Missionary Stew

Chapter 24

At thirty, Velveeta Keats still called her mother ma’am. They had been talking long-distance for nearly twenty minutes, Velveeta Keats staring out at the Pacific, her mother, Francine Keats, staring out at Biscayne Bay. In California the temperature was seventy-two degrees and dry; in Florida it was eighty-five with a humidity of around seventy-five percent.

There was a fifteen-second silence before Francine Keats spoke again. “And you’re sure this Mr. Citron is a nice boy, Vee?”

“Yessum, except he’s not really a boy. He’s forty at least.”

“Well, you know what I mean.”

“Yessum, I know. But Papa’s met him, Mama. Ask Papa about him.”

“Well, I don’t know, flying off down there to Central America with someone you just met, it could lead to — well, you know the kind of fixes you get in.”

“Yessum.”

“How’s the weather out there?”

“It’s real nice, Mama.”

“It’s warm here.” There was another silence and then a long sigh from Florida. “When you all fixin’ to leave?”

“Right away.”

“And you’ll be gone how long?”

“He said about ten days or so.”

“And what’d you say this Mr. Citron does for a living?”

“He’s a writer, Mama. He writes travel articles.”

“Huh,” Francine Keats said, her disapproval total. “Well...” She paused again. “Well, you all have a good time.”

“Yessum, we will.”

“And I’ll tell your papa hello.”

“Yessum. You do that.”

“Well.” There was another pause. “Send me a postcard, hear?”

“Yessum.”

“Well, goodbye then.”

“Goodbye, Mama.”

After Francine Keats put down the phone, she continued to stare out into the bay where a white fifty-six-foot Chris Craft was putting out to sea. She knew the boat. It was the Sea Savvy, and it was owned by that New York couple down the road, that stuck-up Jewish lawyer and his wife, the one with all the red hair who claimed to be from Charleston. My Lord, the people who claim to be from Charleston nowadays. Francine Keats turned away from the window, sighed again, and examined herself in a mirror. She put two forefingers just in front of her earlobes and pushed up. The lines went away. So did ten years. At least ten, she thought. But they’d have to put you under to do it and B. S. won’t stand for that because he knows you’d talk just like you do in your sleep and Lord knows what you’d say. But maybe if you could find a surgeon in Mexico City or Buenos Aires or someplace, one that didn’t understand English, maybe you could have him do it. It sure was worth looking into.

She turned from the mirror and crossed the large room, which she called her sitting room because it sounded nice, went through the door and down the long hall to the door at the very end. There the man she always thought of as the skinny French nigger, the one theycalled Jacques, sat reading his American comic book, or probably just looking at the pictures. Jacques raised his eyes from the comic book and smiled.

“I... need... to see... him,” Francine Keats said, raising her voice and spacing the words to make the English penetrate.

“Oui, madame” Jacques said, rose, turned, knocked softly on the door, and waited for the “come in.” He opened the door and Francine went into what she called her husband’s den. The man was still there, the one B.S. called General, although he didn’t look like a general to Francine Keats. He looked like Mr. Bilgere who had taught her Sunday-school class in the Calvary Baptist Church when she was eleven.

“Sorry to bother you, B. S., but—” She stopped and looked timidly at the general.

“But what?” Keats said.

The general was now on his feet. He even bowed slightly. Francine Keats liked that. She liked any display of nice manners.

“I just talked to Vee and—”

Keats interrupted his wife. “You sure it can’t wait, honey? We’re kinda busy here.”

Francine Keats spoke in a rush. “I just thought you’d better know that Vee’s flying down to Tucamondo with that Mr. Citron you met out there in California. You know, the boy you told me about.”

Keats rose from behind his large teak desk and leaned across it toward his wife, his hands pressed flat against the desk’s leather top. When he spoke his voice was quiet, so quiet and low and hard that Francine Keats began backing toward the door. “When?” Keats said. “When’s Velveeta leaving?” He glanced at the general with a small apologetic smile. “Velveeta’s my daughter.”

