Last chance. Late innings.
"Yeah, and maybe somebody expects an awful lot from a kid," she said. She unshouldered her pack, opened it, yanked out the remains of the poncho, and tore off one of the strips.
This she knotted around the stump of the broken-off gatepost, coughing nervously as she did it. Sweat ran down her face. Noseeums came to drink it; some drowned; Trisha didn't notice.
She stood up, reshouldering the pack, and stood between the remaining upright post and the blue strip of plastic marking the downed one.
"Here's where the gate was," she said. "Right here." She looked straight ahead, in a northwest direction. Then she about-faced and gazed southeast. "I don't know why any-180 one would put a gate here, but I know that you don't bother unless there's a road or a trail or a riding-path or something.
I want..." Her voice trembled toward tears. She stopped, gulped them back, and started again. "I want to find the path. Any path. Where is it? Help me, Tom."
Number 36 didn't reply. A jay scolded her and some-thing moved in the woods (not the thing, just some animal, maybe a deer - she had seen lots of deer over the last three or four days), but that was all. Before her, all around her, was a meadow so old that it could now pass for just another forest clearing unless you looked closely. Beyond this she saw more woods, more clenches of trees she could not name.
She saw no path.
This is your last chance, you know.
Trisha turned, walked northwest across the open space to the woods, then looked back to make sure she had held a straight line. She had, and she looked forward again.
Branches moved in a light breeze, casting deceptive dapples of light everywhere, creating what was almost a disco-ball effect. She could see an old fallen log and went to it, slipping between the closely packed trees and ducking under the maddening interlacing branches, hoping... but it was a log, just a log and not another post. She looked further and saw nothing. Heart thumping, breath coming in anxious, phlegmy little bursts, Trisha fought her way back to the clearing and returned to the place where the gate had been.
This time she faced southeast and walked slowly once more to the rim of the woods.
"Well, here we go," Troop always said, "it's the late innings and the Red Sox need base-runners."
Woods. Nothing but woods. Not so much as a game-trail - at least not that Trisha could see - let alone a path.
She pushed in a little further, still trying not to cry, knowing that very soon she wouldn't be able to help it. Why did the wind have to be blowing? How could you see anything with all those little puppy-shit dots of sunlight spinning around?
It was like being in a planetarium, or something.
"What's that?" Tom asked from behind her.
"What?" She didn't bother turning. Tom's appearances no longer seemed especially miraculous to her. "I don't see anything."
"To your left. Just a tiny bit." His finger, pointing over her shoulder.
"That's just an old stump," she said, but was it? Or was she just afraid to believe it was a - "I don't believe so," said Number 36, and of course he had baseball player's eyes. "I think that's another post, girl."
Trisha worked her way to it (and it was work; the trees were maddeningly thick here, the bushes heavy, the going underfoot littered and treacherous), and yes, it was another post. This one had rusted nips of barbed wire running up the inside like sharp little bowties.
Trisha stood with one hand on its eroded top and looked deeper into the sun-dappled, deceptive woods. She had a dim memory of sitting in her room on a rainy day and work-ing in an activity book Mom had bought her. There was a picture, an incredibly busy picture, and in it you were sup-posed to find ten hidden objects: a pipe, a clown, a diamond ring, stuff like that.
Now she needed to find the path. Please God help me find the path, she thought, and closed her eyes. It was the God of Tom Gordon she prayed to, not her father's Subaudible. She wasn't in Malden now, nor in Sanford, and she needed a God that was really there, one you could point to when - if - you got the save. Please God, please. Help me in the late innings.
She opened her eyes as wide as she could and looked without looking. Five seconds went by, fifteen seconds, thirty. And all at once it was there. She had no idea what, exactly, she was seeing - perhaps simply a vector where there were fewer trees and a little more clear light, perhaps only a suggestive pattern of shadows all pointing the same way - but she knew what it was: the last remains of a path.
I can stay on it as long as I don't think about it too much, Trisha told herself, beginning to walk. She came to another post, this one leaning at an acute angle; one more winter of frost and freeze, one more spring of thaw and it would fall and be swallowed in the next summer's grass. If I think about it too much or look too hard, I'll lose it.
