Vision Quest

by Terry Davis

  IV

  It’s dinnertime at the hotel and Elmo, the cook, asks me what it will be. I tell him a wheat-germ burger. Lean beef mixed with wheat germ. He keeps a couple in the fridge for me.

  Elmo is a big fan of the semipro football team I played a little for this fall. He thinks I’m crazy to lose all this weight just to get my body thrashed. He wants to see me play college ball, then go to the pros. There’s no way. I even got beat up playing my one season of high school ball. I tell him he’s the crazy one. “Those guys are creatures,” I say. “They’ll peel me and eat me!”

  The Spokes picked me up as a flanker. I’m pretty fast and I catch the ball. I’m not crazy about getting hit, though. They paid me twenty bucks a game. I was making pretty good money working five nights a week at the hotel and playing ball on Sundays. Otto played, too, but much more seriously than I did. Otto is a real football player. Football’s what will get him through college, and unless he gets hurt or something, he’ll go with the pros for sure.

  Tanneran played guard and Leeland Wain, the David Thompson varsity football coach, played quarterback. I’m pretty good friends with both Gene and Leeland, considering our age differences.

  I had to go out to Rollie’s Ribs after the game to pick up the extra tens this gambler friend of Elmo’s gave me for each score. Now that it’s legal to drink on Sundays, Rollie’s really blasts after the games. One night some other friend of Elmo’s was drinking or doping or both and decided I was white-assed and chickenshit and that he was going to cut me up and feed me to Rollie’s Afghan hound. I thought he described me pretty well and wasn’t about to argue. When he started after me with the world’s biggest pocketknife, all I could do was stand open-mouthed and greasy-handed. Stuff like that scares me even in the movies and it was twice as scary in real life, especially coming so fast out of a situation where everything had been peaceful and fun. Leeland got up to stop the guy and the guy took a swipe at him. Then Elmo got up and the guy took a swipe at him. Then Tanneran picked up one of those round-bottomed wine bottles they use for candle holders and coldcocked the guy. It wasn’t funny. The bottle broke and the guy went down like he was dead. Gene went back to his ribs and Elmo dragged the guy outside. I was grateful to Gene, but since then I’ve been a little afraid of him. He got so mean so fast, and then he was so normal again. I still like the guy a lot and I admire him, but I’m not too anxious to talk to him about Carla.

  Elmo says, “You are my mainest man.”

  The dinner orders have started to come in. Sally, the cashier, hands me the slips. Number 611 is on top. Crab Newburg, tea, lemon pie. He’s still here. I give the slips to Elmo and he hands me my solitary burger.

  I have no control—it’s gone in two bites. Christ, I’m hungry! I fight it with a book of fiction.

  I read quite a bit. This may be why I’ve done pretty well in school so far. There may be a correlation between reading a lot and appearing to know things. Downstairs in the employees’ bathroom, along with my secondhand copy of Gray’s Anatomy, I’ve stashed The Confessions of Nat Turner. At home in the downstairs bathroom I keep Pathology, a gigantic book by a physician named Robbins. When I’m tired of reading it I balance it on my head to strengthen my neck. Upstairs at home I keep Upjohn’s Manual on Nutrition. I don’t use the upstairs bathroom that much, and I’ll go with Adelle Davis on the subject of nutrition, at least until I’m something other than a layman in the field.

  Next to messing around in the woods up along the Columbia where Dad grew up, I’d have to say that learning about the human body is the thing that interests me most. Next comes the human mind, I guess, or the human heart—whatever it is that makes us act the way we do. I love reading and watching movies and talking with my friends, even standing with a tray of dirty dishes and eavesdropping on the guests at the hotel, gossiping over their dessert. Wrestling combines these things for me.

