Vision Quest (20 page)

Doug wrestled that match in one explosion of energy right after another, which is what it takes against tough guys. With about half a minute left in the match he spun into a short sitout. Rilke freaked and tried to drive Doug's head down between his legs. I guess he was just trying to keep Doug from switching him. But he drove into Doug way too hard and Doug just let Rilke push him to his feet. Then Doug rolled him the exact same way he had in the first round. Except this time he rolled him inbounds.

Time ran out before Doug could pin him, but he got the near-fall points and won the match. The bench just went fucking insane. Coach was leaping up and down and shouting. He had let me sit beside him with the team. Kuch, who lay behind the bench in semi-exhaustion after his very tough win, whooped and yipped and banged his hands and feet on the floor. We mobbed the mat to get Doug, and in the confusion Coach Morgan conked me in the nose with his tape recorder. He slung it over his shoulder, probably to be sure not to lose it, and BLAM—I got his TEAC smack on my nose. I can't even watch a wrestling match without getting my nose bloodied. I soaked my letter sweater in cold water right after I congratulated Doug.

I returned from the bathroom in time to see Balldozer wrestle what I consider to be the best match of his career at David Thompson. Even though he did get beat 6–3. He lost to Dan Klosterman, a two-time state champ and one of the best wrestlers in the Northwest and maybe the whole country. Balldozer is good—strong and fast and loaded with guts—but his balance just isn't what it could be. And if you haven't got that, you just can't beat the good guys. He did everything right and looked beautiful.

Balldozer is this sort of Greco-Roman-looking, incredibly handsome guy. Shute is handsome that way. Shute and Balldozer look a lot alike, in fact. Balldozer is the giant economy size, though. I think if I weren't a pretty fair wrestler and a semigood student, I'd feel inferior around Balldozer
just because he's so good-looking. I've got to get over that. I plan to tell him what a good match he wrestled, but the bastard's drinking a peanut butter milk shake, and I'm afraid if I get near enough to smell it, I'll roll him for it.

We stopped for burgers at Denny's on the way out of town. I drank tea. I figured I'd lost that much weight just watching the match. Boy, it's weird to just sit and watch. I kept thinking what I'd do if I were out there. It was frustrating. I'll watch the guys wrestle out their season and I'll go to the district and state tournaments, but it's sure going to feel weird just watching.

Shute and his dad were sitting at the counter when we trooped in. Poor fuckers. They drove all the way over here to watch me wrestle Rilke. I wonder why they did it. I'm sure they've got just as much film of me as we do of Gary.

Gary and his dad look like brothers. Like brother plumb bobs. I wonder if you can make hair go straight back and wavy like theirs, or if you have to be born that way. Mr. Shute isn't real young, I don't think, but he's in great shape, and whenever I see him he's always in jeans and a tanker jacket, which is a pretty youthful outfit. He's a plumber, so he gets lost of exercise. They also hunt and fish a lot.

I'd talked to Gary for a minute at the match but I wanted just to say hello again, so I stopped.

“Hi, Gary,” I said. “Hi, Mr. Shute.” I shook hands with his dad.

“I don't know what you guys are gonna do without
anybody at fifty-four,” Mr. Shute said and winked. Everybody in the gym was blown away by how good Doug was.

I sat down next to Gary.

“Have you seen this?” His dad handed the
Sports Illustrated
clipping across to me.

“We're famous.” I smiled and punched Gary a light one in the ribs. I've sure taken better pictures than that. Gary looks like Frank Gifford from
Monday Night Football
and I look like old Harpo Marx from
A Night at the Opera
. The bastard photographer caught me right after practice. My hair was all standing up and someone had just made me laugh. I look like I was being electrocuted.

Mr. Shute folded it up and put it back in his wallet. He finished his coffee and Gary finished his Jell-O. Gary said he'd look for me at the New Year's dance and they left after we shook hands. Gary stopped a second to congratulate Doug and Jean-Pierre on their good matches. His dad said hello to Coach and they were out the door and off in their pickup.