With that in mind, Trisha began following the few remaining posts of those planted by a farmer named Elias McCorkle in the year 1905; these marked the wood-drag trail he had made as a young man, before the drink got him and he lost his ambition. Trisha went with her eyes wide, never hesitating (to do so would give thought a chance to creep in and likely betray her). Sometimes there would be a stretch where there were no posts, but she did not stop to hunt through the heavy underbrush for their remains; she allowed the light, the shadow-patterns, and her own instinct to guide her. She walked in such steady fashion for the rest of the day, weaving through heavy clumps of trees and high bramble-chokes with her eyes always on the faint trace of the path. She went on for a good seven hours, and just when she was thinking she'd be sleeping again beneath her poncho, huddling there to keep the worst of the bugs at bay, she came to the edge of another clearing. Three posts, leaning drunkenly this way and that, marched to the mid-dle of it. The remains of a second gate still hung from the last of these posts, mostly held up by the thick twining of grass around its lower two crossbars. Beyond it, a pair of fading ruts grown over with grass and daisies headed south, curving back into the forest again. It was an old woods road.
Trisha walked slowly past the gate and to where the road seemed to begin (or finish up; it all depended, she supposed, on which way you were pointing). She stood still a moment, then dropped to her knees and crawled along one of the ruts. As she did it she started crying again. She crawled across the old road's grassy crown, letting the tall grass tickle beneath her chin, and went up the other rut, still on her hands and knees. She crawled like a person who is blind, calling through her tears as she went.
"A road! It's a road! I found a road! Thank You, God!
Thank You, God! Thank You for this road!"
Finally she stopped, slipped off her pack, and lay down in the rut. This was made by wheels, she thought, and laughed through her tears. After a little while she rolled over and looked at the sky.
Eighth Inning
A FEW MINUTES LATER, Trisha got up. She walked along the road another hour, until the dusk was thick around her. Off in the west, for the first time since the day she got lost, she could hear thunder rumbling. She would want to get in under the thickest clump of trees she could find, and if it rained hard enough she would still get wet. In her present mood Trisha hardly cared.
She stopped between the old wheelruts and was begin-ning to unshoulder her pack when she saw something ahead in the gloom. Something from the world of people; a thing with corners. She resettled her packstraps and crept toward the right side of the road, peering like a person who has grown nearsighted but is too vain to wear spectacles. In the west, thunder rumbled a little louder.
It was a truck, or the cab of one, rearing out of the mat-ted undergrowth. Its hood was long and nearly buried in woods ivy. One wing of the hood had been flung up, and Trisha could see there was no engine inside; ferns grew where it had been. The cab was dark red with rust, tilted to one side. The windshield was long gone, but there was still 185. a seat inside. Most of its upholstery had rotted away or been chewed away by small animals.
More thunder, and this time she could see lightning shiver inside the clouds, which were advancing rapidly and eating the first stars as they came.
Trisha broke off a branch, reached through the open space where the crank-out windshield had been, and beat at the seat's stuffing as briskly as she could. The quantity of dust which rose was amazing - it came drifting out through the windshield cavity and window-holes like mist. Even more amazing was the flood of chipmunks that came boil-ing up from the floorboards, squeaking and fleeing out through the lozenge-shaped rear window.
"Abandon ship!" Trisha cried. "We've hit an iceberg!
Women and chipmunks fi - " She got a lungful of the dust.
The resultant coughing fit wracked her until she sat down heavily with her beating-stick in her lap, gasping for a clear breath and half in a faint. She decided she wasn't going to spend the night in the cab of the truck after all. She wasn't afraid of a few leftover chipmunks, not even of snakes (if there were snakes in residence, she guessed the chipmunks would have moved out long since), but she didn't want to spend eight hours breathing dust and coughing herself blue.
It would be great to sleep under an actual roof again, but that was too high a price to pay.
Trisha made her way through the bushes beside the truck cab and then a little way into the woods. She sat down under a good-sized spruce, ate some nuts, drank some water. She was getting low on food and drink again, but she was too tired to worry about that tonight. She had found a road, that was the important thing. It was old and unused, but it might take her somewhere. Of course it might also peter out as the streams had, but she wouldn't think about that now. For now she would allow herself to hope the road would take her where the streams had not.
That night was hot and close, the humid edge of New England's short but sometimes fierce summer. Trisha fanned the neck of her grimy shirt against her grimy neck, stuck out her lower lip and blew hair off her forehead, then resettled her hat and lay back against her pack. She thought of digging out her Walkman and decided not to. If she tried listening to a West Coast game tonight, she'd fall asleep for sure and trash whatever was left of the batteries.
