Magic Red

© 1998 Rich Logsdon
All rights reserved.

I. Locked in My Head

I couldn't get Eddie Van Halen's "Runnin' with the Devil" out of my head.

Wet and shivering, I stood on the deck of the bright boat and peered through the hellishly whirling black fog. Enveloped in darkness, I felt sick at heart, fears shrieking like bats in the cave of my soul. I had no idea how I'd gotten there.

Attempting to get my bearings, I held firm to the freezing iron rail that ran from the deck up to the wheel in the captain's room and listened to the intermittent wind pound over the water. There was no captain. In this darkness I was wrapped in a swirling black mist that clung to me like death. The wind, failing to dissipate the mist, carried a winter chill and a child's voice, which sang to me. The voice floated like a butterfly over the still water, beckoning and calming me. I tried to look through the dark mist in the direction of the voice that was growing steadily louder. I recognized the song, "Hush, Little Baby." It was a song I sang years ago to my baby, my daughter, Charlotte. The boat drifted towards the sound.

Suddenly, singing stopped, bringing dead silence. Wind dropped, mist turning to sulfur, and waves stopped lapping the boat. Save for swirling mists (spirits of the dead? demons?) all was an icy, dead, leaden calm.

I listened for an hour or two to my own heart's thumping. Then, from my soul, I reached for the voice, and I felt a light gust rush over me, the chill reaching to the bottoms of my feet. I knew I was not alone on the lake and steadied myself as the boat pushed forward.

The mist changed from black to iron gray as light filtered through. Assuming this signaled the sunrise, I stared ahead at a dark mass, certainly land. As the boat approached the mass, I made out a forest thick with pine trees, wind whistling through the branches and reminding me of the spirits of the dead. Within the thick growth, as I let my vision travel back, I perceived the flickering of a fire.

Suddenly, the child's voice began again, this time with adult accompaniment that I recognized as my wife's. Both sang "Hush, Little Baby." Their words drifted sweetly across the water, a hush through the mist, drugging me with melody.

I continued to stare in the direction of the voices, towards the fire, and my mind flooded with images of my 12-year-old daughter, who had been killed with her mother in an automobile accident five years ago. The story cruelly jolted me, the pictures like knives wounding my soul.

In my imagination I relived the crash. The event played before me with the intensity of a scene from Scream. In a blind rage, I had been the one driving our car, a purple and black '88 Oldsmobile. The two months I spent in the hospital following the accident had not brought my wife and daughter back from the dead; for five thought-tormented years those two had nightly called me from beyond the grave. Eventually, I came to fear sleep and the darkness of night.

Realizing I should be the dead one, I tried to push the memories out of my mind, wished desperately for a drink of hard liquor, imagined a slut I had fucked in Bangkok, and looked for the sun, just rising over towering desert mountains brooding over dissipating gray fog. To drive away fears and demons, I hummed my parents' favorite hymn, "It Is Well with my Soul."

As the boat drifted nearer the dark trees, as the singing gradually increased in volume, I could no longer restrain my dark heart's shriek, and I knew I was choking. Then, I heard my wife's scream pierce the dark and I tumbled back to the nightmare five years past.

II. First Meeting with Magic Red

My wife screamed as our car slid into the blackish-red semi whose trailers blocked the narrow, two-lane mountain highway. Having somehow skidded out of control, the truck now lay across both lanes as I came shooting around the corner of the twisting mountain road.

My wife and I had been arguing all day. Oddly, I forget what set her off. Perhaps it was the fact that I had gotten in at three o'clock the night before. Or maybe I had forgotten to go get some butter and milk from the local convenience store. Perhaps I had taken too much Prozac again. Who the hell knows? I think she was high on crank again. Anyway, from morning until mid-afternoon, when we picked my daughter up from school, we had been fighting.

"You know, Harry," she began after lunch, as I sat in the great red chair in the family room watching the Cubs play, "you're a real piece o' shit, y'know that, you bastard, a real swinish mother-fucker."

