Trisha put the back of her right hand over her mouth and hurried rapidly on, making weird little urk-urk sounds as she went and trying with all her might not to upchuck. The thing that had killed the deer wanted her to upchuck, maybe. Was that possible? The rational part of her mind (and there was still quite a lot of it) said no, but it seemed to her that something had deliberately polluted the two biggest, lushest growths of fiddleheads in the bog with a deer's man-113 gled body. And if it had done that, was it impossible to believe it might try to make her throw up the little nourish-ment she had managed to scrounge?
Yes. It is. You're being a dork. Forget it. And don't upchuck, for heaven's sake!
The urk-urk noises - they were like big, meaty hiccups - began to space themselves out as she walked west (keeping on a westward course was easy now, with the sun low in the sky) and the sound of the flies began to recede. When it was entirely gone, Trisha stopped, took off her socks, then slipped her sneakers back on. She wrung the socks out again, then held them up and looked at them. She could remember putting them on in her Sanford bedroom, just sitting there on the end of the bed and putting them on while she sang "Put your arms around me... cuz I gotta get next to you" under her breath. That was Boyz To Da Maxx; she and Pepsi thought Boyz To Da Maxx were yummy, espe-cially Adam. She remembered the patch of sun on the floor.
She remembered her Titanic poster on the wall. This mem-ory of putting on her socks in her bedroom was very clear but very distant. She guessed it was the way old people like Grampa remembered things which had happened when they were kids. Now the socks were little more than holes held together by strings, and that made her feel like crying again (probably because she herself felt like holes held together by strings), but she controlled that, too. She rolled the socks and put them in her pack.
She was re-fastening the buckles when she heard the whup-whup-whup of helicopter rotor-blades again. This time they sounded much closer. Trisha bounded to her feet and turned around with her wet clothes flapping. And there, off in the east, black against the blue sky, were two shapes.
They reminded her a little bit of the dragonflies back there in Dead Deer Swamp. There was no sense waving and shouting, they were about a billion miles away, but she did it anyway - she couldn't help herself. At last, when her throat was raw, she quit.
"Look, Tom," she said, following them wistfully from left to right... north to south, that would be. "Look, they're trying to find me. If they'd just come a little bit closer..."
But they didn't. The distant helicopters disappeared behind the bulk of the forest. Trisha stood where she was, not moving until the sound of the rotors had faded into the steady hum of the crickets. Then she fetched a deep sigh and knelt to tie her sneakers. She couldn't feel anything watching her anymore, that was one thing - Oh you liar, the cold voice said. It was amused. You little liar you.
But she wasn't lying, at least not on purpose. She was so tired and so mixed up she wasn't sure what she felt...
except still hungry and thirsty. Now that she was out of the muck and the goo (and away from the torn corpse of the deer), she felt hunger and thirst very clearly. It crossed her mind to go back and pick more of the fiddleheads after all - she could steer clear of the deer's body and the goriest, bloodiest places, surely.
She thought of Pepsi, who was sometimes impatient with Trisha if Trisha scraped her knee while they were rollerblad-ing or fell while they were tree-climbing. If she saw tears welling in Trisha's eyes, Pepsi was apt to say, "Don't go all girly on me, McFarland." God knew she couldn't afford to go all girly about a dead deer, not in a situation like this, but...
.. . but she was afraid that the thing which had killed the deer might still be there, watching and waiting. Hoping she'd come back.
As for drinking the bog-water, get serious. Dirt was one thing. Dead bugs and mosquito eggs were something else.
Could mosquitoes hatch in a person's stomach? Probably not. Did she want to find out for sure? Definitely not.
"I'll probably find some more fiddleheads, anyway," she said. "Right, Tom? And berries, too." Tom didn't reply, but before she could have any second thoughts, she got moving again.
She walked west for another three hours, at first moving slowly, then able to go a little faster as she entered a more mature stretch of woods. Her legs ached and her back throbbed, but neither of these hurting places drew much of her attention. Not even her hunger occupied her mind to any real degree. As the day's light went first to golden and then to red, it was her thirst that came to dominate Trisha's thoughts. Her throat was dry and throbbing; her tongue felt like a dusty worm. She cursed herself for not having drunk from the swamp when she had the chance, and once she stopped, thinking, Screw this, I'm going back.
You better not try, sweetheart, said the cold voice. You'd never find your way. Even if you were lucky enough to backtrack perfectly, it would be dark before you got there... and who knows what might be waiting?
"Shut up," she said wearily, "just shut up, you stupid mean bitch." But of course the stupid mean bitch was right.
Trisha turned back in the direction of the sun - it was now orange - and began walking again. She was becoming actively frightened of her thirst now: if it was this bad at eight o'clock, what would it be like at midnight? Just how long could a person live without water, anyway? She couldn't remember, although she had come across that particular fun fact at some time or other - she was sure that she had. Not as long as a person could go without food, any-way.
What would it be like to die of thirst?
