Around four in the afternoon she stumbled over a log, fell on her side, tried to get up, and found she couldn't. Her legs were trembling and felt as weak as water. She took off her pack (struggling with it for an alarming length of time), and finally got free of it. She ate all but the last two or three beechnuts, almost gagging up the last one she attempted.
She fought for it and won, stretching her neck like a baby bird and double-gulping. She tamped it down (at least for the time being) with a swig of warm, gritty water.
"Red Sox time," she muttered, and dug out her Walk-man.
She doubted if she could pick them up, but it wouldn't hurt to try; it would be one o'clock or so on the West Coast, a sure day game, and just starting.
There was nothing at all on the FM band, not even a faint whisper of music. On the AM she found a man babbling rapidly away in French (he chuckled as he did so, which was disquieting), and then, down near 1600, at the very foot of the dial, a miracle: faint but audible, the voice of Joe Cas-tiglione.
"All right, Valentin leads away from second," he said.
"The three-one pitch... and Garciaparra hits a long high drive to deep center field! It's back... it's GONE! Red Sox lead, two to nothing!"
"Way to go, Nomar, you the man," Trisha said in a hoarse, croaky voice she hardly recognized as her own, and pumped her fist weakly at the sky. O'Leary struck out and the inning ended. "Who do you call when your WINDshield's BUSted?" sang voices from a world far away, one where there were paths everywhere and all gods worked behind the scenes.
"1-800," Trisha began. "54..."
She trailed off before she could finish. As her doze deep-ened she slid further and further to her right, coughing from time to time. The coughs had a deep, phlegmy sound. Dur-ing the fifth inning, something came to the edge of the woods and looked at her. Flies and noseeums made a cloud around its rudiment of a face. In the specious brilliance of its eyes was a complete history of nothing. It stood there for a long time. At last it pointed at her with one razor-claw hand - she is mine, she is my property - and backed into the woods again.
Bottom of the Ninth
AT SOME POINT late in the game, Trisha thought she came briefly, blearily awake. Jerry Trupiano was announcing - it sounded like Troop, at least, but he was saying that the Seat-tle Monsters had the bases loaded and Gordon was trying to close the game out. "That thing at the plate's a killer," Troop said, "and Gordon looks afraid for the first time this year.
Where's God when you need him, Joe?"
"Danvizz," Joe Castiglione said. "Crying real tizz."
Surely that was a dream, had to have been - one that might or might not have been mixed with a little smidge of reality. All Trisha knew for sure was that when she next awoke completely, the sun was almost down, she was fever-ish, her throat hurt badly each time she swallowed, and her radio was ominously quiet.
"Fell asleep with it on, you stupid thing," she said in her new croaky voice. "You big dumb ass**le." She looked at the top of the case, hoping to see the little red light, hoping she had just moved the tuning by accident when she started sliding off to one side (she had awakened with her head 195. cocked against one shoulder and her neck aching fiercely), knowing better. And sure enough, the red light was out.
She tried to tell herself the batteries couldn't have lasted much longer, anyway, but it didn't help and she cried some more. Knowing the radio was dead made her feel sad, so sad. It was like losing your last friend. Moving slowly and creakily, she stowed the radio back in her pack, did the buckles, and put the pack back on. It was almost empty, yet seemed to weigh a ton. How could that be?
I'm on a road, at least, she reminded herself. I'm on a road.
But now, with the light of another day slipping out of the sky, not even that seemed to help. Road, shmoad, she thought.
The fact of it actually seemed to mock her, began to seem like a blown save opportunity, somehow - like when a team got just an out or two away from sewing up the win and then the roof fell in. The stupid road could go on through these woods for another hundred and forty miles, for all she knew, and at the end of it there might be nothing; just another scruff of bushes or another hideous bog.
Nevertheless she began to walk again, slowly and wearily, with her head down and her shoulders so slumped that the pack-straps kept trying to slip off like the straps of a shell did if the top was too big. Only with a shell top, you only had to brush the straps back up. With the pack-straps you first had to pick and then lift.
About a half hour before full dark, one of them slipped off her shoulder entirely and the pack came askew. Trisha thought briefly of just letting the damned thing fall and walking on without it. She might have done just that if there had only been the last handful of checkerberries inside.
But there was the water, and the water, gritty as it was, soothed her throat. She decided to stop for the night instead.
She knelt down on the crown of the road, slipped off the pack with a sigh of relief, then lay down with her head on it.
She looked at the dark mass of the woods to her right.