Chapter 3

While I admit to various faults in telling you this strange tale, it is my sincerest hope you will stick with me. However, I find myself somewhat distracted at present—too much so to continue at the moment. For Sofi is on my mind. Yes, yes, the same girl I pointed out to you earlier. Look at her now. No. Carefully. With quick glances. You see her shoulders? Notice how they slump like a flower in a rainstorm. And ah! look how mindlessly she strokes the wine glass with her finger—with those despondent eyes, searching the sky. She wonders, I tell you, if this is how it feels to die. Without doubt, her world is collapsing. If only Warren were here for her.
Oh yes. They knew each other. In fact, Warren’s heart didn’t stand a chance against such a beautiful soul as hers. You could easily call Warren a sucker for long, dark hair, deep, almond eyes, and pristine shoulders as well. To see the two of them together, laughing—one would have thought that much laughter could power sixteen cities for four years. To have seen their matching green eyes gazing into the other’s, I count myself among the luckiest alive.
But now she weeps. Oh, you might search her face for an hour without spotting a tear, but believe me, the way she bites her lip, stares upward, cradles the glass—she’s in torment. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if clouds rolled in and a downpour started, to shed Sofi’s tears for her. And, as fate would have it, Warren Spicks is to blame.
How did they meet? Well, at a coffee shop in Manitou Springs, Colorado, which is a five hour drive from our present location. As far as the story goes, there is precious little to tell between Warren’s rescue and their trip to Manitou.
Warren, of course, had been under the impression that the hobo was a wandering modern-day nomad of sorts, a hitch-hiker who made his way across the country, stopping wherever he will. But after an hour’s hike, they came to a cul-de-sac where an old, topless Jeep waited, parked in the only spot of shade available. After Warren figured out that the vehicle did indeed belong to the hobo, he quickly deduced that a bit of planning had been made to land the Jeep in the shade at this hour. He then wondered that if the hobo had known of the attack on his house and had come with the precise purpose of rescuing him, who had sent Livingstone to his aid?
While these questions fluttered through his head, and as he tried desperately to form them into questions of passable reason, Livingstone motioned him into the vehicle. “We have some road to cover before 2:35. Get in.” Warren obeyed first, and then asked his first question, but expecting a flippant answer demolishing the validity of his inquiry. This expectation did not improve the quality of his question.
“What are you doing with a car?” He, of course, regretted the question immediately and scrambled to form a better one. Livingstone smiled.
“Just because I didn’t arrive at your house in a car, you believed me car-less?”
“I know; I know. Bad question. I just...You didn’t strike me as…” Warren floundered. The hobo laughed outright.
“I want you to take a deep breath, settle your mind, and ask the real question in which all these silly queries are rooted,” he stated and started the engine.
Warren nodded. “How did you know I was in trouble?”
“You were tied to a chair in a burning house.”
Warren’s eyebrows fell and he tried again: “No, how did you come to be in the perfect place, at the perfect time, to warn me of my doom before those…men…showed up?”
“Feet,” was Livingstone’s answer.
“Feet?”
“Yes, my dear Watson, feet. Well legs and hips and joints and muscles and bone structure and the central nervous system too, if one were to be technically accurate in describing the procedure of walking. But feet will do.”
It seemed to Warren that Livingstone was getting a fantastic kick out of tormenting him. And so, as the Jeep pulled on a main road and headed back east, Warren was much too busy building an appropriate question to care where they were driving. After several long breaths with closed eyelids, he looked to the hobo and fired off his question. “Who sent you?”
Livingstone tilted his head back and blinked a long time, inhaling deeply through his nostrils. “Now there,” he stated, “is a fine question.” He paused and gazed at the road ahead of him for some time. “I suppose I will answer you. In a way, I sent myself. Took some doing to bring myself around to it, but as it turns out, the mobsters back there made my decision for me by deciding to burn your house down. So perhaps they sent me—but certainly not purposefully. I hate to be labeled a reactionary—but yes, it was their decision that forced mine.”
“So you know them?” Warren asked.
“Not a one of them; why should I?”
“Well, how did you know they were going to attack me?”
