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Titolo: primo capitolo di TGWLTG

Per chi conosce l'inglese ecco il primo capitolo dell'ultima novella di King
The Girl who loved Tom Gordon
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Pregame
     The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.
     Trisha McFarland discovered this when she was nine years old. At ten
     o'clock on a morning in early June she was sitting in the back seat of
     her mother's Dodge Caravan, wearing her blue Red Sox batting practice
     jersey (the one with 36 GORDON on the back) and playing with Mona, her
     doll. At ten thirty she was lost in the woods. By eleven she was
     trying not to be terrified, trying not to let herself think, This is
     serious, this is very serious. Trying not to think that sometimes when
     people got lost in the woods they got seriously hurt. Sometimes they
     died.
     All because I needed to pee, she thought...except she hadn't needed to
     pee all that badly, and in any case she could have asked Mom and Pete
     to wait up the trail a minute while she went behind a tree. They were
     fighting again, gosh what a surprise that was, and that was why she
     had dropped behind a little bit, and without saying anything. That was
     why she had stepped off the trail and behind a high stand of bushes.
     She needed a breather, simple as that. She was tired of listening to
     them argue, tired of trying to sound bright and cheerful, close to
     screaming at her mother, Let him go, then! If he wants to go back to
     Malden and live with Dad so much, why don't you just let him? I'd
     drive him myself if I had a license, just to get some peace and quiet
     around here! And what then? What would her mother say then? What kind
     of look would come over her face? And Pete. He was older, almost
     fourteen, and not stupid, so why didn't he know better? Why couldn't
     he just give it a rest? Cut the crap was what she wanted to say to him
     (to both of them, really), just cut the crap.
     The divorce had happened a year ago, and their mother had gotten
     custody. Pete had protested the move from suburban Boston to southern
     Maine bitterly and at length. Part of it really was wanting to be with
     Dad, and that was the lever he always used on Mom (he understood with
     some unerring instinct that it was the one he could plant the deepest
     and pull on the hardest), but Trisha knew it wasn't the only reason,
     or even the biggest one. The real reason Pete wanted out was that he
     hated Sanford Middle School.
     In Malden he'd had it pretty well whipped. He'd run the computer club
     like it was his own private kingdom; he'd had friends -- nerds, yeah,
     but they went around in a group and the bad kids didn't pick on them.
     At Sanford Middle there was no computer club and he'd only made a
     single friend, Eddie Rayburn. Then in January Eddie moved away, also
     the victim of a parental breakup. That made Pete a loner, anyone's
     game. Worse, a lot of kids laughed at him. He had picked up a nickname
     which he hated: Pete's CompuWorld.
     On most of the weekends when she and Pete didn't go down to Malden to
     be with their father, their mother took them on outings. She was
     grimly dedicated to these, and although Trisha wished with all her
     heart that Mom would stop -- it was on the outings that the worst
     fights happened -- she knew that wasn't going to happen. Quilla
     Andersen (she had taken back her maiden name and you could bet Pete
     hated that, too) had the courage of her convictions. Once, while
     staying at the Malden house with Dad, Trisha had heard their father
     talking to his own Dad on the phone. "If Quilla had been at Little Big
     Horn, the Indians would have lost," he said, and although Trisha
     didn't like it when Dad said stuff like that about Mom -- it seemed
     babyish as well as disloyal -- she couldn't deny that there was a
     nugget of truth in that particular observation.
     Over the last six months, as things grew steadily worse between Mom
     and Pete, she had taken them to the auto museum in Wiscasset, to the
     Shaker Village in Gray, to The New England Plant-A-Torium in North
     Wyndham, to Six-Gun City in Randolph, New Hampshire, on a canoe trip
     down the Saco River, and on a skiing trip to Sugarloaf (where Trisha
     had sprained her ankle, an injury over which her mother and father had
     later had a screaming fight; what fun divorce was, what really good
     fun).
     Sometimes, if he really liked a place, Pete would give his mouth a
     rest. He had pronounced Six-Gun City "for babies," but Mom had allowed
     him to spend most of the visit in the room where the electronic games
     were, and Pete had gone home not exactly happy but at least silent. On
     the other hand, if Pete didn't like one of the places their Mom picked
     (his least favorite by far had been the Plant-A-Torium; returning to
     Sanford that day he had been in an especially boogery frame of mind),
