Vision Quest

by Terry Davis

  I’m just a little kid—a fat little Cub Scout—and Mom and Dad and I are driving north on 395 toward Colville. Dad was selling Fords then and we’re in a Thunderbird. Mom’s got her heating pad plugged into the cigarette lighter. She says she’s really feeling pretty good and that she’s glad she decided to come to the picnic. I’m in back with my face in the blast from the air conditioner.

  A new turbine is being put in Grand Coulee Dam, so they’ve had to let a lot of water out of Lake Roosevelt. The water is so low that my great-grandfather’s old homestead and a lot of other people’s old homesteads are uncovered for the first time since 1941, when the Columbia was dammed and renamed. There’s going to be a big picnic and fireworks. I’m kind of excited to get to see the place where my dad was a kid, but shooting my .22 and eating a lot of great pie and cake and ice cream and seeing the fireworks are what I’m really looking forward to.

  We pass through Colville and the little town of New Kettle Falls and turn onto a dirt road that goes down to the river. It’s hot and dry as hell. Dust rolls thick from two pickups ahead of us, and Mom comments on her thankfulness for the air conditioner. We stop on the hillside before going down to the river. It’s a beautiful view.

  But this landscape is totally new to me and I’m blown away by what I see. Lake Roosevelt has always been at least a half-mile wide here. But now that it’s gone back to being the Columbia River it’s about a block wide. A little shit like me could fling a rock across it.

  “There’s Kettle Falls,” Dad says to me, pointing south toward the bridge.

  I turn and see where the river drops over a cliff onto a rocky bed. Most of the water falls onto a big boulder that looks like a bowl.

  “See that big rock that looks like a kettle?” Dad asks, pointing to the rock that’s catching all the water. “That’s why the Indians called it Kettle Falls. They used to stand on those big rocks there to the side and spear and net salmon.”

  I am one astonished little kid. I’d been over the bridge and looked down at that exact spot probably fifty times, but none of this had ever been there. At least I couldn’t see it.

  All the Swains except Grandpa Harry are sitting around my great-uncle Walker’s old Chevy pickup. My great-aunt Lola is there with a giant lunch. She says she’s saving it until after we take a walk upriver to see the old place. She’s waiting for Grandpa Harry to show up. She calls him “brother.” She gives me a chicken leg because I’m a kid. My four cousins are a lot older. The two girls are in their teens, and they put lunch on the picnic table. The two guys are out of school and logging. They sit on the fenders of the pickup and drink beer. My dad didn’t get married until he was pretty old. He’s the oldest of his generation and I’m the only kid left in mind.

  Aunt Lola says to Dad that Grandpa Harry has been drinking again. She says she’s worried about him. My uncle Bert says Grandpa’s been boozing hard. He calls him “Dad.” My dad says he’ll drive up to Grandpa’s cabin if he doesn’t show up soon. I hear this clearly from my seat on the bumper of the pickup in the circle of people.

  After a while Dad says we might as well walk up to look at the old place. He puts his hand on my shoulder. Mom says she’d better not walk, and the other folks want to wait till the cool of the evening. So my great-aunt, my uncle, and Dad and I walk along the river in the wet sand.

  Around a bend, where Lake Roosevelt is normally over a mile wide, the river bends away from us and flows in a narrow channel, leaving a broad mudflat black and shiny as coal. It must have been great farmland. An old jeep is mired up to its fenders in the mud.

  “That’s Dad’s jeep,” Uncle Bert says.

  We all walk out to where the mud gets over our shoes. I see the stone foundation of buildings, fence posts dripping rusty barbed wire, a rusted-through water trough sticking out of the mud. My grandfather is walking through where one of the buildings used to be. He’s talking, but I can’t make out what he’s saying.

  Dad and Uncle Bert walk out through the mud. Lola points out the foundation of the house where she and Grandpa Harry were born. She says my dad and both my uncles and my aunt were born there too. She shows me where the barn was and the baking kitchen and the outhouse. Dad and Bert and Grandpa are standing where the cemetery was. It had three graves, Lola says: my other uncle, whose .22 is mine and kept for me by Grandpa Harry, and my great-grandmother and great-grandfather. They were moved to the New Kettle Falls cemetery before the water rose.

