The Best of Joe Haldeman

by Joe W. Haldeman

  He was flabby in this universe, fat over old, tired muscle, like Hemingway at his age, perhaps, and he felt a curious anxiety that he realized was a real need to have a drink. Not just desire, not thirst. If he didn’t have a drink, something very very bad would happen. He knew that was irrational. Knowing didn’t help.

  John carefully mounted the stairs up to their apartment, stepping over the fifth one, also rotted in this universe. He put the beer in the refrigerator and took from the freezer a bottle of icy vodka—that was different—and poured himself a double shot and knocked it back, medicine drinking.

  That spiked the hangover pretty well He pried the top off a beer and carried it into the living room, thoughtful as the alcoholic glow radiated through his body. He sat down at the typewriter and picked up the air pistol, a fancy Belgian target model. He cocked it and, with a practiced two-handed grip, aimed at a paper target across the room. The pellet struck less than half an inch low.

  All around the room the walls were pocked from where he’d fired at roaches, and once a scorpion. Very Hemingwayish, he thought; in fact, most of the ways he was different from the earlier incarnations of himself were in Hemingway’s direction.

  He spun a piece of paper into the typewriter and made a list

  EH & me—

  —both had doctor fathers

  —both forced into music lessons

  —in high school wrote derivative stuff that didn’t show promise

  —Our war wounds were evidently similar in severity and location. Maybe my groin one was worse; army doctor there said that in Korea (and presumably WWI), without helicopter dustoff, I would have been dead on the battlefield. (Having been wounded in the kneecap and foot myself, I know that H’s story about carrying the wounded guy on his back is unlikely. It was a month before I could put any stress on the knee.) He mentioned genital wounds, possibly similar to mine, in a letter to Bernard Baruch, but there’s nothing in the Red Cross report about them.

  But in both cases, being wounded and surviving was the central experience of our youth. Touching death.

  —We each wrote the first draft of our first novel in six weeks (but his was better and more ambitious).

  —Both had unusual critical success from the beginning.

  —Both shy as youngsters and gregarious as adults.

  —Always loved fishing and hiking and guns; X loved the bullfight from my first corrida, but may have been influenced by H’s books.

  —Spain in general

  —have better women than we deserve

  —drink too much

  —hypochondria

  —accident proneness

  —a tendency toward morbidity

  —One difference. I will never stick a shotgun in my mouth and pull the trigger. Leaves too much of a mess.

  He looked up at the sound of the cane tapping. The Hemingway was in the Karsh wise-old-man mode, but was nearly transparent in the bright light that streamed from the open door. “What do I have to do to get your attention?” it said. “Give you cancer again?”

  “That was pretty unpleasant.”

  “Maybe it will be the last.” It half sat on the arm of the couch and spun the cane around twice. “Today is a big day. Are we going to Paris?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something big happens today. In every universe where you’re alive, this day glows with importance. I assume that means you’ve decided to go along with me. Stop writing this thing in exchange for the truth about the manuscripts.”

  As a matter of fact, he had been thinking just that. Life was confusing enough already, torn between his erotic love for Pansy and the more domestic, but still deep, feeling for Lena ... writing the pastiche was kind of fun, but he did have his own fish to fry. Besides, he’d come to truly dislike Castle, even before Pansy had told him about the setup. It would be fun to disappoint him.

  “You’re right. Let’s go.”

  “First destroy the novel.” In this universe, he’d completed seventy pages of the Up-in-Michigan novel.

  “Sure.” John picked up the stack of paper and threw it into the tiny fireplace. He lit it several places with a long barbecue match, and watched a month’s work go up in smoke. It was only a symbolic gesture, anyhow; he could retype the thing from memory if he wanted to.

  “So what do I do? Click my heels together three times and say. There’s no place like the Gare de Lyon’?”

  “Just come closer.”

  John took three steps toward the Hemingway and suddenly fell up down sideways—

  It was worse than dying. He was torn apart and scattered throughout space and time, being nowhere and everywhere, everywhen, being a screaming vacuum forever—

  Grit crunched underfoot and coalsmoke was choking thick in the air. It was cold. Grey Paris skies glowered through the long skylights, through the complicated geometry of the black steel trusses that held up the high roof. Bustling crowds chattering French. A woman walked through John from behind. He pressed himself with his hands and felt real.

  “They can’t see us,” the Hemingway said. “Not unless I will it.”

  “That was awful.”

  “I hoped you would hate it. That’s how I spend most of my timespace. Come on.” They walked past vendors selling paper packets of roasted chestnuts, bottles of wine, stacks of baguettes and cheeses. There were strange resonances as John remembered the various times he’d been here more than a half century in the future. It hadn’t changed much.

