A Face in the Crowd

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 exchange for directions to North Berwick.
    Oh, bliss.

Missing the days of Red Sox glory?
    Visit your favourite eBook retailer to download Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan’s previous collaboration Faithful .
Steven King and Stewart O’Nan
    Faithful
     
    Early in 2004, two writers and Red Sox fans, Stewart O’Nan and Stephen King, decided to chronicle the upcoming season, one of the most hotly anticipated in baseball history. They would sit together at Fenway. They would exchange emails. They would write about the games. And, as it happened, they would witness the greatest comeback ever in sports, and the first Red Sox championship in eighty-six years. What began as a Sox-filled summer like any other is now a fan’s notes for the ages.
    “ Faithful is ultimately a quasi-religious book about what all great religions should be founded upon: love-in all its blindness and terror and euphoria and purity and, yes, addiction.”-Dennis Lehane, Entertainment Weekly .

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
    First Hodder eBook edition August 2012
    Copyright © 2012 by Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan

    The right of Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan to be identified as the Authors of the Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be