"I'm not going to die of thirst in the darn old woods...
am I, Tom?" she asked, but Tom wasn't saying. The real Tom Gordon would be watching the game by now. Tim Wake-field, Boston's crafty knuckleballer, against Andy Pettitte, the Yankees' young lefthander. Trisha's throat throbbed. It was hard to swallow. She remembered how it had rained (as with her memory of sitting on the end of her bed and putting on her socks, this also seemed like a long time ago) and wished it would rain again. She would get out in it and dance with her head back and her arms out and her mouth open; she would dance like Snoopy on top of his doghouse.
Trisha plodded through pines and spruces that grew taller and better spaced as this part of the woods grew older.
The light of the setting sun came slanting through the trees in dusty bars of deepening color. She would have thought the trees and the orange-red light beautiful if not for her thirst... and a part of her mind noted their beauty even in her physical distress. The light was too bright, though. Her temples were pounding with a headache and her throat felt like a pinhole.
In this state, she first dismissed the sound of running water as an auditory hallucination. It couldn't be real water; it was too darned convenient. Nevertheless she turned toward it, now walking southwest instead of due west, duck-ing under low branches and stepping over fallen logs like someone in a hypnotic trance. When the sound grew even louder - too loud to mistake for anything other than what it was - Trisha began to run. She slipped twice on the carpet of needles underfoot, and once she ran through an ugly little pocket of nettles that tore fresh cuts on her forearms and the backs of her hands, but she hardly noticed. Ten minutes after first hearing that faint rushing noise, she came to a short, steep drop-off where the bedrock emerged from the thin soil and needle carpeting of the forest floor in a series of gray stone knuckles. Below these, brawling along at a healthy clip, was a brook that made her first one seem like no more than a drip from the end of a shut-off hose.
Trisha walked along the edge of the drop with perfect unself-consciousness, although a misstep would have sent her tumbling at least twenty-five feet and likely would have killed her. Five minutes' walk upstream brought her to a kind of rough groove from the edge of the forest into the gully where the stream ran. It was a natural flume, floored with decades of fallen leaves and needles.
She sat down and hooked herself forward with her feet until she sat on top of the grooved place like a kid sitting on top of a slide. She started down, still sitting, dragging her hands and using her feet as brakes. About halfway down she started to skid. Rather than trying to stop herself - that would most likely start her somersaulting again - she lay back, laced her hands together behind her neck, closed her eyes, and hoped for the best.
The trip to the bottom was short and jolting. Trisha whammed into one jutting rock with her right hip, and another struck her laced-together fingers hard enough to numb them. If she hadn't put her hands over the top of her head, that second rock might have torn open her scalp, she thought later. Or worse. "Don't break your fool neck" was another grownup saying she knew, this one a favorite of Gramma McFarland.
She hit bottom with a bonecrunching thud, and suddenly her sneakers were full of freezing cold water. She pulled them out, turned around, flopped onto her belly, and drank until a spike drove into her forehead the way it sometimes did when she was hot and hungry and gobbled ice cream too fast. Trisha pulled her dripping, mudstreaked face out of the stream's cold boiling course and looked up at the dark-ening sky, gasping and grinning blissfully. Had she ever tasted water this good? No. Had she ever tasted anything this good? Absolutely not. This was in a class by itself. She plunged her face back in and drank again. At last she got up on her knees, uttered a vast watery belch, and then laughed shakily. Her stomach felt swollen, tight as a drum. For the time being, at least, she wasn't even hungry.
The flume was too steep and too slippery to re-climb; she might get halfway or even most of the way up only to slide all the way back to the bottom again. The going looked fairly easy on the other side of the brook, however - steep and tree-covered but not too brushy - and there were plenty of rocks to use as stepping-stones. She could go a lit-tle way before it got too dark to see. Why not? Now that she had filled her belly with water she felt strong again, wonderfully strong. And confident. The bog was behind her and she had found another stream. A good stream.
Yes, but what about the special thing? the cold voice asked.
Trisha was frightened by that voice all over again. The stuff it said was bad; that she should have discovered such a dark girl hiding inside her was even worse. Did you forget about the special thing?
"If there ever was a special thing," Trisha said, "it's gone now. Back with the deer, maybe."
It was true, or seemed to be true. That sensation of being watched, perhaps stalked, was gone. The cold voice knew it and made no reply. Trisha found she could visualize its owner, a tough little sneery-mouthed tootsie who looked only slightly, coincidentally, like Trisha herself (the resem-blance of a second cousin, perhaps). Now she was stalking away with her shoulders held stiffly high and her fists clenched, the very picture of resentment.
"Yeah, go away and stay away," Trisha said. "You don't scare me." And after a pause: "Fuck you!" There it came out of her mouth again, what Pepsi called The Terrible Effword, and Trisha wasn't sorry. She could even imagine saying it to her brother Pete if Pete started up with all his Malden crap again while they were walking home from school. Malden this and Malden that, Dad this and Dad that, and what if she just said Hey Pete, fuck you, deal with it instead of trying to be either all quiet and sympathetic or all bright and cheery and let's-change-the-subject? Just Hey Pete, that's a big fuck you, like that? Trisha saw him in her head - saw him staring at her with his jaw dropped most of the way down to his chin. The image made her giggle.
She got up, approached the water, picked out four stones that would take her across, and dropped them, one at a time, into the streambed. Once on the far side, she began to work her way down the slope.
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.