Chapter 1

I’ve seen many strange things in this world; so when I tell you that Warren Spicks was the strangest man I’ve met, believe that he was a unique specimen of our race indeed. If it weren’t for him, however, this world would be quite different. Let me give a quick example. See that girl over there, at that café? The pretty one, with the dark hair falling around her shoulders and her slim black dress? With the wide-brimmed, thatched sort of hat. Look at her more closely: her eyes dart from her glass of wine to the street corner—with a bit of sadness to them, a bit of worry. As if she’s expecting someone to rush to her with bad news. How she holds that glass with both hands—without setting or sipping!
Her name is Sofi. And let me be the first to say that if it weren’t for Warren Spicks, our beautiful Sofi might never have made it to this seaside café in that delicate dress. She would never have ordered the wine she dare not drink; she might not have been gifted those shifting green eyes. Indeed, she may never have been born at all. And while all this may sound strange; the strangest part (to my mind, at least) is that poor Sofi will probably never realize to whom she’s indebted so.
But I have started on a shifting, rambling sort of note. I apologize. Warren deserves a proper introduction—and for that, we must transgress the boundaries of time and peel years back from the layers of history. But just a few. In fact, three should be adequate. Yes, make yourself comfortable; order a lunch—or perhaps a margarita? For once you know a little about Warren, he pulls you in. Grabs your soul, it seems, and gives it a shake or two.
Right. On with the tale. So three years back, when Warren was looking forward to his twentieth birthday in June, his father received a rather frantic call from his business partner. The ensuing conversation (its details unimportant here) had his father packing soon afterwards for an emergency trip north, to Grand Junction, CO, if you must know. This sort of trip occurred but once or twice every five years—and only in the direst of times. So when Warren inquired about his father’s packing that afternoon, his father replied with some distress that his own personal touch was required so that he (Warren) could continue on with college that fall and that his brother and mother would continue to eat. Warren couldn’t fault that logic and wished his father well on the trip.
It interests me to note Warren’s eyebrows. When he listens to another speak, without fail, his eyebrows find the truth. Whether he is aware of this, I don’t know. But as that sort of human being who will question anyone’s perception of the truth, Warren Spicks’ eyebrows are among the greatest interrogators known to man and a dreadful weapon to anyone unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of his gaze. Of course, one may easily know when he agrees with the conversation. Those brows will soften in understanding and compassion—but at the first hint of deceit, will furrow slightly. In a full-fledged lie, he will lower one brow into a skeptical grin; God forbid you speak in ignorance, or those brows will rise in complete and scathing mockery. But the ignorant usually ignore that fact, and babble on—to Warren’s great amusement.
But despite his thick, lie-detecting eyebrows, Warren’s face is generally a pleasant one. One thinks of a monk; perhaps a hermit. While his eyes are colored a deep green—they are soft and unassuming, pleasant to hold conversation with. He keeps his hair short and his face clean-shaven—if he remembers. One might easily find the traditional five o’clock shadow at ten the next morning. His thin lips are usually chapped as he has never in life remembered to carry any lip balm on his person. Among other things he frequently forgets: contacts, deodorant, shoes. Yet his memory (or the apparent lack thereof) has never distressed him.
But enough of this; Warren left his father to pack, but with eyebrows raised in contemplation. Perhaps he thought the meeting a bit of a farce; since his move to college, his visits home had become increasingly taxing. Such might be said of any adaptation of life—but Warren’s had a particular tinge to it. He knew how his father cited the virtue of honesty—especially the adherence to a promise. But in this case, Warren found it much easier to question his father’s business strategies than to believe him when he said he would be gone only a few days to settle some minor issues.
However, Warren’s sense of tact had also been making an impact on how he conducted his conversations—he himself probably didn’t realize it. But the less important issues: song choice on the radio, hours for marinating steak, drapery choice for the windows—on these he managed to restrain himself and bow to the wishes of the others involved. And while he had detected some sense of strain in his father’s words, he had let it pass, rather wishing to enjoy his time at home than argue. He did enough of that with his mother already.
