Vision Quest (17 page)

“How about some spinach?” Carla asked.

“No, thanks,” I replied. “I don't need that much iron. I wouldn't want to rust before I wrestle Shute.”

I whipped downstairs and took a quick shower and returned in a clean pair of old sweat pants. Carla sat on the floor in front of the fire and Katzen slept curled on Dad's
Time
in his lap. Between the fragrance of the Christmas tree and the pine-scented candle I gave Carla, the living room smelled like the woods.

Dad was trying to push some Christmas candy on Carla. He's a great one for lots of goodies at Christmastime. It's
like the old thing about the poor kid who makes good and wants his family to have the stuff he didn't. In Dad's case the cliché is real. I've seen the cabin he lived in—the foundation of it, anyway. And I've walked most of the two miles he walked to the highway to catch the school bus. Part of that walk is underwater now. I've seen pictures of him in his Sunday best—his sweatshirt, his black jeans, and his weird high shoes with the huge round toes. Dad's hair was jet black and straight then. His complexion is darker than mine and his cheekbones are high. In one of his old basketball pictures he looks like an Indian. His hair is wavy now and gray around the ears. He said he pressed the wave into it when he was fishing in Alaska before he went into the service. In his Alaska pictures he's got one of those little thin mustaches and looks exactly like the old movie star Clark Gable. I try to get him to grow it again, but he won't.

Every Christmas, Dad always got Mom and me about a dozen presents each. Perfume and scented soap and slippers and robes and tapes for her, always socks and gloves and a flannel shirt and whatever I needed for school or sports. I don't think he got Mom anything this year, though. But he got Carla and me all kinds of stuff.

I think it really hurts him that I'm not able to eat my way through the holidays this year. Otto takes up the slack. This evening he was good for a few chocolate peanuts for his pockets, a couple pieces of fudge, a slice of cold turkey, and a big mouthful of hard candy to keep his energy level
high through our three miles. Kuch went for a glass of cider.

Dad likes Otto. Otto reminds Dad of himself as a kid. I can see it in his face. Otto doesn't have much money and neither did Dad. Otto's parents broke up when he was pretty young and so did Dad's. Otto's got it a little tougher than Dad had it, though. At least as far as I know. Otto's been living with his father in an apartment downtown since his mother was committed to the state hospital for her alcoholism. I used to stop by his place on my way home from work, until one night when just before I knocked on the window of their apartment, I heard Mr. Lafte yelling at Otto that he was just a big fat baby and not as tough as he thought. He was drunk and I could hear him push Otto after each sentence. “Oh, come on, Dad. Jesus Christ, lay off!” was about all Otto said back. I wanted to leave, out of respect for Otto, but my curiosity got the best of me, and I walked quietly up to their half-open door. Mr. Lafte, who is nearly as big as Otto but about half dead from straight whiskey and three packs of Camels a day, kept pushing and pushing. He's already had some of his throat removed because of cancer and his voice bubbles with phlegm. He began slap-fighting with Otto, boxing him around the room. Finally, Otto yelled, “Goddamnit, Dad!” and shoved him across the room, past the door, and into a wooden table, which shattered with a crash. Mr. Lafte got up swearing and swinging. Through the open door I saw him rush across the room. Then I ran away. Otto is as gentle a guy as
could be to his friends and to everybody who doesn't give him shit. But he's vicious with people he thinks do him or his friends wrong. Then he fights crazy, like a dog. Dad sold Otto his '58 Chevy at cost. That and his letter sweater are the only nice things Otto has. If Otto didn't have sports to make a career and maybe to channel his meanness, I'd be worried about his future.

I'd love to munch some candy with Dad. I could probably handle a piece or two. I'm holding 147 pretty well now. It's just that eating trash food after all this time would spoil the pattern. It would upset the rhythm I've got going with my body and break the deal I made with my spirit. I mean, I'm so close now I can see the end.

