Vision Quest by Terry Davis Page A

cabin, I was a good two fingers taller, and I’m only five-eleven. Carla was searching through the junked cars by the creek, where we saw a couple cats go running. Harry unlocked the padlock on his door and we went in. He just has a hole in the wall and a hole in his door and a chain to go through them. I sat on the floor and leaned against the stove and studied the guns and fish poles in the gun rack, as I always do. Harry took a Medihaler out of his shirt pocket and gave himself a couple good blasts down the throat. He breathed deep through his mouth and smiled.
    â€œThey give me those down ’t the Vets,” he said. “I can fish, hunt, hike these goddman mountains—anything I want. I just carry a couple of these along. I might even feel like doin’ some rasslin’,” he said, and laughed until the crap in his lungs crackled and snapped like a wood fire. He moved his hands like he was milking a cow and rose about two inches off the bed, as though he were going to come for me.
    â€œGo find yourself some Indian woman to wrestle with,” I said. “You’d just hurt me, and this is my year to be a hero.”
    â€œA hero . . . !” He laughed and coughed up a few cubic centimeters of trench warfare and spit it in his spit can alongside the bed. It’s a good thing he got his emphysema in the war and not just from his homeland air. This way he’s got the Veterans’ Hospital anytime he needs it and he’s got his pension. The State of Washington lets him hunt and fish for free now that he’s over seventy-five, and Dad finds him a cheap old jeep or a pickup when the one he’s got goes too bad for any of us to fix.
    â€œHow ’bout it?” I asked. “Comin’ down to the falls with us?”
    â€œNaw,” Harry said. “I’m gonna run up to Davis Lake an’ fish.”
    â€œWe could see the old homestead.”
    â€œThat place is just a dirty old ditch to me,” Harry said. “Goin’ fishin’.”
    Just then Carla came in holding a dusty yellow cat and sat in the chair.
    â€œGonna have some fleas in all them red curls,” Grandpa Harry said.
    â€œThat’s okay,” Carla replied, scratching the cat’s head and sending it into ecstasy. “Couldn’t be more than I get sitting next to him.” And she pointed at me.
    Harry loved that. He laughed and spit again, but just tobacco this time. Carla didn’t bat an eyelash. Harry told her she oughta know better than pet deer like they was dogs and cats, and Carla said she’d remember.
    We sat for a few minutes talking about which creeks were fished out and who had been snakebit and how sparse the deer would be come fall. We refused several coffee offers and finally I said we’d better get moving so we could see the falls and take Aunt Lola to Colville to do her grocery shopping. I asked Grandpa Harry if he needed anything. I don’t know what I could do for him, but Dad always asks, so I do, too.
    â€œShit,” he said, getting up and walking us out the door. “I don’t need nothin’. Got these inhalers and I’ll prob’ly be dead before I know it and then I won’t even need them no more.”
    Carla set the cat down by the porch and we walked across the little bit of grass to the truck. I ground the gears and Harry laughed and pointed and said something I couldn’t hear. We waved and I honked and Grandpa Harry waved his hand back at us. The cat rubbed his boot top and he gave it a gentle shove off the porch. Then he laughed some more andtouched two fingers to the brim of his straw fishing hat and stuck out his arm and waved again before he went to work chaining his door.
    â€œWhat will he do?” Carla asked as we turned onto the highway.
    â€œHe’ll drive up to Davis Lake and fish and shoot snakes,” I said. And I honked a few final times and looked up the bank to see if he was