"At least I'm no whore," I responded, keeping my eye on the set for fear of missing something valuable. "Who was it you were with last night? Tim? Mark? Jason? The family dog?"

At that she ran into the kitchen, picked up a carving knife, ran back into the family room and hurled it at me. She was definitely on something again, I decided. I ducked and laughed. "You worthless little bitch," I said, resuming my seat in my favorite chair. "Fuck you."

After we picked up Charlotte from school, warfare turned to silent, glaring hatred, and after a sullen, silent dinner of biscuits and gravy, I snapped. I knew my wife and daughter viewed me as the eternal flunky, punching out customers in the check-out line. Running to the bedroom, I opened my night stand, took out my gun (always loaded), and returned to the kitchen, where I demanded that my wife and daughter get into the car with me. I wasn't pointing the gun at anyone, just holding it to my side. The safety was still on.

"We're all goin' for a little drive into the mountains with daddy," I told them, smiling sardonically. I think they thought I was plotting their execution. Paranoia's a funny thing. I just wanted to teach them who's boss. I didn't want to kill anyone.

"We're not leaving this house," my wife responded, clinching her fists, standing her ground. My daughter leaned on the kitchen counter between us, her eyes frantic with fear; she had never seen her parents fight like this.

My wife's defiant attitude vanished instantly as I grabbed our darling daughter, got her in a choke hold, put the barrel of the gun to Charlotte's head and threatened to splatter the kid's brains all over the kitchen out if the two of them didn't do as I said.

"Look, honey," I said as lovingly as I could to my wife, "that would make one bloody, awful mess. Guests might object."

"We never have any guests, you big prick!" she snapped back, sobbing. "You drive them away."

"Get in the fuckin' car, you two, or the kid's just another fuckin' statistic." I was bluffing, but I was determined to win this round.

So we had climbed into the car, backed out of the driveway, and sped down Hacienda Boulevard towards the mountains, which began just five miles beyond the outskirts of town. When I reached the city limits, I floored the accelerator and quickly took the car up to 120 miles per hour. I liked speed, and so did my wife Caroline. It had made us crazy.

I held on to the gun. Not that I was afraid of either one of them. The fact is, I could overpower either one, or both together, in a matter of seconds. After all, in college, I had been a champion weight-lifter. But, if you've ever noticed, guns scare the living shit out of people. There's a world of difference between holding a clenched fist to someone's face and just standing back coolly pointing a firearm at an imaginary point between that person's eyes.

As I drove like a demoniac, my wife kept her head buried in her hands, weeping uncontrollably, hysterically, claiming she had never seen this side of me.

"Hey, hey, hey!!!" I protested, joyfully mimicking the cartoon voice of Yogi the Bear. "Enough of this shit. I've always been like this. You've just chosen to ignore me. For which you must pay a price, Booboo."

God, I had them going. My wife could probably imagine her darling Harry, now crazy as a jackrabbit, pulling off onto one of those little dirt mountain roads, stopping within a growth of trees, and telling her and Charlotte to get out with the words, "Daddy has a little surprise for you."

As I sped hell-bent-for-leather through the mountains, my daughter sat in the back seat, clutching her teddy bear, whining and sobbing, begging me to please forgive her and mommy and just let us all go home and start over.

"C'mon, Daddy, this is stupid," she cried. "Let's you, me, an' Mommy go back and watch something on TV. Isn't Homicide on tonight? This is Friday, right? We always watch Homicide on Friday night."

"I got two words for you, punkin'," I responded, feeling I was gaining control of the situation. "Fuck Homicide." I turned on the radio to the sound of Eddie Van Halen.

At that moment, to my eternal damnation, I could have shot the little bitch. I didn't know why I felt that way. Maybe it was the Prozac. Maybe she talked too much. I wished a seizure upon her. I could have shot both of them without blinking, but that wasn't the plan. I just wanted to scare the piss out of both of them so no one in the family would ever question me again.

