The Man With Candy (7 page)

Mrs. Hilligiest thanked the boy for his sympathy.

“But ya know, ma’am”—Wayne pronounced it “may-em”—“I rilly don’t believe anythang’s happened to David.”

Dorothy was touched. The neighborhood was full of people who were beginning to think the Hilligiests were slightly dotty to press so stubborn a search at a time when teen-agers were deserting their homes and flocking into communes and hitchhiking all over the continent without so much as a twinge of remorse about the generation they had left behind. Why must the Hilligiests act as though their own son would never have done such a thing, as though he were something special? But this deeply troubled half-drunken boy, with his disarmingly wispy moustache and his sad dark eyes, was doing his best to provide solace, and Dorothy appreciated it. “Well, Wayne,” she said softly, “I believe that in this length of time we should have heard something about David. I’ve always felt like that somebody in this Heights knows what happened. The answer’ll show up someday.”

“Well, ya know I put out the reward posters,” Henley said. “Quite a few of them. But David could still be rat around here.
Sometimes the parents cain’t see the kids and the kids cain’t see the parents.”

“I don’t think he’s in Houston anywhere,” Dorothy said, “’cause somebody would tell us something. It’s been a long time now, Wayne. Whatever’s happened to him, kids are afraid to talk. The more time goes on, the more I think something bad musta happened.”

“Well, yes’m, but he could be rat under yer nose, too, and yew woultn’t even know it.”

“I hope that’s right,” Mrs. Hilligiest said. She patted his skinny arm. “I just hope that’s the way it is.”

RUBEN WATSON, A PALE TEEN-AGER
with Cupid’s-bow lips and medium-long hair parted in the middle with geometrical precision, lived three blocks east of Heights Boulevard and a mile south of the Hilligiests and the Winkles. Like many boys in the waning neighborhood, he came from a broken home, and he had had his share of difficulties with juvenile authorities. But as the summer of 1971 began, the seventeen-year-old boy seemed to be maturing. His grandmother had bought him a new stereo and a whole new set of clothes, and for the moment he seemed content.

On Tuesday, August 17, eighty days after David Hilligiest and Malley Winkle had disappeared, Ruben asked his grandmother for money to go to an afternoon movie. She gave him two dollars and seventy-five cents to spend and a few extra dimes in case he had to use a pay phone. A short while later, the boy called his mother at work and told her he would see her at home when she got off at seven-thirty. Then he vanished from the earth.

Winter came and went, and one night an ambitious young man
of eighteen years completed his shift at Long John Silver’s restaurant on Yale Street. Frank Aguirre, slightly walleyed, with crow-black hair, was determined to finish high school, and he had just two months to go. He worked steadily, invested some of his money in a 1967 Rambler and put the rest aside. His girl friend, Rhonda Williams, was only fourteen, but the serious young man had already proposed marriage. His mother told him they were both too immature and urged him to finish school first and get a job. Frank accepted the advice and worked harder than ever.

On this evening of March 24, 1972, nearly ten months after the disappearance of Malley Winkle and David Hilligiest, Frank called home and reported that he would arrive by 10
P.M.
AS usual, he tried to allay his mother’s anxieties. “He would always let me know where he was and would knock on my door to let me know when he got home at night because he knew I would worry about him,” she said. But that night he failed to knock, and the next morning he was still not home.

Young Aguirre and his family had lived earlier on Twenty-eighth Street, close to the Hilligiests and the Winkles and Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., and the boy had kept up his friendships in the area. Now the same teen-age children who had been pondering the disappearance of the others talked about the newest departure. As before, there was immediate disdain for the runaway theory. “What could Frank do anyplace else that he couldn’t do here?” asked seventeen-year-old Johnny Reyna. “And besides, him and Rhonda was gonna get married.”

Rhonda Williams herself, a cherub with the face and figure of an early Brigitte Bardot, had waited inconsolably for word from her fiance, but there was neither message nor letter nor phone call. “Somethin’ has to be wrong,” the tearful girl told her friends.

A boy talked about Frank: “I used to borrow money from him and the next day he’d want it back. Why would a guy like that leave town without picking up his paycheck at Long John’s? Why
would a guy like that leave his car on the parking lot without ever coming back to get it?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” said a precocious girl named Sheila Hines, one of the leaders of the neighborhood teen society, and Rhonda’s best friend. Sheila pronounced final judgment on the matter: “Frank didn’t run away. Frank couldn’t do nothin’ like that to Rhonda. Somethin’ funny’s goin’ on.”

