Missionary Stew

by Ross Thomas

  Jack Replogle had been a hot navy pilot in that long-ago war. After it was over Haere's father and Replogle discovered they had once been only a thousand feet or so apart on a small island in the Philippines: Replogle up in the air in his Hellcat, Haere's old man down on the ground: both of them shooting at each other; Replogle by mistake, Haere's old man on purpose. Jack Replogle later swore that the infantry rifle fire had actually hit his plane that day. It was a charming lie and he told it often and Haere's old man always pretended to believe it, but it was still a lie, because, as the senior Haere later told his son, everyone in Company D had been an absolutely rotten shot. Haere was six years old when his father had finally come back from the war in 1946, and he remembered it was years after that before the overage former private first class had stopped referring to it as the fuckininfantry, not two words, but one, virtually inseparable.The morning traffic was heavy, but Replogle drove quickly, expertly, apparently oblivious to the snow that was already turning to slush. They headed south and then turned west at Sixth Avenue, which would lead them onto Highway 6, which eventually turned into Interstate 70. The sun had come out and there was no smog. Ahead, there were the glittering mountains to admire.

  Replogle lit a cigarette, which Haere noted was still an unfiltered Lucky Strike, and said, “I knew I had cancer at least two months before they cut me open down in Houston.”

  “How?”

  “My plumbing started backing up. I figured it was the prostate. When they went in, they found out there wasn’t much they could do, so they sort of patched me up and reamed me out and now I come backwards.” He paused. “Except I haven’t been doing much of that lately either, although there is this one lovely I’ve known for years who's got a lady friend, and once a week or so we all three get together and play a mild game of Lincoln logs. Very mild. Almost geriatric.”

  “Well, an orgy's an orgy, I guess,” Haere said. “How's Maureen?” Maureen was Replogle's wife of twenty-seven years.

  “Maureen,” he said. “Let me tell you about Thanksgiving.”

  “Which Thanksgiving?”

  “This one.”

  “It's still two weeks away.”

  “Not at my house. At my house they had Thanksgiving last Thursday on account of they don’t think I’m going to last through Christmas, which sure as hell won’t bother me too much.”

  Replogle paused and put his cigarette out in the car's ashtray. “Well, they’re all there, Maureen's family, gathered around the table— her three brothers, already half in the bag, and their godawful wives, and maybe half a dozen assorted nephews, all of them nine feet tall and out of work, and Maureen's old man who's ninety-two and barking about how he's not going to eat any fucking turkey because whathe really wants is Salisbury steak. That's what they always call hamburger in Maureen's family. Salisbury steak.” “Class,” Haere said.

  “So there we all are, the pot smoke so thick you could can it, my brothers-in-law shitffaced, my sisters-in-law arguing about what TV show they’re going to watch, Maureen's old man complaining about his goddamn Salisbury steak being too rare, and suddenly Maureen announces that we’re going around the table so everybody can say what they’ve got to be thankful for—starting with me.”

  “Norman Rockwell,” Haere said.

  “Exactly. Well, they’re all looking at me and I just sat there and didn’t say anything for a while. And then I said, ‘What the fuck have I got to be thankful for? I’ve got cancer.’ Well, you should’ve seen their faces.” Replogle chuckled at the memory and then said, as though repeating a favorite punch line, “What the fuck have I got to be thank-fful for? I’ve got cancer.”

  After that he started to laugh, and he went on laughing until Draper Haere joined in out of what he later decided was self-defense.

  CHAPTER 3

  Had it not been for the actress Craigie Grey, it is doubtful that Draper Haere would ever have found and retained the services of Morgan Citron, who, for the past year, had been living on the $6,000 he had realized in Paris from the sale of the somewhat flawed two-carat diamond.

  Until the money ran out, Citron had lived the year in a converted two-car garage in Venice, California, only a block from the beach. The rent had been $300 a month for the one large room with its cement floor, toilet, sink, and the jerry-built shower that was rigged up out of a garden hose. For heat and cooking, there was a two-burner hot plate.