You have to understand that I was not a total prick. Even as I drove at kill-speed through the black mountain mists, it occurred to me that this incident, this rage within me, was not their fault. I do have moments of occasional clear thought. Within the past two weeks, I had gotten laid off at work at Costco, my dog had died of food poisoning, my brother had begun his lawsuit to take his rightful share of our mother's estate back to him, and my daughter had had a series of seizures that had taken her to the ER at least twice. And the depression—attributed, my doctor said, to a chemical imbalance—had taken a tremendous toll. In this time of trial, no one from the church called; none of my friends from Costco called to ask how I was doing; at the store, my neighbors wouldn't look at us. We were about as important as the garbage stacked at the end of our street and, pondering humanity's indifference, I finally went over the edge.

Thus, now hurtling along the mountain road in excess of 80 miles per hour, I felt unafraid at the prospect of my own annihilation. I may have welcomed it. I didn't care what lay beyond the speed barrier: heaven, hell, maybe the Great Void, the negation of all being. I think I wanted to die in those moments and, in suicidal fashion, to the screams of my wife and daughter, I took the hairpin curves as fast as I could, several times leaving the road and nearly flying over the edge into the canyon below and once nearly colliding head-on with a red and black car in the other lane. I remember honking wildly and flipping off the stunned driver of the other vehicle, like it was his fault.

It was when we were rounding the last curve, actually coming down from the mountain and leaving the black mists, that I encountered the huge blackish-red two-rig truck pushed sideways, blocking both lanes. The driver had painted a name, "Magic Red," in bold green lettering on the driver's door. This was a purely ironic moment, for my wife's and daughter's punishment was now officially over.

Just as "Stairway to Heaven" began playing on the FM dial, I hit the brakes, but we didn't have time or space to stop. "Jesus Christ Almighty!" I remembered yelling. As the car went into the death skid, my wife began screaming "Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God," over and over and over; and Charlotte began crying, frantically, "Oh, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, please help us all. Please!!!"

At about 70 miles per hour, we hit the side of the second trailer head-on with such force that the top of our car was literally cut off. I remembered seeing my wife's head instantly severed from her body in a shower of bloody spray as a sheet of metal tore through the front windshield. Instantly trapped in the twisted metal of the wreckage, the bones of one leg pulverized, my daughter screamed hysterically. "Oh, God, oh, Daddy, oh, Mommy, I hurt, I hurt, I hurt!"

Covered with my own blood and the blood of my wife, I pushed open the door and threw myself on the ground. I had ducked in the front seat on the moment of impact. Although I sustained kidney damage, lost blood, and back strain, I lived.

Punishment for my indiscretion began right after the wreck, when I watched the rescue crew use torches and crow bars to pull the mangled, bloodied body of my daughter from the car. She had been dead for at least 30 minutes, they figured. Too, I waited in sickening agony while the police searched the brush on the side of the road until they found the head of the woman I had once loved.

III. Running from the Devil

For the next five years I lived in torment. Trying to escape my guilt, I left our home town, traveled the country and eventually the world. It didn't matter, however: Wherever I went, something always reminded me of my failure.

I recall sitting at a restaurant in Amsterdam, sipping coffee with a gorgeous redhead who did a live sex-on-the-stage performance in the famous red-light district. Sipping delicately, we were talking while watching ducks float down a muddy canal. Suddenly, I heard familiar voices and turned around to see them both, Caroline and Charlotte, dressed in ethereal flowing green-and-white gowns, standing together beneath a great oak tree in the park across the street. They couldn't have been more than 30 feet away, and I remember their eyes, an empty beautiful blue that looked right into my heart. They beckoned me with their arms, and part of me felt an intense desire to go to them. The other part felt damned to eternal suffering as I quickly turned away, leaned over, and began vomiting. When I finished, I looked up to find that the prostitute had gone. Relieved, actually, I got up, hurried back to the hotel, checked out, and took the plane to Madrid that evening.

