“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.
“DOONG SA— DON’T BE AFRAID,” he told them, and they stopped crying. The girl orphans had gathered in the doorway.
Major Rawls removed his necktie and tried to apply a tourniquet—just above the elbow of one of Owen’s arms. I removed Owen’s tie and tried to apply a tourniquet—in the same fashion—to his other arm. Both of Owen Meany’s arms were missing—they were severed just below his elbows, perhaps three quarters of the way up his forearms; but he’d not begun to bleed too badly, not yet. A doctor told me later that—in the first moments—the arteries in his arms would have gone into spasm; he was bleeding, but not as much as you might expect from such a violent amputation. The tissue that hung from the stumps of his arms was as filmy and delicate as gossamer—as fine and intricate as old lace. Nowhere else was he injured.
Then his arms began to bleed more; the tighter Major Rawls and I applied our tourniquets, the more Owen bled.
“Go get someone,” the major told one of the nuns.
“NOW I KNOW WHY YOU HAD TO BE HERE,” Owen said to me. “DO YOU SEE WHY?” he asked me.