The Gorge

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The rain began as a soft, subtle invasion from above. The first drops were barely more than coagulated mist, settling on Clara’s skin with a gentle tickle. The water was warmer than that of the river, though cooler than air temperature. Her clothes were still a little moist from jumping out of the canoe, but she no longer wanted to be naked in front of Ace. The lust and sick pride of ownership she’d enjoyed in his gaze (first seen by the dashboard lights of his pickup, later by campfire, cheap motel fluorescents, and, once, by candlelight when they’d spent the night with one of Ace’s militia buddies, the men taking turns with her) now disgusted her more than flattered her. She figured he was breaking several of the commandments Moses had brought down from Mount Sinai, but Ace said those rules only applied to kikes, yet another of his intellectual contradictions.

She guessed it was somewhere between three and six o’clock, though time had lost most of its meaning as the sky had settled into a persistent twilight. Ace had stretched a thin, tattered vinyl canopy over a rhododendron stand, and they huddled among the tangled branches and long, waxy leaves, waiting. Waiting for what, she wasn’t sure, and she was pretty sure Ace didn’t know, either. She was afraid to ask.

Actually, she knew his answer already: Waiting for the Lord to give us a sign.

They were slightly above the Unegama, and massive hemlocks grew all the way down to the water, their roots hugging the thick black soil where the current lapped at them. The branches were brown halfway up their trunks, afflicted with blight or pest infestation. Higher up the slopes on this side of the river, hardwoods dominated the forest, though the undergrowth was thick with laurel, briars, stunted pines, and crippled dogwood. Hiking through the greenery would be like tackling a boot camp obstacle course.

The opposite shore was an unforgiving tumble of rocks that time had taken from the high cliffs. The rocks were a mixture of square, chalky slabs and rounded granite, evidence of the different geologic layers that had facilitated the erosion. Clara would have found the scientific puzzle fascinating if she had been here camping with one of her college lovers, smoking dope, drinking wine, and laughing about God’s seemingly random ditch. Since Ace, God was no longer a laughing matter.

Neither were the angels.

Ace was curled in a fetal position, turned away from her, lying on his side on the leafy loam. He wore only a filthy tank top. She couldn’t tell if he was asleep.

“Are we going to stay here all night?”

He snorted, his sinuses thick as if he were catching a cold. She chalked it up to congestion from smoking.

“You asleep?” she ventured.

“I was until you started up.”

“Tell me about the angels.”

“What about them?”

“They don’t look like the angel pictures they showed us in Sunday school. Your angels are gray and nasty-looking. Those Sunday school angels were blond and white, I mean pure white, not pink like white people, and they had big, feathery wings and wore robes and appeared in golden light-”

“Them Sunday school angels were on paper. Who you going to believe, something on paper or something you see with your own eyes?”

“Angels shouldn’t look nasty.”

Ace rolled over with a suddenness that surprised her. She flinched away and lifted her forearms, but the blow didn’t come. She wondered if the constant clench of her stomach would hurt the thing inside her.

“That’s the trouble with people like you,” Ace said. “You don’t got no faith. The Lord lays it out plain as day and you don’t see it, because you think you know so much. Well, all you uppity smart people don’t know a goddamned thing. You don’t believe in miracles, you don’t accept that the Lord works in everybody, you don’t allow that there’s a higher law. You got to dream up a reason for things.”

“Ace, I-”

“You don’t see no magic. That’s why smart women think it’s okay to flush a baby out of their cunts. To them, it’s just a mess of cells thrown together, a little accident of nature. Something they got to control. See, that’s the real problem with people. Control. They don’t know how to give it up to the Lord.”

Ace knew all about control. She’d seen that firsthand. When she ran away from the campsite, after the FBI agents had appeared, she had expected him to kill her if he managed to escape. She wasn’t even sure why she had fled. Maybe it was the thing inside her, as if for the first time in her life, she had something to live for.

Ace wouldn’t kill her. Perhaps he needed a vessel for his anger. Out here in the wilderness, there were no abortion clinics. The bombs he’d planted with trip wires around the camp might have killed the two agents, but Ace wasn’t a mindless killing machine. After all, he’d spared the New Jersey couple, taking only their canoe and leaving them with their money, jewelry, and lives.

“It’s raining,” she said. The drops were heavier now, ticking off the dry leaves.

Ace sat up. “I had a vision.”

She cupped a hand over her eyes, scanning the breaks in the canopy for the angels.

“No, not up there,” he said. “In my head.”

Clara expected him to cite book, chapter, and verse. “Did it show you the way to the Promised Land?”

He looked at her as if gauging the length between his hand and her cheek. “No,” he said, nodding down the slope to the long, plunging falls that had caused them to ditch the canoe. “It showed me that.”

Through the gray gauze of the rain and the mist that was beginning to rise over the river, she saw the raft above the falls, making for shore. Three occupants. They reached the shallows, apparently forewarned of the falls and able to avoid the insistent pull of the main channel. The person in front, wearing an orange life vest, rubber-looking suit, and blue helmet, jumped out of the raft and towed it to the muddy bank. The other two got out when it ran aground. Unlike the couple with the canoe, these boaters looked experienced and confident.

“They’re going to carry the raft around the falls,” Ace said. “Smart.”

“Should we catch a ride?”

Ace reached for his pants. “That’s what the vision told me to do.”

“Maybe we should wait. If they give us the raft now, we’ll have to carry it ourselves. But if we wait until they reach that sandy beach at the bottom of the waterfall, we can get in the water and put some distance between them and us.”

Ace twisted his mouth to one side, chewing the inside of his lip. “It’ll take them at least twenty minutes to get around those rocks on foot.”

“They might even be setting up a camp.” The vision of a dry tent appealed to her, but she didn’t want to think about Ace marching the three people into the woods and pumping them full of bullets. Killing was okay when it happened off somewhere in another state, or if it was cops or something, but people you looked in the eye were another matter.

The man Ace had killed in Atlanta was trying to stop them from stealing his car. That murder made sense. It had a purpose. She understood that one, and knew God would forgive it. But these people were innocent.

The three had hoisted the raft over their heads, which provided protection from the rain as well as allowing easy balance. The raft was the inflatable kind, so it probably wasn’t that heavy, but Clara didn’t see how they could carry it that way over either the steep, rocky drop or the dense and twisted vegetation. But instead of walking the raft along the shore, they carried it to a sparse stand of trees, where they set it down and stood talking to each other, the tallest one making wild gestures with his arms.

“What are they waiting for?” she asked Ace, who was now rolling his damp socks up his pale, knobby ankles.

Ace reached for the backpack and pulled it to him, drawing out the pistol. He pointed it upriver, well above the falls. “Them.”

Another raft. Three more passengers. Three more victims. The one in the rear wore no helmet or life vest.

“And them.” Ace poked a thumb toward the sky.

As if determined to be a permanent fixture in Ace’s visions, the angels circled high overhead, mixing with the roiling clouds.