The Gorge

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The fuck she thinks we are, beavers? Why did I let her talk me into coming down to water? We’da been better off hiking out the way we came in and taking our chances thumbing south.

Up close, the river was both faster and deeper than it had appeared from the high ridges. A few big boulders jutted up wet and gray, the current beating froth between them. Ace Goodall couldn’t swim, and his fear of the water was almost as bad as his fear of heights. No way would he let on to Clara, though. After all, this was all her fault. If she hadn’t fucked up when the agents came snooping around, Ace would be waking up to instant coffee and a packet of instant oatmeal. Instead, he was forced to lie on his belly and scoop river water into his mouth. No telling how much fish piss he was drinking.

Clara knelt beside him, splashing cold water on her face. They had slept for an hour or so, Ace leaning against her so he’d wake up if she tried to run away again. Even though God was on his side, God didn’t do much to cut out the loneliness. The joy of setting off those clinic bombs had faded and left him hollow, and even the newspaper clippings didn’t quite cheer him up. Sure, his mission was important, but it wasn’t until he met Clara that he found true pride in his work. In her, he had a partner, but most importantly, he had someone who admired him and appreciated the role God had given him. Even though she was still a dumb, highfalutin bitch.

“What now?” he asked, raising his voice over the water.

“I guess we follow the river,” she said. “It ought to come out somewhere.”

“Sure. It comes out at the ocean. What other bright ideas do you have? Want me to gnaw some damned trees in two so we can build a raft?”

“Ace, don’t get mad. We got away, didn’t we?”

“Thanks to the angels. But I don’t see them nowheres now. Looks like we’re on our own.”

He squinted toward the east, where the sun rose like an egg yolk sliding up a greasy griddle. The river was loud and the tinkling, splashing, and gurgling hurt his ears and set him on edge. Sharp, high-pitched sounds had always bothered him. Maybe because his dad had worked him in the sawmill at the age of six, when Ace’s job had been to carry away the scrap bark. The rusty blade was as tall as Ace, with teeth as big as those in a shark’s grin.

Ace had been there the day his dad had lost three fingers to the mill. Not in the saw, but in the great fan belt hooked to the gasoline engine that drove the blade. The fingers had kicked out and bounced off a pile of wood chips at Ace’s feet. He’d looked down at them, thinking how they didn’t look like fingers once they were no longer attached to a hand. More than anything, they resembled fat, pale grubs that had swollen and popped. A good lesson. When you take something out of its rightful place, it don’t belong no more. His dad had wrapped a dirty handkerchief around the maimed limb and met the day’s quota. The fingers lay where they were until the sawdust and wood chips covered them.

“About how far do you think it is?” Clara asked. For an uppity rich bitch with an uppity name, she looked like hell. Watery, purple pouches bulged under her bloodshot eyes, her hair was oily and tangled, and her clothes were damp and dirty. She was way too scrawny, and Ace wondered not for the first time if she was the kind who threw up after eating. He heard some of those uppity rich bitches did that sort of thing.

He wondered if Eve had thrown up after the first bite of the apple, once she knew the thing was poisoned with sin and forbidden knowledge. Hell, no. Of course not. The natural thing to do, the woman thing, was to poison Adam.

“I reckon three or four miles,” he said, pulling a guess out of the air. Lying had never been a problem for him. “At least if we stick to the river, we know we’re going downhill.”

“Think the police will know about the agents yet?”

“Don’t hardly see how. They ain’t been dead long enough to go missing. Of course, there might be other ones already in the woods that we ain’t seen yet.”

“What will they do to you for killing them?”

He sighed, but the sound was lost in the sweeping roar of the river. “How many times I got to tell you? It was the angel that killed them, not me.”

“Yeah, but you’re the one they’ll blame.”

Ace had to agree with that. The law had always nailed his ass for the least little infraction. Every time someone tossed a rock through a school window, little Robert Wayne Goodall took the fall. When the neighbor’s cat turned up skinned and hanging from a tree branch, Bobby Wayne’s ass was also swinging in the wind. When a fire took down the new Sunday school wing of the Beulaville Baptist Church, Goodall drew his first stretch, a three-month cakewalk in a juvenile detention center in Mobile. That’s where he earned the nickname “Ace,” partly for his skill at poker and partly because he’d fought off a big German goon who’d wanted Bobby Wayne to swallow his one-eyed bratwurst. The German had eventually found another sweetheart and befriended Ace, and they’d spent their sentences swapping out cigarettes, lies, and survival tips.

Bouncing from juvie to high school had been a case of frying pan to fire. The probation officer was on him like a green fly on shit, and Ace could hardly score a joint without the crew-cut motherfucker reading him the riot act. Home life was hell, his mom lost in the Bible and Dad a hopeless workaholic who couldn’t understand why his little Bobby Wayne couldn’t straighten up and follow in his footsteps. After all, Dad may have lost a few fingers, but he still had ten toes and they all pointed toward God’s golden stairway.

Ace took to staying out all night, sometimes balling some skank welfare slut in the trailer park, sometimes just sleeping out in the woods under a blanket propped up on sticks. It was in the Alabama pine forest where he first felt at peace. Alone, he felt everything made sense, and when he first heard the Voice, he thought it was just another too-loud radio blaring from an open window on the freeway. But the Voice didn’t fade with distance. It stayed right there until it made itself heard. Probably like Jesus did when God sent Him out to wander the wilderness.

“Ya gotta carry your own cross when the time comes,” his mom was fond of saying.

He didn’t know about no cross, but when he started carrying around a Bible, the probation officer suddenly became all smiles, his teachers cut him enough slack that he didn’t drop out until he reached legal age, and he wasn’t an automatic suspect every time a Coke machine was jimmied or a motorbike turned up missing. That was when Ace finally appreciated the power of the Lord: Go to church of a Wednesday night and twice on Sunday, and you could pull the wool over the eyes of a lot of sheep.

With their blind faith, Ace turned seriously cruel instead of just being casual about it.

“Ya gotta carry your own cross when the time comes,” he said now to Clara.

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. It’s just words.”

“We’re out of toilet paper.”

He nodded, wondering what Jesus used to wipe his ass when out wandering in the wilderness. Probably, the Devil had popped up and offered the Lord a roll of Charmin hot off the presses, saying, “Sit on my porcelain throne and be king of all thou survey.” Jesus would never take the soft wipe, the easy way. No, He’d rather tough it out, ass rash or no.

“Let’s get walking,” Ace said.

Clara nodded, waited for him to take the lead, and he wanted to slap her silly straight teeth down her throat. Just because Eve was beyond his reach.

Instead, he pointed downriver. “That way.”

Clara nodded again, like she knew it all along, then gathered her macrame shawl about her shoulders and sought a flat path near the shore.

Uppity bitch. Ace followed her, pausing first to spit into the churning river.