  After I first thought seriously about a profession I decided I’d become an exobiologist. I was going to be one right up until the start of this season. Since I’d decided to try to come down a weight class and give Shute a go, I thought I’d consult a specialist about my chances of losing twenty-nine pounds while still retaining enough strength to shake hands before Shute osterized my body. So I made an appointment with a nutritionist. His office was in a huge old house on the Southside near where Mom’s naturopath had had his clinic. An old Mercedes 190 SL sat halfway in the garage. I couldn’t tell what year it was. If it was the doctor’s, he sure had good taste in autos. If the guy did his own decorating, he also had good taste in furnishings. The place was paneled in brown leather, carpeted wall to wall in a dark wine color, and filled with black crushed-leather chairs and davenports. It was also filled with some very svelte ladies and a few hog bodies. I was the only guy. I was surprised when I got to see him—he looked like a regular young doctor. He asked what it was he could do for me. “Consultation,” I said. He looked at me as though I’d called him a chiropractor. He said he didn’t hand out pills. I told him I didn’t take pills, except vitamins. He thought I was after some speed. I told him how much weight I needed to lose, the length of time I had to lose it, and why. I explained that I thought I could do it if I kept to one thousand calories a day and kept my nitrogen balance positive. I described my workout and my diet, relating the luck I’d had in the past with vitamins E and B12. He grimaced when I mentioned Adelle Davis. Before I could ask his opinion he was up and out the door. I sneaked a look at the chart he’d written up on me. After my name it said, “Hippie health nut; hard drug symptoms.” I’d put it down and was puzzling over some possible “hard drug symptoms” when he came back with a vial of Gaudium and told me to eat, even if I wasn’t hungry. Then he walked into the next examining room, where reclined the sveltest of the svelte. I was so stunned I missed what was surely a terrific shot at her pudenda. Driving home, I regained my composure enough to be pissed off. I gave the capsules to Otto. He loves that shit. Pops those things like Life Savers and still he eats like a catfish.

  I’d figured I would hit it off with a nutritionist, that I’d develop some rapport and go back to him for the two physicals I’d need for the season. You have to get one before the first league match, and then you have to get another one if you plan to drop down a weight when the classes come up.

  Dad’s doctor is a myopic old fart who laughs like hell at me anytime I use a medical term or ask a medical question. He makes me feel about as intelligent as a grapefruit. But he set Mom straight as an arrow, so I don’t mind going to him instead of a nutritionist. I don’t know the extent to which he relies on God’s healing powers. Lucky for me I went to see him. He had this medical student with him from some place in Ohio, doing what they call a “preceptorship,” which is a brief practical introduction to the kind of medicine you intend to practice. You live with the doctor and see what it’s really like to be one.

  The medical student’s name was Max Mokeskey. Max was doing his preceptorship in Spokane so he could hike in the mountains and fish in the lakes and streams and hunt birds in the Palouse. I liked him. He laughed at me and told me I was full of shit and that I’d surely die if I tried to hit 147. I told him I’d already come down from 176 to the 155 I weighed then. That impressed him. We talked for a couple hours. Old Dr. Livengood wanted him to get to know patients. He said that was the essence of a successful family practice. We talked about my plans and his plans and about hiking and fishing and hunting birds. While we talked I got my physical and was informed I have a roving testicle. Max called my exobiology idea bullshit. He said few specialists in any field of medicine have time to do anything but read their journals and be present at the auditing of their taxes. He said family practice gives you at least a little time to yourself and a chance to have relationships with your patients as people instead of just diseases. He also said there were few trout streams out in space, where exobiology will be practiced when I finish med school. He didn’t actually convince me, but he sure was a lot better example of a
physician than that nutritionist.

  I don’t know what kind of doctor I want to be. For now I’ve got to be a teratologist and study that monster Shute.

  Whatever kind of doctor I become, I hope I always make time to read and see movies and talk about them with my friends. I hope I meet people in college who like to do this. When I get home tonight I’ll proofread a paper I wrote on The Water-Method Man, a novel by John Irving, who is a former wrestler. The paper is for a course I’m taking by mail from Eastern Washington State College. I wrote my last one on Don Delillo’s End Zone. I got a B. The instructor wrote that my approach was too personal and that I misunderstood the book. He said it was a metaphor, not about football at all. Beats me what it would be a metaphor for. Carla thought it was about how living with the bomb fucks us up. I still think it was about football.

