Vision Quest by Terry Davis Page B

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 ofsmallpox 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.
    â€œYour braid?” Kuch’s braid still falls ass-length.
    â€œYah,” 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.
    â€œAre you okay?” she asked.
    â€œBaarrrrrrrrrff!” I replied.
    â€œAre you okay?” she asked again, a little more concerned.
    â€œFine, 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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œMy tummels-tummels already hurts,” I said, running the water. “What’s a folding bear?”
    â€œA bear that folds over things, especially when he’s happy,” Carla explained.
    â€œI’m not happy.”
    â€œI could tell right away you weren’t really a folding bear,” she tittered. She was a little drunk herself. “You have a very muscular boom-boom,” she continued, pulling off my pants.
    I hung parallel to the floor, perpendicular to the tub edge, balanced on my “tummels-tummels,” my head wedged under the faucet, my legs waving my pants good-bye.
    â€œHow did you get so muscular?” Carla asked, toweling me off.
    â€œGod’s will,” I replied.
    â€œYou’re not one of them, are you?” she inquired, leading me to the davenport. “I refuse to help a drunken Jesus freak.”
    â€œJest,” I replied, “frivolity”—bucking up against the pain.“It was probably Him got me into this. He finds ways to get even, even if He doesn’t exist.”
    Carla began to walk on things. I thought I was dreaming. She got up on the other davenport and walked along the top, spreading her arms wide to balance herself. She walked atop the old oak table, then the bar. Her blue hat