The Gorge

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Despite what Ace thought, Clara Bannister wasn’t from old Yankee money and she wasn’t an uppity bitch. She’d been raised in a mobile home in Cleveland, Ohio. Her father had been an automotive mechanic as well as a preacher, and had briefly been on the pit crew of Indy 500 champ Al Unser. In between sermons, he ran his own garage and raced the dirt tracks. Her mother worked the counter at the Dairy Queen, attending night school at the local community college, taking five years to get a two-year degree in physical therapy. Not enough money to make it out of the trailer park, but they had instilled a strong work ethic and a passion for success. And a whole severe slate of morals.

Sometimes, she wondered if her overachieving nature related to those roots. Such a beginning wasn’t humbling. It was embarrassing. In junior high, once she was old enough to know better, she loathed catching the school bus with the dirty-kneed, runny-nosed brats from the neighboring trailers. She deserved better. In her off-the-rack Kmart jeans and thrift store blouses, she was always four years behind the trends, but the real cruelty was that she’d been granted just enough intelligence to be painfully aware of her condition. She didn’t fit, even though she pursued the usual outsider fields of band, theater, and art. Even among the losers, she came up lacking.

But there was one area where genetics paid off: rides. When the other juniors were sporting about in pre-owned Hummers and Toyotas, her dad put her behind the wheel of a lovingly restored 1969 Camaro. Such cars were the fuckmobiles of their era, and Clara did her best to uphold that reputation. Clara had never derived as much self-esteem and satisfaction as she did when chauffering some boy around the downtown square a few times before parking in the alley and rutting with him in the backseat, leaving him spent but her bright-eyed and eager for the next pickup.

Determination (and a timely sexual encounter with the high school counselor) had won her a scholarship to Radford University in Virginia. She did well her first semester, but made the mistake of falling for an anthropology professor who turned her on to the pleasures of hallucinogenics, feminism, and radical politics. When she should have been studying for finals, the nights were spent instead with sagging candles, oversized pupils, and debates about the “eternal struggle.” The sex was lousy, but the discussion was exhilarating. Such stuff was as far removed from her childhood trailer park as she could imagine, and nothing could have made her happier. Clara roved from Green Party to Marxism to Taoism to Maoism and, despite a brief love affair with the chairman of the Radford Young Republicans, she began exploring the extreme libertarian fringes. Out there where left and right collided in a conflicting ideology of legalized drugs and Fourth Amendment fever.

The sophomore Clara had grown bored with acid, as even the most ardent hippies eventually did, because once you’d visited there a few times, it wasn’t so revolutionary or appealing. Instead, she was drawn to a new form of excitement, one she would never have thought possible and one that no doubt would have sent her father toward his third and probably fatal heart attack. She found she enjoyed pain.

At first, it had come in fleeting electric brushes, such as a boy who bit her nipples a bit too hard through inexperience. Then the Young Republican had taken delight in twisting them between his thumbs and fingers until she yelped in a surprise that he took as delight. A Buddhist old enough to be her father had picked her up in a bar and taken her to a motel room, tied her to the bed, and left her there for two hours until she wet the sheets. He then proceeded to remove his leather boot strings and lash them across her bare legs, back, and buttocks for an additional two hours. Sometimes cruelly slapping, sometimes teasing the laces across the welts. He entered her at dawn and, raw and tingling and confused, she experienced the first orgasm of her life.

From pain, she evolved toward danger. Still an honor-roll student during daylight, Clara became a denizen of the wee hours, cruising closing times and only talking to the most drunken and abusive men, occasionally bedding them if they weren’t too intoxicated to perform. Sexual stimulation became as boring as the Lucy-in-the-Sky cosmic trip of LSD, but the possibility that she might be harmed or even killed gave her a deep satisfaction. Educated enough to recognize her perversion, she couldn’t find an answer in the writings of Freud, Jung, Skinner, Nietzsche, or Friedan. She dared not visit a shrink.

