Stephen King - Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

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Stephen King "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon"
Pregame
THE WORLD had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. Trisha
McFarland discovered this when she was nine years old. At ten o'clock on a morning
in early June she was sitting in the back seat of her mother's Dodge Caravan,
wearing her blue Red Sox batting practice jersey (the one with 36 GORDON on the
back) and playing with Mona, her doll. At ten thirty she was lost in the woods. By
eleven she was trying not to be terrified, trying not to let herself think, This is
serious, this is very serious. Trying not to think that sometimes when people got
lost in the woods they got seriously hurt. Sometimes they died.
All because I needed to pee, she thought ... except she hadn't needed to pee all
that badly, and in any case she could have asked Mom and Pete to wait up the trail
a minute while she went behind a tree. They were fighting again, gosh what a
surprise that was, and that was why she had dropped behind a little bit, and
without saying anything. That was why she had stepped off the trail and behind a
high stand of bushes. She needed a breather, simple as that. She was tired of
listening to them argue, tired of trying to sound bright and cheerful, close to
screaming at her mother, Let him go, then! If be wants to go back to Malden and
live with Dad so much, why don't you just let him? I'd drive him myself if I bad a
license, just to get some peace and quiet around here! And what then? What would
her mother say then? What kind of look would come over her face? And Pete. He was
older, almost fourteen, and not stupid, so why didn't he know better? Why couldn't
he just give it a rest? Cut the crap was what she wanted to say to him (to both of
them, really), just cut the crap.
The divorce had happened a year ago, and their mother had gotten custody. Pete
had protested the move from suburban Boston to southern Maine bitterly and at
length. Part of it really was wanting to be with Dad, and that was the lever he
always used on Mom (he understood with some unerring instinct that it was the one
he could plant the deepest and pull on the hardest), but Trisha knew it wasn't the
only reason, or even the biggest one. The real reason Pete wanted out was that he
hated Sanford Middle School.
In Malden he'd had it pretty well whipped. He'd run the computer club like it was
his own private kingdom; he'd had friends - nerds, yeah, but they went around in a
group and the bad kids didn't pick on them. At Sanford Middle there was no computer
club and he'd only made a single friend, Eddie Rayburn. Then in January Eddie moved
away, also the victim of a parental breakup. That made Pete a loner, anyone's game.
Worse, a lot of kids laughed at him. He had picked up a nickname which he hated:
Pete's CompuWorld.
On most of the weekends when she and Pete didn't go down to Malden to be with
their father, their mother took them on outings. She was grimly dedicated to these,
and although Trisha wished with all her heart that Mom would stop-it was on the
outings that the worst fights happened-she knew that wasn't going to happen. Quilla
Andersen (she had taken back her maiden name and you could bet Pete hated that,
too) had the courage of her convictions. Once, while staying at the Malden house
with Dad, Trisha had heard their father talking to his own Dad on the phone. "If
Quilla had been at Little Big Horn, the Indians would have lost," he said, and
although Trisha didn't like it when Dad said stuff like that about Mom-it seemed
babyish as well as disloyal-she couldn't deny that there was a nugget of truth in
that particular observation.
Over the last six months, as things grew steadily worse between Mom and Pete, she
had taken them to the auto museum in Wiscasset, to the Shaker Village in Gray, to
The New England Plant-A-Torium in North Wyndham, to SixGun City in Randolph, New
Hampshire, on a canoe trip down the Saco River, and on a skiing trip to Sugarloaf
(where Trisha had sprained her ankle, an injury over which her mother and father
had later had a screaming fight; what fun divorce was, what really good fun).
Sometimes, if he really liked a place, Pete would give his mouth a rest. He had
pronounced Six-Gun City "for babies," but Mom had allowed him to spend most of the
visit in the room where the electronic games were, and Pete had gone home not
exactly happy but at least silent. On the other hand, if Pete didn't like one of
the places their Mom picked (his least favorite by far had been the Plant-A-Torium;
returning to Sanford that day he had been in an especially boogery frame of mind),
he was generous in sharing his opinion. "Go along to get along" wasn't in his
nature. Nor was it in their mother's, Trisha supposed. She herself thought it was
an excellent philosophy, but of course everyone took one look at her and pronounced
her her father's child. Sometimes that bothered her, but mostly she liked it.