As much as Warren loved his mother, she seemed to him a unique variety of woman especially endowed with the gift of nagging. And while she went on, living in this sort of constructed reality of her own in which every last detail fell to her to enforce to perfection, Warren instinctively felt obliged to have to shatter her insulating bubble-like worldview every now and again. His obvious favorite was answering, “No,” to any of her requests.
“Will you bring me a battery for this electric candle?” she might have asked around Christmastime. With a smirk, Warren would answer that, no, he wouldn’t, and she would place her hands on her hips and sigh, asking God why she troubled to ask. Then Warren would have to relent and fetch the battery. But in all his dealings with his mother, he felt some need to make her think if she really did need something done right that moment, or if it was some frivolity that passed through her mind at the same instant she saw Warren—wherein she equated task with worker and hoped for a solution.
Of course, this meant that Warren wound up doing a great many tasks he “said” he wouldn’t—but he really only looked for progress with his mother and if she went a whole hour without nagging him to finish some chore, he congratulated her—but usually received one that instant. He would drop his eyebrows slightly and sigh, doing his very best not to roll his eyes, and plod off to complete the task.
So it was no surprise to him when, after speaking briefly with his father, that his mother saw him proceeding in his usual fashion, an unhurried sort of saunter, through the house, she immediately remembered that the kitchen trash bag was now full and should be emptied. But before she opened her mouth, Warren met her gaze and shook his head, eyebrows held high—just a trace of a smile on his lips. The hands went to her hips, and he looked for a distraction.
“Warren, the trash needs…” she began, but he yawned and turned towards the door to the garage.
“Ima feed the cats,” he stated and slipped out. The garage was an asylum for him—though the kingdom of his father, the cats ruled it in his absence. The moment he stepped onto the cool, comforting concrete, his brother’s cat was weaving itself around his legs, pathetically meowing for “dinner.” He patted him once on the side and scratched behind his ear a bit. “Hungry are we? Yeah? Want some dinner?” This final word caught the furry ear and the cat blitzed to the empty, white food bowl. “I take that as a yes.” It just so happened that Warren talked to the cats almost as often as to his parents—not necessarily a thing to be ashamed of, but it illustrates my point: Warren found that if words could be avoided, actions, eyes, and silence spoke plenty. And the cats (on the exception of breakfast and dinnertime) generally stuck to this rule as well.
His brother did not. On occasion, Warren wondered if the boy was capable of silence for more than a minute—at least, while conscious. His brother often dominated the conversation at the dinner table. While Warren chewed away, he listened to his brother ramble on, anecdote after anecdote—most of which were hardly related at all in topic but somehow shared a common thread in his brother’s brain. Every now and again, Warren would swallow, ask a question of his sibling, and let the man try to work it out. There were, of course, a great many things Warren loved about his brother: his wit on the fly was second to none, he found a great joy in laughter, and the house was usually full of it when he was around. But while his brother loved to argue, Warren had never lost a debate to him. Let me be clear about this record though. Warren, on several occasions, being quite wrong and about to be defeated, would manage to eschew the topic so severely within minutes that his point of view could not be disputed and render his brother’s arguments useless and moot—and thus always won the argument. Neither their mother nor father relished their playful contentions, and often banished them upstairs to finish, while the couple retired to the living room to watch the nightly news.
And so, not a few seconds after he had escaped to the garage, his brother had come bounding through the door as well.
“Hey dude. So guess what?”
“You have to take out the trash?”
“What? No. But Mom did tell me to tell you to. But that’s not…the freaking river is up to 1200 cfs!”
“That rain helped then, did it?”
“Frick yeah, dude! What? Aren’t you stoked?”
“Not really. No.”
“What the? Are you insane? That’s like…unheard of! Dude! Get a grip. We gotta yak manana! Go stomp some waves, man! You down?”
“Aren’t you leaving tomorrow?”
