Vision Quest (14 page)

Carla goes along with this, especially the music and vegetables, but she is only lukewarm about my last variable limiter, the 9mm Luger that I stow under the seat and sleep with on almost all camping trips. I admit I am not completely sold on the idea of having a gun along, but I am committed to it for now because I just believe our lives are too important to leave even relatively unprotected. I
mean, I'm pretty strong and probably fairly up to fighting for our lives, but I can't punch out a bullet or turn knife steel to rubber. Also, there are guys around who could beat me to death in a very few minutes with nothing but their fists and feet. I mean, we're vulnerable enough just in relation to things like disease and bad moods, without leaving ourselves open to attacks by other human beings. Animals don't worry me.

The problem, of course—and this is another variable—is that someone trying to hurt us might get to the gun first. I mean there are some arch motherfucking weirdos running around—even in the Northwest. Last summer, a social worker in a Triumph Spitfire picked up two hitchhikers near Missoula, and they killed him and cut off his fingers and ears for jewelry and ate his heart. This fall, some poor crazy asshole strapped a dozen sticks of dynamite around his middle and walked into a schoolhouse up on the reservation and hugged his estranged wife, who was substitute teaching, and blew the whole fucking place into the happy hunting ground. And that was three or four miles from our cabin on Loon Lake. But you can't let stuff like that worry you into a preoccupation. It would diminish all the neat stuff about being alive. I just try to forget about it but still be ready.

I really didn't make a very active deer watcher last night. I've seen plenty of deer and I was pretty sleepy, so I didn't pay as much attention as Carla. I mostly just wanted
to relax. I was dancing my toes to a quiet Don McLean tune called “Winterwood” when Carla said softly, “Here come some more.”

Sure enough, four more deer stood at the edge of the trees.

“Are those mule deer?” Carla asked.

“I can't tell,” I said. “I'd have to see their tails.” You're supposed to be able to tell mule deer by their big ears, but I never can. They're also supposed to be stockier than whitetails.

“I think they're mule deer,” Carla said.

I sat with my eyes closed, very comfortably tucked in my corner of the DeSoto, wondering why you see more falling stars in summer than in winter. I opened my eyes and looked at Carla and then closed them again and stretched my leg until my foot found her thermal crotch. Her hand rubbed across my big wool boot sock and patted my foot. Then I felt some woolly toes pad along my inner thigh and then a warm squirrelly foot tried to make off with my acorns before I trapped it. Feeling each other's pressure was all we were after.

“They are mule deer,” Carla whispered. “They have very big ears compared to the others.” And her toes gave me a prod that said “I told you so.” It also made me instantly horny.

Carla felt it with her foot and responded with more pressure. To which my cock responded with increased
turgidity. “You're supposed to relax for tomorrow,” she said.

“I think it would be relaxing,” I replied.

“And don't forget,” Carla said on her way over to my side of the seat, “you said it burns up two hundred calories.”

“We have a secret from these deer” was the last thing I remember hearing before Carla woke me in the garage this morning. She said I was sleeping so soundly when we got home from seeing the deer that she didn't want to wake me to come to bed.

I decided to walk home
from Dr. Livengood's office. I weigh 149.5 on his scale, so I need all the exercise I can get. It turned out that getting his permission to drop the weight was no sweat at all. He just listened to my story, then to my chest, then pushed me on the scale. He read off 50, but it was really 49.5.

“Shouldn't be any problem. A little jogging and a healthy shit ought to do it now,” he said, and smiled. “Flush out that Christmas turkey.”

“Wouldn't have seemed like Christmas without a little white meat and turkey gravy.” I smiled sheepishly. I nearly lost control at the dinner table yesterday.

Dr. Livengood smiled again and patted me on the shoulder as though I were a little kid and then took my weight-loss form over to his desk and signed it. Over his shoulder he handed me a Christmas card. It was from Max Mokeskey, the med student who had done his preceptorship here. Max sent his greetings to Dr. and Mrs. Livengood and in a PS said, “Please give Louden Swain my wishes for good luck in his big wrestling match.”

“Gee,” I said. “That's really nice of him to remember me.”

“He's a good boy,” Dr. Livengood said, handing me back my weight-loss form.

