Vision Quest by Terry Davis

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 andtalked 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.
    â€œYa know what I’m gonna do instead of goin’ to college?” Kuch asked, popping another beer.
    â€œWin the Spanish Grand Prix?” I replied.
    â€œBesides that.”
    â€œWhat, then?”
    â€œI’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 theAmerican 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.
    â€œWhy a vision quest?” I asked.
    â€œI’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 andhis braided hair hung down to his ass. He was just overzealous, and looking back, I guess he didn’t have his beliefs too