Joe Haldeman: Work Done for Hire

Maybe it’s odd that I haven’t met them, since they’re only like ten miles away and I’ve been seeing Kit for almost a year. The first couple of months you wouldn’t have wanted to take me home to Mother; some asshole decked me with a Jack Daniels bottle, which broke my nose and knocked out a tooth under a split lip. The VA fixed me up, but it took a while.

That was a good bar, but I don’t go there anymore. The bartender turned out to be the owner. He bitched about the damage, and I sort of picked up the broken bottle and offered him a colonoscopy. He went for the phone and I decided to go bleed somewhere else.

Kit met me about a week later at a branch of the library, where I was giving a reading from my second novel, which I think I will retitle The Fucking Albatross . It had to be the worst reading in the history of literary indecent exposure. I sounded exactly like a guy with a nose full of cotton, and with the temporary cap on my front tooth, I whistled every time I tried to pronounce “s” or “th.” We had a beer afterwards and she took me home for a mercy fuck that turned out to be a yearlong hobby, maybe more.

So now to meet her parents. Shave, clean shirt, find some socks. Hide the porn. I left my desk a random hellhole—I probably couldn’t find anything if I neatened it—but closed the office door.

Kit once asked me why male writers had offices and female ones had studios or writing rooms. Maybe it’s so we can pretend we’re working.

I clicked “random classical” on the living room pod and made a salad and put it in the fridge. Dumped some coals in the grill and soaked them with starter fluid and waited. Normally, I’d make a drink at five, but that might not be a good idea. Wait and offer them one. I had a wild impulse to roll a joint; they’d be almost old enough to be hippies. No, that was the sixties and seventies. They were probably just born. Besides, Kit didn’t smoke, so her parents probably didn’t either. The family that smokes together croaks together.

They were exactly on time, and of course dressed down, for a picnic. Her father, Morrie, was wearing a T-shirt that half exposed a Marine Corps anchor tattoo on his beefy bicep. But it was a Princeton crew shirt, a little cognitive dissonance. Her mother, Trish, was delicate and quiet. Quietly observant.

Kit had brought the ingredients for sangria and took over the kitchen to make a pitcher. So I dumped a bag of potato chips in a bowl and escorted her parents out to the patio. That made things a little awkward, with no mediator. I braced myself for the usual “so you’re a writer” excruciation.

It was worse. “Kitty says you were a sniper in the war,” Morrie said. “In the army, was it?”

“Guard unit, actually.”

“Same same.” Not a good sign when a civilian uses military slang. “How long did they keep you over there?”

“Sixteen months.”

“Not fair.” He shook his head. “Ain’t it a bitch, as we used to say.” He glanced at his wife, and she gave him a tiny nod. “It would’ve been less if you’d gone RA.”

“That was often a topic of discussion.”

He smiled a kind of Princeton smile. “I can well imagine.”

“Morrie was in the Marines,” Trish said, somewhat unnecessarily.

“Just a grunt,” he said. “We didn’t get along with the snipers too well.”

“We heard about that. They had a high opinion of themselves. Their school was a lot harder than ours, though.”

“Yes. No question it was a difficult job. A lot of lying in wait.”

“Like an alligator,” I said.

“Alligator?”

“I used to spend a lot of time watching them, down in Florida. They lie still for hours, until all the other animals accept them as part of the landscape. One gets too close and they strike, fast, like a rattlesnake.”

“Have you seen that?” Trish asked.

“Once. He got a big blue heron.”

“I like alligators,” she said. Why was I not surprised?

“Did you watch him for hours?” he said.

“Yes, I did. With a camera. But it happened too fast. All I got was a picture of his tail, sticking out of the water.”

“Drowning the bird?”

“That’s what they do.”

“Are you guys talking about the war?” Kit brought out a tray with the pitcher of sangria. Three glasses with the wine punch and one of ice water. Her father took that one. “Two vets get together—”

“Not the war,” I said. “Alligators.”

She handed me a glass. “That’s good. Some of my favorite people are cold-blooded animals.”

“You even vote for one every now and then,” her father said.

“Morrie…”

“Sorry. No politics.”

“I’ll get the coals going.” I escaped to the lawn and squirted some fresh starter on the charcoal, then lit the pile in several places.

Nobody said anything until I came back. I picked up the drink and sipped it; extra brandy. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

“Kitty says you write books, Jack,” her mother said.

“I’ve written two and a half. Taking time off right now to do a purely commercial one, a kind of novelization.”

To their blank look Kit said, “That’s normally when they make a book out of a movie. In this case, Jack’s writing the book first.”

Her father tilted his head. “I would’ve thought that was the usual way.”

“Kind of. Nobody seems eager to make a movie out of one of my books. But this isn’t actually a movie yet; just a pitch.”

Her mother shook her head slightly, with a blank look. “A pitch is a sales job,” her father supplied.

“My literary agent actually came up with the deal,” Jack said. “She was talking with a producer/director, Duke Duquest, and my name came up. He had a vague idea about doing a horror movie with its roots in present-day war. My war novel had just come out, with good reviews.”

“It has a sort of horror angle,” Kit said.

“Well, I’d call it fantasy. This one is real horror, though, a monster who hunts people.”

“Like you,” her mother said.

“What?”

“Isn’t that what you did?” She looked honest and sincere and not judgmental. “Like a hunter after deer? With a rifle?”

“I suppose it is.”

“If the deer had guns,” her father said.

“It’s good money,” Kit said. “As much as a thousand dollars a page.”

“My word. How many pages can you write a day?”

“Four or five, on a good day. Two or three’s more common.”

“Still damned good pay,” her father said.

“I was lucky to get it.” I decided not to mention that it would only be fifty pages. Kit said nothing to disillusion them, either, so the rest of the evening passed convivially, the Majors mistakenly thinking that their daughter was dating a budding millionaire rather than a starving artist. After they left, Kit rewarded me with a night of uncharacteristically inventive sex.

I didn’t sleep well. Dreams about hunting.

Hunter crossed two state lines and wound up in backwoods Georgia. Then he drove an extra hour so he wouldn’t be working too close to his own home. Following a smudged penciled map, he got off the interstate, then went a few miles down a pot-holed blacktop road, then turned onto a lime-rock road, and finally off that road, through crackling low brush for a few hundred yards, into a sunlit copse surrounded by thick forest. He backed and filled so that he would be able to drive straight out. He pulled on surgeon’s gloves.

He opened the side door of the van and with a grunt lifted out the huge cooler. It held eight twenty-five-pound blocks of ice. He set it down so a rock tilted it up at a slight angle, and opened a petcock so that the excess water drained out. Then he set it squarely in front of a large tree.