Vision Quest

by Terry Davis

  “What saved you?” I asked.

  “Getting pregnant,” she replied.

  That sobered me up a little. But just then Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” came around on the tape and Carla rocked back and forth and banged on the steering wheel and tapped her free foot in time. The girls I knew were more sedate than that, and right then I realized exactly what it was that fascinated me about Carla. She had the best things I liked about girls and the best things I liked about guys. She was soft and beautiful and made up little animals and could be kind and tender. But she also swore creatively and worked hard at stuff besides her appearance and did what moved her—like leaving home or peeing with the door open or going with a black guy or banging on the steering wheel. Maybe when you get older you begin to appreciate many of the same qualities in the opposite sex as you do in your own. It would be pretty hard to live closely with somebody if you couldn’t like her or him at least for the same reasons you liked all your other friends. Now that Carla and I have been together for a while I can feel this happening in me.

  We rocked and rolled through the main street of Colville and turned west on 395 to New Kettle Falls and my great-aunt’s place on Gold Creek. We talked about our jobs and the jobs we’d had before, laughing about everything. I told Carla about my job helping the Stern family get in shape.

  “Last year,” I began, “Mr. Stern, a teacher at school, hired me to teach his family an exercise routine that would get them in shape for summer hiking in the Cascades. They’re probably on Mt. Rainier right now,” I said to add immediacy to the story.

  “Umm,” Carla replied politely. “What exercises did you teach them?” She was only listening half-intently because the tape had come around to the Dead and “Casey Jones.”

  “Oh, some pushups and sits and rope skipping and run-a-lap, walk-a-lap. Just stuff everybody already knows. Just stuff to help them build up a little muscle tone. By the end of the year I’d left no Stern untoned.”

  Not only did Carla refrain from laughing, she didn’t even react.

  “Stern,” I explained. “Stern untoned.”

  “I’m trying to ignore it,” Carla replied. “You are a menace. You scare little paper boys and you make dumb puns. You watch out.” She smiled. “You’re gonna get it.”

  “It,” of course, was exactly what I wanted.

  She talked about working in a record store in Chicago and about all the records she left with her brothers and sisters back home. “It’s hard to believe people really live this kind of life,” she said, swinging her arm out the window toward the fields and farmhouses. “Nobody next door and nobody across the street. Dogs and cats probably live long enough to die natural deaths here.”

  “A lot of ’em get killed on the highway,” I said. “The more room you’ve got, the farther you roam.” That sounded like a song, so I started to sing it to the tune of “Momma Tried,” which was playing at the time. I don’t sing nearly as pretty as Merle Haggard, so I shut up after the first few lines.

  Carla was mellowing. She was also probably about to have kidney failure from the truck’s bouncing. A straight hour of that old Ford suspension was all anybody but a bronc rider could comfortably take. We were almost to Aunt Lola’s place, so there wasn’t much use to stop and rest. To ease Carla’s fluttering kidneys I decided to tell her about the time I introduced the entire Turn family to dope.

  “It was shortly after my assignment toning up the Sterns,” I began, “that I embarked on my life of crime.”

  Carla blew a few wisps of hair out of her eyes and looked over at me. “You mugged the milkman,” she said.

  “Worse,” I replied. I looked penitently into my lap and wrung my hands in contrition. I also had a hard-on to conceal. “I led a good middle-American family into intercourse with the evil weed.”

  “No,” Carla said. “Oh, my.”

  “The Turn family,” I continued. “Friends of the Sterns. They wanted to take up hiking, too. They already had muscle tone, but they couldn’t stand each other’s company long enough to walk together from the davenport to the TV. Mr. Turn came to me one day for help. He saw how I’d brought the Sterns around. It sounded to me like a case of familiarity having bred contempt, so I prescribed alteration in their psychic landscape. I got fifteen fat numbers from Otto and laid them on Mr. Turn, with the instruction to have a boot-oiling and dope-smoking session in the family room while watching a National Geographic special. That was three numbers for each patient. All it took was one apiece before they forgot their boots were warming in the oven. After two they trooped arm in arm through the house, singing Sierra Club songs. And after the third they set up camp in the garage and roasted their gerbils over an open fire. They were great friends afterward, even Garret, who had sacrificed his gerb-gerbs for family unity. They had to buy new boots, but Melissa added the roasted shrunken ones to her doll wardrobe. I felt pretty good. After all, I left no Turn unstoned.”

