The Best of Joe Haldeman (53 page)

Here it stops.
A frozen tableau:

Afternoon light slanting in through the tall cloudy windows of the Cambon bar, where he had liberated, would liberate, the hotel in August 1944. A good large American-style martini gulped too fast in the excitement. The two small trunks unpacked and laid out item by item. Hundreds of pages of notes that would become the Paris book. But nothing before ‘23, of course,
the manuscripts
. The novel and the stories and the poems still gone. One moment nailed down with the juniper sting of the martini and then time crawling rolling flying backwards again—

no control
?

Months blurring by, Madrid Riviera Venice feeling sick and busted up, the plane wrecks like a quick one-two punch brain and body, blurry sick even before them at the Finca Vigia, can’t get a fucking thing done after the Nobel Prize, journalists day and night, the prize bad luck and bullshit anyhow but need the $35,000

damn, had to shoot Willie, cat since the boat-time before the war, but winged a burglar too, same gun, just after the Pulitzer, now that was all right

slowing down again—Havana—the Floridita—

Even Mary having a good time, and the Basque jai alai players, too, though they don’t know much English, most of them, interesting couple of civilians, the doctor and the Kraut look-alike, but there’s something about the boy that makes it hard to take my eyes off him, looks like someone I guess, another round of Papa Dobles, that boy, what is it about him? and then the first round, with lunch, and things speeding up to a blur again.

out on the Gulf a lot, enjoying the triumph of
The Old Man and the Sea,
the easy good-paying work of providing fishing footage for the movie, and then back into 1951, the worst year of his life that far, weeks of grudging conciliation, uncontrollable anger, and black-ass depression from the poisonous critical slime that followed Across the
River,
bastards gunning for him, Harold Ross dead, mother Grace dead, son Gregory a dope addict hip-deep into the dianetics horseshit, Charlie Scribner dead but first declaring undying love for that asshole Jones

most of the forties an anxious blur, Cuba Italy Cuba France Cuba China found Mary kicked Martha out, thousand pages on the fucking
Eden
book wouldn’t come together Bronze Star better than Pulitzer

Martha a chrome-plated bitch in Europe but war is swell otherwise, liberating the Ritz, grenades rifles pistols and bomb runs with the RAF, China boring compared to it and the Q-ship runs off Cuba, hell, maybe the bitch was right for once, just kid stuff and booze

marrying the bitch was the end of my belle epoch, easy to see from here, the thirties all sunshine Key West Spain Key West Africa Key West, good hard writing with Pauline holding down the store, good woman but sorry I had to

sorry I had to divorce

stopping

Walking Paris streets after midnight:

I was never going to throw back at her losing the manuscripts. Told Steffens that would be like blaming a human for the weather, or death. These things happen. Nor say anything about what I did the night after I found out she really had lost them. But this one time we got to shouting and I think I hurt her. Why the hell did she have to bring the carbons what the hell did she think carbons were for stupid stupid stupid and she crying and she giving me hell about Pauline Jesus any woman who could fuck up Paris for you could fuck up a royal flush

it slows down around the manuscripts or me—

golden years the mid-twenties everything clicks Paris Vorarlburg Paris Schruns Paris Pamplona Paris Madrid Paris Lausanne

couldn’t believe she actually

most of a novel dozens of poems stories sketches—
contes,
Kitty called them by God woman you show me your
conte
and I’ll show you mine

so drunk that night I know better than to drink that much absinthe so drunk I was half crawling going up the stairs to the apartment I saw weird I saw God I saw
I saw myself standing there on the fourth landing with Hadley’s goddamn bag

I waited almost an hour, that seemed like no time or all time, and when he, when I, when he came crashing up the stairs he blinked twice, then I walked through me groping, shook my head without looking back and managed to get the door unlocked

flying back through the dead winter French countryside, standing in the bar car fighting hopelessness to Hadley crying so hard she can’t get out what was wrong with Steffens standing gaping like a fish in a bowl

twisting again, painlessly inside out, I suppose through various dimensions, seeing the man’s life as one complex chord of beauty and purpose and ugliness and chaos, my life on one side of the Mobius strip consistent through its fading forty-year span, starting,
starting,
here:

the handsome young man sits on the floor of the apartment holding himself, rocking racked with sobs, one short manuscript crumpled in front of him, the room a mess with drawers pulled out, their contents scattered on the floor, it’s like losing an arm a leg (a foot a testicle), it’s like losing your youth and along with youth

with a roar he stands up, eyes closed fists clenched, wipes his face dry and stomps over to the window

breathes deeply until he’s breathing normally strides across the room,

kicking a brassiere out of his way stands with his hand on the knob and thinks this:

life can break you but you can grow back strong at the broken places

and goes out slamming the door behind him, somewhat conscious of having been present at his own birth.

With no effort I find myself standing earlier that day in the vestibule of a train. Hadley is walking away, tired, looking for a vendor. I turn and confront two aspects of myself.

“Close your mouth, John. You’ll catch flies.”

