Candy;

by White, Robb, 1909-1990

  Candy told them about Tony and the visit to the doctor.

  "Whew!" Ryan said. "What did your father do when you told him you'd nicked him for twenty-five dollars?"

  "He just said Voinnng/ " Candy said.

  Dotty T. sighed. "If I told my father I'd charged that much to him, he would go right up through the roof, leaving a hole for the rain to come in."

  "Mine would leave a hole in me. Right between the eyes," Ryan declared.

  "If the Faraway hadn't gotten so flattened out, you could have rented her to people who wanted to go fishing," Chuck said. "We rented our boat for fifty cents the other day."

  "Yeh, and the guy lost an oar and that cost a buck. So we lose four bits on the transaction."

  'What's that horrible object?" Dotty T. asked

  Candy jumped up. "Haven't you seen my new boat?"

  'Tou done built a new one already?''

  "No. Come on."

  From the wharf they looked down at Candy's boat. "Oh, brother/" Ryan said softly. "Look at that, Chuck." Suddenly he shoved his right arm out. "I'll swap you this for her, Candy."

  Candy laughed.

  "Where'd you get her?" Ryan asked.

  Candy thought for a moment. "A man gave her to me," she said slowly.

  "Gave her?" Ryan gasped.

  Candy nodded.

  Ryan looked at her closely. "What you got that I ain't got. Candy? No man ever gave me a boat."

  Chuck said, "She's got a boat, that's what she's got. And if it was my boat I'd charge a dollar just to let people sit down in it."

  "And there she was crying because she didn't have five cents. Candy, with that boat, and me to sail her, you can make plenty of money. Just charge the tourists for sailing 'em around."

  "A dollar to go around the Bay. Two dollars to go out to the fishing flats. Five dollars to the islands."

  "Or maybe by the hour." Ryan felt around in his pocket and found fifteen cents. "I'll give you this just to take me out in her for five minutes."

  "Let's all go," Candy said, starting down.

  "Free?" Chuck asked.

  Candy laughed. Then she remembered. "No, we can't. Mr. Carruthers just put another coat of varnish on the mast. But come down tomorrow afternoon."

  They went back and sat down on the driftwood again. They were talking about what the hurricane had done \hen Candy heard a faint, gentle tapping noise behind her. She looked around in the darkness and saw Tony, his white cane tapping along the concrete sea wall.

  Candy jumped up. "Hi, Tony/' she said.

  ''Hi." He stopped and waited.

  She ran across the sand. ''What you doing?''

  "Nothing."

  "Come on down and sit with us and Hsten to some big stories."

  "All right."

  She led him down to the driftwood and introduced him to the others. Dotty T. made a place for him to sit down next to her on the log.

  Candy whispered to Ryan, "Lend me a nickel, will you? I'll get Tony a coke."

  He slipped her a nickel and she brought Tony a drink. She just put it in his hand vithout saying anything.

  "Thanks," he said.

  Candy was surprised that he didn't start to argue about it.

  Dotty T. said to Tony, in her most ladylike manner, "Candy tells me that you and she had a slight adventure with Mr. Jenkins."

  Tony laughed a httle. "He got mad."

  "Candy says you got mad, too."

  He shook his head. "No. I was scared to death."

  Ryan said, "I heard he had a regular cannon loaded with rock salt. Good thing he didn't pop you with that."

  "Golly," Candy said, feeling scared again, "he wouldn't shoot you, would he?"

  "I've heard he would."

  "I've heard that every night he goes up in his attic and counts all his money. There're miUions of dollars up there."

  "If I had a million dollars, I'd be just sweetness and light," Dotty T. declared. "I wouldn't be cross with anyone."

  "Me, neither."

  Tony suddenly said quietly, "I think I know what he looks like, Candy." Then he turned his head toward the other three, and Candy saw that he was smihng. "You see," he explained,

  "Fm blind. But I think I know what he looks like. He's not very tall. He's skinny. His face is dried up and the skin on it is wrinkly. His eyes aren't so that you can see inside them."

