The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Page 17

  "Who do you call, baby who do you call when the damn thing's busted, oh yeah," Trisha chanted in a singsongy whis-per, 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 gen-uine 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 beech-nuts 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 some-times said.

  Trisha picked up the small flayed fish by the tail, carried it back to the stream, and dipped it to get rid of the pine-needles and grime. Then she cocked her head back, opened her mouth, and bit off the trout's top half. Small bones crunched under her teeth; her mind tried to show her the trout's eyes popping out of its head and onto her tongue in little dark dabs of jelly. She got one blurry look at this and then her body banished her mind yet again, this time slap-ping instead of merely pushing. Mind could come back when mind was needed; imagination could come back when imagination was needed. Right now body was in charge, and body said dinner, it's dinner, it may be morning but dinner is served and this morning we got fresh fish.

  The trout's top half went down her throat like a big swal-low of oil with lumps in it. The taste was horrible and also wonderful. It tasted like life. Trisha dangled the trout's dripping lower half in front of her upturned face, pausing only long enough to pull another piece of bone out of it, whispering: "Dial 1-800-54-FRESH-FISH. "

  She ate the rest of the trout, tail and all.

  When it was down she stood looking across the stream, wiping her mouth and wondering if she was going to puke it all back up again. She had eaten a raw fish, and although the taste of it was still coating her throat, she could hardly believe it. Her stomach gave a funny little lurch and Trisha thought, This is it. Then she burped and her stomach settled again. She took her hand away from her mouth and saw a few fish-scales gleaming on the palm. She wiped them on her jeans with a grimace, then walked back to where her pack lay. She stuffed the remains of her poncho and the severed hood (which had turned out to work pretty well, at least on fish that were young and stupid) into it on top of her food supply, then reshouldered the pack. She felt strong, ashamed of herself, proud of herself, feverish, and a little nutzoid.

  I won't talk about it, that's all. I don't have to talk about it and I won't. Even if I get out of here.

  "And I deserve to get out," Trisha said softly. "Anyone who can eat a raw fish deserves to get out. "

  The Japanese do it all the time, said the tough tootsie as Trisha set out once more along the side of the stream.

  "So I'll tell them," Trisha said. "If I ever get over there for a visit I'll tell them. "

  For once the tough tootsie seemed to have no comeback.

  Trisha was delighted.

  She made her way carefully down the slope and into the valley, where her stream bowled along through a forest of mixed firs and deciduous trees. These were thickly packed, but there was less underbrush and fewer bramble-patches, and for most of the morning Trisha got along well. There was no sense of being watched, and eating the fish had revi-talized her strength. She pretended that Tom Gordon was walking with her, and they had a long and interesting con-versation, mostly about Trisha. Tom wanted to know all about her, it seemed - her favorite classes at school, why she thought Mr. Hall was mean for giving homework on Fri-days, all the ways Debra Gilhooly had of being such a bitch, how she and Pepsi had planned to go trick-or-treating as Spice Girls last Halloween and Mom had said Pepsi's Mom could do whatever she wanted, but no nine-year-old girl of hers was going out trick-or-treating in a short skirt, high heels, and a cammi top. Tom sympathized completely with Trisha's utter embarrassmen
t.

  She was telling him about how she and Pete were plan-ning to get their Dad a custom-made jigsaw puzzle for his birthday from this company in Vermont that made them (or if that was too expensive, they would settle for a Weed Whacker), when she stopped suddenly. Stopped moving.

  Stopped talking.

  She studied the stream for almost a full minute, the cor-ners of her mouth drooping, one hand waving automati-cally at the cloud of bugs around her head. The underbrush was creeping back in among the trees now; the trees them-selves were stuntier, the light brighter. Crickets hummed and sang.

  "No," Trisha said. "No, huh-uh. No way. Not again. "

  The stream's new quietness was what had first distracted her from her fascinating conversation with Tom Gordon (pretend people were such good listeners). The stream no longer babbled and brawled. That was because the speed of its current had slowed. Its bed was weedier than it had been above the valley's floor. It was beginning to spread out.

  "If it goes into another swamp, I'll kill myself, Tom. "

  An hour later Trisha pushed her way wearily through a snarl of mixed poplars and birches, raised the heel of her hand to her forehead to crush a particularly troublesome mosquito, and then just left it there, hand to brow, the image of every human in history who is exhausted and doesn't know what to do or where to turn.

  At some point the stream had spilled over its low banks and drowned a large area of open land, creating a shallow marsh of reeds and cattails. Between the vegetation, the sun glittered on standing water in hot pricks of light. Crickets hummed; frogs croaked; overhead, two hawks cruised on stiff wings; somewhere a crow was laughing. The marsh didn't look nasty, like the bog of hummocks and drowned deadwood she'd waded through, but it stretched for at least a mile (and probably two) before coming to a low, pine-cov-ered ridge.

