The Gorge

by Scott Nicholson

  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 summ
ers, 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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Jim Castle walked a quarter of a mile along the riverbank, occasionally getting his feet wet, sometimes climbing along the mossy and root-rich lips of soil where the river had carved its path. The Rook hadn’t invaded his thoughts since he’d encountered the couple on the shore, and Castle believed himself cured of whatever temporary syndrome had afflicted him.

  You mean, “ Short-term post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  The Rook was back and better than ever.

  “No, I mean, I can’t decide whether you’re dead or I’m crazy.”

  Go for both. It’s the most reasonable explanation.

  “Since when have you ever been reasonable?”

  Look, you’re the one thinking all this up.

  “Except you make me think things I don’t understand.”

  Join the club. It’s a big one, and at last count included six and a half billion other bald monkeys. Plus those things. You know…

  “Flying, man-eating creatures that don’t exist. Yeah, I know.”

  Castle concentrated on his respiration, the roar in his ears mirroring the rush of white water. Sympatico with the river, both of them heading downhill toward the lowest common denominator, the final crush of time and tide.

  Deeeeeep, partner. Like the river. Extended metaphors. Not the kind of thing you expect from a crew-cut type.

  “Don’t look now, but we’ve got company.”

  Company?

  Maybe when you were dead, or just the figment of some cracked cop’s imagination, you couldn’t see the two inflated rafts bobbing on the river, rows of white helmets glinting in the afternoon light. They bounced over a series of whitecaps and reached an eddy that pulled both rafts in a slow circle. There were three people in each raft, all wearing life vests. One, a muscular man in a tank top with dark, curly hair, shook a triumphant fist at Castle, who waved back. He fought an urge to lift one thumb in the universal sign of the hitchhiker.

  Instead, Castle waved his badge and gun. The nearest raft headed toward shore, two of the occupants paddling while the one in front slumped as if deciding whether to make a dash downstream, away from the threat of the gun. As if Castle would actually use the weapon, as if they could outrun his bullets if he did.

  “Hey,” Castle shouted, as the raft scooted ashore and grounded on the muddy, debris-wracked shore. The man in the middle looked pale and ill, eyes focused miles downstream. The man in front, in some type of wet suit, appeared to be the leader. At least, he stuck his chin out in a defiant gesture.

  Castle felt stupid holding the badge out for the man’s inspection. Protocol was protocol, though.

  By the book, right, partner? Straight down the line, all the way.

  “All the way?” Castle answered aloud.

  “What did you say?” the man in the raft said.

  “Nothing.”

  Tell them it’s the only way to fly.

  “It’s the only way to fly,” Castle said.

  The three men in the raft stared at him as if he’d just dropped from the sky.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Expect the unexpected.

  ProVentures had adopted the oxymoronic cliche as a slogan for its line of climbing gear. Bowie Whitlock had to admit the phrase was perfectly crafted to catch the attention of hurried, harried Earth children and the overachieving stoners who were the biggest consumers of outdoor adventure equipment. But the phrase was just as appropriate to being flagged down by a man waving a badge and a gun, as if the rafts had broken the speed limit and the man was playing backwoods traffic cop.

  Though Bowie figured the group might encounter hikers, fishermen, and possibly kayakers and canoeists along the way, he hadn’t imagined interacting with them. Bowie, in the lead raft, had intended to simply wave and do the bit about relaxing and floating downstream John Lennon had encouraged in the drug-drenched Beatles tune “Tomorrow Never Knows.” The badge had been barely recognizable when viewed from mid-river simply because it was so unexpected. But there was no mistaking the gun, especially when the man made menacing gestures toward them.

  “What is it?” Lane asked behind him.

  “I’m not sure.” He gestured to McKay, indicating that he should stop paddling. The second raft was about a hundred feet upstream, too far away to see the man’s gun. Apparently Raintree had lost some of his determined edge.

  “He thinks he’s Kojak or something?” McKay said.

  “Might be a park ranger.”

  The current had eased since the group had launched after the noon break, and even if Bowie had been tempted to float past the man and ignore him, a competent marksman could have easily picked them off like ducks in a kiddie pool. Even if he missed, bullets piercing the rafts would have grounded the whole enterprise. Bowie figured the man must have been a law enforcement officer or he wouldn’t have bothered flashing the badge.

  Whether the man was really a ranger or merely imitating one, Bowie felt he had little choice. He stroked the raft toward the dank stretch of shore. When he could see the glittering stones of the bottom, he went over the stern into thigh-deep water and guided the boat with the grab loop. Twenty feet away, and the man said, “All the way?”

  “What did you say?” Bowie asked him, one eye on the handgun.

  “Nothing.”

  From that distance, the badge looked real. Bowie disregarded the obvious question, the one about why a ranger should be standing by a river in the middle of nowhere with a gun in his hand. “U.S. Forest Service?”

  The ranger cocked his head as if listening to something in the distance. After a moment, he said, “It’s the only way to fly.”

  As a kid, Bowie had been a big fan of Serpico, both the television series and the titular movie. Bowie especially loved the movie version of the experiences of the realistic cop, portrayed by Al Pacino, one of the greatest actors of the last century. Serpico had shaped Bowie’s perception of all officers, because his own biggest criminal offense had been an expired inspection sticker. He tried to picture Serpico flagging down a raft, but couldn’t. This trip had long ago passed the point of reason. This was already Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole, and ten miles of crazy river still lay ahead.

  “Sorry to scare you,” the man said. “Special Agent Jim Castle with the FBI. I’m afraid I need t
o commandeer this boat on behalf of the U.S. government.”

  “FBI?” Bowie said.

  “You can’t be serious,” Lane said.

  “Do I look like I’m joking?” Castle said. The guy looked liked he’d eaten a bucket of brass tacks for breakfast and was getting ready to shit brass knuckles. His eyes held a clouded, elusive quality, as if they’d seen something they hadn’t quite believed. He lowered the handgun to his hip, pointing it at the mud. A little comforted, Bowie glanced at Dove’s raft. She gave him a look, one he knew too well and despised.

  “We’re on a commercial enterprise,” Lane said to Castle. “ProVentures. We secured all the proper permits.”

  “I need the boat.”

  “Assignment or vacation?” Bowie asked.

  “Government business, like I said.”

  “Top secret, no doubt,” McKay said. “Like the hunt for Bin Laden.”

  “Not really. I don’t know enough yet to know what’s secret and what’s obvious.”

  Castle’s tone was deep and gruff, though more uncertain than other cops Bowie had known. Not a bit like Serpico. Maybe FBI agents were different, removed from public interaction and television cameras.

  “I’m in charge of this trip,” Bowie said, feeling Dove’s eyes boring him the way they did when she expected something of him. “I’m responsible for these people. I can’t just let you abandon us out here.”