Aric Davis: The Fort

“Was it scary?”

The question fell out of Scott’s mouth accidentally. He had long wanted to talk to his stepdad about the conflict that still seemed visible in the national rearview mirror, but had never done so, and was terrified at the prospect of what the man might say. Now, with his mother gone and the Tigers tied 0–0 at the top of the second inning, the sound of a pin dropping would have been thermonuclear in the silence.

“Yeah,” said Carl. “And anybody that would tell you otherwise is an idiot. But there were good parts too. Knowing that if you did your job right your buddies would live, and if they did theirs, you might too.

“The worst part was all the traps Charlie would build. Not just land mines—those were scary as hell too, of course, but I mean other stuff. Like, they’d sharpen a bunch of sticks, rub shit all over them, and then dig a hole. You step in that and it goes through your boot, you’ll be lucky if you don’t lose the leg. It was scary, but it wasn’t all scary. I made some of my best friends in that war. Like Hooper. That was where we hooked up. You remember him?”

Scott was not a fan of Hooper. He’d been over a few times to help work on Scott’s mom’s troubled Oldsmobile, and had seemed to spend a lot more time fondling tools and ogling his mother than he had fixing the car. She had pretended not to notice, Scott could tell, and Carl either didn’t care or didn’t notice.

“Yeah, he helped you fix the car.”

“Right, when the tranny went. Jesus, you see that? One–nothing. Sheridan just came home, good start. Anyways, yeah, it was scary, real scary. But despite what all those fucking hippies said at the time, and all the antiwar people say now, it wasn’t all bad. They don’t know what it was like to be hunting other men, and let me tell you, it beats the shit out of sitting under a tree and shooting a buck. And I like shooting a buck a whole hell of a lot. That’s the thing none of your teachers are going to tell you, and none of the books you read, even the ones that tell the truth, are going to have printed in them. Some people are built for war, and for the ones who are, there is nothing more satisfying than being good at it. Like when you beat the snot out of that kid last fall—”

“Mike Haverford. He pushed a girl down.”

“Yeah, that asshole. You felt pretty damn good afterward, right?”

“Yeah.” Scott blushed at the memory. Alice Klein had kissed him after his suspension was up.

“Well, war can be like that. It can be scary, and awful when one of your buddies gets hurt, but it can be great too. When that napalm would roll in and we could feel those assholes roasting like pork chops, man. Look at that, Brookens just got two in, a double. Three–nothing, Tigs.” Carl stood. “Get these dishes cleaned up, and then come watch the game with me. They might be finally turning that losing streak around.”

5

Luke Hutchinson sat watching the Tigers while his mother sat smoking and talking on the phone to a friend. Unlike Scott and Tim, Luke didn’t live in the suburbs on the other side of the forest. He lived in a trailer park called the Cruise Inn, which was a fairly odd name, as most who came seemed to stay. Luke knew that he, his mom, and his younger twin sisters didn’t have as much money as a lot of the other kids that he hung around with, but it didn’t matter, at least not to him. The trailer park existed to allow lower-income people to still have their kids in the well-regarded Northview Public School system. The majority of kids who attended those schools were suburban children of baby boomers, but there were kids from two other trailer parks too, along with those from a pair of cheap apartment complexes.

The division between these less-well-off children and their better-heeled fellows in the suburbs was less marked than one would have expected in their quiet North Kent County school district. Luke had thought about that a few times, not that he’d ever mentioned it to Tim or Scott. His theory was that while there were some kids at Northview whose families had money, real money , there were very few of them. And because there were so few, it was almost more awkward for those kids than for the poor kids. A couple years earlier, Luke had gone to an acquaintance’s to hang out, a boy named Jeff Baker. Luke didn’t realize just how well-off Jeff was until they arrived at his house. It was huge! Pool, indoor hot tub, all the kids had their own rooms and bathrooms—it was easily the nicest house Luke had ever been in. Even still, what he remembered most from the visit was Jeff asking him, almost begging him, not to tell anyone else about the house. After that, Luke just figured that different was different, and no kid wants to be the weird one, no matter what the reason is.

Lately, Luke had felt a bit like the weird kid, even if he wasn’t sharing that with his best friends. His mom, even though he loved her very much, seemed to be spiraling out of control. She was smoking more than ever, and drinking too, sometimes in the morning and at night. She had trouble keeping a job for more than a few months at a time, and the family they’d been before she kicked Luke’s dad out was a lot different than it was now. Back when he worked at Case, they were always one step from making it. Now they were always just a few feet from the gutter.

Luke never told anyone about his plans for the future, not his mom, not his friends, and certainly not that annoying guidance counselor at school. His friends loved all the cool war stuff he was always reading about and sharing with them, but what they didn’t know was why he read it in the first place. Luke planned to enlist on his eighteenth birthday, rain or shine. He figured it was as good a way out as any, and a hell of a lot more to count on than to hope for a scholarship. He wanted out of the park, out of his mother’s house, even away from his annoying little sisters. As for them, Luke felt that Ashley and Alisha were inevitably destined to appear on one of those trashy daytime talk shows his mom watched sometimes, where they showed kids and people who had made royal fuck-jobs of their lives. Granted, the twins were only eleven, but both already had a reputation, and those tended to grow as one got older, and usually were pretty accurate.

The Tigers game let him ignore his sisters bickering in their room, his mom blabbing on the phone with a Camel hanging out of her mouth, and all the other nonsense around him. Anyone looking at him would have thought that the kid he or she saw was entranced by the shellacking the Tigers were putting on the Milwaukee Brewers, 10–0 in the bottom of the fifth. He or she never would have known that, while Luke may have been there, in his mind he was crawling through a rice paddy, readying himself to make a thousand-yard shot on a female sniper known as Apache, who had been torturing captured US soldiers. The story played out in his mind as he finally dragged himself off of the couch, brushed his teeth, and went to his room. His mom was still on the phone and his sisters still arguing as Luke lay in bed, trying his best to ignore them all, and to make his one shot count.

6

Tim woke in his bed, sure that he was still dreaming. The hall lights were turned on, and there was shouting coming from the living room. He could hear Becca and both of his parents. Home late , thought Tim devilishly, and then he looked at his clock and saw that it was only 11:38. Still Monday night. Curious, and unable to help himself, he leapt from his bed and began plodding from his room toward the noise. He caught only snippets of conversation, and was able to understand none of it, until he made the hall. Then quite clearly, he heard his dad say, “I’m going to fucking kill him,” just as he walked in.