Vision Quest

by Terry Davis

  Two small white legs approach me through the steam. The kneecaps look me in the eye. At this moment I remember I’ve left my teeth in the soap dish. I see a blur above me as the small arm reaches. The legs turn and are gone in a splash. The Sausage Man’s cackle hangs in the mist.

  I’m up and whipping across the cold concrete floor after him, but Sausage is already out the locker room door. Last I see of him he’s dancing off across the park, naked, a pink Christmas cherub in black wrestling shoes, cackling and spitting little ice crystals that catch the light from the parking lot and shine like tiny falling stars. He knows if I chase him I’ll be late for work.

  XI

  Here comes Carla in our snowcapped DeSoto. The big old skinny tires squeak and crunch through the dry packed snow. The chrome and snow reflect the streetlight and for a second or two I’m blind. I’m rubbing my eyes as she pulls up to the curb.

  “I have a surprise.” She stops. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I say. “Just blinded for a sec by all the snow.”

  “The smell of that room probably rotted your eyes,” she says as I walk around to the passenger side. The locker room is in shadow. She hasn’t noticed I’m toothless.

  I nearly sit on the surprise.

  “Watch out!” cries Carla.

  “Raaahrr!” cries the surprise.

  The surprise makes it out of the way, but I do catch Carla’s hands, pinning them under my fatigued butt.

  “Gotcha,” I say, looking fondly down into my lap, bubbling with red curls.

  “Hullock,” mumbles Carla into the mohair. “You almost squished our new Katzenburger.”

  An emaciated gray-and-black kitten roams the tops of the front seats. I loft it, give it a couple good rubs along the soft gray flannel headliner, and set it gently down on Carla’s head.

  “Nice Katzen.” Carla gasps affectionately. Mohair upholstery is all kinds of fun in terms of tactile sensation, but it’s hell to try to breathe through.

  I remove the kitten, scrutinizing it at arm’s length. The little critter is indeed undernourished. I check for gender. Her survival seems dubious.

  “Katzen B.!” squeals a freed Carla, grabbing the little beast and nuzzling it nose to nose. She hands the kitten back to me and notices that my visage has changed some. “Oh, my God—your teeth!” she exclaims, with a hand tender on my slackened mandible. “Did they break?”

  “That bastard-assed dwarf Thuringer stole them,” I explain as little Katzenburger crawls inside my coat, curls near my heart, and falls asleep, purring like a diesel, healthier than she appears.

  “Why would Damon do something like that?” Carla asks as we crunch off toward the hotel.

  “Vendetta,” I answer. “Otto and I tied him up and hid him under his blankets. He missed practice. Coach didn’t even notice he was gone. If Coach hadn’t sat on him by accident when we started our wrestle-offs, Sausage might never have been discovered. We just wanted to temper his hubris a little.”

  “But you said he has a tough match on Tuesday.”

  “It’s not wise to take such things too seriously,” I say. “It’s only a game.”

  “Someone should knock hell out of you.” Carla smiles.

  “Somehow I feel that at this very moment just such an act is being planned.” I sink deep into the comfort of our good old car. Katzenburger squeaks. Carla pulls to the curb and examines her, curled in the downy fold of my parka.

  “She’s not very well,” Carla says, pulling back into traffic. “But she’s better than when we got her.”

  “When did we get her?” I ask.

  “Dad brought her home this afternoon. He sent someone up to some valley to deliver a car and Katzen was in the car the guy brought back.”

  Dad’s Honda dealership is going fairly strong now. About the only people who buy them are college types, Dad says. But there are six colleges around Spokane, so that should give him enough customers to stay in business until a few more of our countrymen decide they’ve got better things to do with their money than spend it on gas. Dad sometimes wishes there were a little American car as good as the Honda he could sell. But I tell him to forget it, that he can’t afford that kind of economic patriotism. During the season I don’t get much time to hang around the store, so I don’t know all his salesmen yet. I do know he sent someone up to the Okanogan Valley to deliver a Honda Civic and pick up an Olds. The reason I know this is because the guy was also supposed to pick up a box of apples from Dad’s mom. She cooks for the pickers in an apple orchard there. The orchard owners are the ones who bought the Civic. Grandma turned them onto Dad. Apple-picking is long over, of course, but she stays up there anyway. Most of our communication takes the form of boxes of apples. Okanogan Grandma is a little like Columbia River Grandpa. They’re separated and they don’t like each other much, but they’re a lot alike. Grandma won’t leave her cabin in the Okanogan, and Grandpa won’t leave his cabin on the upper Columbia. Grandma talks to us in apples, and Grandpa speaks in venison steaks.

  “The guy told Dad he heard some squeaking in the back of the car, but he didn’t see anything back there. Dad said that when they opened the trunk to see if the spare tire was any good, they found five little kittens. They were very young and very little and four of them were dead. Dad took Katzenburger into his office and put her by the heater and gave her some skim milk. When he brought her home she could hardly walk. We took her to Poodle’s doctor, and he gave us some kitten vitamins and he wouldn’t give Katzen her shots for a few weeks and that for only about five weeks old she is a very healthy Katzen. We have to give her vitamins every two hours. Look!”

  Carla holds up a plastic dropper bottle filled with a dark bilious substance.

  “Smell!” Carla commands.

  I smell. My nasal passages are cleared for eternity.

  Carla laughs villainously. “Ha!” She bounces up and down on the seat. “Aha! We fixed you. That’s still not as smelly as your wrestling clothes,” she continues gleefully. “But anything worse might be permanently damaging.”

  “You sure showed me.” The stuff doesn’t smell that bad, actually. I take a cautious whiff. It just surprises you. “Smells very nutritious,” I say, handing it back.

  Carla is really happy. I confess without too much self-consciousness that seeing her this way really gets me off. My face expands into a smile. I can’t control it. My lips pull back over my gums. Smiling is easier when you don’t have any teeth. Probably not as pretty, though.

  Carla talks on about the promise of jars and jars of applesauce to be canned and speculates concerning cruelty-to-animals statutes.

  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 h
otel’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.

  XII

  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.

  XIII

  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.