THE NEXT DAYS WERE a nightmare jumble of confused newspaper reports and police statements, unanswerable questions, disbelief, sadness, and fear. They had not caught Tom’s murderer, and so we didn’t know why he was killed. It could have been a botched robbery—although why someone looking to steal actual money would target Tom would be beyond explanation. To be fair, it was possible that his death had nothing to do with politics or with the war or with the damning prayers of our local crusading Christians. To be fair.
On the day we buried Tom, I stood between Danny and Jake and felt the wind biting all the way through to my bones. Rosalita stood by herself at the edge of his grave and never said a word, just cried onto the raw red dirt.
Jake came back to our house with Danny and me after the funeral and sat next to Danny on our couch drinking beer, not saying anything.
“I guess y’all both knew Tom for a long time,” I said tentatively.
“Years,” Jake said.
Danny stared into the empty fireplace.
“What do you suppose will happen to the bookstore now?” I asked.
There was a pause. Jake glanced over at Danny and then said, “Dunno,” and lapsed back into silence. Danny just kept staring straight ahead.
“Rosalita . . . ,” I started, but stopped when Danny stood up suddenly.
“If you don’t mind,” he said in a voice a little louder than usual, “I think I want to spend some time alone now.”
He didn’t look at me, just took the keys and shut the door behind him. When I heard the car start outside, I looked over at Jake, who was still sitting on the couch holding his beer but not drinking it.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “He just needs a little space for a while. He knew Tom for a long, long time.”
“Where do you think he’s going?”
“He’ll be back when he’s ready.”
But Danny didn’t come back at all that evening. Jake stayed, sitting on the couch watching TV and drinking beer. Eventually I went to bed, and when I woke up the next day, Jake was gone and Danny was asleep face down on the couch with all his clothes on. I didn’t ever ask Danny where he had been. It could have been anywhere.
Two days later, the president of the United States declared that the war was over and that the United States had won and that there had been almost no casualties, not counting the people who didn’t, after all, really count. All across the country, there were celebrations of victory.
Down in the Cave, we watched the presidential announcement on the cable news channel. Then Rafi turned off the TV, and no one said anything.
The next day when I went to open the Cave in the middle of the afternoon, I found Pancho (who of course knew where the key was hidden) already inside. The television was on with the sound off, and by the flickering light from the screen, Pancho was playing the piano—music that sounded like lonely souls lost in the wilderness.
“Whatcha doing?” I asked him.
“Shh,” he said, pressing the keys with his eyes closed. “I’m trying to touch the spirit world.”
He played for a long time while I swept the floors and washed the ashtrays and opened up the pool tables. By the time I came in from the back room with the quarters from the pool tables all put neatly into their paper rolls, he was sitting at the bar drying the ashtrays for me.
“Any luck?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he said, looking downcast. Then he smiled a little at me in an encouraging way. “I’ll keep trying, though.”
“Thank you, Pancho,” I said. I figured it couldn’t hurt. Maybe Tom’s soul was out there somewhere, and maybe he would be happy to be in touch and to have us say hello.
How strange it must be for the other prisoners when one among their number vanishes, is taken from them. It must be terrifying at first to have their gods appear among them and lay hands on their comrade. Direct contact with the gods is a dangerous proposition in many philosophies.
And afterward, when it slowly becomes clear that he is not coming back—that he is never coming back—what do they begin to think of him? Perhaps they search their memories of him to dredge up possible sins, something that would justify and give meaning to his abduction. Or perhaps they begin to develop myths of him and to weave them into their theology, transfiguring him into one among the gods who have, at long last, come for him, their brother. Are any of them resentful—angry at being left behind? Do they begin then to plot their own escape? Plato does not tell us.
All we are told is that they stay there, shackled at the bottom of the cave. They are there waiting—endlessly, faithfully waiting—for the freed one to return.
I don’t know who decided it or how it was decided that the bookstore would reopen. Vera and Blossom went in together one afternoon and cleaned up Tom’s blood—and came out looking older than they did when they went in. And then we reopened the store, taking shifts in pairs because it was too hard still to be in there all alone. During those days, none of us talked much, but hardly anyone ever went home alone at night.
