Missionary Stew by Ross Thomas Read Free Book Online

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 ofkilling 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 uncomfortablesilence 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