The Death & Life of Red Henley

by Philip Wilding

  Henry stopped as if the plastic icon was looming over him once more, impassive features set in violent relief.

  ‘It made romance pretty hard, you know. I shouldn’t have been surprised given the way I met her in Washington Square, on one of the benches there. She came and sat next to me, I thought she was an office girl on the make, which I suppose she was, but she handed me this flyer and told me she could save me. I just started laughing, I thought it was one of the greatest pick-up lines I’d ever heard, I thought about filing it away and using it later, but she meant it, her eyes, she had these amazing pale green eyes, just opened up, filled with this disbelief when I cracked up, this really puzzled and hurt look came across her face, I thought she was going to start crying.’

  Green could see her there in the park, nervously picking out the soul she should save next. Waiting for a signal from her Lord as she set down lightly next to Willow, and he’d laughed and told her what a great line it was, but had been quick enough to take in the blaze of red hair and the unblinking green eyes, her mother’s pretty oval face, her father’s resolute features, it made Green think of a figurehead at the prow of an old ship, pushing determinedly forward, clear-eyed and tenacious, a thing of quiet beauty finding new places to land. Henry brought him quickly back to earth.

  ‘So I waved her off, you know, another nut. City’s filled with them. I took the flyer though and she looked back at me as I was reading it, just checking I hadn’t tossed it, I guess. And I kept it, I put it in my pocket, it was just this thing about attending one of their church meetings, but it wasn’t really a church, was it? More a group thing, it sounded screwy to me, like a cult or something, but she was a picture, though I figured she must be some kind of honey trap, to pull guys like me in. You know, let me save you and then you get there and they want twenty bucks for a donation or something and then they get to assert their will upon you, like a strip joint without the happy ending.’ He laughed until the air went out of him.

  Green watched his face happily spasm and wondered what Red might have found there, that she wanted to make space among her things for him.

  ‘And then the damndest fucking thing,’ said Henry. ‘That guy goes and nearly kills me and I got to thinking about my own mortality and the frailty of life, the exact same stuff she’s been talking about, it was like she was warning me, trying to guide my steps, you know, someone really had sent me down an angel.’

  Henry Willow looked disgusted at the thought; he looked disgusted with himself.

  ‘I must have been out of my mind.’

  ‘Someone tried to kill you, Hank?’ asked Green, mentally thumbing through records for some kind of near-atrocity that might feature Henry Willow’s bemused features crinkled with horror and relief as a bullet or blade came within inches of confounding his fate forever.

  ‘Not me, the only person he was trying to off was himself and he managed that, boy, did he manage that.’

  Green gave a very audible sigh that sounded like the slow leak of an old tyre. All these words and the question was only becoming more confused. Willow was leaning back in his chair; he was expounding on the subject, the words leaving him in a stream and heading towards the ceiling like moths racing for the source of the light.

  *

  They called it The Beast and it haunted his dreams. It promised to transport them from their homes across the border and into the New World, but took payment in dangling arms and legs, trailing limbs becoming detritus on the tracks; a blood toll, some called it. Alejandro’s father and uncles told him stories of friends who’d tried to climb the train, latch on to its curved roof, and had held on unsteadily until The Beast moaned and bucked, throwing them up in the air and catching them between its carriages and cars, swallowing them up in the shadows and thin slices of light, their screams drowned by the endless turning of wheels and the catch of the heavy chains that pulled and pushed The Beast along. When it came to his turn, Alejandro had held on, but one of his friends, Guilhermo, slid along the roof of the train and went clattering backwards and was swallowed up by the blackness. Guilhermo imagined a sea monster from his childhood snatching him and dragging him down into the swirling depths, his screams lost among the greens and blues as he slid backwards and down. But, much to his surprise, there he sat quite alive on the steel tracks in a cloud of dust, all the colour completely gone from his face, two surprised eyes in a near-translucent face. He was trying to give a dazed wave to the departing train, but half of his hand was gone.