One time in Toronto Red's, a nude bar in the darkest section of Toronto, I recall enjoying the evening with a tall girl with raven hair, a gorgeous creation with ruby-red lips and pierced nipples. She was sitting on my lap, her hand on my crotch, massaging me, when I glanced at the door. The two of them stood just inside the door, wearing black. Even through the darkness of the nightclub, I could see the deep cobalt blue of their eyes as they bored into me like earwigs burrowing into a cabbage leaf, and again I got sick. When I looked up, my raven girl was gone, my wife and daughter had vanished, and I paid my bill. Frightened by my ghostly pursuers, I rushed back to my room, packed my bags and left for Tahiti on a three-in-the-morning flight.

The most haunting incident occurred when I was driving to the Red Fish Cafe in Malibu. I recall passing an accident along the side of the road. At least seven patrol cars were there, their red-and-blues flashing furiously. There had been a major crash involving an automobile, a motorcycle, and a truck. At least four victims lay on the ground, their bodies covered by white cloth. I drove by very slowly. Two bodies, stripped of all clothing, had not been covered in the traditional white sheets that signify death. Soaked in blood, the first one was clearly my wife. Her eyes were open, her expression gray as she watched me pass without blinking. The second victim was Charlotte. When I slowly drove past, she picked her bloodied body up off the ground and walked towards me, arms extended. She was singing, but I didn't stay to listen. I put my foot to the floor, turning up the radio so that ZZ Top drowned out her song, jumping lanes, getting the hell out of there.

IV. Magic Red's Bar & Grill

So now here I was, wet and shivering, standing on a boat that was drifting toward a forest. Head pounding, I forced myself to recall the incidents of the past two days. Suddenly, I remembered the painting I had seen over the fireplace at Magic Red's the evening before.

I had spent two days fishing alone in the mountains just north of the Idaho-Nevada border. I had had a great day of it. After six hours on the second day, after catching triple my limit and gutting and cleaning my trout, I returned to my car, which was parked along the road about 100 yards down the trail, and headed back to my motel, 100 miles to the south.

By seven in the evening, I'd driven about 50 miles when I sighted a little brown wooden shack standing on the side of the road. Over the shack, Magic Red's Bar & Grill, the owner had erected a red, pulsating neon side that said "Good Eats and Gas." A Texaco station was sitting right next door.

I didn't like the looks of the place. There were no cars in the parking lot and the shutters, beaten by incessant desert winds, hung from the windows, which were covered in 1950s-style screens. However, when I drove into the parking lot, I noticed the door was open and heard music. It was the hypnotic sound of Eddy Van Halen. I loved Eddy Van Halen.

I pulled into a space out front of the restaurant, got out and stretched. I could actually smell food cooking. Roast beef—or roast beast, as the good Dr. Seuss used to say. This was definitely the place to go to eat.

Smelling of fish guts and blood, I walked through the entrance. For an instant I couldn't see a thing. It was as if I'd walked into a cave so pitch black that I couldn't see the hand in front of my face. I stood there, waiting for my vision to adjust. Then, in a high, thin, hissing voice from somewhere in front of me, I heard, "Well, well, well, may I help you, my good sir?"

I couldn't see the speaker in the darkness, but I felt I knew him intimately, a companion of my soul. Then I heard laughter and conversation coming from somewhere behind the voice. For an instant, I hesitated. But I was hungry enough to eat my fish raw. So I responded: "Sure, you can help me. I'm a hungry fisherman and need some good eats."

I had said the magic word. Instantly, the place exploded with darkly reddish light. Looking around the room, I saw that each table had a candle; overhead, from the high ceiling, hung a dimmed but very elaborate crystal chandelier. The place was packed, men and women eating dinner, drinking burgundy wine, conversing.

Just over the huge blazing fireplace five feet to my right, facing me, hung an enormous painting titled "Execution at Black Mist Lake." It pictured a still lake of dark blue waters over which a dark mist hung. The most curious detail was the red boat, the curious words "Der Cigam" painted in bright green on the side. I saw no one aboard the boat.

The more I studied the picture, the more the images took on a life of their own. It was like peering into another dimension, another world. Thus, through the mist, if I searched long enough, I could make out an island of evergreen trees whose branches swayed with the wind. And through the trees, as the eyes of my imagination wandered into the forest, I could see a flame actually flickering, probably an optical illusion created by the artist's mixture of particular colors. I looked for the execution.