  Citron spent much of his time during that year in the comfortable Santa Monica library reading old travel books, the older the better, and anything he could find on cannibalism, which was not very much. When not in the library, he was usually down on the beach, where he watched the people, but talked to virtually no one, and sipped carefully, even sparingly, from his daily bottle of cheap red wine. He talked to virtually no one because his disease was still in remission. It had gone into remission shortly after he was jailed and he often suspected that he was cured of it forever. The disease that Citron no longer suffered from was curiosity.

  Citron's one meal a day was taken in the evening and usually consisted of a large bowl of what he still insisted on thinking of as pot au feu, which simmered sporadically on the hot plate and whose ingredients were suspect vegetables, meat and chicken bought on sale with blackmarket food stamps at Boys Market in the Marina del Rey. Sometimes Citron also bought day-old bread. He once estimated that he was living slightly more than $1,000 a year beneath the federal government's official poverty line, which that year was $4,680.

  After the diamond money finally ran out and he was down to his last $32.64, Citron packed what little he owned into the trunk and backseat of his one luxury, a 1969 Toyota Corona sedan, and headed north to a spot on the Pacific Coast Highway about halfway between Malibu and Oxnard. It was there that the Cadillac People lived.

  The Cadillac People into whose midst Citron settled were called that because that's what some of them lived in—old Cadillac sedans with savaged fenders and rust spots and backseats jammed with whatever their owners couldn’t bear to part with. Other Cadillac People lived in equally old Lincolns and Chrysler Imperials and huge Ford station wagons and converted school buses and homemade campers that perched haphazardly on the beds of senile pickup trucks. It was a community of sorts, an anarchists’ community perhaps, parked defiantly and illegally at the edge of the continent on land owned by the state. Occasionally, the highway patrol stopped by and halfheartedly shooed the Cadillac People away. But they almost always drifted back.

  Some of the Cadillac People drank. Some didn’t. Nearly all of them slept in their cars and used the ocean as their combination bathroom and TV set. They sat there in the mild sunshine, day after day, on the western edge of the American dream, listening mostly to country-western radio music because of the stories it told, drumming bored fingers on worn doorsills, and staring out through tinted windshields at the Pacific as they waited for something inevitable to happen—death perhaps; certainly not taxes.

  For three weeks Citron had waited with them and listened to their stories, which, like the country-western lyrics they favored, usually involved cheating lovers, faithless friends, venal employers, and feckless offspring.

  “You know what this is kinda like?” the Cadillac People's resident philosopher had once asked Citron. “This is kinda like a real bad double feature. You sit here waitin’ for this one to end and the other to begin, except you know damn well the second one ain’t gonna be no better’n the first. But you wait anyhow.”

  During what he sometimes later came to think of as Life's Intermission, Citron gambled four gallons of gasoline to drive into Venice and back to check out his post-office box. Another six months’ rent would be due on the box in two weeks. Citron had no plans to pay it.

  The post-office box in Venice was Citron's last outpost, his final link with civilization. It was where dunning letters could be sent; where strangers could implore him to buy their costly goods and services; where his oldest and dearest friends could send him money orders and entrea
ties to come and stay with them forever; where warmhearted foundations could offer him grants-in-aid; and where somebody, somewhere, could write to tell him that she loved him.

  What Citron found in the post-office box were four letters from the Internal Revenue Service, which he tossed, unopened, into the wastebasket. There were also nineteen pieces of junk mail, which were also discarded, and two letters from the American Express Company, forwarded from Paris, which he assumed to be rude demands for payment and which he also tossed away unread, unopened.

  The one letter Citron did open was prettily addressed to him by hand in brown ink. It was an invitation to an American Civil Liberties Union fund-raiser in Bel-Air. Citron assumed the ACLU had somehow got his name and address from Amnesty International.

