Let's Go Play at the Adams'

commercial spreads farmed by traveling machinery and-when the fruit was ripe-Pickers. And in

the fall-it was almost time, now-the Pickers came to help. They were dark Latin people with oily

shiny skin, dark luminous eyes, "heavy faces" and volatile natures. Their futures were also

hopeless. If Bobby had had the ability to phrase his opinion, he would have called them slaves-

to his parents, to his group.

For two or three weeks Pickers filled the country-

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side, spent their meager pay at Ti11man's or the local bars, and then disappeared again. They

spoke an incomprehensible language Bobby's parents called pachuco, and no one Bobby knew,

knew any of them.

During the period of their stay, Pickers might appear anywhere at any time doing anything. By

turns the local community depended upon, tolerated, persecuted and then drove them out.

And then they returned the next year unchanged. To Bobby, however, the idea of a Picker

camping in his marsh under the present circumstances, was menacing. The man might come

to the door; Barbara might make a noise; and then the whole plot might be exploded. In the

darkness he became much as his father was--careful.

He put down his milkshake half drunk, turned, and went down the hall, down the stairs into the

rec room where the guns were kept. There he put two shells into a .410 shotgun, several more

in his pocket, and went back upstairs, his heart now beating very irregularly. From Freedom

Five, Bobby had gained rather advanced notions of tactics. The way to defend a castle was not

to sit on the walls but to leave it there like a tantalizing target. What you really did was go out

into the woods, lie flat, let the enemy pass through you, and then shoot them from the rear.

This, in his thirteen-year-old manner, he did, opening the kitchen door (away from the fire),

sneaking out and down into the vegetable garden where he was concealed. Wild little thoughts

flitted. Wake Cindy? No, she was no use; she might get hurt. Let Barbara go? Again no use. Go

for help? It was too far away, too risky, too unavailable. Instead he crept ·down between the

lines of tomatoes (to the right) and beans (to the left) and knelt in the dust. Except for distant

thunder he could hear nothing, and he kept his cool.

As on the night his dog had been put to sleep by his father's merciful hand, as on the day he

was too sick to graduate from grammar school and had to miss the party, as on the day ... as

on the day ... he found here was nothing to do but accept life. It ran you, and

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you did not run it. The problem was to do the best you could with what you had-that was

another of his father's sayings.

So he lay down in the. vegetable garden alone, aware both of the unknown person or

persons down beside the marsh and· of Barbara and Cindy inside of the house. They were

all in his hands, and they didn't know it. He felt quite brave. And scared.

The fire in the marsh burned on, but no one came. The night wore out in wet dew, and

green became the color of the sky. Any adult walking past would have been hit by a

shotgun blast, but luckily (Bobby thought) it wasn't required. Eventually-nodding, fighting

it-he went to sleep, pink cheeks on crossed hands, the gun at his side.

The physically painful side of Barbara's captivity continued to worsen. Because of her

several struggles with Freedom Five, her wrists and ankles were· so raw that she bloodied

the ropes that held· her, and of course she could not hope to heal under the circumstances.

From containment and inactivity, her body steadily became more stiff and cranky; she was

slowly acquiring a form of bed sickness, so that when the children came and made her get

up, she felt dizzy for a moment. Her mouth was perpetually dry-the wad of cloth in her

mouth kept it so-and her throat from trying to swallow when there was nothing to swallow

was swollen and tender. Her lips, from being taped and untaped, were dry and sore, and

hunger pains came and went like menstrual cramps. The kids had never fed her much, and

refusing that chicken sandwich tonight had been stupid.

None of this was fatal, of course. She knew that.

None of it would leave so much as one scar, and yet considered as one-her small

complaints added up to torture.

To Barbara's thoughts tonight were added new problems. Paul had indeed scratched and

pricked her with his knife. John had indeed taken her virginity, 134

clumsily, but taken it: she had been opened for the first time, and she had bled a little (a very

little, she noted when she had been allowed to get up). All that was left now was a distant,

burning sensation between her legs.

Also, of course, there was the mental affront-humiliation, but more than that-a feeling of "going

down." With every day, her status as an adult, her hold on Freedom Five steadily declined.

Where she had begun as their keeper, she was now down to being their equal-less than equal