The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Page 6

  At last, moving as wearily as a woman of sixty after a hard day's work (she felt like a woman of sixty after a hard day's work), Trisha replaced everything in her pack - even the shattered Gameboy went back in - and stood up.

  Before rebuckling the flap, she took off her poncho and held it up in front of her. The flimsy thing hadn't been any pro-tection in her slide down the slope, and now it was torn and flapping in a way she would have considered comic under other circumstances - it looked almost like a blue plastic hula skirt - but she supposed she'd better keep it. If noth-ing else, it might protect her from the bugs, which had reformed their cloud around her hapless head. The mosqui-toes were thicker than ever, no doubt drawn by the blood on her arms. They probably smelled it.

  "Yug," Trisha said, wrinkling her nose and waving her cap at the cloud of bugs, "how gross is that?" She tried to tell herself she ought to be grateful she hadn't broken her arm or fractured her skull, also grateful that she wasn't allergic to stings like Mrs. Thomas's friend Frank, but it was hard to be grateful when you were scared, scratched, swollen, and generally banged up.

  She was putting the rags of her poncho back on - the pack would come next - when she looked at the stream and noticed how muddy the banks were just above the water.

  She dropped to one knee, wincing as the waist of her jeans chafed against the wasp-stings above her hip, and took up a fingerful of pasty brown-gray gluck. Try it or not?

  "Well, what can it hurt?" she asked with a little sigh, and dabbed the mud on the swelling above her hip. It was bless-edly cool, and the itchy pain diminished almost at once.

  Working carefully, she dabbed mud on as many of the stings as she could reach, including the one which had puffed up beside her eye. Then she wiped her hands on her jeans (both hands and jeans considerably more battered now than they had been six hours ago), donned her torn poncho, then shrugged into her pack. Luckily, it lay without rubbing against any of the places where she'd been stung. Trisha began walking beside the stream again, and five minutes later she re-entered the woods.

  She followed the stream for the next four hours or so, hearing nothing but twitting birds and the ceaseless drone of bugs. It drizzled for most of that time, and once it show-ered hard enough to wet her through again even though she took shelter under the biggest tree she could find. At least there was no thunder and lightning with the second down-pour.

  Trisha had never felt as much like a town girl as she did while that miserable, terrifying day was winding down toward dark. The woods came in clenches, it seemed to her.

  For awhile she would walk through great old stands of pine, and there the forest seemed almost all right, like the woods in a Disney cartoon. Then one of those clenches would come and she would find herself struggling through snarly clumps of scrubby trees and thick bushes (all too many of the latter the kind with thorns), fighting past interlaced branches that clawed for her arms and eyes. Their only pur-pose seemed to be obstruction, and as mere tiredness slipped toward exhaustion, Trisha began to impute them with actual intelligence, a sly and hurtful awareness of the outsider in the ragged blue poncho. It began to seem to her that their desire to scratch her - to perhaps even get lucky and poke out one of her eyes - was actually secondary; what the bushes really wanted was to shunt her away from the brook, her path to other people, her ticket out.

  Trisha was willing to leave sight of the brook if the clenches of trees and tangles of bushes near it got too thick, but she refused to leave the sound of it. If the brook's low babble got too thin, she'd drop to her hands and knees and crawl under the worst of the branches rather than sliding along them and looking for a hole. Crawling over the squelchy ground was the worst part (in the pine groves the ground was dry and nicely carpeted with needles; in the clenchy tangles it always seemed wet). Her pack dragged through the lacings of branches and bushes, sometimes actually getting stuck. . . and all the time, no matter how thick the going, the cloud of minges and noseeums hung and danced in front of her face.

  She understood what made all of this so bad, so dispirit-ing, but could not articulate it. It had something to do with all the things she couldn't name. Some stuff she knew because her mother had told her: the birches, the beeches, the alders, the spruces and pines; the hollow hammering of a woodpecker and the harsh cawing cry of the crows; the creaky-door sound of the crickets as the day began to darken. . . but what was everything else? If her mother had told her, Trisha no longer remembered, but she didn't think her mother had told her in the first place. She thought her mother was really just a town girl from Massachusetts who had lived in Maine for awhile, liked to walk in the woods, and had read a few nature guides. What, for instance, were the thick bushes with the shiny green leaves (please God, not poison oak)? Or the small, trashy-looking trees with the dusty-gray trunks? Or the ones with the narrow hanging leaves? The woods around Sanford, the woods her mother knew and walked - sometimes with Trisha and sometimes alone - were toy woods. These were not toy woods.