  Citron turned to look up at the clock on the post-office wall. He still owned no watch and sometimes doubted that he ever would again. The post-office clock read 4:32. The ACLU reception with its promise of free food and drink was from 5:00 to 7:30. Citron found the public washroom and inspected himself in the mirror. He had clipped his gunfighter mustache the day before, just after one of the Cadillac People had given his gray-streaked brown hair a free trim along with a fanciful story about having once been Sinatra's favorite barber in Tahoe.

  As for clothes, Citron was wearing a clean blue button-down shirt, a worn but still good tweed jacket, faded jeans, and presentable brown loafers. It was a uniform that in Los Angeles would enable him to pass for either a sincere probation officer or a rich producer.

  At the ACLU fund-raiser in Bel-Air, Citron managed to put away a quarter of a pound of assorted cheese, a half-dozen cocktail sausages, perhaps fifteen Triscuits, and two glasses of white wine before he was discovered by Craigie Grey, the actress, questioned sharply, and hired on the spot as the resident manager of her Malibu beach apartment building.

  Upon turning thirty-two in 1971, Craigie Grey had taken a long bleak look at herself in a three-way mirror and a week later put every dime she could raise into a down payment on the two-story, eight-unit beach apartment building on the Pacific Coast Highway a block or so from the pier in what was generally conceded to be one of Malibu's less ritzy sections.

  The redheaded film actress bought the apartment building as both an investment and a hedge against what she called the three Fs—Fat, Fifty, and Forgotten. She also bought shrewdly and cheaply, bargaining the price down to less than three-quarters of a million. Eleven years later it was still worth four, possibly five times what she paid for it. Some said six.

  On that unseasonably warm November evening when she hired Citron (despite his murmured protestations that his inability to fix anything broken, either mechanical or spiritual, just might border on criminal negligence), Craigie Grey raised a glass of white wine to her broad, grin-prone mouth, sipped it, and stared at him over the glass's rim with her bluebonnet-blue eyes. A native of Longview in East Texas, which she had left thirty years ago when she was twelve (or six to hear her tell it now), her birthplace could still be detected in the softly twanged vowels that glided in and out of her speech.

  “How long were you in there, all in all?” she said, lowering her glass.

  “All in all, not quite thirteen months,” Citron said.

  Her next question was predictable—at least to Citron. But first there was to be the inevitable hesitation while the battle with prurience was fought. As usual, prurience won.

  “Was he really a cannibal like they all said?”

  Citron shrugged his answer, or lack of it, as he almost always did when asked that particular question. He reached for another Triscuit on which he placed a large chunk of cheese that turned out to be Monterey jack. They were standing next to the table where the wine and cheese were being served. Craigie Grey was there to make the fund-raiser's principal speech. Citron, of course, had come for the grub.

  “You don’t like to talk about it,” Craigie Grey said in a tone that mingled sympathy with disappointment.

  “It's not my favorite topic,” Citron admitted.

  Craigie Grey nodded and changed the subject. “You used to move around a lot, didn’t you?” she said. “Overseas, I mean.”

  “Yes. A lot.”

  “Why’d you come back here? I mean to L.A. You’re not from here.”

  “No.”

  Craigie Grey waited for him to answer her latest question. Citron seemed to be thinking about it. “The weather,” he said finally, as though the answer came as a surprise even to him. “I got used to a warm climate. I don’t much like the cold anymore.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy her, because she raised the wineglass to her mouth again, drank, put the glass down, and turned back to Citron, her attitude suddenly crisp and businesslike.

  “I’ll tell you what it pays,” she said.

  “All right.”

  “It pays four hundred a month and you get the grungy downstairs back unit free—that's the one on the highway.”

  Citron decided he should at least appear to consider it. He counted to five and said, “Okay. Fine.”

  “If something goes kaput, call a plumber or a carpenter or an electrician. Whatever. I’ll give you a list of numbers. It's cheaper in the long run. Professional maintenance, I mean.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ve only got two rules. Maybe three. Don’t rent to any coke dealers or whore ladies. And anyone who doesn’t come up with their rent by the tenth of the month is out on their ass. No exceptions. Okay?”

