by Jack Olsen
“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 his eighteen-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, 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, fishin’ and all.”
His wife started to cry. “I cain’t believe it either,” she said. “I’ll never believe it.” She composed herself and dialed Missing Persons to pass along the news about the letter. After she had read it into the phone, the voice on the other end told her, “Well, if you’ve heard from him, he isn’t missing anymore. We’ll have to take him off our list.”
That same morning, Gerald and Eunice Oncale read a similar letter. Eunice mislaid it later, but she could recite it from memory:” ‘Mom, I’m sorry I left like I did, but I got a better job working on a truck loading and unloading from Houston to Washington. We should be back within three or four weeks. I’ll either call you or see you then. Love, Johnny.’”
Gerald noted that the letter was in Johnny’s handwriting, but Eunice saw something peculiar. “Gerald,” she said, “Johnny can’t write this good. Why, there’s not a misspelt word anywhere!” She told her husband she had a mother’s feeling that she might never see her son again.
Oncale flatly refused to believe that the boy was in trouble. “Just like all the rest of ’em nowadays,” he said. “He’s run away for a while. Can’t nobody keep track of ’em. He’ll be back when he gets an appetite.”
Summer passed, and Houston’s clammy winter began, and there was no word from either boy. One night Eunice’s sister picked up her ringing telephone and was told to stand by for a person-to-person call from Frankfurt, Germany. A voice came on the line and began talking like a phonograph record played at high speed, and the operator cut in and said she would try for a better connection. The sister waited, but there was no call-back. Later she told Gerald and Eunice, and they decided that Johnny must be in the Army in Germany. “That call couldn’t have come from anybody else,” Gerald insisted. “He’s alive, he’s okay, that’s the main thing!”
The Baulches took turns dialing anyone who might have a clue or a suggestion about Little Bill’s disappearance. Like Dorothy and Fred Hilligiest, undergoing their own quiet ordeal twelve blocks north, they examined their son’s background for clues, and like the Hilligiests they found nothing to suggest that he might have run away. “Little Bill was a steady boy,” Billy Gene said. “He wasn’t mixed up in the thangs that alius get boys in trouble. Why, he wouldn’t even touch a drank! When we’d be fishin’ out in the middle of the lake, I’d alius take along a few beers, which I have myself drank a little all my life, and I’ve offered it to him, and he’d say no thanks. Out there dyin’ of thirst! That’s how I know my son wouldn’t touch no alkeehol. I’d say, ‘Son, it’s wet, jes’ put a little in your mouth,’ and h
e’d say, ‘No, I don’t wont that stuff in my mouth.’ Wouldn’t take a swaller even.”
“He was the same about dope,” Janey Baulch said. “One time when he was fifteen, two years before he went away, a blond-headed boy named David Brooks give him a capsule, and Billy brought it on home to me. Said, ‘Hey, lookee here what David give me!’ His dad wasn’t in from work, and I just took that pill and I said, ‘We’ll dispose of this rat cheer!’ And I flushed it down the commode. Then I called the police, and they sent a man from narcotics. He wrote everythin’ down, and he tole Little Bill and I, he said, ‘We have David Brooks on our list now, but we can’t pick him up unless we catch him sellin’ or passin’ it to somebody.’ The next time Brooks tried to give Little Bill some dope, we called headquarters and asked for the same detective, but they never could locate him. Efficiency! Little Bill tole me Brooks kept givin’ those things out like candy, and the police never did nothin’.”
The Baulches also had reason to remember David Brooks’s close companion, Dean Corll, who once had been the subject of mild suspicion in the Baulch household. When Little Bill was eleven, he had roamed the streets looking for odd jobs, like most Heights boys, and one day he knocked on the door of a candy factory on Twenty-second street. A nondescript young man gave him candy to eat and candy to sell, door to door, and Little Bill ran seven blocks home to tell his parents. “He give you candy?” Billy Gene Baulch said. “Well, ain’t that a little funny?”
