Missionary Stew

Chapter 5

After his hands were treated by a doctor in Idaho Springs, Draper Haere talked to a trio of policemen that consisted of a fiftyish Clear Creek County deputy sheriff and two mustachioed, look-alike investigators from the Colorado Highway Patrol.

Haere described the blue Dodge pickup and its two masked occupants as best he could. He also said he didn’t think it was an accident: that as far as he could tell it had seemed intentional. The policemen nodded somberly, looked thoughtful, and marked it down as hit-and-run. Haere didn’t mention Jack Replogle’s tale about the CIA and Singapore and Drew Meade, because he could see no purpose it would serve.

Since Haere no longer went to funerals, he didn’t stay for Jack Replogle’s. Instead he called Maureen, Replogle’s wife, to express his condolences. Maureen was appropriately tearful and, as always, excessively dramatic.

“Tell me he didn’t suffer, Draper,” Maureen Replogle said.

“He didn’t suffer, Maureen.”

“That man was my life — my entire life. How can I live without him? How can I possibly go on living without him? I’m thinking of killing myself, Draper. I’ve got some sleeping pills. I’ll just take those and when I wake up I’ll be with Jack.”

“I don’t think Jack would really want you to do that, Maureen. He’d want you to go on living for as long as possible.”

There was a silence and then Maureen said in a very small voice, “Do you really think so?”

“I’m sure of it.”

There was another silence and then the tears started again. “Do you know what I am, Draper? I’m — oh, my God — I’m a widow.”

Maureen hung up without saying goodbye, and Draper Haere went aboard the United flight to Los Angeles. There, in the first-class section, even before the plane took off, he asked for and was served a martini, which he drank through a couple of straws because of his lightly bandaged hands.

During the two-hour flight to Los Angeles, Haere stared down at the occasional lights six miles below and thought about death and dying and the last funeral he had attended, which had been that of his father twenty-five years before in Birmingham, Alabama.

Father and son had moved to Birmingham from Denver in 1954, when the senior Haere had managed to secure a job on the copy desk of the Birmingham News.The News didn’t seem to care whether the senior Haere was a communist or not as long as he was a competent journeyman who would work cheap. Haere was just finishing his junior year in high school when his father — on his day off — started going down to Sylacauga on the bus. Haere at first thought his old man had found a lady friend, until father invited son to go along. They got off the Trailways bus at the combination depot and five-and-dime and walked three miles out of town to a small farmhouse, where they sat on the front porch with a man of about the same age as Haere’s father. Haere drank lemonade. The two men drank beer. Nobody said much. The other man had also served in Spain, and his left leg was gimpy. They sat there in the warm spring afternoon in a not uncomfortable silence that seemed both to separate and embrace what surely were the only two veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Alabama. A Sunday or so later, when Haere’s old man asked him if he’d like to go down to Sylacauga again, Haere said no.

On March 25,1957, Haere was summoned to the office of the high school principal and informed that he was being offered a full four-year scholarship to Harvard. “That’s in Cambridge,” the principal said. “In Massachusetts.” Haere told the principal he would have to think it over.

It wasn’t until years later that Haere learned that it wasn’t his straight-A average that had won him the Harvard scholarship. Instead, it had been Jack Replogle calling in a political debt. Replogle had called Big Ed Johnson of Colorado, who had called Big Jim Folsom of Alabama, who had called a Birmingham banker who had earned both his B.A. and M.B.A. at Harvard. Big Jim as governor kept large sums of the state’s money interest-free in the banker’s bank. The banker was one of Harvard’s unofficial scholarship scouts. It took only a few minutes for the banker to decide that Draper Haere would do wonderfully well at his alma mater.

When Haere told his old man about the scholarship offer, the senior Haere had grinned and said, “No shit? You going to take it?”

“I don’t know,” Haere said.

“I don’t see why not.”

“I’ll think about it,” Haere said.

He reached his decision four weeks later when his father died from heart failure, seated in front of the radio listening to the detested Fulton Lewis, Jr. He also would have detested anyone’s calling it heart failure. “Heart failure kills everybody,” he sometimes told Haere, quoting one of his favorite copy-desk maxims. “But people die from heart attacks and heart seizures. Remember that.”

There was just enough money to bury him in a cemetery called Memorial Park. There were no services of any kind. The man from Sylacauga came up for the burial. He and Haere rode out to the cemetery together in the funeral-home car behind the hearse. No one from the paper came. Haere never did know why. Perhaps, he told himself, they just forgot.

