A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  So we took a six-pack of beer and a bucket of ice back to our room; we watched The Late Show, and then The Late, Late Show—while we tried to remember all the movies we’d ever seen. I was so drunk I don’t remember what movies we saw in Phoenix that night. Owen Meany was so drunk that he fell asleep in the bathtub; he’d gotten into the bathtub because he said he missed sitting in the swimming pool. But then he couldn’t watch the movie—not from the bathtub—and so he’d insisted that I describe the movie to him.

  “Now she’s kissing his photograph!” I called out to him.

  “WHICH ONE IS KISSING HIS PHOTOGRAPH—THE BLOND ONE?” he asked. “WHICH PHOTOGRAPH?”

  I went on describing the movie until I heard him snoring. Then I let the water out of the bath, and I lifted him up and out of the tub—he was so light, he was nothing to lift. I dried him off with a towel; he didn’t wake up. He was mumbling in his drunken sleep.

  “I KNOW YOU’RE HERE FOR A REASON,” he said.

  When I tucked him into his bed, he blinked open his eyes and said: “O GOD—WHY HASN’T MY VOICE CHANGED, WHY DID YOU GIVE ME SUCH A VOICE? THERE MUST BE A REASON.” Then he shut his eyes and said: “WATAHANTOWET.”

  When I got into my bed and turned out the light, I said good night to him.

  “Good night, Owen,” I said.

  “DON’T BE AFRAID. NOTHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU,” said Owen Meany. “YOUR FATHER’S NOT THAT BAD A GUY,” he said.

  When I woke up in the morning, I had a terrible hangover; Owen was already awake—he was writing in the diary. That was his last entry—that was when he wrote: “TODAY’S THE DAY! ‘… HE THAT BELIEVETH IN ME, THOUGH HE WERE DEAD, YET SHALL HE LIVE; AND WHOSOEVER LIVETH AND BELIEVETH IN ME SHALL NEVER DIE.’”

  It was Monday, July 8, 1968—the date he had seen on Scrooge’s grave.

  Major Rawls picked us up at our motel and drove us to the airport—to the so-called Sky Harbor. I thought that Rawls behaved oddly out of character—he wasn’t at all talkative, he just mumbled something about having had a “bad date”—but Owen had told me that the major was very moody.

  “HE’S NOT A BAD GUY—HE JUST KNOWS HIS SHIP ISN’T EVER GOING TO COME IN,” Owen had said about Rawls. “HE’S OLD-FASHIONED, BROWN-SHOE ARMY—HE LIKES TO PRETEND HE’S HAD NO EDUCATION, BUT ALL HE DOES IS READ; HE WON’T EVEN GO TO THE MOVIES. AND HE NEVER TALKS ABOUT VIETNAM—JUST SOME CRYPTIC SHIT ABOUT HOW THE ARMY DIDN’T PREPARE HIM TO KILL WOMEN AND CHILDREN, OR TO BE KILLED BY THEM. FOR WHATEVER REASON, HE DIDN’T MAKE LIEUTENANT COLONEL; HIS TWENTY YEARS IN THE ARMY ARE ALMOST UP, AND HE’S BITTER ABOUT IT—HE’S JUST A MAJOR. HE’S NOT EVEN FORTY AND HE’S ABOUT TO BE RETIRED.”

  Major Rawls complained that we were going to the airport too early; my flight to Boston didn’t leave for another two hours. Owen had booked no special flight to Tucson—apparently, there were frequent flights from Phoenix to Tucson, and Owen was going to wait until I left; then he’d take the next available plane.

  “There are better places to hang around than this fucking airport,” Major Rawls complained.

  “YOU DON’T HAVE TO HANG AROUND WITH US—SIR,” said Owen Meany.

  But Rawls didn’t want to be alone; he didn’t feel like talking, but he wanted company—or else he didn’t know what he wanted. He wandered into the game room and hustled a few young recruits into playing pinball with him. When they found out he’d been in Vietnam, they pestered him for stories; all he would tell them was: “It’s an asshole war—and you’re assholes if you want to be there.”

  Major Rawls pointed Owen out to the recruits. “You want to go to Vietnam?” he said. “Go talk to him—go see that little lieutenant. He’s another asshole who wants to go there.”

  Most of the new recruits were on their way to Fort Huachuca; their hair was cut so short, you could see scabs from the razor nicks—most of them who were assigned to Fort Huachuca would probably be on orders to Vietnam soon.

