The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

by Stephen King

Page 8

  The Red Sox win five to four over the Yankees and Tom Gordon gets his eighteenth save!" His voice dropped into a more normal register. "Gordon's teammates head for the mound with Mo Vaughn pumping his fist in the air and leading the charge, but before Vaughn gets there, it's Gordon with the quick gesture, the one the fans have gotten to know very well in just the short time he's been the Sox closer. "

  Trisha burst into tears. She pushed the power button on the Walkman and then just sat there on the damp ground with her back against the tree-trunk and her legs spread and the blue poncho hanging between them in its hula-skirt tatters. She cried harder than she had since first realizing for sure that she was lost, but this time she cried in relief. She was lost but would be found. She was sure of it. Tom Gor-don had gotten the save and so would she.

  Still crying, she took off the poncho, spread it on the ground as far under the fallen tree as she thought she could wriggle, and then eased to her left until she was on the plas-tic.

  She did this with very little awareness. Most of her was still at Fenway Park, seeing the umpire ringing Strawberry up, seeing Mo Vaughn starting for the mound to congratu-late Tom Gordon; she could see Nomar Garciaparra trot-ting in from short, John Valentin from third, and Mark Lemke from second to do the same. But before they got to him, Gordon did what he always did when he secured the save: pointed at the sky. Just one quick point of the finger.

  Trisha tucked her Walkman back into her pack, but before she put her head down on her outstretched arm she pointed briefly up, the way Gordon did. And why not?

  Something had brought her through the day, after all, horri-ble as it had been. And when you pointed, the something felt like God. You couldn't point to dumb luck or the Sub-audible, after all.

  Doing this made her feel better and worse - better because it felt more like praying than actual words would have done, worse because it made her feel really lonely for the first time that day; pointing like Tom Gordon made her feel lost in some heretofore unsuspected fashion. The voices which had poured out of the Walkman's earbuds and filled her head seemed dreamlike now, the voices of ghosts. She shivered at that, not wanting to think about ghosts out here, not in the woods, not cowering under a fallen tree in the dark. She missed her mother. Even more, she wanted her father. Her father would be able to get her out of here, would take her by the hand and lead her out of here. And if she got tired of walking he would carry her. He had big muscles. When she and Pete stayed weekends with him, he would still pick her up at the end of Saturday night and carry her to her little bedroom in his arms. He did that even though she was nine (and big for her age). It was her favorite part of their weekends in Malden.

  Trisha discovered, with a miserable species of wonder, that she even missed her boogery, endlessly complaining brother.

  Weeping and hitching in big watery gusts of air, Trisha fell asleep. The bugs circled around her in the dark, moving closer and closer. Finally they began to light on the exposed patches of her skin, feasting on her blood and sweat.

  A puff of air moved through the woods, ruffling the leaves, shaking the last of the rainwater from them. After a second or two the air fell still. Then it was not still; in the dripping quiet came the sound of twigs breaking. That stopped and there was a pause followed by a flurry of mov-ing branches and a rough rasping sound. A crow called once, in alarm. There was a pause and then the sounds began again, moving closer to where Trisha slept with her head on her arm.

  Bottom of the Fourth

  THEY WERE behind Dad's little house in Malden, just the two of them, sitting in lawn chairs that were a little too rusty, looking out over grass that was a little too long. The lawn-dwarves seemed to peer at her, smiling secret, unpleasant smiles from deep in their clumps of weeds. She was crying because Dad was being mean to her. He was never mean to her, he always hugged her and kissed the top of her head and called her sugar, but now he was, he was being mean, all because she didn't want to open the cellar bulkhead under the kitchen window and go down four steps and get him a can of beer from the case he kept down there where it was cool. She was so upset that her face must have broken out, because it was all itchy. Her arms, too.

  "Baby bunting, Daddy's gone a-hunting," he said, lean-ing toward her, and she could smell his breath. He didn't need another beer, he was drunk already, the air coming out of him smelled like yeast and dead mice. "Why do you want to be such a little chickenguts? You don't have a single drop of icewater in your veins. "

  Still crying, but determined to show him she did so have 79. icewater in her veins - a little, anyway - she got out of the rusty lawn chair and went over to the even rustier bulkhead door. Oh, she just itched all over, and she didn't want to open that door because there was something awful on the other side - even the lawn-dwarves knew, you only had to look at their sly smiles to get that. She reached for the han-dle, though; she grasped it as behind her Dad jeered in that horrible stranger's voice to go on, go on, baby bunting, go on, sugar, go on, toots, go on and do it.

