Weekly Short Story

"Henry: The Promise" by CSCHWEIZER

Henry and I were in a field somewhere in Northern California. It was just me and Henry and a 6-pack of beer. We scrambled in the moonless night to the top of a hill in the darkness. There was nothing but shadowy hills and stars. It was just another beautiful Northern California night, but for Henry it seemed important.

He was unusually quiet as we sat down and opened a couple of beers. We actually drank in silence while we caught our breath. I watched Henrys face light up as he lit a cigarette. There was no sign of the usual smug happy confidence in his eyes. They seemed dead in the flicker of the flame.

I watched the red glow from his cigarette as a cool wind blew up the hillside. Then he spoke. His voice was distant and he seemed to float away with the wind. His words were clear, and until now, I did not know how important that moment was to Henry. In the darkness I knew he was crying.

When he was done he made me promise. We stood and shook on it, and he gave me a painful hug. And as we stood there beaming with masculine bonding, I knew this promise was different than most…this one would be followed through with…

Basically, I promised that I would write down some of the stories he told me. He assured me that they were all true. For some reason I believed him. Now that he is gone, it really does not matter. But, I always wondered why it was he was still alive....oh, he may be dead, now, but nobody knows for sure. He is just gone. The last anyone heard from him he was living in a remote valley in Northern California, but then some heard him say something about Europe. Nobody truly knows, but that was pure Henry. One year he is always around, and then a post-card arrives from Finland saying he is at the Arctic Circle playing around in an empty Santa’s Village during the endless days of spring.…

I first met Henry in Los Angeles. I had just returned from Christmas break to my dorm at UCLA. There was the usual amount of secret partying going on as the other students returned and classes had not yet started. There was a lot of noise coming from my friend Phil’s room. I knocked the secret knock and was admitted to a room full of people smoking and drinking cheap beer.

In the middle of all this was Henry dramatically telling a tale of some adventure he may or may not have had to the still impressionable faces staring intently at his animated descriptions. He held them captive with his words and all at once they seemed to get the point of his story and simultaneously leaned back in a collective understanding. Henry seemed pleased with himself, sat back in the ratty couch, and sucked down his beer in one long drink.

For the next three months this was the scene. There was a lot of drinking, smoking, and listening to Henry and his stories. We had formed a small tight group of friends, all from Northern California, and we would float en masse from one party to the next. The parties would always seem to liven up when we arrived. Henry would always manage to position himself near the beer and would have eventually befriended the entire room full of people. Women would sit for hours seemingly mesmerized by Henry and his words. He had some sort of aura about him, and once you got sucked into that space, you were held there until he was done with you. I watched him for hours and I still do not know how he did it.

I became intrigued with Henry and what he was really all about. I rarely, if ever, saw him on campus. He would occasionally substitute on the Intra-Mural basket ball team for some of the guys on the floor, but that ended when Henry go into a fist-fight with some rather large frat guys and the referee…when he realized it was 6 against one, Henry somehow managed to talk his way out of a beating, and convinced the frat guys to buy the beer after the game. It was not until I was working the front door of the dorm late one night that I started to get a picture of Henry.

It was about 3:30 AM on a Tuesday. I was reading the current Stephen King novel when he buzzed impatiently at the front door, freaking me out. He did not seem to recognize me in my uniform, but was used to people knowing him and he not knowing them, so he was not fazed when I addressed him by name. He stood there fumbling in the pockets of his thin long wool trench coat for his entry pass and was soon becoming quite frustrated. I told him it was ok, but he seemed insistent on finding his card. The girl I was working with did not know Henry and was a bit frightened. She did not want to let him in. They began to argue about his card and I just stepped back to watch.

Henry decided that his card was upstairs in his room, but the girl was not about to let him in to get it. So finally Henry convinced her by giving up one of his shoes in ransom, so that if he did not return, logically, he would only have one shoe. Henry also insisted that he only had one pair of shoes so this would be a big problem for him. I nodded that this was indeed true and the girl took his street beaten boot. Henry rushed upstairs and was back in 10 minutes with his entry card.

