Trisha started coughing again, and that got her moving. She dropped the branches in a helter-skelter pile and crawled among them without any attempt to create order out of their jumbled chaos. She winced and moaned a little when one of them poked the place on her hip where she had been stung, then lay still. She sensed it coming now, slipping out of the pines and finally coming for her. The tough tootsie's special thing, the wasp-priest's God of the Lost. You could call it whatever you wanted-the lord of dark places, the emperor of understairs, every kid's worst nightmare. Whatever it was, it had finished teasing her; it was all done playing games. It would simply tear away the branches beneath which she was cowering and eat her alive.
Coughing and shivering, all sense of reality and rationality gone-temporarily insane, in fact-Trisha put her arms over the back of her head and waited to be torn open by the thing's claws and stuffed into its fangy mouth. She fell asleep that way, and when she woke in the early light of Tuesday morning, both of her arms were asleep from the elbows down and at first she couldn't bend her neck at all; she had to walk with her head cocked slightly to one side.
I guess I won't have to ask either Gramma what it's like to be old, she thought as she squatted to pee. I guess that now I know.
As she walked back to the pile of branches where she had slept (like a chipmunk in a burrow, she thought wryly), she saw that one of the other needle-filled hammocks-the one nearest hers, in fact-looked disturbed. The needles had been sprayed around and dug right down to the thin black earth in one place. So maybe she hadn't been insane in the dark of early morning, after all. Or not entirely insane. Because later on, after she'd gone back to sleep, something had come. It had been right next to her, perhaps squatting and watching her sleep. Wondering if it should take her now and finally deciding not to, deciding to let her ripen for at least one more day. To let her sweeten like a checkerberry.
Trisha turned in a circle, feeling a dim sense of deja vu but not remembering she had turned exactly the same circle in almost exactly the same place only a few hours ago. She stopped when she came back to where she had started, coughing nervously into her hand. The cough made her chest hurt, a small dull pain that was very deep inside. She didn't exactly mind-the pain was warm, at least, and every other part of her felt cold this morning.
'It's gone, Torn,' she said. 'Whatever it is, it's gone again. For a little while, anyway.'
Yes, Tom said, but it'll be back. And sooner or later you'll have to deal with it.
'let the evil of the day be sufficient thereof,' Trisha said. That one was her Gramma McFarland's. She didn't know exactly what it meant but thought she sort of knew, and it seemed to fit this occasion.
She sat on a rock beside her hammock and munched three big handfuls of berries and beechnuts, telling herself it was granola. The berries weren't as tasty this morning - a little tough, in fact-and Trisha guessed they would be even less tasty come lunchtime. Still, she made herself eat all three handfuls, then went to the stream for a drink. She saw another of those little trout in it, and although the ones she'd seen so far weren't much bigger than smelts or large sardines, she suddenly decided to try and catch one. The stiffness had begun working out of her body a little, the day was warming as the sun rose, and she had begun to feel a little better. Hopeful, almost. Maybe lucky, too. Even the cough had eased.
Trisha went back to her tangled bed, extracted the remains of her poor old poncho, and spread it on one of the rock outcrops. She hunted for a stone with a sharp edge and found a good one near the place where the stream tumbled over the rounded lip of the bluff and into the valley below. This slope was easily as steep as the one she'd gone sliding down on the day she had gotten lost (that day seemed at least five years ago to Trisha), but she thought it would be a much easier descent. There were lots of trees to hold onto.
Trisha took her improvised cutting tool back to her poncho (spread on the rock like that the poncho looked like a big blue paperdoll) and sawed the hood off below the shoulder-line. She doubted very much if she could actually catch a fish in the hood, but it would be amusing to try and she didn't feel like trying the slope until she had limbered up a little more. She sang softly under her breath as she worked, first the Boyz To Da Maxx song that had been in her head throughout, then the Hansons' 'MMMm-Bop,' then a snatch of 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame.' Mostly, however, she sang the one that went 'Who do you call when your windshield's busted?'
The chilly breeze of the night before had kept the worst of the bugs away, but as the day heated up the usual cloud of tiny airshow performers coalesced around Trisha's head. She barely noticed them, giving an occasional impatient wave only when they got too close to her eyes.
When she had finished cutting the hood off the poncho she held it upside down, dangling it and studying it with a critical, judicious eye. Interesting. Undoubtedly too stupid to work, but sort of interesting, just the same.
'Who do you call, baby who do you call when the damn thing's busted, oh yeah,' Trisha chanted in a singsongy whisper, and walked over to the stream. She picked out two rocks protruding side by side from the water and planted her feet on them. She gazed down between her spread legs into the rushing current. The stream's pebble- packed bed was wavery but otherwise clear. No fish right now, but so what? If you wanted to be a fishergirl, you had to be patient. 'Put your arms around me . . . cause I gotta munch on you,' Trisha sang, then laughed. Pretty goofy! Holding the hood upside down by the ragged shoulder-material, she bent and dropped her improvised snare into the stream.
The current pulled the hood back between her legs, but it stayed open, so that was all right. The problem was her position-back bent, butt in the air, head at the level of her waist. She wouldn't be able to hold this pose long, and if she tried to squat on the rocks, her sore, shaky legs would likely betray her and send her tumbling into the stream. A fullbody dunk wouldn't help her cough.
When her temples started to thud, Trisha compromised by bending her knees and lifting her upper body a little. This shifted her eyeline upstream, and she saw three quicksilver flashes-they were fish, all right, there was no doubt coming toward her. If she'd had time to react, Trisha almost certainly would have jerked the hood and caught none of them. As it was, she had time for only a single thought
(like underwater shooting stars)
and then the silver glints were zipping between the rocks she was standing on and right beneath her. One of them missed the hood, but the other two swam right into it.
'Booya!' Trisha screamed.
With that cry-it was as much dismay and shock as joy-Trisha bent forward again and grasped the lower edge of the hood. In doing so she almost overbalanced and went into the stream anyway, but she managed to stay up. She lifted the hood, full of water and slopping over the sides, in both hands. It shifted out of shape as she stepped back to the bank and more water slopped out, soaking the left leg of her jeans from hip to knee. One of the little trout went with it, twisting and flipping its tail in the air, then hitting the water and swimming away.
'SUGARTIT!' Trisha screamed, but now she was also laughing. As she worked her way up the bank, still holding the hood in front of her, she began coughing, as well.
