Vision Quest

by Terry Davis

  “They give me those down ’t the Vets,” he said. “I can fish, hunt, hike these goddman mountains—anything I want. I just carry a couple of these along. I might even feel like doin’ some rasslin’,” he said, and laughed until the crap in his lungs crackled and snapped like a wood fire. He moved his hands like he was milking a cow and rose about two inches off the bed, as though he were going to come for me.

  “Go find yourself some Indian woman to wrestle with,” I said. “You’d just hurt me, and this is my year to be a hero.”

  “A hero . . . !” He laughed and coughed up a few cubic centimeters of trench warfare and spit it in his spit can alongside the bed. It’s a good thing he got his emphysema in the war and not just from his homeland air. This way he’s got the Veterans’ Hospital anytime he needs it and he’s got his pension. The State of Washington lets him hunt and fish for free now that he’s over seventy-five, and Dad finds him a cheap old jeep or a pickup when the one he’s got goes too bad for any of us to fix.

  “How ’bout it?” I asked. “Comin’ down to the falls with us?”

  “Naw,” Harry said. “I’m gonna run up to Davis Lake an’ fish.”

  “We could see the old homestead.”

  “That place is just a dirty old ditch to me,” Harry said. “Goin’ fishin’.”

  Just then Carla came in holding a dusty yellow cat and sat in the chair.

  “Gonna have some fleas in all them red curls,” Grandpa Harry said.

  “That’s okay,” Carla replied, scratching the cat’s head and sending it into ecstasy. “Couldn’t be more than I get sitting next to him.” And she pointed at me.

  Harry loved that. He laughed and spit again, but just tobacco this time. Carla didn’t bat an eyelash. Harry told her she oughta know better than pet deer like they was dogs and cats, and Carla said she’d remember.

  We sat for a few minutes talking about which creeks were fished out and who had been snakebit and how sparse the deer would be come fall. We refused several coffee offers and finally I said we’d better get moving so we could see the falls and take Aunt Lola to Colville to do her grocery shopping. I asked Grandpa Harry if he needed anything. I don’t know what I could do for him, but Dad always asks, so I do, too.

  “Shit,” he said, getting up and walking us out the door. “I don’t need nothin’. Got these inhalers and I’ll prob’ly be dead before I know it and then I won’t even need them no more.”

  Carla set the cat down by the porch and we walked across the little bit of grass to the truck. I ground the gears and Harry laughed and pointed and said something I couldn’t hear. We waved and I honked and Grandpa Harry waved his hand back at us. The cat rubbed his boot top and he gave it a gentle shove off the porch. Then he laughed some more and touched two fingers to the brim of his straw fishing hat and stuck out his arm and waved again before he went to work chaining his door.

  “What will he do?” Carla asked as we turned onto the highway.

  “He’ll drive up to Davis Lake and fish and shoot snakes,” I said. And I honked a few final times and looked up the bank to see if he was standing there.

  Carla and I drove back to Barney’s, crossed the bridge, and turned onto the dirt road that leads to the public access. The sun was high by then and the cheatgrass was dry. Grasshoppers zinged through the air and banged into the sides of the pickup. A dull roar like the rumble of heavy trucks rose ahead of us. It grew into a real thunder as we crested the last hill before the road dropped down to the riverbank. We stopped a minute and looked out. The scene was about the same as I remembered it from ten or so years before and about the same as I dream it now. Where fat lazy Lake Roosevelt had lain in a bed of sand, the Columbia River cut through rock. Northward lay the mudflat that had once been farmland. An olive-drab Dodge Power Wagon was skidding driftwood logs through the mud to dry ground. Its driver and Carla and I were the only folks around.

  We walked down the rocky trail, across the dry sandy beach, through wet sand, and finally through mud before we reached the boulders that gleamed through the driftwood and trash. It looked like a whole lakeful of litter had lodged where the channel narrowed. The heat drew a dead smell from the mud. Carla walked back to the clean sand to lie in the sun while I worked my way across the rocks and logs to a broad ledge parallel to the falls but higher in elevation and about thirty yards away. White plastic bleach jugs floated in the shallow pools and hung like snowberries in the driftwood jams.