  “They look like babies,” I said to Owen.

  “BABIES FIGHT THE WARS,” said Owen Meany; he told the young recruits that he thought they’d like Fort Huachuca. “THE SUN SHINES ALL THE TIME,” he told them, “AND IT’S NOT AS HOT AS IT IS HERE.” He kept looking at his watch.

  “We have plenty of time,” I told him, and he smiled at me—that old smile with the mild pity and the mild contempt in it.

  Some planes landed; other planes took off. Some of the recruits left for Fort Huachuca. “Aren’t you coming, sir?” they asked Owen Meany.

  “LATER,” he told them. “I’LL SEE YOU LATER.”

  Fresh recruits arrived, and Major Rawls went on making a killing—he was a pro at pinball.

  I complained about the extent of my hangover; Owen must have had a worse hangover—or one at least as bad as mine—but I imagine, now, that he was savoring it; he knew it was his last hangover. Then the confusion would return to him, and he must have felt that he knew absolutely nothing. He sat beside me and I could see him changing—from nervousness to depression, from fear to elation. I thought it was his hangover; but one minute he must have been thinking, “MAYBE IT HAPPENS ON THE AIRPLANE.” Then in another minute, he must have said to himself: “THERE ARE NO CHILDREN. I DON’T EVEN HAVE TO GO TO VIETNAM—I CAN STILL GET OUT OF IT.”

  In the airport, he said to me—out of the blue: “YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A GENIUS TO OUTSMART THE ARMY.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I said: “I suppose not.”

  In another minute, he must have been thinking: “IT WAS JUST A CRAZY DREAM! WHO THE FUCK KNOWS WHAT GOD KNOWS? I OUGHT TO SEE A PSYCHIATRIST!”

  Then he would stand up and pace; he would look around for the children; he was looking for his killer. He kept glancing at his watch.

  When they announced my flight to Boston—it was scheduled to depart in half an hour—Owen was grinning ear-to-ear. “THIS MAY BE THE HAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE!” he said. “MAYBE NOTHING’S GOING TO HAPPEN!”

  “I think you’re still drunk,” I told him. “Wait till you get to the hangover.”

  A plane had just landed; it had arrived from somewhere on the West Coast, and it taxied into view. I heard Owen Meany gasp beside me, and I turned to look where he was looking.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I asked him. “They’re just penguins.”

  The nuns—there were two of them—were meeting someone on the plane from the West Coast; they stood at the gate to the runway. The first people off the plane were also nuns—two more. The nuns waved to each other. When the children emerged from the airplane—they were closely following the nuns—Owen Meany said: “HERE THEY ARE!”

  Even from the runway gate, I could see that they were Asian children—one of the nuns leaving the plane was an Oriental, too. There were about a dozen kids; only two of them were small enough to be carried—one of the nuns carried one of the kids, and one of the older children carried the other little one. They were both boys and girls—the average age was maybe five or six, but there were a couple of kids who were twelve or thirteen. They were Vietnamese orphans; they were refugee children.

  Many military units sponsored orphanages in Vietnam; many of the troops donated their time—as well as what gifts they could solicit from home—to help the kids. There was no official government-sponsored refugee program to relocate Vietnamese children—not before the fall of Saigon in April 1975—but certain churches were active in Vietnam throughout the course of the war.

  Catholic Relief Services, for example; the Catholic Relief groups were responsible for escorting orphans out of Vietnam and relocating them in the United States—as early as the mid-sixties. Once in the United States, the orphans would be met by social workers from the archdiocese or diocese of the particular city of their arrival. The Lutherans were also involved in sponsoring the relocation of Vietnamese orphans.

  The children that Owen Meany and I saw in Phoenix were being escorted by nuns from Catholic Relief Services; they were being delivered into the charge of nuns
from the Phoenix Archdiocese, who would take them to new homes, and new families, in Arizona. Owen and I could see that the children were anxious about it.

  If the heat was no shock to them—for it was certainly very hot where they’d come from—the desert and the hugeness of the sky and the moonscape of Phoenix must have overwhelmed them. They held each other’s hands and stayed together, circling very closely around the nuns. One of the little boys was crying.