Livingstone chuckled. “I like that you ask so many questions; strive to understand everything. But that is behind you now. As are my decisions that led me here. As are yours. And right now, they matter very little, in comparison to the decisions ahead of us. So let us worry about this road, and the potential deer which may try to cross it.”
“Then where are we headed?”
“I thought you were going to leave that question alone, Watson?”
Warren sighed and decided to mention his family. “You know, Livingstone, my family will return in three days and wonder what happened.”
“And?”
“And if I’m not there to explain, they’ll think the worst.”
“Like?”
“I don’t know…that I died. That I burned it and fled.”
“And that’s…bad?”
“Yes!”
“Why so?”
Warren’s eyebrows flattened in frustration. “Because I did neither!”
“And they won’t find that out? Suppose the detectives come and sift through the ruins and find no bones, no retainer, no identification that you died, wouldn’t they rule it out that you were consumed in the fire? As for believing you to be the arsonist…do you really have so little faith in your own family to assert your innocence?”
“But if I were there, those questions wouldn’t have to be answered.”
“Because that’s bad…right?”
“No. Because it’s time consuming to find those answers that I already possess.”
“But not impossible?”
“You’re impossible,” Warren stated and looked away. They had already passed the main town—though he didn’t distinctly remember doing so—and were headed east towards the pass. The mountains grabbed Warren’s attention and conversation died. Thoughts of rationality entered his mind and gnawed at his consciousness. Here he was, a human being of capable thought, riding to who knew where with a strange wanderer who had never the less just saved him from death by fire. And he wasn’t ready to jump from the jeep at the first possible convenience? To what end would this hobo lead him?
But if there was something Warren despised more than not knowing the answers to questions, it was an over-abundance of questions themselves. And every mile that ticked on the Jeep’s odometer brought with it a host of new questions which he couldn’t possibly ask, for fear of damaging his intellectual pride. If he were a fool, he knew well enough to follow proverbial advice and keep his mouth shut—that he might at least appear wise. His mind, however, was a spawning glen for the pestering inquiries. And he was powerless to ignore them.
The next hours in the car passed slowly, methodically, with chaos assaulting Warren from every side in the silence. The hobo felt little or no need for conversation and only answered those questions which Warren had poured over many a time in an attempt to make them “acceptable” questions. Because of this stipulation, however, the final versions of the questions he asked made very little sense or only required a simple yes or no from the driver. So Warren sat, chin in hand, staring out the window, waiting for something to happen.
It is surprising, then, to note Warren’s astonishment when an elephant crossed the road in front of the car, dead in the center of the San Luis Valley. He stared open-mouthed as they passed the big, lilting creature which trekked on across the valley, without anything that seemed to pass as an aim. Warren, upon looking back to Livingstone, found it even more incredulous that the hobo didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that an elephant had just crossed the road in southwest Colorado. And so Warren’s knack for bad questions kicked back into gear.
“Did you just see that?” he exclaimed.
“Take a moment, dear Watson, and ask yourself first if you really want to ask that question.”
“But…but…what is an elephant doing here?” Warren stammered.
“What are you doing here?”
“I live here!”
“As does it, apparently.”
“But that’s preposterous.”
“Is it now? What makes you say that?”
“Elephants don’t live in Colorado.”
“That one does.”
“But I’ve never seen…” Warren began, but the hobo interrupted him.
“Aha! Here’s the crux of the discussion. Just because you haven’t seen it, means it doesn’t exist? And I’m sure you know I’ll bring up the Ostrich.”
Warren sighed, flabbergasted by the experience. “Am I really that ignorant?”
“Yes, dear Watson, you are. But I mean that in the best sense possible.”
Warren’s eyebrows furrowed. “Which is?”
“You have a great deal yet to learn; as long as you don’t stand on your knowledge, but look to take steps on the knowledge of others, your understanding will increase, and eventually, after years of climbing, your ignorance might begin to decrease as well. And that is a noble goal—one I figure you already pursue.”
“So for now, I’ll just stop asking questions,” Warren lamented.
“Don’t do that. Just ask the right questions. It will save you breath…and perhaps a little frustration.”
