The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (19 page)

“Oh, Tom,” she whispered in a trembling voice. “Oh Tom, look at this. Do you see?”

Most were momentary white flashes, thin and straight and gone so quickly that they would have seemed like hallucinations if there hadn't been so many of them. A few, however—five, perhaps eight—lit up the sky like silent fireworks, brilliant stripes that seemed to burn orange at the edges. That orange might just have been eye-dazzle, but Trisha didn't think so.

At last the shower began to wane. Trisha lay back again and scooted the various sore parts of her body around some more until she was comfortable again . . . as comfortable as she was apt to get, anyway. As she did, she watched the ever more occasional flashes as bits of rock further off the path than she could ever get dropped into earth's well of gravity, first turning red as the atmosphere thickened and then burning to death in brief glares of light. Trisha was still watching when she fell asleep.

Her dreams were vivid but fragmentary: a kind of mental meteor shower. The only one she remembered with any clarity was the one she had been having just before she woke up in the middle of the night, coughing and cold, lying on her side with her knees drawn all the way up to her chin and shivering all over.

In this dream she and Tom Gordon were in an old meadow which was now running to bushes and young trees, mostly birches. Tom was standing by a splintery post that came up to about the height of his
hip. On top of it was an old ringbolt, rusty red. Tom was flicking this back and forth between his fingers. He was wearing his warmup jacket over his uniform. The gray road uniform. He would be in Oakland tonight. She had asked Tom about “that pointin thing.” She knew, of course, but asked anyway. Possibly because Walt from Framingham had wanted to know, and a cellular El Dopo like Walt wouldn't believe any little girl lost in the woods; Walt would want it straight from the closer's mouth.

“I point because it's God's nature to come on in the bottom of the ninth,” Tom said. He spun the ringbolt on top of the post back and forth between his fingers. Back and forth, back and forth. Who do you call when your ringbolt's busted? Dial 1-800-54-RINGBOLT, of course. “Especially when the bases are loaded and there's only one out.” Something in the woods chattered at that, perhaps in derision. The chattering grew louder and louder until Trisha opened her eyes in the dark and realized it was the sound of her own teeth.

She got slowly to her feet, wincing as every part of her body protested. Her legs were the worst, closely followed by her back. A gust of wind struck her—not a puff this time but a gust—and almost knocked her over. She wondered how much weight she had lost.
A week of this and you'll be able to put a string around me and fly me like a kite,
she thought. She started to laugh at that, and the laugh turned
into another coughing fit. She stood with her hands planted on her legs just above her knees, her head down, coughing. The cough started deep in her chest and came out of her mouth in a series of harsh barks. Great. Just great. She put the inside of her wrist to her forehead and couldn't tell if she had a fever or not.

Walking slowly with her legs spread far apart—her butt chafed less when she did that—Trisha went back to the pines and broke off more branches, this time meaning to pile them on top of her like blankets. She took one armload back to her bed, got a second, and stopped halfway between the trees and the needle-floored dip she'd chosen to sleep in. Slowly, she turned in a complete circle under the blazing four o'clock stars.

“Leave me alone, can't you?” she cried, and that started her coughing again. When she got the cough under control, she said it again, but in a lower voice: “Can't you quit it? Can't you just cut me a break, let me be?”

Nothing. No sound but the soughing of the wind through the pines . . . and then a grunt. Low and soft and not even remotely human. Trisha stood where she was with her arms around her fragrant, sappy load of branches. Her skin broke out in hard little bumps. Where had that grunt come from? This side of the stream? The other side? From the stand of pines? She had a horrible idea, almost a certainty, that it was
the pines. The thing which had been watching her was in the pines. As she harvested branches to cover herself with, its face had been perhaps less than three feet from her own; its claws, the ones which had torn into the trees and ripped both deer apart, had perhaps hovered within inches of her own hands as she bent the branches back and forth, first splintering them and then breaking them.

Trisha started coughing again, and that got her moving. She dropped the branches in a helter-skelter pile and crawled among them without any attempt to create order out of their jumbled chaos. She winced and moaned a little when one of them poked the place on her hip where she had been stung, then lay still. She sensed it coming now, slipping out of the pines and finally coming for her. The tough tootsie's special thing, the wasp-priest's God of the Lost. You could call it whatever you wanted—the lord of dark places, the emperor of understairs, every kid's worst nightmare. Whatever it was, it had finished teasing her; it was all done playing games. It would simply tear away the branches beneath which she was cowering and eat her alive.

