HEADQUARTERS BARRACKS, AND YOU CAN GO EAST ANOTHER SIX MILES FROM THERE. I'M GOING TO START PLAYING TENNIS-I CAN TAKE FLYING LESSONS, IF I WANT TO! AND MEXICO IS ONLY TWENTY MILES AWAY! THE PRAIRIE IS NOT LIKE THE DESERT-BUT THERE ARE JOSHUA TREES AND PRICKLY PEAR, AND THERE ARE WILD PIGS CALLED JAVELIN A, AND COYOTE. YOU KNOW WHAT COYOTES LIKE TO EAT BEST! HOUSE CATS!

"FORT HUACHUCA HAS THE LARGEST HORSE POPULATION OF ANY ARMY POST. THE HORSES AND THE TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY ARCHITECTURE OF THE OLD HOUSES, AND THE WOODEN BARRACKS, AND THE PARADE GROUNDS-WHICH ARE LEFT OVER FROM THE INDIAN WARS-MAKE EVERYTHING FEEL LIKE THE PAST. AND ALTHOUGH EVERYTHING IS HUGE, IT IS ALSO ISOLATED; THAT FEELS LIKE THE PAST, TOO.

"WHEN IT RAINS, YOU CAN SMELL THE CREOSOTE BUSHES. MOSTLY, IT'S SUNNY AND WARM-NOT TERRIBLY HOT; THE AIR IS DRIER THAN ANY PLACE I'VE EVER BEEN. BUT-DON'T WORRY-THERE ARE NO PALM TREES!"

And so I moved in with Hester. I quickly realized that I had done her a disservice-to think of her as slovenly. It was only herself she treated carelessly; she kept the shared rooms of the apartment fairly neat, and she even picked up my clothes and books-when I left them in the kitchen or in the living room. Even the roaches in the kitchen were not there out of any dirtiness that could t"e ascribed to Hester; and although she appeared to know a lot of guys, not one of them ever returned to the apartment and spent the night with her. She often came home quite late, but she always came home. I did not ask her if she was being "faithful" to Owen Meany; I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt-and besides: who could even guess what Owen was doing? From his letters, we gathered he was doing a lot of typing; he was playing tennis, which Hester and I found unlikely-and he had actually taken a couple of flying lessons, which we found unbelievable. He complained that his room in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters-a dormitory-type room, with a private bath-was stifling. But he complained, for a while, of almost nothing else. He confessed he was "BUTTERING UP THE COMMANDER"-& certain Major General LaHoad. "WE CALL HIM LATOAD," Owen wrote, "BUT HE'S A GOOD GUY. I COULD DO A LOT WORSE THAN END UP AS HIS AIDE-DE-CAMP-THAT'S THE ANGLE I'M SHOOTING. FORGIVE THE EXPRESSION-I'VE BEEN SHOOTING SOME POOL IN THE COMPANY DAY ROOM.

"TYPICAL ARMY: WHEN I ARRIVE AND REPORT TO THE STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS COMMAND, THEY TELL ME THERE'S BEEN A MISTAKE-THEY WANT ME IN THE PERSONNEL SECTION, INSTEAD. THEY CALL IT 'PERSONNEL AND COMMUNITY ACTION' AT THE POST. I SIGN DISCHARGE PAPERS, I ATTEND THE OCS AND WARRANT OFFICER BOARDS-HAVE BEEN 'RECORDER' FOR THE LATTER. SCARIEST THING I DO IS PLAY NIGHT WATCHMAN: I CARRY A FLASHLIGHT AND A MILITARY-POLICE RADIO. IT TAKES TWO HOURS TO CHECK ALL THE LOCKS YOU THINK MIGHT BE JIMMIED AROUND THE FORT: THE SHOPS AND THE CLUBS AND THE STORAGE SHEDS, THE MOTOR POOL AND THE COMMISSARY AND THE AMMO DUMP. MEANWHILE, I KNOW THE EMERGENCY PROCEDURES IN THE STAFF DUTY OFFICER'S NOTEBOOK BY HEART-'UPON WARNING OF A NUCLEAR ATTACK YOU SHOULD NOTIFY . . . ' AND SO FORTH.

