The Fort (Aric Davis)

after Scott’s dad had boarded his pickup truck, gone to work, and never come back. Scott had received a Christmas card a few years later, but he had just thrown it away. Though he wasn’t the biggest Carl fan, Carl was around, and was promising to take him deer hunting for the first time when Scott turned sixteen. Besides, Scott figured his mother, Beth, could do worse than the Vietnam vet, who was currently employed as a tool-and-die engineer on the south end of town. He rarely drank, never to excess, and Scott’s mom at least seemed happy with him. Still, having a dad who just up and left one day can leave a hell of a mark, and Scott could still feel the sting of it.
    “Why don’t you get off your butt,” said Carl, making Scott jump, “see if the Tigs are on yet. I’ve had enough of this depressing crap. Reminds me way too much of the buildup to Nam. At least we finally did something there, when they let us, that is.”
    “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