I stopped tending bar at the Cave then so I could work the morning shifts at the bookstore, unpacking boxes of books that Tom had ordered only days ago and sitting sadly on the couch next to Jake or Danny. Tom was everywhere in the store, his coat still hanging on the back of a door, his coffee cup, a coverless copy of Mythology with a bookmark at the beginning of the chapter about the Trojan War sitting on the arm of the broken-down couch on the porch. Sometimes people who didn’t know he had died called and asked to speak to him.
“I’m glad,” Vera said when I told her I was quitting. “Somebody should be there to make sure it stays open—somebody who knew him.”
The professors who had stopped sending students in for books placed orders again now. Even some who had never known Tom or been in the store called up with orders, and their students dutifully came by, holding copies of the syllabus and looking anxious for being in a place where a murder had happened. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to tide us over for the time being.
Tom’s daughter was born. Rosalita named her Rigoberta, and she was called Bertie by everyone. Winter rolled into spring again, but there was no Bartenders’ Ball that year. The cat Emma Goldman padded softly around, looking for something she couldn’t find. I kept hearing Tom’s voice—I could hear him laughing in delight. But no one played the whirling dervish music anymore, and Emma Goldman didn’t dance.
The Greek underworld had a distinct geography. There were specific rivers to cross—Acheron, the river of Woe; Cocytus, the river of Lamentation; Phlegethon; Styx; and Lethe, the river of Forgetfulness. And there were different areas within the underworld where dead souls were sent—Erebus; Tartarus, where the wicked would meet their everlasting torment; and the Elysian Fields, where the good would live in eternal bliss.
Hades reigned in the underworld with Persephone (when she was not on her summer vacation), but he did not judge the souls when they arrived. That was done by a trio of judges—Rhadamanthus, Minos, and Aeacus. After the judgment was complete, punishment was left in the hands of the Furies, who were feared because they were so just.
Tom was presumably sent straight to the Elysian Fields. He had been a generous and kindly man, so it would only be just. There was no doubt he deserved a blissful eternity.
But I worried. According to Virgil, the boatman Charon had to ferry dead souls across the river of Lamentation to arrive at the entrance to the underworld. He would consent to take only those souls who had passage money with them between their lips. I worried that this might be a problem for Tom, who had been so short of cash lately because of all the repairs to the bookstore. Without the proper fee, Charon left poor souls in a shadowy limbo outside the gates of the underworld, stranded on the far shore of Lamentation.
It seems wrong that the dead would have to pay money to get into heaven—or even to get into hell. More to the point, it seems unjust.
But perhaps on the banks of Lamentation, when the time comes, we will find all of our friends, all of us who are chronically short of cash. It would be a good place to hold the next Bartenders’ Ball. Tom would be there to welcome us all with joy.
Vera never spoke about her first husband. It was known, though, that he had caused her trouble and left some deep emotional scars as souvenirs. She had not intended to ever get married again. Or even fall in love again—because it’s the love that really traps you, that keeps you sticking with someone you would be better off without. Vera never meant to lose herself like that again.
But Pete—Pete had scars, too. So much so that he had given up wanting anything from the world anymore, except maybe to sit quietly at the bar and drink a beer and listen to Billy Joe play the blues. He and Vera just began talking one night. That’s how it started.
After the long cold winter when Tom died, Vera and Pete decided to get married. It seemed the only thing to do—to hold on tight to each other and to promise forever.
The wedding was held at Vera’s house out in the pine woods south of town. The woods themselves were still black and dreary, but inside the house it was warm from the fire in the fireplace and from all of Vera and Pete’s friends standing together talking and smiling and drinking wine. Pete didn’t look quite like himself, dressed up in his good suit and his tie with his hair carefully combed, but Vera looked pretty in her blue silk dress and seemed happy while she promised to love him and honor him and cherish him. Blossom openly wiped away tears; Rafi did it more furtively.
The party afterward lasted all night. People danced and Billy Joe played with Charlie Blue bashfully backing him up. Endless food kept appearing from the kitchen. It felt good to laugh together in the warm little house, but all night long I couldn’t forget the dark, cold woods around us.
It was Jake who finally closed the book that Tom had been reading and put it away—not on the shelves to be sold, though, but tucked under the counter.
“Who do you think did it?” I asked him—the question we had all been asking each other over and over for months.
“Could have been anyone,” he said. “Just some loser.”