  Dad and Uncle Bert come back and tell her that Grandpa is all right. They stay with me while she walks out through the mud. They act strange. Dad turns me around and points up on the forested hill to a bare spot where they used to go sledding in winter. Uncle Bert points way up near the top of the mountain to where his dead brother, Bobby, shot his first deer.

  I turn and see my great-aunt holding my grandfather and patting his head like he’s a little kid. Soft-hued in their cotton and flannel, fat good old people, they stand in my memory, clinging and shaking, sinking imperceptibly into the mud of Lake Roosevelt.

  Sometimes this experience comes back to me in reverie and sometimes it comes back as a real dream. It’s changed a lot since the night of the picnic when I first dreamed it and when it got stuck maybe forever in my memory. I guess it’s become what I need it to be rather than what it really was. I don’t even remember exactly how the day went anymore.

  I do remember that Grandpa Harry was very quiet when he came to eat with us after they winched his jeep out of the mud, and that in the evening he took me across the river and up on the mountain to his cabin to shoot the .22, and that we watched the fireworks from his porch until Dad and Mom came to take me home.

  Grandpa Harry’s in a lot better spirits these days. He had just retired from logging then and I guess he couldn’t handle that change in his life. The guy gets better as he gets older. And the less he drinks.

  Even though it’s a sad memory and has the power to depress me bad sometimes, I still like remembering it. It’s the only look I’ve ever gotten into my family history. Beyond my great-grandparents on Dad’s side who came to the Columbia from Oklahoma Territory, I don’t know anything about my family. I ask, but nobody seems to know where anybody came from.

  I’m looking into the darkness and feeling Carla incredibly warm beside me. It’s very quiet. I think about that day on the river and wonder what was really said and thought out there in the middle of all that mud.

  It’s five thirty and time to “rise and shine,” as Dad says when he can get up before I do. I feel good and ready to get moving. There’s plenty to do. I’ve got to hide in the shrubs and scare Damon Thuringer’s little brother, who delivers our paper, and I’ve got to run my three miles.

  VII

  “We may have a guest for breakfast one of these mornings,” Dad forewarns us from the door on his way to work.

  “Hmmmm?” I look over at Carla.

  “Hmmmm?” She looks back.

  For the past few weeks Dad has been staying out pretty late on nights off. Except Monday. On Mondays we watch pro football on TV.

  We woke up to lots of snow. I couldn’t scare little Thuringer this morning. I knew he’d see my tracks wherever I hid. We sit at the kitchen table and I mention to Carla that we’d better wax the DeSoto tonight. They’ll be salting the roads.

  “What do you mean ‘we’?” she asks. “Have you got an oozling in your pocket?”

  An oozling? I think to myself. What the hell’s an oozling? Carla is forever making up animals. The oozling is a new one.

  “Okay,” I say indignantly. “I’ll wax it myself.”

  “I’ll wax the DeSoto,” Carla says. “I was teasing. You’ve got to work, you’ve got to run, you’ve got to study, and you’ve got to sleep. I’ll wax the DeSoto,” she says. “And you’ve got to make love to me. You said it burns up two hundred calories.”

  “It’s the truth,” I say.

  “How do you like my new animal?” She beams.

  “Fine,” I reply.
“An oozling sounds like a nice animal.”

  Before we leave I fetch the space heater from the upstairs closet and carry it out to the garage so Carla won’t have to look for it tonight.

  On the way to school I promise we’ll take a picnic out to Seven Mile to see the deer.

  * * *

  Carla didn’t take to me right away. She did, however, take to Austin Tower, a Spokane Community College basketball player from New York.

  She got a job right off at the New Pioneer, a health food store downtown. That’s how she met Belle, who was her first Spokane girl friend. They soon arranged things so they could work the same hours.

  Although I prefer the night shift so I can prowl around after work, sometimes in summer I get stuck on days. Some days I’d look out a Main Avenue window after I’d delivered somebody’s lunch and see Carla’s blue hat with the white polka dots bouncing down the street, her long rusty hair frizzing in curls beneath it like a bizarre noontime sunset.

