The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(17)
Trisha waved at the bugs (this gesture was now so auto-matic she didn't even realize she was doing it) and then delved into her lunchbag. The tuna sandwich wasn't as bad as she had feared, flattened and torn into hunks but still rec-ognizably a sandwich. The Baggie had sort of kept it together.
The remaining Twinkie, however, had turned into what Pepsi Robichaud would likely have called "total sploosh."
Trisha sat listening to the game and slowly ate half of her tuna sandwich. It awoke her appetite and she easily could have gobbled the rest, but she put it back in the bag and ate the splooshed Twinkie instead, scooping up the moist cake and the nasty-tasty white creme filling (that stuff was always creme and never cream, Trisha mused) with one fin-ger.
When she had gotten all she could with her finger, she turned the paper inside out and licked it clean. Just call me Mrs. Sprat, she thought, and put the Twinkie wrapper back into her lunchbag. She allowed herself three more big swal-lows of Surge, then went prospecting for more potato chip crumbs with the tip of one grimy finger as the Red Sox and Yankees played through the rest of the third and the fourth.
By the middle of the fifth it was four to one Yankees, with Martinez gone in favor of Jim Corsi. Larry McFarland regarded Corsi with deep mistrust. Once, while talking baseball with Trisha over the telephone, he had said: "You mark my words, sugar - Jim Corsi is no friend of the Red Sox." Trisha got giggling, she couldn't help it. He just sounded so solemn. And after awhile Dad had gotten gig-gling, too. It had become a catch-phrase between them, something that was just theirs, like a password: "Mark my words, Jim Corsi is no friend of the Red Sox."
Corsi was a friend of the Red Sox in the top of the sixth, though, getting the Yankees one-two-three. Trisha knew she should turn off the radio and conserve the batteries, Tom Gordon wasn't going to pitch in a game where the Red Sox were three runs behind, but she couldn't bear the thought of disconnecting Fenway Park. She listened to the seashell-murmur of the voices even more eagerly than to the play-byplay guys, Jerry Trupiano and Joe Castiglione. Those people were there, actually there, eating hotdogs and drink-ing beer and lining up to buy souvenirs and sof-serve ice cream and chowder from the Legal Seafood stand; they were watching as Darren Lewis - DeeLu, the announcers some-times called him - stepped into the batter's box, the bright banks of lights casting his shadow behind him as daytime gave up overhead. She could not bear to exchange those thirty thousand murmuring voices for the low hum of mos-quitoes (thicker than ever as dusk advanced), the drip of rainwater from the leaves, the rusty rick-rick of the crick-ets .. . and what other sounds there might be.
It was the other sounds she was most afraid of.
Other sounds in the dark.
DeeLu singled to right, and one out later Mo Vaughn got hold of a slider that did not slide. "Back back WAYYY BACK!" Troop chanted. "That's in the Red Sox pen! Some-one - I think it might have been Rich Garces - caught it on the fly. Home run, Mo Vaughn! That's his twelfth of the year and the Yankee lead is cut to one."
Sitting on her tree-trunk, Trisha laughed and clapped her hands and then resettled her signed Tom Gordon hat more firmly on her head. It was full dark now.
In the bottom of the eighth, Nomar Garciaparra hit a two-run shot into the screen on top of the Green Monster.
The Red Sox took a five-to-four lead and Tom Gordon came on to pitch the top of the ninth.
CHAPTER 5
Trisha slid off the fallen tree to the ground. The bark scraped against the wasp-stings on her hip, but she hardly noticed. Mosquitoes settled with immediate hungry intent on her bare back where her shirt and the tatters of the blue poncho had rucked up, but she didn't feel them. She gazed at the last held glimmerglow in the brook - fading tar-nished quicksilver - and sat on the damp ground with her fingers pressed to the sides of her mouth. Suddenly it seemed very important that Tom Gordon should preserve the one-run lead, that he should secure this victory against the mighty Yankees, who had lost a pair to Anaheim at the start of the season and had hardly lost since.
"Come on, Tom," she whispered. In a Castle View hotel room her mother was in an agony of terror; her father was on a Delta flight from Boston to Portland to join Quilla and his son; at the Castle County state police barracks, which had been designated Rally Point Patricia, search-parties very much like the ones the lost girl had imagined were coming back in after their first fruitless sallies; outside the barracks, newsvans from three TV stations in Portland and two in Portsmouth were parked; three dozen experienced woods-men (and some were accompanied by dogs) remained in the forests of Motton and the three unincorporated townships which stretched off toward New Hampshire's chimney: TR-90, TR-100, and TR-110. The consensus among those remaining in the woods was that Patricia McFarland must still be in Motton or TR-90. She was a little girl, after all, and likely hadn't wandered far from where she had last been seen. These experienced guides, game wardens, and Forest Service men would have been stunned to know that Trisha had gotten almost nine miles west of the area the searchers considered their highest priority.
"Come on, Tom," she whispered. "Come on, Tom, one two three, now. You know how it goes."
But not tonight. Gordon opened the top of the ninth by walking the handsome yet evil Yankee shortstop, Derek Jeter, and Trisha remembered something her father had once told her: when a team gets a lead-off walk, their chances of scoring rise by seventy percent.
If we win, if Tom gets the save, I'll be saved. This thought came to her suddenly - it was like a firework bursting in her head.