Cryptic Foreshadowing
The author effectively uses imagery for the purpose of foreshadowing future events in the story. The opening paragraph is short and basically to the point: the two main characters are introduced by name and their relationship established. The significance of the car is conveyed in the same sentence that situates fact that they live on a reservation. It also ends on a note of simple, direct foreshadowing with the first person narrator informing the reader that despite having bought the car, he now must walk everywhere. But right in the middle of the paragraph—amidst all this literal delineation of fact, the author inserts a cryptic bit of imagery that will remain unclear in its meaning until the very end:
“We owned it together until his boots filled with water on a windy night and he bought out my share.”
Henry, Before
The summer the boys take their car on a ride across the region, they pick up a girl hitchhiker whose hair is piled up into two big buns on either side of her ears. She later undoes the buns to show that her hair is actually so long it reaches down to the ground and the both brothers are so mesmerized and amazed by this transformation that they stand there gaping until:
“my brother Henry did something funny. He went up to the chair and said, `Jump on my shoulders.’ So she did that, and her hair reached down past his waist, and he started twirling, this way and that, so her hair was flung out from side to side. `I always wondered what it was like to have long pretty hair,’ Henry says.”
The imagery of Henry being so carefree and unabashedly open in teasing about gender roles despite this massive size and manifest masculinity will only come to sharp focus once he returns from Vietnam. In retrospect, this image of Henry stands out as more than just a cute little incident on the road; it is a snapshot picture of what the loss of innocence has cost not just Henry, but his whole family.
Henry, After
Take note of the stark differences in the image of Henry the narrator presents after his brother’s return from Vietnam as he sits watching TV like a zombie as opposed to that image of Henry on the twirling around with a girl on his shoulders:
"He sat in front of it, watching it, and that was the only time he was completely still. But it was the kind of stillness that you see in a rabbit when it freezes and before it will bolt…I heard his teeth click at something. I looked over, and he'd bitten through his lip. Blood was going down his chin…He rushed from his chair and shoved me out of the way, against the wall.”
The Real Henry
The boys’ younger sister, Bonita, takes a photo of them posing in the front of the car one last time. The narrator’s relationship with the photo is complex and torturous as he goes from forgetting about it to pinning it on a wall to being unable to stay in the same room to hiding it in the back of a closet. His description of the picture being taken is very clear: Bonita asks them to smile and Henry definitely did so. But that memory occurred when the narrator was still innocent. After his loses that defining element of his character, the imagery captured in the picture changes with perspective, allowing him to see Henry as he really was for the first time:
“My face is right out in the sun, big and round. But he might have drawn back, because the shadows on his face are deep as holes. There are two shadows curved like little hooks around the ends of his smile, as if to frame it and try to keep it there— that one, first smile that looked like it might have hurt his face.”
