Vision Quest (12 page)

I guess I'm a little dizzy. The lights make me a little sick. It's also about 8,000 degrees in this car. I crack my window. Carla brings her speculations to a halt.

“Don't get too much wind on the Katzen,” she warns.

“Just need some air,” I respond.

“Louden.” She takes my chin in one hand as she guides the DeSoto with the other. “Are you all right?”

“Ah'm hungry,” I whimper. “Do you suppose if I called Shute he'd come down to the hotel tonight and wrestle me in one of the banquet rooms? I don't know if I can last another week and a half.”

“You could just forget it. You don't have to wrestle him.”

“Too late,” I say. “I've made my bed. Now I've got to starve and get hell beat out of me in it. I'll eat a little
something now; then I'll be okay for work. And maybe you could fix us a snack when I get home. A couple hot fudge sundaes, perhaps? Some rhubarb pie? Two or three double cheeseburgers, maybe?”

“Really?” Carla is wide-eyed.

“No.” I sigh.

“How about some applesauce?” Carla suggests.

“Wonderful,” I reply. “And I'll pretend it's surrounded by monadnocks of vanilla ice cream.”

We turn off Monroe onto Sprague Avenue. Downtown Spokane is all Christmassy. A Lenny Dee version of “Jingle Bell Rock” begins on the hotel's Christmas tape. The organ notes fall in flakes. The black Santa rings his bell, smiling at Carla. I take some deep breaths and feel better.

Carla is talking to me.

“Hmmmm?” I ask.

“Damon—will he give you back your teeth?”

“I imagine,” I answer. “They'll be too big for him.”

Carla grabs the kitten from inside my coat. She pushes me out the door. I turn back for a good-bye.

“It's sure nice to have a little live thing,” she says. Her eyes glow like electric chestnuts.

“It sure is,” I reply, getting a peck on the cheek from Carla and a moist little nose rub from the kitten.

At the door I look back. Carla is holding Katzenburger up to the window, waving her little paw. “Wave good-bye to Daddy,” she commands.

I keep my mouth closed
a lot during work. Sally thinks it's a “damn shame” and Elmo knows where I can get a set of red-white-and-blue enamels made. I'm considering the idea. I could base my practice on being the doctor with the patriotic smile.

The phone starts ringing with dinner orders and I begin to feel my self-discipline slip away. I put down three wheat-germ burgers before pulling myself together.

“Lemon Pie is still here,” Sally says, handing me 611's order. I wonder what the guy does with all his lemon pie.

*  *  *

He's naked again. Not even a towel, the brazen fucker. He's got what my grandfather calls a soft-off. His cock flaps limp as a whitefish. They're everywhere in the Columbia now that it doesn't flow anymore. I used to sit for hours in front of Grandpa's cabin pulling them in. The ones I didn't fling at rattlesnakes I'd stuff into a gunnybag. I'd get a bagful and we'd bury them in Grandpa's corn patch.

The guy asks about my teeth, so I tell him about Thuringer. He asks how I lost them originally and I tell him about the incredible monster from Issaquah who ran
my face into a corner of the bleachers in the state tournament my sophomore year. It knocked a bunch of my teeth out and broke my nose. I think he was the only guy I ever wrestled that I actually got mad at. He'd been state champ the year before and was pissed I was beating him.

“I didn't realize you were still in school,” the guy says, pulling some photographs from his attaché case.

I admit to a certain curiosity concerning them. He spreads his pictures across the bed. One draws me. It's of a well-built-gone-to-fat guy with the giantest cock I've ever seen. It looks like a loaf of French bread. The glans penis is about half as round as the faces of the four pubescent boys who lap wondrously at it. I'm reminded of one of Otto's road-trip Boy Scout reminiscences: “Shit,” Otto said. “It's just like sucking on your finger.”

The guy says he's leaving tomorrow, but that he'll be back in a couple weeks. He's sorry we can't get together. He has a guest coming. He'll leave the tray in the hall.

I consider listening at the door when I make my pickup rounds.

Downstairs, Sally informs me that she's heard Lemon Pie is a queer. She's checked the register and his name is . . . I tune her out. It's none of my business. Tuning her back in, I hear he's from Walla Walla. Somehow it's good to know that homosexuals come from someplace besides San Francisco. I decide not to listen at the door. In fact, the morning crew can get his tray.