“Boy,” Dr. Livengood called him. Max is probably twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. He stands probably six-four and goes maybe 220. “Boy.” I really get a bang out of old people.

*  *  *

God, it's a beautiful day! Carla drove to work early just to drop me off at Dr. Livengood's. It's still pretty early. My appointment was for eight and it only took about ten minutes. People are still on their way to work. Carla's probably drinking tea with Belle right now, sitting on a granola barrel, waiting for nine o'clock and the first customers.

We got just enough snow last night to cover up the dog shit on the sidewalks and the bus exhaust spores in the streets. Ordinarily I'd avoid a busy street like Monroe on a walk from town. But now the traffic is slow and soft-sounding. The cars and buses seem like a herd of big, friendly animals headed for grazing ground. All of us emit little clouds of vapor. I imagine us as comic book characters with writing in our clouds. A snowcapped Toyota pickup has turned into a pronghorn antelope. Dressed in a camp cook's apron and hat, it waves a ladle and hails me in Kuch's voice.

“Howdy, pilgrim,” says the antelope-cook. “How's about warmin' up yur ribs with a little wild onion stew?”

“No thanks, ole stud hoss,” I say. “Can't even take time to set. Headed for the winter rendezvous up to Fort David Thompson. Figure to wrestle Gary Shute out of all his hides and his poke o' gold.”

“That Shute's quick as a snake an' mean as an old mountain lion,” yells the pronghorn from far down the trail. “Best watch yur topknot!”

“Best watch yourn!” I yell back. But the little cook is gone, the chuckwagon obscured by the lumbering buffalo buses. Yesterday afternoon just before Christmas dinner I finished reading a book called
Mountain Man
by Vardis Fisher. I'm really a sucker for a good wilderness story. Kuch had been after me to read that book for a long time.

I like feeling a kinship with traffic. I like pretending. Carla would get a kick out of seeing me this way.

She really loved seeing the deer last night. I had a great night, too, even though Christmas night has traditionally been an anticlimax for me. But Christmas Eve is a gas all day. I always go to a matinee, then open presents at night and have a great time at home. But Christmas night is always a bummer, because everything I've looked forward to is over. This Christmas night was different because of Carla and the deer, and because the thing I've been looking forward to most isn't Christmas presents—it's my match with Shute. Also, I'm just growing up.

Carla and Cindy made yogurt all afternoon, Kuch and his dad were somewhere racing snowmobiles, and Otto hates
Jesus Christ Superstar
, so I went to the matinee alone. I half wanted to go alone anyway, but I called Kuch and Otto because since we were in grade school we've always gone to a matinee on Christmas Eve.

Nobody except Carla understands why I like
Jesus Christ Superstar
so much. And even though she understands, she can't get into it herself. I guess my reasons are pretty personal and fairly dumb. It's just that I've always wanted to believe that story, and this movie version concentrates on some believable aspects.

Christ is a guy who has committed himself to a goal none of his people clearly understands. He is disciplined and calculating in pursuit of the goal. He defines his whole reality as though the goal—eternal life for himself and everybody who believes in him—were really possible. He lives fierce and proud and then he dies. In the movie his is resurrected, but it's okay because you feel like he deserves it. I don't for a second believe Christ or anybody else lives on eternally, except maybe for a while as a memory or an artifact. But I do think a lot of people deserve to. I think old Jay Gatz in
The Great Gatsby
would certainly deserve to if he were a real person, and I think my mom and dad do. But that's not the only reason I'm hooked on J.C.

I
know
the characters in that movie. They're real. In all my younger days in Sunday school I never heard one biblical story about characters I figured I knew. I didn't even believe the living people in Mom's church were real. But in the movie everybody yells and fights and cries and sweats and farts and probably fucks, and Judas has some noble qualities, and Simon is an archfreak and dancin' fool who slobbers like the Sausage Man, and Jesus warns God he'd
best take him soon before he changes his mind, and that poor fucking Pilate just wants to let Jesus off, but he can't because it's not part of the way things are defined.

