Vision Quest (6 page)

“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 be 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.

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 waist 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.