  I turned to Carla and flashed my biggest grin. Then I pushed out my upper plate with my tongue and let it fall out of my mouth, catching it with lightning speed before it hit the seat.

  Carla screamed and almost collided with a logging truck coming from New Kettle. She’d never seen me do that with my teeth before. She drove with her left hand and beat on me with her right. She pulled off in the Gold Creek rest area and beat on me with both fists. I hunched in a ball on the floor and laughed like a loon while Carla pounded away. Then she barked her knuckles on the heater and swore, “Oh, shit, piss, and fuck,” and shook her injured fist and began to laugh.

  Carla lay across the seat laughing and I sat happily on the floor until I got a muscle spasm in my thigh and couldn’t stand it and opened the door and fell out backward and writhed on the gravel until I rubbed it out. Carla just laughed some more.

  After we pulled out of the rest area I could feel things had changed a little between us. For one thing, Carla stopped after she turned off the highway onto Lola’s road and gave me a big wet Willy. It was more a playful one than your usual drive-in-movie wet Willy, but it turned me on anyway. She grabbed my head with both hands and lifted my hair and scoured my ear a good one. She must have noticed a strange texture or taste, because she pulled back and scrutinized my ear.

  “Louden . . . ?” she began.

  “Cauliflower ear,” I said. “Both of ’em. Hope it doesn’t taste bad.”

  “It tastes fine,” she said, giving me a few softer wet ones. She pulled me over sideways till my head lay on the seat beside her and examined my right ear, which is in a little worse condition than my left. “Don’t they hurt?” she asked, after treating my semicircular canals to a generous wash of saliva.

  “Only when someone rubs them into the mat,” I said.

  She thought I was referring to my other ear being mashed into the cracked leather seat, so she let me go and pulled me up and said she was sorry and looked that ear over for damage she might have done. Actually, it had hurt some, but only a little, since my nervous system had been momentarily hijacked by the desperate jolts of sensation rushing to my cock.

  We had a great time at Aunt Lola’s. We fed the chickens and collected the eggs. We were too late to milk the cow, but we were in time to eat some fresh cream on our breakfast strawberries, which we picked, along with carrots, onions, tomatoes, green beans, corn, and peas. We also dug some spuds and boxed up a few jars of jam and a couple jars of the honey Lola trades eggs to a neighbor for. We mowed the lawn and trimmed it. We cut wood and stacked it. Carla touched me a lot and that reassured me and settled me down. I had gotten pretty excited and nervous thinking about how I could make some moves on her. She was and is more sexually sophisticated than I am. We held hands and walked through the alfalfa to the pond my dad and uncle and cousins had stocked when they were kids. They caught the fish in Gold Creek and ran them down to the pond in buckets. Eastern brook and rainbow grow big in the pond because there’s so much food and no kids to catch them anymore. We sat on
the bank and watched the fish and frogs and watersnakes and turtles go on about their business. The pond has grown so green with life I always about half expect to haul in a couple coelacanths or see a trilobite or two squint up at me from the mud. But we didn’t fish. We just talked.

  We left Lola’s at twilight, promising to come back the next day to drive her to Colville so she could do her shopping. I drove and Carla sat on her side of the seat and looked for deer. She’d seen a DEER CROSSING sign and was determined to spot some. She wasn’t totally ignoring me, though. As I talked about how the deer come out of the woods in the evenings to feed in the fields, every so often Carla would reach over and let her hand rest on my thigh. She didn’t turn to look; she just touched me on the thigh where my jeans were worn thinnest. Sometimes she ran her fingertips along the inseam. Naturally, I had a raging boner.

