The Best of Joe Haldeman (42 page)

They both laughed. “But I don’t think so. He’s a sweet guy but he’s just not real sexy. I think his students see him as kind of a favorite uncle.”

“You fell for him once.”

“Uh huh. He had all of his current virtues plus a full head of hair, no potbelly—and, hm, what am I forgetting?”

“He was hung like an elephant?”

“No, I guess it was the millions of dollars. That can be pretty sexy.”

~ * ~

9.
wanderings

It was a good thing John liked to nose around obscure neighborhoods shopping; you couldn’t walk into any old K mart and pick up a 1921 Corona portable. In fact, you couldn’t walk into any typewriter shop in Boston and find one, not any. Nowadays they all sold self-contained word processors, with a few dusty electrics in the back room. A few had fancy manual typewriters from Italy or Switzerland; it had been almost thirty years since the American manufacturers had made a machine that wrote without electronic help.

He had a little better luck with pawnshops. Lots of Smith-Coronas, a few L. C. Smiths, and two actual Coronas that might have been old enough. One had too large a typeface and the other, although the typeface was the same as Hemingway’s, was missing a couple of letters:
Th quick b own fox jump d ov th lazy dog
. The challenge of writing a convincing Hemingway novel without using the letters “e” and “r” seemed daunting. He bought the machine anyhow, thinking they might ultimately have two or several broken ones that could be concatenated into one reliable machine.

The old pawnbroker rang up his purchase and made change and slammed the cash drawer shut. “Now you don’t look to me like the kind of man who would hold it against a man who ... “ He shrugged. “Well, who sold you something and then suddenly remembered that there was a place with lots of those somethings?”

“Of course not. Business is business.”

“I don’t know the name of the guy or his shop; I think he calls it a museum. Up in Brunswick, Maine. He’s got a thousand old typewriters. He buys, sells, trades. That’s the only place I know of you might find one with the missing what-ever-you-call-ems.”

“Fonts.” He put the antique typewriter under his arm—the handle was missing—and shook the old man’s hand. “Thanks a lot. This might save me weeks.”

With some difficulty John got together packing materials and shipped the machine to Key West, along with Xeroxes of a few dozen pages of Hemingway’s typed copy and a note suggesting Castle see what he could do. Then he went to the library and found a Brunswick telephone directory. Under “Office Machines & Supplies” was listed Crazy Tom’s Typewriter Museum and Sales Emporium. John rented a car and headed north.

The small town had rolled up its sidewalks by the time he got there. He drove past Crazy Tom’s and pulled into the first motel. It had a neon VACANCY sign but the innkeeper had to be roused from a deep sleep. He took John’s credit card number and directed him to Room 14 and pointedly turned on the NO sign. There were only two other cars in the motel lot.

John slept late and treated himself to a full “trucker’s” breakfast at the local diner two pork chops and eggs and hash browns. Then he worked off ten calories by walking to the shop.

Crazy Tom was younger than John had expected, thirtyish with an unruly shock of black hair. A manual typewriter lay upside down on an immaculate worktable, but most of the place was definitely maculate. Thousands of peanut shells littered the floor. Crazy Tom was eating them compulsively from a large wooden bowl. When he saw John standing in the doorway, he offered some. “Unsalted,” he said. “Good for you.”

John crunched his way over the peanut-shell carpet. The only light in the place was the bare bulb suspended over the worktable, though two unlit high-intensity lamps were clamped on either side of it. The walls were floor-to-ceiling gloomy shelves holding hundreds of typewriters, mostly black.

“Let me guess,” the man said as John scooped up a handful of peanuts. “You’re here about a typewriter.”

“A specific one. A 1921 Corona portable.”

“Ah.” He closed his eyes in thought. “Hemingway. His first. Or I guess the first after he started writing. A ‘27 Corona, now, that’d be Faulkner.”

“You get a lot of calls for them?”

“Couple times a year. People hear about this place and see if they can find one like the master used, whoever the master is to them. Sympathetic magic and all that. But you aren’t a writer.”

“I’ve had some stories published.”

“Yeah, but you look too comfortable. You do something else. Teach school.” He looked around in the gloom. “Corona Corona.” Then he sang the six syllables to the tune of “Cor-ina, Corina.” He walked a few steps into the darkness and returned with a small machine and set it on the table. “Newer than 1920 because of the way it says ‘Corona’ here. Older than 1927 because of the tab setup.” He found a piece of paper and a chair. “Go on, try it.”

John typed out a few quick foxes and aids to one’s party. The typeface was identical to the one on the machine Hadley had given Hemingway before they’d been married. The up-and-down displacements of the letters were different, of course, but Castle should be able to fix that once he’d practiced with the backup machine.

John cracked a peanut. “How much?”

“What you need it for?”

“Why is that important?”

“It’s the only one I got. Rather rent it than sell it.” He didn’t look like he was lying, trying to push the price up. “A thousand to buy, a hundred a month to rent.”

“Tell you what, then. I buy it, and if it doesn’t bring me luck, you agree to buy it back at a pro ratum. My one thousand dollars minus ten percent per month.”

Crazy Tom stuck out his hand. “Let’s have a beer on it.”

“Isn’t it a little early for that?”

“Not if you eat peanuts all morning.” He took two long-necked Budweisers from a cooler and set them on paper towels on the table. “So what kind of stuff you write?”

“Short stories and some poetry:” The beer was good after the heavy greasy breakfast. “Nothing you would’ve seen unless you read magazines like
Iowa Review
and
Triquarterly.”

“Oh yeah. Foldouts of Gertrude Stein and H.D. I might’ve read your stuff.”

“John Baird.”

