The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(43)

The chilly breeze of the night before had kept the worst of the bugs away, but as the day heated up the usual cloud of tiny airshow performers coalesced around Trisha's head. She barely noticed them, giving an occasional impatient wave only when they got too close to her eyes.

When she had finished cutting the hood off the poncho she held it upside down, dangling it and studying it with a critical, judicious eye. Interesting. Undoubtedly too stupid to work, but sort of interesting, just the same.

"Who do you call, baby who do you call when the damn thing's busted, oh yeah," Trisha chanted in a singsongy whis-per, and walked over to the stream. She picked out two rocks protruding side by side from the water and planted her feet on them. She gazed down between her spread legs into the rushing current. The stream's pebble-packed bed was wavery but otherwise clear. No fish right now, but so what?

If you wanted to be a fishergirl, you had to be patient. "Put your arms around me... cause I gotta munch on you,"

Trisha sang, then laughed. Pretty goofy! Holding the hood upside down by the ragged shoulder-material, she bent and dropped her improvised snare into the stream.

The current pulled the hood back between her legs, but it stayed open, so that was all right. The problem was her position - back bent, butt in the air, head at the level of her waist. She wouldn't be able to hold this pose long, and if she tried to squat on the rocks, her sore, shaky legs would likely betray her and send her tumbling into the stream. A full-body dunk wouldn't help her cough.

When her temples started to thud, Trisha compromised by bending her knees and lifting her upper body a little. This shifted her eyeline upstream, and she saw three quicksilver flashes - they were fish, all right, there was no doubt -  coming toward her. If she'd had time to react, Trisha almost certainly would have jerked the hood and caught none of them. As it was, she had time for only a single thought (like underwater shooting stars) and then the silver glints were zipping between the rocks she was standing on and right beneath her. One of them missed the hood, but the other two swam right into it.

"Booya!" Trisha screamed.

With that cry - it was as much dismay and shock as joy - Trisha bent forward again and grasped the lower edge of the hood. In doing so she almost overbalanced and went into the stream anyway, but she managed to stay up. She lifted the hood, full of water and slopping over the sides, in both hands. It shifted out of shape as she stepped back to the bank and more water slopped out, soaking the left leg of her jeans from hip to knee. One of the little trout went with it, twisting and flipping its tail in the air, then hitting the water and swimming away.

"SUGARTIT!" Trisha screamed, but now she was also laughing. As she worked her way up the bank, still holding the hood in front of her, she began coughing, as well.

When she reached a level place, she looked into the hood, sure she would see nothing - she had lost the other fish, as well, must have, girls didn't catch trout, even baby ones, in the hoods of their ponchos, she just hadn't seen its getaway.

But the trout was still there, swimming around like a mollie in a goldfish bowl.

"God, what do I do now?" Trisha asked. This was a gen-uine prayer, both agonized and bemused.

It was her body that answered, not her spirit. She had seen plenty of cartoons where Wile E. Coyote looked at Roadrunner and saw him turn into Thanksgiving dinner.

She had laughed, Pete laughed, even Mom laughed if she was watching. Trisha did not laugh now. Berries and beech-nuts the size of sunflower seeds were all very well, but they weren't enough. Even when you ate them together and told yourself they were granola, they weren't enough. Her body's reaction to the four-inch trout swimming in the blue hood was radically different, not hunger exactly but a kind of clench, a cramp that centered in her belly but actually came from everywhere, an inarticulate cry (GIMME THAT) which had little to do with her brain. It was a trout, just a little one far below the legal limit, but whatever her eyes saw, her body saw dinner. Real dinner.

Trisha had only one clear thought as she took the hood over to the remains of the poncho, which was still spread on the outcrop (a paperdoll without a head now): I'll do it but I'll never ever talk about it. If they find me rescue me I'll tell them everything except how I fell into my own shit... and this.

She acted with no planning or consideration; her body brushed her mind aside and simply took over. Trisha spilled the contents of the hood onto the needle-covered ground and watched the little fishie flop about, strangling in the air.

When it was still she picked it up, put it on the poncho, and slit it up the belly with the stone she'd used to cut off the poncho's hood. A thimbleful of watery, mucusy fluid ran out, more like thin snot than blood. Inside the fish she could see tiny red guts. These Trisha levered out with a grimy thumbnail. Beyond them was a bone. She tried to pull it free and got about half of it. During all this her mind tried to take over only once. You can't eat the head, it told her, its reasonable tone not really masking the horror and disgust beneath. I mean... the eyes, Trisha. The eyes! Then her body brushed it away again, and more roughly this time. When I want your opinion I'll rattle the bars in your cage, Pepsi some-times said.

Trisha picked up the small flayed fish by the tail, carried it back to the stream, and dipped it to get rid of the pine-needles and grime. Then she cocked her head back, opened her mouth, and bit off the trout's top half. Small bones crunched under her teeth; her mind tried to show her the trout's eyes popping out of its head and onto her tongue in little dark dabs of jelly. She got one blurry look at this and then her body banished her mind yet again, this time slap-ping instead of merely pushing. Mind could come back when mind was needed; imagination could come back when imagination was needed. Right now body was in charge, and body said dinner, it's dinner, it may be morning but dinner is served and this morning we got fresh fish.