“Yeah. So? We can go before.”
“Mom says she wanted to leave at eight.”
“Screw that! I’m not getting up that early!”
“Thought you wanted to kayak?”
“Yeah but…frick.”
“Tell me about it.”
Warren scooped out a cupful of food for the cats and rattled it into the dish. His brother’s cat instantly began devouring the bits. They were so alike, the two of them, cat and owner. Both ready for instant gratification—disappointed when it didn’t happen and would probably complain for hours if left to their own habits.
“The river will still be there when you get back you know?” Warren advised his brother.
“Nah, man. It’ll all be gone. That’s no river in July. It’s a freaking creek, dude. Can’t run that shaz at 150 cfs! This is like my last chance to surf something before the summer drought. Unless you and I go hit the M-wave or something.”
Warren and his brother had both been kayaking for two seasons now, but his brother had spent the greater amount of time in the water and therefore had gained a considerably better level of skill on the river than Warren—who had only a few combat rolls to his record. His brother preformed them on a regular basis, being routinely flipped while “surfing” a wave. There was something deeper than just missing water time that gnawed at Warren. He might have termed it a healthy respect for the river. But I think that a sort of primordial fear for the water lurked inside him—and while he rarely opposed a chance to kayak, it unsettled him every time he stepped into the boat and sealed the spray skirt around him. But before he could answer his brother, Warren’s mother poked her head inside the garage.
“Get in here, you two. Dinner’s ready.”
*
The Spicks family made a habit eating together—a feat rarely accomplished these days. And while the meal set before them simmered with homecooked flavors, when the brothers sat at the table, they felt a twinge of offness in the air. Warren detected it in his father’s prayer, in his mother’s anxiousness to serve the food. It stood out to him plainly that they would refuse to tell him. His brother, it seemed, had noticed and tried to cover it up with conversation. “Dad, what about hitting the river tomorrow morning, before me and Mom leave? I mean, its still raining. River should be up plenty high.”
“I don’t think so, Son. I need to leave early.”
And that was as close as Warren came to understanding the purpose of his father’s trip north. Not that he much minded the scattering of his family from the house—it gave him another taste of the freedom he had experienced in college and to say the least, he embraced the opportunity to do as he pleased for three days while his family was on the road.
When the evening meal had finished, his father retreated to the evening news, his mother to the kitchen to clean up, but his brother caught his eye and nodded his head towards the stairs. Warren agreed and followed.
“So dude,” he began with a sly grin when they were behind the doors of his brother’s room, “you’re effin lucky.”
Warren laughed once. “Yeah, I s’pose so.”
“Are you going to eat all? Or just play World of Warcraft for three days straight?”
“Probably just play,” Warren said, smiling grandly.
“But seriously. What do you think’s going on with Dad?”
“Same ole lousy business partner. But you know Dad, he’d rather burn his mustache off than back out of a contract.”
“Yeah I know. Remember when uh…what’s his name?”
“Dolk. I think.”
“Right. When he came over that one time and his freaking dog. Ha! Remember that? Brizz freaking chased him down.”
The anecdote made Warren smile: his brother’s fat cat, Brizz, had arched his back and hissed, whereupon the meek dog decided she wanted no part of that action, and sure enough, Brizz took off after the dog.
“Yeah but remember last time Dad went on a trip.”
“Yeah man. Effing black eye and all. You didn’t believe him when he told us that he had tripped, right?”
“Hell, no. That was a fist for sure.”
“ ‘At’s what I said.”
“Eh, Dad’s got a good head on his shoulder; he’s not stupid.”
“Yeah. But you got’s to wonder sometimes, you know? Meh. What about some LAN? Age of Myth?”
“Sure dude.”
And so the evening passed, brothers upstairs, parents below, in the most normal fashion. The mother called upstairs several times to ask if anyone “up there” wanted dessert. And so the four gathered together in what would be their last evening as a family and silently ate vanilla ice cream with a dash of chocolate syrup.