As I studied the painting, Eddy Van Halen's "Runnin' With the Devil" building to a crescendo in the background, I noticed two figures materialize, a woman and an adolescent girl, both dressed in red and standing on the shores of the lake. I stepped closer, inches from the painting. The two figures were Caroline and Charlotte. Their red gowns billowed in the wind. They beckoned me, and I could smell the dampness of the lake, hear the water lapping again a boat, and feel the breeze through dark mists. My mind spun.

I tore my eyes and mind from the painting. I had to be hallucinating. Panicked, I looked back at the maitre'd or the owner or whatever he was—undoubtedly the infamous Magic Red. Then I quickly looked around the room, and realized the tables and guests had vanished, leaving only a bright green sofa. The place was dead silent. The man who had been the maitre'd, a small thin man with fiercely cold blue-gray eyes and reddish-black hair that came to the top of the forehead in a widow's peak, sat on the sofa, smiling serenely.

"Look at the picture again, young sir," said the man, this time in a sepulchral voice that went right through me like the tolling of an old church bell. "Why don't you look at the picture again? It won't hurt you, " the voice directed me.

Instantly, as if by some unseen force, my head was yanked back around so I was facing the picture.

As I watched the painting, I felt drawn into the entire scene: the boat gently bouncing on the slate-colored lake, the swirling black mists, the beckoning women. I couldn't resist the painting, which had a field of gravity all its own. I was pulled into the painter's world, now a powerful magnet.

When I heard the singing and felt myself floating, I just let myself go.

V. Magic Red Strikes Again

I awoke from my recollection with a start as the boat struck shore and abruptly halted. I stood for an instant, tightly gripping the rail, looking down the small beach that quickly disappeared from view. Moved by song, cold and wet, still smelling of fish guts and blood, I jumped from the boat's deck into water up to my hips and walked ashore. The singing continued from somewhere deep in the forest. I found a path and began walking in the direction of the song and the flame.

After what seemed like a half an hour, the singing stopped. I pressed forward, and as I did I heard a low male voice singing an old family favorite, "Bringing in the Sheaves." The voice sounded vaguely familiar. Perhaps it was my father, perhaps just an old friend. Whenever he stopped his singing, I heard a high-pitched grinding that grew louder as I moved toward the flame.

Suddenly I came to a clearing, a meadow ringed by tongues of fire, and in the middle of the meadow, 50 feet from me, I saw a huge man with stringy reddish-black hair, wearing a leather outfit of black and red, leaning over a wheel and holding a gigantic green sword. He was sharpening his blade. The whetstone and sword sang together as the man, about six and a half feet tall, put his weapon to it. Sparks flew as the giant glanced my way, lifted the blade from the stone, and continued working.

Before I had time to react, I felt someone grab my left arm and someone grab my right arm. Looking to both sides, I saw Charlotte on my left and Caroline on my right, each grasping an arm and carrying me forward.

"Welcome to Magic Red's," they said together. I struggled to get away. Their strength now was easily ten times my own. They had picked me up like a stick and held each arm in a vice-like grip. I couldn't have escaped if I had wanted to.

Dressed in diaphanous blood-red gowns, the two females escorted me toward the blade man. He was through sharpening and now faced me, one hand on his hip and the other holding the sword straight up so that I could see sun's rays dancing off steel.

My wife and daughter set me down about five feet from the man, who glowered at me through a face with an enormous black beard and mustache and shaggy eyebrows. His eyes were red and malevolent. Then he smiled.

"Now, Harry," he began, motioning with his head in the sword's direction, "this here is some kind of fuckin' blade, ain't it, whaddya think, son?" He held out the blade for me to see and touch, and then he leaned over so his face was inches from mine. He smelled of onions and roots. "Whaddya think, son," he mockingly whined again, "about my blade?" Then thrusting forward an enormous hairy paw for me to shake, he said, "By the way, people 'round here just call me Magic Red."