“He gives it to all the kids,” Little Bill said. “They come across the street from Helms school and he passes it out.”
“Well, that’s funnier still,” his father said. “People just don’t supply a whole school with candy, do they, son?”
A few years later, around the end of 1968, Little Bill came home out of breath and told his mother, “Mama, the man with the candy’s living down the street! Dean! Dean Corll! He moved into 402.”
“You mean that old barny-lookin’ shed?” Mrs. Baulch asked.
“Well, it looks bad from the outside, but he’s got it fixed up inside. He’s got rugs, he’s got TV and tape decks and stereo, and he’s got those neat black lights. It’s rilly fixed up nice, Mama. Airconditioned and all, and the place is wired so if anybody comes snooping around, a warning light goes on in Dean’s bedroom.”
One day Mrs. Baulch was introduced to the candyman on the street, and she was impressed by his genteel appearance. “When you go down there to play,” she asked Little Bill later, “what do y’all do?”
“Oh, Mama, he’s rilly good to me. He just loves children! He treats us just like a big brother.”
“But what do you boys do?”
“We play the stereo and watch TV, and Dean shows us things. Once he showed us his handcuffs. We was there with a couple other boys, David Brooks and somebody else, and they got to playing around with the handcuffs and put ’em on one of the boys, and then Dean couldn’t find the key. He like to never found the key to take ’em off!”
When Janey Baulch discussed the incident with her husband, the ex-cowboy became disturbed. “I cain’t help how I feel,” he said. “It’s jes’ not normal for a man that old to be playin’ games with little boys.”
“Billy says they enjoy theirselves,” Mrs. Baulch said. “His heart’s gonna be broke if you tell him he cain’t go back.”
Billy Gene considered the problem. “Sometimes our boys look at me like I’m an old fogey and I don’t want ’em to have no friends,” he told his wife softly. “But I been around in this world, Janey, and I know it’s not natural to keep hangin’ with young kids. Back home on the ranch, why, that’d be a good way to get your head blowed off!”
“Billy says Dean’s good to ’em.”
“Yeh, maybe too good,” Billy Gene Baulch said. “Them’s the kind you gotta watch.” He ordered his children to stay away from the shed at 402 W. Sixteenth Street permanently.
Four years later, with their son mysteriously missing, the elder Baulches thought of Dean Corll again. They knew he had moved from the shed years before and they also knew that the candy factory was out of business. They seriously doubted that the candy-man could help them, but with his wide circle of young friends he might be worth a call.
There was no listing under “Dean Corll” in the phone book or in the files of telephone information. “He used to be friendly with Betty Hawkins,” Janey Baulch said. She called up the young divorcee and was told that Betty seldom saw Dean anymore. “Betty said everytime she went over to his house to see him, he’d always have a bunch of boys hangin’ around,” Janey reported to her husband, “and whenever he’d come by her place, he’d have more boys hangin’ on him. She said she hasn’t seen him for a month or two, but he’s livin’ just off Washington Street. She’ll get the number and call us back.”
Around midnight, Betty Hawkins finally turned up the candy-man’s latest unlisted number. Both Baulches spoke with him and both found him polite and sympathetic. He told them he had seen neither Billy Baulch nor Johnny Delome, but he would check around and call back if he learned anything. He said if the boys had run away, it might be possible to get word to them to call home. The Baulches were grateful.
A few months later, fifteen-year-old Michael Anthony “Tony” Baulch, the family’s sufferer from chronic wanderlust, went on one of his impromptu journeys. On a gray November morning, he returned as nonchalantly as he had left and told his mother and father that he had been working on a shrimp boat out of Delcambre, Louisiana. “Billy and Johnny were workin’ on the same boat!” the boy said. “They’re healthy, they’re fine, so y’all can quit worryin’!”