  Even if you survived the fall from The Beast, as Guilhermo had, you were left there doomed and broken between the tracks trying to sit up as the train pulled away, your friends desperate to come back and help you, but more determined yet to reach America. The fingers from your right hand – spread out along the ground around you – were now paying to carry those same friends for the next few miles or more, the heat from the turning wheels searing the wound, your hand now a half, completely fingerless, but sealed, one estranged thumb all that was left, and the one thought still resonating in your head: how will I get back up on The Beast now?

  Alejandro left the California he’d fought so hard to enter illegally the day immigration officers raided the restaurant he’d been working in and took his father and uncle away. They hustled them out, his father half-heartedly waving a filleting knife around that had been lying on the worktop until the police the officers had brought with them threatened to fill the kitchen with tear gas. Alejandro still had his other job, cleaning an elementary school at dawn each day; he liked the vacant parking lot, the school’s wide, empty corridors and the way the gentle morning light flooded softly through them, the squeak of his shoes in the gym, but Los Angeles frightened him, it felt impervious to his being, as if the very streets and walls could tell he didn’t belong there. The streets hissed his name. People either thought he was a gang member or an illegal immigrant, or both, so he walked cowed, as if in chains, tied somehow to the earth. Feeling utterly removed, like the alien he was.

  Alejandro thought about Guilhermo and wondered where his friend who had fallen from the train was now; he’d call home when he could and speak to his sister or her husband, but no one knew where Guilhermo had gone, he’d disappeared once he’d slid from the train as if once he’d fallen out of The Beast’s sight then he suddenly ceased to exist. Alejandro saw his friend lift his fingerless hand to wave goodbye that day and imagined the space where his fingers had once been spreading along his hand and down his arm, eating away at the limb, leaving only air. Guilhermo’s panic and dismay as his elbow was rubbed out like a child retracing his mistakes with an eraser. In Alejandro’s mind, his friend’s jaw hung open, his mouth a spreading, startled O, but there was no blood or pain, only confusion as his teeth came into view and then his nose was gone and Alejandro could see the sky behind his friend’s face and then the shoulders slumped as though they had no purpose with no head to support and then it was quiet, the body was gone before it had time to fall, eaten up by nothingness, out of mind and sight. In the distance, The Beast sounded its horn and turned a long corner and pulled slowly away, indifferent carriages shunting their way towards an uncertain future.

  Alejandro had read in a magazine that Robert Mitchum had once ridden the rails west to Hollywood and infamy, but Alejandro was now going the other way. He knew of friends who had come over the border and had been picked up in Texas and in California; the closer you clung to the land you came from, the more quickly you could be suddenly snatched back as if someone were monitoring your movements, waiting to pounce. He imagined crocodiles and wildebeest suddenly alive and then dead at watering holes, death coming in an explosion of water and the rutting struggle for life; he saw Guilhermo literally fall through the spaces between.

  The first time Alejandro had attempted to board a moving train, he counted his breaths to slow them down, to settle himself the way his father had showed him; the clanking of the yard terrified him, the churning of the wheels, the very real sound that metal on meta
l made. He felt small, as if he were being watched from the sky, a warm life form set as a spot of red among the cold, hulking green of the lifeless rolling stock that surrounded him. He felt hemmed in even though he knew he could weave through the cars and get safely back to the fence he’d just clambered over. His uncles had taught him how to hoist himself up on a moving train – they likened it to snaring a bolting calf, the dip and feint and then thrusting your arm out, avoiding the rail, doing anything to dodge that feeling of hopelessness in your stomach as you mistimed your step and were pulled under the clanging monster, your leg lost to the unforgiving wheels. He saw himself as a young matador, pinned into a gleaming suit of lights, his cape a defiant block of red as the train charged him down, roaring forward, the thunder of imaginary hooves. He sat in the corner of the truck, legs folded up in on himself, feeling frightened; light came in at intervals, a bell rang clearly somewhere across the yards, tolling for someone, he thought, but not for him, he was already gone.