The card said ‘4-Day Visitor Pass’. I was stunned. Henry had been living in the dorm room with Phil and another guy for well over three months now. I checked the date. It was current. Then I got it. Henry had been getting to know everybody and coming in at odd hours to avoid being suspect of not being a student. He was, in fact, just crashing here, and had managed to pull it off for months. And I also saw his name…it was not Henry.

About a week after the shoe night, Henry was gone. He had moved out of the dorms and took a room with some random guys’ right outside of Westwood Village. I asked Phil about Henry. For a close friend, he did not seem to know much, and was rather vague about everything. I did find out that Henry was called ‘Henry’ because of his love for Charles Bukowski stories. ‘Henry’ was also Bukowskis’ main character and a rough-and-tough skid-row street-writer…quite opposite the charming privileged life Phil and Henry shared as children. One night Henry was wasted and Phil started to call him ‘Henry’, a title Henry seemed to love…from that day on he would only answer to either Henry or to ‘Hank’. It was a bit odd, but that was about par for Henry.

Time moved on and most of us graduated and returned to the East Bay Area of Northern California to deal with the next phase of our lives. It was a surreal time as slowly people from LA showed up in the area, and others drifted across the globe. We re-formed our tight group of friends and began a newsletter in order to keep in touch with each other. Henry became a close part of this team and would write strange stories of ‘life outside the box’. Nobody was really sure what Henry was up to in those days, but he seemed to always be around.

There was a sense of finality towards the end of that period. Henry seemed to feel it. He became sullen and extremely moody. He was always drunk and raging about something…usually about ‘how the world is missing the sunset’ and other such rants. He loved the world and feared it was killing itself. He became disillusioned with people and humans and society in general. All he wanted to do was to open people’s eyes to other ideas and ways of thinking. His rants were often met with empty, vacant stares and puzzled confusion. The circles he occasionally travelled in were more concerned with keeping up with trendy fashions and spiffy cars. These things were useless in Henrys world and he tried to get them to see life differently. He saw his words fall on empty ears and began to lose hope. His intentions were based on purely good, but he was soon becoming isolated in his own world and was seen in public as a bit of an eccentric…he was once called an ‘enigma’ by a 65-year old drinking buddy.

Henry and I had several serious discussions while staring over the San Francisco Bay watching the early morning stars and the lights from the City shimmer out across the water. There was change in the air and the feeling that a good thing was about to go sour. It was just growing-up, but it seemed so fatal.

But grow up we did. We all moved on to relatively successful careers. Some of us have become husbands and fathers, others are still swinging singles. Overall we managed to become a group of reasonably responsible people with decent lives and good souls. Some of us have stayed close to home while others, like me, have found ourselves scattered across the globe taking up residence in other countries. My group of friends is quite the eclectic one.

Here, now, many years later, all these memories flood my brain. I have not thought about those days in years. And here before me was a mystery pile of scribbling from one of the most ‘out-there’ people from those days. I never really thought this day would happen, but it has. It has arrived. The demons from the past must be dealt with, and my promise must be kept. I sat and stared at the package and smoked a cigarette before letting them loose on the world.

I searched through the huge stack of papers; there had to be a note some where. I spread the pages out over the table in the living room, pages spilling over onto the floor. Then I took a minute and decided to post some emails first. I figured someone may know where Henry was.

The computer was dark. Rarely, if ever, is it off, but I had not sat at it for a few days and it lie there silent and waiting. Like a vacant endless cave it looked at me, screen blank and a bit green in the ambient light; just a gaping hole waiting to suck me in for hours and days and weeks at a time. It was a retched beast, but quite handy for instant communication all over the world. I started her up and the room became noisy with the silent hum of the fan. She was alive.

