The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (14 page)

As she reached toward the last few fiddleheads growing on the second hummock, her hand froze. She heard the somnolent buzzing of flies again. It was a lot louder this time. Trisha would have angled away from it if she could, but as the swamp ran out it had become choked with dead branches and drowned bushes. There seemed to be only a single halfway-clear channel through this mess, and
she'd have to take it unless she wanted to spend an extra two hours struggling over submerged barriers and maybe cutting her feet up in the process.

Even in this channel, she was forced to clamber over one downed tree. It had fallen just recently, and “fallen” was really the wrong word. Trisha could see more slash-marks in its bark, and although the butt-end of its trunk was lost in a tangle of bushes, she could see how fresh and white the wood of the stump was. The tree had gotten in something's way, and so the something had simply pushed it over, snapping it like a toothpick.

The buzzing grew louder still. The rest of the deer—most of it, anyway—was lying at the foot of an extravagant splurge of fiddleheads near the spot where Trisha finally climbed wearily out of the swamp. It lay in two pieces which were connected by a fly-shining snarl of intestines. One of its legs had been torn off and stood propped against the trunk of a nearby tree like a walking stick.

Trisha put the back of her right hand over her mouth and hurried rapidly on, making weird little
urk-urk
sounds as she went and trying with all her might not to upchuck. The thing that had killed the deer
wanted
her to upchuck, maybe. Was that possible? The rational part of her mind (and there was still quite a lot of it) said no, but it seemed to her that
something
had deliberately polluted the two biggest, lushest growths of fiddleheads in the bog
with a deer's mangled body. And if it had done that, was it impossible to believe it might try to make her throw up the little nourishment she
had
managed to scrounge?

Yes. It is. You're being a dork. Forget it. And don't upchuck, for heaven's sake!

The
urk-urk
noises—they were like big, meaty hiccups—began to space themselves out as she walked west (keeping on a westward course was easy now, with the sun low in the sky) and the sound of the flies began to recede. When it was entirely gone, Trisha stopped, took off her socks, then slipped her sneakers back on. She wrung the socks out again, then held them up and looked at them. She could remember putting them on in her Sanford bedroom, just sitting there on the end of the bed and putting them on while she sang “Put your arms around me . . . cuz I gotta get next to you” under her breath. That was Boyz To Da Maxx; she and Pepsi thought Boyz To Da Maxx were yummy, especially Adam. She remembered the patch of sun on the floor. She remembered her
Titanic
poster on the wall. This memory of putting on her socks in her bedroom was very clear but very distant. She guessed it was the way old people like Grampa remembered things which had happened when they were kids. Now the socks were little more than holes held together by strings, and that made her feel like crying again (probably
because she herself felt like holes held together by strings), but she controlled that, too. She rolled the socks and put them in her pack.

She was re-fastening the buckles when she heard the
whup-whup-whup
of helicopter rotor-blades again. This time they sounded much closer. Trisha bounded to her feet and turned around with her wet clothes flapping. And there, off in the east, black against the blue sky, were two shapes. They reminded her a little bit of the dragonflies back there in Dead Deer Swamp. There was no sense waving and shouting, they were about a billion miles away, but she did it anyway—she couldn't help herself. At last, when her throat was raw, she quit.

“Look, Tom,” she said, following them wistfully from left to right . . . north to south, that would be. “Look, they're trying to find me. If they'd just come a little bit closer . . .”

But they didn't. The distant helicopters disappeared behind the bulk of the forest. Trisha stood where she was, not moving until the sound of the rotors had faded into the steady hum of the crickets. Then she fetched a deep sigh and knelt to tie her sneakers. She couldn't feel anything watching her anymore, that was one thing—

Oh you liar,
the cold voice said. It was amused.
You little liar you.

But she
wasn't
lying, at least not on purpose. She
was so tired and so mixed up she wasn't sure
what
she felt . . . except still hungry and thirsty. Now that she was out of the muck and the goo (and away from the torn corpse of the deer), she felt hunger and thirst very clearly. It crossed her mind to go back and pick more of the fiddleheads after all—she could steer clear of the deer's body and the goriest, bloodiest places, surely.

