The Man With Candy by Jack Olsen Page A

turned on the battered air conditioner that sounded like a light plane warming up, and attended to the needs of her other four children. She was surprised that Little Bill and Johnny Delome were not back by late afternoon, but the movie started at dusk and there was still plenty of time. Young Billy was nervous at night; he suffered from a deep-seated fear of the dark. “Not that he was just scared of plain darkness,” his mother explained apologetically, “but the things that might be in the dark.” His fifteen-year-old brother, Michael Anthony “Tony” Baulch, was the mirror opposite; he seemed to crave carousing at all hours, gadding about the senescent neighborhood where his family had lived for twenty years. Tony had a tendency to disappear, and more than once his parents had reported him to police as a runaway. Tony bore more watching than Little Bill, but the parents tried to be extraprotective of both. Three years before, they had lost their oldest son in an automobile accident.
    By nightfall, Billy and Johnny Delome had not returned, and Mrs. Baulch checked outside and saw that their bicycles were undisturbed; clearly they had planned no extended trip. The younger children were already complaining about being late for the movie,and Janey kept watching the clock and growing more anxious. Finally she left a note and a key in the mailbox and piled the children into the old family sedan.
    A double feature was playing, but the preoccupied woman barely noticed. “I must of called home ten times durin’ that picture,” she said. “Up and down, up and down, till I drove the other folks crazy. I was worried to death, and when the second feature started, I tole the kids, ‘Come own, we’re goin’!” Little Bill was the type of boy who phoned to apologize if he was going to be ten minutes late for dinner. Now it was pushing toward midnight, and something had to be wrong.
    Janey waited by the phone into the next morning. When her road-weary husband pulled in, she told him, “Somethin’ bad’s happened to those boys. I can feel it. Somebody’s got ’em where they cain’t contact us.”
    “It may be,” Billy Gene Baulch said. Life had conditioned him to expect the worst. “Little Bill sure ain’t the runnin’ kind.” When there was no word by the next morning, he called police and made a missing person’s report. On Wednesday, three days after the disappearance, the postman brought a letter from Madisonville, Texas, a small town about seventy miles north of Houston:
    Dear Mom and Dad, I am sorry to do this, But Johnny and I found a better Job working for a trucker loading and unloading from Houston to Washington and we’ll be back in three to four Weeks. After a week I will send money to help You and Mom out. Love, Billy
    “It don’t even sound like Little Bill,” Billy Gene Baulch said. “It don’t rang right at all.” He studied the letter. The small envelope was addressed in his son’s unmistakable childish scrawl, and was postmarked May 23, 1972, the day before. The note itself, on lined paper, seemed to be in a slightly different handwriting, as though someone had tried to imitate Little Bill’s hand, or as though the boy had written under abnormal conditions.
    “Janey,” Billy Gene said, “nobody gets a job of loadin’ and unloadin’ on the road. Nobody! It don’t work that way. Different people load and unload at every stop, but never anybody on the truck. When you’re a trucker, you don’t touch a truck except’n to drive it, because if you do, you’ll be throwed out the gate.”
    He asked his wife if anything untoward had happened on Sunday to upset the boys or make them angry. “Nothin’,” Mrs. Baulch said. “Not a single thing. They had a nice breakfast and they was lookin’ forward to the movie.”
    “Did they take anythin’?”
    “Just what they was wearin’.”
    “I cain’t imagine them runnin’ away,” Billy Gene said. “They seemed so satisfied here,