  "That's him, exactly/' Ryan declared. '1 saw him at the airport one time. And he was giving the people out there a fit about his ticket. You'd think he owned the whole airport, planes and all."

  That led them to talk about airplanes, then car wrecks, then to terrible things that had happened to them.

  ''The worst thing ever happened to me was when Ryan and a whole lot of other kids hung me up in a bam by my belt," Chuck said. ''Then they went off and left me. That belt almost cut me in half before a man came and unhooked me."

  "A pure accident," Ryan said. "We wouldn't have forgotten you except that a woman who made parachute jumps from a balloon landed out in our peanut field and broke her leg."

  "An}way, you forgot me," Chuck said.

  Somehow that started them talking about the war and then about disasters they had heard about.

  They were all talking at the same time, so that at first no one except Candy heard what Tony said.

  His voice was so quiet and gentle as he said, "The worst thing that ever happened to me was when the town blew up."

  Dotty T. said, "What? What blew up?"

  Then they all listened. "The town," Tony said.

  "How can a town blow up?" Ryan asked.

  "It can. There was a ship at the dock and she caught on fire. She had nitrate inside and it exploded. Then the refinery exploded, and then the chemical company. And what was left burned down."

  Ryan whistled through his teeth. "Where was that, Tony?"

  "Texas Cit', Texas."

  "And you were there?"

  "We lived there."

  "Your father and mother?" Candy asked.

  He nodded. *'Dad was at the chemical plant. Mother was in the house. I was riding my bicycle/'

  Candy said, almost whispering, ''What happened, Tony?"

  ''I don't know," he said slowly. ''Dad and Mother were killed. I don't know what happened to the bicycle, because I was blind by that time."

  Dotty T. put her hand on his arm. "That's the most terrible thing I ever heard about, Tony."

  "I remember seeing pictures of it," Ryan said. *'Smoke and fire all over every'thing. It was rough."

  "How'd you get here, Tony?" Chuck asked.

  When Tony answered, his voice had changed entirely. It was flat now and cold. "I just came."

  After that no one wanted to say anything else. Chuck gathered up the empty bottles. "We got to go home."

  "I have, too," Dotty T. said. "Tony, do you want us to walk home with you?"

  "No," he said abruptly, and stood up. Before Candy could turn around he was walking away as fast as he could.

  "Let's go," Candy said to Dotty T. "Come on."

  They said good night to the Magruders and Candy hurried along, so that Dotty T. finally stopped in the street. "Where's the fire. Candy?"

  "I've got to get home/' Candy said. "I just remembered something."

  At Dotty T.'s house Candy said good night quickly, and as soon as she was sure that Dotty T. \'asn't looking, she turned and ran.

  Back on the beach she found Tony's footprints and followed them until they reached the sea wall. Candy climbed it and went on down Front Street in the same direction he had been going on the sand. Front Street ran right along the sea wall so that at the blocks there was only one way to look.

  There weren't many people around and all the stores were closed except the jukes.

  As she ran on and on, without seeing him, Candy began to feel desperate. She was on the point of giving up and going home when she saw a woman sitting on the porch of her house.

  ''Did you see a bhnd boy go by here?" Candy asked. ''He had
a walking stick.''

  "He turned up Ninth Street/' the woman said.

  "Thanks/' Candy said, and ran on.

  Tony was walking slowly along, feeling first one edge of the sidewalk and then the other with his cane.

  Candy's rubber-soled shoes made only a faint hissing noise as she followed him, keeping a block behind him. When he turned a corner, though, she would run so as not to lose sight of him.

  In this part of the town the hurricane had done a lot of damage mainly because the houses were old and tumbled down or just shacks anyway.

  She saw Tony hesitate for a moment under the light from a street lamp. He seemed to be searching for something with his cane and, when he found it, he turned.

  He went past a house that was leaning crazily over on its side and then he disappeared.

  Candy followed him past the leaning house. Behind it there was a low, rickety shed which the hurricane hadn't hurt much.

  The back and two ends of the shed were solid, but the whole front was open. The street lamp on the corner made enough light so that she could see Tony moving around inside the shed.