"IDEALLY, MAJOR GENERAL LAHOAD WILL CHOOSE ME TO BE THE BARTENDER AT HIS PARTIES-AT THE LAST PARTY, I BROUGHT DRINKS TO HIS FLUFF OF A WIFE ALL NIGHT; STILL COULDN'T FILL HER UP, BUT SHE LIKED THE ATTENTION. SHE THINKS I'M 'CUTE'-YOU KNOW THE TYPE. I FIGURE IF I COULD BE LATOAD'S AIDE-DE-CAMP-IF I COULD SWING IT-THE MAJOR GENERAL WOULD LOOK KINDLY UPON MY REQUEST FOR TRANSFER. THINK WHAT A BLOW IT WOULD BE TO THE PERSONNEL SECTION-HOW THEY WOULD MISS ME! TODAY I SIGNED A CHAPLAIN OUT ON LEAVE, AND I HELPED A HYSTERICAL MOTHER LOCATE HER SON IN

THE SIGNAL GROUP-APPARENTLY, THE BAD BOY HADN'T WRITTEN HOME.

"SPEAKING OF HOME, I'M TAKING TEN DAYS' LEAVE FOR CHRISTMAS!"

And so Hester and I waited to see him. That October, President Johnson visited the U.S. troops in Vietnam; but we heard no further word from Owen Meany-concerning what progress or success he had encountered with his efforts to be reassigned. All Owen said was: "MAJOR GENERAL LA-HOAD IS THE KEY. I SCRATCH HIS BACK . . . YOU KNOW THE REST."

It was December before he mentioned that he'd sent another Personnel Action Form to Washington, asking for transfer to Vietnam; those forms, as many times as he would submit them, were routed through his chain of command-including Major General LaHoad. By December, the major general had Owen working as a casualty assistance officer in the Personnel Section. Apparently, Owen had made a favorable impression upon some grieving Arizona family who had connections at the Pentagon; through the chain of command, the major general had received a special letter of commendation-the Casualty Branch at the post had reason to be proud: a Second Lieutenant Paul O. Meany, Jr., had been of great comfort to the parents of a LT infantry type who'd been killed in Vietnam. Owen had been especially moving when he'd read the award citation for the Silver Star medal to the next of kin. Major General LaHoad had congratulated Owen personally. At Fort Huachuca, the Casualty Branch was composed of Second Lieutenant Paul O. Meany, Jr., and a staff sergeant in his thirties-"A DISGRUNTLED CAREER MAN," according to Owen; but the staff sergeant had an Italian wife whose homemade pasta was "SUCH AN IMPROVEMENT ON HESTER'S THAT IT MAKES THE STAFF SERGEANT OCCASIONALLY WORTH LISTENING TO." In the Casualty Branch, the second lieutenant and the staff sergeant were assisted by "A TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD SPECS AND A TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD SPEC."

"He might as well be talking about insects-for all I know!" Hester said. "What the fuck is a 'Spec Four' and a 'Spec Five'-and how does he expect us to know what he's talking about?"

I wrote back to him. "What exactly does a casualty assistance officer do!" I asked. On the walls of the Casualty Branch Office at Fort Hua-huca, Owen said there were maps of Arizona and Vietnam- and a roster of Arizona men who were prisoners of war or missing in action, along with the names of their next of kin. When the body of an Arizona man arrived from Vietnam, you went to California to escort the body home-the body, Owen explained, had to be escorted by a man of the same rank or higher; thus a private's body might be brought home by a sergeant, and a second lieutenant would escort the body of another second lieutenant or (let's say) of a warrant officer.

"Hester!" I said. "He's delivering bodies*. He's the one who brings the casualties home!"

"That's his line of work, all right," Hester said. "At least he's familiar with the territory."