Trisha didn't care where they went on Saturdays, and would have been perfectly
happy with a steady diet of amusement parks and mini-golf courses just because they
minimized the increasingly horrible arguments. But Mom wanted the trips to be
instructive, too-hence the Plant-A-Torium and Shaker Village. On top of his other
problems, Pete resented having education rammed down his throat on Saturdays, when
he would rather have been up in his room, playing Sanitarium or Riven on his Mac.
Once or twice he had shared his opinion ("This sucks!" pretty well summed it up) so
generously that Mom had sent him back to the car and told him to sit there and
"compose himself " until she and Trisha came back.
Trisha wanted to tell Mom she was wrong to treat him like he was a kindergartener
who needed a time-out - that someday they'd come back to the van and find it empty,
Pete having decided to hitchhike back to Massachusetts-but of course she said
nothing. The Saturday outings themselves were wrong, but Mom would never accept
that. By the end of some of them Quilla Andersen looked at least five years older
than when they had set out, with deep lines grooved down the sides of her mouth and
one hand constantly rubbing her temple, as if she had a headache ... but she would
still never stop. Trisha knew it. Maybe if her mother had been at Little Big Horn
the Indians still would have won, but the body-count would have been considerably
higher.
This week's outing was to an unincorporated township in the western part of the
state. The Appalachian Trail wound through the area on its way to New Hampshire.
Sitting at the kitchen table the night before, Mom had shown them photos from a
brochure. Most of the pictures showed happy hikers either striding along a forest
trail or standing at scenic lookouts, shading their eyes and peering across great
wooded valleys at the time-eroded but still formidable peaks of the central White
Mountains.
Pete sat at the table, looking cataclysmically bored, refusing to give the
brochure more than a glance. For her part, Mom had refused to notice his
ostentatious lack of interest. Trisha, as was increasingly her habit, became
brightly enthusiastic. These days she often sounded to herself like a contestant on
a TV game show, all but peeing in her pants at the thought of winning a set of
waterless cookware. And how did she feel to herself these days? Like glue holding
together two pieces of something that was broken. Weak glue.
Quilla had closed the brochure and turned it over. On the back was a map. She
tapped a snaky blue line. "This is Route 68," she said. "We'll park the car here,
in this parking lot." She tapped a tittle blue square. Now she traced one finger
along a snaky red line. "This is the Appalachian Trail between Route 68 and Route
302 in North Conway, New Hampshire. It's only six miles, and rated Moderate. Welt
... this one little section in the middle is marked Moderate-to-Difficult, but not
to the point where we'd need climbing gear or anything."
She tapped another blue square. Pete was leaning his head on one hand, looking
the other way. The heel of his palm had pulled the left side of his mouth up into a
sneer, He had started getting pimples this year and a fresh crop gleamed on his
forehead. Trisha loved him, but sometimes last night at the kitchen table, as Mom
explained their route, for example-she hated him, too. She wanted to tell him to
stop being a chicken, because that was what it came down to when you cut to the
chase, as their Dad said. Pete wanted to run back to Malden with his little teenage
tail between his legs because he was a chicken. He didn't care about Mom, didn't
care about Trisha, didn't even care if being with Dad would be good for him in the
long run. What Pete cared about was not having anyone to eat lunch with on the gym
bleachers. What Pete cared about was that when he walked into homeroom after the
first bell someone always yelled, "Hey CompuWorld! Howya doon, homo-boy?"
"This is the parking lot where we come out," Mom had said, either not noticing
that Pete wasn't looking at the map or pretending not to. "A van shows up there
around three. It'll take us back around to our car. Two hours later we're home
again, and I'll haul you guys to a movie if we're not too tired. How does that
sound?"
Pete had said nothing last night, but he'd had plenty to say this morning,
starting with the ride up from Sanford. He didn't want to do this, it was
ultimately stupid, plus he'd heard it was going to rain later on, why did they have
to spend a whole Saturday walking in the woods during the worst time of the year
for bugs, what if Trisha got poison ivy (as if he cared), and on and on and on.
