Joe Haldeman: Work Done for Hire

Afriend called me this morning and asked whether I could go shooting, and I said no, I couldn’t. I made up something about work, but the fact is, I couldn’t.

I was a sniper in the desert, in this war that it seems no one can really stop. I didn’t volunteer for the job, not initially, but I wasn’t smart enough to miss the targets in Basic Training. And “sniper” sounded cool, so I signed up for the school when they offered it.

I count back on all my fingers and it’s been nine years. Sometimes it feels like yesterday, literally. I wake up in grainy grime and shit smell, the slimy cold of the damned plastic suit. Cold until the sun comes up and tries to kill you. That sounds too dramatic, but I’ll leave it. The sun bakes you and broils you and disorients you, and it makes you a target. They have rifles, too. Not so many snipers.

In sixteen months I killed maybe twenty people, sixteen confirmed. What kind of a prick keeps track? Besides, as often as not, you can’t tell. The recoil usually knocks you off the sight picture, and with the scope at maximum power, it takes a second or two to get back. Your spotter will say, “Good shot,” but what’s he going to say? You’re usually shooting at someone who’s peeking out of a window or from behind the edge of a wall, and if an ounce and a half of lead buzzes by his ear at the speed of sound, he’s not about to stand up and shout, “You missed!”

So I don’t know whether I’m going to burn in Hell sixteen times or thirty or forty, or whether they even make you burn in Hell for not being smart enough to miss the god-damned target in Basic Training. I suspect I’ll go wherever the people I killed went. But I don’t expect to meet them.

I had a girlfriend all those sixteen months, and she e-mailed me every afternoon, morning her time, and I wrote back whenever I was near a hot point. We were going to get married.

But I know I’m not as nice in person as I am at the keyboard. That must happen all the time.

She put up with me for three or four months after I got out of the hospital. I think she still loved me for maybe half that time. But how long can you love someone who goes into bars just to beat people up? To get drunk enough to start fights. And then cry in movies. You can cry for Bambi or Meryl Streep, but crying in a zombie movie is a symptom that something is loose in your head.

That sounds so drama queen. I didn’t really get that bad a deal, wounded once and out. The bullet that blew off my left pinkie also smashed a rib and bounced into my left lung, serious enough to get me six weeks in Bethesda and an early honorable discharge. Eighty percent disability pays for the rent and groceries and some of the beer.

For a few years the rest of the beer came out of the GI Bill, while I finished college and got an easy Master’s. When that cow ran dry I did this and that, temp jobs like typing and answering phones. But I don’t take orders well anymore, and tend to raise my voice. So I had lots of jobs, none of them for too long.

I’ve always written poetry, not a fast track to fame and fortune, and started writing stories when I was in the hospital. I actually sold one, for $150, before I was out of rehab. So the idea of doing it for a living was pretty natural. How far could it be from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine to the best-seller list?

I still don’t know, but it’s more than nine years.

I wrote a novel and it did about as well as most first novels, which is to say my mother bought ten copies and a few thousand other people must have thought I was a relative. It did get two or three good reviews, and a couple of poisonous ones, notably from the Times . It bothers me to know that I probably got into graduate school because I got reviewed in the Times . They hated the book but evidently thought it was important enough to warn potential readers away.

I guess every writer who’s been a soldier has to write his war novel. I can’t stand to read the damned thing anymore. Though I hate to think that maybe the Times was right.

Second novels are a hard sell, especially if you don’t have cheerful blurbs from the first. “Puerile,” shouts the New York Times . “A worthwhile journeyman effort,” mumbles Publishers Weekly . My hometown newspaper called it a “good read,” but I went to high school with the reviewer. So my second novel has been to some of the best addresses in New York, according to my agent, but it hasn’t been invited to stay.

The agent, Barb Goldman, probably took me on because she’s a vet, too. Twice my age, she was in the hundred-hour war that started the whole thing. Before 9/11 and Gehenna. When I go up to New York we get drunk together and remember the desert. Old sergeants whom we sincerely hope are dead by now.

Drinking with her, I’ve never felt the crazy urge to fight. Maybe because she’s older than my mother and would die of embarrassment. Maybe because the bars we go to are a little nicer than the ones I frequent in Florida. Get into a fight in the Four Seasons and you might hurt somebody who could buy your book.

So she called and asked whether I’d like to make some easy money doing work for hire, and of course I said, “Who do you think I am?” She knew exactly who I was, and said I could make fifty thousand bucks, writing a sort of “novelization” of a movie by Ron Duquest. I said it sounded like a fun way to pay for the next two thousand cases of beer, and she said that’s good, because she’d already accepted. She knew I liked fantasy and horror, and this was going to be a horror movie.

And that was not all, not by a long shot. Duquest had asked for me specifically. She showed me the note that had come with the request:

I really liked “High Kill,” by your client Jack Daley. Good natural storytelling talent. Could he write a short book for me? We got an idea sounds right up his alley—a sci-fi monster and a returned vet. I can put a little up front: Ten grand to write the book, and he keeps all the book rights. We’ll send another contract if we like the book for a movie: basically $50,000 for an 18-month option against $500,000 if the movie gets made. Make that “start of principal photography.” Don’t want to haggle but I have the check right here if you want it.

I wasn’t sure quite how to take that. But I’d seen several features by Ron Duquest, and liked his light touch. I asked her what he meant by a “short book,” and she said a novella, between a hundred and two hundred typed pages.

Sort of the opposite of what I normally thought of as a “novelization,” which would be taking an existing movie script and cranking out a novel based on that. This might actually be easier, though. I could probably write a hundred pages of acceptable prose in a couple of weeks. For twice what I got for the last novel.

It would be a “work done for hire” in that Duquest would own the copyright. But since I’d keep the book rights, and also make a small fortune if a movie came out of it, what the hell.

She zapped me the two-page description. Pretty good story; the main character was my age and had gone to my war. He’s a lawyer and a private eye but unsuccessful. I like that in a lawyer.