The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(30)

Yes. It is. You're being a dork. Forget it. And don't upchuck, for heaven's sake!

The urk-urk noises - they were like big, meaty hiccups -  began to space themselves out as she walked west (keeping on a westward course was easy now, with the sun low in the sky) and the sound of the flies began to recede. When it was entirely gone, Trisha stopped, took off her socks, then slipped her sneakers back on. She wrung the socks out again, then held them up and looked at them. She could remember putting them on in her Sanford bedroom, just sitting there on the end of the bed and putting them on while she sang "Put your arms around me... cuz I gotta get next to you" under her breath. That was Boyz To Da Maxx; she and Pepsi thought Boyz To Da Maxx were yummy, espe-cially Adam. She remembered the patch of sun on the floor.

She remembered her Titanic poster on the wall. This mem-ory of putting on her socks in her bedroom was very clear but very distant. She guessed it was the way old people like Grampa remembered things which had happened when they were kids. Now the socks were little more than holes held together by strings, and that made her feel like crying again (probably because she herself felt like holes held together by strings), but she controlled that, too. She rolled the socks and put them in her pack.

She was re-fastening the buckles when she heard the whup-whup-whup of helicopter rotor-blades again. This time they sounded much closer. Trisha bounded to her feet and turned around with her wet clothes flapping. And there, off in the east, black against the blue sky, were two shapes.

They reminded her a little bit of the dragonflies back there in Dead Deer Swamp. There was no sense waving and shouting, they were about a billion miles away, but she did it anyway - she couldn't help herself. At last, when her throat was raw, she quit.

"Look, Tom," she said, following them wistfully from left to right... north to south, that would be. "Look, they're trying to find me. If they'd just come a little bit closer..."

But they didn't. The distant helicopters disappeared behind the bulk of the forest. Trisha stood where she was, not moving until the sound of the rotors had faded into the steady hum of the crickets. Then she fetched a deep sigh and knelt to tie her sneakers. She couldn't feel anything watching her anymore, that was one thing -  Oh you liar, the cold voice said. It was amused. You little liar you.

But she wasn't lying, at least not on purpose. She was so tired and so mixed up she wasn't sure what she felt...

except still hungry and thirsty. Now that she was out of the muck and the goo (and away from the torn corpse of the deer), she felt hunger and thirst very clearly. It crossed her mind to go back and pick more of the fiddleheads after all - she could steer clear of the deer's body and the goriest, bloodiest places, surely.

She thought of Pepsi, who was sometimes impatient with Trisha if Trisha scraped her knee while they were rollerblad-ing or fell while they were tree-climbing. If she saw tears welling in Trisha's eyes, Pepsi was apt to say, "Don't go all girly on me, McFarland." God knew she couldn't afford to go all girly about a dead deer, not in a situation like this, but...

.. . but she was afraid that the thing which had killed the deer might still be there, watching and waiting. Hoping she'd come back.

As for drinking the bog-water, get serious. Dirt was one thing. Dead bugs and mosquito eggs were something else.

Could mosquitoes hatch in a person's stomach? Probably not. Did she want to find out for sure? Definitely not.

"I'll probably find some more fiddleheads, anyway," she said. "Right, Tom? And berries, too." Tom didn't reply, but before she could have any second thoughts, she got moving again.

She walked west for another three hours, at first moving slowly, then able to go a little faster as she entered a more mature stretch of woods. Her legs ached and her back throbbed, but neither of these hurting places drew much of her attention. Not even her hunger occupied her mind to any real degree. As the day's light went first to golden and then to red, it was her thirst that came to dominate Trisha's thoughts. Her throat was dry and throbbing; her tongue felt like a dusty worm. She cursed herself for not having drunk from the swamp when she had the chance, and once she stopped, thinking, Screw this, I'm going back.

You better not try, sweetheart, said the cold voice. You'd never find your way. Even if you were lucky enough to backtrack perfectly, it would be dark before you got there... and who knows what might be waiting?

"Shut up," she said wearily, "just shut up, you stupid mean bitch." But of course the stupid mean bitch was right.

Trisha turned back in the direction of the sun - it was now orange - and began walking again. She was becoming actively frightened of her thirst now: if it was this bad at eight o'clock, what would it be like at midnight? Just how long could a person live without water, anyway? She couldn't remember, although she had come across that particular fun fact at some time or other - she was sure that she had. Not as long as a person could go without food, any-way.

What would it be like to die of thirst?

"I'm not going to die of thirst in the darn old woods...

am I, Tom?" she asked, but Tom wasn't saying. The real Tom Gordon would be watching the game by now. Tim Wake-field, Boston's crafty knuckleballer, against Andy Pettitte, the Yankees' young lefthander. Trisha's throat throbbed. It was hard to swallow. She remembered how it had rained (as with her memory of sitting on the end of her bed and putting on her socks, this also seemed like a long time ago) and wished it would rain again. She would get out in it and dance with her head back and her arms out and her mouth open; she would dance like Snoopy on top of his doghouse.