  Candy crept closer to the shed and, without thinking about it, she kept hiding behind things as she got closer. At last, standing behind a water oak, she wasn't fifteen feet from the shed.

  Tony's bed was along one end. As she looked at it, she almost cried. It was made out of two planks laid across some boxes and the mattress wasn't anything but excelsior covered with what looked like an old army blanket.

  Tony was at the other end moving slowly about, but she couldn't tell what he was doing until, suddenly, a match flared up.

  Candy ducked behind the tree then, remembering, she watched as he lit a rickety one-burner kerosene stove. He adjusted the flame by feeling how high it was with his hand.

  He had some water in a bucket and he dipped up some in a stewpan, feeling how much with his finger and pouring some back. Then he got a can of something, opened it, and poured it into the pan.

  He kept stirring the stuff for a long time. When it was cooked, he turned off the stove and put the pan down on the ground.

  Feeling with his cane, he found a piece of crate and brought it around to the front of the shed where he sat down on it, leaning back against one of the posts of the shed.

  To Candy, standing so close to him, he looked pitiful. His face was turned up so that the light fell on it. His ragged hair was drooping past his ears and his eyes were closed. His arms hung down limply, his hands almost touching the ground.

  At last he moved, feeling for the stewpan. He put his finger down in it, then sucked his finger. He picked up the pan, leaned forward, and began to drink carefully.

  Candy couldn't stand any more. In a moment, she knew, she'd start to cry, and he would hear her. And, she realized, he mustn't ever know that she knew where he lived. For some reason he didn't want her to know.

  As she went silently away, she had a strange feeling that she had cheated on Tony. She had taken advantage of his blindness and followed him and found out the secret he didn't want anyone to know.

  As she walked slowly home, she could see again the shed with its dirt floor and sagging walls. She remembered light coming through holes in the roof. And when she saw in her mind's eye those planks for a bed, she shut her eyes tight, driving away the vision of it.

  CHAPTER

  8

  The first thing Candy did in the morning was make fifty cents. But she never got the money.

  Hawk MacNair bet her fifty cents that he could beat her to the buoy and back. Hawk had a boat which Candy had once envied very much.

  He beat her away from the mark and led her for half of the way to the buoy. But Candy settled down and began to sail. She overhauled him and went past him without even looking over in his direction. She was laughing to herself as she took a long tack to starboard and saw, when she came about, that she was going to clear the buoy by about two inches.

  Hawk missed the buoy entirely and had to go inside it. Candy was surprised when he kept right on, heading for the finish.

  By not going around the buoy as she had done, he got ahead of her on the home leg and Candy had to start really sailing. She got everything she could out of each little change in the wind, and she sailed her boat so close that it was constantly on the verge of luffing, but her sails never shivered a single time all the way in.

  She beat him by twenty yards. She had even dropped her jib when he came across the line.

  Everybody declared that she had beat him fair and square. In fact, she had beat him at the buoy because he hadn't gone around it. But Hawk, who was famous for quibbhng, began to argue that it was no race. He claimed that he had said '*to the buoy" and back. Therefore, since she had gone "around" the buoy and he had gone *'to" the buoy, no one had won or lost. Candy argued for a little while, but Hawk kept squirming and getting madder and madder so at last she said, ''All right, any time you want to race fair, just let me know." She knew perfectly well that Hawk wouldn't ever race her again.

  So she still had twenty-five dollars to go. With Dotty T. and the Magruder brothers, they combed the water front searching for someone who wanted a ride in a sailboat—for a fee. They found plenty of people who wanted to go out in Candy's beautiful boat, but not if they had to pay for it.

  After an hour or so, with no luck, Candy was about to give up and invent some other way to make money, when Chuck Magruder turned up with two tourists. The man was dressed in bright blue pants and a yellow sports shirt, but his skin was so pale it looked as though he had lived all his life under a rock. The lady with him had a silk scarf around her hair, a silk shirt with a big red 'Tes!" printed on it. As she got gingerly down into the boat, Candy couldn't decide whether her pink slacks were too small or there was just too much lady in them.

