The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon(56)
In any case, he was never tried for anything, or even fined, and he did not kill the creature he saw standing in front of the little girl, who faced it so still and so brave-like.
"If she'da moved when it first come up to her, it woulda tore her apart," Herrick said. "It's a wonder it didn't tear her apart anyways. She musta stared it down, just like Tarzan in them old jungle movies. I come over the rise and see the two of em, I musta stood there watchin em for twenty seconds at least. Might even have been a minute, you lose all track of time in a situation like that, but I couldn't shoot. They 'us too close together. I was afraid of hittin the girl. Then she moved. She had somethin in her hand and she went to throw it at im almost like she was pitchin a baseball. Her movin like that startled it. It stepped back and kinda lost its bal-ance.
I knew right there was the only chance that little girl had, so I lifted up my gun and I shot."
No trial, no fine. What Travis Herrick got was his own float in Grafton Notch's 1998 Fourth of July parade. Yeah, baby.
Trisha heard the gunshot, knew it at once for what it was, and saw one of the thing's cocked ears suddenly fly apart at the very tip like a piece of shredded paper. She could see momentary squiglets of blue sky through the torn flaps; she also saw a scatter of red droplets, no bigger than checker-berries, fly into the air in an arc. At the same instant she saw that the bear was just a bear again, its eyes big and glassy and almost comically surprised. Or perhaps it had been a bear all along.
Except she knew better than that.
She continued with her motion, flinging the baseball. It struck the bear dead-bang between the eyes and - whoa, hey, talk about hallucinations - she saw a couple of Ener-gizer double A batteries fall out of it onto the road.
"Strike three called!" she screamed, and at the sound of her hoarse, triumphant, breaking voice, the wounded bear turned and fled, lumbering on all fours, quickly picking up speed, shedding blood from its torn ear as it got into an all-out fanny-wagging run. There was another whipcrack gun-shot, and Trisha felt the slug buffet the air as it passed less than a foot to her right. It dug up a puff of road dust well behind the bear, which veered to its left and plunged back into the woods. For a moment she could see the gleam of its shiny black pelt, then small trees shaking as if in a parody of fear as it passed among them, and then the bear was gone.
She turned, staggering, and saw a small man in patched green pants, green gumrubber boots, and an old flapping T-shirt running toward her. His head was bald on top; long hair flapped down on either side and hung on his shoulders; little rimless eyeglasses flashed in the sun. He was carrying a rifle high over his head, like a raiding Indian in an old movie. She wasn't a bit surprised to see that his shirt had the Red Sox emblem on it. Every man in New England had at least one Sox shirt, it seemed.
"Hey girlie!" he screamed. "Hey girlie, Jesus, are you all right?
Christ almighty, that was a f**king BEAR, are you all right?"
Trisha staggered toward him. "Strike three called," she said, but the words hardly reached beyond her own mouth.
She had used up most of what she had with that last scream.
All that remained was a kind of bleeding whisper. "Strike three called, I threw the curve and just froze him."
"What?" He stopped in front of her. "I can't make you out, honey, come again."
"Did you see?" she asked, meaning the pitch she had thrown - that unbelievable curve that hadn't just broken but snapped like a whip. "Did you see it?"
"I... I saw..." But in truth he didn't know what he had seen. There had been a few seconds in that frozen time when the girl and the bear had been regarding each other that he hadn't been sure, not entirely sure it was a bear, but that he never told anyone. Folks knew he drank; they would think he was crazy. And all he saw now was a delirious little girl who looked like nothing but a stick-figure held together by dirt and ragged clothes. He couldn't remember her name but he knew who she was; it had been on the radio and the TV, as well. He had no idea how she could possibly have gotten so far north and west, but he knew perfectly well who she was.
Trisha stumbled over her own feet and would have fallen to the road if Herrick hadn't caught her. When he did, his rifle - a . 350 Krag that was the pride of his life - discharged again, close to her ear, deafening her. Trisha hardly noticed.
It all seemed normal, somehow.
"Did you see?" she asked again, not able to hear her own voice, not even completely sure if she was actually speaking.
The little man looked bewildered and scared and not espe-cially bright, but she thought he also looked kind. "I got him with the curve, froze him, did you see?"
His lips were moving, but she couldn't tell what he was saying. He put the rifle down on the road, though, and that was a relief. He picked her up and turned her so fast it made her dizzy - she probably would have thrown up if there had been anything left in her stomach. She began to cough. She couldn't hear that, either, not with that monstrous ringing in her ears, but she could feel it, way down in her chest and ribcage, pulling.
She wanted to tell him she was glad to be carried, glad to be rescued, but she also wanted to tell him that the bear-thing had been backing away even before he fired his gun.
She had seen the bewilderment in its face, had seen its fear of her when she went from the set to the motion. She wanted to tell this man who was now running with her one thing, one very important thing, but he was jouncing her and she was coughing and her head was ringing and she couldn't tell if she was saying it or not.