Yatata-yatata-yatata. He even had the gall to say he should be home studying for
his final exams. Pete had never studied on Saturday in his life, as far as Trisha
knew. At first Mom didn't respond, but finally he began getting under her skin.
Given enough time, he always did. By the time they got to the little dirt parking
area on Route 68, her knuckles were white on the steering wheel and she was
speaking in clipped tones which Trisha recognized all too well. Mom was leaving
Condition Yellow behind and going to Condition Red. It was looking like a very long
six-mile walk through the western Maine woods, all in all.
At first Trisha had tried to divert them, exclaiming over barns and grazing
horses and picturesque graveyards in her best oh-wow-it's-waterless-cookware voice,
it but they ignored her and after awhile she had simply sat in the back seat with
Mona on her tap (her Dad liked to call Mona Moanie Balogna) and her knapsack beside
her, listening to them argue and wondering if she herself might cry, or actually go
crazy, Could your family fighting all the time drive you crazy? Maybe when her
mother started rubbing her temples with the tips of her fingers, it wasn't because
she had a headache but because she was trying to keep her brains
from undergoing spontaneous combustion or explosive decompression, or something.
To escape them, Trisha opened the door to her favorite fantasy. She took off her
Red Sox cap and looked at the signature written across the brim in broad black
felt-tip strokes; this helped get her in the mood. It was Tom Gordon's signature.
Pete liked Mo Vaughn, and their Mom was partial to Nomar Garciaparra, but Tom
Gordon was Trisha's and her Dad's favorite Red Sox player. Tom Gordon was the Red
Sox closer; he came on in the eighth or ninth inning when the game was close but
the Sox were still on top. Her Dad admired Gordon because he never seemed to lose
his nerve - "Flash has got icewater in his veins," Larry McFarland liked to say-and
Trisha always said the same thing, sometimes adding that she liked Gordon because
he had the guts to throw a curve on three-and-oh (this was something her father had
read to her in a Boston Globe column). Only to Moanie Balogna and (once) to her
girlfriend, Pepsi Robichaud, had she said more. She told Pepsi she thought
Tom Gordon was "pretty good-looking." To Mona she threw caution entirely to the
winds, saying that Number 36 was the handsomest man alive, and if he ever touched
her hand she'd faint. If he ever kissed her, even on the cheek, she thought she'd
probably die.
Now, as her mother and her brother fought in the front seat-about the outing,
about Sanford Middle School, about their dislocated life-Trisha looked at the
signed cap her Dad had somehow gotten her in March, just before the season started,
and thought this:
I'm in Sanford Park, just walking across the playground to Pepsi's house on an
ordinary day. And there's this guy standing at the hotdog wagon. He's wearing blue
jeans and a white T-shirt and he's got a gold chain around his neck-he's got his
back to me but I can see the chain winking in the sun. Then he turns around and I
see ... oh I can't believe it but it's true, it's really him, it's Tom Gordon, why
he's in Sanford is a mystery hut it's him, all right, and oh God his eyes, just
like when he's looking in for the sign with men on base, those eyes, and he smiles
and says he's a little lost, he wonders if I know a town called North Berwick, how
to get there, and oh God, oh my God I'm shaking, I won't he able to say a word,
I'll open my mouth and nothing will come out but a little dry squeak, what Dad
calls a mousefart, only when I try I can speak, I sound almost normal, and I say
...
I say, he says, then I say and then he says: thinking about how they might talk
while the fighting in the front seat of the Caravan drew steadily farther away.
(Sometimes, Trisha had decided, silence was life's greatest blessing.) She was
still looking fixedly at the signature on the visor of her baseball cap when Mom
turned into the parking area, still far away (Trish is off in her own world was how
her father put it), unaware that there were teeth hidden in the ordinary texture of
things and she would soon know it. She was in Sanford, not in TR-90. She was in the
town park, not at an entry-point to the Appalachian Trail. She was with Tom Gordon,
Number 36, and he was offering to buy her a hotdog in exhange for directions to
North Berwick. Oh, bliss.
First Inning
MOM AND PETE gave it a rest as they got their packs and Quilla's wicker plant-
collection basket out of the van's back end; Pete even helped Trisha get her pack
settled evenly on her back, tightening one of the straps, and she had a moment's
foolish hope that now things were going to be all right.
