fluttered between the two locked faces, one furry and the other smooth. Minges flicked against the damp surfaces of Trisha's open, unblinking eyes. The thing's rudiment of a face was shifting and changing, always shifting and changing-it was the face of teachers and friends; it was the face of parents and brothers; it was the face of the man who might come and offer you a ride when you were walking home from school. Stranger-danger was what they had been taught in the first grade: stranger-danger. It stank of death and disease and everything random; the hum of its poisoned works was, she thought, the real Subaudible.
It rose up on its back legs again, swaying a little as if to beast-music only it could hear, and then it swatted at her ... yet it was playful, only playful as yet, missing her face by several inches. The passage of its earth-darkened claws breezed the hair off her forehead. The hair settled back light as milkweed puffs but Trisha did not move. She stood in the set position, looking through the bear's underbelly, where a bluish-white blaze of fur grew in a shape like a lightning bolt.
Look at me.
No.
Look at me!
It was as if unseen hands had grasped her beneath the angles of her jaw. Slowly, not wanting to but helpless to resist, Trisha raised her head. She looked up. She looked into the bear-thing's empty eyes and understood it meant to kill her no matter what. Courage was not enough. But so what? If a little courage was all you had, so what? It was time to close.
Without thinking about it, Trisha brought her left foot back against her right one and went into her motion-not the one her Dad had taught her in the back yard but the one she'd learned on TV, watching Gordon. When she stepped forward again and raised her right hand to her right ear and then beyond-really rearing back because this would be no lazy offspeed pitch, no eephus; this was going to be the heartbreaker, the serious bent cheese-the bear-thing took a clumsy, overbalanced step backward. Did the squirming things which lent it its dim vision register the baseball in her hand as a weapon? Or was it the threatening, aggressive motion which startled it-the raised hand, the stepping forward when she should have been stepping back and turning to run? It didn't matter. The thing grunted in what might have been perplexity. A little cloud of wasps puffed out of its mouth like living vapor. It waved one furry foreleg in an effort to keep its balance. As it struggled to stay on its feet, a shot rang out.
The man in the woods that morning, the first human being to see Trisha McFarland in nine days, was too shaken to even try lying to the police about why he had been in the woods with a high-powered autoload rifle; he'd been in the market for an out-of-season deer. His name was Travis Herrick, and he didn't believe in spending money on food if he didn't have to. There were too many other important things to spend money on-lottery tickets and beer, for instance. In any case, he was never tried for anything, or even fined, and he did not kill the creature he saw standing in front of the little girl, who faced it so still and so brave-like.
'If she'da moved when it first come up to her, it woulda tore her apart,' Herrick said. 'It's a wonder it didn't tear her apart anyways. She musta stared it down, just like Tarzan in them old jungle movies. I come over the rise and see the two of em, I musta stood there watchin em for twenty seconds at least. Might even have been a minute, you lose all track of time in a situation like that, but I couldn't shoot. They 'us too close together. I was afraid of hittin the girl. Then she moved. She had somethin in her hand and she went to throw it at im almost like she was pitchin a baseball. Her movin like that startled it. It stepped back and kinda lost its balance. I knew right there was the only chance that little girl had, so I lifted up my gun and I shot.'
No trial, no fine. What Travis Herrick got was his own float in Grafton Notch's 1998 Fourth of July parade. Yeah, baby.
Trisha heard the gunshot, knew it at once for what it was, and saw one of the thing's cocked ears suddenly fly apart at the very tip like a piece of shredded paper. She could see momentary squiglets of blue sky through the torn flaps; she also saw a scatter of red droplets, no bigger than checkerberries, fly into the air in an arc. At the same instant she saw that the bear was just a bear again, its eyes big and glassy and almost comically surprised. Or perhaps it had been a bear all along.
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 Energizer 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 allout fanny-wagging run. There was another whipcrack gunshot, 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 fucking 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.