  I sat on the wet rock, drew my arms around my knees, and gazed south. Thin and blue, the river rolled through a black band of mud bordered by white sand. Where the white sand ended, green pines rose and blurred in the distance to dark high-mountain blue. On the east ran the Huckleberry Mountains and on the west the Kettle River Range. Some of the land between the mountain ranges south to the great bend in the river still belongs to the Spokane and Colville Indian tribes.

  I felt insulated by the roar of water all around me. I couldn’t hear the cars on the highway, and when I closed my eyes I couldn’t see the trash.

  I was thinking of something Seattle, Chief of the Duwamish Indians, had said about his people and their land on Puget Sound:

  When the last red man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe. . . . They will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land.

  I was thinking of those invisible dead and of my own as I pulled the cassette recorder from my wrestling bag and set it on the rock ledge. A shower of mist blew off the falls and with it fell a great coolness. I watched the tiny points of moisture brighten the black surface of the machine for a second before I pressed “record.”

  When I got back to the clean part of the beach I found Carla sunning with her shirt off. She opened one eye as she heard my footsteps squinch across the sand. I was slightly crazed by the river I guess, or I wouldn’t have had the nerve to do what I did then. I stood above her and let myself topple from the ankles like a tree. She yelped, but I caught myself before I touched her. My head level with her breasts, I did one pushup kissing her right nipple and another pushup kissing her left. Then my nerve deserted me and I got up and ran like hell for the pickup.

  “Wait!” I heard Carla yell behind me.

  Aunt Lola was sitting in the rocking chair on her porch waiting for us when we arrived. Since my great-uncle Walker died Lola has had to depend on family and friends for some little things, like splitting wood and rides into New Kettle and Colville. She said the Baptist church van comes around once a week to take folks into town and back, but that she can’t always catch it because she doesn’t always feel up to walking out to the highway. I don’t know the name of the condition that makes old people’s ankles swell—maybe it’s just Time—but whatever it is, her ankles get about the size of cantaloupes, so it’s no wonder she doesn’t feel like walking out to the highway.

  We had a good ride. The past year and a half or so, Lola and most of the other folks, young and old, around what they call “Panorama Land” have been pretty upset about all the “hippies” moving in and marring the panorama. Communes spring up around Colville like toadstools around Lola’s pond.

  “There’s another one a them hippie girls,” Lola said of what I took to be a normally overdressed girl walking down the main street in a sunbonnet, shawl, long dress, and bare feet. “At least she looks clean.”

  We teased her some. “Prob’ly nothin’ but a mass a marijuana scabs under that dress,” I said.

  “Her packsack is probably full of food stamps and Goodwill underwear,” Carla said.

  “Well, she don’t look no worse than the two of you.” Lola smiled at us. And, boy, was she correct.

  “You know,” I said, “I’ve seen pictures of you and Uncle Walker where you looked just about like that girl there and Walker had a handlebar mustache about to his ears. You’re a lot prettier than that girl, of course,” I added, giving
her a little elbow in the ribs.

  It’s easy to forget sometimes that people Lola’s age were raising families before cars were a common thing, were grandparents before a jet first broke the sound barrier, and now buy Skylab and lunar module toys for Christmas presents. I think it speaks well of my aunt Lola that she even took a ride in the pickup with Carla and me without pushing money on us for haircuts and new jeans.

  In the Safeway store I gave Carla a small kiss on the back of her neck when she bent down to sniff the smoked salmon in the meat bin, and she goosed me with a big purple beet in the vegetable aisle. Then she got me with another wet Willy as I balanced a twenty-five-pound bag of sugar on my head to the check stand. Later, back on the lawn at Lola’s, I countered by lifting her in the air over my head and blowing fierce and wet in her belly button. Then I pretended to take a long time getting the lint out of my mouth.

  “Louden!” Lola yelled from the door. “You’re too big to be handling her that way. You’ll have her other arm all cut up soon.”

  I growled something brutish in gorilla language.

  “Help! Help!” chirped Carla.