  When they came into the Sky Harbor terminal, the blast of air conditioning instantly chilled them; they were cold—they hugged themselves and rubbed their arms. The little boy who was crying tried to wrap himself up in the habit of one of the nuns. They all milled around in lost confusion, and—from the game room—the young recruits with their shaved heads stared out at them. The children stared back at the soldiers; they were used to soldiers, of course. As the kids and the recruits stared back and forth at each other, you could sense the mixed feelings.

  Owen Meany was as jumpy as a mouse. One of the nuns spoke to him.

  “Officer?” she said.

  “YES, MA’AM—HOW MAY I HELP YOU?” he said quickly.

  “Some of the boys need to find a men’s room,” the nun said; one of the younger nuns tittered. “We can take the girls,” the first nun said, “but if you’d be so kind—if you’d just go with the boys.”

  “YES, MA’AM—I’D BE HAPPY TO HELP THE CHILDREN,” said Owen Meany.

  “Wait till you see the so-called men’s room,” I told Owen; I led the way. Owen just concentrated on the children. There were seven boys; the nun who was also Vietnamese accompanied us—she carried the smallest boy. The boy who was crying had stopped as soon as he saw Owen Meany. All the children watched Owen closely; they had seen many soldiers—yes—but they had never seen a soldier who was almost as small as they were! They never took their eyes off him.

  On we marched—when we passed by the game room, Major Rawls had his back to us; he didn’t see us. Rawls was humping the pin-ball machine in a fury. In the mouth of a corridor I’d walked down before—it led nowhere—we marched past Dick Jarvits, the tall, lunatic brother of the dead warrant officer, standing in the shadows.

  He wore the jungle fatigues; he was strapped up with an extra cartridge belt or two. Although it was dark in the corridor, he wore the kind of sunglasses that must have melted on his brother’s face when the helicopter had caught fire. Because he was wearing sunglasses, I couldn’t tell if Dick saw Owen or me or the children; but from the gape of his open mouth, I concluded that something Dick had just seen had surprised him.

  The “Men’s Temporary Facilities” were the same as I had left them. The same mops and pails were there, and the unhung mirror still leaned against the wall. The vast mystery sink confused the children; one of them tried to pee in it, but I pointed him in the direction of the crowded urinal. One of the children considered peeing in a pail, but I showed him the toilet in the makeshift, plywood stall. Owen Meany, the good soldier, stood under the window; he watched the door. Occasionally, he would glance above him, sizing up the deep window ledge below the casement window. Owen looked especially small standing under that window, because the window ledge was at least ten feet high—it towered above him.

  The nun was waiting for her charges, just outside the door.

  I helped one of the children unzip his fly; the child seemed unfamiliar with a zipper. The children all jabbered in Vietnamese; the small, high-ceilinged room—like a coffin standing upright on one end—echoed with their voices.

  I’ve already said how slow I am; it wasn’t until I heard their shrill, foreign voices that I remembered Owen’s dream. I saw him watching the door, his arms hanging loosely at his sides.

  “What’s wrong?” I said to him.

  “STAND BESIDE ME,” he said. I was moving toward him when the door was kicked wide open and Dick Jarvits stood there, nearly as tall and thin as the tall, thin room; he held a Chicom grenade—carefully—in both hands.

  “HELLO, DICK,” said Owen Meany.

  “You little twit!” Dick said. One of the children screamed; I suppose they’d all seen men in jungle fatigues before—I think that the little boy who screamed had seen a Chicom grenade before, too. Two or three of the children began to cry.

  “DOONG SA,” Owen Meany told them. “DON’T BE AFRAID,” Owen told the children. “DOONG SA, DOONG SA,” he said. It was not only because he spoke their language; it was his voice that compelled the children to listen to him—it was a voice like their voices. That was why they trusted him, why they listened. “DOONG SA,” he said, and they stopped crying.

  “It’s just the place for you to die,” Dick said to Owen. “With all these little gooks—with these little dinks!” Dick said.

  “NAM SOON!” Owen told the children. “NAM SOON! LIE DOWN!” Even the littlest boy understood him. “LIE DOWN!” Owen told them. “NAM SOON! NAM SOON!” All the children threw themselves on the floor—they covered their ears, they shut their eyes. “NOW I KNOW WHY MY VOICE NEVER CHANGES,” Owen said to me. “DO YOU SEE WHY?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “WE’LL HAVE JUST FOUR SECONDS,” Owen told me calmly. “YOU’LL NEVER GET TO VIETNAM, DICK,” Owen told the terrible, tall boy—who ripped the fuse cord and tossed the bottle-shaped grenade, end over end, right to me.

