Missionary Stew by Ross Thomas

all the right moves?”
    “They were perfect.”
    Citron poured them both more coffee. “What’d they want to know—most of all?”
    “They wanted to know a little about me and a lot about Jack Replogle, and whether he’d said anything to me before we cracked up.”
    “What in particular?”
    “Drew Meade. They wanted to know if Replogle told me what he and Meade had talked about.”
    “Did they want that more than anything else?”
    Haere thought back to the night before. “I’d say they bore down on it pretty hard.” Haere took out a pack of cigarettes and offered Citron one. Citron shook his head. Haere lit his with a match from a small box supplied by the bar.
    Citron waited until the cigarette was lit. “I guess I’d better spend some more of your money.”
    Haere nodded his assent. “What on?”
    “Long distance.”
    “Singapore?”
    “Singapore,” Citron agreed. “I thought I’d call this afternoon. If you can drop me off on the PCH, I can catch a bus or hitch a ride from there.”
    Haere signaled for the check. “Where's your car?”
    “Somebody gave me a ride into Century City. To see my mother. He was supposed to run me back, but it didn’t work out.”
    Haere almost had his American Express card out of his wallet when he stopped and looked at Citron. “Jesus. Not Gladys Citron?”
    Citron grinned. It was a brief, wry grin. “I’m not sure if that's a question or an accusation. But you’re right. She's my mummy.”
    “Jesus,” Haere said again.
    “You know her?”
    “We’ve met a few times.” Haere tried to make the tone of his next question casual, but he could hear his voice betraying him. “Somebody didn’t tip her off on the Replogle thing, did he?”
    Citron shook his head. “No, she just wanted to say hello, give me a birthday present, and find out if I’d ever been a cannibal.”
    “That sounds like Gladys.”
    “Yes,” Citron said. “Doesn’t it?”
    Because he had a thirty-five-minute wait between buses, Drew Meade took a twenty-minute survey stroll around Santa Barbara and reconfirmed his impression of it as a candy-ass town. He found its people either too tan or too old, its weather too nice, its architecture too hokey. There was no hustle. Everybody seemed to have just got up from a nap, or about to go take one. Still candy-ass all right, he thought, looking up State Street, then turned and went back to the bus station.
    The thing to do, he decided, is to stay out of towns named after saints. St. Louis, St. Paul, San Diego, all horseshit towns. Even San Francisco, now that the fags have taken over. But when his ship came in (and Meade's ship had remained hull down on the horizon for forty years now), he’d go live in New York or Chicago or even Cleveland. Someplace without suntans. Someplace with suits and ties. Someplace civilized, for God's sake.
    Meade went into the bus station's men's room and had two quick drinks from his pint of Jim Beam. Back out in the waiting room he sat down in a plastic seat, took out a box of gumdrops, and ate themone by one as he surveyed his fellow passengers, not at all liking what he saw.
    Time was, he told himself, when people going somewhere could be divided up into three classes: bus guys, train guys, and plane guys. Bus guys wore coats and pants that didn’t match and tieless shirts buttoned up to their necks. Train guys dressed a little better, if not much, and carried shoeboxes filled with fried chicken, hard-boiled eggs, and potted-meat sandwiches. Plane guys all wore $100 suits with vests and if they couldn’t think of anything else to do, they’d climb up on a shoeshine stand and let some nigger play with their feet. Nowadays, though, you couldn’t tell the plane guys from the bus guys. They had leveled it all out. It's like they’d gone over it all with a grader.
    If someone had suggested to Drew Meade that at sixty-three he might be considered a senior citizen, or even elderly, he would have stared contemptuously