They both stand paralyzed while I slide open the door and pull the overnight bag from under the seat. I walk away and the universe begins to tingle and sparkle.

I spend forever in the black void between timespaces. I am growing to enjoy it.

I appear in John Baird’s apartment and set down the bag. I look at the empty chair in front of the old typewriter, the green beer bottle sweating cold next to it, and John Baird appears, looking dazed, and I have business elsewhere, else-when. A train to catch. I’ll come back for the bag in twelve minutes or a few millennia, after the bloodbath that gives birth to us all.

~ * ~

25.
a moveable feast

He wrote the last line and set down the pencil and read over the last page sitting on his hands for warmth. He could see his breath. Celebrate the end with a little heat.

He unwrapped the bundle of twigs and banked them around the pile of coals in the brazier. Crazy way to heat a room, but it’s France. He cupped both hands behind the stack and blew gently. The coals glowed red and then orange and with the third breath the twigs smoldered and a small yellow flame popped up. He held his hands over the fire, rubbing the stiffness out of his fingers, enjoying the smell of the birch as it cracked and spit.

He put a fresh sheet and carbon into the typewriter and looked at his penciled notes. Final draft? Worth a try:

Ernest M. Hemingway,

74 rue da Cardinal lemoine,

Paris, France

))UP IN MICHIGAN))

Jim Gilmore came to Horton
’
s Bay from Canada. He bought the blacksmith shop from old man Horton.

Shit, a typo. He flinched suddenly, as if struck, and shook his head to clear it. What a strange sensation to come out of nowhere. A sudden cold stab of grief. But larger somehow than grief for a person.

Grief for everybody, maybe. For being human.

From a typo?

He went to the window and opened it in spite of the cold. He filled his lungs with the cold damp air and looked around the familiar orange-and-grey mosaic of chimney pots and tiled roofs under the dirty winter Paris sky.

He shuddered and eased the window back down and returned to the heat of the brazier. He had felt it before, exactly that huge and terrible feeling. But where? For the life of him he couldn’t remember.

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION TO “GRAVES”

This story comes from a macabre experience I had in Vietnam. I was a demolition engineer, temporarily in charge of a squad with a kind of scary assignment. A bunch of artillery pieces were being airlifted into place on a hill, and the hill had lots of trees for the enemy to hide behind. Our job was to place explosives at the base of each tree in about a half an acre, and wire them all together, and then pop them all at once— the Big Bang Theory of lumberjacking.

The forest smelled to high heaven, the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh. We found two bodies side by side, a North Vietnamese lieutenant and private—scouts, we supposed—who had been killed by a random artillery round a couple of days before. The lieutenant had been decapitated; his head had rolled a few yards away, empty sockets staring up at the jungle canopy.

One of the guys snapped and gave the head a kick. Another one, giggling, kicked it hard, and in a couple of seconds they were all running or trying to run on the slippery sloping ground, hooting with hysterical laughter, kicking the poor guy’s skull around in a macabre game of pick-up soccer.

I implored them to stop and be civilized, though the command surely had the word “fucking” in it once or twice, and they ignored me. I was not a born leader, and they were not all that good at following orders.

They were also in the grip of something primal; something that was more about their own mortality than the lieutenant’s. A few months later, all but me and one other would have lost life or limbs. Maybe they felt it.

GRAVES

have this persistent sleep disorder that makes life difficult for me, but still I want to keep it. Boy, do I want to keep it. It goes back twenty years, to Vietnam. To Graves.

Dead bodies turn from bad to worse real fast in the jungle. You’ve got a few hours before rigor mortis makes them hard to handle, hard to stuff in a bag. By that time they start to turn greenish, if they started out white or yellow, where you can see the skin. It’s mostly bugs by then, usually ants. Then they go to black and start to smell.

They swell up and burst.

You’d think the ants and roaches and beetles and millipedes would make short work of them after that, but they don’t. Just when they get to looking and smelling the worst, the bugs sort of lose interest, get fastidious, send out for pizza. Except for the flies. Laying eggs.

The funny thing is, unless some big animal got to it and tore it up, even after a week or so, you’ve still got something more than a skeleton, even a sort of a face. No eyes, though. Every now and then we’d get one like that. Not. too often, since soldiers don’t usually die alone and sit there for that long, but sometimes. We called them dry ones. Still damp underneath, of course, and inside, but kind of like a sunburned mummy otherwise.

You tell people what you do at Graves Registration, “Graves,” and it sounds like about the worst job the army has to offer. It isn’t. You just stand there all day and open body bags, figure out which parts maybe belong to which dog tag, not that it’s usually that important, sew them up more or less with a big needle, account for all the wallets and jewelry, steal the dope out of their pockets, box them up, seal the casket, do the paperwork. When you have enough boxes, you truck them out to the airfield. The first week maybe is pretty bad. But after a hundred or so, after you get used to the smell and the godawful feel of them, you get to thinking that opening a body bag is a lot better than winding up inside one. They put Graves in safe places.