Scott Nicholson - The Gorge

“There’s life outside New Jersey, you know.”

Give her hell, Ace cheered silently. Let her know who’s boss. Woman was made slave to man. No shame in it. That’s just the way God set it up.

“Like, this is life?” Jenny’s voice grew shrill, tits shaking in her excitement. “This is life? This is a backache and wet clothes and mosquitoes and we could have gotten killed out there while you played Ranger Rick with a three-inch dick.”

She was pouring it on, and Pete didn’t have the balls to rise to the occasion. Pussy-whipped or worse. She probably had the biggest dick in this couple. Old Pete probably bent over for her.

Pete looked at the canoe, which sported a bushel-sized dent near the bow. “You’re right, honeybunch. What do you want to do? Break for lunch? You can have a dry pair of socks if you want.”

Ace’s blood pressure jumped. First, he’d felt bad for Pete, hooking up with such a bitch. But now he felt anger, because Pete was letting her walk all over him. Enough was fucking enough. He needed a boat, but even worse, he needed to show these people what was what.

Ace stepped over the fallen tree. “Howdy, folks,” he said, trying to be polite, though his voice quivered just a little. Yankees expected Southerners to be polite.

“Hey,” Pete said, instantly wary. Jenny drew up, folding her arms across her chest.

“Looks like you had a little trouble.”

“Yeah.” Pete gave a weak attempt at a laugh. “Water’s up this morning.”

Ace nodded. “Running hard, all right. Not usually so wild this time of year.”

“We’re not from around here, you know.”

“Never would have figured it.”

Jenny-bitch was letting Pete do all the talking now, for probably the first time ever. Pete’s eyes shifted from side to side. “Are you canoeing it? Or kayaking?”

“I flew in from heaven on the red-eye.”

“Listen, are you going to mug us? This isn’t Central Park, and… ”

Pete glanced at the backpacks strapped in the canoe, no doubt wondering if they contained any valuables that weren’t insured against theft. Ace smiled, letting his dark, chipped teeth make the answer.

“We don’t have any money,” Jenny said, the bitchiness gone from her tone, now just another scared cunt as she edged over to hide behind Pete. “Honest. We’re on vacation.”

Remember that, Petey, next time you’re giving it to her hard and dry and hurting. Remember she deserves it.

“I don’t want no money,” Ace said. He was many things, but he was only a liar when necessary, and right now it wasn’t necessary. “What good is money out here in the sticks?”

“Jesus,” said Jenny under her breath before shifting into what could only be a high-pitched mockery of Pete. “‘Appalachian Mountains,’ he says. ‘Get in touch with nature.’ Nature, my fanny. Like this is some dreamland. Like you don’t touch anything but yourself these days.”

Pete defensively raised the paddle and aimed it toward Ace, playing hero, keyboard-honed muscles already straining. “We’re registered with the Park Service. They have my driver’s license.”

Ace looked around, made a big show of a shrug. “Who needs a driver’s license out here? And I don’t see no Park Service.”

“Look, we don’t want any trouble.”

“Don’t matter what you want,” Ace said, enjoying this a little more than he thought he would. “Trouble found you anyway.”

Clara came out of the thick hedge of underbrush that skirted the branch-cluttered shore. “Ace, what are you doing?”

“These nice folks here said we could borrow their boat,” he said. “Once I explained to them about your sick aunt, o’ course, and how we had to get there before the hospital turned off the machines.”

“I don’t have a sick aunt,” Clara said.

Ace made another big shrug. He sure knew how to pick them. Well, between her and Jenny and a dozen other women, put them all together and maybe you’d get enough brains to do a three-piece jigsaw puzzle.

Fuck it. Time’s a-wasting.

He pulled out the Colt revolver.

“Mother Mary,” Pete said, no longer pink-faced.

“I knew it,” Jenny wailed. “He’s going to rape me.”

“I don’t do nothing to a woman against her will,” Ace said. “Just ask my sweetheart.”

“He won’t hurt you unless he has to,” Clara concurred.

“You don’t have to,” Jenny said, a little too eagerly.

“We just want the boat, okay?” Ace didn’t need any extra drama. He had plenty enough already. Jenny was Pete’s problem, and God grant him the strength to deal with it. “Our feet are tired and it’s a long way to the end of the river.”

“But we’ll get lost,” Pete said, his Northern whine now in perfect pitch with Jenny’s, as if the two had been practicing together for years. “We don’t know the trails.”

“You’ll learn ‘em.” He waved the revolver like a bank robber in a movie, the piece heavy in his hand. “Leave the paddles. You can take your backpacks.”

“He’s not going to rape me,” Jenny said. Ace couldn’t tell whether she was relieved or disappointed. Maybe she had a little seed of submission in her, as God intended. She sounded like a woman who could be put in her place at the hands of the right man. With this Pete clown, fat fucking chance.

The couple took their belongings out of the canoe, and Clara tied her backpack to the steel support bar that ran across the middle of the boat. “How do you work this thing?” Ace asked Pete, hefting the paddle and testing its weight.

Pete was all too anxious to get Ace downriver. “Row on the opposite side of the boat from the direction you want to go. Say you wanted to go left, and hard. Then both of you will paddle on the right.”

“You’re not going to shoot us, are you?” Jenny asked, still standing behind Pete, still Yankee, still ninety-nine-percent bitch.

“They might identify us,” Clara said.

“Mercy is as mercy does,” Ace said. “We’ll be long gone by the time they hike out of these woods and get back to the world. Let’s get this piece of shit in the water and make like ducks. Besides, the angels ought to take care of them.”

Ace dragged the canoe to the edge of the river, keeping the Colt where the couple could see it. Not that he expected Pete to make a play, but he’d seen plenty of men screw up at the hands of a woman, and Jenny might be the type who got off on recklessness. As long as she didn’t risk nothing herself. And she wouldn’t. She was a woman. Some things were as sure as the sun of a new day and the eternal love of the Lord.

The canoe sat a little askew in the water, probably because of the dent. Ace climbed in front, pushed against the sandy bottom with his paddle, and eased the canoe toward the white water.

“Hey, wait for me,” Clara said, running after him, splashing to reach the boat and clamber into the back, nearly tipping it in the process. Ace grinned. He hadn’t considered leaving her behind at all. He’d forgotten all about her.

Maybe I’m getting sentimental in my old age.

“Thanks for the canoe,” Ace hollered at Pete and Jenny, the New Jersey couple who would probably sell the story of this encounter to some magazine. Make money so Jenny-bitch could spend it on games of chance.

Then the current caught the boat and he found himself fighting it, the paddle jerking in his arms, the rocks approaching too fast. Clara wasn’t much help on her end, and the boat jerked and plunged in the water, threatening to spill them at any moment. They had gone a hundred feet backwards, squirting down a thin waterfall that splashed Ace’s neck and shoulders, before he finally got the hang of it and pointed the canoe downstream.