  “Think fast—Mister Fuckin’ Intelligence Man!” Dick said.

  I caught the grenade, although it wasn’t as easy to handle as a basketball—I was lucky. I looked at Owen, who was already moving toward me.

  “READY?” he said; I passed him the Chicom grenade and opened my arms to catch him. He jumped so lightly into my hands; I lifted him up—as easily as I had always lifted him.

  After all: I had been practicing lifting up Owen Meany—forever.

  The nun who’d been waiting for the children outside the door of the “Men’s Temporary Facilities”—she hadn’t liked the looks of Dick; she’d run off to get the other soldiers. It was Major Rawls who caught Dick running away from the temporary men’s room.

  “What have you done, you fuck-face?” the major screamed at Dick.

  Dick had drawn the bayonet. Major Rawls seized Dick’s machete—Rawls broke Dick’s neck with one blow, with the dull edge of the blade. I’d sensed that there was something more bitter than anger in the major’s uncommon, lake-green eyes; maybe it was just his contact lenses, but Rawls hadn’t won a battlefield commission in Korea for nothing. He may not have been prepared to kill an unfortunate, fifteen-year-old boy; but Major Rawls was even less prepared to be killed by such a kid, who—as Rawls had said to Owen—was (at least on this earth) “beyond saving.”

  When Owen Meany said “READY?” I figured we had about two seconds left to live. But he soared far above my arms—when I lifted him, he soared even higher than usual; he wasn’t taking any chances. He went straight up, never turning to face me, and instead of merely dropping the grenade and leaving it on the window ledge, he caught hold of the ledge with both hands, pinning the grenade against the ledge and trapping it there safely with his hands and forearms. He wanted to be sure that the grenade couldn’t roll off the ledge and fall back in the room. He could just manage to wriggle his head—his whole head, thank God—below the window ledge. He clung there for less than a second.

  Then the grenade detonated; it made a shattering “crack!”—like lightning when it strikes too close to you. There was a high-velocity projection of fragments—the fragmentation is usually distributed in a uniform pattern (this is what Major Rawls explained to me, later), but the cement window ledge prevented any fragments from reaching me or the children. What hit us was all the stuff that ricocheted off the ceiling—there was a sharp, stinging hail that rattled like BB’s around the room, and all the chips of cement and tile, and the plaster debris, fell down upon us. The window was blown out, and there was an instant, acrid, burning stink. Major Rawls, who had just killed Dick, flung the door open and jammed a mop handle into the hinge assembly�
��to keep the door open. We needed the air. The children were holding their ears and crying; some of them were bleeding from their ears—that was when I noticed that my ears were bleeding, too, and that I couldn’t actually hear anything. I knew—from their faces—that the children were crying, and I knew from looking at Major Rawls that he was trying to tell me to do something.

  What does he want me to do? I wondered, listening to the pain in my ears. Then the nuns were moving among the children—all the children were moving, thank God; they were more than moving, they were grasping each other, they were tugging the habits of the nuns, and they were pointing to the torn-apart ceiling of the coffin-shaped room, and the smoking black hole above the window ledge.

  Major Rawls was shaking me by my shoulders; I tried to read the major’s lips because I still couldn’t hear him.

  The children were looking all around; they were pointing up and down and everywhere. I began to look around with them. Now the nuns were also looking. Then my ears cleared; there was a popping or a ripping sound, as if my ears were late in echoing the explosion, and then the children’s voices were jabbering, and I heard what Major Rawls was screaming at me while he shook me.

  “Where is he? Where is Owen?” Major Rawls was screaming.

  I looked up at the black hole, where I’d last seen him clinging. One of the children was staring into the vast sink; one of the nuns looked into the sink, too—she crossed herself, and Major Rawls and I moved quickly to assist her.

  But the nun didn’t need our help; Owen was so light, even the nun could lift him. She picked him up, out of the sink, as she might have picked up one of the children; then she didn’t know what to do with him. Another nun kneeled in the bomb litter on the floor; she settled back on her haunches and spread her habit smoothly across her thighs, and the nun who held Owen in her arms rested his head in the lap of the sister who’d thus arranged herself on the floor. The third and fourth nuns tried to calm the children—to make them move away from him—but the children crowded around Owen; they were all crying.