New cars are supposed to represent promising futures, where adventure lurks around every corner, but in “Red Convertible” this is not the case. The new convertible featured in this story is purchased by Erdrich’s two main characters: Lyman and Henry Lamartine, best friends and brothers. For these teenagers, convertibles are the fashionable fast wheeling car; it is sleek, sexy, and chic in design. Everything a young man would want in their first set of wheels.
However, the author, Louise Erdrich, chooses this particular vehicle to illustrate how the dreams of our youth (unlimited freedom as well as youthful idealism) can remain forever unrealized. The car is rather a symbol of ravaged youth, innocence lost, and shattered dreams. This is true, especially in the case of Henry.
After returning home from the Vietnam War, the once carefree confident Henry has transformed into an introverted anxious mess. More than likely suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Henry cannot connect with the world around him. Civilian life becomes illusive to the veteran; every day tasks feel like shallow endeavors after having bore witness to the futility of combat. Such an extreme breakdown of a character serves Erdrich’s purpose of this story — the loss of faith in one self, and others.
The summer before Henry had been sent off to war, both he, and his younger brother, Lyman, had purchased the promising red convertible. Both boys, as Lyman recalls, “Went places in that car. […] Some people hang on to details when they travel, but we didn’t let them bother us and just lived our everyday lives here to there.” The younger man’s wistful statement displays how his older brother had once been: Optimistic and hopeful for the future. Like many teenagers before him, Henry had seen the world as beautiful once. A place he was determined to explore every square inch of, if he could.
As suddenly as both boys’ summer starts, it ends, and, just as suddenly, the army remembers Henry Lamartine. By 1970, Lyman’s brother-turned-marine, became a prisoner of war. Erdrich implies that Henry spent years inside a POW camp before being released. The brutality of North Vietnamese prison camps was infamous too. According to the National Museum of the USAF (United States Air Force,” … prison guards bound POWs’ arms and legs with tight ropes and then dislocated them, and left men in iron foot stocks for days or weeks. Extreme beatings were common, many times resulting in POW deaths.” It is no wonder Henry returned home depressed and angry.
Lyman makes note of his brother’s transformation with the following passage, ” When he came home, […] Henry was very different, and I’ll say this: the change was no good. […] He was quiet, so quiet, and never comfortable sitting still anywhere but always up and moving around. I thought back to times we’d sat still for whole afternoons, never moving a muscle. […] He’d always had a joke, then, too, and now you couldn’t get him to laugh, or when he did it was more the sound of a man choking, a sound that stopped up the throats of other people around him. They got to leaving him alone. [….] It was a fact: Henry was jumpy and mean.”
Besides becoming surly and withdrawn Henry also forgets his beloved convertible. The younger brother, Lyman, is amazed by Henry’s behavior. It is as if by ignoring the car Henry is declaring to others that he is giving up on himself. This now neglected convertible had been an example of the veteran’s passion for life. To let it rust mirrors Henry’s sharp decline mentally, physically, and emotionally. The car (much like its owner) is only a faded shell of its previous self. In a last ditch effort to “save” his brother, Lyman vandalizes the convertible. He wants Henry to find purpose in his life: Fixing the convertible could be that purpose. In doing so, then, maybe, the lost soldier could fix himself.
At first, it appears that Henry is embracing life once more; he painstakingly fixes the coveted convertible. He even expresses how he wishes to go off joyriding again. Excited at his brother’s shift in demeanor, Lyman joins Henry to visit an old spot from their childhood— the Red River. As Lyman observes the water rush past him beside his brother, he has a revelation about Henry, ” As I watched it I felt something squeezing inside me and tightening and trying to let go all at the same time. I knew I was not just feeling it myself; I knew I was feeling what Henry was going through. […] I couldn’t stand it, the closing and opening. […] I took Henry by the shoulders. […] I says, ‘wake up […].’
Henry refuses his brother’s pleas. ” ‘I know it,’ he says. ‘I know it. I can’t help it. It’s no use.'” At this point, Henry has decided to allow his pain to consume him. As if finalizing his will, Henry attempts to give his car to Lyman. By passing the vehicle onto his younger brother, Henry is silently asking Lyman to live for him. Distraught over Henry’s despondency, Lyman refuses to take the car, and, so the two fight. When the argument ceases Henry kills himself. Louise Erdrich writes, “Got to cool me off!” […] Then he (Henry) runs over to the river and jumps in. […] “My boots are filling,” he says. He says this in a normal voice, like he just noticed and he doesn’t know what to think of it. Then he’s gone.”
Erdrich wrote such a dark disturbing ending to convey how many servicemen and women can remain trapped inside prisons of their own making. Yes, we can certainly free ourselves from a physical place of torment, but the psychological effects of traumatic experiences can linger. For example, Henry believed he deserved to die. His survivors guilt, along with the nightmares he endured as a soldier, made him long to be with his dead friends. He simply could not forgive himself for what the war compelled him to do, nor could he forgive society for what he had observed in war.
In an attempt to lay Henry’s troubled soul to rest, bereaved Lyman sinks their convertible into the Red River. Lyman recognizes that, even though the car was no longer new, or promising, this vehicle was truly his brother’s car. It was a representation of Henry’s soul; a glimpse into the unburdened teenager he used to be. Truly, the convertible was Henry’s ticket to greener pastures. His final shot at freedom. A last chance at salvation, which, ultimately, the marine ignored, instead embracing a cold baptism in the river of his youth.
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