  We crossed the bridge over Lake Roosevelt and I looked down, but it had gotten too dark to see the level of the water. We drove south and turned off on the road to the Trout Lake campground. I stopped to wire a big can of beef stew to the exhaust manifold so it would be warm for our dinner. We took off for the campground, and rounding the first curve, we hit a little doe. She must have been standing just on the shoulder of the road, because she jumped square into our right fender. If she’d been very far off the road, she’d have jumped clean over us. It scared Carla because it happened so fast and about two feet from her nose. And it scared me because I had been talking about how I learned to heat canned food on the exhaust manifolds of the trucks and dozers at the Trapper Peak forest fire and wasn’t paying much attention to my driving.

  The little doe lay in the ditch in front of us crying and kicking the two legs that weren’t broken. People think deer don’t make sounds, but they do. They sort of whistle. Her eyes were wild and she shook her head from side to side and tried to get up. The hide was barked on her face and shoulder, but aside from that she looked okay. Except for her two right legs, which only swept a little gravel, no matter how she thrashed away. “Poor little deer,” I said. I don’t mind killing animals—to eat, for example. But I sure can hardly stand to see them suffer, or people either.

  Carla didn’t know much about deer, or at least not wild deer, so when she went close to pet her and comfort her a little, the doe kicked out with a good leg and raked Carla’s arm. She yelled and jumped back in surprise and then got another surprise when she looked down and saw her shirt torn and her arm bleeding. Deer hooves are very sharp and not all that clean. I sat Carla down on the running board and looked at her arm. I had to get a flashlight to see. The cut was shallow, but about an inch wide. The skin was ripped down the inside of her arm from her elbow to the middle of her forearm. A four-inch flap of it hung in her shirtsleeve.

  “I just wanted to pet it,” Carla said.

  “I know,” I said. “Me, too. But she can’t know.”

  “Isn’t there some way we can help her?” Carla asked. “She’s crying.”

  I cut Carla’s sleeve off with my hunting knife and pulled the skin flap back over the cut and wrapped her arm in gauze. “I’d like to wash this,” I said, not answering her question. “But all we have is Gatorade.”

  “And you’re saving it to drink,” she replied.

  “Damn right,” I said.

  “Can’t we keep her from suffering?” Carla asked.

  “I’m gonna shoot her.”

  “But she only has broken legs. And she’s a deer, not a racehorse.”

  “I know,” I said. “But she’ll starve. Somebody’ll come along and shoot her anyway.”

  “You don’t have a gun,” Carla said.

  “It’s in my bag.”

  “Please do it now, then,” she said. “It’s awful to hurt alone.”

  So I got the Luger and walked behind the deer and shot her once through the back of the head. She shook with the impact of the bullet, but then she went still and didn’t twitch at all. The shot rang and rang in my ears, that gun is so loud.

  I let down the tailgate and shoved the dead deer in with her head hanging out so she wouldn’t drip blood on our stuff when we went downhill. At the campground we gave her to the ranger and I washed Carla’s arm and found out the nearest doctor was back in Kettle. The ranger couldn’t do any more for the cut than I could, but he did promise to hold a camp spot for us if we wanted to come back. Carla said we did and we took off, barreling down the gravel road to the highway. I wanted to get there fast so maybe the doctor could stich the skin back on.

  It turned out the cut wasn’t very bad after all. The lady doctor just called it a “scrape” and snipped off the flap of skin, cleaned the grit out, and gave Carla a tetanus shot. We talked a little and she gave us Rocky Mountain spotted fever shots for free. We just had to pay for the tetanus toxoid, and it was only $3.50.

  The ride back to Trout Lake was beautiful. The night was warm and clear. We drove real slow and there were lots of falling stars. When we crossed over to the west side of the river we saw lots of deer and a couple porcupines. When we got to the campground the ranger had the doe dressed out and hanging from a hook at the side of his house. Carla couldn’t use her arm much, so I set up the tent alone. She went right to sleep after we ate the stew, but I talked to some of the folks camping around us, and to the ranger to see if he’d seen anything of my grandpa.

  I crawled into the tent then and lay for a few minutes on top of my sleeping bag looking at the dark silhouette of Carla lying on her side in her sleeping bag. I reached up and traced along her hip lightly with my finger; then I pulled off my T-shirt and jeans and crawled into the bag, where I fought the desire to beat off until the birds began to sing.