During a golden autumn day, she’d awoken in Moultrie, Georgia. She vaguely recalled a road trip for a rock concert (she sensed it had involved one of the Grateful Dead’s surviving members), but didn’t remember her traveling companions. She’d lost her purse, her pockets were empty, and her clothes disheveled. She probably could have gotten a wire transfer for a plane ticket from one of her lovers or abusers, but the thought of hitchhiking appealed to her.

Only crazy people hitchhiked, and only crazy people stopped to pick them up, but a young woman never had to wait long on the side of America’s highways. When Ace Goodall pulled into the emergency lane in his rusty Ford pickup and rolled down the passenger’s-side window, she almost told him to forget it, she’d wait for a Cadillac. Ace told her to get in the goddamned truck right this fucking second, what was she trying to do, get picked up by a goddamned peckerhead pervert or something and get raped?

When he first told her he was a murderer, she glanced at him out of the corners of her eyes and grinned. When he insisted, she nodded, staring through the windshield at the highway ahead and wondering how much damage she’d suffer if she rolled onto the pavement at sixty-five miles per hour. Then he told her about the bombs, and she remembered seeing something on the news about them, abortion clinics, a few doctors and patients killed, a nationwide manhunt, no description of the killer but FBI experts agreed the guy knew his stuff. He was widely believed to be an American terrorist, though the word “terrorist” was rarely used for white killers, even mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber.

It was Ace’s knowledge of the details of the bombings, as well as his glee in sharing them, that had convinced her. Fifty miles north of Athens, she had given up the idea of escape and instead warmed to a new fever. Traveling with a soon-to-be-famous maniac offered a strange, romantic beauty. A higher purpose. A reason to live and probably die.

Life on the run was occasionally more exhausting than exciting, though, and now was one of those times. Her shoulders ached from paddling, the current had bumped and rocked the canoe until she thought her bones would come apart, and thirst had turned her throat into a tunnel of sand and gravel.

“Can’t we take a break, Ace? Nobody’s on to us.”

Ace, kneeling in the stern and watching for rocks, didn’t answer for a half minute, so she repeated the question. He pushed off against a sodden log, driving the canoe toward the middle of the river. Then he turned around. “You hear that?”

“Hear what?” The constant wash of the rapids had soaked her ears with white noise until the surrounding sounds blended into one droning roar.

Ace sat higher and studied the riverbanks, which had given way to gentle sloping woods instead of the twenty-foot stone cliffs along the first part of the trip. “Like a thunderstorm.”

Clara squinted against the early afternoon sun. A few high clouds had invaded the morning’s perfect sky, but they were white and wispy, not the type to harbor ill weather. All fine, but sometimes Ace saw things beyond the sky.

“Something ain’t right.”

“Ain’t right” was Ace’s sixth sense, the preternatural alarm that went off whenever danger was near. She believed it was this gift that had so far allowed him to elude capture. Of course, Ace thought such things were messages from the Lord, sometimes beamed right into his brain from heaven above. Compared to the armchair radicals and garden-variety crackpots Clara had met during her first two years of college, Ace came off as practically a messiah. Charming in a crude way. Sincere, as only a zealot could be.

“Maybe more FBI agents,” Clara said, raising her voice, sibilants lost in the splashing. “If they really thought you were here, wouldn’t they send in a bunch of people?”

“They ain’t that smart, or they wouldn’t be walking haircuts with dicks made of liver mush. No, it’s something up yonder.” He nodded downriver.

“Why don’t we take a break, then? Think about it some?”

“If I told you once, I told you a thousand times, you don’t run from the Lord’s will, you jump in with both feet and a prayer and a gun.”

If that were the case, Clara wondered why Ace had been evading capture for eighteen months instead of staring down those who wanted him dead or alive. After all, if the mission was for the glory of the Lord, God would deliver him in his dark hours. Thanks to a half-dozen university-level courses in philosophy and religion (and the extracurricular, sensory-challenging research that went along with them), Clara decided that God would pick and choose depending on the situation and followed no set rules Himself, though His believers labored under a rigid and archaic moral code. All fine and dandy for the faithful, but that didn’t ease the ache in her back and shoulders and belly.