My "line of work," it seemed to me, was reading; my ambitions extended no further than to my choice of reading material. I loved being a graduate student; I loved my first teaching job, too-yet I felt I was so undaring. The very thought of bringing bodies home to their next of kin gave me the shivers. In his diary, he wrote: "THE OFFICE FOR THE CASUALTY BRANCH IS IN THE PART OF THE POST THAT WAS BUILT JUST AFTER BLACK JACK PERSHING'S EXPEDITION AGAINST PANCHO VILLA-OUR BUILDING IS OLD AND STUCCOED AND THE MINT-GREEN PAINT ON THE CEILING IS PEELING. WE HAVE A WALL POSTER DEPICTING ALL THE MEDALS THE ARMY OFFERS. WITH A GREASE PENCIL, ON TWO PLASTIC-COVERED CHARTS, WE WRITE THE NAMES OF THE WEEK'S CASUALTIES, ALONGSIDE THE ARIZONA PRISONERS OF WAR. WHAT THE ARMY CALLS ME IS A 'CASUALTY ASSISTANCE OFFICER'; WHAT I AM IS A BODY ESCORT."

"Jesus! Tell me all about it!" I said-when he was home on leave for Christmas.

"SO HOW DO YOU LIKE BEING A GRADUATE STUDENT?" he asked me. "SO WHAT'S HE LIKE FOR A ROOMMATE?" he asked Hester. He was tan and fit-looking; maybe it was all the tennis. His uniform had only one medal on it.

"THEY GIVE IT TO EVERYONE!" said Owen Meany. On his left sleeve was a patch indicating his post, and on each shoulder epaulet was a brass bar signifying that he was a

second lieutenant; on each collar was the brass U.S. insignia and the red-and-blue-striped silver shield of his branch: the Adjutant General's Corps. The MEANY name tag was the only other hardware on his uniform-there were no marksmanship badges, or anything else.

"NO OVERSEAS PATCH-I'M NOT MUCH TO LOOK AT," he said shyly; Hester and I couldn't take our eyes off him.

"Are they really in plastic bags-the bodies?" Hester asked him.

"Do you have to check the contents of the bags?" I asked him.

"Are there sometimes just parts of a head and loose fingers and toes?" Hester asked him.

"I suppose this might change how you feel-about going over there?" I said to him.

"Do the parents freak!" Hester asked. "And the wives-do you have to talk to the wives?"

He looked so awfully composed-he made us feel as if we'd never left school; of course, we hadn't.

"IT'S A WAY TO GO TO CALIFORNIA," Owen said evenly. "I FLY TO TUCSON. I FLY TO OAKLAND-IT'S THE ARMY BASE IN OAKLAND WHERE YOU GET YOUR BODY INSTRUCTIONS."

"What are 'body instructions,' for Christ's sake?" Hester said; but Owen ignored her.

"SOMETIMES I FLY BACK FROM SAN FRANCISCO," he said. "EITHER WAY, I GO CHECK THE CONTAINER IN THE BAGGAGE AREA-ABOUT TWO HOURS BEFORE WE TAKE OFF."

"You check the plastic bag?" I asked him.

"IT'S A PLYWOOD CONTAINER," he said. "THERE'S NO BAG. THE BODY IS EMBALMED. IT'S IN A CASKET. IN CALIFORNIA, I JUST CHECK THE PLYWOOD CONTAINER."

"For what?" I said.

"FOR LEAKS," he said. Hester looked as if she might throw up. "AND THERE'S INFORMATION STAPLED TO THE CONTAINER-I JUST MATCH THAT UP WITH THE K.I.A. SHEET."

" 'K.I.A.'-what's that?" I said.

"KILLED IN ACTION," he said.

"Yes, of course," I said.

"BACK IN ARIZONA, IN THE FUNERAL HOME- THAT'S WHEN I CHECK THE BODY," he said.

"I don't want to hear any more," Hester said.

"OKAY," he said; he shrugged. When we got away from Hester-we went to the Gravesend Academy gym to practice the shot, of course-I kept asking him about the bodies.