  She pulled the door up and the stairs leading down to the cellar were gone. The stairwell itself was gone. Where it had been was a monstrous bulging wasps' nest. Hundreds of wasps were flying out of it through a black hole like the eye of a man who has died surprised, and no, it wasn't hundreds but thousands, plump ungainly poison factories flying straight at her. There was no time to get away, they would all sting her at once and she would die with them crawling on her skin, crawling into her eyes, crawling into her mouth, pump-ing her tongue full of poison on their way down her throat - Trisha thought she was screaming, but when she thumped her head against the underside of the tree-trunk, showering bits of bark and moss down into her sweaty hair and waking herself up, she heard only a series of tiny, kit-tenish mewling sounds. They were all her locked throat would allow.

  For a moment she was utterly disoriented, wondering why her bed felt so hard, wondering what she had thumped her head on. . . was it possible she had actually gotten under her bed? And her skin was crawling, literally crawling from the dream she had just escaped, oh God what a terrible nightmare.

  She rapped her head again and stuff began to come back.

  She wasn't on her bed or even under it. She was in the woods, lost in the woods. She had been sleeping under a tree and her skin was still crawling. Not from fear but because - "Get off, oh you bastards get off!" she cried in a high, frightened voice, and waved her hands rapidly back and forth in front of her eyes. Most of the minges and mosquitoes lifted from her skin and re-formed their cloud. The crawling sensation stopped but the terrible itching remained. There were no wasps, but she had been bitten just the same. Bitten in her sleep by pretty much anything that happened by and stopped for a chomp. She itched everywhere. And she needed to pee.

  Trisha crawled out from under the tree-trunk, gasping and wincing. She was stiff everywhere from her tumble down the rocky slope, especially in her neck and left shoul-der, and both her left arm and left leg - the limbs she had been lying on - were asleep. Numb as pegs, her mother would have said. Grownups (at least the ones in her family) had a saying for everything: numb as a peg, happy as a lark, lively as a cricket, deaf as a post, dark as the inside of a cow, dead as a - No, she didn't want to think of that one, not now.

  Trisha tried to get on her feet, couldn't, and made her way into the little crescent of clearing at a hobbling crawl.

  As she moved, some of the feeling started to come back into her arm and leg - those unpleasant tingling bursts of sensa-tion.

  Needles and pins.

  "Damn and blast," she croaked - mostly just to hear the sound of her own voice. "It's dark as the inside of a cow out here. "

  Except, as she stopped by the brook, Trisha realized that it most surely wasn't. The little clearing was filled with moonlight, cold and lucid, strong enough to cast a firm shadow beside her and put ash-bright sparkles on the water of her little stream. The object in the sky overhead was a slightly missha
pen silver stone almost too bright to look at. . . but she looked anyway, her swollen, itchy face and upcast eyes solemn. Tonight's moon was so bright that it had embarrassed all but the brightest stars into invisibility, and something about it, or about looking at it from where she was, made her feel how alone she was. Her earlier belief that she would be saved just because Tom Gordon had got-ten three outs in the top of the ninth was gone - might as well knock on wood, toss salt back over your shoulder, or make the sign of the cross before you stepped into the bat-ter's box, as Nomar Garciaparra always did. There were no cameras here, no instant replays, no cheering fans. The coldly beautiful face of the moon suggested to her that the Subaudible was more plausible after all, a God who didn't know He - or It - was a God, one with no interest in lost little girls, one with no real interest in anything, a knocked-outloaded God Whose mind was like a circling cloud of bugs and Whose eye was the rapt and vacant moon.

  Trisha bent over the stream to splash her throbbing face, saw her reflection, and moaned. The wasp-sting above her left cheekbone had swelled some more (perhaps she had scratched it or bumped it in her sleep), bursting through the mud she had smeared on it like a newly awakened volcano bursting through the old caked lava of its last eruption. It had mashed her eye out of shape, making it all crooked and freakish, the sort of eye that made you glance away if you saw it floating toward you - usually in the face of a men-tally retarded person - on the street. The rest of her face was as bad or even worse: lumpy where she had been stung, merely swollen where mosquitoes in their hundreds had had at her while she was sleeping. The water by the bank where she crouched was relatively still, and in it she saw there was at least one mosquito still on her. It clung to the corner of her right eye, too logy to even pull its proboscis from her flesh. Another of those grownup sayings occurred to her: too stuffed to jump.

