Vision Quest

by Terry Davis

  Tanneran once told us that college is where you make your lifetime friends. He said college is where you begin your intellectual growing and that you just grow away from your high school friends. I hope that doesn’t turn out to be true. I never want to lose the friendship of Kuch or Otto. I guess it can’t turn out to be true if I don’t let it.

  “Ya know what I’m gonna do instead of goin’ to college?” Kuch asked, popping another beer.

  “Win the Spanish Grand Prix?” I replied.

  “Besides that.”

  “What, then?”

  “I’m gonna go on a vision quest,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything for a minute or two. I’d read about vision quests in several books, but I learned the real detailed stuff about them from a book called Seven Arrows by a Northern Cheyenne named Hyemeyohsts Storm. The circumstances under which I read that book consisted of Kuch yelling and screaming, “Read this sonofabitching book, man. It is un-fucking-believable!” It has nice pictures, but outside of the part where the Indian kid fucks his mother, I didn’t bend the edges of too many pages.

  I originally turned Kuch on to the subject of the American Indian early in our sophomore year. I got into it by way of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man. From Berger I went to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, to Black Elk Speaks, and then to everything I could get my hands on. I liked learning about the Indians, but Kuch freaked out. He rampaged through Indian fiction, history, anthropology, and also through the Wickiup Tavern in Springdale on the border of the Spokane Indian Reservation. For a while it looked like I’d created a monster.

  “Why a vision quest?” I asked.

  “I’d like to see if I can’t find my place in the circle,” Kuch replied. “I’d like to know why things happen. I wanna get clean.” He sat for a while looking down into his beer bottle and then he went on. “That stuff I was into last year was such bullshit. If there really is an Everywhere Spirit, he oughta be plenty pissed off at me for that.”

  Kuch was talking about the way he’d acted last wrestling season and on into the spring. He’d wear nothing to school but a pair of deerskin pants and vest and some coyote teeth on a leather thong—in the dead of winter! He’d sit cross-legged on the floor and eat lunch with his hands. And he’d dance and sing and warcry before, during, and after all his matches. I never figured he was being pretentious exactly, because he was sincere. And he really did look like a noble savage. He was heavily tanned from going half-naked all the time and he was in incredible shape from fasting and working out for wrestling. He glowed with suntan and belief and his braided hair hung down to his ass. He was just overzealous, and looking back, I guess he didn’t have his beliefs too well in hand.

  I feel able to comment on pretension because I pulled some similar shit when I was going through my “I’m-going-to-be-a-doctor” phase. I wrote a monograph on the clitoris and submitted it to the school paper. Thurston Reilly, the editor, figured it for a public service feature and printed it right away. Thurston was expelled from school just seconds after the papers hit the halls, and I joined him a few seconds later. That was the point at which the David Thompson Explorer lost its editorial freedom. Kuch was out of school at the time, too. He had refused a directive from the vice principal to wear more clothes. He was threatening to attack the vice principal’s house, rape his wife, and cut his nuts off and use the scrotum for a medicine bag. They let us back in before Kuch had finished his research on tanning human hide.

  Kuch talked on slowly. I popped another beer. “I’m gonna try to use this whole next season like the Plains Indians used their sweat lodge,” he said. “And when the season’s over, I’m gonna keep a decent diet and try to keep a straight head through the spring races. And when summer comes, I oughta be ready to go somewhere quiet and sit and learn something.”

  “Who’ll you get to talk about the vision with?” I asked.

  “I’ll get you, if you’re still around. But it doesn’t matter, really. There’s no sense in tryin’ to do it right. Hell, I’m no fuckin’ Indian. There probably aren’t even any Indians left who could do it right. Where’d they go to find a shield maker or a medicine man?” He popped a final beer and rummaged among the bones for a meaty rib.

  “Why wait till next summer?”

  “That’s just the thing,” Kuch replied. “I wanna wait. It’s gotta stay important for a long time. Indian kids waited a long time. If it’s just a fucking Jesus trip, I don’t wanna insult the memory of the American Indian by being part of it.”