She thought of Pepsi, who was sometimes impatient with Trisha if Trisha scraped her knee while they were rollerblading or fell while they were tree-climbing. If she saw tears welling in Trisha's eyes, Pepsi was apt to say, “Don't go all girly on me, McFarland.” God knew she couldn't afford to go all girly about a dead deer, not in a situation like this, but . . .

. . . but she was afraid that the thing which had killed the deer might still be there, watching and waiting. Hoping she'd come back.

As for drinking the bog-water, get serious. Dirt was one thing. Dead bugs and mosquito eggs were something else. Could mosquitoes hatch in a person's stomach? Probably not. Did she want to find out for sure?
Definitely
not.

“I'll probably find some more fiddleheads, anyway,” she said. “Right, Tom? And berries, too.” Tom didn't reply, but before she could have any second thoughts, she got moving again.

She walked west for another three hours, at first
moving slowly, then able to go a little faster as she entered a more mature stretch of woods. Her legs ached and her back throbbed, but neither of these hurting places drew much of her attention. Not even her hunger occupied her mind to any real degree. As the day's light went first to golden and then to red, it was her thirst that came to dominate Trisha's thoughts. Her throat was dry and throbbing; her tongue felt like a dusty worm. She cursed herself for not having drunk from the swamp when she had the chance, and once she stopped, thinking,
Screw this, I'm going back.

You better not try, sweetheart,
said the cold voice.
You'd never find your way. Even if you were lucky enough to backtrack perfectly, it would be dark before you got there . . . and who knows what might be waiting?

“Shut up,” she said wearily, “just shut up, you stupid mean bitch.” But of course the stupid mean bitch was right. Trisha turned back in the direction of the sun—it was now orange—and began walking again. She was becoming actively frightened of her thirst now: if it was this bad at eight o'clock, what would it be like at midnight? Just how long could a person live without water, anyway? She couldn't remember, although she had come across that particular fun fact at some time or other—she was sure that she had. Not as long as a person could go without food, anyway. What would it be like to die of thirst?

“I'm not going to die of thirst in the darn old woods . . . am I, Tom?” she asked, but Tom wasn't saying. The real Tom Gordon would be watching the game by now. Tim Wakefield, Boston's crafty knuckleballer, against Andy Pettitte, the Yankees' young lefthander. Trisha's throat throbbed. It was hard to swallow. She remembered how it had rained (as with her memory of sitting on the end of her bed and putting on her socks, this also seemed like a long time ago) and wished it would rain again. She would get out in it and dance with her head back and her arms out and her mouth open; she would dance like Snoopy on top of his doghouse.

Trisha plodded through pines and spruces that grew taller and better spaced as this part of the woods grew older. The light of the setting sun came slanting through the trees in dusty bars of deepening color. She would have thought the trees and the orange-red light beautiful if not for her thirst . . . and a part of her mind noted their beauty even in her physical distress. The light was too bright, though. Her temples were pounding with a headache and her throat felt like a pinhole.

In this state, she first dismissed the sound of running water as an auditory hallucination. It couldn't be real water; it was too darned convenient. Nevertheless she turned toward it, now walking southwest instead of due west, ducking under low branches and stepping over fallen logs like someone in a hypnotic
trance. When the sound grew even louder—too loud to mistake for anything other than what it was—Trisha began to run. She slipped twice on the carpet of needles underfoot, and once she ran through an ugly little pocket of nettles that tore fresh cuts on her forearms and the backs of her hands, but she hardly noticed. Ten minutes after first hearing that faint rushing noise, she came to a short, steep drop-off where the bedrock emerged from the thin soil and needle carpeting of the forest floor in a series of gray stone knuckles. Below these, brawling along at a healthy clip, was a brook that made her first one seem like no more than a drip from the end of a shut-off hose.

