The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (24 page)

The night passed as nights of deepening sickness always do; time grew soft and strange. When the birds at last began to chirrup and she saw a little light beginning to strain through the trees, Trisha could hardly believe it. She lifted her hands and looked at
her dirty fingers. She could hardly believe she was still alive, either, but it seemed she was.

She stayed put until the day was light enough to see the ever-present cloud of bugs around her head. Then she got slowly up and waited to see if her legs were going to support her or give way and spill her back down again.

If they do I'll crawl,
she thought, but she didn't have to crawl, not yet; they held her. She bent and hooked a hand into one of the pack-straps. When she straightened back up again, dizziness roared through her and a squadron of those black-winged butterflies clouded her sight. At last they faded and she managed to get the pack on.

Then there was another problem—which way had she been going? She was no longer entirely sure, and the road looked the same in both directions. She stepped away from the log, looking uncertainly back and forth. Her foot clipped something. It was her Walkman, all tangled up in the earphone cord and wet with dew. Apparently she had taken it out after all. She bent down, picked it up, and looked at it stupidly. Was she going to take off the pack again, open it, and put the Walkman back inside? That seemed too hard—on a par with moving a mountain. On the other hand, throwing it away seemed wrong, like admitting she had given up.

Trisha stood where she was for three minutes or more, looking down at the little radio-tape player
with her fever-bright eyes. Throw it away or keep it? Throw it away or keep it? What's your decision, Patricia, do you want to stick with the waterless cookware or go for the car, the mink coat, and the trip to Rio? It occurred to her that if she were her brother Pete's Mac PowerBook, she'd be throwing up error messages and little bomb icons all over the place. She was startled into a laugh at this image.

The laughter almost immediately turned into coughing. It was the worst bout by far, doubling her over. Soon she was barking like a dog with her hands planted just above her knees and her hanging hair swaying back and forth in a filthy curtain. She somehow kept her feet, refusing to give in and fall, and as the coughing fit was tapering off, she realized that she ought to clip the Walkman to the waistband of her jeans. That was what the clip on the back of the case was for, wasn't it? Sure, you bet. What an El Dopo she was.

She opened her mouth to say,
Elementary, my dear Watson
—she and Pepsi sometimes said that to each other—and when she did, something wet and warm came slobbering out over her lower lip. She wiped up a palmful of bright red blood and looked at it, her eyes widening.

I must have bit something in my mouth when I was coughing,
she thought, and immediately knew better. This had come from deeper inside. The idea
scared her, and fright brought the world into sharper focus. She found herself able to think again. She cleared her throat (gently; it hurt too much to do it any other way) and then spat. Bright red. Oh jeez, Louise, but there was nothing she could do about it now, and at least she was clearheaded enough to figure out how to make sure of her direction on the road. The sun had gone down on her right. She turned now until the rising sun was winking through the trees on her left, and immediately saw she was pointed the right way. She didn't know how she could have been confused in the first place.

Slowly, gingerly, like someone walking on a freshly rinsed tile floor, Trisha got moving again.
This is probably it,
she thought.
Today's probably my last chance, maybe even this morning's my last chance. I may be too weak and sick to walk by this afternoon, and if I can get on my feet after another night out here, it'll be a blue-eyed miracle.

Blue-eyed miracle. Was that her mother's or her father's?

“Who gives a rat's ass?” Trisha croaked. “If I get out of this, I'm going to make up some sayings of my own.”

Fifty or sixty feet north of the place where she had spent that endless Sunday night and Monday morning, Trisha realized she still had her Walkman in her right hand. She stopped and went carefully
and laboriously about the task of getting it clipped to her waistband. Her jeans were absolutely floating on her now, and she could see the sharp jut of her hipbones.
Lose a few more pounds and I'll be able to model the latest Paris fashions,
she thought. She was just wondering what to do with the headphone attachment when a sudden rough rattle of distant explosions split the still morning air—it sounded like a puddle of soda being sucked up through a giant straw.

Trisha cried out, and she was not alone in her startlement; a number of crows cawed, and a pheasant exploded through the brush in a ruffled whir of indignation.

Trisha stood, wide-eyed, the forgotten earbud headphones penduluming at the end of their cord by her scabby, dirty left ankle. She knew that sound; it was the rattle of backfires through an old muffler. A truck, maybe, or some kid's bucket of rods. There was another road up there. A
real
road.

She wanted to run and knew she must not. If she did, she would blow out all her energy in one burst. That would be dreadful. To faint away and perhaps die of exposure within actual sound of traffic would be like blowing the save when the opposing team was down to their last strike. Such abominations happened, but she would not let it happen to her.

She began to walk instead, forcing herself to move slowly and deliberately, listening all the while
for another series of those rattling backfires, or a distant engine, or a horn. There was nothing, nothing at all, and after an hour of walking she began to think she had hallucinated the whole thing. This hadn't seemed like a hallucination, but . . .

She topped a rise and looked down. She began coughing again, and more blood flew from her lips, bright in the sun, but Trisha took no notice—did not even put her hand up. Below her the rutted track she was on ended, T-squaring into a dirt road.

Trisha walked slowly down and stood upon it. She could see no tire tracks—it was hardpan—but there were real ruts here, and no grass growing down the middle. The new road ran at right angles to her road, roughly east and west. And here, at last, Trisha made the right decision. She did not turn west for any other reason than that her head had begun to ache again and she didn't want to be walking directly into the sunshine . . . but she
did
turn west. Four miles from where she stood, New Hampshire Route 96, a patched ribbon of hot-top, ran through the woods. A few cars and a great many pulp-trucks used this road; it was one of the latter which Trisha had heard backing off through its ancient exhaust system as the driver downshifted for Kemongus Hill. The sound had carried better than nine miles through the still morning air.