THE TEEN-AGE BOYS OF THE HEIGHTS
were called names like Vernon, Greg, Marty, Ricky, Lamar, Ronnie or Wayne, less often old standards like John, James, William or Frank. There were hardly any Jonathans or Seans, Brads or Terences; these were considered too suburban, too precious. Every year a few old-fashioned names like Elmer, Chester, Homer and Ruben were preserved in birth records for another generation, and newborns were still tagged with agglutinations like Marty Ray, Johnny Ray and Frankie Ray, or Jim Bob, Jackie Lee and Billy Joe.

Most Heights boys dressed as plainly as their names, the common factor being a lack of funds. In schools like Alexander Hamilton Junior High, at the northern end of Heights Boulevard, the boys were as drab as the fifty-year-old building. Flashy dressers in platform soles and mod shirts and pimpish floppy hats were regarded as effeminate; teachers gave close attention to length of hair and considered a boy well attired if he wore clean jeans, Hush-puppy shoes or sneakers and a T-shirt with no more than a few holes. Form followed function, and function was the first consideration in all matters.

The boys of The Heights were more likely to express individuality in their bicycles, ranging from homemade models put together
with spare parts and salvaged wire up to Peugeot ten-speed racers at a hundred and fifty dollars the copy. Some of the older boys had motor scooters and “choppers,” long stretched-out motorcycles, and at the top of the teen-age society were aristocrats with old Fords and Chevrolets (called “Shivs”), clunker Buicks and Chryslers worth a few hundred dollars on used-car lots, or a rare Corvette or foreign sports car, usually on its last wheels and kept rolling only by the most sedulous attentions.

These creaking vehicles served as the rallying points of a highly mobile neighborhood youth culture. “On Saturday night we usually get in Vernon’s car and cruise down Yale to Houston Avenue,” a sixteen-year-old boy related. “There’d be maybe four or five of us, mostly boys, sometimes a girl if she was all right. We’d go over to Shepherd and all the way out towards Alabama, where there’s movies and drive-ins and a lot of kids. We’d just keep repeating that same drive over and over. All the people we know around here, if you want to meet ’em on Saturday night you just ride around like that, and in ten, fifteen minutes you’ll pass ’em all, and then you pull up and rap. ‘Hey, what’re y’all gonna do tonight?’ Stuff like that. Somebody’d say, ‘Come on, we cain’t sit here and talk all night,’ and we’d drive to the reservoir, seventeen miles out on the Katy Freeway, and sit around and talk some more and maybe have a beer and a red, but the sheriff wants you away from there by ten, so maybe we’d drive back to the freeway and race and drag and harse around. There’s no speed cops to worry about. At midnight, we’d go to a movie, the Beatles, the Stones, Frankenstein, Godzilla, and pop a few more pills, and when the movie let out around two, we’d do some more cruising, see who was up, try to think of something else to do, and maybe pop a couple more pills and get a bite to eat. Usually we’d be nodding out on the backseat by then, and we’d go home around four or five in the morning nice and quiet and sleep till three.”

Among the parents, there was a shortage of beneficent martinets
like the Hilligiests, not because of disregard or callousness, but because life had simply worn most of them out. At heart, most Heights’ parents were unpretentious country folk, engaged in a life-or-death struggle for existence in an alien place at a hectic time; they were in the city but not of it. The desideratum of their days was to snap open a can of Lone Star beer and watch
Hee Haw
or
Hawaii Five-O
or their own counterpart in the borough of Queens, Archie Bunker. Adversity had most of them by the throat; they reared their children as Geraldine Winkle did, improvising all the way, madly searching for trustworthy, low-cost baby-sitters and the money to pay them, keeping one eye open and one eye closed and praying to God that nothing went wrong. Like Mrs. Winkle, they recited reassuring litanies (“I raised Malley right, I was mother and father to him, I taught him right from wrong”), and like Mrs. Winkle they sometimes came home to find that the child was in jail, or gone for good.

