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 summers, 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