*  *  *

It's nearly two o'clock. All the inside lights are off, so out the window you can see the snow blowing down and swirling from the trees. Good cheer lasted almost to the Idaho line. Kuch loves beating Custer and Battleground. After both matches he walked into their locker rooms and invited them all to come to Spokane and visit him on the twenty-fifth of June so together they could celebrate the great victory at the Greasy Grass. “What the fuck is that?” a couple guys
asked. “Custer's last stand.” Kuch smiled. The Custer and Battleground guys got a kick out of it, but the Custer coach asked us to leave.

Just after we pulled out of Denny's parking lot, Otto called out above the din, “Hey, Coach! How about next year you don't get us up so early just to go beat up a bunch of cowboys and miners!”

“Yah, yah, yah!” everybody yelled. Before Coach could respond, Schmoozler declared in a firm cadence, “We're not gonna be here next year, Turd Head.” The bus went a little quieter for a minute or two while the seniors thought that one over. But the noise picked right back up. Coach promised never again to get Otto out of bed to beat up a cowboy or a miner.

I talked to Balldozer awhile. He also thinks tonight's match was his best ever. We listened to Schmoozler's tape for a while. I snatched it when Schmooz fell asleep. Balldozer's asleep now, too. The bus driver and I are probably the only ones awake. Sausage and Little Konigi may be awake back there somewhere, though, still trying to determine which girls in the sophomore class are ripe for the large one.

It's amazing. Balldozer's grandparents in France live in a house that's been in their family since right before the French Revolution. That's 183 years. He says the house is even older than that. The stones have scars from two world wars. He says they have a room with paintings of all the
Baldosiers up until the invention of the camera and then they have photographs. It must be neat to know where you come from. The relatives on his mom's side are Spanish, which must account for Jean-Pierre's darkness.

He wasn't terribly impressed with my thesis as I summarized it. I guess he's more classical in his approach to things. Like when we talk about the meaning and importance of different things in life, I bring up Fitzgerald and Agee and Carlos Castaneda and other fairly contemporary guys like that. But Balldozer always talks about Rousseau and Voltaire and Montaigne and Shakespeare and other guys long dead. Once he brought up Chief Joseph, but that was probably because he'd just come back from a camping trip with Kuch.

I explained about the myth of self-discovery—that this stuff about a person “finding himself” and having the world then fall into place around him is wishful bullshit, and that what really happens among the few people who make it happen is not that they find themselves but that they “define” themselves. I used the example of Bob Dylan from the Scaduto biography Kuch gave me for my birthday. Dylan wanted to be a folk-hero-singer, so he made up a history, went on the road and followed the tradition, worked hard, and by the power of his will and imagination became his dream and probably more.

I talked about how, even if you define yourself as a Christian and believe in eternal life, you've got to realize
your time on earth is incredibly short. And I explained further that along with this has to go the realization that we not only die alone, but that, really, we live alone, too. That no matter how we love our families and friends, we can't breathe for each other when our alveoli clog up with cigarette smoke and car exhaust, that we can't pee for each other when our kidneys stop working, and that we can't really comfort each other once we know these things. This is the real reason Thomas Wolfe couldn't go home again and why old Don Genaro won't ever reach Ixtlan and most of all why we've got to love the people who deserve it as fiercely as we love our own lives.

And then Balldozer says, “Oh, you're writing about growing up.” I passed over the remark and went on. But now the bastard's got me wondering.

Sunday night is sure a
weird night for a dance. But it's New Year's Eve and that's when the dance is traditionally held. I feel as though I should be doing leftover homework. I think I'd like to see Christmas and New Year's made Wednesday every year. Carla notes, however, that there's a sense of orderliness in beginning a new week and a new year on the same day.

Although she denies responsibility, I'm blaming Carla for some embarrassment I suffered this afternoon. Actually, it was the fault of general fatigue and my often intractable libido, but it's more fun to blame Carla.

I was really, really tired last night. I puzzled over Balldozer's comment until I fell asleep. I vaguely remember him waking me in the school parking lot and Carla driving me home. I remember flopping into bed and Katzenburger licking my face, or maybe it was Carla taking advantage of me. Anyway, I was dog tired.

