The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(37)

Trisha leaned back against the tree and looked into her knapsack with deep happiness and gratitude. If she hadn't been so full (too stuffed to jump, she thought), she would have stuck her head in like a mare sticking her head into an oat-sack, just to fill her nose with the delicious combined smell of the checkerberries and beechnuts.

"Saved my life, you guys," she said. "Saved my goshdarn life."

On the far side of the rushing stream there was a little clearing carpeted with pine needles. Sunlight fell into it in bright yellow bars filled with slow-dancing pollen and woods dust. Butterflies also played in this light, dipping and swoop-ing.

Trisha crossed her hands on her belly, where the roaring was now still, and watched the butterflies. In that moment she did not miss her mother, father, brother, or best friend. In that moment she did not even want to go home, although she ached all over and her butt stung and itched and chafed when she walked. In that moment she was at peace, and more than at peace. She was experiencing her life's greatest contentment. If I get out of this I'll never be able to tell them, she thought. She watched the butterflies on the other side of the stream, her eyelids drooping. There were two white ones; the third was velvety-dark, brown or maybe black.

Tell them what, sugar? It was the tough tootsie, but for once she didn't sound cold, only curious.

What there really is. How simple. Just to eat... why, just to have something to eat and then to be full afterward...

"The Subaudible," Trisha said. She watched the butterflies.

Two white and one dark, all three dipping and darting in the afternoon sun. She thought of Little Black Sambo up in the tree, the tigers running around down below and wearing his fine new clothes, running and running until they melted and turned into butter. Into what her Dad called ghee.

Her right hand came unlaced from her left, rolled over, and thumped palm-up to the ground. It seemed like too much work to put it back and so Trisha let it stay where it was.

The Subaudible what, sugar? What about it?

"Well," Trisha said in a slow, sleepy, considering voice.

"It's not like that's nothing... is it?"

The tough tootsie didn't reply. Trisha was glad. She felt so sleepy, so full, so wonderful. She didn't sleep, though; even later, when she knew she must have slept, it didn't seem as if she had. She remembered thinking about her Dad's back yard behind the newer, smaller house, how the grass needed cutting and the lawn-dwarves looked sly - as if they knew something you didn't - and about how Dad had started to look sad and old to her, with that smell of beer always com-ing out of his pores. Life could be very sad, it seemed to her, and mostly it was what it could be. People made believe that it wasn't, and they lied to their kids (no movie or television program she had ever seen had prepared her for losing her balance and plopping back into her own crap, for instance) so as not to scare them or bum them out, but yeah, it could be sad. The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. She knew that now. She was only nine, but she knew it, and she thought she could accept it. She was almost ten, after all, and big for her age.

I don't know why we have to pay for what you guys did wrong!

That was the last thing she had heard Pete say, and now Trisha thought she knew the answer. It was a tough answer but probably a true one: just because. And if you didn't like it, take a ticket and get in line.

Trisha guessed that in a lot of ways she was older than Pete now.

She looked downstream and saw that another stream came pouring into hers about forty yards from where she was sitting; it came over the bank in a spraying little water-fall.

Good deal. This was the way it was supposed to work.

This second stream she had found would get bigger and big-ger, this one would lead her to people. It -  She shifted her eyes back to the little clearing on the other side of the stream and three people were standing there, looking at her. At least she assumed they were look-ing at her; Trisha couldn't see their faces. Their feet, either.

They wore long robes like the priests in those movies about days of old. ("In days of old when knights were bold and ladies showed their fan-nies," Pepsi Robichaud sometimes sang when she jumped rope.) The hems of these robes pud-dled on the clearing's carpet of needles. Their hoods were up, hiding the faces within. Trisha looked across the stream at them, a little startled but not really afraid, not then. Two of the robes were white. The one worn by the figure in the middle was black.

"Who are you?" Trisha asked. She tried to sit up a little straighter and found she couldn't. She was too full of food.

For the first time in her life she felt as if she had been drugged with food. "Will you help me? I'm lost. I've been lost for..." She couldn't remember. Was it two days or three?

".. . for a long time. Will you please help me?"

They didn't answer, only stood there looking at her (she assumed they were looking at her, anyway), and that was when Trisha began to feel afraid. They had their arms crossed on their chests and you couldn't even see their hands, because the long sleeves of their robes flowed over them.

"Who are you? Tell me who you are!"

The one on the left stepped forward, and when he reached up to his hood his white sleeves fell away from long white fingers. He pushed the hood back and revealed an intelli-142 gent (if rather horsey) face with a receding chin. He looked like Mr. Bork, the science teacher at Sanford Elementary who had taught them about the plants and animals of northern New England... including, of course, the world-famous beechnut. Most of the boys and some of the girls (Pepsi Robichaud, for instance) called him Bork the Dork.