Scott Nicholson - The Gorge

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.