I got up around nine and ran three miles and came home and did a workout in the laundry room. I started my laundry-room workouts again because without school and work I was afraid I wouldn't burn enough energy to keep
my weight down. I start the school year with my laundry-room workouts and only give them up when I feel really in good shape. I take my tape player in and put on a special workout tape. I keep the tape player in a plastic bag so the moisture doesn't get to it. I dry a load of laundry so the room's good and hot and I wear my rubber sweat suit under my cotton one. I've got ten songs on my tape. I skip rope through one song, stop the tape, do a hundred pushups, then a hundred sits, then turn the next song on and do it till the tape is over. Sometimes, between the music and the exercise and the heat, I really get spacy. I start out skipping to “Dancing in the Moonlight,” which always makes me think of drinking beer on summer evenings down under the Hangman Creek bridge. Then I go through “Family Affair,” “Treat Her like a Lady,” “Respect Yourself,” and five other good ones, so that by the time I get to the long version of “Layla” I believe myself to be the toughest, meanest, most in-shapest, baddest-ass kid on the block. I'm also near death.

Anyway, I finished my laundry-room workout and took off my soggy clothes and was headed for the shower when I saw Carla reading in front of the fireplace and decided to bedevil her some. I tiptoed up behind her and lay my wasted cock gently on her shoulder. She didn't respond for a few seconds; then she turned her head a little and glanced down at the thing. “What's that look like?” I asked.

She studied it a bit. Finally she responded. “Well,” she
said. “It looks like a cock, I guess . . . only smaller.”

I hadn't expected it was quite that wasted. I began to whimper and crept over to the davenport and curled up in a fetal position. Carla cast aside her book and kitten and hurried over to me. After a minute or two she sat up and faced me. “It's beginning to look more like a cock all the time,” she said very sweetly.

We hadn't made love for two and a half days. We slid along the linoleum like brazen bobsledders. We did the monkey in the banana tree, the grasshopper and the leaf, we practiced our tandem bearwalk. We ended up on the bed.

I tried to sit up afterward, but one workout on top of another was just too much. I rose to a sitting position but couldn't hold it and fell backward the other ninety degrees. Before my eyes Carla's rusty muff glistened postcoitally. We fell asleep, each pillowed on the other's thigh.

I awoke in a spasm of guilt. Coach had scheduled a practice just for my benefit at three thirty. It was 3:25, so I didn't have time to shower. I jumped into my clammy sweat suits, laced up my boots, and made a run for it.

I burst through the locker-room door in a sweat. Coach was the only one still downstairs. “Sorry, Coach,” I said. “Went running without my watch.”

“It's okay,” he said. He smiled big and patted me on the shoulder. I grabbed my wrestling shoes and followed him upstairs. Coach turned into the film room to set up the films on Shute for tomorrow.

In the wrestling room Kuch and Doug and Smith and Balldozer and Otto lay around the mats in various attitudes of repose. I flopped down on my back and began to bridge up on my neck to get loose. Right away Kuch began to sniff loudly. He sniffed and sniffed. He crawled over next to me and sniffed along my back and down my arm all the way to the ends of my fingers. He called the guys over for a consultation. Full of curiosity they tumbled across the mats. I quit bridging and just sat down and rested my chin in my palm.

“It's possum,” Kuch said.

Otto poked his head close and sniffed loudly. “Good thing Sausage and Little Konigi aren't here, Swain. They'd chew your mustache off.”

Bowden sniffed long and looked at Kuch. “Is that really what it smells like?” he asked.

“That's the scent, all right,” Kuch replied. “But usually you'll find it more attractively wrapped.”

“It appears you've been playing the drooling clarinet,” observed Balldozer.

“You guys ate nothin' but spinach all the time, you'd smell funny, too,” I declared.

They made me take a shower before they'd start the workout. They told Coach I just ran downstairs for some nose stoppers. Only he had been gentleman enough to ignore it.

*  *  *

The dance is at the Spokane Club, which is a pretty spiffy place. We've risen to it, though, at least in terms of apparel. Carla's in her long soft white dress with the little ducks and I'm in my white denim suit. It's fun to dress up sometimes.