“Do you think it was a botched robbery, like the police say?”
“Could have been. This place is empty enough of customers a lot of the time.”
“But Tom would have just given the money to someone who needed it. Why would they shoot him?”
“Maybe they just fucked up,” Jake said.
“There wouldn’t have been enough money here to make it worth it. Everybody knows that.”
“I guess not everybody.”
“Do you think it was someone else? Something else? Something political? People were awfully bent out of shape about this war. Awfully gung-ho.”
“Not enough to put their own rosy asses on the line, I notice,” Jake said.
“There’s a difference, though, between putting yourself at risk and gunning down an unarmed man. Plenty of fanatics would be willing to do that.”
Jake considered this for a minute and then lit another cigarette.
“Do you have a theory?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Or maybe yes—too many theories. Like I can’t help but think that someone like Stinky, say . . . someone who had something to prove . . .”
“I doubt that little pissant would have the guts to pull the trigger. He’s never been anything other than talk.”
I remembered Stinky’s fingernails digging into my skin, the stench of his breath in my face, how he had started to push me down on my knees.
“See, that’s the thing,” I said. “It’s the pissants who do it. It’s the pissants who get in over their heads trying to prove something. And then things get out of hand.”
“Maybe,” Jake conceded. “But whoever it was, it was just some loser who fucked up.”
At first, no one was ever alone in the bookstore. There was, after all, a murderer on the loose, and if you let yourself think too clearly about that, a wave of fear rolled up and the silence took on a frightening, suffocating quality of real terror. But human beings are resilient. By the time the spring sun was hot enough to open the dogwood blossoms, I was opening the store by myself in the morning quiet.
I don’t know of a town in the whole South where there is an especially high demand for communist books, and after the first few weeks of mourning drew us all together there, it became clear to me that it had been Tom whom people had come to see, Tom himself who had brought people to the store, and without him, I had a lot of empty time on my hands.
The bookstore was converted from an old house. No matter how often I swept the floorboards, they always felt dusty to my bare feet. The windowpanes rippled gently and made the outside seem dreamy and unreal. The books looked permanently settled into their shelves, even where they were all jumbled together. The rooms smelled of sawdust, of old paint and paper, and—very faintly—of Tom. But that may have just been my memory fooling me.
After Bertie was born, Rosalita, who might otherwise have felt only blissful joy, felt instead despair. She pondered the Fates that could have made life otherwise, but had chosen to make it unbearably hard. She felt walls all around her, and it seemed incomprehensible to her that she had once been filled with hope and expectation. It seemed incomprehensible that she would ever feel those feelings again. She and Bertie lived in Tom’s house, surrounded by all she had left of him.
It became hard for Rosalita to stay awake. She became listless and forlorn, and although the sound of the baby’s crying could drag her to the side of the cradle that Billy Joe had made for her, it hurt her to look at her baby’s eyes and see the ghost of Tom looking back at her from so far away. The space between the living and the dead is not a long distance, but once someone crosses it, they can never cross back.
“I’m worried about Rosalita,” Blossom said to me, standing next to my table and holding the coffeepot in her hand while I ate breakfast. “That child is looking too thin for someone who has a new baby. I can tell she’s not eating. Does she come into the bookstore any?”
“Not so far,” I said. “Vera went by to see her yesterday, see if she needed anything, but she was asleep.”
“Where are her folks?”
“I’m not sure—I think her mother is in Guatemala. And I think I heard that her daddy was disappeared. Tom was pretty much the only family she had. Other than the baby.”
“A baby is one kind of family,” Blossom said. “A mama is another.”
She looked thoughtful, and then she shook herself. “Are you done eating those biscuits?” she asked me. “Then come with me and help me carry some things.”
We went to see Rosalita with two pies, a plate of hot biscuits, and four pints of green tomato pickles. Rosalita ate a piece of pie just to humor Blossom and then felt better for it. She felt so much better, in fact, that she crawled into Blossom’s arms and buried her face in the warm, vanilla-scented softness of Blossom’s neck and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Blossom rocked her gently and let her cry.
“Oh, my baby,” Blossom crooned into Rosalita’s hair. “Oh, my poor, poor baby.”