Coughing and shivering, all sense of reality and rationality gone—temporarily insane, in fact—Trisha put her arms over the back of her head and waited to be torn open by the thing's claws and stuffed into its fangy mouth. She fell asleep that way, and when she woke in the early light of Tuesday
morning, both of her arms were asleep from the elbows down and at first she couldn't bend her neck at all; she had to walk with her head cocked slightly to one side.

I guess I won't have to ask either Gramma what it's like to be old,
she thought as she squatted to pee.
I guess that now I know.

As she walked back to the pile of branches where she had slept (like a chipmunk in a burrow, she thought wryly), she saw that one of the other needle-filled hammocks—the one nearest hers, in fact—looked disturbed. The needles had been sprayed around and dug right down to the thin black earth in one place. So maybe she hadn't been insane in the dark of early morning, after all. Or not
entirely
insane. Because later on, after she'd gone back to sleep, something had come. It had been right next to her, perhaps squatting and watching her sleep. Wondering if it should take her now and finally deciding not to, deciding to let her ripen for at least one more day. To let her sweeten like a checkerberry.

Trisha turned in a circle, feeling a dim sense of déjà vu but not remembering she had turned exactly the same circle in almost exactly the same place only a few hours ago. She stopped when she came back to where she had started, coughing nervously into her hand. The cough made her chest hurt, a small dull pain that was very deep inside. She didn't exactly mind—the pain was warm, at
least, and every other part of her felt cold this morning.

“It's gone, Tom,” she said. “Whatever it is, it's gone again. For a little while, anyway.”

Yes,
Tom said,
but it'll be back. And sooner or later you'll have to deal with it.

“Let the evil of the day be sufficient thereof,” Trisha said. That one was her Gramma McFarland's. She didn't know exactly what it meant but thought she
sort
of knew, and it seemed to fit this occasion.

She sat on a rock beside her hammock and munched three big handfuls of berries and beechnuts, telling herself it was granola. The berries weren't as tasty this morning—a little tough, in fact—and Trisha guessed they would be even less tasty come lunchtime. Still, she made herself eat all three handfuls, then went to the stream for a drink. She saw another of those little trout in it, and although the ones she'd seen so far weren't much bigger than smelts or large sardines, she suddenly decided to try and catch one. The stiffness had begun working out of her body a little, the day was warming as the sun rose, and she had begun to feel a little better. Hopeful, almost. Maybe lucky, too. Even the cough had eased.

Trisha went back to her tangled bed, extracted the remains of her poor old poncho, and spread it on one of the rock outcrops. She hunted for a stone
with a sharp edge and found a good one near the place where the stream tumbled over the rounded lip of the bluff and into the valley below. This slope was easily as steep as the one she'd gone sliding down on the day she had gotten lost (that day seemed at least five years ago to Trisha), but she thought it would be a much easier descent. There were lots of trees to hold onto.

Trisha took her improvised cutting tool back to her poncho (spread on the rock like that the poncho looked like a big blue paperdoll) and sawed the hood off below the shoulder-line. She doubted very much if she could actually catch a fish in the hood, but it would be amusing to try and she didn't feel like trying the slope until she had limbered up a little more. She sang softly under her breath as she worked, first the Boyz To Da Maxx song that had been in her head throughout, then the Hansons' “MMMm-Bop,” then a snatch of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Mostly, however, she sang the one that went “Who do you call when your
wind
shield's
bus
ted?”

The chilly breeze of the night before had kept the worst of the bugs away, but as the day heated up the usual cloud of tiny airshow performers coalesced around Trisha's head. She barely noticed them, giving an occasional impatient wave only when they got too close to her eyes.

When she had finished cutting the hood off the poncho she held it upside down, dangling it and
studying it with a critical, judicious eye. Interesting. Undoubtedly too stupid to work, but sort of interesting, just the same.