  “There she is.” The Hemingway pointed. Hadley looked worn, tired, dowdy. She stumbled, trying to keep up with the porter who strode along with her two bags. John recalled that she was just recovering from a bad case of the grippe. She’d probably still be home in bed if Hemingway hadn’t sent the telegram urging her to come to Lausanne because the skiing was so good, at Chamby.

  “Are there universes where Hadley doesn’t lose the manuscripts?”

  “Plenty of them,” the Hemingway said. “In some of them he doesn’t sell ‘My Old Man’ next year, or anything else, and he throws all the stories away himself. He gives up fiction and becomes a staff writer for the Toronto Star. Until the Spanish Civil War; he joins the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and is killed driving an ambulance. His only effect on American literature is one paragraph in The Autobiography of Alice B. Tofclos.”

  “But in some, the stories actually do see print?”

  “Sure, including the novel, which is usually called Along With Youth. There.” Hadley was mounting the steps up into a passenger car. There was a microsecond of agonizing emptiness, and they materialized in the passageway in front of Hadley’s compartment. She and the porter walked through them.

  “Merci,” she said, and handed the man a few sou. He made a face behind her back.

  “Along With Youth?” John said.

  “It’s a pretty good book, sort of prefiguring A Farewell To Arms, but he does a lot better in universes where it’s not published. The Sun Also Rises gets more attention.”

  Hadley stowed both the suitcase and the overnight bag under the seat. Then she frowned slightly, checked her wrist-watch, and left the compartment, closing the door behind her.

  “Interesting,” the Hemingway said. “So she didn’t leave it out in plain sight, begging to be stolen.”

  “Makes you wonder,” John said. “This novel. Was it about World War I?”

  “The trenches in Italy,” the Hemingway said. A young man stepped out of the shadows of the vestibule, looking in the direction Hadley took. Then he turned around and faced the two travelers from the future.

  It was Ernest Hemingway. He smiled. “Close your mouth, John. You’ll catch flies.” He opened the door to the compartment, picked up the overnight bag, and carried it into the next car.

  John recovered enough to chase after him. He had disappeared.

  The Hemingway followed. “What is this?” John said. “I thought you couldn’t be in two timespaces
at once.”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “It sure as hell wasn’t the real Hemingway. He’s in Lausanne with Lincoln Steffens.”

  “Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t.”

  “He knew my name!”

  “That he did.” The Hemingway was getting fainter as John watched.

  “Was he another one of you? Another STAB agent?”

  “No. Not possible.” It peered at John. “What’s happening to you?”

  Hadley burst into the car and ran right through them, shouting in French for the conductor. She was carrying a bottle of Evian water.

  “Well,” John said, “that’s what—”

  The Hemingway was gone. John just had time to think Marooned in 1922? when the railroad car and the Gare de Lyon dissolved in an inbursting cascade of black sparks and it was no easier to handle the second time, spread impossibly thin across all those light years and millennia, wondering whether it was going to last forever this time, realizing that it did anyhow, and coalescing with an impossibly painful snap:

  Looking at the list in the typewriter. He reached for the Heineken; it was still cold. He set it back down. “God,” he whispered. “I hope that’s that.”

  The situation called for higher octane. He went to the freezer and took out the vodka. He sipped the gelid syrup straight from the bottle, and almost dropped it when out of the corner of his eye he saw the overnight bag.

  He set the open bottle on the counter and sleepwalked over to the dining room table. It was the same bag, slightly beat-up, monogrammed EHR, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. He opened it and inside was a thick stack of manila envelopes.

  He took out the top one and took it and the vodka bottle back to his chair. His hands were shaking. He opened the folder and stared at the familiar typing.

  ERNEST M. HEMINGWAY

  ONE-EYE FOR MINE

  Fever stood up. In the moon light he could xx see blood starting on his hands. His pants were torn at the knee and he knew it would be bleeding there too. He watched the lights of the caboose disappear in the trees where the track curved.

  That lousy crut of a brakeman. He would get him some day.

  Fever scraped scuffed off the end of a tie and sat down to pick the cinders out of his hands and knee. He could use some water. The brakeman had his canteen.

  He could smell a campfire. He wondered if it would be smart to go find it. He knew about the wolves, the human kind that lived along the rails and the disgusting things they liked. He wasn’t afraid of them but you didn’t look for trouble.

  You don’t have to look for trouble, his father would say. Trouble will find you. His father didn’t tell him about wolves, though, or about women.

  There was a noise in the brush. Fever stood up and slipped his hand around the horn grip of the fat Buck clasp knife in his pocket.

  ~ * ~

  The screen door creaked open and he looked up to see Pansy walk in with a strange expression on her face. Lena followed, looking even stranger. Her left eye was swollen shut and most of that side of her face was bruised blue and brown.

  He stood up, shaking with the sudden collision of emotions. “What the hell—”

  “Castle,” Pansy said. “He got outta hand.”

  “Real talent for understatement.” Lena’s voice was tightly controlled but distorted.