There were two funeral-home attendants in the hearse. They, along with Haere and the man from Sylacauga, were to carry the casket, the cheapest available. At the last moment another car, a 1949 Hudson, pulled up and a man in his late forties got out. Wordlessly, he took hold of one of the handles and the five of them carried the casket to the open grave, into which it was lowered by a pair of gravediggers.

The man who came late turned to Haere. “I knew your father,” he said. “I admired him.” The man had a European accent of some kind. He didn’t say anything to the man from Sylacauga. Haere thought they might not have known each other, or it might have been that they did know each other but the man from Sylacauga simply ignored the stranger the way he ignored almost everyone.

“Would you like me to say a few words?” the man with the accent said.

“Sure,” Haere said. “If you want to.”

The man with the accent reached down, picked up a clod or two of red clay, and tossed the earth down on the casket.

“I knew this comrade,” said the man with the accent. “He was steadfast in the pursuit of justice all his life.”

The man from Sylacauga snorted in disgust, turned, and walked away. Draper Haere never saw either man again.

At virtually the same time that Draper Haere and his bleak thoughts were passing over the Grand Canyon on their way to Los Angeles, Morgan Citron was parking his 1969 Toyota sedan on the edge of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.

From the highway, Craigie Grey’s apartment building didn’t look like six million dollars to Citron. Or five million. Or even four. It was only two stories in height and a bare fifty feet in width. Its architecture was mineshaft modern, and it was protected from Valley marauders by a seven-foot-high redwood fence that had a locked gate. Citron tried the key Craigie Grey had given him in the gate’s lock and was mildly surprised to find that it worked.

He went through the gate and into a small bricked patio. The bricks were used and divided into squared-off sections by old railroad ties. The patio also boasted a small green jungle of potted succulents and ferns illuminated by an outside floodlight that was mostly focused on the gate. From the light Citron could determine that the apartment building was constructed of redwood and shingle, which would burn quite merrily when one of the periodic fires swept down from the Santa Monica mountains and hopped the highway. If the place was really worth upward of four million dollars, Citron decided it must be because of the sound caused by the bang and crash of a heavy surf, which was so loud he could scarcely hear the highway traffic.

The grungy downstairs back apartment seemed to be Unit A. Using the same key he had used on the gate, Citron unlocked the apartment door and went in. He felt for the light switch, turned it on, and found himself in a one-room studio with a large single window overlooking the patio. The furnishings were sparse: a phone, a couch that he assumed pulled out into a bed, a round Formica-topped table with four chairs made out of bent iron and molded plastic, a shabby armchair that seemed to be of the reclining variety, and an old seventeen-inch black-and-white General Electric television set. The floor was covered with linoleum of the speckled-white-and-gold kind. It was almost worn through in the space in front of the Pullman kitchen. On the walls there was nothing. Not even a calendar.

It took Citron only two trips out to the Toyota to bring in everything he owned. As he was storing away the last of his three aluminum cooking pots, a woman’s voice said from the still-open door, “Can you fix a running toilet?”

Without turning, Citron said, “No.”

“What about a broken heart?”

“Not that either,” he said and turned.

His first impression was that although she was not very old, she was not nearly as young as she looked, which would have made her around nineteen, possibly twenty. Twenty-one at most. Somehow Citron knew she was at least thirty. It might have been the melancholy that peered out through her eyes, which were large and almost the color of woodsmoke. She had a beach dweller’s careless sun-streaked hair and an oval face with a rather interesting nose and a wide mouth set above a quite small chin that nevertheless looked defiant — or perhaps only stubborn. She was effortlessly pretty and with a little artful makeup might even have been beautiful in a vulnerable sort of way.

“I’m in Apartment E — in front,” she said. “My name’s Keats. Velveeta Keats.”

“Velveeta.”

“Sort of tips you off, doesn’t it? I mean, about my family. You’re wondering what kind of folks would name their youngest daughter Velveeta.”

“Am I?”

“Sure. The answer is: my kind of folks. The Keatses. The Florida Keatses. Or to pinpoint it: the Miami Keatses. My family was very big in the drug trade down there in the sixties and seventies.”

“But no more,” Citron said.