"Kids got your ponchos?" Mom asked, looking up at the sky. There was still blue
up there, but the clouds were thickening in the west. It very likely would rain,
but probably not soon enough for Pete to have a satisfying whine about being
soaked.
"I've got mine, Mom!" Trisha chirruped in her oh-boy-waterless-cookware voice.
Pete grunted something that might have been yes.
"Lunches?"
Affirmative from Trisha; another low grunt from Pete.
"Good, because I'm not sharing mine." She locked the Caravan, then led them
across the dirt lot toward a sign marked TRAIL WEST, with an arrow beneath. There
were maybe a dozen other cars in the lot, all but theirs with out-of-state plates.
"Bug-spray?" Mom asked as they stepped onto the path leading to the trail.
"Trish?"
"Got it!" she chirruped, not entirely positive she did but not wanting to stop
with her back turned so that Mom could have a rummage. That would get Pete going
again for sure. If they kept walking, though, he might see something which would
interest him, or at least distract him. A raccoon. Maybe a deer. A dinosaur would
be good. Trisha giggled.
"What's funny?" Mom asked..
'Just me thinks," Trisha replied, and Quilla frowned "me thinks" was a Larry
McFarland-ism. Well let her frown, Trisha thought. Let her frown all she wants. I'm
with her, and I don't complain about it like old grouchy there, hut he's still my
Dad and I still love him.
Trisha touched the brim of her signed cap, as if to prove it.
"Okay, kids, let's go," Quilla said. 'And keep your eyes open.
"I hate this," Pete almost groaned-it was the first clearly articulated thing
he'd said since they got out of the van, and Trisha thought: Please God, send
something. A deer or a dinosaur or a UFO. Because if You don't, they're going right
back at it.
God sent nothing but a few mosquito scouts that would no doubt soon be reporting
back to the main army that fresh meat was on the move, and by the time they passed
a sign reading NO. CONWAY STATION 5.5 mi., the two of them were at it full-bore
again, ignoring the woods, ignoring her, ignoring everything but each other.
Yatata-yatata-yatata. It was, Trisha thought, like some sick kind of making out.
It was a shame, too, because they were missing stuff that was actually pretty
neat. The sweet, resiny smell of the pines, for instance, and the way the clouds
seemed so close - less like clouds than like draggles of whitish-gray smoke. She
guessed you'd have to be an adult to call something as boring as walking one of
your hobbles, but this really wasn't bad. She didn't know if the entire Appalachian
Trail was as well-maintained as this-probably not-but if it was, she guessed she
could understand why people with nothing better to do decided to walk all umpty-
thousand miles of it. Trisha thought it was like walking on a broad, winding avenue
through the woods. It wasn't paved, of course, and it ran steadily uphill, but it
was easy enough walking. There was even a little hut with a pump inside it and a
sign which read: WATER TESTS OK FOR DRINKING. PLEASE FILL PRIMER JUG FOR NEXT
PERSON.
She had a bottle of water in her pack - a big one with a squeeze-top - but
suddenly all Trisha wanted in the world was to prime the pump in the little hut and
get a drink, cold and fresh, from its rusty lip. She would drink and pretend she
was Bilbo Baggins, on his way to the Misty Mountains.
"Mom?" she asked from behind them. "Could we stop long enough to-"
"Making friends is a job, Peter," her mother was saying. She didn't look back at
Trisha. "You can't just stand around and wait for kids to come to you."
"Mom? Pete? Could we please stop for just a-"
"You don't understand," he said heatedly. "You don't have a clue, I don't know
how things were when you were in junior high, but they're a lot different now."
"Pete? Mom? Mommy? There's a pump-" Actually there was a pump; that was now the
grammatically correct way to put it, because the pump was behind them, and getting
farther behind all the time.
"I don't accept that," Mom said briskly, all business, and Trisha thought: No
wonder she drives him crazy. Then, resentfully: They don't even know I'm here. The
Invisible Girl, that's me. I might as well have stayed home. A mosquito whined in
her ear and she slapped at it irritably.