  In late July a higher hat joined her. It was brown leather and floppy-brimmed and belonged to Austin Tower.

  Carla and I talked very little last summer. I think she took me for an archgoon. God knows I have my goonish aspects. I’m not what any truly discerning female would consider good-looking either. I wear my hair pretty short now, so I’m in trouble in the plumage department. I tried growing it long for two years. It grew straight out on the sides and curly on top. My head looked like a floral model of a geodesic dome. My junior year in physics the kids called me “Bucky Head.” I retain my pissy-assed little mustache. A guy as generally hairy as I am should be able to grow hair on his upper lip, but I can’t. I covet Kuch’s hair—ponytailed or braided.

  Anyway, Carla and I didn’t talk very much back then. She was not impressed with my trophies when I took her down to the basement to show her where she’d be staying.

  For a while I thought she had tried to gross me out. She took off her clothes, turned on the shower, and started in. She had a nice body, but she seemed awfully top-heavy and she had stretch marks low on her stomach. Otto has them on his back and shoulders. Then she turned from the shower and sat down on the toilet and peed. I stood open-mouthed. I do that a lot. I’m a pretty fun person to surprise. When she reached for the toilet paper, I split for the other room. All the time she acted like I wasn’t even there.

  She was unobtrusive through Mom’s leaving. I think she spent those three days and nights at the New Pioneer.

  I finally decided she really probably hadn’t tried to gross me out. I don’t think she ever did anything to purposely offend anyone, including me. She worked like crazy keeping the basement clean; she split the dishwashing with me and cooked when Mom went out of town. She even bought food after she got her job. After her first words down at Dad’s old store—“Fuck you guys!”—Carla turned out to be pretty gracious. I felt a real gentleness all around her.

  Carla had one record and two prints with her when she came. She played the record low and often. It’s a classical record by Johann Pachelbel. Her favorite band on it is “Canon in D Major.” It’s a simple tune played by three violins and a continuo, whatever in hell that is. The prints are by a French painter named Henri Rousseau and are very colorful and have monkey faces peeking through a jungle inhabited by soft, naked women and creatures I’m not able to identify. Maybe they’re oozlings.

  Several times Carla told Dad she’d worn out her welcome and each time Dad told her she hadn’t. He even lent her the money for a minor operation she had to have. It was a hemorrhoid operation, which I thought was pretty strange for a young girl. But since then I’ve read that people of any age can have hemorrhoids.

  After reading in Pathology about some different types of hemorrhoids and “striae,” which are stretch marks, I began to wonder if maybe Carla hadn’t been pregnant. So then I read about the effects of pregnancy in Obstetrics and Gynecology and was pretty sure she had.

  It seems that carrying a baby can stretch a woman’s muscles so far they can lose their tonicity. That’s one of the causes of stretch marks. And in a way it seems to be the same with the veins in the anal cavity that become hemorrhoids. When a mother is giving birth there’s so much blood being pumped around and so much pressure being exerted that the veins get stretched so far they can’t regain their shape. The tissue bursts through the mucous membrane lining the anal canal and hangs around being a hemorrhoid.

  I figured if Carla could pee in front of me, I could ask her if she’d been pregnant. So I did.

  “Did Dad tell you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “I just thought from your stretch marks that maybe you had been.”

  “I was,” Carla said.

  I didn’t know what to say then.

  “My baby died,” she said. “I don’t believe in God, but I think it was a blessing.”

  “That’s good,” I said, with incredible thoughtlessness. “I mean, I’m sorry it had to be a good thing.” Then I shut up fast.

  “My milk’s almost gone,” Carla said. “I had to milk myself for a while.”

  “Milk yourself?” I’d never heard of that. “I thought women took shots for that. It’s supposed to hurt like hell when the milk isn’t nursed out.”

  “It’s a wonderful pain,” Carla said. “Look.”

  Carla unbuttoned her shirt and squeezed a breast pretty hard. A bead of milk appeared on her nipple. I felt strange. I’d never seen anything like that before. I thought it was beautiful and sad. She was so beautiful.

  “Your breasts have gotten smaller since you came,” I said.

