Free Vision Quest by Terry Davis Page A

other ear being mashed into the cracked leather seat, so she let me go and pulled me up and said she was sorry and looked that ear over for damage she might have done. Actually, it had hurt some, but only a little, since my nervous system had beenmomentarily hijacked by the desperate jolts of sensation rushing to my cock.
    We had a great time at Aunt Lola’s. We fed the chickens and collected the eggs. We were too late to milk the cow, but we were in time to eat some fresh cream on our breakfast strawberries, which we picked, along with carrots, onions, tomatoes, green beans, corn, and peas. We also dug some spuds and boxed up a few jars of jam and a couple jars of the honey Lola trades eggs to a neighbor for. We mowed the lawn and trimmed it. We cut wood and stacked it. Carla touched me a lot and that reassured me and settled me down. I had gotten pretty excited and nervous thinking about how I could make some moves on her. She was and is more sexually sophisticated than I am. We held hands and walked through the alfalfa to the pond my dad and uncle and cousins had stocked when they were kids. They caught the fish in Gold Creek and ran them down to the pond in buckets. Eastern brook and rainbow grow big in the pond because there’s so much food and no kids to catch them anymore. We sat on the bank and watched the fish and frogs and watersnakes and turtles go on about their business. The pond has grown so green with life I always about half expect to haul in a couple coelacanths or see a trilobite or two squint up at me from the mud. But we didn’t fish. We just talked.
    We left Lola’s at twilight, promising to come back the next day to drive her to Colville so she could do her shopping. I drove and Carla sat on her side of the seat and lookedfor deer. She’d seen a DEER CROSSING sign and was determined to spot some. She wasn’t totally ignoring me, though. As I talked about how the deer come out of the woods in the evenings to feed in the fields, every so often Carla would reach over and let her hand rest on my thigh. She didn’t turn to look; she just touched me on the thigh where my jeans were worn thinnest. Sometimes she ran her fingertips along the inseam. Naturally, I had a raging boner.
    We crossed the bridge over Lake Roosevelt and I looked down, but it had gotten too dark to see the level of the water. We drove south and turned off on the road to the Trout Lake campground. I stopped to wire a big can of beef stew to the exhaust manifold so it would be warm for our dinner. We took off for the campground, and rounding the first curve, we hit a little doe. She must have been standing just on the shoulder of the road, because she jumped square into our right fender. If she’d been very far off the road, she’d have jumped clean over us. It scared Carla because it happened so fast and about two feet from her nose. And it scared me because I had been talking about how I learned to heat canned food on the exhaust manifolds of the trucks and dozers at the Trapper Peak forest fire and wasn’t paying much attention to my driving.
    The little doe lay in the ditch in front of us crying and kicking the two legs that weren’t broken. People think deer don’t make sounds, but they do. They sort of whistle. Her eyes were wild and she shook her head from side to side andtried to get up. The hide was barked on her face and shoulder, but aside from that she looked okay. Except for her two right legs, which only swept a little gravel, no matter how she thrashed away. “Poor little deer,” I said. I don’t mind killing animals—to eat, for example. But I sure can hardly stand to see them suffer, or people either.
    Carla didn’t know much about deer, or at least not wild deer, so when she went close to pet her and comfort her a little, the doe kicked out with a good leg and raked Carla’s arm. She yelled and jumped back in surprise and then got another surprise when