She reclined further, turning the pack into a pillow, feel-ing something which had been so solidly gone that its return seemed miraculous: simple contentment. "Thanks, God," she said. In three minutes she was asleep.
She woke up perhaps two hours later, when the first cold drops of a drenching thundershower found their way through the forest's overlacing and landed on her face. Then thunder cracked the world open and she sat up, gasping.
The trees were creaking and groaning in a strong wind, almost a gale, and sudden lightning flashed them into stark news-photo relief.
Trisha struggled to her feet, brushing her hair out of her eyes and then cringing as more thunder banged... except it was more of a whipcrack than a bang. The storm was almost directly overhead. She would shortly be drenched, trees or no trees. She grabbed up her pack and blundered back toward the dark, tilted hulk of the truck's cab. Three steps and she stopped, gasping in the wet air and then coughing it out, hardly feeling the leaves and small branches that spanked her neck and arms in the gusty wind. Somewhere in the forest a tree fell over with a rending, splintering crack.
It was here, and very close.
The wind changed direction, spattering her with a faceful of rain, and now she could actually smell it - some rank wild odor that made her think of cages at the zoo. Except the thing out there wasn't in a cage.
Trisha began moving toward the truck cab again, hold-ing one hand up before her to ward off whipping branches and the other clapped to the top of her Red Sox cap to keep it on. Thorns tore at her ankles and calves, and when she came out of the sheltering woods to the edge of her road (so she thought of it, as her road), she was instantly drenched.
As she reached the driver's door of the cab, which hung open with vines twisting in and out through its socket of win-dow, lightning flashed again, painting the whole world pur-ple.
CHAPTER 14
In its glare Trisha saw something with slumped shoulders standing on the far side of the road, something with black eyes and great cocked ears like horns. Perhaps they were horns. It wasn't human; nor did she think it was animal. It was a god. It was her god, the wasp-god, standing there in the rain.
"NO!" she screamed, diving into the truck, unmindful of the dusty cloud that puffed up around her and the uphol-stery's rotting, ancient smell. "NO, GO AWAY! GO AWAY AND LEAVE ME ALONE!"
Thunder answered. Rain also answered, drumming down on the cab's rusty roof. Trisha hid her head in her arms and rolled over on her side, coughing and shivering. She was still waiting for it to come when she fell asleep again.
This sleep was deep and - as far as she could remem-ber - dreamless. When she awoke, full daylight had returned.
It was hot and sunny, the trees seemingly greener than they had been the day before, the grass lusher, the birds twitting away in the depths of the woods more complacently happy.
Water rustled and dripped from leaves and branches; when Trisha raised her head and looked out through the tilted glass-less rectangle where the old truck's windshield had been, the first thing she saw was sunlight glaring from the surface of a puddle in one of the road's ruts. The glare was so brilliant that she raised a hand to her eyes, squinting. The afterimage hung in front of her even when the real thing was gone: reflected sky, first blue, then a fading green.
The truck's cab had kept her quite dry despite its lack of glass. There was a puddle on the floor around the ancient control pedals and her left arm had gotten wet, but that was pretty much it. If she had coughed in her sleep, it hadn't been hard enough to wake her up. Her throat felt a little raw and her sinuses were plugged, but those things might improve once she got out of the damned dust.
It was here last night. You saw it.
But had she? Had she really?
It came for you, it meant to take you. Then you climbed into the truck and it decided not to, after all. I don't know why, but that's what happened.
Maybe not, though. Maybe the whole thing had just been the sort of dream you could have when you were half-awake and half-asleep at the same time. Something brought on by waking up to a full-fledged thunderstorm, with light-ning flashing and the wind blowing a gale. A situation like that, anyone might see stuff.
Trisha grabbed her pack by one slightly frayed strap and wriggled backward through the driver's side doorhole, rais-ing more dust and trying not to breathe it in. When she was out, she stepped away (still wet, the cab's rusty-red surface had darkened to the color of plums) and started to put her pack on. Then she stopped. The day was bright and warm, the rain was over, she had a road to follow... but all at once she felt old and tired and zero at the bone. People could imagine things when they woke up suddenly, especially when they woke up at the height of a thunderstorm. Of course they could. But she wasn't imagining what she was seeing now.