To this there was no reply. Perhaps even the cold voice, traitor that it was, understood that much - she'd had to drink, had to.
She slipped off her pack, opened it, and reverently took out her Walkman. She settled the earbuds into place and pushed the power button. WCAS was still strong enough to listen to, but the signal wasn't what it had been last night.
It made Trisha feel funny to think she had almost walked out of a radio station's broadcast area the way that you drove out of them when you were on a long car-trip. It made her feel funny, all right, very funny indeed. Funny in her stomach.
"All right," Joe Castiglione said. His voice was thin, seeming to come from a great distance. "Mo stands in and we're ready for the bottom of the fourth."
Suddenly the butterflutters were in her throat as well as her stomach, and those meaty hiccups - urk-urk, urk-urk - started again. Trisha rolled away from her shelter, lurched to her knees, and threw up into the shadows between two trees, holding onto one tree with her left hand and clutch-ing her stomach with her right.
She stayed where she was, gasping for breath and spit-ting out the taste of slightly used fiddleheads - sour, acidic - while Mo fanned on three pitches. Troy O'Leary was up next.
"Well, the Red Sox have got their work cut out for them,"
Troop remarked. "They're down seven to one in the bottom of the fourth and Andy Pettitte is twirling a gem."
"Oh sugartit," Trisha said, and then vomited again. She couldn't see what was coming out, it was too dark for that and she was glad, but it felt thin, more like soup than puke.
Something about the almost-rhyme of those two words, soup and puke, made her stomach immediately knot up again. She backed away from the trees between which she had thrown up, still on her knees, and then her bowels cramped again, this time more fiercely.
"Oh SUGARTIT!" Trisha wailed, tearing at the snap on the top of her jeans. She was sure she wasn't going to make it, absolutely positive, but in the end she was able to hold on just long enough to get her jeans and underwear yanked down and pulled out of the way. Everything down there came out in a hot, stinging rush. Trisha cried out and some bird in the dying light cried back, as if in mockery. When it was finally over and she tried to get on her feet, a wave of lightheadedness struck her. She lost her balance and plopped back down in her own hot mess.
"Lost and sitting in my own crap," Trisha said. She began to cry again, then also to laugh as it struck her funny. Lost and sitting in my own crap indeed, she thought.
She struggled up, crying and laughing, her jeans and underwear puddled around her ankles (the jeans were torn at both knees and stiff with mud, but at least she'd avoided dipping them in shit... so far, anyway). She pulled her pants off and walked to the stream, naked from the waist down and holding her Walkman in one hand. Troy O'Leary had singled around the time she lost her balance and plopped into her own poop; now as she stepped barefoot into the freezing cold stream, Jim Leyritz hit into a double play. Side retired. Utterly SECK-shoo-al.
Bending, getting water and splashing it onto her fanny and the backs of her thighs, Trisha said: "It was the water, Tom, it was the damn old water, but what was I supposed to do? Just look at it?"
Her feet were completely numb by the time she stepped out of the stream; her backside was also pretty numb, but at least she was clean again. She put on her underwear and her pants and was just doing the snap on the jeans when her stomach clenched again. Trisha took two big steps back to the trees, clutched the same one, and vomited again. This time there seemed to be nothing solid in it at all; it was like eject-ing two cups of hot water. She leaned forward and put her forehead against the pine tree's sticky bark. For just a moment she could imagine a sign on it, like the kind people hung over the doors of their lakeside and seaside camps: TRISHA'S PUKIN' PLACE. That made her laugh again, but it was bad laughter.
And through all the air between these woods and the world she had so foolishly believed was hers, that jingle was playing again, the one that went "Dial 1-800-54-GIANT."
Now her bowels again, tightening and cramping.
"No," Trisha said, with her forehead still against the tree and her eyes closed. "No, please, no more. Help me, God.
Please no more."
Don't waste your breath, said the cold voice. It's no good praying to the Subaudible.
The cramp loosened. Trisha walked slowly back to her shelter on legs that felt rubbery and unstable. Her back hurt from vomiting; her stomach muscles felt oddly sprung.
And her skin was hot. She thought maybe she had a fever.