He sighed-the put-upon male. "OK. For a few minutes."
Barbara had no one to talk to, however. They all left the room to change into their
swimsuits, and when they came back, they meant pure business.
"Thank you," she said bitterly and opened her mouth for them.
After that-nothing-just tape and numbness and immobility and silence.
With a whoop of relief, Freedom Five banged out of the house and down the path toward
the river, leaving Dianne to watch the prisoner first. Barbara tried to make sounds and get
her attention several times, but it was no use: being ignored by her only made Barbara's
ears and cheeks bum pink with anger and humiliation. And she was ignored.
Dianne unconcernedly curled up on the bed behind Barbara and began to read. Barbara
had heard of the book not long ago-it seemed pretty grown-up for Dianne-a book club
selection about mythology and ancient times (which were often sexy and sometimes
gruesome, if the reviews were half right). In spite of this, Dianne read with absorption:
Barbara could see her by looking in the vanity mirror and thence backward over her own
shoulder.
The girl's face was pale and stem and distant. If Barbara had been able to speak to her,
she would not have been sure of getting an answer at all.
38
It was evening but still light. Having helped with the dishes and separated the trash-"hard"
things for fill, paper for burning, vegetables for compost-John Randall descended his
veranda steps and stood looking toward a spot indeterminately between sky and earth.
The Randall house was next upriver from the Adams', the dividing line being Oak Creek.
Like the Adams house, it faced the water but after that, the situation was quite different.
An older, much added-to frame building with porches and gingerbread, oddly placed
chimneys and roof angles, it sat on a knoll facing almost due west across the confluence of
creek and river. From it, a mowed lawn-John's work-rounded down to a marsh on the river
side. Where the cropped grass ended, water pooled, and a meadow of drowned reeds
began. On the creek side, the same lawn ran right to title's edge, and there hung a single-
plank, weather grayed dock.
The appeal to the senses offered by these sights was pleasant enough. The wind was still,
the river reflecting twilight was deceptively blue and clean, and its surface was rippled only
by feeding fish here and there. By contrast, Oak Creek was sunk in shadow to the left: in
another twenty minutes it would merge with the dark stand of pine on the Adams property.
Lightning bugs were out, frogs disputed, a faint smell of dust came from the cooling
ground, all pleasant enough, indeed. Nonetheless, the view had not been pleasant to John
39
for a long time now. In many ways, it even appeared as the confines of a prison, not so
much one of place (though it was) as one of process, a system from which he could not
escape or even imagine escape. He was growing up, and they were waiting for him.
Plans were laid.
If he got good grades-and they were fair enough-two years from now on an equal
evening of late August, he would be all but departed for college. Four years more with
working in the summer plus these immediate two, made it six years in all. Afterward he
would go into the family business in Bryce or get a job and- What?
John's lack of clarity and motivation at this point was not blamable on poor training.
Cause and effect, work and reward, had been hammered into his head and reinforced
from the beginning. It was simply that being familiar with both, he found them
commonplace, worth neither waiting nor striving for.
The fact was that John-quite predictably-wanted freedom now. By nature (if he disclosed
it), by size, weight, strength, intelligence and desire, he was ready to become an
apprentice adult, to be where wars were fought, rockets were fired, ships were steered
and ice caps crossed. He was ready for girls and love. His spirit not only bent under the
weight of years that separated him from these things practically, but cracked at the re-
alization that such visions would never come true without enduring the same heavy
and future years.
Before colonels commanded or astronauts flew, they were nearly forty! They told you
all these things you could be, but the truth of it was that when you wanted it you
couldn't have it, and when you got it, you were old and boring like everybody else. It
quenched ambition-growing up simply took too longand he made no plans and few
starts. John was allowed his judgment: most people are. And in his judgment, nothing
that grown-ups offered him-given the prerequisite qualifications-was worth a good
goddamn. What the world was out to do was kill him, or at least
40
the part of himself he considered best. Well, the hell with them all. He put himself on
answering serviceyes, sir; no, ma'am-and drifted on the now. Such was the John Randall of
the background, the one revealed by himself to himself in long, not infrequently self-pitying
moods.
To see John Randall at the moment, however, would be to miss this entire personality.
Indeed to the unfamiliar eye he would seem-standing at the foot of the veranda steps-alert,
wholly engaged, mentally charged, and even impatient. If he had been vague for several
days, it was only because he was suddenly dazzled. Without expecting or intending to, he
had stumbled into life; though he dare tell no one, he all at once felt himself to be living.
Flinging away from the house and the noise of the endless TV, John descended the lawn to
the dock and slipped into his rowboat. There, not twenty yards across the creek, the Adams
property began. Go up the clay bank, back through the woods by the path, across the field
to the vegetable garden and you'd be at the house. It wouldn't take forty-five minutes-
fifteen minutes going, fifteen there, and fifteen back again-and he would have seen
Barbara again. Unfortunately, of course, they had all agreed to do nothing unusual to at-
tract attention, and normally he never went over there at night. Dropping down on the
center thwart of the boat, he sat knees together, shoulders sloping, chin in hand, inducing
and savoring a new feeling of miserable bliss.
Actually, when it comes to sheer exposure of flesh, John Randall had seen much- more of
Barbara the times that everyone had gone swimming together than he ever had today. Her
bikini bathing suit worn unconsciously in their presence, left exactly three and a half small
things to the imagination, and while John admired her more than he hoped was noticeable,
still it was somewhat abstract admiration.
Barbara was fun and friendly and a helluva good swimmer; she was almost like one of
them, but it frost-
41
ed him that like other adults, she just seemed to take it for granted that all kids were
dumb and innocent and friendly and everything else, and that all they thought of was
staying in line and having fun. Her obvious assumption that down deep they were just
what she wanted them to be-good and well-behaved-was a real put-down. Her
stupidity, her cheerful bossiness, that coercion be could forgive in someone really,