I went to the email, ignored the pile of incoming messages, clicked open the address book and selected all those people from the past that I had known from the ‘daze of Henry’. Surprisingly, I had at least 10 names and they were always good for at least 5 more so I wrote a group letter:

“Dear Friends, It has been some time since I have last spoken to you. I hope you all are well and happy with what it is you are doing with your lives today. I write this letter in regards to our mutual friend Henry. I have received a package from him with no note or return address. If anybody can help with any information on him, please contact me at this address.

Much Love to all…”

Then I signed it.

I sent it off and went back to the mess in the living room. There must be an explanation somewhere…

I carefully re-organized the mess of papers into one stack. Most of the papers were dated, going back 15 or so years. There were at least 500 pages there. I decided to sort through them all by date. I went into the kitchen to put the kettle on, it was going to be a long night.

Several hours, two pots of coffee and some ginseng tea later, I had the task complete. In front of me I had 5 separate stacks of pages organized by date and what was written on them. I had poems which consisted of the bulk of the pages, complete short stories, half started short stories with notes, just notes and outlines, and then lists. I still had not found any note to me or anything that gave me a clue as to what this was all about. It was late and I had to get some sleep.

I dreamed of Henry and the night of the promise…

…it was dark and the beer was Guinness. Unfortunately neither one of us had a bottle opener, but this did not stop Henry. In the pitch dark he found a barbed wire fence with his bare hands and followed it to an iron post in the ground. Feeling with his hands he held the lip of the bottle on the top of the post and with a sharp hard thrust of his free hand he smashed down on the bottle top. Normally this would just flip the bottle cap off, but in the darkness, Henry managed to snap the entire glass neck of the bottle off, leaving the bottle, and its contents, useless and sharp.

He came back to me and put the broken bottle pieces in the 6-pack holder and went off with all the beer to try again. I heard him giggle in the blackness as he successfully opened each of the remaining 5 bottles. Soon he was back and sat down with the now 5-pack. We both reached at the same time and both managed to slice our hands on the broken bottle number 6.

Together we yelped in pain and then laughed it off after successfully finding and consuming the rest of the beer. Henry insisted that we split the odd beer so that everything would be fair. We finished the night with the promise and headed tearful and renewed down the hill to the car.

As I sat behind the wheel I saw Henrys face in the dome light. He was covered in blood. He held up his hands in the light they were a red brown mass of clotted and flowing blood. I looked at my hands-they too were covered in blood. I saw my face in the mirror and it was covered in blood as well. Henry screamed and I started to push on the steering wheel causing the horn to sound into the night. The sound echoed across the fields and then back into my head. It stayed there beeping and screaming and beeping and screaming…

I awoke with a start. I was sweating and it was almost noon. The beeping and screaming was coming from downstairs. As I got up it melted into the sound of the front door buzzer. I quickly dressed with whatever was handy on the floor, and ran downstairs to see who interrupted my nightmare.

It was the postman with another package.

I raced back upstairs to the flat and inspected the package. It was exactly the same thing as before: several ragged packets with no return address. I carefully tore open the top of one and pulled out a huge stack of papers tied with thick string. It was the same type of stuff...just more of it. This time there was at least 1000 pages. I went to the kitchen and put the kettle on again…this stack would take longer than the first.

A few pots of coffee later I had the second stack organized as the first. At the very bottom of the stack was a piece of paper with one sentence on it. At first I thought it was just another outline idea, but I read it over and over and realized that this was the note I had been looking for. It read:

“Fulfil the promise and we shall live for ever.’

That was enough for me. I had to do it.

So, the stories here are those of a missing man. I have tried to write them as Henry would have told them. I did elaborate on some things, to fill in some blanks, but that is the way Henry would have wanted it. In his life-long search for truth, Henry liked to re-create reality a bit in order for the story to be a little more interesting…and as a result, Henry lived in his own reality.

So here is the life and adventures of my friend Henry.

Next week... "Henry: The Trip"

 

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