Read Online Vision Quest by Terry Davis - Free Book Online Page B

baby and she was nineteen and had to be self-sufficient after she left home, so maybe my comparison with the other girls I knew wasn’t fair. Anyway, on that trip to the Columbia I was giddy from more than the memory of scaring the pee out of Dwight Thuringer. I was about half in love.
    I tried to get her to talk about herself, but all she said was that her father was an insurance executive and her mother was a housefrump, that they were both shithooks, and that her brothers and sisters would turn out exactly the same.
    â€œWhat saved you?” I asked.
    â€œGetting pregnant,” she replied.
    That sobered me up a little. But just then Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” came around on the tape and Carla rocked back and forth and banged on the steering wheel and tapped her free foot in time. The girls I knew were more sedate than that, and right then I realized exactly what it was that fascinated me about Carla. She had the best things I liked about girls and the best things I liked about guys. She was soft and beautiful and made up little animals and could be kind and tender. But she also swore creatively and worked hard at stuff besides her appearance and did what moved her—like leaving home or peeing with the door open or going with a black guy or banging on the steering wheel. Maybe when you get older you begin to appreciate many of the same qualities in the opposite sex as you do in your own. It would be pretty hard to live closely with somebody if you couldn’t like her or him at least for the same reasons you liked all your other friends. Now that Carla and I have been together for a while I can feel this happening in me.
    We rocked and rolled through the main street of Colville and turned west on 395 to New Kettle Falls and my great-aunt’s place on Gold Creek. We talked about our jobs and the jobs we’d had before, laughing about everything. I told Carla about my job helping the Stern family get in shape.
    â€œLast year,” I began, “Mr. Stern, a teacher at school, hiredme to teach his family an exercise routine that would get them in shape for summer hiking in the Cascades. They’re probably on Mt. Rainier right now,” I said to add immediacy to the story.
    â€œUmm,” Carla replied politely. “What exercises did you teach them?” She was only listening half-intently because the tape had come around to the Dead and “Casey Jones.”
    â€œOh, some pushups and sits and rope skipping and run-a-lap, walk-a-lap. Just stuff everybody already knows. Just stuff to help them build up a little muscle tone. By the end of the year I’d left no Stern untoned.”
    Not only did Carla refrain from laughing, she didn’t even react.
    â€œStern,” I explained. “Stern untoned.”
    â€œI’m trying to ignore it,” Carla replied. “You are a menace. You scare little paper boys and you make dumb puns. You watch out.” She smiled. “You’re gonna get it.”
    â€œIt,” of course, was exactly what I wanted.
    She talked about working in a record store in Chicago and about all the records she left with her brothers and sisters back home. “It’s hard to believe people really live this kind of life,” she said, swinging her arm out the window toward the fields and farmhouses. “Nobody next door and nobody across the street. Dogs and cats probably live long enough to die natural deaths here.”
    â€œA lot of ’em get killed on the highway,” I said. “The more room you’ve got, the farther you roam.” That sounded likea song, so I started to sing it to the tune of “Momma Tried,” which was playing at the time. I don’t sing nearly as pretty as Merle Haggard, so I shut up after the first few lines.
    Carla was mellowing. She was also probably about to have kidney failure from the truck’s bouncing. A straight hour of that old