“They cashed out and went into T-bills. At least, that’s what they were in a year or so ago. They may be in municipal bonds by now. You ever notice how fast things move nowadays? The Keatses went from dirt-poor to hog-rich to banker-stuffy in one generation. But when I was born back in ’fifty-two they named me Velveeta because back then they thought it sounded pretty and tasted good.”

“They still like Velveeta?”

“The name?”

“The cheese.”

“They don’t like either one anymore. Mama calls me Vee now and they switched to Brie. Mama puts it on crackers with slivered almonds and sticks it in the microwave for a few seconds. If you’re wondering what I’m doing out here, I’m a remittance woman. Are you the new super?”

“Caretaker really.”

“What’s your name?”

Citron told her.

“That’s nice. French, isn’t it?”

“French.”

“Well, I’ve got this running toilet.”

“Jiggle it.”

“The handle?”

“Right.”

“I did that.”

“Try taking the top off. There’s a round ball in there that floats. Bend the rod that holds the ball. Bend it down. That sometimes works.”

“I did that, too.”

“Have you got a radio?”

“Sure.”

“Well, put the radio in the bathroom and turn it on. If you play it loudly enough, you won’t hear the toilet.”

She came farther into the apartment and looked around curiously. “Mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“Not at all.” He gestured toward the recliner, but Velveeta Keats chose instead one of the bent-iron-and-plastic chairs. Citron took a half gallon of Gallo red out of one of the two cardboard cartons he had carried in from the Toyota and poured wine into a pair of mismatched Kraft cheese glasses. He handed one of them to Velveeta Keats and then sat down opposite her at the table.

She examined her glass. “I remember these. Pimento cheese used to come in them. The Keatses always drank out of these and jelly glasses. Back when we were poor. Are you poor?”

“Extremely,” Citron said.

“What’d you do — before you got poor?” she said. “That’s my personal question.”

“I wrote and traveled.”

“You mean you were a travel writer? What’s doing in Omaha? Beautiful, unspoiled Belize. Tierra del Fuego on twenty a day. Stuff like that?”

“I guess I was really more of a writing traveler.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, I’d travel to someplace where not too many people go, live there awhile, maybe six months, sometimes longer, and then write about what it was like.”

“Is that what you’re doing here — in Malibu?”

Citron shook his head. “No.”

“What happened?”

“I think I ran out of places.”

“How long’ve you known the landlady?”

“Craigie Grey? Not long.”

“How long’s not long?”

“About five hours.”

“You’re right. That’s not long.”

Velveeta Keats finished her wine, put the glass down, and cupped her face in her palms. “I was married to a Cuban for three years.”

Citron waited for the rest of the tale. When there was nothing but silence for almost fifteen seconds, he said, “Well. A Cuban.”

“His family used to own all the milk in Cuba.”

“Before Castro.”

“Uh-huh. I don’t know how anyone could own all the milk in Cuba, but that’s what he always said. When I married him, he was in the dope business. That’s really why I married him, so the Keatses and the Manerases could combine operations. It worked out okay. Sort of, I reckon. For a while. You ever been married?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“The usual reasons.”

“Name two.”

Citron thought for a moment. “Well, one died and the other one said no thanks.”

“Then you’re not gay?”

“I don’t think so.”

“The guy who was here before you, he was gay. I mean, he was gay gay. I’d be feeling low and he’d pop over with a plate of fudge and the latest gossip and have me in stitches in no time.” She examined Citron carefully. “Somehow, I don’t think you’re the type to pop over with a plate of fudge.”

“Who can tell?” Citron said.

Velveeta Keats rose. “Well, thanks for the wine and the plumbing advice.”

“You’re welcome.”

She moved to the still open door, stopped, and turned. “I’m a good cook,” she said.

Citron smiled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Yes,” she said. “You do that.” She then turned and went through the door.

After Velveeta Keats had gone, Citron continued to sit at the table with his almost empty glass. He felt it stir then, almost uncoil, the first faint signs of the disease that had killed a billion or so cats. Curiosity. He began to wonder how it would all turn out and where he would be a year later. He was not accustomed to thinking of the future in terms of more than a day or a week — a month at most. The thought of a year was unsettling. It seemed like infinity. For a moment he thought of repacking his two cardboard cartons and returning to the comforting hopelessness of the Cadillac People. Instead, he rose, rinsed out the two glasses, transformed the couch into a bed, brushed his teeth, and got between what seemed to be a pair of reasonably clean sheets. After fifteen minutes or so, the sound of the surf put him to sleep. He dreamed of Africa.