  Trisha tried to imagine hundreds of searchers flooding toward her. Her imagination was good, and at first she was able to do this quite easily. She saw big yellow schoolbuses with the words CHARTER SEARCH PARTY in the destination windows pulling into parking areas all along the western Maine part of the Appalachian Trail. The doors opened and out spilled men in brown uniforms, some with dogs on chains, all with walkie-talkies clipped to their belts, a special few with those battery-powered loudhailers; these would be what she heard first, big amplified God-voices calling "PATRICIA McFARLAND, WHERE ARE YOU? IF YOU HEAR, COME TO THE SOUND OF MY VOICE!"

  But as the shadows in the woods thickened and joined hands, there was only the sound of the stream - no wider and no smaller than when she had tumbled down the slope beside it - and the sound of her own breathing. Her mental pictures of the men in the brown uniforms weakened, little by little.

  I can't stay out here all night, she thought, no one can expect me to stay out here all night - She felt panic trying to grab her again - it was speeding her heartbeat, drying out her mouth, making her eyes throb in their sockets. She was lost in the woods, hemmed in by trees for which she had no name, alone in a place where her town-girl vocabulary had little use, and she was conse-quently left with just a narrow range of recognition and reaction, all of it primitive. From town girl to cave girl in one easy step.

  She was afraid of the dark even when she was at home in her room, with the glow from the streetlight on the corner falling in through the window. She thought that if she had to spend the night out here, she would die of terror.

  Part of her wanted to run. Never mind how flowing water was bound to take her to people eventually, all that was likely just a crock of Little House on the Prairie shit. She had been following this stream for miles now, and all it had brought her to was more bugs. She wanted to run away from it, run in whatever direction the going was easiest.

  Run and find people before it got dark. That the idea was totally nutso didn't help much. It certainly didn't change the throb in her eyes (and the stung places, now they were throbbing, too) or ease the coppery fear-taste in her mouth.

  Trisha fought her way through a tangle of trees growing so close together they were almost intertwined and came out in a little crescent of clearing where the brook took an elbow-bend to the left. This crescent, hemmed in on all sides by bushes and raggedy clumps of trees, looked like a little patch of Eden to Trisha. There was even a fallen tree-trunk for a bench.

  She went to it, sat down, closed her eyes, and tried to pray for rescue. Asking God to not let her Walkman be bro-ken had been easy because it had been unthinking. Now, however, praying was hard. Neither of her parents were churchgoers - her Mom was a lapsed Catholic, and her Dad, so far as Trisha knew, had never had anything to lapse from - and now she discovered herself lost and without vocabulary in another way. She said the Our Father and it came out of her mouth sounding flat and uncomforting, about as useful as an electric can-opene
r would have been out here. She opened her eyes and looked around the little clearing, seeing all too well how gray the air was becoming, clasping her scratched hands nervously together.

  She couldn't remember ever discussing spiritual matters with her mother, but she had asked her father not a month ago if he believed in God. They had been out behind his lit-tle place in Malden, eating ice cream cones from the Sunny Treat man, who still came by in his tinkling white truck (thinking of the Sunny Treat truck now made Trisha feel like crying again). Pete had been "down the park," as they said in Malden, goofing with his old friends.

  "God," Dad had said, seeming to taste the word like some new ice cream flavor - Vanilla with God instead of Vanilla with Jimmies. "What brought that on, sugar?"

  She shook her head, not knowing. Now, sitting on the fallen trunk in this cloudy, buggy June dusk, a frightening idea bloomed: what if she had asked because some deep future-seeing part of her had known that this was going to happen? Had known, had decided she was going to need a little God to get through, and had sent up a flare?

  "God," Larry McFarland had said, licking his ice cream.

  "God, now, God. . . " He thought awhile longer. Trisha had sat quietly on her side of the picnic table, looking out at his little yard (it needed mowing), giving him all the time he needed. At last he said, "I'll tell you what I believe in. I believe in the Subaudible. "

  "The what?" She had looked at him, not sure if he was joking or not. He didn't look as if he was joking.