  I’m almost a college sophomore in terms of credits. I hope to be one by the time I graduate. They don’t let you take premed courses by mail, so I’m getting some other basic stuff out of the way. I finished my high school biology, chemistry, physics, and calculus last year. Each morning during my two study halls, if I don’t go for a workout, I read Dr. Ralph Besson’s Obstetrics and Gynecology. So far I only understand the conjunctions. Dr. Besson is down at the University of Oregon, but I didn’t get to meet him when I was invited down there. About all I ever get to talk to when I’m invited to a college is the athletes and occasionally a sorority girl.

  I feel spacy now, light-headed. My hunger is out of control. I’m a little nervous to read anatomy, so I sit here on the employees’ toilet with a good story. I’m just to the part in Styron where Nat is given to the Reverend Eppes, who, as Styron says, “gropes malodorously” after Nat’s “virgin bum.”

  * * *

  Elmo has the order ready. I take it on a cart rather than a tray, thinking I want to have my hands free.

  The guy is nude again, I know. I can hear the shower running.

  He is. He stands shivering and toweling, his stubby cock flapping. I push the cart past him, in front of the mirror.

  In the mirror I see him come up behind me. He’s a round man. Young, maybe thirty, but getting bald. He’s hairy as hell—like me. He takes care of himself, and that’s not easy for an endomorph.

  I see myself staring at him. He’s smiling. His cock cranks up. He drops the towel at my feet. I’m sweating, and I don’t sweat much anymore. My hands shake on the edge of the cart. Softly he knocks me into it. The dishes clank. The tea spills a little. The lemon pie quakes. He’s shorter than I am, almost resting his head on my shoulder. He brings his hands around and cups my cock. He sighs. His head rests on my shoulder.

  “Would you like me to blow you?” he asks.

  I look in the mirror. I look scared and he sees it. But I’m not scared of him. I breathe deep. We sometimes get four thousand people in our gym for a match. I hear them roar, chant for a takedown, a reversal, a pin. I breathe deep again and stop shaking. If I ever experiment with this stuff, it won’t be now.

  “No, thanks,” I reply.

  He backs off, looking at me in the mirror.

  “Don’t be nervous,” he says. “Would you like to look at some pictures?”

  “No, thanks,” I say at the door.

  I do a hundred pushups before the elevator reaches six.

  V

  I leave my white shirt and black slacks in my hotel locker, stuff my school clothes into my packsack, and run home in my rubber sweat suit. I look pretty weird running down Riverside. But it’s eleven thirty, so downtown Spokane is pretty deserted. Fridays and Saturdays you can’t get across the street for all the kids cruising. I run down alleys on Fridays and Saturdays.

  Up on the Northside a two-cycle bike blows by me, wound tight. It must be Kuch!

  This is mid-December. The streets sparkle. The moon is cold. Nobody rides in December in Spokane.

  Whoever it is brakes and goes down, sliding a half-circle, ramming the snowbank at the curb.

  It is Kuch! I know his fall. We haul his bikes to the races in Dad’s truck when Kuch’s dad has to work. Kuch is good. No shit. He’s already an AMA Junior, and I bet he makes Expert next year. He’s mainly a motocross rider. He spends all his money on his racers. He’s got two 360 Yamahas—one for motocross and one for flat track and TT. I don’t know what Kuch would do if he had a choice between living his life over as an Indian in the early 1800s or becoming a world-class motocross rider.

  “I came down to the hotel to see you,” he says, looking up at me.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “Sure,” he says. “You kicked the holy living shit out of me today,” he says, getting up.

  “I’m bigger than you are,” I say.

  “You’ll murder Shute,” says Kuch. “You’ll pound up on him.”

  Kuch knows plenty about Gary Shute. Shute’s been the only guy to pin him in the past two years. Shute pinned him six times. Twice in duel meets, twice at district, and twice in the state tournament. In this case, however, Kuch’s perspective may be clouded. He’s my friend.

  “Tell my dad,” I say. “He’s already taking contributions for the Louden Swain memorial fund.”

  “You and your dad are both nuts,” Kuch says.

  Kuch rides slow while I run. “How many miles you do a day?” he asks.

  “Three,” I reply. “Not enough.”

  “Were you really trying to pin me in the second round?”

