The Best of Joe Haldeman (38 page)

There are places where you can shoot a person even with a .22 and he will die quickly and without too much pain. There are other sites that are quite the opposite. Of course I concentrated on those, trying to make him talk. Each time I shot him I dressed the wound, so there would be a minimum of blood loss.

I first shot him during the evening news, and he lasted well into Johnny Carson, with a new bullet each half hour. He never said a word, or cried out. Just stared.

After he died, I waited a few hours, and nothing happened. So I walked to the police station and turned myself in. That’s it.

So here we be now. I know it be life for me. Maybe it be that rubber room. I ain’t care. This be the only place be safe. The Monster, he know. I can feel.

[This is the end of the transcript proper. The respondent did not seem agitated when the guards led him away. Consistent with his final words, he seemed relieved to be back in prison, which makes his subsequent suicide mystifying. The circumstances heighten the mystery, as the attached coroner’s note indicates.]

State of California

Department of Corrections

Forensic Pathology Division

Glyn Malin, M.D., Ph.D.—Chief of Research

I have read about suicides that were characterized by sudden hysterical strength, including a man who had apparently choked himself to death by throttling (though I seem to recall that it was a heart attack that actually killed him). The case of Royce “Chink” Jackson is one I would not have believed if I had not seen the body myself.

The body is well muscled, but not unusually so; when I’d heard how he died I assumed he was a mesomorphic weight lifter type. Bones are hard to break.

Also, his fingernails are cut to the quick. It must have taken a burst of superhuman strength, to tear his own flesh without being able to dig in.

My first specialty was thoracic surgery, so I well know how physically difficult it is to get to the heart. It’s hard to believe that a person could tear out his own. It’s doubly hard to believe that someone could do it after having brutally castrated himself.

I do have to confirm that that is what happened. The corridor leading to his solitary confinement cell is under constant video surveillance. No one came or went from the time the door was shut behind him until breakfast time, when the body was discovered.

He did it to himself, and in total silence.

GM:wr

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION TO “THE HEMINGWAY HOAX”

For some reason I was not, unlike most people in my generation, overexposed to Ernest Hemingway in high school. I didn’t study him as an undergraduate, either—majoring in physics and astronomy, to which he contributed little—and so when my first novel came out, I was amused when critics talked about the obvious influence Hemingway had had on my writing. My only exposure had been “The Old Man and the Sea,” in junior high school, which I hadn’t liked much.

The influence was secondary, but still strong. The postwar science fiction that I’d devoured since childhood was heavily influenced by Hemingway, as was most popular fiction of the time.

I put in the back of my mind that I’d better read some of this guy before somebody exposed my ignorance. After my first novel came out,

Gay and I took a summer vacation in Europe, starving-student style. Our Spanish rail pass covered the ferry over to Morocco, and we couldn’t resist
that.
I ran out of reading material in Marrakesh, and in the sunbaked souk found a table full of books. One of the few in English was
Fiesta,
the British title of Hemingway’s first novel, which we call
The Sun Also Rises.

I read it with admiration and an unusual degree of identification: like Jake Barnes, I was a young American fiction writer trying to deal with the horror of war, still recovering from a serious wounding. (Mine considerably less serious than Jake’s loss of his most important digit.)

Over the next year and a half I sought out and read almost every word that Hemingway had published. I also read a lot of critical and biographical material, fascinated by the curious links between his work and his life. (Such links rarely exist in mine: I’ve never been to Mars or annihilated an entire planet.)

By pure coincidence, Gay and I went down to Key West, to do some astronomy and partying, the same week that the International Hemingway Society was meeting there. They were having a banquet in a nice hotel over the water, so we bought tickets and sat at a random table.

The other people who sat down there included Michael Reynolds, Jackson Bryer, Jim Nagel, and Scott Donaldson—all big-league Hemingway scholars. That I had read their books was not surprising, but that I had done it just as a reader (rather than an academic) and that I was a professional fiction writer, made me someone special. So after the banquet we hit the bars, which is what one does in Key West, and by the end of the weekend we were good friends, fated to meet again, year after year, as the conference moved from Paris to Pamplona to Petoskey and beyond.

One fascinating aspect of Hemingway’s life is the “lost manuscripts,” which his first wife famously left in a train station.

One of my students gave me a ride to the airport when I was headed for Australia, and while we were waiting in the bar I told him the story of the lost manuscripts, and how much they would be worth if somebody found them—and, since writers’ minds work that way, how much money you could make if you successfully counterfeited them. He’s probably the easiest writer in the American idiom to pastiche.

On the way back from the men’s room, I had a flash of inspiration. You wouldn’t have to risk all that inconvenient jail time if, instead of writing fake Hemingway stories yourself, you wrote a story about someone
else
doing it! The next day, I was sitting in a screened-in porch on an island in the Great Barrier Reef, using my typewriter to carry me back to the similar muggy heat in Key West.

