The Man With Candy (2 page)

Mother, I went over to a friend’s house. I’ll be back after-while. Love Malley.

He remembered special occasions:

Dear mother this $10 well $5 of it is for your mothers day gift, not for bills, for something that you want.

Spend it on yourself!

This $5 doesn’t come out of the money that I owe you, I still owe you $25.

This is your mothers day gift.

P.S. I didn’t know what to buy you. I love you!

One summer he went to a public camp and dispatched a letter reminiscent of the wry satire of Allan Sherman:

Dear Mother I hope every thang is alright there. I am having fun at camp. I am going to go shoping after I get to Houston and then I will be home. One of my best friends got bit buy a copper-head snake
when he was going on and highk. Give Ben a kiss for me. I love you. Malley W. xxxxxooooooo.

He was a handsome boy, with blond wavy hair, oversize blue eyes with long lashes and thick brows, and an easy, wide grin that he bestowed on everyone, as though there was something hugely amusing about his fellow man.

Privately he suffered the agonies of youth. “He used to get hair straightener like the colored people use,” his mother said, “and work on his hair by the hour, ’cause he wanted it like all the other kids.’ But he couldn’t get it straight, and he was furious.” By his sixteenth birthday, Malley had grown to five feet seven inches, only two inches shorter than his mother, with a slender build accented by broad shoulders. Little Benjamin, eight years younger, lionized his “Bubba.” Mrs. Winkle said, ‘I’d take Ben to the baby-sitter before I went to work, and he’d run right back home to Bubba. One day I took him to the sitter and a little while later I eased back through the front door and there was Ben with the TV on and a dog in his lap that he was pattin’ on the head, and he had a glass of milk and a sandwich and he was sittin’ in the rocker relaxin’, and pretty soon he picked up a plastic pipe I’d bought him and he puffs on the pipe like a li’l ol’ gray-headed man. I was gonna spank him, but I had to laugh.”

The incident made Gerry Winkle realize that she could no longer depend on the inexpensive baby-sitters of the neighborhood, and she laid plans to send Ben twenty miles away to Boy’s Harbor, a foster home operated by the Shriners. By now both sons had begun to squirm out from under her control; from the time she went to work in the early afternoons, Malley was completely his own boss, and he was traveling with a gang of older boys. One night Gerry Winkle came home to find that her son had been arrested for stealing one of the precious ten-speed racers that every child in the neighborhood coveted.

“The police kept him in jail for about a month,” Mrs. Winkle
recalled. “They said I could take him home if I wanted to, ’cause it wasn’t Malley’s fault. It was the other boys with him that really stole the bike, and all Malley did was ride it. But the police said the sooner he learned the difference between a felony and a misdemeanor, the better off he’d be. They said, ‘Miz Winkle, he has the chance to be the President of the United States if he learns his lesson young.’ They were
so
impressed by him. They loved him!”

Malley was put on juvenile probation and returned home. In an outburst of boyish ingenuousness, he admitted that he had smoked marijuana two or three times, drunk a little, and sniffed glue and acrylic paint, but he swore to reform. Gerry Winkle forgave her firstborn son. “A kid that’s had it tough all his life, how can you not forgive him? He never had a chance, with no father and all.”

On a Saturday afternoon soon after the bicycle incident, David Hilligiest knocked on the door just as Mrs. Winkle was getting ready to leave for her job at the hospital. She was surprised to see him. She knew that Mrs. Hilligiest was an extremely protective mother who lately had frowned on the close friendship between the two boys.

David wanted to go swimming, and Malley asked his mother for eighty cents to get into the Bohemian lodge pool. Mrs. Winkle gave him a dollar and a half, but Malley insisted on handing back fifty cents; “that’s the kind of guy he was.” When she saw the two boys last, Malley was wearing gray-and-white-striped swimming trunks and a towel.

That night when Geraldine Winkle came home from work at eleven-thirty, the telephone was ringing as she stepped into the hot, dark house. “Mother,” Malley’s voice said, “I called ’cause I knew you’d be worried.”

“Malley!” Mrs. Winkle said. “Where in the world are you?”

For a moment the line went silent. She heard her son whisper to someone else, and a muffled response.

“We’re in Freeport, Mother,” Malley said. “I called to let you know 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 and
silent 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 downtown business section is sealed by freeways, choked with traffic and offered in sacrifice to the great god Commerce, including the alcoholic-beverage industry that supplies a noxious Skid Row. Until the power shortage brought its demise, a big lighted orange wafer bearing the word “Gulf” rotated over one of the tallest buildings, and a subtle petroleum scent completed a vague impression of a giant, ultramodern filling station.