  In his dreams Alejandro was following the river down, floating along, in the reeds of the bank, his fingers tracing the water’s surface; the sun shone in his eyes, his father stood nearby, a silhouette calling out to him: ‘Alejandro, where are you going?’ ‘I don’t know, Papa,’ he said; he was lost to the current, the rapids were a distant murmur, a quiet threat, foreboding pools and rocks, something was swimming close by and just beneath the surface. He came rushing to life as the crocodile broke the channel, its elongated jaw endless and gleaming, wet with hunger and opportunity.

  *

  Red had found Alejandro in Washington Square. Lost, eyes like a frightened animal in the long grass trying to evade the hunter. He flinched when she sat next to him and she instinctively placed a hand on his arm to settle him. She thought about how she’d been lost when she’d first come to the city, how dark and improbable it had all seemed. She’d travel across to Brooklyn at night just to stare back at Manhattan and marvel at its geometry of lights and try to figure a way in, find a way to fit. Alejandro, she learned, was sleeping on the floor of a family friend’s studio apartment way uptown, working three illegal, poorly paid cleaning jobs as well as some shifts in an all-night grocery store that was prone to ransacking and hit-and-run thefts where the produce set out on the sidewalk would be spirited away in a flurry of grabbing hands and the all-too-familiar fading thunder of feet. He’d given chase once, before he knew better, but stopped when the assailants did, turning around to coolly observe their would-be pursuer.

  ‘Don’t be a fucking hero, idiot. Walk on,’ one of them said, raising his chin slowly. The three of them stared hard at him, unwavering glances filled with indolence and quiet rage; he guessed they were all younger than he was. He’d travelled this far to be undone by teenagers. He trudged back to the store, picking up discarded fruit and vegetables, his hands full of now useless food. As he dropped the pieces in the bin he wondered why he’d come here to this unflinching city that shrugged souls off, to sleep on a friend of a friend’s floor and be quite alone. In Los Angeles, he was afraid of being seen; here he was a ghost, another shadow, he wasn’t even a number; he didn’t even count.

  Red took him down to the basement and introduced him around; he clutched the cup of coffee she’d given him the way a child clings to a favourite blanket. He couldn’t understand or believe the warmth of these people, the unblinking welcome of strangers; their enthusiasm pressed down on him. He sat and listened to their leader, the Reverend James Bulley, he was a red face on a fat body in a flowing robe that danced around him as he paced around in front of them, his fist repeatedly slamming into a pudgy hand. Alejandro couldn’t make out all the words, Bulley’s voice rose and fell in sudden peaks, emphasis came in a fierce whisper as he ducked out of sight, and then rose again to hammer his point home. Forgiveness was set at gale force, revenge almost muted, underhand, Bulley’s world was aflame; the city and all its sinners were on fire. Alejandro looked to Red for some comprehension, but she was transfixed, eyes and mouth wide; she turned to glance at Alejandro and grabbed his hand excitedly, her smile was wide, excited and open, she looked like an awed child who had just spotted a hot air balloon overhead, he was surprised that she hadn’t raised an arm to point it out.

  It was then that Alejandro finally tuned into Bulley’s relentless rhetoric; he was talking about Tomas de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor who masterminded the Spanish Inquisition with his relentless pursuit to bend people to his Catholic will. He tortured and terrified a country under the auspices of the Catholic Church, flushing Jews out of their hiding places like pheasants startled and forced to take to a sky filled with shot. Alejandro knew he was some kind of monster, a bogeyman, but Alejandro had been raised a Catholic, Torquemada’s sins were allowed to wash over him; his evil was shrouded and hidden in the Church’s long shadows.

