The Gorge Read online

  “Maybe it’s different when you actually make a baby out of love. Maybe it really is a gift from God.”

  Ace cackled like a rooster with a sore throat. “What the hell you think I been telling you?”

  “I don’t mean like that. I mean, like, it’s something you own. Something you owe. Something you have a duty to care for.”

  “Don’t be getting uppity. It’s God’s will that makes them, and it’s God’s instruments that plant them, and it’s God’s whores that spread their legs and squirt them out. A woman’s just there to serve. That’s the only reason it’s set up that way.”

  “I could never kill a baby.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “But you did kill one. In Birmingham. That pregnant woman who died.”

  “That’s different. The baby wasn’t born yet.”

  “So it was just another innocent bystander?”

  “Ain’t nobody innocent. I told you that already.” Ace was getting a headache. He wished his instrument would get hard so he could shut her up with another round of loving, but the cigarette tasted like mud and his toes were cold and it was going to rain before long and the Feds were closing in and they wouldn’t take him alive, which meant this might be all he had left so he’d better make it matter.

  “Well, if I ever got pregnant, I’d consider it a blessing.”

  “It’s gonna rain.”

  “What are we going to do, Ace?”

  “Get up under them big trees, I reckon.”

  “No. I mean, what are we going to do?”

  The angels were nowhere in sight. Maybe they were off helping other servants in need. “We’re already doing it,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Raven Mocker.

  Robert Raintree couldn’t believe he’d even mentioned the legend. Raised in the Qualla Boundary, less than two hundred miles from the Unegama Wilderness Area, he knew better. The Cherokee reservation had been the home of alcoholism, violence, and poverty during his childhood, until his grandfather had whisked him off to Oklahoma. In Qualla, the best job you could hope for was to pose in ceremonial headdress and buckskins beside a stuffed, moth-eaten black bear while sweaty white people took your picture. Or, if you had patience, you might work your way into a cashier’s job at a shop that sold rubber tomahawks and Confederate license plates.

  All that changed with the coming of Harrah’s Casino, federally approved gambling that offered belated reparations for the White Man’s long-ago massacre. A tiny portion of the profits were distributed to anyone who was at least one-sixteenth Cherokee. Not a bad deal, all the way around. The U.S. government shed the public’s collective guilt, and the average Qualla resident graduated from drinking Boone’s Farm Kountry Kwencher to Crown Royal, though white people ran the casino and managed to gain a majority interest in nearby hotels and restaurants.

  Raintree invested his gambling proceeds in his fitness gyms, and now he was a partner in another White Man project. One that now had a body on its hands. He wasn’t sure he liked the way Bowie had ordered them to haul it to the edge of the woods and cover it with stones.

  It wasn’t an it. It was a person. C.A. McKay was a celebrity to some people, those who followed cycling. A man was dead, torn up by a creature that wasn’t a vision and wasn’t a Raven Mocker because the Cherokee spirits were too weak “What you thinking, Chief?” Farrengalli called from the rear of the raft.

  He was thinking of the painkiller he’d taken while on burial duty, and how it was seeping softly through his bloodstream. Raintree made a powerful dip with his paddle, sending the raft shooting ahead of Bowie’s. A drop of rain hammered off his nose. “I think we’re going to get wet.”

  Dove touched his shoulder, her fingers gentle and warm. The first warmth he’d felt in a long time. “You have to talk to him.”

  Him. Raintree wasn’t in any position to challenge Bowie Whitlock. Though Raintree had a formal business relationship with ProVentures, his contract for the Muskrat run was clear: He was only along for promotional considerations. He assumed the others had received the same contract, though he had no doubt the payments varied, depending. Bowie would earn the most, probably twice what the others made. Travis Lane, already on the payroll, would probably get a bonus and maybe some stock benefits, while Vincent Farrengalli had probably signed for minimum wage and a date with a hair stylist.

  But nowhere had the contract covered the possibility of being ripped to shreds by bloodsucking creatures.

  “We finish the mission,” Raintree told Dove. It was the sort of thing Bowie would say. What she would expect to hear.

  “Did you see that fucker?” Farrengalli said, working his paddle at a feverish pace, dipping off starboard and hurrying back to port, arms not resting. “I mean, I know I don’t have no imagination, so I couldn’t dream up nothing like that. Fucking doo-dah-day.”

  “I wish I had photographed it,” Dove said.

  “Did you see it fly off and leave its brains behind?”

  “Maybe we should have collected some of the flesh,” Raintree said. “For later analysis.”

  “Would you touch that shit?” Farrengalli was talking even faster than usual. “No telling what kind of alien AIDS that thing carried. You saw the way it ripped into Golden Boy’s neck.”

  “A search team will have to come back for his body,” Dove said.

  “Let the FBI worry about it,” Raintree said. “Castle acts like he’s seen it all before.”

  “He seems a little unstable to me,” she replied, her voice barely audible over the incessant wash of the river.

  “You kidding? He’s a fucking nutter,” Farrengalli said. “Talking to himself all the time. I can’t believe none of us brought a gun.”

  “Why would we need a gun?” Raintree asked. “Nobody expected something like this to happen, even ProVentures.”

  “Expect the unexpected, dude. Isn’t that what Bowie Boy says?”

  “That’s not helping any,” Dove said. “Bowie knows this gorge better than any of us. Maybe better than anybody.”

  “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 b
y 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.

  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.”

  “The
y 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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Bowie dragged the raft up the bank where Dove and the others waited under the trees. After giving McKay a shallow burial, Bowie had warned the group about the upcoming falls, a severe and impassable drop known as Little Flush to white-water enthusiasts, though on the official maps the stretch was called Echota. Bowie no longer fully trusted his memory of the river’s twists and turns because Hurricanes Katrina and Ivan had flooded the gorge and altered the channels. However, Little Flush was still just as severe as ever, and probably had been since the dinosaurs had died out. The only way down it was around it.