THE HEMINGWAY HOAX

1.
the torrents of spring

ur story begins in a run-down bar in Key West, not so many years from now. The bar is not the one Hemingway drank at, nor yet the one that claims to be the one he drank at, because they are both too expensive and full of tourists. This bar, in a more interesting part of town, is a Cuban place. It is neither clean nor well-lighted, but has cold beer and good strong Cuban coffee. Its cheap prices and rascally charm are what bring together the scholar and the rogue.

Their first meeting would be of little significance to either at the time, though the scholar, John Baird, would never forget it. John Baird was not capable of forgetting anything.

Key West is lousy with writers, mostly poor writers, in one sense of that word or the other. Poor people did not interest our rogue, Sylvester Castlemaine, so at first he didn’t take any special note of the man sitting in the corner scribbling on a yellow pad. Just another would-be writer, come down to see whether some of Papa’s magic would rub off. Not worth the energy of a con.

But Castle’s professional powers of observation caught at a detail or two and focused his attention. The man was wearing jeans and a faded flannel shirt, but his shoes were expensive Italian loafers. His beard had been trimmed by a barber. He was drinking Heineken. The pen he was scribbling with was a fat Mont Blanc Diplomat, two hundred bucks on the hoof, discounted. Castle got his cup of coffee and sat at a table two away from the writer.

He waited until the man paused, set the pen down, took a drink. “Writing a story?” Castle said.

The man blinked at him. “No ... just an article.” He put the cap on the pen with a crisp snap. “An article about stories. I’m a college professor.”

“Publish or perish,” Castle said.

The man relaxed a bit. “Too true.” He riffled through the yellow pad. “This won’t help much. It’s not going anywhere.”

“Tell you what ... bet you a beer it’s Hemingway or Tennessee Williams.”

“Too easy.” He signaled the bartender. “
Dos cervezas
. Hemingway, the early stories. You know his work?”

“Just a little. We had to read him in school—
The Old Man and the Fish?
And then I read a couple after I got down here.” He moved over to the man’s table. “Name’s Castle.”

“John Baird.” Open, honest expression; not too promising. You can’t con somebody unless he thinks he’s conning you. “Teach up at Boston.”

“I’m mostly fishing. Shrimp nowadays.” Of course Castle didn’t normally fish, not for things in the sea, but the shrimp part was true. He’d been reduced to heading shrimp on the Catalina for five dollars a bucket. “So what about these early stories?”

The bartender set down the two beers and gave Castle a weary look.

“Well ... they don’t exist.” John Baird carefully poured the beer down the side of his glass. “They were stolen. Never published.”

“So what can you write about them?”

“Indeed. That’s what I’ve been asking myself.” He took a sip of the beer and settled back. “Seventy-four years ago they were stolen. December 1922. That’s really what got me working on them; thought I would do a paper, a monograph, for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the occasion.”

It sounded less and less promising, but this was the first imported beer Castle had had in months. He slowly savored the bite of it.

“He and his first wife, Hadley, were living in Paris. You know about Hemingway’s early life?”

“Huh uh. Paris?”

“He grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. That was kind of a prissy, self-satisfied suburb of Chicago.”

“Yeah, I been there.”

“He didn’t like it. In his teens he sort of ran away from home, went down to Kansas City to work on a newspaper.

“World War I started, and like a lot of kids, Hemingway couldn’t get into the army because of bad eyesight, so he joined the Red Cross and went off to drive ambulances in Italy. Take cigarettes and chocolate to the troops.

“That almost killed him. He was just doing his cigarettes-and-chocolate routine and an artillery round came in, killed the guy next to him, tore up another, riddled Hemingway with shrapnel. He claims then that he picked up the wounded guy and carried him back to the trench, in spite of being hit in the knee by a machine gun bullet.”

“What do you mean, ‘claims’?”

“You’re too young to have been in Vietnam.”

“Yeah.”

“Good for you. I was hit in the knee by a machine gun bullet myself, and went down on my ass and didn’t get up for five weeks. He didn’t carry anybody one step.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Well, he was always rewriting his life. We all do it. But it seemed to be a compulsion with him. That’s one thing that makes Hemingway scholarship challenging.”

Baird poured the rest of the beer into his glass. “Anyhow, he actually was the first American wounded in Italy, and they made a big deal over him. He went back to Oak Park a war hero. He had a certain amount of success with women.”

“Or so he says?”

“Right, God knows. Anyhow, he met Hadley Richardson, an older woman but quite a number, and they had a steamy courtship and got married and said the hell with it, moved to Paris to live a sort of Bohemian life while Hemingway worked on perfecting his art. That part isn’t bullshit. He worked diligently and he did become one of the best writers of his era. Which brings us to the lost manuscripts.”