  I thought Kuch’s idea was a good one then, cheap drunk that I am. But I think it’s a good idea now, too. And he’s really doing it. He never talks about it, but he’s gotten very reserved and a little mystical, so I assume he’s going strong. He’s very low in his weight class, so I imagine he’s fasting most of the time. That’s one reason I cleaned up on him so bad.

  I don’t know exactly how Kuch plans to work his vision quest. Indian kids would get the advice of some older guy about what to do. The older guy, who had been on his vision quest already, would tell the kid to go to a hill outside the camp, or if there were no hill, to someplace far away. There the kid would fast and talk to the Everywhere Spirit until he saw a vision or until the Everywhere Spirit talked back. Then he’d return to camp and discuss what he’d felt and seen. I don’t think the word “vision” meant strictly that you saw something. Although you might talk with a coyote or ride over the earth on a white buffalo, you might not “see” anything. I take the word more in a philosophical way. Like the way you see yourself in the world. That’s the idea of it all: to discover who you are and who your people are and how you fit into the circle of birth and growth and death and rebirth. I can see how you could get pretty far inside yourself sitting naked and hungry and alone on some mountain for a couple days and nights. Storm, in that book Seven Arrows, says an Indian kid would come back from his vision quest and explain what he saw to his adviser; then the adviser would interpret the visions and tell the kid how they revealed his true character and the way the course of his life should run. One of the reasons Kuch might be waiting is to give himself time to acquire the wisdom to interpret for himself. That’s probably an okay idea. Indian men would go on a vision quest when their medicine was going sour and they needed to change their lives. After they had gotten wisdom from their first vision quest they could interpret later ones for themselves.

  Kuch is pretty smart about using wrestling season like a sweat lodge. You’re eating pretty well—which is to say damn little and every bit of it real food—and you’re in pretty fair shape. The wrestling room is always like a sauna bath and if you get in a good practice you can feel really cleaned out. Sometimes you can even see visions if you get beat around enough.

  It was a mellow talk we had that night. I sat and thought what it would have been like to live a hundred years or so ago. I wondered if it was more fun to die of smallpox or cholera than emphysema or cancer of the colon. I looked up at the pines and through them at the stars, some of which probably burned out when my dad was a kid and when his dad was. The Columbia was a river then and Kettle Falls was actually a falls and not just the name of a little town. And I thought that in a few months the greatest time of my life would be over and I’d have to go somewhere and become more responsible and make a new time the greatest of my life.

  Kuch wiped the front wheel of his racer with a greasy napkin. “I found out about my headaches,” he said. He’d been having awful headaches since racing started in the spring. “It’s my braid,” he said.

  “Your braid?” Kuch’s braid still falls ass-length.

  “Yah,” he said. “I went to a doctor after the Wilbur race. He takes one look at me and grabs hold of my braid. ‘You put your helmet on over this?’ he says. You wouldn’t believe how much better my helmet fits with my hair unbraided.”

  Kuch drove me home through the park so fast the wind pulled tears from my eyes. There wasn’t much room on that little racing seat, so I slapped a tight wais
t on him and hung on for all I was worth. It was so late the eastern horizon had begun to gray and the birds had started singing. I was fast becoming sick.

  Carla found me retching in the basement laundry tub.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Baarrrrrrrrrff!” I replied.

  “Are you okay?” she asked again, a little more concerned.

  “Fine, thanks. And yourself?” I gummed, having taken out my partial plate. I’d broken a plate once before by throwing it up in the laundry tub.

  “I’m fine,” Carla said. “You look like a folding bear hanging over the washtub that way. You’re going to hurt your tummels-tummels.”

  The folding bear was the first of her animals to whom I was introduced.

  “My tummels-tummels already hurts,” I said, running the water. “What’s a folding bear?”

  “A bear that folds over things, especially when he’s happy,” Carla explained.

  “I’m not happy.”