"USUALLY, YOU DISCUSS WITH THE MORTICIAN WHETHER OR NOT THE BODY IS SUITABLE FOR VIEWING-WHETHER OR NOT THE FAMILY SHOULD SEE IT," he said. "SOMETIMES THE FAMILY WANTS TO BE CLOSE TO YOU-THEY FEEL YOU'RE ONE OF THEM. OTHER TIMES, YOU GET THE FEELING YOU SHOULD KEEP OUT OF THEIR WAY-YOU HAVE TO PLAY THIS PART BY EAR. AND THEN THERE'S THE FOLDING OF THE FLAG-YOU GIVE THE FLAG TO THE MOTHER, USUALLY; OR TO THE WIFE, IF THERE'S A WIFE. THAT'S WHEN YOU GIVE YOUR LITTLE SPEECH."

"What do you say?" I asked him. He was dribbling the basketball, his head nodding almost imperceptibly to the rhythm of the ball bouncing on the floor, his eyes always on the rim of the basket. " 'IT IS MY PRIVILEGE TO PRESENT TO YOU OUR COUNTRY'S FLAG IN GRATEFUL APPRECIATION FOR THE SERVICE RENDERED TO THIS NATION BY YOUR SON'- NATURALLY, YOU SAY 'BY YOUR HUSBAND,' IF YOU'RE GIVING THE FLAG TO A WIFE," he added.

"Naturally," I said; he passed me the ball.

"READY?" he said. He was already moving toward me-already timing his leap and, in his mind's eye, seeing the shot fall-when I passed the ball back to him. Those were brief days and nights; we tried to remember which government spokesman had said that Operation Rolling Thunder was "closing in on Hanoi." That was what had prompted Owen to say: "I THINK HANOI CAN HANDLE IT."

According to the State Department-according to Dean Rusk-we were "winning a war of attrition." That was what prompted Owen to say: "THAT'S NOT THE KIND OF WAR WE WIN."

He had revised a few of his earlier views of our Vietnam policy. Some veterans of the war, whom he'd met at Fort

Huachuca, had convinced him that Marshal Ky had once been popular, but now the Viet Cong was gaining the support of South Vietnamese peasants-because our troops had pulled out of the populated areas and were wasting their time chasing the North Vietnamese through the jungles and the mountains. Owen wanted to learn why our troops didn't pull back into the populated areas and wait for the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong to come to them. If we were "protecting" South Vietnam, why didn't we stay with the people and protect them? On the other hand, it was confusing because many of the Vietnam veterans Owen had met were of the opinion that we should be fighting more "all-out," that we should bomb North Vietnam even more, mine the harbors, and make an amphibious landing north of the DMZ to cut the supply lines for the North Vietnamese Army-in short, fight to win. There was no way to really know what we should do if one didn't go over there and see it, Owen said, but he believed that trying to win a conventional war against North Vietnam was stupid. We should stay in South Vietnam and protect the South Vietnamese from North Vietnamese aggression, and from the Viet Cong- until such time as the South Vietnamese developed an army and, more important, a government that was strong and popular enough to make South Vietnam capable of protecting itself.

"Then the South Vietnamese will be able to attack North Vietnam all by themselves-is that what you mean?" Hester asked him. "You make about as much sense as LBJ," she said. Hester wouldn't say "President Johnson."

As for President Johnson, Owen said: "THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A WORSE PRESIDENT-THERE COULDN'T BE A WORSE ONE, UNLESS THEY ELECT MCNAMARA."

Hester talked about the "Peace Movement."

"WHAT 'PEACE MOVEMENT'?-OR DO YOU MEAN THE DON'T-GET-DRAFTED MOVEMENT? THAT'S THE ONLY 'MOVEMENT' I SEE," said Owen Meany. We talked like the war itself, going nowhere. I moved out of the apartment, so that he could have some nights alone with Hester-I don't know if either of them appreciated it. I spent a few pleasant evenings with Dan and Grandmother. I had convinced Grandmother to take the train, with me, to Sawyer Depot for Christmas; Grandmother had decided, previously, that she no longer took trains. It was arranged that Dan would take the Christmas Eve train from Gravesend, following the closing performance of A Christmas Carol. And Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred had prevailed upon Hester to bring Owen to Sawyer Depot for Christmas-that was how significantly Owen had managed to impress them. Hester kept threatening to back out of these lavish reunion plans; I believe it was only for Owen's sake that she was agreeing to go home at all-especially for Christmas. Then all these plans fell through. No one had noticed how severely the train service had been deteriorating; it turned out that it wasn't possible to take a train from Gravesend to Sawyer Depot-and on Christmas Eve, the stationmaster told Dan, it was impossible to take a train anywhere] And so we once more reverted to our isolated Christmases. On the day of Christmas Eve, Owen and I were practicing the shot in the Gravesend Academy gym and he told me he was simply spending a quiet Christmas with his parents; I was spending the day with Grandmother and Dan. Hester, according to Owen, had-on the spur of the moment-accepted an invitation to SOMEWHERE SUNNY.