But atop one of these downtown buildings the visitor soon learns that there is more to Houston than meets the nose. In almost every direction, satellite groupings of clustered towers and spheres sprout from a broad emerald blanket of trees and bushes and golf-green lawns. The effect is as though one were standing at the center of a fairy ring of cities, each with its own stylistic personality, ranging from the blockily functional Lyndon B. Johnson Spacecraft Center to the southeast to the glaring white façades of the huge grain elevators to the northwest, and every edifice looking in the fresh rain as though a clean-up team had just finished its work. There is every conceivable type of design, from the outhouse simplicity of the old rural South to soaring minarets and fluted granite columns and gold-leafed domes, and still the young architects and engineers stream toward Houston, sniffling money and challenge, as fast as they can finish college. Several hundred of them labor at a single project: a $1.5 billion plan by a huge corporation to transform thirty-two blocks along Main Street into “a city in the sky,” with parking for forty thousand cars, a shopping center with parks and fountains and arcades high above the city, and sealed tubes to transport people like blow darts, rapidly and painlessly and screaming all the way, encased in plastic carriers.

At night, Houstonians descend from their spectacular office buildings and villages to mansions with Neo-Gothic arches and Grecian pillars, to condominiums with mansard and gambrel roof lines and Potemkin fronts. But mostly they flee to tract houses, tens of thousands of them fabricated of ticky-tacky and cinder block and huddled together like the green houses of Monopoly, providing protection from rain and sun while their mortgagors wriggle in upward mobility, like spermatozoa. After 6
P.M.,
the swarming downtown section becomes deserted, a struck set, peopled only by merchant seamen seeking the action, bored security guards and a few promenading blacks looking in store windows.

Until the power shortage imposed national limitations, Houston
remained stubbornly incandescent; the fossil fuels that created the city’s wealth were treated as though inexhaustible. Even at three and four in the morning, luxurious landscapes in rich sections like River Oaks were flooded by spotlights of many colors, improving on nature, and name plates and address numbers were splashed with yellow rays from hooded gas jets that were never extinguished. Long necklaces of soft blue mercury lights reached for miles along major streets like Main and Travis and Milam, twinkling southward toward the Warwick Hotel, with its glass outdoor elevator, down past the green-neon-tipped Shamrock Hilton, and even farther south to the shallow parabolic curve of the Astrodome, Houston’s pride, a $32 million stadium where men play games in air-conditioned, hermetically sealed, rainless, sunless, breezeless comfort.

Houston, like Cairo, Egypt, lies athwart the thirtieth parallel, farther south than Casablanca, Baghdad, Algiers, more southerly than any part of Spain or Portugal, Italy or Greece. “Try to remember, Bill,” a visitor wrote in 1885, “hell and houston both begin with a h.” The city is an open sauna, relieved now and then by punishing thunderstorms and showers, and in summer by the odd hurricane. There are more air conditioners per capita than in any city in the world; even the public transportation is refrigerated. Houston boasts a “no-sweat set,” affluent citizens who step from air-conditioned homes into air-conditioned limousines and drive to air-conditioned offices, taking their ease in the evening at air-conditioned restaurants and clubs and watching air-conditioned sports events. They are the lucky ones. The typical working-stiff Houstonian is drenched by perspiration except when he is drenched by rain.

In recent years, this community so lacking in meterological advantage has been second only to Orange County, California, in rate of growth, moving quickly from what one observer called
wilderness to bewilderness in a tiny parenthesis of time. World War II accelerated the exploitation of the Gulf Coast’s rich hoards of oil and sulphur and natural gas, and rural depressions after the war sent thousands of hungry farmers sputtering toward the city in their jalopies. Battening on both trends, Houston doubled and trebled and quadrupled its population, and its growth shows no signs of abating. Along the fifty miles of the Houston Ship Channel, linking the city to the Gulf of Mexico, a massive marine-industrial complex has risen from meadows that once were the domain of muskrats and mink. Rice and wheat and other grains are sluiced into ships from giant spouts, while sweating blacks wearing respirators level the loads with rakes. Tons of baled cotton and whole boxcars of paper move out of the port, and so many gallons of oils and acids and liquefied gases and other petrochemical products that Houston has moved to third place among U.S. ports in total tonnage, even though the city itself has all the seafaring atmosphere and tradition of Indianapolis.