compulsive, addictive. Was that all anybody needed to become torturer, rapist, killer, just
the possibility and then the power and then a way out-free? Barbara saw back over the
past days as a single, horrible revelation. "Oh."
John picked up his damp shirt and put it on. He said nothing.
"But why didn't you stop? You could see what was happening, you can see what's
happening now. It's still going on."
"Because we didn't know, I guess." "But you do now!"
"Yeah, I guess so." He finished buttoning up and
stepped into his moccasins.
"Then stop it now." "I can't."
"Yes-you-can!" Barbara shouted. "Let me go.
Now. Right this minute. It won't even take a minute. And then it'll all be over, and you'll be
safe. It's your life, too, you know. They'll catch you no matter what you've thought up and
you'll spend the rest of your life in prison. You know that."
John's expression showed that he had, indeed, considered the matter, still had to consider
it, of course. It also showed that the risk had been accepted.
"You won't. Oh, god! You can, and you won't."
Barbara began to cry again. "He won't," she said aloud to the world around, "he won't, he
won't, he won't ... "
"It's too late." The regret was fading from John's voice. She had lost him for the last time.
Barbara looked up, and though John's face was water-blurry to her, she saw where his
thoughts had begun to wander. It was so horrible that she wet the sleeping bag and herself.
He was thinking about-about a world she would never know, a time (could it be as
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little as twelve hours from now?) that was beyond any time she would ever experience. He
was thinking beyond her lifetime.
It was impossible. He was thinking of something as ordinary as Saturday afternoon or
Sunday, perhaps, and it was all beyond her lifetime. And where would she be? In the
heaven she'd been told about? Cold and stiff in death and half hidden by the weeds of a
country ditch? Sunk in the river? Buried?
She could not even become hysterical. The look on his face, though not really intended for
her, was too numbing for there to be anything save the reactive spurt of urine all over her
legs. She even stopped crying. It was like being in shock. She went dead-cold; she
trembled uncontrollably; her breathing was irregular; she felt that she had forgotten how to
blink her eyes. They felt dry and wide open and unfocussed. She barely felt what was being
done to her.
John almost idly bound her ankles together again and them to her wrists again. He rolled
her on her side and closed the sleeping bag over her up to the neck, and then he passed
clothesline around the sleeping bag until she was cocooned. Then be gathered up his
things, looked around carefully for mistakes, gagged her, and left. She could hear him
going down the stairs and then gone.
Barbara understood.
She wasn't going to escape; she wouldn't die; and the prowler, whoever he had been, had
gone. There was no longer any need to guard her.
Nobody was coming.
Late in the morning Dianne came. Dianne came up the stairs of the tenant house and knelt
beside Barbara.
The dawn had come kindly over an unkind world for Barbara. The rain of the night had
washed out the dust and the haze and the mosquitoes from the air-and through the
window-the sky had been as green and clear and blameless as the sea, as green and cold-
blue
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as autumn, or the promise of autumn (which it was). There were comers and edges of
unbelievably soft, white-gray clouds which she could see through the win-
. dow. Bound, naked,. shivering even Within the sleeping bag, she had seen and felt the
chillness of the dawn and of the promised fall.
The day-to her limited field of vision-had grown in the same way, grown into a great,
white towering day of the change of seasons, summer and yet not any more summer,
not winter and yet winter to come. The day had grown into something of indescribable
beauty to her, something inscrutable, ironic, cruel, and yet still beautiful.
Is this the last and only one? Barbara said.
She had the hungry desire to be outside and in it, free and naked and bowed on her
knees, her forehead to the earth: she had the ravenous want to open her mouth and
bite the wholesome dirt, to feel the cool, damp grit and sand in her mouth and between
her teeth. It was a more ancient form of prayer than she had known before. I want the
dirt in my mouth, and then it will be all right, she thought. I want the dirt on my whole
face, dirt in iny hair, dirt against my whole body and then I'll be safe. On the earth, with
the grass and weeds lay anonymity, oneness, inviolability.
Is this the last and only day? Dirt, I pray to you. And a little while later, Dianne came up
the stairs.
She came slowly and coolly and quietly, and she carried impossible things. 'She carried
a pitcher of watercountry style-a washrag, a fresh, bristly nylon hairbrush, and-as
Barbara saw-cologne.
Before anything else, Dianne set these things down and took off her shorts and blouse.
This was done primly, obviously more out of a want to stay neat than from any near
attempt at disclosure. (It was diffi.-
, cult to imagine Dianne ever being naked entirely. Perhaps she never was.) Afterward,
Dianne knelt down and mostly untied Barbara. She undid the ropes around the
sleeping bag, opened it and undid the rope that John had put on hours earlier until
only three were left-ankles, wrists, upper arms. Everything else lay on
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the floor around them. Blood pushed through bruised arteries and again burned in
Barbara's body. Dianne was good. It was a simple thank you: Dianne might be going to help
kill her, but Dianne was kind. Barbara straightened out stiffly. Then Dianne began to bathe
her.
She did it with knowingness and gentleness and womanliness. So completely knowing was
Dianne's touch that Barbara had the feeling it was her own hands touching herself. She
bathed Barbara's streaked face and her neck and upper body and rinsed them softly. She
reached between Barbara's legs where John had forced her to orgasm and where she had
peed on herself, and washed her gently there. She washed her legs and feet and dried
them, and afterward she patted on the cologne she had brought. Finally she took Barbara's
head in her lap and brushed her hair.
There was sensuousness in it. The soap was mild and scented, and the wash cloth was
from an expensive monogrammed set. The cologne was summery, and the stroke of the
brush was gentle and lulling. Feeling all of it and knowing that she could be killed soon
now, Barbara took these little pleasures in bitterness.
If nothing happens, she said-what a big "if," what a steadily vanishing "if," what a never-
was-there "if," what a totally, impossible "if"-if nothing happens to stop what is happening,
I'm going to die. And 0 god, the sun's already up that high, the morning's going, help is