I'm feeling pretty good, generally. I take all stairs two at a time. I loft the heaviest trays of dirty dishes to my shoulder, balancing them on my fingertips, flexing my fingers frequently, exercising those unsung muscles of a good grip, the interossei and lumbricales. I reflect upon the tracks a good grip will leave on wrists and upper arms. Dishes brush my ear. Turkey gravy, bits of dressing, peaks of burned meringue deck my hair. Each time I see Sally for a new order she picks the garbage off my head.

Elmo and I arm wrestle. I beat him both arms. I bounce on my toes while Elmo runs the charcoal brick over his grill. His tools are cleaned and put away in their slots in the cutting board. It's about time to head home.

I've never been more in touch with my body than I am at this weight. I swear I can hear the valves of my heart open and slam shut. Oxygenated blood swooshes through my arteries. It sounds like the Seattle monorail. Leukocytes and erythrocytes politely line up at my capillaries: “Be my guest!” “No, no. After you!” they say.

My highly energized state strikes Elmo as comical. Wiping the grill a final few times with his burlap rag, he looks up at me and smiles. “You get you some teeth, you be a totally tuned man,” he says, chuckling. “You about a yard off the floor. Best be sure you come down on that Shute.”

I smile and dance and hold my palms up for him to punch. He throws a combination, blowing out his nose each time his fist smacks my palm. The veins bulge beneath the
tattoos on Elmo's forearms. He was a lightweight fighter in Chicago in the 1940s. He's the only black adult I've ever known, besides teachers and coaches. I'm sure glad he got out of boxing with his brain intact.

Sally looks up from balancing her till. She's already pulled the velvet cord across the doorway. It's been a pretty slow night in the dining room.

“Merry Christmas, Elmo,” I say, shaking his hand. I'm off for the next week and a half. I arranged it way back when I decided I'd wrestle Shute.

“Merry Christmas to you,” Elmo says.

I give Sally a peck. “Merry Christmas, Sal!”

“Good luck, Louden,” Sally says.

The asphalt alleys are glazed
with ice and shine like new black nylon wrestling shoes. I fall on my ass occasionally. The snow melted from the heat of all the stores and signs and people and cars downtown, but now after the stores are closed it's freezing again. Riverside and Monroe are both still slushy, though, because of all the kids cruising. But the alleys I run are iced up.

Crossing the Monroe Street bridge is a pain. Creeps of all sorts honk and leer and fling ice balls at me. I recognize some David Thompson kids, so I wave. As I run along I wonder where Shute might be now. I
know
where Shute is: he's out running up some mountain through heavy snow, ready to pound Christmas out of Santa Claus.

I feel good when I cross the bridge. Now I can run down side streets. I crunch crisply through the snowy streets. Peripherally, I see the little chunks of snow fling from my boots. Everywhere the night is brightened by the clean snow. Under the streetlights it sparkles. Colored Christmas lights are a muted glow beneath the snow in hedges and firs. They remind me of Harmoniums—happy glowing little creatures living within the planet Mercury
in a Kurt Vonnegut book,
The Sirens of Titan
. I feel good. The air tastes good. I roll my arms in wide circles from the shoulders and watch the running angel shadow. But there are two. Running footsteps crunch behind me. I stop and turn. Bundled and panting, cap hanging elflike, the Sausage Man stands in a cloud of vapor. He hands me something. It's a frozen plastic bag. I gape.

“Your teeth,” Sausage says. “I'm sorry they froze. I put them in some water like my grandfather does and they froze solid.”

Sure enough, there's my partial plate embedded in a block of ice.

“Thanks, Sausage,” I say. “Hope you didn't get cold or in trouble or anything running out of the locker room that way.”

“No sweat,” says the Sausage Man, starting to jog. “The Russian hockey team does that shit all the time.”

*  *  *

“How was your run?” Carla asks from the bottom of the basement stairs.

“Okay,” I say. “Sausage caught me down by the bridge and gave me back my teeth.” I hold up the plastic bag.

“Frozen shrimp?” Carla guesses.

“Teeth,” I reply. “He put them in water and they froze. He ran with me up to the park and we meet Kuch and ran three through the snow on the track. I hope Mash doesn't do him permanent harm.”