  “I could tell right away you weren’t really a folding bear,” she tittered. She was a little drunk herself. “You have a very muscular boom-boom,” she continued, pulling off my pants.

  I hung parallel to the floor, perpendicular to the tub edge, balanced on my “tummels-tummels,” my head wedged under the faucet, my legs waving my pants good-bye.

  “How did you get so muscular?” Carla asked, toweling me off.

  “God’s will,” I replied.

  “You’re not one of them, are you?” she inquired, leading me to the davenport. “I refuse to help a drunken Jesus freak.”

  “Jest,” I replied, “frivolity”—bucking up against the pain. “It was probably Him got me into this. He finds ways to get even, even if He doesn’t exist.”

  Carla began to walk on things. I thought I was dreaming. She got up on the other davenport and walked along the top, spreading her arms wide to balance herself. She walked atop the old oak table, then the bar. Her blue hat flopped. Her breasts, which had become amazingly smaller, bobbed in her tank top. After turning off the lights, she walked along above me, singing a little song called “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” I yearned for a peek at her pussy. I squinted through the night-light dark. It’s not true that seeing a girl naked a few times makes you lose interest in her body.

  “Let’s be friends,” I offered before losing consciousness.

  “You hardly ever talk to me,” Carla replied. “What do you expect? I thought you were just a dumb jock. I couldn’t understand how you could have such a nice father.”

  “I am just a dumb jock,” I said. “But I have a nice father. I’m a little shy,” I explained more seriously. “You never talk to me, either.”

  We had nearly formulated a friendship pact when I changed the subject to Grand Coulee Dam and lost consciousness in the middle of invective.

  Carla avoided me for a couple weeks after that. She was convinced I was just a dumb jock.

  VIII

  In a way it was the Columbia that finally got Carla and me together, and in a way it was Dad. Dad read in the New Kettle Falls newspaper that Lake Roosevelt was being lowered because of some work on the dam, and he told Carla and me that if we drove up there we might get to see the river and the falls. Carla was fired up to go, even if it was with me. I traded my days off to match hers and we were set.

  Carla wanted to get an early start. I heard the basement door open and close and then footsteps across the patio. I opened one eye for a second and saw Carla’s boots at the edge of my cot. It was still dark. She nudged my shoulder through the sleeping bag. “Louden,” she said. “Louden. Time to get up.” Her voice was soft. I kept my eyes closed and thought of waking up beside her. “Louden.”

  “Good morning,” I said, opening my eyes. “Thanks for waking me.”

  “You’re sure you’re awake?”

  “I’m awake. I’ll be in in just a sec.” Carla went back in and I sat up and rubbed my eyes and peered at my watch. I had to cup my hand around it to read the dim luminous dial. It was four thirty. I checked around to see if she was looking out the door, then jumped up, grabbed my jeans, and ran to the grass behind the house. I had my shorts on, but I didn’t want her to see me. My cock stuck out straight as a tentpole.

  We still had our ’51 Ford half-ton pickup then, so we set the tent and sleeping bags and mason jars that we had to take back to Aunt Lola and ax and shovel and tarp and first-aid kit in the back since it wasn’t going to rain.

  It was an incredibly beautiful morning, which is the way most summer mornings are around Spokane. There wasn’t a sound and the only smell was freshness. The streetlights were still on and the sky was graying into blue. I was stretching and yawning and growling and about fixing to give the neighborhood my Mountain Man good-morning yell when eleven-year-old Dwight Thuringer came whistling down the sidewalk with his newspapers. My hiding was totally unpremeditated. I just whipped into the big shrubs before he saw me. I didn’t decide to scare him until he got right to the porch and banged his paper off the screen door. I leaped out and threw my arms in the air and bellowed like a Sasquatch. Little Thuringer screamed and fell back on the lawn in a storm of neatly folded newspapers. He twitched a little and gurgled in his throat. I was rolling on the lawn, laughing out of control.