     he was generous in sharing his opinion. "Go along to get along" wasn't
     in his nature. Nor was it in their mother's, Trisha supposed. She
     herself thought it was an excellent philosophy, but of course everyone
     took one look at her and pronounced her her father's child. Sometimes
     that bothered her, but mostly she liked it.
     Trisha didn't care where they went on Saturdays, and would have been
     perfectly happy with a steady diet of amusement parks and mini-golf
     courses just because they minimized the increasingly horrible
     arguments. But Mom wanted the trips to be instructive, too -- hence
     the Plant-A-Torium and Shaker Village. On top of his other problems,
     Pete resented having education rammed down his throat on Saturdays,
     when he would rather have been up in his room, playing Sanitarium or
     Riven on his Mac. Once or twice he had shared his opinion ("This
     sucks!" pretty well summed it up) so generously that Mom had sent him
     back to the car and told him to sit there and "compose himself" until
     she and Trisha came back.
     Trisha wanted to tell Mom she was wrong to treat him like he was a
     kindergartener who needed a time-out -- that someday they'd come back
     to the van and find it empty, Pete having decided to hitchhike back to
     Massachusetts -- but of course she said nothing. The Saturday outings
     themselves were wrong, but Mom would never accept that. By the end of
     some of them Quilla Andersen looked at least five years older than
     when they had set out, with deep lines grooved down the sides of her
     mouth and one hand constantly rubbing her temple, as if she had a
     headache...but she would still never stop. Trisha knew it. Maybe if
     her mother had been at Little Big Horn the Indians still would have
     won, but the body-count would have been considerably higher.
     This week's outing was to an unincorporated township in the western
     part of the state. The Appalachian Trail wound through the area on its
     way to New Hampshire. Sitting at the kitchen table the night before,
     Mom had shown them photos from a brochure. Most of the pictures showed
     happy hikers either striding along a forest trail or standing at
     scenic lookouts, shading their eyes and peering across great wooded
     valleys at the time-eroded but still formidable peaks of the central
     White Mountains.
     Pete sat at the table, looking cataclysmically bored, refusing to give
     the brochure more than a glance. For her part, Mom had refused to
     notice his ostentatious lack of interest. Trisha, as was increasingly
     her habit, became brightly enthusiastic. These days she often sounded
     to herself like a contestant on a TV game show, all but peeing in her
     pants at the thought of winning a set of waterless cookware. And how
     did she feel to herself these days? Like glue holding together two
     pieces of something that was broken. Weak glue.
     Quilla had closed the brochure and turned it over. On the back was a
     map. She tapped a snaky blue line. "This is Route 68," she said.
     "We'll park the car here, in this parking lot." She tapped a little
     blue square. Now she traced one finger along a snaky red line. "This
     is the Appalachian Trail between Route 68 and Route 302 in North
     Conway, New Hampshire. It's only six miles, and rated Moderate.
     Well...this one little section in the middle is marked
     Moderate-to-Difficult, but not to the point where we'd need climbing
     gear or anything."
     She tapped another blue square. Pete was leaning his head on one hand,
     looking the other way. The heel of his palm had pulled the left side
     of his mouth up into a sneer. He had started getting pimples this year
     and a fresh crop gleamed on his forehead. Trisha loved him, but
     sometimes -- last night at the kitchen table, as Mom explained their
     route, for example -- she hated him, too. She wanted to tell him to
     stop being a chicken, because that was what it came down to when you
     cut to the chase, as their Dad said. Pete wanted to run back to Malden
     with his little teenage tail between his legs because he was a
     chicken. He didn't care about Mom, didn't care about Trisha, didn't
     even care if being with Dad would be good for him in the long run.
     What Pete cared about was not having anyone to eat lunch with on the
     gym bleachers. What Pete cared about was that when he walked into
     homeroom after the first bell someone always yelled, "Hey CompuWorld!
     Howya doon, homo-boy?"
     "This is the parking lot where we come out," Mom had said, either not
     noticing that Pete wasn't looking at the map or pretending not to. "A
     van shows up there around three. It'll take us back around to our car.
     Two hours later we're home again, and I'll haul you guys to a movie if
     we're not too tired. How does that sound?"
     Pete had said nothing last night, but he'd had plenty to say this
     morning, starting with the ride up from Sanford. He didn't want to do
     this, it was ultimately stupid, plus he'd heard it was going to rain