The general nodded.

“Why, right away, she said.”

“Right away could be a couple of hours, honey, maybe a day even.”

“I got the impression they were on their way to the airport.”

“I see,” Keats said. “Well, thank you, Francine. Thank you for comin’ in and tellin’ me. I appreciate it.”

“I thought maybe you oughta know,” she said, turned, and hurried from the room.

When she was gone the mild-looking general sat back down and crossed his legs. He was wearing a double-breasted blue blazer and gray slacks of very fine light flannel. On his feet were the black laceless shoes that he still had made in London. His hazel Sunday-school teacher’s eyes were covered by rimless bifocals. His face was round and unremarkable. His gray hair was thinning. Only his voice was distinctive. It was a deep clipped bass.

“She said Citron, I believe. Your wife.”

Keats nodded and sat back down behind his desk.

“Gladys’s son, I presume.”

Again Keats nodded. “Yeah, he’s Gladys’s kid all right.”

“Well,” the general said. “That does present us with yet another problem, hmm?”

“You mean my daughter?”

“The problem — or question — as I see it, is why did young Citron ask your daughter to accompany him, hmm?” The general usually ended his questions with “hmm?” It was a habit he had picked up from an upperclassman at Virginia Military Institute, where he had been sent by his father, himself a general, after his eyes prevented him from being admitted to West Point. The general was actually a colonel-general and his name was Rafael Carrasco-Cortes. He was fifty-six years old and looking forward to an extremely comfortable retirement. However, his retirement now seemed to depend almost entirely on the man who sat behind the large desk in the book-lined room. The general was sure the books were unread, probably unopened. To the general, B. S. Keats was a social inferior, clever perhaps, but crude and ignorant and, of course, dangerous. B. S. Keats invariably thought of Carrasco-Cortes as the spic general. Their mutual contempt made for a curiously effective partnership.

“You wanta know why Citron took my daughter along?” Keats said. “Well, that’s simple enough. He probably wants to fuck her some more, that’s why.” Keats smiled at the general’s wince of dismay and then continued: “That’s one, and two, I’d say, is he figures she might be useful as sort of a hostage. I don’t reckon that sucker trusts me after all, despite all the time I spent butterin’ him up.”

“We are so close to complete success,” the general said, his tone full of regret. “So extremely close.”

“Hell, Ralphie, we’re still gonna make it,” Keats said. “But you and me might as well get one thing straight. Ain’t nothing gonna happen down there to my daughter, understand?”

The general nodded his agreement. “But that still leaves us the problem of young Mr. Citron, doesn’t it, hmm?”

“Yes, sir, that it does.”

The general sighed. “Gladys, of course, won’t like it. She won’t like it at all.”

“Now that’s just too fuckin’ bad about Gladys, isn’t it?” B. S. Keats said, grinned his cold gray-toothed grin, and added, just for spite, “Hmm?”

They met for the first time outside the door of the grungy downstairs front apartment, the tall gray-haired woman in the dark-blue suit and the young blond woman with the sun-streaked hair and deep tan who was dressed in jeans and shirt and carrying in her right hand a small expensive Mark Cross suitcase made out of bleached pigskin.

Gladys Citron was about to knock on the door of Unit A when Velveeta Keats said from behind her, “I’ll bet you’re his mama. You two sure look alike.”

Gladys Citron turned. “I’m Mrs. Citron.”

Velveeta Keats smiled, shifted the suitcase to her left hand, and stuck out her right. “I’m Velveeta Keats, and Morgan and I’re just fixing to leave for the airport.”

“Velveeta,” Gladys Citron said, accepting the offered hand.

“Like the cheese,” the younger woman said.

“Well,” Gladys Citron said, smiling her most brittle smile and turning back toward the door. “Let’s see if he’s receiving.”

