The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(32)
The hillside steepened steadily and the stream grew ever noisier beside her, rolling and tumbling in its rocky bed.
When Trisha came to a clearing where the ground was rela-tively flat, she decided to stop for the night. The air had grown thick and shadowy; if she tried to go on down the slope, she would be risking a fall. Besides, this wasn't too bad; she could see the sky, at least.
"Bugs are fierce, though," she said, waving at the mos-120 quitoes around her face and slapping a few more off her neck. She went to the stream to get mud, but - ha-ha, joke's on you, girl - there was no mud to get. Plenty of rocks but no mud. Trisha sat back on her heels for a moment while the minges executed complicated flying patterns around her eyes, thought things over, then nodded. She scraped the needles away from a small circle of ground with the sides of her hands, dug a little bowl in the soft earth, then used her water-bottle to fill it up from the stream. She made mud with her fingers, taking a great deal of pleasure in the process (it was Gramma Andersen she thought of, making bread in Gramma Andersen's kitchen on Saturday mornings, stand-ing on a stool to knead the dough because the counter was so high). When she had lots of good goo she smeared it all over her face. By the time she finished this, it was almost dark.
Trisha stood up, still rubbing mud on her arms, and looked around. There was no convenient fallen tree to sleep under tonight, but about twenty yards from this side of the stream she spied a tangle of dead pine-boughs. She took these to one of the tall firs near the stream and leaned them against the trunk like upside-down fans, creating a little space she could crawl into... sort of a half-tent. If no wind came up to knock the branches over, she thought she would be fairly snug.
As she brought the last two over, her stomach cramped and her bowels loosened. Trisha stopped, holding a branch in each hand, waiting to see what would happen next. The cramp let go and the odd weak feeling down low inside of her passed, but she still didn't feel quite right. Fluttery. But-terfluttery was Gramma Andersen's word, only she used it to mean nervous and Trisha didn't feel nervous, exactly. She didn't know how she felt.
Chapter 9
It was the water, the cold voice said. Something in the water.
You're poisoned, sugar. Probably be dead by morning.
"If I am I am," Trisha said, and added the last two branches to her makeshift shelter. "I was so thirsty. I had to drink."
To this there was no reply. Perhaps even the cold voice, traitor that it was, understood that much - she'd had to drink, had to.
She slipped off her pack, opened it, and reverently took out her Walkman. She settled the earbuds into place and pushed the power button. WCAS was still strong enough to listen to, but the signal wasn't what it had been last night.
It made Trisha feel funny to think she had almost walked out of a radio station's broadcast area the way that you drove out of them when you were on a long car-trip. It made her feel funny, all right, very funny indeed. Funny in her stomach.
"All right," Joe Castiglione said. His voice was thin, seeming to come from a great distance. "Mo stands in and we're ready for the bottom of the fourth."
Suddenly the butterflutters were in her throat as well as her stomach, and those meaty hiccups - urk-urk, urk-urk - started again. Trisha rolled away from her shelter, lurched to her knees, and threw up into the shadows between two trees, holding onto one tree with her left hand and clutch-ing her stomach with her right.
She stayed where she was, gasping for breath and spit-ting out the taste of slightly used fiddleheads - sour, acidic - while Mo fanned on three pitches. Troy O'Leary was up next.
"Well, the Red Sox have got their work cut out for them,"
Troop remarked. "They're down seven to one in the bottom of the fourth and Andy Pettitte is twirling a gem."
"Oh sugartit," Trisha said, and then vomited again. She couldn't see what was coming out, it was too dark for that and she was glad, but it felt thin, more like soup than puke.
Something about the almost-rhyme of those two words, soup and puke, made her stomach immediately knot up again. She backed away from the trees between which she had thrown up, still on her knees, and then her bowels cramped again, this time more fiercely.
"Oh SUGARTIT!" Trisha wailed, tearing at the snap on the top of her jeans. She was sure she wasn't going to make it, absolutely positive, but in the end she was able to hold on just long enough to get her jeans and underwear yanked down and pulled out of the way. Everything down there came out in a hot, stinging rush. Trisha cried out and some bird in the dying light cried back, as if in mockery. When it was finally over and she tried to get on her feet, a wave of lightheadedness struck her. She lost her balance and plopped back down in her own hot mess.
"Lost and sitting in my own crap," Trisha said. She began to cry again, then also to laugh as it struck her funny. Lost and sitting in my own crap indeed, she thought.
She struggled up, crying and laughing, her jeans and underwear puddled around her ankles (the jeans were torn at both knees and stiff with mud, but at least she'd avoided dipping them in shit... so far, anyway). She pulled her pants off and walked to the stream, naked from the waist down and holding her Walkman in one hand. Troy O'Leary had singled around the time she lost her balance and plopped into her own poop; now as she stepped barefoot into the freezing cold stream, Jim Leyritz hit into a double play. Side retired. Utterly SECK-shoo-al.