Her belly. She touched it. Sick, that was all. Bad diet, too many canned meats and energy bars, maybe some contaminated water. The morning’s purge hadn’t totally eliminated the nausea, and the roiling of the canoe didn’t help matters any.

She stopped paddling. “I’m going to be sick again.”

Ace beat the water with his oar, sending spray across her already soaked clothes. “All right, goddamn it, just quit your bitching for a minute.”

He guided the canoe to the shore and the thunder swelled in intensity. Ace, watching for rocks off the bow, didn’t see it looming downstream, but Clara already had her paddle in the water, noticing the current had picked up steam.

“Waterfall!” she screamed.

Ace didn’t hear her, or didn’t understand her, because he still wore the pissed-off scowl. Clara leaned forward and grabbed him by the shoulder. “Look!”

Ace muttered something that probably was “Shit fire,” one of his favorite expressions, but the words were lost amid his flailing maneuvers with the paddle. The canoe spun until they were heading downstream sideways. The smooth lip of the waterfall loomed ahead, the river channeling to a spout about fifty feet in width. Clara couldn’t tell the height of the falls, but judging from the bit of rocky river she could see downstream, the drop seemed plenty long enough to smash them and the canoe to pieces and put paid to Ace’s holy work.

Calm descended upon her, though she was aware that her arms now worked in frantic rhythm with Ace’s, dipping into the water and shoving the canoe toward shore. She had no death wish after all, she discovered, at least not here in this cold and lost river with a cold and lost man. Sure, she loved the danger and the thrills, but she didn’t like the ending. It was pain that attracted her, not the absence of feeling.

“Fuck it,” Ace shouted, letting his oar slide into the water. He stood, grabbed his backpack from the middle of the canoe where it lay in a thin skin of water, and jumped overboard. Clara watched, giving three more useless strokes before she realized Ace had actually abandoned her.

The bastard.

It should have deserved an exclamation point, but Ace had been a bastard for at least two weeks.

With time off for good behavior.

No surprises anymore, just another man grabbing in desperation. No higher power, no real threat where it mattered, nothing to offer except a strange, glowing thing deep inside her stomach, a thing that made her both sick and suspicious.

Ace bobbed off the stern, five feet nearer to shore than the canoe. He stroked with one arm, trailing the buoyant backpack behind him. Not looking back. Leaving Clara and the thing inside

— behind.

Ace didn’t understand trailer trash summers, where kids jumped off the bridge into water that had collected the raw sewage runoff and livestock spills and cast a greasy rainbow stain in the current. Clara could swim. She was a survivor, at least so far.

She rolled out of the canoe, kicking it away from her, recalling some distant lesson in science about bodies in motion. Bodies in motion didn’t mean molecules and atoms and quarks and stuff you couldn’t see. It meant moving, staying alive, dodging the worst. Getting by.

She gulped cool air and her face hit cooler water; she raised her arms in a butterfly stroke and plunged, awake, belly tingling, nipples tightening, toes wriggling around the thong of her sandals.

Her hand slid across a rock, skinning her knuckles, then her feet hit bottom. She skated on the algae-slick stones for a moment and gained purchase on a sandy shoal. Wading ashore, she realized she had beaten Ace to high ground. He crawled out of the water, spitting and wheezing, the backpack hooked around his elbow, his camou trousers soaked.

“We made it,” Clara said.

Ace pounded the backpack into the shallow water, splashing both their faces. “What you trying to do, kill me?”

“I’m trying to save us. All of us.”

“That’s the Lord’s job.”

Clara was so tired, she just wanted to lie in the sand and take a nap. But the sun had gone cold, hidden behind clouds that resembled a flock of dirty sheep. She wrapped her arms across her chest, shivering. “What now?”

Ace, knee-deep in the current, watched as the canoe swept over the edge of the world and into the thundering spray far below.

“Wait for the next ride,” he said, and Clara decided that was the story of her life.