  "The Subaudible. Do you remember when we lived on Fore Street?"

  Of course she remembered the house on Fore Street.

  Three blocks from where they were, near the Lynn town line.

  A bigger house than this, with a bigger back yard that Dad had always kept mown. Back when Sanford was just for grandparents and summer vacations and Pepsi Robichaud was just her summer friend and arm-farts were the funniest things in the universe. . . except, of course, for real farts. On Fore Street the kitchen didn't smell of stale beer the way this house's kitchen did. She nodded, remembering very well.

  "It had electric heat, that house. Do you remember how the baseboard units would hum, even when they weren't heating? Even in the summer?"

  Trisha had shaken her head. And her father had nodded his, as if that was what he expected.

  "That's because you got used to it," he said. "But take my word, Trish, that sound was always there. Even in a house where there aren't baseboard heaters, there are noises. The fridge goes on and off. The pipes thunk. The floors creak.

  The traffic goes by outside. We hear those things all the time, so most of the time we don't hear them at all. They become. . . " And he gestured for her to finish, as he had done since she was very small, sitting on his lap and begin-ning to read. His old dear gesture.

  "Subaudible," she said, not because she completely understood what the word meant but because it was so clearly what he wanted from her.

  "Pree-cisely," he said, gesturing once more with his ice cream. A splatter of vanilla drops ran up one leg of his khaki pants, and she'd found herself wondering how many beers he'd had already that day. "Pree-cisely, sugar, subaudible. I don't believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die - I don't want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created - but I believe there has to be something. "

  He had looked around the yard with its too-high, too-patchy grass, the little swing-'n-gym set he had set up for his son and daughter (Pete had outgrown it, and Trisha really had, too, although she still swung or would go down the slide a few times when she was here, just to please him), the two lawn-dwarves (one barely visible in an extravagant splurge of spring weeds), the fence at the very rear that needed painting.

  In that moment he had looked old to her. A little confused.

  A little frightened. (A little lost in the woods, she thought now, sitting on the fallen log with her pack between her sneakers. ) Then he had nodded and looked back at her.

  "Yeah, something. Some kind of insensate force for the good. Insensate, do you know what that means?"

  She had nodded, not knowing exactly but not wanting him to stop and explain. She didn't want him to teach her, not today; today she only wanted to learn from him.

  "I think there's a force that keeps drunken teenagers - most drunken teenagers - from crashing their cars when they're coming home from the senior prom or their first big rock concert. That keeps most planes from crashing even when something goes wrong. Not all, just most. Hey, the fact that no one's used a nuclear weapon on actual living people since 1945 suggests there has to be something on our side. Sooner or later someone will, of course, but over half a century. . . that's a long time. "

  He had paused, looking out at the lawn-dwarves with their vacant, cheery faces.

  "There's something that keeps most of us from dying in our sleep. No perfect loving all-seeing God, I don't think the evidence supports that, but a force. "

  "The Subaudible. "

  "You got it. "

  She had gotten it but hadn't liked it. It was too much like getting a letter you thought would be interesting and important, only when you opened it it was addressed to Dear Occupant.

  "Do you believe in anything else, Dad?"

  "Oh, the usual. Death and taxes and that you're the most beautiful girl in the world. "

  "Da-ad. " She'd laughed and wriggled as he hugged her and kissed the top of her head, liking his touch and his kiss but not the smell of beer on his breath.

  He let her go and stood up. "I also believe it's beer o'clock. You want some iced tea?"

  "No, thanks," she said, and perhaps something prescient had been at work, because as he started away she said: "Do you believe in anything else? Seriously. "

  His smile had faded into a look of seriousness. He stood there thinking (sitting on the log she remembered being flat-tered that he would think so hard on her behalf), his ice cream starting to drip over his hand now. Then he had looked up, smiling again. "I believe that your heartthrob Tom Gordon can save forty games this year," he said. "I believe that right now he's the best closer in the major leagues - that if he stays healthy and the Sox hitting holds up, he could be pitching in the World Series come October. Is that enough for you?"

  "Yessss!" she had cried, laughing, her own seriousness bro-ken . . . because Tom Gordon really was her heartthrob, and she loved her father for knowing it and for being sweet about it instead of mean. She had run to him and hugged him hard, getting ice cream on her shirt and not caring.