  Candy looked at the man's shoes with hard leather heels and soles and had a sinking feeling as she saw them going down on her varnish. Then she shrugged and looked away. She needed the dollar he was going to give her.

  By the time Candy got them back to the wharf after taking them around the Bay she was thoroughly disgusted. The lady kept pretending to be afraid. At each wave she would let out a little screech and grab the man around the neck. Candy could see perfectly well that the lady was no more afraid than she was. Tlie funny part was that the man was really scared stiff. His eyes got a blank look, his lips looked almost gray, and his

  skin was white as paper around his nose. He tried to keep the lady from knowing it, but he hardly said a word the whole way, and Candy knew that he was dying to get out of that boat and never get in another one.

  But she got her dollar. ''I won't have any boat left at this rate/' she complained to Ryan and Chuck. They inspected the mark the man's foot had made on the varnish. It was a tiny scratch about the size of a hair.

  Ryan shook his head sadly. "Ruined. Ruined/' he agreed.

  Chuck laughed. Then he turned serious. 'Tou ought to advertise, Candy. The way the fishing boats do. You ought to have a big sign up on Front Street. 'Boat Rides' or something like that."

  'Teh/' Ryan said. ''You ought to have a sign saying—let me see—yeh—'Be Snooty—Ride in a Yacht.' "

  "That's good. But you ought to have a name for your boat, Candy," Chuck declared.

  "Not the Mistress oi the Seas, though," Ryan insisted. "Every time I think of that vessel I get to laughing."

  "She was a good boat," Candy said loyally.

  "Except in the water," Ryan pointed out, laughing.

  Candy had to laugh, too.

  "How about taking us for a sail, Candy?" Chuck asked.

  "Yeh. Come on. Free."

  Candy shook her head. "But I'll take you for half the regular price—fifty cents."

  "No deal; we're broke," Chuck said.

  "Let's go get Hawk MacNair and beat on him until he gives us the fifty cents he owes Candy. Then we can pay her."

  "Okay," Chuck agreed.

  "No, leave him alone," Candy ordered. "He's just a
bum."

  "And his old man owns a bank. All he has to do is go in the vault where they have money stacked up on the floor and take what he wants." 66

  ''He's a bum/' Chuck agreed. *'But you really whipped the socks off him, Candy."

  ''Left him absolutely barefooted/' Ryan agreed.

  Candy was hardly listening. Dreamily she said, "Faraway."

  "What's far away?"

  "That's what I'm going to name my boat. Faraway."

  "Faraway-twenty-five-bucks."

  "That reminds me," Chuck said. "I saw that boy—Tony?— this morning. Say, you know what he did? I said, 'Hiya, boy,' because I'd forgotten his name. And he said, 'Hello, Chuck.' Now how did he know who I was?"

  "W^ere was he?" Candy asked.

  "Wandering around."

  "Whereabouts?"

  "Stinson's grocery. He was trying to talk old man Stinson into giving him some apples that had gone bad."

  "Did he get 'em?"

  Chuck snorted. "From old man Stinson? You got a cavity in your cranium. Candy."

  Ryan reached out suddenly and got his young brother by the hair. "Home, Shorty," he said. "By," he said to Candy.

  "See you later," Chuck said, as Ryan dragged him off.

  It was nearly twelve-thirty. Candy, going home, went by Stinson's, but Tony wasn't there.

  Candy went back to the beach right after lunch, but no one seemed to want to pay her to take them sailing. She spent an hour or so cleaning up the boat, wiping out the bilges, putting a holiday furl in the sails, and flemishing down all the lines in flat, tight coils.

  She waded ashore and went up on Front Street, but there wasn't a tourist in sight. At last she gave up. Going around to Norton's, she asked Bud Norton how much he would charge to paint "Faraway" in gold letters on the stem of her boat.

  "I generally get a dollar a letter. Candy. That's why boats have such short names, dang it."

  ' 67

  ''Seven dollars/' Candy said. ''Well, I guess Til have to wait av^hile/'

  "Why you gettin' so fancy all of a sudden, Candy? You painted the names on all your other boats."