She knocked. A moment later the door was opened by Morgan Citron, dressed in his new tan suit. He looked first at his mother and then at Velveeta Keats. “I take it you two have met.”

“We introduced ourselves,” Gladys Citron said.

“Come in.” He moved away from the door.

Velveeta Keats backed up a tentative step or two. “I’ll come back later if you two’d like—”

Citron interrupted. “Don’t worry about it, Velveeta. Come on in. Please.”

Gladys Citron was now inside the apartment and turning as she swept it with her eyes. “I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by to see where you were living.”

“Would you like some wine?” he said as Velveeta Keats came in and put her suitcase down.

“Yes, please,” his mother said. “I think I would.”

“We usually sit around the table,” Velveeta Keats said, drawing back one of the bent-iron chairs.

“How cozy,” Gladys Citron said and settled herself into the chair the younger woman held for her. Gladys Citron smiled her thanks and said, “What do you do to keep busy, Miss Keats?”

“I sort of fool around.”

“Velveeta’s a remittance woman,” Citron said as he put three Kraft-cheese glasses of red wine on the table and sat down between the two women.

“Really,” Gladys Citron said. “How fascinating. If you’re a remittance woman, then you’re not from California, are you?”

Velveeta Keats shook her head. “Miami.”

Gladys Citron turned to her son. “You two are taking a trip, I understand.”

“That’s right.”

“Might I ask where?”

“Tucamondo.”

“Well,” she said, “the current bang-bang capital of the world. I’m surprised.”

“Why?”

“It’s not your usual kind of peaceful backwater, Morgan, all quaint and curious. People keep getting shot down there, and decapitated, and kidnapped, and what-have-you. Not your sort of country at all.”

Citron sipped some wine, smiled indifferently at his mother, and turned to Velveeta Keats. “My mother is an authority on danger and violence. During the war she was with the Resistance in France.”

“Was that World War Two?”

Citron nodded. “See this ribbon?” He touched it. “That’s the Legion d’Honneur. It was given to her by de Gaulle himself because of all the Germans she killed. An even three dozen, wasn’t it, Gladys?”

“Around in there.”

“She’s really quite proud of it.”

“I don’t blame her,” Velveeta Keats said. “Lordy, that must’ve really been something.”

Citron turned back to his mother. “Come on, Gladys, what’s the real reason Velveeta and I shouldn’t fly down to Tucamondo?”

They stared at each other for several seconds until Gladys Citron shrugged and looked away. “None really — if neither of you minds getting shot at or beat up or made to disappear. In fact, I understand the climate is rather pleasant down there this time of year. Not too hot.” She paused and then asked as casually as she could, “Just the two of you going?”

“Yes,” Citron lied.

“Well, if you run across something unusual down there in the way of a story, Morgan, do remember your dear old mother. We pay awfully well, you know.”

“All right.”

“Where will you be staying?”

“I suppose at the Inter-Continental, if there is one.”

“There is,” Gladys Citron said as she rose. “There always seems to be an Inter-Continental in places where the people spend much of their time shooting at each other.” She smiled at Velveeta Keats. “It was so nice meeting you, Miss Keats. I don’t think I’ve ever met a real remittance woman before. I do hope we see more of each other.”

Citron rose as his mother moved to the door, opened it, and then turned back. “Have a good trip, Morgan, and do be careful.”

“Thanks. I will.”

Gladys Citron said something very quickly in French, looked long and carefully at her son, and then left, closing the door behind her. Citron resumed his seat at the table. Velveeta Keats stared at him curiously. “What’d she say — in French, I mean?”

“Roughly translated, she said life is full of pitfalls for the unwary.”

Velveeta Keats continued to stare at him. Finally, she said in a very soft sad voice, “Gosh, you two sure do hate each other, don’t you?”

Citron thought about it. “Yes,” he said, wondering why two utter strangers should hate each other. “I suppose we do.”