I heard Bertie whimpering from her cradle and went to get her and hold her in my arms. She was a serious baby with quizzical eyes. “It’s going to be okay,” I whispered to her, but she just looked silently back at me. I walked with her back and forth across the room, slowly swaying from side to side. “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,” I sang to her. “Josie’s gonna buy you a mockingbird . . . .”
We stayed a long time and left them asleep next to each other in Tom’s old iron bed.
For a while after that, Blossom and I went by the house almost every evening after dinner. Blossom would sit at the kitchen table with Rosalita and drink cups of coffee and talk. I walked back and forth, back and forth across the living-room floor holding Bertie in my arms and singing every old lullaby I could think of. At first, I could remember only two or three, and I would have to sing the same ones over and over again, but eventually others started to come back to me, and I could go on and on for quite a while before I had to repeat myself. It was strange to think that my mother must have once sung these songs to me, held me in her arms like I held Bertie. I couldn’t remember it, but the songs were all there, slowly making their way up out of my memory, so it must have been true.
Sometimes Bertie was wide awake and would watch my eyes intently, looking serious, like someone trying to understand Greek when they spoke only French. Other times, she would fall asleep right away, and the tender, translucent lids would cover her eyes and her long golden eyelashes would lie on her cheeks like butterfly wings, and I would keep walking back and forth so as not to wake her.
I came home to find Danny sitting on the couch, watching TV and drinking beer.
“You’ve been gone a long time,” he said. “A suspicious man would be suspicious.”
“I’ve been with Rosalita and the baby. You know you don’t need to be suspicious.”
He sighed. “I know it,” he said, his eyes on the TV.
“The baby is sweet,” I said. And then when he didn’t answer, “Don’t you like babies?”
“I like babies fine—as long as they belong to someone else.”
“They smell so sweet.”
“Their diapers don’t.”
“And Bertie has the sweetest little baby fingers and little baby toes and little baby mouth.”
“The better to scream the house down with, Red Riding Hood.”
“You sure are grumpy tonight.”
“I’m not grumpy. I’m just bored. I’ve been waiting here for you. Let’s go out and have some fun. Let’s find some people and stay up all night together and have a good time.”
“Oh, honey, I’m beat and I’ve got to get up early tomorrow to open the store.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute.
“Suit yourself,” he finally said. “I’ll be back when I’m back.”
After he left, the house was too quiet, and even though I went right to bed, I didn’t fall asleep for the longest time.
The shot glasses at Tia’s had white lines going all the way around them about half an inch down from the rim. When the bartenders poured shots of tequila for ordinary customers, they filled the glasses to the white line. When they poured shots for us, they filled the glasses to the brim. Some of us drank tequila with lime and salt that we licked off the curve between the thumb and forefinger. But most of us didn’t bother with that. We just knocked the shots back in one gulp, without ceremony. People settling in for the evening would slow themselves down by drinking a beer between shots of tequila. It was possible to build up an amazing tolerance, but you had to work at it steadily.
But people who wanted to reach oblivion more quickly could sit at the bar at Tia’s and drink tequila so fast that by the time they started to feel it, they had already had enough to knock them out. Unconsciousness could be a relief sometimes. And there was always someone around who would take you home and sling you into your bed—or near enough to it.
Danny and I started to argue more and more that spring. The more we argued, the more tequila seemed to me to be a good escape.
“Ease up, sugar,” Danny said to me. “You’re drinking like your own ghost is chasing you.”
“I want to go fast,” I said. “I want to be there already now.”
“You need to slow down some—just take it easy and make it last. Let’s just enjoy the evening.”
“Why? Why do I have to slow down? Why don’t you speed up instead?”
“Life doesn’t have to be as hard as you make it, Josie. You’d be happier if you would just take it as it comes. You would be happier if you would just relax.”
“I think you would be the one who would be happier if I would just relax.”
He laughed. “You say it like it’s a bad thing. Don’t you want me to be happy?”
“All I want right now is not to have to think about anything anymore or feel anything anymore or want anything anymore.”
“Oh, sugar, be very, very careful what you wish for.”
“I’m not too interested, as a rule, in being careful. You should know that by now. I’m the same person I’ve always been.”
“Are you?” he said, grabbing my hand.
“Oh, Lord,” I said. “Don’t start. This conversation is starting to bore the crap out of me.”