He shook his head. “Maybe. I’m no good with names.”

“If you recognized my name from
The Iowa Review
you’d be the first person who ever had.”

“I was right about the Hemingway connection?”

“Of course.”

“But you don’t write like Hemingway for no
Iowa Review.
Short declarative sentences, truly this truly that.”

“No, you were right about the teaching, too. I teach Hemingway up at Boston University.”

“So that’s why the typewriter? Play show-and-tell with your students?”

“That, too. Mainly I want to write some on it and see how it feels.”

From the back of the shop, a third person listened to the conversation with great interest. He, it, wasn’t really a “person,” though he could look like one: he had never been born and he would never die. But then he didn’t really exist, not in the down-home pinch-yourself-ouch! way that you and I do.

In another way, he did
more
than exist, since he could slip back and forth between places you and I don’t even have words for.

He was carrying a wand that could be calibrated for heart attack, stroke, or metastasized cancer on one end; the other end induced a kind of aphasia. He couldn’t use it unless he materialized. He walked toward the two men, making no crunching sounds on the peanut shells because he weighed less than a thought. He studied John Baird’s face from about a foot away.

“I guess it’s a mystical thing, though I’m uncomfortable with that word. See whether I can get into his frame of mind.”

“Funny thing,” Crazy Tom said; “I never thought of him typing out his stories. He was always sitting in some cafe writing in notebooks, piling up saucers.”

“You’ve read a lot about him?” That would be another reason not to try the forgery. This guy comes out of the woodwork and says “I sold John Baird a 1921 Corona portable.”

“Hell, all I do is read. If I get two customers a day, one of ‘em’s a mistake and the other just wants directions. I’ve read all of Hemingway’s fiction and most of the journalism and I think all of the poetry. Not just the
Querschnitt
period; the more interesting stuff.”

The invisible man was puzzled. Quite obviously John Baird planned some sort of Hemingway forgery. But then he should be growing worried over this man’s dangerous expertise. Instead, he was radiating relief.

What course of action, inaction? He could go back a few hours in time and steal this typewriter, though he would have to materialize for that, and it would cause suspicions. And Baird could find another. He could kill one or both of them, now or last week or next, but that would mean duty in the fourteenth century for more than forever—when you exist out of time, a century of unpleasantness is long enough for planets to form and die.

He wouldn’t have been drawn to this meeting if it were not a strong causal nexus. There must be earlier ones, since John Baird did not just stroll down a back street in this little town and decide to change history by buying a typewriter. But the earlier ones must be too weak, or something was masking them.

Maybe it was a good timeplace to get John Baird alone and explain things to him. Then use the wand on him. But no, not until he knew exactly what he was preventing. With considerable effort of will and expenditure of something like energy, he froze time at this instant and traveled to a couple of hundred adjacent realities that were all in this same bundle of doomed timelines.

In most of them, Baird was here in Crazy Tom’s Typewriter Museum and Sales Emporium. In some, he was in a similar place in New York. In two, he was back in the Hemingway collection. In one, John Baird didn’t exist: the whole planet was a lifeless blasted cinder. He’d known about that timeline; it had been sort of a dry run.

“He did both,” John then said in most of the timelines. “Sometimes typing, sometimes fountain pen or pencil. I’ve seen the rough draft of his first novel. Written out in a stack of seven French schoolkids’ copybooks.” He looked around, memory working. A red herring wouldn’t hurt. He’d never come across a reference to any other specific Hemingway typewriter, but maybe this guy had. “You know what kind of machine he used in Key West or Havana?”

Crazy Tom pulled on his chin. “Nope. Bring me a sample of the typing and I might be able to pin it down, though. And I’ll keep an eye out—got a card?”

John took out a business card and his checkbook. “Take a check on a Boston bank?”

“Sure. I’d take one on a Tierra del Fuego bank. Who’d stiff you on a seventy-year-old typewriter?”

Sylvester Castlemaine might, John thought.

“I’ve had this business almost twenty years,” Tom continued. “Not a single bounced check or bent plastic.”

“Yeah,” John said. “Why would a crook want an old typewriter?” The invisible man laughed and went away.

~ * ~

10.
banal story

Dear Lena & Castle,

Typing this on the new/old machine to give you an idea about what has to be modified to mimic EH
’
s:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ2345 67890,. /
“
#$#_
£’
() *?

Other mechanical things to think about--

1. Paper--One thing that made people suspicious about the Hitler forgery is that experts know that old paper
smells
old. And of course there was that fatal chemical-composition error that clinched it.

As we discussed, my first thought was that one of us would have to go to Paris and nose around in old attics and so forth, trying to find either a stack of 75-year-old paper or an old blank book we could cut pages out of. But in the JFK Library collection I found out that EH actually did bring some American-made paper along with him. A lot of the rough draft of
in our time
--written in Paris a year or two after our
“
discovery
”
--was typed on the back of 6 x 7
”
stationery from his parents
’
vacation place in Windemere, Xerox enclosed. It should be pretty easy to duplicate on a hand press, and of course it will be a lot easier to find 75-year-old American paper. One complication, unfortunately, is that I haven
’
t really seen the paper; only a Xerox of the pages. Have to come up with some pretext to either visit the vault or have a page brought up, so I can check the color of the ink, memorize the weight and deckle of the paper, check to see how the edges are cut . . .

I
’
m starting to sound like a real forger. In for a penny, though, in for a pound. One of the critics who
’
s sent the fragment might want to see the actual document, and compare it with the existing Windemere pages.

2. Inks. This should not be a problem. Here
’
s a recipe for typewriter ribbon ink from a 1918 book of commercial formulas: