Free Alligator Candy by David Kushner Page A

. Then they _____ [VERB] to the _____ [NOUN] . It took Jon _____ [NUMBER] _____ [UNITS OF TIME] to die. The reason he was missing for a week was because they _____ [VERB] him and then they took him to the _____ [NOUN] and then . . .”
    From there the story degenerated into dark fantasy. It felt like I was in bed, holding that magical old edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that was coming to life. The letters fell from the pages, which became windows to some other world. Each page I flipped had the same image: a scene of a dark forest. The faster I turned the pages, the quicker the scene came to life: a sticky black ooze on the floor of the woods rising up to the tops of the trees until the ooze was coming out of the floor of my room, up through my blue shag carpet, past the orange plastic night table, up alongside my bed, spilling over my fuzzy orange blanket, up the walls of the playing-card-soldier wallpaper, past the blue strips of the Venetian blinds, up toward the ceiling that I had tacked with football pennants—the blackness was everywhere. In those dark moments, I felt immobilized both by what I knew and by what I didn’t know, and I was drowning.
    By 1980 the awful reality of child murder became impossible to push away. It seeped into my house through the portal of my television. I’d be sitting on the couch in our den, waiting for a new episode of M*A*S*H or The Jeffersons , when there’d be another newsbreak—another grainy video of adults searching a forest, or police officers carrying a stretcher with a small mound wrapped on top. The “Atlanta Child Murders,” as they were known, had become a nationwide saga. Day after day, newscasts carried the stories of the missing African-American boys and unsolved murders.
    Sometimes my mom or dad would be sitting next to me when the reports came on, and I would feel an icy stillness envelop us. Nothing was said, and nothing had to be said. I knew that we were all flashing to Jon, to the woods, to our story. And I desperately wanted the moment to pass, the report to end, and to have George Jefferson or Hawkeye Pierce bound back across the screen. My eyes would leave the TV and travel over the wood paneling, past the burbling fish tank, the bookshelves of Tom Robbins and Elie Wiesel novels, and up the wall to the gold-framed photo of Jon: the one that had been used on all the missing person fliers, the one that still ran in the papers whenever the case resurfaced, the one of him in the red shirt, head tilted, smiling.
    But it was getting harder to wish away the news of missing kids on TV. Something seemed to be changing in America. Stories of missing kids were in the headlines more frequently. It had started the year before, on May 25, 1979, when a six-year-old boy in Manhattan, Etan Patz, vanished on the morning of his first solo walk to his school bus, just two blocks away from home. While abductions had been relegated to local news in the past, the unique nature of the Patz story—the SoHo location, the first trip to school—riveted the New York tabloids and spread nationwide.
    The case sparked the missing children movement. The public became aware just how badly coordinated federal, state, and local officials were in sharing information on missing kids. Patz became the first missing child to have his picture appear on milk cartons. Eventually President Ronald Reagan declared May 25, the date of Patz’s disappearance, as National Missing Children’s Day. The ominous tagline of late-night TV news casts—“It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”—seemed to take on a new urgency.
    With the Patz case unsolved, and the body count in Atlanta racking up to nearly two dozen missing children, a new fear began entering the minds of parents around the country. News reports spoke of curfews in Atlanta and kids feeling more afraid of playing outside. The media seemed to have found a new