  Carla got up early and watched some Canadians fish off the bank for a while, she said, before she woke me. I took down the tent, stowed it, fired up the Ford, and headed us for the highway. We were silent for a while, just looking out through the big Ponderosa pines at Trout Lake sparkling in the clear morning. Then I asked, “Carla, did you smell that beautiful smell this morning? I’ve never smelled anything like that in the woods before.”

  She turned from the window and looked at me, then turned back. “Dip,” she said. “You were sleeping with your nose in my panties. You drooled on them.”

  “Sorry” was all I could think to say, and we rode in silence to Barney’s Junction for breakfast.

  Barney’s is on the west side of the Columbia, right where 395 crosses and heads north along the river for a short way before it meets the Kettle River and follows it into Canada. Barney’s is to the loggers and farmers and mill workers who live along the river what The Shack is to the car-business people in Spokane. We pulled in, got some gas, and stood looking at the river. And it really was a river. It was lower than I’d ever seen it, low as I’d hoped it would be. I felt like running across the highway and down the bank to stand beside it, but I controlled myself. We’d planned to eat breakfast, and I wanted to catch my grandfather before he left for the day and ask him if he’d like to drive down and visit the falls with us.

  “Mornin’,” I said to the waitress as she looked us over for signs of California hippiness. “Say,” I said, “we’re up from Spokane, looking for my grandfather, Harry Swain. Has he been around?”

  “Harry was in here yesterday,” she said, smiling. “You’re not Bert’s boy?” Bert is my uncle.

  “No,” I said. “I’m Louden, Larry’s boy.”

  “Larry’s boy!” she said. “I thought Larry’d be a grandfather by now.”

  “Not that any of us knows of.” I smiled real big. “How did Harry look?”

  “Got a gut on him,” she said. “But he’s lookin’ a lot better lately.”

  “That’s good,” I said. Rural people are a little nicer to you if they know you have some local roots.

  That was late August and absolutely the last time I could rationalize eating like a regular human being. I told myself I’d chow down until we got back home. And chow down I did: ham and eggs, a chocolate malt, and hot a
pple pie with cinnamon sauce and ice cream. I weighed 165. If I looked a plate of ham and eggs in the eye right now, my stomach wouldn’t even growl in recognition, it’s been so long.

  “This ham is incredible,” Carla said.

  “Look at the eggs,” I said. “Look at the color of the yolks.”

  “They’re a lot darker,” she affirmed.

  “That comes from chickens what gets exercise,” I said through the deep golden yolk in my mustache. Egg yolk can really give body to a sparse mustache. “Chickens what eats gravel and bugs. Chickens what lives in chicken yards and not no little cages.” I had become pretty rural in my excitement to get down to the river.

  We caught Grandpa Harry just as he was leaving. I saw the old green jeep pulling onto the highway, so I laid on the horn. We turned onto his road and stopped right beside him.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said, and laughed. He always laughs when he first sees me. It’s as though it’s wondrous to him that I can make it all the way up from Spokane by myself. “What you doin’ around here?”

  “Dad read the river was comin’ down, so we came up to take a look. Thought you might like to drive down to the falls with us. This is Carla,” I said. “Carla, this is my grandfather Harry Swain.”

  “Pleased to meet your acquaintance,” Grandpa Harry said.

  Carla leaned over me and stuck her good arm out the window and shook with Harry. “My pleasure,” she said. Harry thought that was funny as hell. You could see him laughing all the way as he backed up into his yard.

  I don’t know if it’s possible, but it seemed as though he was shorter than when we went fishing together at the start of summer. When my dad was a kid, Harry was supposed to have been a little over six feet. But walking behind him to the cabin, I was a good two fingers taller, and I’m only five-eleven. Carla was searching through the junked cars by the creek, where we saw a couple cats go running. Harry unlocked the padlock on his door and we went in. He just has a hole in the wall and a hole in his door and a chain to go through them. I sat on the floor and leaned against the stove and studied the guns and fish poles in the gun rack, as I always do. Harry took a Medihaler out of his shirt pocket and gave himself a couple good blasts down the throat. He breathed deep through his mouth and smiled.