"YOU OUGHT TO THINK ABOUT JOINING THE 'PEACE MOVEMENT,' OLD BOY," he told me. I guess he had picked up the OLD BOY at Fort Huachuca. "AS I UNDERSTAND IT, IT'S A GOOD WAY TO GET LAID. YOU JUST MAKE YOURSELF LOOK A LITTLE DISTRACTED-LOOKING ANGRY ALSO HELPS-AND YOU KEEP SAYING YOU'RE 'AGAINST THE WAR.' OF COURSE, I DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW ANYONE WHO'S FOR IT-BUT JUST KEEP SAYING YOU'RE 'AGAINST THE WAR,' AND LOOK AS IF THE WHOLE THING CAUSES YOU A LOT OF PERSONAL ANGUISH. NEXT THING YOU KNOW, YOU'LL GET LAID-YOU CAN COUNT ON IT!"

We just kept sinking the shot; it still takes my breath away to remember how good we were at it. I mean-zip!-he would pass me the ball. "READY?" he would ask, and-zip!-I would pass it back to him and get ready to lift him. It was automatic; almost as soon as I passed him the ball, he was there-in my arms, and soaring. He didn't bother to yell "TIME"-not anymore. We didn't bother to time ourselves; we were consistently under three seconds-we had no doubt about that-and sometimes I think we were faster.

"How many bodies a week are there?" I asked him.

"IN ARIZONA? I WOULD GUESS THAT WE AVERAGE TWO-AT THE MOST, THREE-CASUALTIES A WEEK. SOME WEEKS THERE AREN'T ANY, OR ONLY ONE. AND I WOULD ESTIMATE THAT ONLY HALF OF OUR CASUALTIES HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH VIETNAM-THERE ARE A LOT OF CAR ACCIDENTS, YOU KNOW, AND SOME SUICIDES."

"What percentage of the bodies is not-how did you put it?-'suitable for viewing'?" I asked him.

"FORGET ABOUT THE BODIES," Owen said. "THEY'RE NOT YOUR PROBLEM-YOUR PROBLEM IS YOU'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WHEN YOU LOSE YOUR STUDENT DEFERMENT? DO YOU HAVE A PLAN? DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO DO-PROVIDED THERE'S A WAY TO DO IT? I DON'T SEE YOU BEING HAPPY IN THE ARMY. I KNOW YOU DON'T WANT TO GO TO VIETNAM. BUT I DON'T SEE YOU IN THE PEACE CORPS, EITHER. ARE YOU PREPARED TO GO TO CANADA? YOU DON'T LOOK PREPARED-NOT TO ME. YOU DON'T EVEN LOOK LIKE MUCH OF A PROTESTER. YOU'RE PROBABLY THE ONE PERSON I KNOW WHO COULD JOIN WHAT HESTER CALLS THE 'PEACE MOVEMENT' AND MANAGE NOT TO GET LAID. I DON'T SEE YOU HANGING OUT WITH THOSE ASSHOLES-I DON'T SEE YOU HANGING OUT WITH ANYBODY. WHAT I'M TELLING YOU IS, IF YOU WANT TO DO THINGS YOUR OWN WAY, YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO MAKE A DECISION-YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO FIND A LITTLE COURAGE."

"I want to go on being a student," I told him. "I want to be a teacher. I'm just a reader," I said.