“Well, at risk of sounding like a fool: where are we headed?”
“Manitou Springs.”
“Thank you,” Warren said, as if he had been repaid a delinquent loan. Then he added another question, “Now was that so difficult?”
“Not at all.”
“Then why didn’t you say so earlier?”
“You weren’t in the car yet.”
Warren could not fault this logic, manipulative as it seemed to him. But what about the hobo hadn’t seemed like manipulation? It was a fair question, to be sure. And the more he pondered it, the less settled he felt about the whole situation. Apparently, the hobo had come to save him from his death, but only so that he might be more “meaningful to the world” in the history books (what the history books would have to say about him, he hadn’t the foggiest idea at the time) than Warren was, but warned him beforehand to make him curious about his purpose and follow him to the car, where he wouldn’t tell him their destination until they were far enough along in their journey to make that question an invalid one to act upon. This picture wasn’t getting any clearer, except for the fact that the hobo had some hidden motive for transporting Warren to Manitou Springs. Apparently, he would have to wait for his arrival in the snug little town for any solid answers.
This didn’t help Warren’s mood one bit. But somehow he relegated his confusion to a dark corner of his mind and actually nodded off for about an hour. But when he awoke, what he saw didn’t immediately reconcile with his current seasonal paradigm. They were near La Garita, with the looming Blanca Peak to the north, and it was snowing. And to his shame, he will admit, it took him several minutes of staring out into the blowing, drifting haze of flakes to realize that it was still early June. Now, he had always heard, and frequently used the Colorado maxim, “April showers bring May blizzards,” but only a few times had he remembered snow this late—that one snow on the Fourth of July that cancelled the parade. But the past few years had been drought years, and this was truly extraordinary. After having regained his ability to speak, he promptly abused them:
“What is this?”
“Snow.”
Warren’s shoulders drooped. “Yes, I can see that. But why is it snowing?”
“I had heard they were cloud-seeding a bit more on the eastern slopes…apparently the western-slope counties aren’t as keen on the thievery of their water as they used to be. Someone must not be bribing them enough.”
“But, it’s the middle of June!”
“Early June,” Livingstone corrected.
“Still! It wasn’t even cloudy in Monte Vista.”
“Imagine that. Those cloud seeders get better every year. Like pulling a rabbit out of a top-hat, ehh?”
Warren decided he wouldn’t win this one and instead sat back and enjoyed the snow. For the most part, it did please him. Only on a couple of the sharper curves on the highway did he tense up, feeling that the hobo’s speed bordered on the upper regions of a safe velocity. But he didn’t lose traction for a moment. Ten minutes later, they pulled out of the storm and into the warming rays of an afternoon sun.
The drive to Walsenburg and then up I-25, however, was as uneventful as Warren always remembered it. They stopped briefly to fill up the gas tank in the middle of nowhere (aka Pueblo) and continued on their way north directly afterwards. Luckily they didn’t have to navigate the tangled mess of Colorado Springs, and exited the interstate for the short jaunt west to Manitou.
The only thing Warren remembered about Manitou was getting sick from the jalapeno peppers on his Subway sandwhich he had eaten there some four or five years prior. He didn’t mind the rest of the town, packed into a steep little valley with a sorry excuse for a river running down the middle in a concrete canal. The shops seemed interesting enough—certainly the hobo would fit right in. Warren wasn’t sure if he were mountain-hippy enough to blend, or if that rough rural side of him pegged him as one of those somewhat-less-cultured natives, opposed to the high-class tree-huggers who wore designer capri’s, massive California-beach style sunglasses, a light green linen scarf, a large flower-print blouse and river sandals and basked in café’s with ambient seascape music playing in the background. Like the people who lived in towns such as Crested Butte or Telluride.
The hobo drove just past what some might have called a “river-side” café and parked. When the two of them had exited, the hobo nodded towards the café and Warren decided to obey, following him into the place. And, as you might have guessed, the first person he saw was a slim girl sitting in a booth by herself, sipping at some tea with the bag still in the cup. She lifted her deep green eyes as they entered and met Warren’s gaze. And something leapt up within Warren and he decided he would talk to her before they left. No matter what.