     later on, why did they have to spend a whole Saturday walking in the
     woods during the worst time of the year for bugs, what if Trisha got
     poison ivy (as if he cared), and on and on and on.
     Yatata-yatata-yatata. He even had the gall to say he should be home
     studying for his final exams. Pete had never studied on Saturday in
     his life, as far as Trisha knew. At first Mom didn't respond, but
     finally he began getting under her skin. Given enough time, he always
     did. By the time they got to the little dirt parking area on Route 68,
     her knuckles were white on the steering wheel and she was speaking in
     clipped tones which Trisha recognized all too well. Mom was leaving
     Condition Yellow behind and going to Condition Red. It was looking
     like a very long six-mile walk through the western Maine woods, all in
     all.
     At first Trisha had tried to divert them, exclaiming over barns and
     grazing horses and picturesque graveyards in her best
     oh-wow-it's-waterless-cookware voice, but they ignored her and after
     awhile she had simply sat in the back seat with Mona on her lap (her
     Dad liked to call Mona Moanie Balogna) and her knapsack beside her,
     listening to them argue and wondering if she herself might cry, or
     actually go crazy. Could your family fighting all the time drive you
     crazy? Maybe when her mother started rubbing her temples with the tips
     of her fingers, it wasn't because she had a headache but because she
     was trying to keep her brains from undergoing spontaneous combustion
     or explosive decompression, or something.
     To escape them, Trisha opened the door to her favorite fantasy. She
     took off her Red Sox cap and looked at the signature written across
     the brim in broad black felt-tip strokes; this helped get her in the
     mood. It was Tom Gordon's signature. Pete liked Mo Vaughn, and their
     Mom was partial to Nomar Garciaparra, but Tom Gordon was Trisha's and
     her Dad's favorite Red Sox player. Tom Gordon was the Red Sox closer;
     he came on in the eighth or ninth inning when the game was close but
     the Sox were still on top. Her Dad admired Gordon because he never
     seemed to lose his nerve -- "Flash has got icewater in his veins,"
     Larry McFarland liked to say -- and Trisha always said the same thing,
     sometimes adding that she liked Gordon because he had the guts to
     throw a curve on three-and-oh (this was something her father had read
     to her in a Boston Globe column). Only to Moanie Balogna and (once) to
     her girlfriend, Pepsi Robichaud, had she said more. She told Pepsi she
     thought Tom Gordon was "pretty good-looking." To Mona she threw
     caution entirely to the winds, saying that Number 36 was the
     handsomest man alive, and if he ever touched her hand she'd faint. If
     he ever kissed her, even on the cheek, she thought she'd probably die.
     Now, as her mother and her brother fought in the front seat -- about
     the outing, about Sanford Middle School, about their dislocated life
     -- Trisha looked at the signed cap her Dad had somehow gotten her in
     March, just before the season started, and thought this:
     I'm in Sanford Park, just walking across the playground to Pepsi's
     house on an ordinary day. And there's this guy standing at the hotdog
     wagon. He's wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt and he's got a gold
     chain around his neck -- he's got his back to me but I can see the
     chain winking in the sun. Then he turns around and I see...oh I can't
     believe it but it's true, it's really him, it's Tom Gordon, why he's
     in Sanford is a mystery but it's him, all right, and oh God his eyes,
     just like when he's looking in for the sign with  men on base, those
     eyes, and he smiles and says he's a little lost, he wonders if I know
     a town called North Berwick, how to get there, and oh God, oh my God
     I'm shaking, I won't be able to say a word, I'll open my mouth and
     nothing will come out but a little dry squeak, what Dad calls a
     mousefart, only when I try I can speak, I sound almost normal, and I
     say...
     I say, he says, then I say and then he says: thinking about how they
     might talk while the fighting in the front seat of the Caravan drew
     steadily farther away. (Sometimes, Trisha had decided, silence was
     life's greatest blessing.) She was still looking fixedly at the
     signature on the visor of her baseball cap when Mom turned into the
     parking area, still far away (Trish is off in her own world was how
     her father put it), unaware that there were teeth hidden in the
     ordinary texture of things and she would soon know it. She was in
     Sanford, not in TR-90. She was in the town park, not at an entry-point
     to the Appalachian Trail. She was with Tom Gordon, Number 36, and he
     was offering to buy her a hotdog in exhange for directions to North
     Berwick.
     Oh, bliss.
     Copyright &copy; 1999 by Stephen King
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Saluti :
Gordie