"DON'T SOUND SO ASHAMED," he said. "READING IS A GIFT."

"I learned it from you," I told him.

"IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT-IT'S A GIFT. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO PROTECT IT-IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE YOU LOVE, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT."

"What do / need courage for?" I asked him.

"YOU WILL NEED IT," he told me. "WHEN YOU'RE NOTIFIED TO REPORT FOR YOUR PREINDUCTION PHYSICAL, YOU'RE GOING TO NEED SOME COURAGE THEN. AFTER YOUR PHYSICAL-WHEN THEY PRONOUNCE YOU 'FULLY ACCEPTABLE FOR INDUCTION'-IT WILL BE A LITTLE LATE TO MAKE A DECISION THEN. ONCE THEY CLASSIFY YOU ONE-A, A LOT OF GOOD A LITTLE COURAGE WILL DO YOU. BETTER THINK ABOUT IT, OLD BOY," said Owen Meany. He reported back to Fort Huachuca before New Year's Eve; Hester stayed away, wherever she was, and I spent New Year's Eve alone-Grandmother said she was too old to stay up to welcome in the New Year. I didn't drink too much, but I drank a little. Hester's damage to the rose garden was surely of the stature of a tradition; her absence, and Owen's, seemed ominous to me. There were more than , Americans in Vietnam, and almost , Americans had been killed there; it seemed only proper to drink something for them. When Hester returned from SOMEWHERE SUNNY, I refrained from commenting on her lack of a tan. There were more protests, more demonstrations; she didn't ask me to accompany her when she went off to them.Yet no one was allowed to spend the night with her in our apartment; when we talked about Owen, we talked about how much we loved him.

"Between how much you love him and whatever it is that you think of me, I sometimes wonder if you'll ever get laid," Hester told me.

"I could always join the 'Peace Movement,' " I told her. "You know, I could simply make myself look a little distracted-looking angry also helps-and I could keep saying I am 'against the war.' Personal anguish-that's the key! I could convey a lot of personal anguish in regard to my anger 'against the war'-next thing you know, I'll get laid!" Hester didn't even crack a smile.

"I've heard that one," she said. I wrote Owen that I had selected Thomas Hardy as the subject for my Master's thesis; I doubt he was surprised. I also told him that I had given much thought to his advice to me: that I should gather the courage to make a decision about what to do when faced with the loss of my draft deferment. I was trying to determine what sort of decision I might make-I couldn't imagine a very satisfying solution; and I was puzzled about what sort of COURAGE he'd imagined would be required of

me. Short of my deciding to go to Vietnam, the other available decisions didn't strike me as requiring a great deal in the way of courage.

"You're always telling me I don't have any faith," I wrote to Owen. "Well-don't you see?-that's a part of what makes me so indecisive. I wait to see what will happen next-because I don't believe that anything I might decide to do would matter. You know Hardy's poem "Hap"-I know you do. You remember . . . 'How arrives it joy lies slain,/And why un-blooms the best hope ever sown?/-Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,/And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . . /These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown/ Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.' I know you know what that means: you believe in God but I believe in 'Crass Casualty'-in chance, in luck. That's what I mean. You see? What good does it do to make whatever decision you're talking about? What good does courage do-when what happens next is up for grabs?'' Owen Meany wrote to me: "DON'T BE SO CYNICAL- NOT EVERYTHING IS 'UP FOR GRABS.' YOU THINK THAT ANYTHING YOU DECIDE TO DO DOESN'T MATTER? LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE BODIES. SAY YOU'RE LUCKY-SAY YOU NEVER GO TO VIETNAM, SAY YOU NEVER HAVE A WORSE JOB THAN MY JOB. YOU HAVE TO TELL THEM HOW TO LOAD THE BODY ON THE AIRPLANE, AND HOW TO UNLOAD IT_YOU HAVE TO BE SURE THEY KEEP THE HEAD HELD HIGHER THAN THE FEET. IT'S PRETTY AWFUL IF ANY FLUID ESCAPES THROUGH THE ORIFICES-PROVIDED THERE ARE ANY ORIFICES.

