"Okay," she said, standing up again and nervously re-adjusting the straps of her pack. "Okay, berries ho. But if it gets too gross, I'm going back." She gave the straps one final tug and started forward again, walking slowly over the increasingly wet ground, testing each step as she went, detouring around the skeletal standing trees and the fallen tangles of deadwood.
Eventually - it might have been half an hour after start-ing forward again, it might have been forty-five minutes - Trisha discovered what thousands (perhaps even millions) of men and women before her have discovered: by the time it gets too gross, it's often also too late to go back. She stepped from an oozy but stable patch of ground onto a hummock that wasn't a hummock at all but only a disguise. Her foot went into a cold, viscous substance that was too thick to be water and too thin to be mud. She tilted, grabbed a jutting dead branch, screamed in fright and vexation when it snapped off in her hand. She fell forward into long grass that hopped with bugs. She got a knee under her and yanked her foot back. It came with a loud sucking plop, but her sneaker stayed down there someplace.
"No!" she yelled, loud enough to scare a big white bird into flight. It exploded upward, trailing long legs behind it as it became airborne. In another place and time, Trisha would have stared at this exotic apparition with breathless wonder, but now the bird barely registered. She turned around on her knees, her right leg covered with shining black muck up to the knee, and plunged her arm into the water-welling hole which had temporarily swallowed her foot.
"You can't have it!" she shouted furiously. "It's mine and you... can't... HAVE IT!"
She felt around in the cold murk, fingers tearing through membranes of roots or dodging between those too thick to tear. Something that felt alive pressed briefly against her palm, and then was gone. A moment later her hand closed over her sneaker and she pulled it out. She looked at it - a black mudshoe just right for an all-over-mudgirl, the very thing, the total puppy-shits, Pepsi would have said - and began to cry again. She lifted the sneaker up, tilted it, and a stream of grunge ran out of it. That made her laugh. For a minute or so she sat on the hummock with her legs crossed and the rescued sneaker in her lap, laughing and crying at the center of a black orbiting universe of bugs while the dead trees stood sentinel all around her and the crickets hummed.
At last her weeping tapered to sniffles, her laughter to choked and somehow humorless giggles. She tore handfuls of grass out of the hummock and wiped the outside of the sneaker as well as she could. Then she opened her pack, tore up the empty lunchbag, and used the pieces as towels to swab out the inside. These pieces she balled up and threw indifferently behind her. If someone wanted to arrest her for littering this butt-ugly, bad-smelling place, just let them.
She stood up, still holding the rescued sneaker in her hand, and looked ahead. "Oh f**k," Trisha croaked.
It was the first time in her life she had said that particular word out loud. (Pepsi said it sometimes, but Pepsi was Pepsi.) She could now more clearly see the green she had mistaken for a hill. It was hummocks, that was all, just more hummocks. Between them was more standing, stag-nant water and more trees, most dead but some with fluffs of green at the top. She could hear frogs croaking. No hill.
From bog to swamp, bad to worse.
She turned and looked back but could no longer tell where she had entered this purgatorial zone. If she'd thought to mark the place with something bright - a piece of her nasty old shredded poncho, say - she might have gone back. But she hadn't, and that was that.
You can go back anyway - you know the general direction.
Maybe, but she wasn't going to follow the kind of think-ing that had gotten her into this mess in the first place.
Trisha turned toward the hummocks and the bleary glints of sun on scummy standing water. Plenty of trees to hold onto, and the swamp had to end somewhere, didn't it?
You're crazy to even think about it.
Sure. It was a crazy situation.
Trisha stood a moment longer, her thoughts now going to Tom Gordon and that special stillness of his - it was how he stood on the mound, watching one of the Red Sox catch-ers, Hatteberg or Veritek, flash the signs. So still (the way she was standing now), all of that deep stillness seeming to somehow spin out around him from the shoulders. And then to the set and the motion.
He's got icewater in his veins, her Dad said.
She wanted to get out of here, out of this nasty swamp to start with and then out of the damned woods altogether; wanted to get back to where there were people and stores and malls and phones and policemen who would help you if you lost your way. And she thought she could. If she could be brave. If she had just a little of the old icewater in her veins.