“Who do you call, baby who do you call when the
damn
thing's
bus
ted, oh yeah,” Trisha chanted in a singsongy whisper, and walked over to the stream. She picked out two rocks protruding side by side from the water and planted her feet on them. She gazed down between her spread legs into the rushing current. The stream's pebble-packed bed was wavery but otherwise clear. No fish right now, but so what? If you wanted to be a fishergirl, you had to be patient. “Put your
arms
around me . . . cause I gotta munch on
you,
” Trisha sang, then laughed. Pretty goofy! Holding the hood upside down by the ragged shoulder-material, she bent and dropped her improvised snare into the stream.

The current pulled the hood back between her legs, but it stayed open, so that was all right. The problem was her position—back bent, butt in the air, head at the level of her waist. She wouldn't be able to hold this pose long, and if she tried to squat on the rocks, her sore, shaky legs would likely betray her and send her tumbling into the stream. A full-body dunk wouldn't help her cough.

When her temples started to thud, Trisha compromised by bending her knees and lifting her upper body a little. This shifted her eyeline upstream, and she saw three quicksilver flashes—they were fish, all
right, there was no doubt—coming toward her. If she'd had time to react, Trisha almost certainly would have jerked the hood and caught none of them. As it was, she had time for only a single thought

(like underwater shooting stars)

and then the silver glints were zipping between the rocks she was standing on and right beneath her. One of them missed the hood, but the other two swam right into it.

“Booya!” Trisha screamed.

With that cry—it was as much dismay and shock as joy—Trisha bent forward again and grasped the lower edge of the hood. In doing so she almost overbalanced and went into the stream anyway, but she managed to stay up. She lifted the hood, full of water and slopping over the sides, in both hands. It shifted out of shape as she stepped back to the bank and more water slopped out, soaking the left leg of her jeans from hip to knee. One of the little trout went with it, twisting and flipping its tail in the air, then hitting the water and swimming away.

“
SUGARTIT!
” Trisha screamed, but now she was also laughing. As she worked her way up the bank, still holding the hood in front of her, she began coughing, as well.

When she reached a level place, she looked into the hood, sure she would see nothing—she had lost the other fish, as well, must have, girls didn't catch
trout, even baby ones, in the hoods of their ponchos, she just hadn't seen its getaway. But the trout was still there, swimming around like a mollie in a goldfish bowl.

“God, what do I do now?” Trisha asked. This was a genuine prayer, both agonized and bemused.

It was her body that answered, not her spirit. She had seen plenty of cartoons where Wile E. Coyote looked at Roadrunner and saw him turn into Thanksgiving dinner. She had laughed, Pete laughed, even Mom laughed if she was watching. Trisha did not laugh now. Berries and beechnuts the size of sunflower seeds were all very well, but they weren't enough. Even when you ate them together and told yourself they were granola, they weren't enough. Her body's reaction to the four-inch trout swimming in the blue hood was radically different, not hunger exactly but a kind of clench, a cramp that centered in her belly but actually came from everywhere, an inarticulate cry

(GIMME THAT)

which had little to do with her brain. It was a trout, just a little one far below the legal limit, but whatever her eyes saw, her body saw dinner.
Real
dinner.

Trisha had only one clear thought as she took the hood over to the remains of the poncho, which was still spread on the outcrop (a paperdoll without a head now):
I'll do it but I'll never ever talk about it.
If they find me rescue me I'll tell them everything except how I fell into my own shit . . . and this.

She acted with no planning or consideration; her body brushed her mind aside and simply took over. Trisha spilled the contents of the hood onto the needle-covered ground and watched the little fishie flop about, strangling in the air. When it was still she picked it up, put it on the poncho, and slit it up the belly with the stone she'd used to cut off the poncho's hood. A thimbleful of watery, mucusy fluid ran out, more like thin snot than blood. Inside the fish she could see tiny red guts. These Trisha levered out with a grimy thumbnail. Beyond them was a bone. She tried to pull it free and got about half of it. During all this her mind tried to take over only once.
You can't eat the head,
it told her, its reasonable tone not really masking the horror and disgust beneath.
I mean . . . the eyes, Trisha. The
eyes! Then her body brushed it away again, and more roughly this time.
When I want your opinion I'll rattle the bars in your cage,
Pepsi sometimes said.