"THEN THERE'S THE LOCAL MORTICIAN. PROBABLY HE NEVER KNEW THE DECEASED. EVEN SUPPOSING THAT THERE'S A WHOLE BODY-EVEN SUPPOSING THAT THE BODY ISN'T BURNED, AND THAT IT HAS A WHOLE NOSE, AND SO FORTH- NEITHER OF YOU KNOWS WHAT THE BODY USED TO LOOK LIKE. THE MORTUARY SECTIONS BACK AT THE COMMAND POSTS IN VIETNAM ARE NOT KNOWN FOR THEIR ATTENTION TO VERISIMILITUDE. IS THAT FAMILY GOING TO BELIEVE IT'S EVEN HIM! BUT IF YOU TELL THE FAMILY THAT THE BODY ISN'T 'SUITABLE FOR VIEWING,' HOW MUCH WORSE IS IT GOING TO BE FOR THEM?-JUST IMAGINING WHAT A HOR- RIBLE THING IS UNDER THE LID OF THAT CASKET. SO IF YOU SAY, 'NO, YOU SHOULDN'T VIEW THE BODY,' YOU FEEL YOU SHOULD ALSO SAY, 'LISTEN, IT ISN'T REALLY THAT BAD.' AND IF YOU LET THEM LOOK, YOU DON'T WANT TO BE THERE. SO IT'S A TOUGH DECISION. YOU'VE GOT A TOUGH DECISION, TOO- BUT IT'S NOT THAT TOUGH, AND YOU BETTER MAKE IT SOON."

In the spring of , when I received the notice from the local Gravesend draft board to report for my preinduction physical, I still wasn't sure what Owen Meany meant. "You better call him," Hester said to me; we kept reading the notice, over and over. "You better find out what he means-in a hurry," she said.

"DON'T BE AFRAID," he told me. "DON'T REPORT FOR YOUR PHYSICAL-DON'T DO ANYTHING," he said. "YOU'VE GOT A LITTLE TIME. I'M TAKING A LEAVE. I'LL BE THERE AS SOON AS I CAN MAKE IT. ALL YOU'VE GOT TO KNOW IS WHAT YOU WANT. DO YOU WANT TO GO TO VIETNAM?"

"No," I said.

"DO YOU WANT TO SPEND THE REST OF YOUR LIFE IN CANADA-THINKING ABOUT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY DID TO YOU?" he asked me.

"Now that you put it that way-no," I told him.

"FINE. I'LL BE RIGHT THERE-DON'T BE AFRAID. THIS TAKES JUST A LITTLE COURAGE," said Owen Meany.

'''What takes 'just a little courage'?" Hester asked me. It was a Sunday in May when he called me from the monument shop; U.S. planes had just bombed a power plant in Hanoi, and Hester had only recently returned from a huge antiwar protest rally in New York.

"What are you doing at the monument shop?" I asked him; he said he'd been helping his father, who had fallen behind on a few crucial orders. Why didn't I meet him there?

"Why don't we meet somewhere nicer-for a beer?" I asked him.

"I'VE GOT PLENTY OF BEER HERE," he said. It was odd to meet him in the monument shop on a Sunday. He was alone in that terrible place. He wore a surprisingly clean apron-and the safety goggles, loosely, around his neck. There was an unfamiliar smell in the shop-he had already

opened a beer for me, and he was drinking one himself; maybe the beer was the unfamiliar smell.

"DON'T BE AFRAID," Owen said.

"I'm not really afraid," I said. "I just don't know what to do."

"I KNOW, I KNOW," he said; he put his hand on my shoulder. Something was different about the diamond wheel.

"Is that a new saw?" I asked him.

"JUST THE BLADE IS NEW," he said. "JUST THE DIAMOND WHEEL ITSELF."

I had never seen it gleam so; the diamond segments truly sparkled.

