The Man With Candy Read Free

where I was at.”
    Freeport was a popular swimming and surfing spot on the Gulf of Mexico, and Mrs. Winkle was thoroughly disturbed that her son had gone so far. “What are you doin’ out there?” she said. “What in the world are you doin ’ there? Malley, you know better. You’ve never—”
    “I’m out here with the kids.”
    “What kids?”
    “Oh, just the kids,” Malley answered.
    Mrs. Winkle said she certainly hoped there were adults along, but Malley said no. “I’m just with some kids. Joe and the kids.”
    “Are there any girls?”
    “Mama, there’s just a buncha boys and we’re havin’ a swim out here.”
    Gerry Winkle asked how he had managed to get to Freeport, sixty miles away, and Malley said the “kids” had driven him. He said the others were out now, but any minute someone would return and drive him home to Houston.
    Mrs. Winkle said, “You know better than to be out this late.” She hung up the phone.
    For hours, the troubled woman fought off sleep. She remembered a time when Malley had gone to the Astroworld amusement park, eight miles away, and become so enthralled that he had missed the last bus home. He walked all the way, or so he told her when he came in at 3 A.M. Poor kid, she thought, I had to rub his feet and put him to bed. He was almost crying, he was so worn out. Well, at least he won’t have to walk this time. Drowsily, she wondered why Malley had had to ask someone else where he was. He knew Freeport backwards. Could he have been blindfolded? She was letting her imagination run away.
    Around four-thirty she dozed off, only to jump up several hours later with the apprehension that her son was in serious trouble. She checked his bed; it was undisturbed. The phone lay cold andsilent on its cradle. She telephoned a few young people around the neighborhood and learned that Malley and David had been seen talking to a man in a white van and that they had climbed in and been driven off, but the report was vague and insubstantial. No one was certain of anything, except that Malley was gone, and David along with him.
    Gerry Winkle had no idea where to turn. The very next morning—and every Monday morning—Malley was supposed to call his probation officer, and there already had been severe warning that he would be sent to the reformatory at Gatesville if he broke probation or got into any new trouble. Uncertain of the possibilities, Gerry Winkle paced the floor and deliberately avoided calling the police for help. “I just looked at the walls,” she said later, “and hoped to God he’d come back.”

Murdertown
    —Sumerian tablet, about 3500 B.C. The city, where the tumult of man is.
    H OUSTON, T EXAS, IS A CULTURE DISH of urban sprawl, a baffling and stultifying and astonishing congeries of good taste, bad taste and no taste scattered across five hundred square miles of flat Gulf coastal plains. It is also a vaporous cauldron where tempers are short and murder rates are high and there are few restraints, least of all on the God-given right to accumulate money.
    The wonder is that a metropolis of any magnitude should have come to life in the middle of the scrub brush and salt grass, unrelieved by mountain or hint of hill to shield the scalding sun. But there stands Houston, a sleepy country town thirty years ago, now rich and prospering and loudly proud, suddenly the nation’s sixthlargest city and clearly destined for third place behind those old beldames, New York and Chicago. Houston is growth and Houston is boom, and every local neophile will tell you: Houston is the future of the United States.
    What meets the eye downtown is a cluster of glassy buildings, some of them mirrored and buffed to a high shine, reflecting one another in bronze and silver and gold. A few are garnished with pools and fountains the color of lapis lazuli (dye added) and here and there are tightly coiffured ornamental trees or modernistic artworks of finespun wire and hammered brass. The entire