  She struck at it and it burst, filling her eye with her own blood, making it sting. Trisha managed not to scream, but a wavery sound of revulsion - mmmmmmhh - escaped her tightly pressed lips. She looked unbelievingly at the blood on her fingers. That one mosquito could hold so much! No one would believe it!

  She dipped her cupped hands into the water and washed her face. She didn't drink any, vaguely remembering some-one saying that woods-water could make you sick, but the feel of it on her hot and lumpy skin was wonderful - like cold satin. She dipped up more, wetting her neck and soak-ing her arms to the elbow. Then she scooped up mud and began to apply it - not just on the bites this time but all over, from the round collar of her 36 GORDON shirt right up to the roots of her hair. As she did it she thought of an I Love Lucy episode she'd seen on Nick at Nite, Lucy and Ethel at the beauty parlor, both of them wearing these funky 1958 mudpacks, and Desi had come in and looked from one woman to the other and he had said, "Hey Loocy, jwich one are jew?" and the audience had howled. She probably looked like that, but Trisha didn't care. There was no audi-ence out here, no laugh-track, either, and she couldn't stand to be bitten anymore. It would drive her crazy if she was.

  CHAPTER 6

  She applied mud for five minutes, finishing with a couple of careful dabs to the eyelids, then bent over to look at her reflection. What she saw in the relatively still water by the bank was a minstrel-show mudgirl by moonlight. Her face was a pasty gray, like a face on a vase pulled out of some archeological dig. Above it her hair stood up in a filthy spout. Her eyes were white and wet and frightened. She didn't look funny, like Lucy and Ethel getting their beauty treatments. She looked dead. Dead and badly inbarned, or whatever they called it.

  Speaking to the face in the water, Trisha intoned: "Then Little Black Sambo said, 'Please, tigers, do not take my fine new clothes. ' "

  But that wasn't funny, either. She smeared mud up her lumpy, itchy arms, then lowered her hands toward the water, meaning to wash them off. But that was stupid. The gosh-damn old bugs would just bite her there.

  The pins and needles had mostly worked out of her arm and leg; Trisha was able to squat and pee without falling over. She was also able to stand up and walk, although she grimaced with pain each time she moved her head more than a little to the right or left. She supposed she had a kind of whiplash injury, like the one Mrs. Chetwynd from up the block had gotten when some old man had rammed her car from behind as she waited for a traffic light to change. The old man hadn't been hurt a bit, but poor Mrs. Chetwynd had been in a neck brace for six weeks. Maybe they would put her in a neck brace when she got out of this. Maybe they would take her to a hospital in a helicopter with a red cross on the belly like in M*A*S*H, and - Forget it, Trisha. It was the scary cold voice. No neck brace for you. No helicopter ride, either.

  "Shut up," she muttered, but the voice wouldn't.

  You won't even get inbarned because they're never going to find you. You'll die out here, just wander around in these woods until you die, and the animals will come and eat your rotting body and some day some hunter will come along and find your bones.

  There was something so terribly plausible about this last - she had heard similar stories on the TV news not just once but several times, it seemed - that she began to cry again. She could actually see the hunter, a man in a bright red woolen jacket and an orange cap, a man who needed a shave. Looking for a place to lie up and wait for a deer or maybe just wanting to take a leak. He sees something white and thinks at first, Just a stone, but as he gets closer he sees that the stone has eyesockets.

  "Stop it," she whispered, walking back to the fallen tree and the wrinkled spread remains of the poncho under it (she hated the poncho now; she didn't know why, but it seemed to symbolize everything that had gone wrong). "Stop it, please. "

  The cold voice would not. The cold voice had one more thing to say. One more thing, at least.

  Or maybe you won't just die. Maybe the thing out there will kill you and eat you.

  Trisha stopped by the fallen tree - one hand reached out and grasped the dead jut of a small branch - and looked around nervously. From the moment of waking all she'd really been able to think about was how badly she itched.

  The mud had now soothed the worst of the itching and the residual throb of the wasp-stings, and she again realized where she was: in the woods alone and at night.

  "At least there's a moon," she said, standing by the tree and looking nervously around her little crescent of clearing.

  It looked even smaller now, as if the trees and underbrush had crept in closer while she was sleeping. Crept in slyly.

  The moonlight wasn't as good a thing as she'd thought, either. It was bright in the clearing, true, but it was a decep-tive brightness that made everything look simultaneously too real and not real at all. Shadows were too black, and when a breeze stirred the trees, the shadows changed in a disquieting way.