“About how far do you think it is?” Clara asked. For an uppity rich bitch with an uppity name, she looked like hell. Watery, purple pouches bulged under her bloodshot eyes, her hair was oily and tangled, and her clothes were damp and dirty. She was way too scrawny, and Ace wondered not for the first time if she was the kind who threw up after eating. He heard some of those uppity rich bitches did that sort of thing.
He wondered if Eve had thrown up after the first bite of the apple, once she knew the thing was poisoned with sin and forbidden knowledge. Hell, no. Of course not. The natural thing to do, the woman thing, was to poison Adam.
“I reckon three or four miles,” he said, pulling a guess out of the air. Lying had never been a problem for him. “At least if we stick to the river, we know we’re going downhill.”
“Think the police will know about the agents yet?”
“Don’t hardly see how. They ain’t been dead long enough to go missing. Of course, there might be other ones already in the woods that we ain’t seen yet.”
“What will they do to you for killing them?”
He sighed, but the sound was lost in the sweeping roar of the river. “How many times I got to tell you? It was the angel that killed them, not me.”
“Yeah, but you’re the one they’ll blame.”
Ace had to agree with that. The law had always nailed his ass for the least little infraction. Every time someone tossed a rock through a school window, little Robert Wayne Goodall took the fall. When the neighbor’s cat turned up skinned and hanging from a tree branch, Bobby Wayne’s ass was also swinging in the wind. When a fire took down the new Sunday school wing of the Beulaville Baptist Church, Goodall drew his first stretch, a three-month cakewalk in a juvenile detention center in Mobile. That’s where he earned the nickname “Ace,” partly for his skill at poker and partly because he’d fought off a big German goon who’d wanted Bobby Wayne to swallow his one-eyed bratwurst. The German had eventually found another sweetheart and befriended Ace, and they’d spent their sentences swapping out cigarettes, lies, and survival tips.
Bouncing from juvie to high school had been a case of frying pan to fire. The probation officer was on him like a green fly on shit, and Ace could hardly score a joint without the crew-cut motherfucker reading him the riot act. Home life was hell, his mom lost in the Bible and Dad a hopeless workaholic who couldn’t understand why his little Bobby Wayne couldn’t straighten up and follow in his footsteps. After all, Dad may have lost a few fingers, but he still had ten toes and they all pointed toward God’s golden stairway.
Ace took to staying out all night, sometimes balling some skank welfare slut in the trailer park, sometimes just sleeping out in the woods under a blanket propped up on sticks. It was in the Alabama pine forest where he first felt at peace. Alone, he felt everything made sense, and when he first heard the Voice, he thought it was just another too-loud radio blaring from an open window on the freeway. But the Voice didn’t fade with distance. It stayed right there until it made itself heard. Probably like Jesus did when God sent Him out to wander the wilderness.
“Ya gotta carry your own cross when the time comes,” his mom was fond of saying.
He didn’t know about no cross, but when he started carrying around a Bible, the probation officer suddenly became all smiles, his teachers cut him enough slack that he didn’t drop out until he reached legal age, and he wasn’t an automatic suspect every time a Coke machine was jimmied or a motorbike turned up missing. That was when Ace finally appreciated the power of the Lord: Go to church of a Wednesday night and twice on Sunday, and you could pull the wool over the eyes of a lot of sheep.
With their blind faith, Ace turned seriously cruel instead of just being casual about it.
“Ya gotta carry your own cross when the time comes,” he said now to Clara.
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. It’s just words.”
“We’re out of toilet paper.”
He nodded, wondering what Jesus used to wipe his ass when out wandering in the wilderness. Probably, the Devil had popped up and offered the Lord a roll of Charmin hot off the presses, saying, “Sit on my porcelain throne and be king of all thou survey.” Jesus would never take the soft wipe, the easy way. No, He’d rather tough it out, ass rash or no.
“Let’s get walking,” Ace said.
Clara nodded, waited for him to take the lead, and he wanted to slap her silly straight teeth down her throat. Just because Eve was beyond his reach.
Instead, he pointed downriver. “That way.”
Clara nodded again, like she knew it all along, then gathered her macrame shawl about her shoulders and sought a flat path near the shore.
Uppity bitch. Ace followed her, pausing first to spit into the churning river.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“What the fuck, Raintree?”
Robert Raintree looked up from his stump. Beside him was his backpack. He’d broken down his tent, tucked it and his sleeping bag away, and had rekindled the campfire for breakfast. He’d dipped into the medicine bag and found peace, as he had on so many mornings.
He’d been sitting on the stump for two hours. He’d seen Bowie Whitlock slip into the woods, then Dove Krueger following him a few minutes later. A distant woodpecker nailed a staccato breakfast, the wilderness equivalent of a barnyard rooster. After that, he’d lapsed into meditation, the way he imagined his ancestors had done before their vision quests.
But Farrengalli was now in his face, loud, asinine, raw as nature and twice as ugly.
“Excuse me?” Raintree said.
“You’re, like, up with the fucking birds, dude.”
“I thought we were getting an early start.”
Farrengalli blinked at the ragged, red dawn. “Yeah. Where’s that fucking Whitlock, anyway?”
The way Farrengalli had been drinking from his flask last night, Raintree was surprised to see the man had no sign of a hangover. If anything, flushed cheeks and a pained expression seemed to fit Farrengalli, as if waking up in anger were the only reason to bother opening his eyes at all.
“Got any extra water?” Farrengalli said. “I’m thirsty as a mother whore.”
“Whitlock said to ration.”
“Well, the river looks clean enough.”
The river was probably clean enough two hundred years ago, when his ancestors had hunted the watering holes for elk and deer. No, not all his ancestors. He was only half Cherokee, and he was pretty sure his bloodline had been tainted with Choctaw and Shawnee, other tribes that had been driven West and lumped together. “I wouldn’t advise it, unless you’re going to boil it first.”
“Hey, Red Man, afraid to drink a little bear piss? Probably put some hair on your pecker. Or you rather drink’um firewater?”
So much for peace. Raintree closed his eyes and concentrated on the whisper of soft feathers through his central nervous system. Good medicine.
Farrengalli spat a dry chunk of mucus into the fire. “I’m making coffee. Might as well get the old blood system jumpstarted while I’m waiting around for these clowns. Hey, where’s the chick?” Farrengalli undulated his hands in the shape of feminine curves. “You know, the hot squaw?”
Raintree said nothing. He listened again to the birds and their timeless songs of morning, wondering what messages they were sharing. At the edge of the clearing, Travis Lane and C.A. McKay were busy breaking down their tents. Dove Krueger’s tent stood with its front flap open, empty. Whitlock’s gear was already packed, except for one of the Muskrats, which lay in a sleek bundle near the campfire.