The Man With Candy by Jack Olsen

could imagine where the money was going so fast. I said, ‘Son, why do you want to spend your money like that?’ I thought maybe he was buying dope for others, ’cause I knew Johnny would never use dope himself. One day I asked him flat out not to run with the Baulch kid no more, and Johnny got mad. Well, I was mad, too! Every time I’d come home and say, ‘Where’s Johnny?’ Eunice’d say, ‘He just went to Billy’s for a few minutes.’ He wouldn’t stay home, and I’d tell Eunice, ‘Don’t let him go! I don’t want him down there,’ but she’d let him go anyway.”
    One May morning, Johnny Delome was walking out the back door when Gerald noticed that the boy’s stark black hair was hanging over his ears. “Son!” he called. “Don’t leave just yet. We’re gonna get a haircut in a while.”
    Later in the day, Eunice reported that Johnny was gone.
    “Whattaya mean, ‘gone’?” Gerald said.
    “He moved in with my sister.”
    “Just like that? You let him move out?”
    “Well, he didn’t wanna get his hair cut.”
    Gerald Oncale was furious. “So you let him leave ’cause he didn’t want to get a haircut?” he said. He stomped outside in disgust.
    Eunice Oncale’s sister lived a mile from the Oncale house. OnSunday, May 21, 1972, almost exactly a year after David Hilligiest and Malley Winkle had disappeared, she returned to her home to find that her nephew and his bike were gone.
    At eleven that same Sunday morning, Johnny Delome bounced into the sparsely furnished living room of the Baulch residence on Sixteenth Street, three blocks from his own house. “Do you want breakfast, Johnny?” asked a smiling woman with brown hair bunned and tied against her head.
    “I sure do, Mom,” the boy said. “I’m starving to death.” Johnny regularly called Janey Baulch “Mom,” and had even discussed moving in with the Baulches, but he was nervous about broaching the idea to Gerald Oncale, and the Baulches would not accept him without parental permission. Young Billy “Little Bill” Baulch, seventeen years old, a ruddy-complexioned boy with wavy hair the color of wheat, joined his pal after breakfast and the two decided to take a walk.
    “Where y’all goin’?” Janey Baulch asked her son.
    “Well, we’re just gonna git a Coke,” Little Bill said. “Do you have enough change for me to git a Coke?”
    Mrs. Baulch plundered her purse and produced two dollars, all her silver. The family, plus Johnny Delome, planned to attend a drive-in movie that night, and she said, “Now don’t stay gone too long and have me worried about you! Don’t y’all be late!” The boys laughed and waved and were gone, leaving their bicycles parked outside.
    Janey Baulch knew she had nothing to worry about. Little Bill sometimes rambled, but only with permission, and only after filing an estimated time of arrival and usually following it closely. The boy worshiped his father, Billy Gene, a swarthy cross-country truck driver and former cowboy from the Texas hill country near Waco. Whenever Billy Gene Baulch came back from one of his long trips, hauling Sheetrock for U.S. Gypsum Company, driving hiseighteen-wheeled thirty-one-geared red-and-white tractor-tandem for ten hours on and eight hours off, Little Bill and his friend Johnny Delome would be waiting eagerly on the front porch of the fusty old bungalow. “They alius wanted me to load the boat and take ’em to the lake,” the forty-one-year-old father reminisced. “Hail far, that’s all they ever thought about! I’d be so tarred and give out I couldn’t hardly put one foot before the other’n, and they’d be waitin’, and which I went, too. They’d just set there on the front porch till I was ready, and I didn’t thank no more of taking Johnny than I did my own son. He was over here half the time anyway.”
    With the two boys out for a Coke and her husband somewhere on the road, Janey Baulch straightened up the plain interior of the small house,