Vision Quest by Terry Davis

window and looked at me, then turned back. “Dip,” she said. “You were sleeping with your nose in my panties. You drooled on them.”
    â€œSorry” was all I could think to say, and we rode in silence to Barney’s Junction for breakfast.
    Barney’s is on the west side of the Columbia, right where 395 crosses and heads north along the river for a short way before it meets the Kettle River and follows it into Canada. Barney’s is to the loggers and farmers and mill workers who live along the river what The Shack is to the car-business people in Spokane. We pulled in, got some gas, and stood looking at the river. And it really was a river. It was lower than I’d ever seen it, low as I’d hoped it would be. I felt like running across the highway and down the bank to stand beside it, but I controlled myself. We’d planned to eat breakfast, and I wanted to catch my grandfather before he left for the day and ask him if he’d like to drive down and visit the falls with us.
    â€œMornin’,” I said to the waitress as she looked us over for signs of California hippiness. “Say,” I said, “we’re up from Spokane, looking for my grandfather, Harry Swain. Has he been around?”
    â€œHarry was in here yesterday,” she said, smiling. “You’re not Bert’s boy?” Bert is my uncle.
    â€œNo,” I said. “I’m Louden, Larry’s boy.”
    â€œLarry’s boy!” she said. “I thought Larry’d be a grandfather by now.”
    â€œNot that any of us knows of.” I smiled real big. “How did Harry look?”
    â€œGot a gut on him,” she said. “But he’s lookin’ a lot better lately.”
    â€œThat’s good,” I said. Rural people are a little nicer to you if they know you have some local roots.
    That was late August and absolutely the last time I could rationalize eating like a regular human being. I told myself I’d chow down until we got back home. And chow down I did: ham and eggs, a chocolate malt, and hot apple pie with cinnamon sauce and ice cream. I weighed 165. If I looked a plate of ham and eggs in the eye right now, my stomach wouldn’t even growl in recognition, it’s been so long.
    â€œThis ham is incredible,” Carla said.
    â€œLook at the eggs,” I said. “Look at the color of the yolks.”
    â€œThey’re a lot darker,” she affirmed.
    â€œThat comes from chickens what gets exercise,” I said through the deep golden yolk in my mustache. Egg yolk can really give body to a sparse mustache. “Chickens what eats gravel and bugs. Chickens what lives in chicken yards and not no little cages.” I had become pretty rural in my excitement to get down to the river.
    We caught Grandpa Harry just as he was leaving. I saw the old green jeep pulling onto the highway, so I laid on the horn. We turned onto his road and stopped right beside him.
    â€œI’ll be damned,” he said, and laughed. He always laughs when he first sees me. It’s as though it’s wondrous to himthat I can make it all the way up from Spokane by myself. “What you doin’ around here?”
    â€œDad read the river was comin’ down, so we came up to take a look. Thought you might like to drive down to the falls with us. This is Carla,” I said. “Carla, this is my grandfather Harry Swain.”
    â€œPleased to meet your acquaintance,” Grandpa Harry said.
    Carla leaned over me and stuck her good arm out the window and shook with Harry. “My pleasure,” she said. Harry thought that was funny as hell. You could see him laughing all the way as he backed up into his yard.
    I don’t know if it’s possible, but it seemed as though he was shorter than when we went fishing together at the start of summer. When my dad was a kid, Harry was supposed to have been a little over six feet. But walking behind him to the