The teen-age culture in The Heights ran on pills—Seconal, Nembutal, phenobarbital, Quaalude, mostly barbiturates and tranquilizers but sometimes stimulants—washed down with beer or Coke. The children frowned on psychedelic drugs (“Too many bad trips, man!”), but marijuana was widely available, and the sniffing of acrylic paint was a popular new pastime. “You get a real quick high from acrylics,” said a fourteen-year-old connoisseur. “You spray the can in a paper bag, and you stick your nose in and huff a few times and everythang’s different. You talk funny, you don’t know where you’re at, sometimes you hear voices that ain’t talkin’. When you wake up, you huff again, and you can keep up all night. One of my friends huffed for a whole day and night and he wasn’t hurt a bit. But a twelve-year-old kid did some acrylics on Twenty-third Street and ran around tryin’ to play football and collapsed and died. I guess you can get too much of anythang.”

Acrylics rose in popularity because their possession was not a criminal offense, and because the Houston police department
opened up a fierce campaign against marijuana and pills. “It got hot out there, whoo-
ee!”
said a Heights boy. “The pigs was all over, lookin’ for dope, shakin’ kids down and stompin’ ’em and even plantin’ dope. Jeez Christ, you could rob a bank or beat up a old lady, but if you looked like you was holdin’ dope it was your ass.”

A trucker’s son, eighteen years old, complained, “The cops would come running out of their cars with guns drawn if we didn’t stop fast enough to suit them. Their idea of a crackdown was to beat up a bunch of teen-age kids and plant dope on the hairiest ones. How could we complain? Who’s the public gonna believe, the cops or a bunch of punks from The Heights?”

Most of the children were already discontented. “We’re not all country hicks like our mothers and fathers,” said an excitable six-teen-year-old. “We’re not blind! They say, ‘Why don’t you go out and mow the lawn?’ and we say, ‘Mow the lawn?
Look at the neighborhood!’
We see it for what it is, but our parents still got it mixed up with their dreams. They give us shit like, ‘Just wait till you get to college, everything’ll brighten up.’ But we
know
we’re not going to college. No way! Who goes to college from The Heights? Kids around here go to work as busboys, waiters, laborers; some of them get into things like carpentry, Sheetrocking, chromeplating, roofing. After twelve years in school, we want out, not in!”

The unmotivated children turned quickly to anodyne and chemical thrills, and their habits could not be kept permanently from their families. “Yeh, they know about it, and we know they know,” the boy went on, “but we still got to get along, right? We still got to live together, and you can’t be fighting and screaming every second.”

In the short span of years between the naive era when Heights boys sinned with an occasional beer and the modern era when drugs and pills and cannabis became the
sine qua non
of juvenile
social existence, certain subtle adjustments were worked out between the age groups. The parents, already troubled and semi-defeated, tacitly agreed to settle for a show of normalcy. “We try to be polite to ’em,” a boy explained. “We dress neat, we stay clean, we bring home part of our pay, we call our mothers ‘ma’am’ and our fathers ‘sir.’ We don’t let our hair grow too awful long, ’cause that
shows,
and we don’t run around with a bunch of Fu Manchu drug pushers. As long as we keep up appearances and don’t embarrass everybody, we can pop all the pills and smoke all the grass we want. As long as I don’t come home talking to somebody that isn’t there, they accept me. I
look
normal. And they’ll accept any of my friends that looks normal. They don’t rilly have that much choice. They can see what’s going on in the United States, and they know I could get up in the morning and hitch all the way to California and they’d never see me again.”

Parents and children played their verbal con games together, each contributing his own deception to the
pas de deux:

“Gee, Mama, one of the boys had a red sleeping pill down at the playground today.”

“Oh, that’s terrible, son. I’m glad our fine boy doesn’t fool around with nothing like that.”

“No’m. I just walked away like you and Daddy told me.”

The arrangement seemed neat and tidy; it was based entirely on appearances, and consonant with the cosmetic ethic of the supercity. False fronts were taken for true, artifice for reality, and a Gothic night drench of innocent corruption settled over the old neighborhood. In such gardens of expediency, strange weeds may grow.

NO ONE IN THE HEIGHTS
knew precisely when Dean Corll returned to the friendly venues where once he had made divinity and played billiards, or if indeed he had ever left, and no one seemed to care. When he began turning up around Twenty-seventh Street, it was in the company of Wayne Henley and David Brooks, a tall teenager with a blond Prince Valiant hairdo and finely wrought features. Corll and the two boys made an unlikely trio; by the early 1970’s, he was in his thirties, the boys in their mid-teens. They seemed to have nothing special in common. They rode around in Corll’s white Ford Econoline van or sat on Henley’s porch talking quietly and watching the passers-by.