  “Um-hum,” she replied, buttoning her shirt.

  That was about all we said to each other for a long time. The intimacy of the talk didn’t bring us together or anything.

  I didn’t learn about Austin Tower from Carla. I first saw him at the YMCA. He’d be there in the evenings playing ball and lifting weights. I hated him right off. He was this really handsome guy, about six-three and maybe two hundred pounds. He was the color of a horse chestnut and wore a middle-sized Afro. And aside from being better-looking, he leg-pressed more than I did. Otto barely out-leg-pressed Tower. I don’t train with weights, so I really didn’t hate him as much as if he’d done more pushups than I, or more dips. I was jealous of Tower’s good looks. Not many guys are better-looking than I am from the neck down, but sometimes I think I’d trade all my muscle tone for a better-looking face. I mean I’m not ugly or anything—except maybe for my cauliflower ears. It’s just that I’ve always kind of wished I was good-looking.

  Tower and his pals made me look silly on the basketball court. But they could tell by my rubber sweat suit and my hooded sweatshirt and my high-topped wrestling shoes that basketball wasn’t my sport. They tolerated me in the pickup games.

  “I dig you dudes another day,” Tower would say to us in the mirror, tilting his leather hat. The word at the Y was that the University of Washington recruited him out of a New York City high school, then sent him to Spokane Community to get his grades up.

  Sometimes I’d see him out at Rollie’s Ribs when I’d stop there to pick up a ten-dollar bill or two after a game. Minors aren’t supposed to be in there, but the cops must not watch the place very carefully. I think the cops generally try to stay pretty unobtrusive in that part of town. Also, I’m pretty old-looking for my age. I’m the one who buys everybody’s beer. Now that I’m eighteen I can do that legally.

  The first time I saw Tower out at Rollie’s, Carla was with him. They were sitting with Elmo and some guys who played for the Spokes. Elmo saw me and flashed me the big fist, which in Rollie’s I returned somewhat self-consciously. Elmo was about to introduce me to Carla when Tower said, “They know each other, man. She lives in his daddy’s house.”

  “Did Dad get to see the game?” Carla asked.

  “He had to work,” I replied.

  I got a bucket of ribs for Kuch and me and split, waving to everybody. I’d dropped to 168 by then, but dieting in summer was turning out to b
e way too tough. I rolled the DeSoto toward the Northside with the good night smells coming in the window and the good rib smells coming from the seat beside me and told myself it was best not to overtrain.

  Later, as I sat in the park with the bucket of ribs between my legs and a twelve-pack of Coors beer at my side, Kuch came screaming through the trees on his racer sliding about thirty yards across the grass into the little cove of benches I’d built so the cops wouldn’t spot us drinking. The park was deserted. Kids are always making forts out of the benches, so our little hideout aroused no suspicion.

  “You crazy bastard,” I said. “You get caught riding that thing on the street, they’ll impound it. And you can’t get to be an AMA Expert with your bike in the police garage.”

  “No cop car could catch me,” Kuch replied, jamming the heel of his hand down hard on a bottle top, popping the cap against the edge of a bench. “I can climb trees on this machine,” he said through the foam. “I wouldn’t have to outrun ’em. I’d just wick it up a tree and hide.”

  I told Kuch about my first sighting of Carla’s nipples. I said the time she took off her shirt to wrap Dad’s hand gave me my only shot. I didn’t tell him about how she walked around naked and just peed right in from of me and stuff. I didn’t want him to get the wrong impression.

  Kuch described how his girlfriend, Laurie, handled his Hodaka in dirt and pointed out the cleanness of the welds on his Yamaha, the new spoked alloy wheels and the new rear disc brake he and his dad had put on that afternoon. He traced a dirt track in the air for me and drew in the ruts and showed me the line he’d ride to stomp ass the next weekend in the race at Post Falls. We wiped our greasy fingers on the grass and stared up at the stars.

  We lay back against the Thompson Park benches and talked about how fast our first two years of high school had gone and about how weird it felt to be beginning the last one in less than a month. I was already getting nostalgic thinking about all the great times being over so soon. And it’s a lot worse now that I’ll be graduating in a few weeks.