Pilate is a figure who really interests me. After I had seen J.C. a few times I ran across this book called
The Master and Margarita
at a garage sale. The cover implies it's about the devil and supernatural stuff and I bought it for that interest. It is about the devil, but it turns out to be about a lot more, too. It's mostly a satire on Russian artists' unions, I guess. Anyway, Pilate is a character in it. Bulgakov, the author, shows Pilate suffering in the immortality he achieved through his part in Christ's superstardom.

I can't figure out whether God meant Pilate's immortality as a reward or a punishment. He must have meant it as a reward, or at least a compensation, because Pilate sure couldn't be blamed for Jesus's death. Pilate didn't have any choice. He couldn't have let Christ off. He got sucked in. He had to stay within the divine scope of events. If he'd let Jesus off, it would have spoiled everything. Pilate was duped. And so was Judas.

Anyway, in
The Master and Margarita
, Pilate and his dog sit on this asteroid way out in space and Pilate wonders and wonders where he went wrong with that crazy Galilean. It's beautiful the way Bulgakov frees Pilate from the asteroid so he and his dog can at least stretch their legs in eternity.

And then aside from what the movie makes me think
about, there's what it makes me see and hear and feel. Everybody who had anything to do with the making of that film must be a genius. The singing and dancing and rock and roll are so wild and beautiful. It makes me weak—it truly does—that human folks can produce such sounds and movements.

There are certain points in the movie—like when Jesus is yelling at God about why he has to die—that set me free from my normal consciousness, that disrupt my competitive relationship with life. I mean when Jesus lets blast at God with that shrieking falsetto of his, I get shudders and my eyes tear. I want to jump up and scream some primal sound. What I feel is that I'm a human being and one of my human being teammates has just done a wonderful, beautiful, transcendent fucking thing with our limited human ability. And I'm proud.

It's exactly the same feeling I had at a pep assembly last year when Otto was named Prep Lineman of the Year in Washington. I cried. I'm not ashamed, but I am glad I was sitting in the back row so I could turn my head.

And I had it last summer at the motorcycle races down at Castle Rock. Kuch was leading the novice main until the last lap, when he highsided into the wall coming out of the last corner. His dad and I went running out there after the pack went by to see how he was. He was going sixty or seventy when he crashed, and I figured he at least broke his back. But when we got to the corner he had his
helmet off and was just leaning back against the wall, shaking his head slowly and looking at the sky. When his dad saw Kuch was okay he slowed down and we walked across the track to where Kuch and the bike were. Mr. Kuchera knelt and said, “Kenny, you've got to turn the gas down sometime.” They were so beautiful at that moment it made me feel like I was pretty neat just because I was their friend.

And then I had it again this fall watching
Wide World of Sports
. Pelé was playing his last soccer game. I don't know anything about Pelé except what everybody else knows—that along with Muhammad Ali, Pelé is one of the world's best-known human beings and greatest athletes. He's supposed to be from humble beginnings and all that. I probably wouldn't even have watched the program if it hadn't come on right after football and if Balldozer, whose stepmother is Brazilian, hadn't threatened to kill me if I switched the channel.

So about a quarter into the game—right in the middle of the action—Pelé whips off his jersey and starts to jog around the stadium. All the players stop and the crowd wails and freaks out. The camera came up close on Pelé, and he was waving his jersey high and flashing his ivories wide and crying like a baby. Then they switched to the actual sound inside the stadium, and unless you understood Portuguese you couldn't hear a thing but foreign and semi-insane screaming. They had a guy trying to translate, but you couldn't hear him. It didn't matter to me,
anyway, because all I could think about was Pelé's face. And my eyes filled up with tears for him and all his great days of playing. I wish every human being in the world sometime in his life could know the glory of tears like Pelé's. And I hope I can, too.

I walked home from the movie happy as a fish and about two feet off the ground, just psyched about being alive and aware of all the possibilities. I stayed about that high through the evening and finally came down on the way to the park when I began thinking about Mom and Dad and another year going by and all the possibilities. A person sure doesn't have to be a great athlete or politician or doctor or artist or entrepreneur or performer of any type or degree of greatness to find challenge in life. About half the time I think it's a great victory just to be able to smile semiregularly, to keep your head up, to keep from giving in and getting mean. I'm not ashamed to admit I need regular transfusions of confidence to keep me going. I need some examples that remind me, by God, it can be done.