  “He went nuts. Slappin’ Lena around. Then he started to rummage around in a closet raving about a shotgun, and we split.”

  “I’ll call the police.”

  “We’ve already been there,” Lena said. “It’s all over.”

  “Of course. We can’t work with—”

  “No, I mean he’s a criminal. He’s wanted in Mississippi for second-degree murder. They went to arrest him, hold him for extradition. So no more Hemingway hoax.”

  “What Hemingway?” Pansy said.

  “We’ll tell you all about it,” Lena said, and pointed at the bottle. “A little early, don’t you think? You could at least get us a couple of glasses.”

  John went into the kitchen, almost floating with vodka buzz and anxious confusion. “What do you want with it?” Pansy said oh-jay and Lena said ice. Then Lena screamed.

  He turned around and there was Castle standing in the door, grinning. He had a pistol in his right hand and a sawed-off shotgun in his left.

  “You cunts,” he said. “You fuckin’ cunts. Go to the fuckin’ cops.”

  There was a butcher knife in the drawer next to the refrigerator, but he didn’t think Castle would stand idly by and let him rummage for it. Nothing else that might serve as a weapon, except the air pistol. Castle knew that it wouldn’t do much damage.

  He looked at John. “You three’re gonna be my hostages. We’re gettin’ outta here, lose ‘em up in the Everglades. They’ll have a make on my pickup, though.”

  “We don’t have a car,” John said.

  “I know that, asshole! There’s a Hertz right down on One. You go rent one and don’t try nothin’ cute. I so much as smell a cop, I blow these two cunts away.”

  He turned back to the women and grinned crookedly, talking hard-guy through his teeth. “Like I did those two they sent, the spic and the nigger. They said somethin’ about comin’ back with a warrant to look for the shotgun and I was just bein’ as nice as could be, I said hell, come on in, don’t need no warrant. I got nothin’ to hide, and when they come in I take the pistol from the nigger and kill the spic with it and shoot the nigger in the balls. You shoulda heard him. Some nigger. Took four more rounds to shut him up.”

  Wonder if that means the pistol is empty, John thought. He had Pansy’s orange juice in his hand. It was an old-fashioned Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum six-shot, but from this angle he couldn’t tell whether it had been reloaded. He could try to blind Castle with the orange juice.

  He stepped toward him. “What kind of car do you want?”

  “Just a car, damn it. Big enough.” A siren whooped about a block away. Castle looked wary. “Bitch. You told ‘em where you’d be.”

  “No,” Lena pleaded. “We didn’t tell them anything.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” John said.

  Two more sirens, closer. “I’ll show you stupid!” He raised the pistols toward Lena. John dashed the orange juice in his face.

  It wasn’t really like slow motion. It was just that John didn’t miss any of it. Castle growled and swung around and in the cylinder’s chambers John saw five copper-jacketed slugs. He reached for the gun and the first shot shattered his hand, blowing off two fingers, and struck the right side of his chest. The explosion was deafening and the shock of the bullet was like being hit simultaneously in the hand and chest with baseball bats. He rocked, still on his feet, and coughed blood spatter on Castle’s face. He fired again, and the second slug hit him on the other side of the chest, this time spinning him half around. Was somebody screaming?

  Hemingway said it felt like an icy snowball, and that was pretty close, except for the inside part, your body saying. Well, time to close up shop. There was a terrible familiar radiating pain in the center of his chest, and John realized that he was having a totally superfluous heart attack. He pushed off from the dinette and staggered toward Castle again. He made a grab for the shotgun and Castle emptied both barrels into his abdomen. He dropped to his knees and then fell over on his side. He couldn’t feel anything. Things started to go dim and red. Was this going to be the last time?

  Castle cracked the shotgun and the two spent shells flew up in an arc over his shoulder. He took two more out of his shirt pocket and dropped one. When he bent over to pick it up, Pansy leaped past him. In a swift motion that was almost graceful—it came to John that he had probably practiced it over and over, acting out fantasies—he slipped both shells into their chambers and closed the gun with a flip of the wrist. The screen door was stuck. Pansy was straining at the knob with both hands. Castle put the muzzles up to the base of her skull and pulled one
trigger. Most of her head covered the screen or went through the hole the blast made. The crown of her skull, a bloody bowl, bounced off two walls and went spinning into the kitchen. Her body did a spastic little dance and folded, streaming.

  Lena was suddenly on his back, clawing at his face. He spun and slammed her against the wall. She wilted like a rag doll and he hit her hard with the pistol on the way down. She unrolled at his feet, out cold, and with his mouth wide open laughing silently he lowered the shotgun and blasted her point-blank in the crotch. Her body jackknifed and John tried with all his will not to die but blackness crowded in and the last thing he saw was that evil grin as Castle reloaded again, peering out the window, presumably at the police.