eyes.
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"Who're you?" For the boys, the mystery of the Picker was over, the fright half gone. Now
that they saw him, now that they had guns in their hands, the game was over.
"Cruz," he said carefully. "My name is Cruz." "What're you doing here?" John's voice was a
little high-pitched.
"De rain," he said and shrugged. He made no move to go. He was not alarmed.
John and Bobby stood where they were, out in the open, out of their fortress, in the mud
and a little uncertain. The Picker continued to sit where he sat, feet up out of the wet, back
solidly against the boards of the tenant house, arms folded across his large stomach. Of
the two parties, he was the more comfortable and - sheltered; the distribution of his weight
and his bulk advertised ease. Between him and the boys lay a noman's-land.
The boys were silent, and John, at least, was angry. They couldn't order the Picker out and
make it stick; they couldn't just walk up and beat the hell out of him; they couldn't shoot
him;· and they couldn't let him stay where he was. Barbara weighed on them too heavily.
What would Dianne do?
John lowered his gun and cradled it casually in
the bend of his arm. "Are you hungry?"
.
"Hungry?" There was amused disbelief in the Picker's voice, but there was a hint of
interest, too.
"Food." Bobby lowered his shotgun and patterned
himself after John.
"Where?" the Picker said. "Up at the house."
"What?" Everything the Picker said seemed to drag itself out, like the t-t-t-t of "what."
"I dunno. Different stuff. We're going to get something to eat. We're hungry." This was
nearly always true; it had the ring of sincerity to it.
"C'mon," Bobby added.
"To'd house?" There was the drawn-out sound se again.
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"There's nobody there for a while." "They're out."
"We're just down here camping for the night." "Oh, camping." There was irony in the
Picker's
voice.
"Well, it's better than standing out here." In his bravest move of the evening, John turned
his back on the enemy and started back for the front of the tenant house. Taken in by the
show of confidence, Bobby did the same. "Let's go."
After the longest time, there was a sound behind them and the heavy bending of weeds
and corn into the mud. The Picker was following.
"It just might work," Bobby whispered ahead. "Shut up."
In the morning the grass and weeds were doubly heavy from the rain and dew, and Dianne
stood on John's small dock feeling soiled and not-perfect, Her long, stilt like legs were wet,
her white socks sagging, and there was mud on her sandals. Summer-end weeds and chaff
stuck damply to almost every part of her body, and even the fine white hair on her arms
held downy bits of field fluff loosened by the night's storm. Behind her, silent and
trembling, Paul stood-he was in a state that might be called anticipatory shock-and he was
equally rumpled and disorganized. His neat blue shorts, immaculate fifteen minutes ago,
were now black-streaked and wrinkled where he had pushed through the path to the
Randall house ahead of her. Behind him-the dock being narrow-Cindy sat on the lone wet
board swinging her feet overside and staring indefinitely off into space. For the morning of
the day it was going to happen, everything seemed unfair and conspiring, but Dianne held
her disappointment and waited in her stiff, self-held way.
John's bailing can scraped rustily along the paintfiaked chine of the boat. "He spent the
night there," he said.
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"Where?" Everyone was speaking in stage whispers.
"In the rec room. On the floor. On a' sleeping bag." John emptied the can and continued
bailing without looking up. "Bobby stayed in his room with the gun, and I stayed down at
the tenant house with her."
Dianne looked at him, and when he said nothing more, assumed that their precious
prisoner remained just that way-captive, helpless and waiting. Nonetheless she felt bitter
and angry.
Through the night she had coped with strains far above the heads of most seventeen-year-
olds. There had been the business of helping Cindy make a cake for the Adams'
homecoming-(a project Cindy despised)-of smuggling Paul a sleeping pill and making him
take it, and of keeping herself cool and in command. Above all, however, there bad been
that problem of herself, almost of the person-within-the-person normally called Dianne.
. In a sense, it was a new phenomenon. Like everyone else, Dianne had always confided in
Dianne, self to self, intimately and privately, but the conversations or interming lings of
idea had always been controlled by the outward Dianne whom everyone thought to see.
The one Dianne proposed, and the other supplied: Dianne set forth the subject, the
fantasy, the daydream of the moment, and from within came the details, the variations,
the entire rich contents of cooperative, if inventive, imagination. This commonplace,
Dianne thought unique to herself-again she was seventeen and guarded it behind her pale
gray eyes as if it were some source of magic or wealth. As indeed it was. She rubbed the
lamp of what if, and the genie appeared.
During the Barbara adventure, however, from the moment she saw Barbara tied to the bed
and knew what Freedom Five controlled, Dianne's genie had not been so entirely docile.
The improbable having been done--she had first mentioned it to Paul, and he had blurted it
out to the rest of Freedom Five-the still more improbable suggested itself to her.
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There was an inner spoken phrase connected with this. It had come to her almost as a
physical sensation, one of boundless joy and power, and it began with the words, "We
could .... " (Sometimes it occurred as "I could .... " The jinn of imagination spoke, and she
was momentarily blinded, blurred by the potential implicit in the beginning of the
sentence; her interest quickened, the tips of her fingers burned.
Later in the week-when she had been helping clean the Adams house or watching naked
Barbara or dreaming on the river beach-an amplification of this sentence came to her: "We
could do it so beautifully that . ... " And Dianne was startled. By those words sounding in her
mind, apparently independent of her will, she was informed: to the limitless if urgent realm
of possibility was added the factor of beauty and symmetrical completeness. Mythology.
Like in her book. It was as if the wandering, innocent hand, having begun to draw a
segment of arc, discovered-the line surely commanded and not the person-the inevitability
of the circle. To each fair beginning, solution and finality are promised.
"We could kill her so beautifully that. ... " Dianne had stood up-electric, rapt, visionary-and
nearly wept. "We could kill her so beautifully that .... " Her plans for the execution had
begun immediately. "We could kill her so beautifully that .... " She bad told Paul that.