“You and me both,” he sighed. “I’m worn out and I guess I’m just going home. Do you want to come?”
I went home with him, but I fell asleep before he came to bed, and when I woke up in the morning, he was already gone.
“You’re gone an awful lot,” I said to Danny, “and you’re not always at work. Who are you spending all this time with? Is there someone else?”
“God, I hate suspicious women! Of course, there’s not someone else.”
There was someone else. Her name was Tawni, and she was pretty in the same way my cousin Belle was. It wasn’t that Danny flirted with her at the bar at the café—it was that he so pointedly didn’t. And that she was always there these days. And that she seemed so obviously conscious of me whenever I was around. And that I got the feeling I was interrupting something.
The most fun part of figuring out that the relationship you had managed to fool yourself into thinking might, against all odds, last forever, but was now over, was getting to choose between being a harpy and being a doormat. I myself alternated between the two, to stunningly schizophrenic effect. Danny took to staying out late—even by his standards—which meant that I didn’t see him at all most nights. I would sometimes find him asleep in bed when I came home from the bookstore in the late afternoons and would sometimes not find him, but would go and feel his toothbrush in the bathroom to see if it was damp, if maybe he had been home and gone.
When he was home, we circled around the same argument.
“I never lied to you,” Danny said. “I never made promises.”
“You did!” I screamed. “You made me believe things that weren’t true!”
“I never said them!”
“You can say things without using words!”
“I’m not going to have this conversation with you!” he shouted, and then slammed the door and was gone.
The house in the woods was cold and lonesome without him, and I went back to spending my evenings keeping Rafi company down in the Cave. Pancho sat next to me from time to time and just shook his head sorrowfully.
“It’ll pass, honey,” Rafi would say, pushing another free beer my way. He was trying his best to keep me continuously drunk. For medicinal reasons.
“Oh, Rafi,” I would say. “The weeks go on and on.”
I wanted it to be done. I knew the end of me and Danny was inevitable. But the truth, of course, is that just because some new girl comes along, it doesn’t mean that you stop loving the girl you live with, that you stop sleeping next to her (sometimes) or passing her in the kitchen in the late-afternoon light, seeing all the little pieces of her you fell in love with in the first place. You can still be tender to her and share secrets with her and love her, the whole time you’re betraying her. The problem isn’t that now there’s a new girl—the problem is that now there are two girls, and the one you love the most is the one you’re going to hurt. The new girl, well, she’s new. And the old girl, the one whose secrets you already know so well, the one you’ve loved a long time now, she doesn’t stand a chance. (“Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arms.”)
I knew all that. Knowledge, however, did not make me any more reconciled to the facts. Knowledge did not make me reasonable or serene.
Danny and I didn’t even fight anymore at the end. “We’ve already had every fight there is to be had,” Danny said.
On the day I moved out of our little house in the woods, I went down to the Cave and sat at the bar, not even drinking the beer Rafi put down in front of me.
“You probably don’t want to hear a speech about how it is better to have loved and lost, I’m guessing,” Rafi said.
“Not really.”
He was quiet for a while, letting me brood.
“It can be nice to be alone,” he said.
“But only if you choose it—not if you don’t have a choice.”
“You always have a choice,” he said, not looking at me. “You do.”
So I stayed there, sitting at the far end of the bar all evening while he worked. There was no band that night, but it was busy anyway, and Rafi and I didn’t talk. We didn’t talk after last call or while he restocked the coolers and I covered up the pool tables. Vera and Pete stopped by to get the bank bag, but they didn’t stay, and there was no one else around. Rafi turned off the lights, and it was so quiet I could hear my own heartbeat.
The windows at Tia’s were mostly dark when we walked together out to my car, but we could tell by the faint glow coming from the back that the dishwashers weren’t quite done yet. It was still early by bar time—not even 3 A.M. I unlocked the passenger-side door of my car for Rafi, but it was too dark to see him lean over to unlock my door from the inside. I heard the click when he did.
We still didn’t talk while we drove to his house. Sometimes it is impossible to say things. When we were standing together under the trees in his driveway, he took my hand and led me silently into the house, through the dark kitchen and the hallway into his bedroom. I pushed the door shut behind us.
