Vision Quest (11 page)

Coach is finished with Balldozer, who gasps and nods that he understands about the double-chicken-wing-stackup series.

Coach waives comment on Otto's L.C. man in favor of some brief predictions about the damage the Montana heavyweights are likely to do him when we travel there next Friday. Coach isn't kidding. Those cowpokers really can be mean.

“Cowboys and miners!” Otto giggles, trembling in mock fear.

Behind him I stuff two sweat socks in Thuringer's mouth, being careful not to damage his lip. Then I begin to tie his head between his knees with his shoelaces. I finish just as Coach does, and we all jump up to begin exercises. All except the Sausage Man. We quickly heave him deep in his favorite corner and cover him up good.

We're in our warm-up lines and Coach opens his mouth to scream the first exercise at us when a light but persistent knocking sounds at the door.

Coach screams at the knocking and the door opens hesitantly, revealing red curls. It's Carla.

Coach points at me and points at the door. Coach knows of my semimarital state. Carla babysits Coach's kids sometimes. I trot over. Behind me Coach screams, “On your backs! Neck drill!”

I hear the flops and grunts and straining as the guys
bridge on their necks, navels ceilingward, hands pounding bellies. The chanting starts, a steady “ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh” in time with the pounding hands. A simple tribal song, the sound of clean lungs. I close the door on this familiar rumbling and see that Carla is worried.

“What's wrong?” I ask.

“I heard you fainted in class,” she says. “Are you okay?”

“Okay,” I say. “Just a little light-headed.”

“You should have let me know you were all right,” Carla says sternly.

“I'm sorry. I didn't even think that someone might tell you,” I reply. “I'm sorry—really!” I repeat, going close to kiss her.

Carla's worry has changed to mild pissed-offness. We kiss and part. She sniffs. She moves close again and sniffs my sweat clothes. She wilts, swoons. I lean her against the wall.

“That smell is not human.” She gasps, rubbing her eyes and wrinkling her nose.

Carla pinches the cloth of my sweatshirt delicately, as though she were examining the texture of a turd. The salt crystals crinkle lightly beneath her fingertips. “Ouhhh!” she says with a grimace. “Don't you ever wash this stuff?” This is Carla's first trip up to the wrestling room. She must be skipping her child development class.

“Of course not,” I reply indignantly. “You wash practice sweats before the season starts and that's it,” I explain.
“Each time you put them on you're reminded of all the fat you sweated out the day before. You can feel it. Besides, the smell deadens your mucous membranes, reducing the occurrence of bloody nose. Much healthier than cocaine.”

My good spirits persist in spite of my light-headedness, maybe even aided by the condition. But Carla isn't having any of my jive.

“Does everyone do it that way?” she asks, cringing away.

“Not everyone,” I reply. “Mostly just Otto and Kuch and Schmoozler and me—we're the seasoned veterans.”

“Jesus,” Carla retorts. “You should be seasoned. You should be pickled from wearing this stuff.”

The team is past pushups and into sits now. “Stick your head in and take a whiff,” I encourage her.

She does. “Glaaah!” She retches, slamming the door. “It's like ammonia. You can feel it in the air. Eyccch!” She shimmies and hops, wiping her nose on her pinafore. “It's on me!” she shrieks.

I laugh.

“I'll pick you up at a quarter after,” Carla says, starting down the stairs.

I lean down after her and pooch my lips out for a kiss. “Glaaah!” She shudders and flees.

Behind me I hear the team running in place, the tiny rapid steps, the chant going strong. I'll miss the wrestling room, stuck up here in the rafters of the gym. I'll miss
climbing the stairs, throwing Kuch's headgear out the window at basketball players, hiding Sausage's mouthpiece in my jock. I'll miss the air, so full of sweat it stings. The walls dripping with it. Coach keeps the wrestling room at eighty degrees. We've got mats wall to wall and five feet up the sides so nobody gets smashed into the concrete. Now that the team is so big we have to do our drills in shifts. Coach won't cut anybody. Every guy who comes to practice gets to be on the team. If he's the best he gets to wrestle number one varsity. If he's second best he gets to wrestle number two varsity or number one junior varsity. If he's third best he gets to wrestle number one JV or number two JV. It depends on how tough the matches are and how bad the team needs to win. Coach remembers when he had to go through the halls grabbing guys, asking them if they wanted to turn out for the wrestling team. After we won the state championship last year, the PTA wanted to build us a new wrestling room. Otto and Schmooz and Kuch and I had to threaten to move to Moses Lake before they'd leave us alone.

I slip through the door and find myself some moving room. Soon I'm lost in the thunder.

*  *  *

We're about to begin our wrestle-offs. Coach walks to a corner of the wrestling room to watch. Coach never referees the wrestle-offs or participates in any way. Guys who aren't wrestling at the time do all the refereeing.
We all know Coach has his favorites among us, but it's not Coach's opinion that determines the first team. In wrestling, unlike football or basketball, there's none of this crap about how good so-and-so looked in practice. If a wrestler beats everybody in his weight class, he's number one. That's all there is to it. In wrestle-offs Coach roots for nobody. Coach walks to a corner and takes a seat on a pile of green-and-gold blankets. I look across the room at Otto, whose big face contorts into giggles. We're about to have a diversion.

Coach sits down and his face immediately goes quizzical. He bends his head between his legs and lifts the blankets a bit to check the source of the tremors he feels. Coach finds he is sitting on the Sausage Man.

Untied, Sausage leaps up and down and spits all over. He has this tendency to spit when he gets excited. He's like a lawn sprinkler when he plays his flute. If you're in the audience you've either got to stand way back or wear a raincoat. I doubt the problem is pathological.

Sausage pulls his headgear on sideways and gets his nose stuck in an ear hole. He rips it off and flings it at Otto, who convulses in the center of the mat. “Fucking lardass Lafte!” the Sausage spits.

I pull his mouthpiece out of my jock and toss it to him gently.

“Fucking Swain!” he slavers. “You muscle-bound dog turd!”

Sausage spits lint and chunks of sweat sock. He pops the wretched mouthpiece into his mouth. We all laugh. Coach, too. It's ten minutes before we can get the wrestle-offs started.

*  *  *

Practice is over. I sit on the shower floor, turning pink under the hottest spray I can endure. We've got the drains plugged with towels and the water is about six inches deep. Visibility is about a foot through the steam. The effect is strange. You hear shouts and splashing, but you seldom see anybody, except when they come up to use your shower and fall over you or when they go sliding by in a seal race.

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.

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.