  “Carla, you don’t let him play like that while he’s driving. You’ll have a wreck.” And Lola waved a slab of bacon at us and turned for the kitchen.

  “I’ll make him ride in back!” Carla yelled, catching me off guard and shoulder-blocking me over the lawn mower flat onto the rhubarb plant.

  “Aunt Lola!” I yelled. “Can we take enough rhubarb home for a pie?”

  “Look,” I said to Carla when we were almost out of Colville on the way headed home. “Why don’t we stay another night? I don’t have to work until three thirty tomorrow afternoon. We could camp out on the Little Pend Oreille and have dinner at this big old lodge up there.”

  “I’ll call Belle and ask her to work tomorrow morning for me,” Carla replied.

  We found a great campsite right away beneath some cedars just a few feet from the water.

  If Carla hadn’t opened both sleeping bags and spread them out in the tent we might never have made love. I had cut wood and stacked it for the evening and had begun to identify birds, plants, trees, small animals, and had started on the clouds in the sky when she said, “Louden, why don’t we just lie down awhile?”

  She took off her shirt and bundled it up for a pillow and lay back in the red haze that the sunlight made through the red nylon tent. She didn’t have much of a tan, really, so she looked pearly in all that soft red light with the bushels of red hair spilled around her head and her nipples sprung up like small flowers. She smiled calmly and turned on her side. I took off my shirt and boots and lay beside her. And then she said, “Let’s wait a long time.” So we did.

  We were slick with sweat and slipping around the wet sleeping-bag floor like happy seals.

  “The reason I want to play a long time,” Carla finally said, “is that this will be the first time I’ve made love since I had my baby, and I’m not sure how it’s going to feel.”

  “How’s it feel so far?” I asked.

  “It feels fine,” she said.

  I didn’t believe her about it being the first time since she’d had her baby. I just assumed she’d been making it with Tower, since she spent so much time with him. But I didn’t know if I should say anything. Finally I did.

  “You don’t have to say that about your lovemaking,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.” It came out sounding like I was forgiving her for something, but I really just wanted her to know I was willing to accept her on her own terms.

  “I haven’t been making love with Austin,” she said. “First I was too sore and then I wasn’t sure and then his girlfriend came all the way from New York. Girls don’t spend time with guys just to get laid,” she said.

  I admit it, hearing her say it made me feel good.

  We lay a little longer, just touching and kissing slowly. Carla definitely set the pace those first times. What she was doing was teaching me how she liked it to be. And then she looked me square in the eye and said, “You can do anything you want to me.”

  That sentence I had heard so often in the final throes of wet dreams, had so often fantasized in the last quick strokes of a bathroom beat-off break at school, that sentence opening the way for travel in the farthest reaches of the erotic cosmos had a strange effect: my cock wilted like a sunflower on a gray day.

  I rose again, but only after I had confessed my awe at the grandeur of her invitation and after Carla had shown me some of my options.

  I never really thought I’d ever come head to head with the prospect of fulfilled fantasy. She talked about everything in sex being beautiful if it felt good and said she thought everything would feel wonderful with a guy as gentle as me. That was a very nice thing for her to say and it made me feel awful good. I told her I had some pretty violent but friendly feelings about the love I’d like to make to her and that I’d never felt that way before. Then everything was all right and we proceeded to fuck around and around, rolling and intertwining like two weasels with one lame paw.

  Carla, having a few violent feelings of her own, pulled my hair and bit me little hard ones and dug her fingers into me all over. Thank Christ she keeps her fingernails short. I squeezed her till her vertebrae cracked and drove into her with all my abdominal strength, which is a lot even in off-season. Carla laid her head back and made beautiful animal sounds. I tried to pull out, but she held me and told me to “come, come,” that she was taking pills.

  I came and came, all right. I also twitched like a freshly killed snake and gasped like a victim of cardiac collapse. I had never experienced any feeling like that before. It was several universes beyond any pleasure I’d even imagined. Hard as I worked to help her, Carla didn’t come. But she did say she liked the love. Now that we’ve had some practice she comes all the time.