Then I kissed Rafi. He backed me against the closed bedroom door and put his arms around me. His lips were warm. We kissed again. In the moonlight from the open window, I could see his bed, rumpled sheets, a pillow on the floor.
“This is a mistake,” he whispered into my ear. “You’ll end up breaking my heart.”
“Let’s not think about anything right now,” I said. “Let’s just go to bed, and we can think about things in the morning.”
We sat on his bed, kissing. I touched his face with the tips of my fingers.
“So I’m your rebound,” he said.
“Maybe. Does it really matter so much?”
I lay down on the sheets, and he lay down next to me.
“Did you really love Danny?” he asked.
“Danny . . . ,” I started to say, but then I couldn’t go on because I realized I was sobbing.
Rafi pulled me close in his arms, and I pressed my face against his neck. I didn’t want to cry, but I couldn’t stop. Rafi held me for a long time.
My head was still on his chest when I woke up in the morning. He was awake, looking tired in the blue morning light.
“Are we still friends?” I asked.
“Always.”
I dropped him at Blossom’s, but didn’t feel like eating anything, so I went on to the bookstore to open up.
That afternoon, I moved into Pete’s three-room shotgun house down by the river, empty since he married Vera and moved all his stuff to her place. It was called a “shotgun” because the rooms and doors were all lined up so that if you shot a gun in the front door, the bullet would go straight through the house to the back door without (theoretically) hitting anything on the way. Fortunately no one ever tried it.
It’s important to have friends when you are miserable, and you should count yourself especially lucky if you are fortunate enough to have generous friends with access to a bottomless supply of free alcohol. At times like this, a sufficient amount of tequila, for example, can lead you to a philosophical state of mind where the renunciation of your former one true love seems not only possible but even morally pure and elevated, and you forget that you can’t really renounce someone who has already dumped you—or at least not with much actual effect on him. And if this superior mental state of dignified refusal is expressed mostly by slurring “Fuck him—fuck the fucker” repeatedly to anyone who will listen and then throwing up wretchedly onto your own shoes, that does not negate the overall effect, which is to make you feel so physically bad in the morning that you don’t have enough energy or brain cells left to spend on contemplating how emotionally bad you feel, since you have to spend all your effort on trying not to move or to smell anything. Surprisingly soon, however, you will want a cigarette, and having smoked all of yours in the orgy of sodden desolation the night before, you will have to bum one from your friends. They will give you cigarettes out of their packs, even if they have only two left. This generosity will remind you of what great friends you have, and—especially if you are medicating your tequila hangover with Bloody Marys—this will make you cry.
It’s probably best just to get it all out of your system at once.
This was not my best period. The specter of Danny’s previous girlfriend Candy returned sometimes to whisper late-night suggestions of spurned-lover craziness and mayhem. I felt now that perhaps I had judged Candy too harshly, back in the days when I was innocently shocked and amazed that anyone would think that making such an ugly spectacle of herself would serve any positive purpose. Now, making an ugly spectacle of myself, to my more experienced and worldly eye, seemed to be a perfectly reasonable plan of action. If I couldn’t have Danny back, at least I could irritate the crap out of him. It was better than nothing.
Rafi counseled against this plan. His line of argument, renewed every day across the bar at the Cave, had two themes. The first was that Danny wasn’t worth it, and—when that failed under the unassailable counterargument of “But I loooove him”—the second was that I should have another beer first. This second argument was usually successful, although often rather messy, and Vera and Rafi and Pancho had to take turns getting me home and into bed. There is enormous comfort to be had in friends who see the worst of you and do not turn away. “We’ve all been there,” Rafi would shrug nonchalantly when I turned up looking woeful and contrite every afternoon. He and I did not kiss again, but I thought about him sometimes, thought about the rumpled sheets on his bed and how warm his lips were against mine.
My friends did other things in their own ways to make me feel better. Vera scolded me—in the best imitation of a mother she could manage—to “toughen up, buttercup.” It wasn’t, truth be told, such a bad approximation of a mother, if your mother happened to, say, work in a lumber camp. Or as a stevedore. Anyway it was more helpful than any advice my actual mother had ever bothered to give me. Billy Joe sat next to me at the bar and made drily disparaging comments about Tawni. Charlie Blue made a point of telling me every stupid joke he heard in the kitchen at Tia’s or could remember from elementary school. This gave me some comfort.