They came to a fork in the trail. The main branch-not quite as wide as an avenue
now, but still not bad-went off to the left, marked by a sign reading NO. CONWAY
5.2. The other branch, smaller and mostly overgrown, read KEZAR NOTCH 10.
"Guys, I have to pee," said The Invisible Girl, and of course neither of them
took any notice; they just headed up the branch which led to North Conway, walking
side by side like lovers and looking into each other's faces like lovers and
arguing like the bitterest enemies. We should have stayed home, Trisha thought.
They could have done this at home, and I could have read a book. The Hobbit again,
maybe - a story about guys who like to walk in the woods.
"Who cares, I'm peeing," she said sulkily, and walked a little way down the path
marked KEZAR NOTCH. Here the pines which had stayed modestly back from the main
trail crowded in, reaching with their blueblack branches, and there was underbrush,
as well-clogs and clogs of it. She looked for the shiny leaves that meant poison
ivy, poison oak, or poison sumac, and didn't see any ... thank God for small
favors. Her mother had shown her pictures of those and taught her to identify them
two years ago, when life had been happier and simpler. In those days Trisha had
gone tramping in the woods with her mother quite a bit. (Pete's bitterest complaint
about the trip to Plant-A-Torium was that their mother had wanted to go there. The
obvious truth of this seemed to blind him to how selfish he had sounded, harping on
it all day long.)
On one of their walks, Mom had also taught her how girls peed in the woods. She
began by saying, "The most important thing - maybe the only important thing-is not
to do it in a patch of poison ivy. Now look. Watch me and do it just the way I do
it."
Trisha now looked both ways, saw no one, and decided she'd get off the trail
anyway. The way to Kezar Notch looked hardly used - little more than an alley
compared to the broad thoroughfare of the main trail-but she still didn't want to
squat right in the middle of it. It seemed indecorous.
She stepped off the path in the direction of the North Conway fork, and she could
still hear them arguing. Later on, after she was good and lost and trying not to
believe she might die in the woods, Trisha would remember the last phrase she got
in the clear; her brother's hurt, indignant voice: --don't know why we have to pay
for what you guys did wrong!
She walked half a dozen steps toward the sound of his voice, stepping carefully
around a clump of brambles even though she was wearing jeans instead of shorts. She
paused, looked back, and realized she could still see the Kezar Notch path ...
which meant that anyone coming along it would be able to see her, squatting and
peeing with a half-loaded knapsack on her back and a Red Sox cap on her head. Em-
bare-ASS-ing, as Pepsi might say (Quilla Andersen had once remarked that Penelope
Robichaud's picture should be next to the word vulgar in the dictionary).
Trisha went down a mild slope, her sneakers slipping a little in a carpet of last
year's dead leaves, and when she got to the bottom she couldn't see the Kezar Notch
path any more. Good. From the other direction, straight ahead through the woods,
she heard a man's voice and a girl's answering laughter-hikers on the main trail,
and not far away, by the sound. As Trisha unsnapped her jeans it occurred to her
that if her mother and brother paused in their oh-so-interesting argument, looking
behind them to see how sis was doing, and saw a strange man and woman instead, they
might be worried about her.
Good! Give them something else to think about for a few minutes. Something
besides themselves.
The trick, her mother had told her on that better day in the woods two years ago,
wasn't going outdoors-girls could do that every bit as well as boys-but to do it
without soaking your clothes.
Trisha held onto the conveniently jutting branch of a nearby pine, bent her
knees, then reached between her legs with her free hand, yanking her pants and her
underwear forward and out of the firing line. For a moment nothing happened-wasn't
that just typical-and Trish sighed. A mosquito whined bloodthirstily around her
left ear, and she had no hand free with which to slap at it.
"Oh waterless cookware!" she said angrily, but it was funny, really quite
deliciously stupid and funny, and she began to laugh. As soon as she started
摘要：

StephenKing"TheGirlWhoLovedTomGordon"PregameTHEWORLDhadteethanditcouldbiteyouwiththemanytimeitwanted.TrishaMcFarlanddiscoveredthiswhenshewasnineyearsold.Atteno'clockonamorninginearlyJuneshewassittinginthebackseatofhermother'sDodgeCaravan,wearingherblueRedSoxbattingpracticejersey(theonewith36GORDO\No...

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