"IT'S NOT JUST NEW-I BOILED IT," he said. "AND THEN I WIPED IT WITH ALCOHOL." That was the unfamiliar smell! I thought-alcohol. The block of wood on the saw table looked new-the cutting block, we called it; it didn't have a nick in it. "I SOAKED THE WOOD IN ALCOHOL AFTER I BOILED IT, TOO," Owen said. I've always been pretty slow; I'm the perfect reader! It wasn't until I caught the whiff of a hospital in the monument shop that I realized what he meant by JUST A LITTLE COURAGE. Behind the diamond wheel was a workbench for the lettering and edging tools; it was upon this bench that Owen had laid out the sterile bandages, and the makings for a tourniquet.

"NATURALLY, THIS IS YOUR DECISION," he told me.

"Naturally," I said.

"THE ARMY REGULATION IN QUESTION STATES THAT A PERSON WOULD NOT BE PHYSICALLY QUALIFIED TO SERVE IN THE CASE OF THE ABSENCE OF THE FIRST JOINT OF EITHER THUMB, OR THE ABSENCE OF THE FIRST TWO JOINTS ON EITHER THE INDEX, MIDDLE, OR RING FINGER. I KNOW TWO JOINTS WILL BE TOUGH," said Owen Meany, "BUT YOU DON'T WANT TO BE WITHOUT A THUMB."

"No, I don't," I said.

"YOU UNDERSTAND THAT THE MIDDLE OR RING FINGER IS A LITTLE HARDER FOR ME: I SHOULD SAY IT'S HARDER FOR THE DIAMOND WHEEL TO BE AS PRECISE AS I WOULD LIKE TO BE-IN THE CASE OF EITHER A MIDDLE OR A RING FINGER. I WANT TO PROMISE YOU THERE'LL BE NO MISTAKE. THAT'S AN EASIER PROMISE FOR ME TO MAKE IF IT'S AN INDEX FINGER," he said.

"I understand you," I said.

"THE ARMY REGULATION DOESN'T STATE THAT BEING RIGHT-HANDED OR LEFT-HANDED MATTERS -BUT YOU'RE RIGHT-HANDED, AREN'T YOU?" he asked me.

"Yes," I said.

"THEN I THINK IT OUGHT TO BE THE RIGHT INDEX FINGER-JUST TO BE SAFE," he said. "I MEAN, OFFICIALLY, WE'RE TALKING ABOUT YOUR TRIGGER FINGER."

I froze. He walked to the table under the diamond wheel and demonstrated how I should put my hand on the block of wood-but he didn't touch the wood; if he'd touched it, that would have spoiled his opinion that it was sterile. He made a fist, pinning his other fingers under his thumb, and he spread his index finger flat on its side. "LIKE THIS," he said. "IT'S THE KNUCKLE OF YOUR MIDDLE FINGER YOU'VE GOT TO KEEP OUT OF MY WAY." I couldn't speak, or move, and Owen Meany looked at me. "BETTER HAVE ANOTHER BEER," he said. "YOU CAN BE A READER WITH ALL YOUR OTHER FINGERS-YOU CAN TURN THE PAGES WITH ANY OLD FINGER," he said. He could see I didn't have the nerve for it.

"IT'S LIKE ANYTHING ELSE-IT'S LIKE LOOKING FOR YOUR FATHER. IT TAKES GUTS. AND FAITH," he added. "FAITH WOULD HELP. BUT, IN YOUR CASE, YOU SHOULD CONCENTRATE ON THE GUTS. YOU KNOW, I'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT YOUR FATHER-YOU REMEMBER THE SO-CALLED LUST CONNECTION? WHOEVER HE WAS, YOUR FATHER MUST HAVE HAD THAT PROBLEM-IT'S SOMETHING YOU DON'T LIKE IN YOURSELF. WELL, WHOEVER HE WAS-I'M TELLING YOU-HE WAS PROBABLY AFRAID. THAT'S SOMETHING YOU DON'T LIKE IN YOURSELF, TOO. WHOEVER YOUR MOTHER WAS, I'LL BET SHE WAS NEVER AFRAID," said Owen Meany. I not only couldn't speak, or move; I couldn't swallow. "IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO HAVE ANOTHER BEER," he said, "AT LEAST TRY TO FINISH THAT ONE!"