Trisha walked along the edge of the drop with perfect unself-consciousness, although a misstep would have sent her tumbling at least twenty-five feet and likely would have killed her. Five minutes' walk upstream brought her to a kind of rough groove from the edge of the forest into the gully where the stream ran. It was a natural flume, floored with decades of fallen leaves and needles.

She sat down and hooked herself forward with her feet until she sat on top of the grooved place like a kid sitting on top of a slide. She started down, still sitting, dragging her hands and using her feet as brakes. About halfway down she started to skid. Rather than trying to stop herself—that would most likely start her somersaulting again—she
lay back, laced her hands together behind her neck, closed her eyes, and hoped for the best.

The trip to the bottom was short and jolting. Trisha whammed into one jutting rock with her right hip, and another struck her laced-together fingers hard enough to numb them. If she hadn't put her hands over the top of her head, that second rock might have torn open her scalp, she thought later. Or worse. “Don't break your fool neck” was another grownup saying she knew, this one a favorite of Gramma McFarland.

She hit bottom with a bonecrunching thud, and suddenly her sneakers were full of freezing cold water. She pulled them out, turned around, flopped onto her belly, and drank until a spike drove into her forehead the way it sometimes did when she was hot and hungry and gobbled ice cream too fast. Trisha pulled her dripping, mudstreaked face out of the stream's cold boiling course and looked up at the darkening sky, gasping and grinning blissfully. Had she ever tasted water this good? No. Had she ever tasted
anything
this good? Absolutely not. This was in a class by itself. She plunged her face back in and drank again. At last she got up on her knees, uttered a vast watery belch, and then laughed shakily. Her stomach felt swollen, tight as a drum. For the time being, at least, she wasn't even hungry.

The flume was too steep and too slippery to reclimb;
she might get halfway or even most of the way up only to slide all the way back to the bottom again. The going looked fairly easy on the other side of the brook, however—steep and tree-covered but not too brushy—and there were plenty of rocks to use as stepping-stones. She could go a little way before it got too dark to see. Why not? Now that she had filled her belly with water she felt strong again, wonderfully strong. And confident. The bog was behind her and she had found another stream. A good stream.

Yes, but what about the special thing?
the cold voice asked. Trisha was frightened by that voice all over again. The stuff it said was bad; that she should have discovered such a dark girl hiding inside her was even worse.
Did you forget about the special thing?

“If there ever was a special thing,” Trisha said, “it's gone now. Back with the deer, maybe.”

It was true, or seemed to be true. That sensation of being watched, perhaps stalked, was gone. The cold voice knew it and made no reply. Trisha found she could visualize its owner, a tough little sneerymouthed tootsie who looked only slightly, coincidentally, like Trisha herself (the resemblance of a second cousin, perhaps). Now she was stalking away with her shoulders held stiffly high and her fists clenched, the very picture of resentment.

“Yeah, go away and stay away,” Trisha said. “You don't scare me.” And after a pause: “Fuck you!”
There it came out of her mouth again, what Pepsi called The Terrible Effword, and Trisha wasn't sorry. She could even imagine saying it to her brother Pete if Pete started up with all his Malden crap again while they were walking home from school. Malden this and Malden that, Dad this and Dad that, and what if she just said
Hey Pete, fuck you, deal with it
instead of trying to be either all quiet and sympathetic or all bright and cheery and let's-change-the-subject? Just
Hey Pete, that's a big fuck you,
like that? Trisha saw him in her head—saw him staring at her with his jaw dropped most of the way down to his chin. The image made her giggle.

She got up, approached the water, picked out four stones that would take her across, and dropped them, one at a time, into the streambed. Once on the far side, she began to work her way down the slope.

The hillside steepened steadily and the stream grew ever noisier beside her, rolling and tumbling in its rocky bed. When Trisha came to a clearing where the ground was relatively flat, she decided to stop for the night. The air had grown thick and shadowy; if she tried to go on down the slope, she would be risking a fall. Besides, this wasn't too bad; she could see the sky, at least.