 The Girl who loved Tom Gordon
Grazieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee !!!! ;-)
						Diego
					Fornit Some Fornus
--
                                                    |"|
                                                   _|_|_
                                                   (O-O)
+----------------------------------------------ooO--(_)--Ooo--------+
| ________   __  ____                                               |
| \______ \ |__|/  _ \    ____   ____   Qualcosa di MIO lo lascero' |
|  |    |  \|  |>  _ </\ / ___\ /  _ \      in questo mio tempo     |
|  |    `   \  /  <_\ \// /_/  /  <_> )                             |
| /_______  /__\_____\ \\___  / \____/    TIMORIA - Senza Vento -   |
|         \/          \/_____/                                      |
|                                                                   |
|    E-Mail : 
dg53...@silab.dsi.unimi.it
                           |
|           : 
Kin...@hotmail.com
                                   |
|                                                                   |
|  Web Page : 
http://www.silab.dsi.unimi.it/~dg535002
               |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

The Girl who loved Tom Gordon
Pretty fly , Gordie...thanks a lot...
Ciao
Lars
            Lars Ulrich
 ICQ#33036222
THE FOURHORSEMEN STILL RIDE AND KICK ASS
              * Trashin' from Frisco *
Sabato 5 Giugno METALLICA -DEATH- FEAR FACTORY
Domenica 6 Giugno MOTORHEAD - MANOWAR- ANGRA
             AreaEstiva-FORUM-Assago/Milano
            -  CLIFF IS ALWAYS BETWEEN US -
CA##O !!! 66k un giorno...110k tutti e due...

Grazieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee !!!! ;-)
Grazie Gordie, mi sa che verso il 6 aprile ripasso da feltrinelli
international
^______________^
Jonas                      
tu...@tin.it
ICQ #26577568
"Vai allora. Ci sono altri mondi oltre a questo."
King e la Torre
http://utenti.tripod.it/Jonas/
Sito it.fan.tv.friends
http://friends.acmecity.com/monicuddle/177

novella di King The Girl who loved Tom Gordon
Ma sei autorizzato? Beh, in ogni caso: grazie. Cercherň di leggerlo al
piů presto.
--
Saluti, Kap
ALM Corp. Vaccagher Inside!
Transcendency Div. - Managing Director
**********************************************************************
*Si abbracciarono cosi' stretti che non rimase spazio per i sentimenti. Lec
**********************************************************************
Se vuoi vedermi: 
http://www.blissett.com/ihu/Faccenew/kap.html
Togli Stacippa dall'indirizzo, se no ti si piega***
ICQ# 19857429
Firma progettata in collaborazione con Tagz e PP

Ma sei autorizzato?
Visto che a me e' arrivato in email privata mi sente autorizzato a
rimetterlo in NG per la gioia di tutti i fans.
E comunque e' perfettamente leggibile online sul sito
http://www.simonsays.com
saluti :
Gordie

...



Grazie Gordie, mi-ti-co!
PS: scommetto che nella traduzione italiana il nome della bambola di Trisha
lo cambiano! ^__^
Byez
Sebastiano