“That’s just phenol,” said Major Rawls.
“IT’S ALSO CALLED CARBOLIC ACID,” Owen said.
“I call it ‘phenol,’” Rawls said.
Then I asked them how the warrant officer had died.
“He was such a dumb asshole,” Major Rawls said. “He was refueling a helicopter—he just made some stupid-asshole mistake.”
“YOU AGGRAVATE HIGH OCTANE—THAT’LL DO IT,” said Owen Meany.
“I can’t wait to show you guys this fucking ‘picnic wake,’” Major Rawls said. Apparently, that was where we were driving next—to the “picnic wake” that was now in its third, merrymaking day. Major Rawls blew his horn at someone who he thought was possibly inching out of a driveway into the path of our car; actually, it was my impression that the person was waiting in the driveway for us to pass. “Look at that asshole!” Major Rawls said. On we drove through nighttime Phoenix.
Owen Meany patted the back of my hand. “DON’T WORRY,” he said to me. “WE JUST HAVE TO MAKE AN APPEARANCE AT THE WAKE—WE DON’T HAVE TO STAY LONG.”
“You won’t be able to tear yourselves away!” the major said excitedly. “I’m telling you, these people are on the verge of killing each other—it’s the kind of scene where mass-murderers get all their ideas!”
Major Rawls had been exaggerating. The “tribe,” as he’d called the family, did not live (as he’d said) in a trailer park, but in a one-story tract house with turquoise aluminum siding; but for the daring choice of turquoise, the house was identical to all the others in what I suppose is still called a low-income housing development. The neighborhood was distinguished by a large population of dismantled automobiles—indeed, there were more cars on cinder blocks, with their wheels off or their engines ripped out from under their hoods, than there were live cars parked at the curbs or in driveways. And since the houses were nearly all constructed of cheap, uninsulated materials—and the residents could not afford or did not choose to trouble themselves with air conditioning—the neighborhood (even in the evening) teemed with outdoor activities of the kind that are usually conducted indoors. Televisions had been dragged outside, folding card tables and folding chairs gave the crowded suburb the atmosphere of a shabby sidewalk café—and block after block of outdoor barbecue pits and charcoal grills, which darkly smoked and sizzled with grease, gave the newcomer the impression that this part of Phoenix was recovering from an air raid that had set the ground on fire and driven the residents from their homes with only their most cherished and salvageable belongings. Some of the older people swayed in hammocks.
Screen doors whapped throughout the night, cats fought and fucked without cease, a cacophony of dogs malingered in the vicinity of each outdoor barbecue-in-progress, and an occasional flash of heat-lightning lit up the night, casting into silhouette the tangled maze of television antennas that towered over the low-level houses—as if a vast network of giant spiderwebs threatened the smaller, human community below.
“I tell you, the only thing preventing a murder here is that everyone would be a witness,” said Major Rawls.
Tents—for the children—filled the small backyard of the dead warrant officer’s home; there were two cars on cinder blocks in the backyard, and for the duration of the “picnic wake” some of the smaller children had been sleeping in these; and there was also a great boat on cinder blocks—a fire-engine-red racing boat with a gleaming chrome railing running around its jutting bow. The boat appeared more comfortable to sleep in than the turquoise house, at every orifice of which there popped into view the heads of children or adults staring out at the night.
One of the boat’s big twin engines had been removed from the stern and was fastened to the rim of a large iron barrel, full of water; in the barrel, the noisy engine ran and ran—at least half a dozen grown men surrounded this display of spilled gasoline and oil, and the powerful propellers that churned and churned the water in the sloshing barrel. The men
stood with such reverence around this demonstration of the engine’s power that Major Rawls and Owen and I half expected the barrel to take flight—or at least drive itself away.
By the marvel of a long extension cord, a TV was placed in a prime position on the dry, brown lawn; a circle of men were watching a baseball game, of course. And where were the women? Clustered in their own groups, according to age or marriage or divorce or degree of pregnancy, most of the women were inside the sweltering house, where the ovenlike temperature appeared to have wilted them, like the limp raw vegetables that were plunked in assorted bowls alongside the assorted “dips” that were now in their third day of exposure to this fetid air.
Inside, too, the sink was filled with ice, through which one could search in vain for a cold beer. The mother with her high-piled, sticky, pink hair slouched against the refrigerator, which she seemed to be guarding from the others; occasionally, she flicked the ash from her cigarette into what she vacantly assumed was an ashtray—rather, it was a small plate of nuts that had been creatively mixed with a breakfast cereal.
“Here comes the fuckin’ Army!” she said—when she saw us. She was drinking what smelled like bourbon out of a highball glass—this one was etched with a poor likeness of a pheasant or a grouse or a quail.
It was not necessary to introduce me, although—several times—Owen and Major Rawls tried. Not everyone knew everyone else, anyway; it was hard to tell family from neighbors, and specifics such as which children were the offspring of whose previous or present marriage were not even considered. The relatives from Yuma and Modesto—aside from the uncomfortable fact that their children, and perhaps they themselves, were housed in tents and dismantled cars—simply blended in.
The father who’d struck his stepson at the airport was dead drunk and had passed out in a bedroom with the door open; he was sprawled not on the bed but on the floor at the foot of the bed, upon which four or five small children were glued to a second television set, their attention riveted to a crime drama that surely held no surprises for them.
“You find a woman here, I’ll pay for the motel,” Rawls said to me. “I’ve been working this scene for two nights—this is my third. I tell you, there’s not one woman you’d dare to put a move on—not here. The best thing I’ve seen is the pregnant sister—imagine that!”
Dutifully, I imagined it: the pregnant sister was the only one who tried to be nice to us; she tried to be especially nice to Owen.
“It’s a very hard job you have,” she told him.
“IT’S NOT AS HARD AS BEING IN VIETNAM,” he said politely.
The pregnant sister had a hard job, too, I thought; she looked as if she needed to make a nearly constant effort not to be beaten by her mother or her father, or raped by the latter, or raped and beaten by her younger half brother—or some combination of, or all of, the above.
Owen said to her: “I’M WORRIED ABOUT YOUR BROTHER—I MEAN YOUR HALF BROTHER, THE TALL BOY. I’LL HAVE A WORD WITH HIM. WHERE IS HE?”
The girl looked too frightened to speak.
Then she said: “I know you have to give my mother the flag—at the funeral. I know what my mother’s gonna do—when you give her the flag. She said she’s gonna spit on you,” the pregnant sister told Owen. “And I know her—she will!” the girl said. “She’ll spit in your face!”
“IT HAPPENS, SOMETIMES,” Owen said. “WHERE’S THE TALL BOY—YOUR HALF BROTHER? WHAT’S HIS NAME?”
“If Vietnam hadn’t killed that bastard, somethin’ else would have—that’s what I say!” said the pregnant sister, who quickly looked around, fearful that someone in the family might have overheard her.