  Dwight was throwing papers at me as hard as he could when Carla came out. I was still laughing, rolling around, but I was trying to cover up my tender spots. Those square-folded papers hurt. When he got me right at the base of the skull, it sobered me up and I got to my feet and ran around behind the house. I heard Carla ask Dwight what happened. “Goddamn Louden jumped out and scared me,” he said. He sounded like he was ready to cry.

  I had climbed over the fence and come through the breezeway and out onto the lawn again. “God, I’m sorry, Dwight,” I said. “I just couldn’t help myself.” And then I started to laugh again. But then I saw he had peed his pants and it made me feel ashamed.

  Finally Dwight started to laugh, too. He began to pick up his papers and I helped him. “You really scared me,” he said. “I must have looked funny.”

  “You flew through the air,” I said, starting to guffaw again.

  Carla and I lifted his double bag over his head and brushed the dewy grass off him, ignoring the pee smell, and waved him good morning. I brushed the wet grass off my front and turned for Carla to brush my back. “You’re really a bastard,” she said, refusing to brush me. I asked her if she wanted to drive and she said she did.

  The old Ford had to be double-clutched, and Carla took a while to get the hang of the shifting. But once we got out on 395 she didn’t have to shift, so the ride was smoother. The windows wouldn’t roll up and the heater had a leak, so we were cold till the sun got up a little. I would laugh a little to myself, then shut up, then just go to pieces and laugh till tears ran down, thinking of Dwight flying through the storm of newspapers. Carla asked me to explain what was so funny. I tried, but couldn’t stop laughing. Then she began to laugh, too. She wished she could hear some music and cursed the old truck’s lack of a radio. I pulled the tape player out of my wrestling bag and clipped in a special traveling-music tape. She liked that. Then I took out my tea thermos and poured us some. Carla drinks a lot of tea.

  “You come prepared,” she said.

  “I’m just waiting for the day some millionaire will get a flat or run out of gas. I’ll change his tire, drive him to a gas station, pour him some tea and honey—and he’ll pay my way through college.”

  “What he’ll do is hit you on the head and you’ll wake up with an asshole the size of the Chicago Loop.” She giggled as I squirmed a bit in fun. “I’m very interested in that bag,” she said, looking down at my big old wrestling road bag. “What else do you have in there?”

  She was bent over a little and through her second button I could see a nipple register its protest against the cold morning. Her hair was blowing out the window and back against the broken gun rack. God, she looked good driving the old yellow Ford. Among othe
r things it made her freckles redder.

  “Oh, I’ve got a couple pairs of socks and some shorts and towels, some soap and a thermos full of Gatorade,” I said. I didn’t mention Dad’s old 9mm Luger.

  Carla flipped out when “John Wesley Harding” came on the tape. I knew she liked Bob Dylan because that’s what she played all the time on the stereo at the New Pioneer while she drank tea like an addict. I had the tape loaded heavily with Dylan tunes I recorded at Kuch’s house. I had some Merle Haggard, some Leon Russell, some New Riders and Grateful Dead, and a couple obscure Jim Croce and John Stewart truck-driving songs. It was definitely a tape for the old Ford on 395 North and for Carla.

  We talked about music and books and kids at Lake Shore, Carla’s old school in Chicago, and kids at David Thompson. We were laughing so much and having such a good time we forgot to watch the gas gauge. We ran out on the Colville side of Addy and I had to walk back and get some.

  More than anything else, I was fascinated with Carla’s independence. There are lots of really beautiful girls around and lots of soft ones who are smiley and bright-eyed and in shape and smell good and don’t smoke cigarettes. But I just have the feeling that few of these attractive girls keep time with their own clocks. But Carla had had a baby and she was nineteen and had to be self-sufficient after she left home, so maybe my comparison with the other girls I knew wasn’t fair. Anyway, on that trip to the Columbia I was giddy from more than the memory of scaring the pee out of Dwight Thuringer. I was about half in love.

  I tried to get her to talk about herself, but all she said was that her father was an insurance executive and her mother was a housefrump, that they were both shithooks, and that her brothers and sisters would turn out exactly the same.