I really feel like I understand that Franz Kafka story
A Hunger Artist
now. It's about this guy who's into fasting as a profession. He's making a good living at it until somebody invents the radio or something and everybody turns elsewhere for entertainment. He should hang it up and move into some other line, but he doesn't. He's become an artist of hunger. What was once a painful discipline has become fulfilling and beautiful just for its own sake. His manager tries to get him to quit, but it's too late. The Hunger Artist just fasts himself into a pile of dusty satisfaction at the bottom of his cage. I can't say there's a real strict correlation between the two of us. I mean, I'm not quite ready for cosmic union. But I think I finally do understand what Kafka was getting at.

Dad popped a couple gumdrop orange slices into his mouth and Carla grabbed a miniature candy cane to suck. “Good candy,” Dad said. He put a little bit of gumdrop on Katzen's nose. She slept away, not even flinching. “See,” Dad said, smiling, “even my cat likes it.”

*  *  *

Carla's asleep after a load of love that should hold us over the two days I'll be in Montana. I should be asleep, too, but I'm just too excited, so I'm sitting here in the basement living room in front of a little fire I just made in the fireplace. In five days I'll wrestle Shute and end four months of working toward it. Then we've got test week at school, I turn in my senior thesis, and it's all over. It feels funny to know it's ending. The whole semester has been a little strange because of that. Spring semester will probably be that way for kids graduating at the end of the year. You see things in a special way when you realize your days among them are numbered. You try to treat people a little different so you can leave them with the truest impression of what they've meant to you. I could always go back and hang around school like some guys do after they graduate, but I don't want to do that. I'll visit Gene and Leeland and Coach, but I want to make this break a clean one. I want to put the high school part of my life behind me.

Carla and I and Dad and Cindy and Willa watched the old version of
A Christmas Carol
on TV a few nights ago, and although I didn't bring it up, I was really impressed by
this idea of seeing the end of things in that story. I mean it's Scrooge's knowledge of the end of things that changes his life. Those ghosts show him a glimpse of the future and it gives him a new perspective. Then he takes charge of himself and changes. It takes supernatural power to make old Scrooge realize something everybody should know just from looking around: that he's going to die. This idea of realizing your death and accepting it and keeping its realization with you always is the major thing I got out of Carlos Castaneda's books about his days with Don Juan. This awareness and acceptance of death sets up an almost contradictory way of looking at life. On the one hand, you know your time is short, so you use it preciously. Then on the other hand, you know it all comes to dust anyway, so you don't value anything too highly. You have things in a perspective that allows you to live in equilibrium with the universe. I've tried and tried to find a way to work
A Christmas Carol
into my senior thesis, but it's almost done now and I'd wreck it if I tried to stick something new in. I've got the Castaneda stuff all through it.

You can't graduate with honors from David Thompson unless you write a senior thesis. At the end of the school year the Honor Society has a meeting in which they tell the juniors about the thesis and hand out a little booklet of instructions. That gives you the summer and most of your senior year to get it done. The thesis is supposed to be long and serious and it has to pass a panel of teachers, so you really do need some
time. Washington state colleges are supposed to dig David Thompson graduates because of our theses. Tanneran, who is my thesis adviser, says colleges are hurting so bad for students now he doubts if they give a fuck if the kids they admit are even literate. I decided to write the thing not so much to make my record look good as just to wind up my high school time having done everything there was to do. From the time I was in grade school Dad would take me to all the David Thompson games in all the sports. I'd hang around the football field and the gym watching all the practices, wanting so bad to be big and go to David Thompson. It became what they call a ruling passion.

I should be typing, but it's fun just to sit here and look into the fire. Besides, I'd wake up Carla. The thesis has to have footnotes and a bibliography and it's got to have a conclusion all my own. The conclusion is all I've got left to do, and then I've got to type the whole mess. I'm just lucky I happened on my topic real early, or else with work and working out extra hard, I'd never have gotten it done. It's called “The Mean Goodness” and it's about the meaning of life. I figured since it was such an important assignment I wouldn't mess around with trivialities. The title comes from the first piece we read in senior English.