  “Busting my ass. Do you realize how tough that sonofabitch Shute has become since last year?” I rave. “He carried his dad’s console TV up and down the stadium steps a hundred times—running! He’ll kill me and drag my body around school behind his fucking Camaro. He’ll ravage Carla. He’ll throw our guppies off the water tower. Three miles ain’t enough.”

  “I hate the fucking Iliad,” Kuch says. Beyond motorcycles and American Indians, Kuch’s interests are pretty limited.

  “He’s worried about you,” Kuch says when we hit the park. “Laurie works with his girlfriend’s cousin. She says Shute’s given up fucking.”

  “The guy has no soul,” I puff. “I’m glad I didn’t play school football this year. He would have collapsed my lungs, ruptured my spleen, wailed on my mailbox.” Shute is a high school all-American in football and wrestling.

  “Oh, bullshit,” my friend says.

  “You got time to do a couple miles with me?” I ask as we hit the track.

  “Sure,” Kuch says, speeding up.

  After the first mile I realize I’m carrying the packsack. I fling it somewhere.

  Kuch is riding beside me. “You sure that wasn’t a portable TV?” he asks.

  “Console,” I spit. I’m beat. I begin to lengthen my strides. I suck the air in, count, then blow it out. I puff like an old steam barge. I go loose of mind and body and marvel at the clouds of vapor I emit. Through the pines there must be stars up there somewhere. I think of Dad’s stories about before Grand Coulee Dam, about when the Columbia was still a river, and about how the Colvilles camped at Kettle Falls and speared and netted the salmon and dried them close enough to where Dad lived that he could hear the flies buzzing around them as they dried. I see an old steam barge I’ve only seen in books go steaming up the Spokane, log booms flowing behind like the tail of a peacock. I see Puget Sound. Seattle long before the Space Needle. The lumber schooners docked at Port Blakely, once the biggest mill in the world. I see Shute steaming up the stadium steps with a console TV on his back.

  “Don’t lie down,” Kuch whispers. Snowflakes fall in wonderful cold explosions on my closed eyes. “Christ, you’ll catch a cold.”

  I grab the packsack he hands me. It’s like lifting the DeSoto. My head stops strobing by the time we reach our side of the park. I look back at David Thompson Park, thinking most of my life has revolved around this grass, these ball fields, pools, courts, slides, swings, schools. Kuch walks his bike.

  “I’ll run with you,” he says. “You do your three miles in the morning and we’ll
do two more after practice.”

  “Gotta be to work by five thirty,” I say.

  “I forgot,” he says. “After work then. I’ll catch you on the way home.”

  “Right on!” I shout. “You my mainest man!”

  VI

  Dad is asleep, with his little Sony portable still showing sports news. I turn it off. I turn off his light.

  “Night, Son.” Dad wheezes.

  “Night, Dad,” I whisper.

  * * *

  Carla is listening to her Johann Pachelbel record and studying for her child development test. She takes that and senior English and contemporary world problems at David Thompson. All she needs for her diploma is the English.

  I strip off my sweatshirt and throw it into the laundry room. It sticks to the wall. I do sweat still, if I work hard enough. I pull off my boots and step onto the scales—147. Jesus! I walk in to tell Carla, but she grabs me before I can speak. I smell incredibly bad, but we waltz through her favorite band on the Pachelbel. It fractures me that this music is almost three hundred years old.

  “What do you weigh?” she asks.

  “Forty-seven,” I reply proudly.

  “Wow!” Carla smiles. “Want me to fix you a treat?”

  “Let’s have yogurt and pineapple for breakfast,” I suggest.

  * * *

  I feel her lips on my abdomen. I curse the remaining adipose tissue lurking in the subcutaneous layers. There can’t be much. I flex the muscles of my rectus abdominis. “Narcissus,” Carla whispers.

  * * *

  I’m dreaming, but I’m not asleep. Contrary to popular belief, if you’re in really great shape you don’t need much sleep. I’m so hyper in mind and body, so psyched, I don’t feel like sleeping. I lie here and think about Shute, about Mom and Dad, about Carla, and about the short time I’ve got left to be a kid. And finally I drift into a reverie about the river, about the first time I saw it.