The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(26)

"No!" she yelled, loud enough to scare a big white bird into flight. It exploded upward, trailing long legs behind it as it became airborne. In another place and time, Trisha would have stared at this exotic apparition with breathless wonder, but now the bird barely registered. She turned around on her knees, her right leg covered with shining black muck up to the knee, and plunged her arm into the water-welling hole which had temporarily swallowed her foot.

"You can't have it!" she shouted furiously. "It's mine and you... can't... HAVE IT!"

She felt around in the cold murk, fingers tearing through membranes of roots or dodging between those too thick to tear. Something that felt alive pressed briefly against her palm, and then was gone. A moment later her hand closed over her sneaker and she pulled it out. She looked at it - a black mudshoe just right for an all-over-mudgirl, the very thing, the total puppy-shits, Pepsi would have said - and began to cry again. She lifted the sneaker up, tilted it, and a stream of grunge ran out of it. That made her laugh. For a minute or so she sat on the hummock with her legs crossed and the rescued sneaker in her lap, laughing and crying at the center of a black orbiting universe of bugs while the dead trees stood sentinel all around her and the crickets hummed.

At last her weeping tapered to sniffles, her laughter to choked and somehow humorless giggles. She tore handfuls of grass out of the hummock and wiped the outside of the sneaker as well as she could. Then she opened her pack, tore up the empty lunchbag, and used the pieces as towels to swab out the inside. These pieces she balled up and threw indifferently behind her. If someone wanted to arrest her for littering this butt-ugly, bad-smelling place, just let them.

She stood up, still holding the rescued sneaker in her hand, and looked ahead. "Oh f**k," Trisha croaked.

It was the first time in her life she had said that particular word out loud. (Pepsi said it sometimes, but Pepsi was Pepsi.) She could now more clearly see the green she had mistaken for a hill. It was hummocks, that was all, just more hummocks. Between them was more standing, stag-nant water and more trees, most dead but some with fluffs of green at the top. She could hear frogs croaking. No hill.

From bog to swamp, bad to worse.

She turned and looked back but could no longer tell where she had entered this purgatorial zone. If she'd thought to mark the place with something bright - a piece of her nasty old shredded poncho, say - she might have gone back. But she hadn't, and that was that.

You can go back anyway - you know the general direction.

Maybe, but she wasn't going to follow the kind of think-ing that had gotten her into this mess in the first place.

Trisha turned toward the hummocks and the bleary glints of sun on scummy standing water. Plenty of trees to hold onto, and the swamp had to end somewhere, didn't it?

You're crazy to even think about it.

Sure. It was a crazy situation.

Trisha stood a moment longer, her thoughts now going to Tom Gordon and that special stillness of his - it was how he stood on the mound, watching one of the Red Sox catch-ers, Hatteberg or Veritek, flash the signs. So still (the way she was standing now), all of that deep stillness seeming to somehow spin out around him from the shoulders. And then to the set and the motion.

He's got icewater in his veins, her Dad said.

She wanted to get out of here, out of this nasty swamp to start with and then out of the damned woods altogether; wanted to get back to where there were people and stores and malls and phones and policemen who would help you if you lost your way. And she thought she could. If she could be brave. If she had just a little of the old icewater in her veins.

Breaking out of her own stillness, Trisha took off her other Reebok and knotted the laces of both sneakers together. She hung them around her neck like cuckoo-clock pendulums, debated over her socks, and decided to leave them on as a kind of compromise (as an oog-shield was the thought which actually went through her mind). She rolled the cuffs of her jeans up to her knees, then took a deep breath and let it out.

"McFarland winds, McFarland pitches," she said. She resettled her Sox cap (backward this time, because back-ward was cool) and started moving again.

Trisha stepped from hummock to hummock with careful deliberation, looking up frequently in snatching little glances, setting a landmark and then moving toward it, just as she had yesterday. Only today I'm not going to panic and run, she thought. Today I've got icewater in my veins.

An hour passed, then two. Instead of firming, the ground grew boggier. Finally there was no solid ground at all, except for the hummocks. Trisha went from one to the next, steadying herself with branches and bushes where she could, holding her arms out for balance like a tightrope walker where there was nothing good to hold onto. Finally she came to a place where there was no hummock within jumping distance. She took a moment to steel herself and then stepped into the stagnant water, startling up a cloud of waterbugs and releasing a stench of peaty decay. The water was not quite up to her knees. The stuff her feet were sink-ing into felt like cold, lumpy jelly. Yellowish bubbles rose in the disturbed water; swirling in them were black fragments of who knew what.

"Gross," she moaned, moving forward toward the nearest hummock. "Oh, gross. Gross-gross-gross. Gag a maggot."

She walked in lurching forward strides, each ending in a hard yank as she pulled her foot free. She tried not to think of what would happen if she couldn't do that, if she got stuck in the bottom ooze and started to sink.