The first day of class Tanneran came in wearing jeans, a white tennis shirt, and a gray tweed sport coat, sat on the desk, and said slow and cretinistically, “Ahm gonner teach yawl ta read.” Then he smiled and we saw he'd blacked out
about half his teeth so they looked like they were missing. People laughed a little. Then Thurston Reilly, editor of the school paper, said, “But we knows how ta read!”

“I don't think you do! I do not think you do!” Gene said in his normal voice. He passed out copies of James Agee's
Knoxville: Summer of 1915
and told us to read it and be ready to talk about it the next day. Then he left and didn't come back.

We were all seniors and figured we damn sure knew how to read. A couple kids were offended, but most of us were just dumbfounded. Some people left and some stayed and read it. After about thirty-five minutes Reilly turned to me and said, “This is grounds for an editorial.” And he walked out with a gleam in his eye.

The next morning before school started Reilly found me in the gym and showed me his editorial. He is by far the best editor the
David Thompson Explorer
has had since I've been here and it looked like he'd scored again. The title was “Senior English—the Same Old Hype.” It described young, hairy teachers with old, crew-cut ideas. He worked some cute stuff with “hype” and “hip” and “hypocritical.” I didn't get to read it all because I was dripping sweat on it and he grabbed it away.

Tanneran was a few minutes late to class. Everybody asked everybody else what they thought the Agee piece was about. I thought I knew maybe a little of what it was about, because it seemed to fit so well into my thesis, which I'd
been working at since June. But in typical wiseass fashion I said, “Well, I think it's a surrealist, paranoid vision of how the army deals with indecent exposure,” and I quoted the line “. . . the urination of huge children stood loosely military against an invisible wall. . . .” I got no reaction, except from Molly Philabaum, who gave me the finger. Molly never could take a joke. Last year when Kuch was into his Indian phase and I was in my doctor phase, I hung out my shingle on my locker:

THE DOCTOR IS
IN

HYMENECTOMIES WHILE YOU WAIT!

Molly tore it down and reported me to the vice principal. He at least understood the humor. Everybody knows the only market for hymenectomies is junior high.

Gene came in and asked the class what the piece was about. Nobody said anything. Gene walked back to his chair, sat down, spread his arms and legs wide, flopped his head over, and pretended to snooze. In about ten minutes he opened an eye and scanned the room. Molly was the first to light into him about the stupid assignment and how it didn't relate at all to our lives.

“Molly . . . ?” Gene asked as he got up and stood in front of us. He was sharp in his heavy suede pants, thick old suspenders, and red-and-black plaid shirt. “Molly, you're never going to die?”

Nobody said anything. I suppressed an urge to say Molly
smelled like she was already dead. Molly should be introduced to feminine hygiene. That's what happens when they make PE optional.

Then Gene quoted these lines. People always have at least a measure of confidence in a good quoter:

“By some chance here we are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.”

“Okay,” he said. “Who knows what Agee's talking about in this piece?”

“ ‘The sorrow of being on this earth,' ” answered Patty Ryder in a flash.

“And what is sorrowful about being on this earth?” Gene asked.

“ ‘The hour of their taking away,' ” shot back Larry Brooks. Our class ain't dumb.

I was thinking of old David Thompson back when he was the first white man to set eyes on the Columbia River. And I wondered to myself how, how could he ever have imagined when he named that river that there would ever be enough power on earth to turn it into a fucking lake.

“
Our
taking away,” added Reilly.

“I don't think quite that,” Gene replied. “Not just that. Let's look at everything Agee says. Everything.” Then he went up to the board and wrote “Every Single Word.”

Knoxville: Summer of 1915
is only four pages long, but we read it for the next three days. Each of us read a few lines over and over aloud until we could say what they meant literally and how they fit in with the whole thing. We agreed it was a piece worth reading and that we couldn't make a fair judgment on it at first because we couldn't understand it.