She began to move again, and with a new feeling of strength. It was perhaps forty-five minutes later that she heard something, distant but unmistakable.

Don't be stupid, you've gotten to a place where
anything's
mistakable.

Perhaps so, but . . .

She cocked her head like the dog on Gramma McFarland's old records, the ones Gramma kept up in the attic. She held her breath. She heard the thump of blood in her temples, the wheeze of her breath in her infected throat, the call of birds, the rustle of the breeze. She heard the hum of mosquitoes around her ears . . . and another hum, as well. The hum of tires on pavement. Very distant, but there.

Trisha began to cry. “Please don't let me be making it up,” she said in a husky voice that was now down to little more than a whisper. “Aw, God, please, don't let me be making that u—”

A louder rustling noise commenced behind her—not the breeze, not this time. Even if she might have convinced herself (for a few cruddy seconds or so) that it was, what about the snapping sound of branches? And then the grinding, splintering sound of something falling—a small tree, probably, that had been in the way. In
Its
way. It had let her get this close to rescue, had allowed her to come within actual hearing of the path she had
so casually and carelessly lost. It had watched her painful progress, perhaps with amusement, perhaps with some sort of god's compassion that was too terrible to even think about. Now it was through watching, through waiting.

Slowly, both with terror and with a strange sort of calm inevitability, Trisha turned to face the God of the Lost.

I
T EMERGED
from the trees on the left side of the road, and Trisha's first thought was:
Is that all? Is that all it ever was?
Grown men would have turned and run from the
Ursus americanus
which lumbered out of the last screen of bushes—it was a fully grown North American black bear, perhaps four hundred pounds—but Trisha had been prepared for some awful horror torn from the underside of the night.

There were leaves and burdocks caught in its shiny fur, and held in one hand—yes, it had a hand, the clawed rudiment of one, at least—was a branch from which most of the bark had been stripped. It held this like a woodsy wand or scepter. It came to the middle of the road, seeming almost to paddle from side to side. It remained on all fours for a moment, and then, with a soft grunt, rose to a stand on its rear legs. When it did, Trisha saw it was not a black bear at all. She had been right the first time. It looked a little like a bear, but it was really the God of the Lost, and it had come for her.

It peered at her with black eyes that were not eyes at all but only sockets. Its tan muzzle scented at the air, and then it raised the broken branch it held to its mouth. The muzzle wrinkled back, revealing a double row of huge, green-stained teeth. It sucked at the end of its branch, reminding her of a little kid with a lollipop. Then, with great deliberation, the teeth clenched upon it and tore it in two. The woods had fallen silent, and she heard the sound its teeth made very clearly, a sound like splintering bone. It was the sound her arm would make, if that thing bit down on it.
When
it bit down on it.

It stretched its neck, its ears flicking, and Trisha saw it moved in its own small dark galaxy of minges and noseeums, just as she did. Its shadow, long in the morning light, stretched almost to Trisha's scuffed sneakers. They were no more than sixty feet apart.

It had come for her.

Run,
called the God of the Lost.
Run from me, race me to the road. This bear's body is slow, not yet filled with a summer's forage; pickings have been slim. Run. Perhaps I'll let you live.

Yes, run!
she thought, and then, immediately came the cold voice of the tough tootsie:
You can't run. You can barely stand up, sweetheart.

The thing that wasn't a bear stood looking at her, ears flicking at the bugs which surrounded its
big triangular head, sides shining with healthy fur. It held the stump of its stick in one clawed paw. Its jaws moved with ruminative slowness, and little shredded splinters dribbled out between its teeth. Some fell, some stuck to its muzzle. Its eyes were sockets lined with minuscule buzzing life—maggots and wriggling baby flies, mosquito larvae and God knew what else, a living soup that made her think of the swamp she had walked through.

I killed the deer. I watched you, and drew my circle around you. Run from me. Worship me with your feet and I may let you live.

The woods lay silent all about them, breathing their sour urgent scent of green. Her breath rasped softly in and out of her sick throat. The thing that looked like a bear gazed down on her haughtily from its seven feet of height. Its head was in the sky and its claws held the earth. Trisha looked back at it, up at it, and understood what she must do.

She must close.

It's God's nature to come on in the bottom of the ninth,
Tom had told her. And what was the secret to closing? Establishing who was better. You could be beaten . . . but you must not beat yourself.

First, though, you had to create that stillness. The one that came from the shoulders and spun about the body until it was a cocoon of certainty. You could be beaten, but you must not beat yourself.
You couldn't serve up a fat pitch and you couldn't run.

“Icewater,” she said, and the thing standing in the middle of the dirt road tilted its head so it looked like an enormous listening dog. It cocked its ears forward. Trisha reached up, turned her cap the right way around, and pulled the curved visor low on her brow. Wearing it the way Tom Gordon did. Then she pivoted her body so it was facing the right side of the road and took a step forward so her legs were apart, left leg pointed at the bear-thing. Her face remained turned toward it as she stepped; she fixed her gaze on the eyesockets looking through the dancing cloud of bugs.
It all comes down to this,
Joe Castiglione said;
everybody fasten your seatbelts.