Scott Nicholson - The Gorge

“Yeah, well, he didn’t know about the bat-freak fuckers.”

The reminder of the horror they had witnessed chilled Raintree even more than the dampness that had seeped beneath his SealSkinz. He took his attention from the river and scanned the sky overhead. A drop of rain hit him in the eye, causing him to blink. The cloud ceiling had descended, and he wondered if they’d have time to react if another of the creatures swooped down to attack.

As if sharing an unspoken dread, the three of them paddled with urgency. The falls Bowie had warned them about were somewhere ahead, and below that was the fabled Attacoa, the high, flat stone peak where the Cherokee had held sacred rituals and where shamans asked the Great Spirits for signs and portents. The white settlers had named the peak Babel Tower in tribute to the Biblical edifice that was built so high into the clouds that the workers lost their ability to communicate with one another. Raintree saw little metaphorical connection between a man-made construct and a natural wonder, but the white names for many things often stripped away their inherent magic.

“We should wait for Bowie’s raft to catch up,” Dove said.

“Fuck that.” Farrengalli worked the paddle like a whip-driven galley slave, grunting with each word. “Let’s put some distance between us and those bloodsuckers.”

A soft fog rose from the river, the sun filtered by the gray gauze overhead. The rain was steady but not yet heavy, and drops ticked off the sides of the raft. An inch of water had collected in the bottom of the boat, but it hadn’t affected navigation. This slow stretch of the river was deeper than the previous runs, posing little danger of grounding the watercraft. But the current was picking up speed, the rocky banks narrowing.

In the distance, Raintree imagined he could make out Attacoa, though the fog limited visibility to less than a half mile. He strained his ears for the thundering gush of the falls, but all he could hear was the lapping water and the thrashing made by the three paddles.

Dove touched his shoulder again, on the soft skin just beyond the collar of his life jacket. He enjoyed her touch, though it made him shiver.

She rasped in a half whisper. “If anything happens to Bowie-”

“What’s the big secret?” Farrengalli bellowed. “This isn’t no ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ operation. Leave that to the Fed.”

“Farrengalli?” Raintree didn’t like saying the man’s name. Everything about him was disgusting, from his hairy forearms to his two-day growth of stubble to his oily black hair. And the way his eyes roamed over Dove’s body, as if he’d like to club her over the head and drag her off to a dark cave somewhere “Yeah, Chief?”

“When we get out of here, I’ve got a job for you.”

“Serious?”

“I need a spokesman for my fitness gyms. I’m ready to get out of the spotlight.”

“I’ll be on TV?”

“Regional cable. Probably a hundred thousand households.”

“Fuck-a-reeno, my friend. I’m you’re guy.”

“So let’s make sure we get out of here alive.”

Raintree didn’t need to turn his head to know Farrengalli had cast a worried glance at the mottled, bruised, and leaking sky.

That will shut him up for a few minutes.

And a few minutes might be all he needed, because the first eternal rumble of the falls sounded ahead.

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.