After the fight, the brothers laugh it off, drink beer, and toss bottles into the water until Lyman asks, "You want to go on back?" He suggests he and Henry might "snag" some "Kashpaw girls." Henry says no, because those girls are "crazy." Lyman rejoinders that they themselves are "Crazy Lamartine boys!" Henry breaks into jesting dance, then says, "Got to cool me off!" and runs to the river. He jumps into the dangerous, high river, which contains boards and a strong current. It's also "getting dark." Lyman loses sight of Henry until he reemerges "halfway across the river," dragged out by the current: "I know he didn't swim there but the current took him out." Lyman then hears Henry's voice saying his boots are filling with river water that will pull him underwater. Lyman goes in to save him. Then Lyman pulls himself out of the river, and he is alone; "the sun is down." He walks back to the car, turns on its lights, puts it in gear, gets out, and lets it roll—on its own lighted search for Henry—into the river.
The headlights reach in as they go down, searching, still lighted even after the water swirls over the back end. I wait. The wires short out. It is all finally dark. And then there is only the water, the sound of it going and running and going and running and running.
What happens after Lyman and Henry fight at the side of the swollen, springtime-flooded Red River is both clear and ambiguous. The boys' actions are clear, but the reasons for Henry's actions are ambiguous because of his psychologically disturbed state of being, which is engendered by the trauma of the Vietnam War.
We know they fight over whether or not Henry will accept ownership of the car. Henry believes he has already given the red convertible to Lyman:
[W]hen [Henry] left he said, "Now [the car's] yours," and threw me his key.
"Thanks for the extra key," I'd said. "I'll put it up in your drawer just in case I need it."
While Henry was gone, Lyman never accepted full ownership of the red convertible: "In those years I'd put his car into almost perfect shape. I always thought of it as his car while he was gone. . . [I]t was in tip-top condition and ready [for him] to drive." The fight they have is because each brother wants the other to have their most prized possession: the red convertible.
We know that Henry plunges into the dangerous riverunder the guise of cooling off, but we also know Lyman sees Henry's mood change from the sudden laughter and relaxed good fun to his darker mood: "I can tell his mood is turning again." What we don't know is whether Henry plans to leave his overburdening struggle of suffering behind in the river or if the release of his cares in the surging current is the accidental result of a mind in troubled turmoil: Did he not think clearly or did he think deliberately? The one clue we have to what happens psychologically after the fight is that, when Henry says, "My boots are filling," Lyman detects only a normal voice:
He says this in a normal vice, like he just noticed and he doesn't know what to think of it.
The fact that Lyman perceives a normal tone of voice with a wondering sort of quality to it ("he doesn't know what to think of it"), suggests the ultimate thing that happens after the fight is that Henry, with a distressed mind and having had too much beer to drink, does the unthinkable. He accidentally hurls himself, with his boots on, into a life-threatening river (he would know better having grown up where he did) that is littered with wintertime debris, has a strong current, and is about to surge with inner turmoil and flood its banks (a river symbolic of Henry himself). The final event that happens after the fight is that Lyman settles the fight] about which brother should own their prized convertible in Henry's favor. The red convertible belongs to Henry and symbolically ends its life ("large as life. . . as if it was alive") in search of Henry's life: "The headlights reach in as they go down, searching."
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