  When we reestablished our relationship with the world outside the two of us, we found ourselves in a red twilight. Carla peeked outside and then turned back and said, “Nobody’s around. Let’s go for a swim.”

  “That water is cold,” I informed her.

  “Think how good it will feel.” And she rubbed her hands together, gave me a quick kiss on my shriveled peter, and burst bare-assed through the tent flaps. I heard a splash and then a scream. Then, “Oh, God, it’s wonderful!” That water was so cold it drove my testes up about to my spleen. But it truly was wonderful.

  Later, at the lodge, Carla looked up from her dinner and around at all the people and up at the deer, elk, bear, bobcat, pheasant, and fish trophies on the walls and turned back to me and said, “We have a secret. We know something nobody else in here knows.”

  Actually, I thought our secret was showing. Carla glowed like sunset and I couldn’t stop the smiles coming. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. And maybe it was just the fragrance remaining in my mustache, but in spite of our icy creek baths, I thought we smelled like a fish sack left out in the sun.

  “And we’re going to have another one when we get back to the tent,” Carla said.

  We’ve been having secrets like that ever since.

  IX

  I’m lying on a cot. Tanneran is sitting on a stool talking to me. He says I fainted dead away when I got up to give my book report. He says we walked down here to the nurse’s office and I seemed okay until I fainted again. I feel like I just sprinted to the top of Mt. Rainier and went takedowns with a Sasquatch.

  “How’s your weight?” Gene asks.

  “Forty-seven last night,” I reply.

  “Did you have any breakfast?”

  “A veritable feast, Gene. A big bowl of Carla’s yogurt with some giant chunks of fresh pineapple.”

  “What’d you do before class?” Gene asks.

  “I skipped my two study halls and did a workout,” I reply slowly.

  “What sort of workout?” Gene’s being very slow with me. I’m grateful. I’m having a little trouble following.

  “Regular workout, Gene,” I say. “I ran thre
e. Did five hundred pushups, a hundred dips, a thousand sits.”

  Gene shakes his head. “And what did you weigh then?”

  “Forty-six.”

  “I’ll bet anything you’re going down too fast,” Gene says. He purses his lips and nods. “Coach is on his way. He’ll know.”

  “Where’s the nurse? Where’s the damn nurse?” Coach flaps his arms, looking in all directions.

  “She doesn’t come on Fridays,” I hear myself whisper. I feel strange.

  “What do you weigh?” Coach asks. I close my eyes and breathe through my mouth. My fingertips tingle and my body seems to float. I can’t feel the gray wool blanket I know I’m lying on. In my mind I see Coach waving at me from the top of David Thompson’s green-and-gold water tower in the park. He’s yelling toward school, where I’m being kept prisoner. I think he wants to spring me, but I can hardly hear.

  Gene answers for me. “Forty-six after a workout about fifteen minutes ago.” Gene’s voice is faraway.

  “Christ!” Coach rants. “He’s going down too fast. He’s probably dehydrated. I’ll go get some salt. Make him drink some water, Gene.” And Coach is gone.

  I hear his heels click. He’s walking right down the side of the water tower! What balance! Boy, I’d have hated to wrestle Coach Ratta in his prime.

  I lose control. I rave. I’m out the window, up the hill in the park. It’s summer and I’m swinging on the big kids’ swing. I throw my head back and pump for the sky. Upside down a green-and-gold kingdom oscillates feudally. There are 2,563 of us in David Thompson High School. That’s more than some small towns. The high school is green and gold, the junior high, the grade school, the water tower, the public toilet, the grass, the sun. I swing level with the bar. I stretch my head way back, the ground swooshing, swooshing in my ears. I can’t get sick now. I always get sick on the big swing. I look down. How many David Thompson sneakers rubbed to sand this former grass? My teeth fall out. They slide across the sandy patch below, near, then very far as I swing. They nip the iron pole, bite down on a clump of grass. I can’t get sick now. I’m lean. I carry the colors of the Columbia. I can make the river flow again. My short hair brushes the sand, the grass, the sand, the grass. My nose begins to bleed, arcing dots of blood elliptically. I rave. I jump.