  Alejandro lay inverted, tied to the ladder. Iron prongs held his jaws apart, something filled both nostrils and a piece of linen was draped loosely over his mouth; eight-litre-deep jugs of water sat on a shelf on the far wall, the candlelight casting grotesque shadows. Torquemada sat off to one side, the torturer and a doctor set between him and Alejandro. A clerk sat to his left, poised to record events as they unfolded. The Grand Inquisitor was talking to him, telling him how he could be saved if only he would repent, if he would open up to them, become a convert to Catholicism. Alejandro tried to explain his faith, how he’d been raised a Catholic, but the linen fell into his mouth, clogging his throat and snatching the words away. He was a Jew, said Torquemada, pretending to be a Catholic, his eyes burned red, he was secretly subverting the Catholic faith; he signalled the torturer forward, a sloshing jug filled with water held in both hands. As the water was poured into Alejandro’s mouth, the linen washed into the opening of his throat, meaning he couldn’t spit the water out, so he drank and drank, feeling as if he were being pulled under, the sensation of drowning overwhelming him. He strained and pulled, his back arched and yet the water kept on coming, Torquemada loomed into view, his leering face was suddenly the whole world, the only thing that Alejandro could see or hear, he would find his God, he would recant, he must recant.

  It was that final word that pulled him from his reverie. The room around him righted as the voices united as one. They were repeating Bulley’s call to recant, saying the word over and over like football fans calling for defence as they found their team on the back foot. It suddenly occurred to Alejandro that Bulley had come to praise Torquemada, not bury or denounce him. The Grand Inquisitor, Bulley was insisting, had, ultimately, more faith than his fellow man, he was willing to fight for his God; he would kill for what he believed in. Bulley’s hands were in the air; he was calling his God down the way a soldier signals the target for a payload, as death from above.

  ‘Isn’t he amazing?’ Red’s cheeks were flushed with excitement. She and Alejandro were standing on the street, the rest of the beaming congregation moving around them, points of light heading towards darkness. She grabbed his hand and pulled him along; he really had nowhere to go and so he followed, swept along in the rising tide of her enthusiasm. She bought him a coffee and while he sat there as a smeared reflection in a tall window, cut in half by the company’s logo that ran around the building like a ribbon on a gift, she told him about her mother’s death and how her father had dressed her as a boy and how Rose had become Red and about the painting of Joan of Arc she so revered that it was one of the few things that she’d brought to the city with her and how, when she felt her faith wavering, she looked to Joan for guidance, to feel her spirit rising through the flames.

  ‘Joan fought for the voices she heard too?’ he asked, though not unkindly, not that Red caught the tic of anger or disbelief in his voice.

  ‘Exactly.’ She sat forward in her seat, her unwavering green eyes looking right into him; she looked beautiful, but so far away, unobtainable, he thought, like a normal life in this new world.

  *

  Alejandro’s sister’s voice broke before she could f
inish the sentence. Alejandro stood in the phone booth on the corner directly opposite the grocery store, gingerly holding the receiver a few inches from his mouth, afraid of what might lie there. Traffic idled south as the light ran out of the sky somewhere downtown and his sister told him that they’d finally found Guilhermo’s body a mere half mile from the train tracks where he’d fallen from the train that day. He’d gone into shock after he’d stumbled clear of the tracks, wandered into the fields in a daze and collapsed in the tall grass and died there alone.

  ‘So he really had been swallowed up?’ he asked his sister, imagining his friend falling from view, disappearing out of sight and suddenly invisible. His was a lonely death in an empty field so many miles from home. Alejandro felt petrified, rooted to the spot seeing Guilhermo lying there among the stalks of the grass reaching ever upward towards the sky and then carried away. The Beast had been sated, little wonder that he’d made it across the border and into this country; Guilhermo’s death had eased their passage. It had taken from his friend and given Alejandro his freedom and for what?

  The next time he’d returned to the basement he found himself quickly surrounded by the other members of the congregation; they silently encircled him and linked hands and his eyes widened with surprise until Red smiled at him.

  ‘I told them what happened to your friend, they wanted to pray for you, they wanted you to know you were loved.’

  He looked at the faces around him; the same faces he’d seen swept along by the bloody fervour of Bulley’s rhetoric, and felt confusion instead of revulsion. He’d only kept coming back here to see Red and now he felt a sense of uneasy belonging, as if he’d surreptitiously found a way in. He suddenly understood how Red had unlocked the city; she’d become a part of something bigger than herself. Immersed herself in an alien culture and made it her own. Isn’t that what he needed to do?