The good news ended a turbulent time for Gerald and Eunice Oncale. “I done told you, didn’t I?” Gerald exulted. “Nobody was gonna convince me that Johnny was gone for good.” Gerald was weighed down with work and financial problems, as always, but Eunice drove straight to Delcambre, about two hundred miles away, to collect her son. She showed pictures to a fish wholesaler who identified the boy as a crewman on a shrimp boat—he thought it was the McNeese, under Captain Kirk. A waitress at Chico’s seafood restaurant told Mrs. Oncale the boy had been in a few days before. “I said to myself, ‘If there’s a bakery, then Johnny’s been there too,’” Eunice said, “cause he loves hot doughnuts. And sure enough, I found a bakery and the man looked at the picture real hard and he said, ‘Yeh, that boy was here about two weeks ago. He told me he liked doughnuts, but he insisted on havin’ ’em hot. Had on that same shirt.’” At about the same time, two boys matching the descriptions of Johnny Delome and Billy Baulch had walked into a Delcambre bar and asked permission to shoot pool. “I said, ‘No minors allowed,’” the barmaid told Mrs. Oncale, “but it was them, all right.”
Eunice returned to Houston reassured, and she and Gerald set about contacting marine telephone operators along the Gulf Coast, trying to find a McNeese or a Captain Kirk. They called Biloxi, Dulac, Empire, Grand Isle, Venice, Pointe a la Hache and Delcambre, but the more long-distance calls they placed, the more elusive the boys and the McNeese became. Gerald Oncale drove to Delcambre and began a boat-by-boat check along the waterfront. A crewman told him that a boy who looked exactly like Johnny Delome had signed on a shrimp boat called the Narisso, Narcisso, or something similar. Later Gerald watched Tugboat Annie on television, “and the name of her boat was Narcissus. I figured that was too big a coincidence. I figured somebody was trying to tell me that I was on the right track, that Johnny was okay.”
He went back to the Delcambre residents Eunice had already seen and reconfirmed their stories. To some, he applied heavy verbal pressure. “One ol’ boy almost wanted to fight me. He finally said, ‘Man, I done tole ya for the last time: I seen your son! Now why don’t you believe me?’ He got hot!” Gerald felt encouraged.
But in Houston, Eunice Oncale received a dismaying report from Mrs. Billy Gene Baulch. Young Tony Baulch, the original bearer of the good news about Johnny and Little Bill, had made a confession. He said he had hated to see his parents
suffering over his brother’s absence and he had made up the story to console them. “It wasn’t nothin’ but a little white lie,” Janey Baulch told Mrs. Oncale. “I cain’t tell you how sorry I am. The boy meant well.”
When Gerald returned from Louisiana, he was not to be dissuaded. “Tony Baulch was lyin’, all right,” Oncale said, “but not about working with Johnny and Billy. When he found out I was gonna go over to Delcambre and catch ’em, he changed his story. He didn’t want me finding ’em, that’s why he changed. That’s the only way I can see it happening.”
He resumed his dogged search.
THE HILLIGIEST AND WINKLE CHILDREN HAD DISAPPEARED from the Heights in May, 1971, Ruben Watson in August of the same year, Frank Aguirre seven months later in March, 1972, and the Baulch and Delome boys two months after that. The summer of 1972 passed uneventfully, and on the second day of October, with the coming of fall making temperatures plummet into the sixties and seventies, a sweet-faced fourteen-year-old boy named Wally Jay Simoneaux, scion of Louisiana Cajuns, left his house in The Heights to spend the night with Richard Hembree, a shy thirteen-year-old who lived a few blocks away. Just after dark, a friend saw the two boys in a white vehicle parked in front of a grocery store, but when he tried to engage them in conversation another boy got out and said “Beat it!”
Later that night the phone rang in the Simoneaux house on Twenty-fourth Street. Wally Jay’s voice said “Mama—” and then there was silence.
“Darlin’,” Mrs. Simoneaux said. “Where are you, darlin’?”
There was a shuffling noise in the background, and then a click, and the line went dead. The disturbed mother phoned the Hembree residence and found that both boys were late and unaccounted for. When Mrs. Simoneaux called police, she was told that the boys would be stopped and questioned if they were seen on the streets.
