Free Vision Quest by Terry Davis

Ford suspension was all anybody but a bronc rider could comfortably take. We were almost to Aunt Lola’s place, so there wasn’t much use to stop and rest. To ease Carla’s fluttering kidneys I decided to tell her about the time I introduced the entire Turn family to dope.
    â€œIt was shortly after my assignment toning up the Sterns,” I began, “that I embarked on my life of crime.”
    Carla blew a few wisps of hair out of her eyes and looked over at me. “You mugged the milkman,” she said.
    â€œWorse,” I replied. I looked penitently into my lap and wrung my hands in contrition. I also had a hard-on to conceal. “I led a good middle-American family into intercourse with the evil weed.”
    â€œNo,” Carla said. “Oh, my.”
    â€œThe Turn family,” I continued. “Friends of the Sterns. They wanted to take up hiking, too. They already had muscle tone, but they couldn’t stand each other’s company long enough to walk together from the davenport to the TV. Mr. Turn came to me one day for help. He saw how I’d brought the Sterns around. It sounded to me like a case of familiarity having bred contempt, so I prescribed alteration in their psychic landscape. I got fifteen fat numbers from Otto andlaid them on Mr. Turn, with the instruction to have a boot-oiling and dope-smoking session in the family room while watching a National Geographic special. That was three numbers for each patient. All it took was one apiece before they forgot their boots were warming in the oven. After two they trooped arm in arm through the house, singing Sierra Club songs. And after the third they set up camp in the garage and roasted their gerbils over an open fire. They were great friends afterward, even Garret, who had sacrificed his gerb-gerbs for family unity. They had to buy new boots, but Melissa added the roasted shrunken ones to her doll wardrobe. I felt pretty good. After all, I left no Turn unstoned.”
    I turned to Carla and flashed my biggest grin. Then I pushed out my upper plate with my tongue and let it fall out of my mouth, catching it with lightning speed before it hit the seat.
    Carla screamed and almost collided with a logging truck coming from New Kettle. She’d never seen me do that with my teeth before. She drove with her left hand and beat on me with her right. She pulled off in the Gold Creek rest area and beat on me with both fists. I hunched in a ball on the floor and laughed like a loon while Carla pounded away. Then she barked her knuckles on the heater and swore, “Oh, shit, piss, and fuck,” and shook her injured fist and began to laugh.
    Carla lay across the seat laughing and I sat happily on the floor until I got a muscle spasm in my thigh and couldn’tstand it and opened the door and fell out backward and writhed on the gravel until I rubbed it out. Carla just laughed some more.
    After we pulled out of the rest area I could feel things had changed a little between us. For one thing, Carla stopped after she turned off the highway onto Lola’s road and gave me a big wet Willy. It was more a playful one than your usual drive-in-movie wet Willy, but it turned me on anyway. She grabbed my head with both hands and lifted my hair and scoured my ear a good one. She must have noticed a strange texture or taste, because she pulled back and scrutinized my ear.
    â€œLouden . . . ?” she began.
    â€œCauliflower ear,” I said. “Both of ’em. Hope it doesn’t taste bad.”
    â€œIt tastes fine,” she said, giving me a few softer wet ones. She pulled me over sideways till my head lay on the seat beside her and examined my right ear, which is in a little worse condition than my left. “Don’t they hurt?” she asked, after treating my semicircular canals to a generous wash of saliva.
    â€œOnly when someone rubs them into the mat,” I said.
    She thought I was referring to my