  Citron nodded. “Okay.”

  “Then you’re hired,” she said.

  Out of loyalty and gratitude to his new employer, Citron sat through her speech, which turned out to be predictably gloomy and uncommonly trenchant. When the pledge cards were passed around, he pocketed his and told a vaguely familiar-looking young television actress that he’d mail his check in.

  CHAPTER 4

  The name that Jack Replogle signed to checks and contracts was John T. Replogle. The T stood for Townsend. He built things. Or rather Replogle Construction, Inc., did. With its headquarters in Denver and offices in Jidda and Rome and Singapore, it built things all over the world—roads, docks, airfields, hospitals, pipelines, virtually anything. Replogle was the firm's president and chief executive officer. He was both very rich and very smart, and if he had a hobby, it was politics.

  Over the years Replogle had come to specialize in political fund-raising, which he always called “shaking down the flush-bottoms back East”—although back East to Replogle could mean Dallas or Tulsa or Kansas City or Chicago. Over the years he had shaken them down for close to forty million dollars.

  It was around 10:00 when he and Draper Haere stopped in Idaho Springs for breakfast, a meal Haere had never been able to do without. Although he regularly skipped lunch, Haere could never deny himself breakfast, which was invariably the same: two eggs over easy; bacon or sausage; toast and hash browns, or—if he was in the South—grits. He had grown fond of grits in Birmingham.

  Haere noticed the big high-sprung dark-blue pickup truck when they pulled into the cafe. It was a Dodge. He noticed it because of the angle parking that made it almost impossible not to read the sticker plastered across the pickup's tailgate. The sticker read: “Is There Life After Death? Fuck with This Truck and Find Out.”

  Replogle ordered only coffee, which he scarcely touched. He told Haere he didn’t eat much anymore and that the drugs he had to take made everything taste like brass. For some reason, however, the drugs didn’t affect the taste of liquor, so he was drinking more than he probably should, although at this point in his life he didn’t think anyone was bothering to keep score.

  Back in the station wagon, Replogle again buckled his seat belt, and again Haere didn’t. But this time Replogle failed to go through the fighter-pilot-goggles business, either because he forgot, or because he thought that once a day for the old joke was enough.

  They drove in silence for five minutes or so admiring the scenery. It had also snowed the night before
in the mountains, and there was a seasonal accumulation of three or four feet on level ground and much deeper than that in the drifts. The snowplows had already been through that morning, and the highway was clear and even dry in places where the sun had managed to get at it.

  Replogle lit another of his cigarettes and said, “When they told me they were going to have to cut, I decided to take a little trip.”

  “How little?”

  “Not so little. Around the world. I started in Jidda, where I fired a couple of guys and brought in three more. Then I doubled back to Rome, where I didn’t fire anybody because you can’t beat those Italians for hot-weather construction. I even hired a couple of real finds there and then flew on out to Singapore. That's where it happened. In Singapore.”

  “What?”

  “What I’m going to tell you about, which is the reason you’re here.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know about me and Langley.” It wasn’t a question.

  “No,” Haere said. “I don’t.”

  “At least you suspected.”

  “All right. I suspected.”

  “You never said anything.”

  Haere shrugged. “It wasn’t any of my business.”

  “When's that ever bothered you?”

  “Okay,” Haere said. “I presumed.”

  That seemed to mollify Replogle. “Okay, let's say you also presumed that before anything gets built in some country where the weather's hot and the people’re poor there's going to be some graft— some dash, baksheesh, whatever you want to call it. Otherwise, the poor folks aren’t going to get their shiny new doctorless hospitals, or their four-lane highways going nowhere, or their brand-new international airports where they can go out every Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday and watch a twenty-year-old DC-8 drop in—maybe. At least none of these things—without graft—is going to be built by Replogle Construction. Instead, they’re all going to be built by the British or the Italians or those fucking Koreans, who’re getting to be a real menace. So. I’ve spread a little money around—right?”