The Fort (Aric Davis)

death of rot.
    Hooper turned on the shower, then all but fell in. He was in a boat racing up a Vietnamese river, but he shook the false thought away. Hooper had never been upriver, downriver, or on any river that wasn’t in Michigan. Still, the memory had come from somewhere, and it felt real enough. He slowly lowered himself to a sitting position in the shower, tearing off the curtain and landing on his ass with just a few inches to go. He threw the curtain aside and let the shower work its magic of cleaning his mind and body. Slowly the shit, piss, blood, and pus were scraped off of him by the slowly warming stream, and it felt wonderful, the best feeling in the world.
    Clarity came to Hooper in violent waves, memories from the shit interspersed with movie memories that seemed more and less real at the same time. Also in there were thick blasts of Amy, both the new and the old one. Amy before Vietnam, wearing high-cut denim shorts and laughing with her friends outside in the driveway. Hooper brooding in the house as his mom wheezed and fucking groaned on her respirator. That same Amy moaning beneath him, or was it crying? It hadn’t mattered then, but it seemed to now, for some reason. The new Amy came to him then, Amy strapped to the pole, begging for water. What had he fed her in the last few days? Three or four pieces of dried toast, a few glasses of water? The bitch deserves it , another voice said plainly. She ran, she let that VC motherfucker shoot you. Another seizure wracked Hooper, and he danced the sleep of the dying in the bathtub, every noise but a death rattle escaping his body.
    The cold woke him up violently, helped along with the pain from his leg. He was no longer being blasted by the shock of the pain. It came in waves now, attacking his nervous system like the barrages the VC kept throwing at his long-ago-destroyed emplacement. He knew that risk was past, that he’d been home for years, but every single Fourth of July explosion told him otherwise, each blast a death knell for the men around him, who were a mix of shadows, screams, and spilled blood. Hooper shouted with them, adding his own voice to the raucous sounds of a world gone mad. History and the present were flashing back and forth in ugly intervals, wounds suffered long ago finding a place alongside those of the present. Hooper lay in the shower, letting the water run over him as though it could make him pure.

44
    The afternoon had yielded no hits, and Van Endel was starting to think the holiday might have cut down on the night trade. He was wrong, though, and was almost depressed over it. Even hookers deserved a day off, but from the look of things, most of them had decided that dusk on the Fourth of July was still a perfectly fine time to offer their wares.
    Van Endel and Martinez had circled the blocks where the women were most apt to be walking. The men’s district was a little farther north, though the job opportunities were basically the same. Finally, Martinez spotted a woman they’d talked to before, a rough-looking black hooker who said her name was Candy. “Hard Candy,” she’d told them—if a john got too pushy or tried not to pay, that is. Van Endel pulled the car to the curb and let Martinez get out first, then followed her. Women tended to make them less jumpy, doubly so after the last eighteen months of steady disappearances.
    “Is that Candy?” Dr. Martinez called out, in a voice that was almost as much a lie as the girl’s name. “I know that’s my girl Candy. You remember me?”
    “I don’t know you, White Bread,” said Candy. “Now get the fuck out of here.”
    Van Endel was between the two women almost immediately, holding his badge in one hand and the picture of Molly in the other.
    “Candy, I know you recognize us,” said Van Endel. “I’m the detective that you hate talking to. I’m white bread. Dr. Martinez here is more of a tortilla in ethnicity, and her you like, if you recall correctly.”
    “Oh shit, Doc,” said Candy. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean no harm, but you looked like this white bitch from some church that’s been buggin’ the shit out of us lately, and chasing away the money and the men too. She could keep the men, but the money, that’s a problem,” said Candy with a smile so vivid and full of life that it was almost heartbreaking. Van Endel didn’t figure she gave that look to too many people, and it was sweet enough to take some of the hard living off of her