Except she knew better than that.
She continued with her motion, flinging the baseball. It struck the bear dead-bang between the eyes and - whoa, hey, talk about hallucinations - she saw a couple of Ener-gizer double A batteries fall out of it onto the road.
"Strike three called!" she screamed, and at the sound of her hoarse, triumphant, breaking voice, the wounded bear turned and fled, lumbering on all fours, quickly picking up speed, shedding blood from its torn ear as it got into an all-out fanny-wagging run. There was another whipcrack gun-shot, and Trisha felt the slug buffet the air as it passed less than a foot to her right. It dug up a puff of road dust well behind the bear, which veered to its left and plunged back into the woods. For a moment she could see the gleam of its shiny black pelt, then small trees shaking as if in a parody of fear as it passed among them, and then the bear was gone.
She turned, staggering, and saw a small man in patched green pants, green gumrubber boots, and an old flapping T-shirt running toward her. His head was bald on top; long hair flapped down on either side and hung on his shoulders; little rimless eyeglasses flashed in the sun. He was carrying a rifle high over his head, like a raiding Indian in an old movie. She wasn't a bit surprised to see that his shirt had the Red Sox emblem on it. Every man in New England had at least one Sox shirt, it seemed.
"Hey girlie!" he screamed. "Hey girlie, Jesus, are you all right?
Christ almighty, that was a f**king BEAR, are you all right?"
Trisha staggered toward him. "Strike three called," she said, but the words hardly reached beyond her own mouth.
She had used up most of what she had with that last scream.
All that remained was a kind of bleeding whisper. "Strike three called, I threw the curve and just froze him."
"What?" He stopped in front of her. "I can't make you out, honey, come again."
"Did you see?" she asked, meaning the pitch she had thrown - that unbelievable curve that hadn't just broken but snapped like a whip. "Did you see it?"
"I... I saw..." But in truth he didn't know what he had seen. There had been a few seconds in that frozen time when the girl and the bear had been regarding each other that he hadn't been sure, not entirely sure it was a bear, but that he never told anyone. Folks knew he drank; they would think he was crazy. And all he saw now was a delirious little girl who looked like nothing but a stick-figure held together by dirt and ragged clothes. He couldn't remember her name but he knew who she was; it had been on the radio and the TV, as well. He had no idea how she could possibly have gotten so far north and west, but he knew perfectly well who she was.
Trisha stumbled over her own feet and would have fallen to the road if Herrick hadn't caught her. When he did, his rifle - a . 350 Krag that was the pride of his life - discharged again, close to her ear, deafening her. Trisha hardly noticed.
It all seemed normal, somehow.
"Did you see?" she asked again, not able to hear her own voice, not even completely sure if she was actually speaking.
The little man looked bewildered and scared and not espe-cially bright, but she thought he also looked kind. "I got him with the curve, froze him, did you see?"
His lips were moving, but she couldn't tell what he was saying. He put the rifle down on the road, though, and that was a relief. He picked her up and turned her so fast it made her dizzy - she probably would have thrown up if there had been anything left in her stomach. She began to cough. She couldn't hear that, either, not with that monstrous ringing in her ears, but she could feel it, way down in her chest and ribcage, pulling.
She wanted to tell him she was glad to be carried, glad to be rescued, but she also wanted to tell him that the bear-thing had been backing away even before he fired his gun.
She had seen the bewilderment in its face, had seen its fear of her when she went from the set to the motion. She wanted to tell this man who was now running with her one thing, one very important thing, but he was jouncing her and she was coughing and her head was ringing and she couldn't tell if she was saying it or not.
Trisha was still trying to say I got it, I got the save when she passed out.
Postgame
SHE WAS IN THE WOODS again and she came to a clearing she knew. Standing in the middle of it, by the stump that wasn't a stump but a gatepost with a rusty ringbolt embed-ded in the top, was Tom Gordon. He was idly flicking the ringbolt back and forth.
I already had this dream, she thought, but as she approached him, she saw it had changed in one particular: instead of the gray road uniform, Tom was wearing his white home uniform, with Number 36 on the back in bright red silk. So the road trip was over. The Sox were at Fenway again, back at home, and the road trip was over. Except she and Tom were here; they were back in this clearing.
"Tom?" she said timidly.