I gulped and shook the man's hand. Fear crushed my soul, and the sun went dark. "Uh, uh, uh,...." I timidly began, fingering the blade. "Yessiree, that's a beaut." That was all I could say as my voice trembled uncontrollably. I may have whimpered. My head spun, I felt light, and I thought I was going to pass out.

"Well, it is a beaut, as you say," intoned the old man in a voice of darkness. "Uh, Harry, you wouldn't wanna try it out, would ya?"

"What?" I choked as he pointed the tip of the blade at my right eye. The fire made it bright enough to see images of flame dancing on the blade.

"Because, son, we are going to try out this fuckin' blade right now," he laughed, looking up at the now dark sky; "we're gonna see how sharp it is, how deeply and quickly it cuts, on you, my gutless turnip."

"Paybacks," my wife said next to me, "are always a bitch. WHACK!!" Caroline made a chopping motion with her right hand.

I was led to the far side of the meadow where we stopped at an old trunk. I looked at the trunk's surface, saw blade tracks, noticed the trunk was covered with dried blackened blood. The gutted, rotting carcass of a large gray squirrel lay on the ground next to the trunk.

Terrified, I allowed my wife and daughter to lead me forward. When we reached the trunk, they pushed me to my knees , and before I could ask them to consider this situation in the pure light of reason, my daughter grabbed me hard by my long stringy black hair and forced my head onto the chopping block. As she held my head, my wife pushed my hair off my neck and pulled my shirt down to give the blade man a clean and visible target.

I was panicked, numbed. I defecated in my pants. My breathing stopped altogether; I couldn't force myself to draw a breath. My mind went blank, a white slate inside my head, and I couldn't think. The ice-cold claw of terror reached from the depths of my soul, grabbed my throat, choked me, and suffused me with electric panic.

Glancing up out of the side of my eyes (I couldn't move), I saw the red and green executioner raise his sword over his head. As he paused, I noticed he was suddenly smaller, saw that his reddish-black hair met on his forehead in a widow's peak, that his eyes were a fierce blue-gray, and I knew the blade man and the hotel maitre'd were both Magic Red.

"Hush, sweet papa," whispered Charlotte in a slightly sweet, demonic voice, "and don't you cry." She mocked me, and leaning over she placed a kiss on my cheek. I became aware that I was sobbing.

"Goodbye, my tender love," said my wife, expressionless, leaning down and putting her death-cold lips against mine. "Daddy's gonna sing you a lullaby." Apparently, daddy was the blade man.

As they held me in place, I emitted a series of animal screams, sounds of a pig who realizes it's going to be slaughtered, and tried to squirm my way free. God have mercy, I prayed frantically to myself. I looked up, flames dancing around me like a true vision of the pit. The blade hung suspended in the sky, golden-red firelight magically bouncing off it, for more than an hour, for a lifetime, it seemed. Do it, please, oh my sweet Jesus, hurry and do it, I recall thinking to myself. Just get it the hell over with. Get it over with. Please, God. Please. Please. I thought of my daughter crying to me, trapped in the metal coffin of our car. I saw my wife's beheading. I remembered the truck on the mountain highway, the red boat on the lake, Toronto Red's nude bar, Magic Red's Bar and Grill—it all came together for me. I heard Eddie Van Halen again. The truth was clear: This beheading was what the past five or six years of my life had been about.

My efforts became savage. I screamed and screamed and, tearing temporarily from my daughter's grip, pounded my head bloody on the trunk. My wife and daughter simply tightened their grips and held my sweating, bleeding head in place. I continued to scream; I became the scream.

With sudden, thrashing swiftness, the blade rushed through space. I felt a sharp, crushing pain on my neck, heard the butcher's blade squishing and grinding through bone and meat, felt a thousand hot knives pass through me, and I knew the darkness of eternal night was rushing toward me.

The world grew hushed and darker. I was floating.

In the steadily waning light of diminishing flames, I saw my wife smile at my daughter as they stood over my headless corpse, which gushed a fountain of blood. Then, alongside Magic Red, they walked into the darkening forest, the limbs of the trees singing death in the chilling breeze.

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