I'm beat by this time. I take the stairs one at a time, clinging to the rail with one hand and to my boots and rucksack and sweats and teeth with the other. My T-shirt sticks so tight it's epidermal. Sweat drips from my jock and dots the tile.

“Look!” Carla points to the kitten. It's snuggled up to a little teddy bear I won for Carla arm wrestling at the Whitworth College carnival. And it's nursing, sucking loudly at the fur on the bear's foot.

“It's nursing!” I exclaim with tired astonishment.

“A surrogate mother,” Carla informs me as the kitten slurps away in contented ignorance.

Seems to me like pretty aberrant behavior. But “wow” is all I have energy enough to say on the subject for now.

“The DeSoto looks beautiful!” I yell from the shower. The old blue-and-gray couldn't have looked better when it was new over thirty years ago.

“Katzen helped me!”

I relax against the shower wall, devouring the applesauce that was waiting for me on the scales. It's cold and good and the water is hot and good. I weigh 148. My teeth are beginning to emerge from the block of ice in the soap dish. I'm glad to be out of school and off work for a while. I try like hell to fill my life with things to do, but sometimes they get to be too much. I smile at Carla's name for the kitten. To Carla every cat is Katzen and every dog is Doggels-Doggels. She named the teddy bear Bilbo.

Carla's in bed. She's pillowed up against the headboard, looking awfully comfortable and cozy in her floppy flannel nightgown, reading a little booklet entitled
Your New Kitten
. Naked, I bend my knees for the vault into bed.

“Eeeeeeh!” Carla gives a little scream, tempered by her consideration for Dad sleeping above us. “The Katzen!” she says, lifting kitten and bear from my intended ground zero and placing them at the foot of the bed.

I settle in. Carla turns off the light. We cuddle.

“We're going to have a guest for breakfast,” Carla whispers, pointing to the ceiling.

“Is she decent?” I ask.

“I didn't see her. Katzen and I were waxing,” she replies.

“Thanks for the applesauce,” I say. “It was good.”

“You're welcome,” Carla says.

I tug clumsily at Carla's nightgown. She pulls it off and flings it. The kitten squeaks. I always get a rush at the sight of Carla naked, even when it's dark and I can't really see her. I tremble.

We make slow love, lying on our sides, tummy to tummy, like old people probably do.

We touch and kiss lightly, practicing our tenderness. I hold her bottom so she doesn't fall away. It's just a handful.

Once, when we'd only made love a few times, just after I'd come Carla asked me what I was thinking. I didn't want to lie, so I said I was thinking of the salmon on the Columbia when it was a river and how they'd leap the falls
to swim upstream. She didn't say anything. One of the next times we made love, by some miracle we came together. Recovering, we looked into each other's eyes. “There they go,” Carla said, smiling. At first I didn't get it—salmon and the Columbia were far from my mind. But in a second or two I did, and smiled back. “There they go,” I said. The phrase has since become ritual when our love is at its best.

Half lost in reverie of the loves we've made and the love we're making and just too tired to control myself, I come too soon.

“I'm sorry.” I breathe.

Carla's hands pace softly the back of my neck. “There they go.” She sighs.

We had a guest for
breakfast, all right. And for the rest of Saturday and Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

And she is decent. I put her to the test right away, sprinting upstairs in my boxer shorts and whipping off a hundred quick pushups on the kitchen floor as she scrambled eggs.

“You must be Louden,” she said, unperturbed.

“I'm Carla,” I replied. “Louden's a lot prettier and can do pushups to infinity.”

“My name is Cindy,” she said. She's built like a middle-distance runner. She says she skis a little, but I bet she skis a lot. She's tan as a football. And she sure seems awful young for Dad.

“Howdy, Cindy,” I said, puffing a bit somewhere in the nineties. I was bearing down hard on one hundred when she turned from the stove and hooked my arm with her foot. I fell square on my nose.

“Oh, I'm so sorry,” said Cindy, gathering plates from the cupboard. She was definitely insincere.

I laughed, figuring it a good move and a greeting commensurate with mine. I whipped off my last pushups as the blood dripped slow and steady.

Turning, Cindy saw the blood. “Bloody nose?” she inquired.