  And the stream, of course, was gone.

  Trisha sat down on the ground, started to say something to Tom Gordon, and realized how stupid it was to be pre-tending when it was clear - and growing clearer with every passing hour - that she was going to die. It didn't matter how much walking she did or how many fish she managed to catch and choke down. She began to cry. She put her face in her hands, sobbing harder and harder.

  "I want my mother!" she yelled at the indifferent day. The hawks were gone, but over by that wooded ridge the crow was still laughing. "I want my mother, I want my brother, I want my dolly, I want to go home!" The frogs only croaked, reminding her of some story Dad had read her when she was little - a car stuck in the mud and all the frogs croaking To o deep, too deep. How that had frightened her.

  She cried harder still, and at some point her tears - all these tears, all these goshdamn tears - made her angry. She looked up, bugs spinning all around her, the hateful tears still spilling down her mucky face.

  "I want my MOTHER! I want my BROTHER! I want to get out of here, DO YOU HEAR ME?" She kicked her legs up and down, kicked them so hard that one of her sneakers flew off. She knew she was doing a full-fledged tantrum now, the first one since she'd been five or six, and didn't care. She threw herself onto her back, pounded her fists, then opened them so she could tear handfuls of grass out of the ground and throw them into the air. "I WANT TO GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE! Why don't you find me, you stupid puppy-shit assholes? Why don't you find me? I. . . WANT. . . TO GO. . . HOME!"

  She lay looking up at the sky, panting. Her stomach hurt and her throat was sore from screaming, but she felt a little better, as if she had gotten rid of something dangerous. She put an arm over her face and dozed off, still sniffling.

  When she woke up, the sun was over the ridge on the far side of the marsh. It was afternoon again. Tell me, Johnny, what do we have for our contestants? Well, Bob, we have another afternoon. It's not much of a prize, but I guess it's the best a bunch of puppy-shit assholes like us can do.

  Trisha's head swam when she sat up; a squadron of large black moths unfolded their wings and went flying lazily across her field of vision. For a moment she was sure she was going to faint. The feeling passed, but her throat was still sore when she swallowed, and her head felt hot. Shouldn't have slept in the sun, she told herself, except sleeping in the sun wasn't the reason she felt this way. The reason was that she was getting sick.

  Trisha put on the sneaker she had kicked off doing her stupid tantrum, then ate a handful of berries and drank some stream-water from her bottle. She spied a cluster of fiddleheads growing at the edge of the marsh and ate them, too. They were fading and a lot tougher than they were tasty, but she forced them down. With high tea over, she stood up and looked across the marsh again, this time shad-ing her eyes from the sun. After a moment she shook her head slowly and wearily - the gesture of a woman instead of a child, and an old woman, at that. She could see the ridge clearly and she was sure it was dry over there, but she couldn't face slogging through another quagmire with her Reeboks tied around her neck. Not even if this one was shal-lower than the other one and not as nasty underfoot; not for all the late spring fiddleheads in the world. Why should she, with no stream to follow? She was as apt to find help - or another stream - in another, easier, direction.

  So thinking, Trisha turned fully north, walking along the east side of the marsh that sprawled across most of the val-ley's floor. She had done a great many things right since becoming lost - more than she ever would have guessed - but this was a bad decision, the worst she'd made since leav-ing the path in the first place. Had she crossed the marsh and climbed the ridge, she would have found herself look-ing down at Devlin Pond, on the outskirts of Green Mount, New Hampshire. Devlin was small, but there were cottages on its south end and a camp-road leading out to New Hampshire Route 52.

  On a Saturday or Sunday, Trisha would almost certainly have heard the burr of powerboats on the pond as week-enders towed kids on water-skis; after the Fourth of July there would have been powerboats out there on any day of the week, sometimes so many that they had to weave to avoid each other. But this was midweek in early June, there was no one out on Devlin but a couple of fishermen with lit-tle twenty-horse putt-putts, and Trisha consequently heard nothing but the birds and the frogs and the bugs. Instead of finding the pond, she turned toward the Canadian border and began walking deeper into the woods. Some four hun-dred miles ahead was Montreal.

  Between it and her, not much.

  Seventh Inning Stretch

  THE YEAR before the separation and divorce, the McFar-lands had gone to Florida for a week, during Pete and Trisha's February school vacation. It had been a bad holiday, with the children too often glumly shelling together on the beach while their parents fought in the little beach house they had rented (he drank too much, she spent too much, you promised me you'd, why don't you ever, yatata-yatata-yatata, dahdah-dahdah-dahdah). When they flew back, Trisha somehow got the window seat instead of her brother.