The Gorge

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“There’s one of them angels,” Ace said, pointing a thumb at the sky.

Clara shivered in her damp bra and panties, her clothes spread on a rock to dry. She looked up to where the clouds had thickened and spread, gray mayonnaise smeared over the red and ochre treetops of the high cliffs.

“I don’t see anything,” she said, wondering if that was the correct response. Perhaps Ace was having one of his visions, or maybe he was getting ready to launch into one of his fits.

“Up there,” he said, leaning back. He had stripped completely, his skin as pale as the belly of a trout. The cool autumn air didn’t seem to affect him, though his penis was shriveled and beet-purple. She touched her stomach, wondering about the thing he had passed into her. But that was a wonder best left for later. Right now, she wanted to get away from the river, and eventually away from Ace. Maybe.

She squinted against the filtered sun. Nothing, not even a bird. Too cold for mosquitoes. Dead air, except for the soft, whisking wind from the northwest.

“Why did you leave me?” she said. “In the canoe?”

Ace blinked and continued to stare at the sky. “It was in the Lord’s hands.”

“The Lord wanted you to swim and me to sink?”

“It ain’t that easy. You need to read more of the Good Book. Some of it’s plain, but other things you got to figure out. Sometimes good looks like evil, and sometimes words mean something else besides what they say.”

She had once thought such pronouncements were the insight of an idiot savant, one who had been given the secret decoder ring for truth and spirituality. Now they sounded like the blather of a man who was desperately trying to make sense of a world that was beyond his comprehension. When she thought of the violent losers she had dated (her retroactive word for S amp; M encounters), even the ones who had thrilled her beyond measure, in the end they were all attempting to destroy the things they couldn’t understand. Often, she now realized, the main thing they couldn’t understand had been her.

Funny how getting nearly killed, really killed, had opened her eyes.

Or was it something else? Some creeping change at the cellular level, a biological signal that forced her to get past her selfish and self-destructive nihilism?

The thing Ace had planted in her belly.

“Reckon the Lord has a different plan now,” Ace said.

Like what, drop down a golden ladder and let us climb? “I’m hungry.”

“We’ll be all right, with the angels watching over us.” Ace rummaged in the backpack and pulled out its contents. Some type of explosive he’d double-packed in ziplock bags, along with an electronic detonator. His gun. A soggy bag of cereal. A dented apple. His King James Bible, ragged around the edges, pages stuck together, little more than a papier-mache brick.

“Here.” He handed her the apple.

She bit into the mealy flesh of the fruit, wondering if she’d be able to keep it down. Who would have thought pregnancy would arouse hunger and nausea at the same time?

Ace ran a hand over her breast. “The cold’s making your nipples hard.”

“That hurts.” Her breasts had swollen over the past few weeks. Ace hadn’t commented, but she could feel the difference. They were heavy and tender and strained against her dirty bra.

“You like it hurt,” Ace said, putting his stubbled cheek against her chest and rasping her skin.

Clara couldn’t explain that she had changed. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe whatever consumed Ace, the insanity, the delusions, the sheer blind fervor, had squirted through him and into her and she was now as crazed as he was. Maybe.

Either way, Ace wasn’t stopping, hands busy, going lower. The head of his penis emerged from the wrinkled sheath of skin like a snake from a winter den.

“I don’t feel like it,” she said, the apple bitter in her throat. She tried to move back on the rock, away from him, but he held her in place and eased her down on her back. Her skin chafed against the gritty surface, the rock’s weak warmth providing no comfort. Ace yanked aside one leg of her panties, tearing the elastic.

“The Bible says a woman submits,” Ace said, climbing on top of her, crushing her against the stone, pressing his cruel hardness against her. He didn’t care if she was ready or not, had never once bothered to attend to her needs, and though maybe she had changedmaybe, baby, maybe — no way in Hell had Ace. He rammed inside her, rough and dry, and she had no choice but to submit like always.

She wrapped her arms around him, gripping the apple so hard her fingernails pierced its skin. His breath smelled of mud and reptiles, algae scum and raw meat.

She gasped. “Oh, my God.”

Ace gave her a rotten-toothed grin. “Good, huh?”

Clara couldn’t answer, because past his shoulder and high in the sky soared three of Ace’s angels.