Free FSF, March-April 2010 by Spilogale Authors Page A

Barbed wire hadn't been invented when the fort was built, so rows of sharp wooden spikes—Corman called them the abatis —still projected from the dunes, dry and gray and worm-eaten like driftwood. She took a series of pictures through the spikes to suggest both the fort's original warlike purpose and its present hopeless decay.
    Meanwhile Corman chattered about life in the 1860s, which he knew in detail. He explained the problems of supplying the fort in bad weather, of securing fresh water for the garrison in the absence of natural springs, of keeping the men healthy so close to the malarial coast. There'd been other problems, he recalled, in the days when Fort Clay was used as a prison both for Rebel sympathizers and common criminals. Along with forty or so men, a dozen women had been jailed, charged with a variety of crimes great and small—spying, prostitution, insulting the flag, emptying chamber pots on the heads of Union soldiers. Keeping them secure from rape among a crowd of unwillingly celibate males had not been easy.
    "Bathing was a problem,” he mused. “The men skinny-dipped by the roster on the Gulf side of the fort, women on the land side. While the ladies were washing, guards were posted with orders to turn their backs and not to peek. I don't think those orders were always obeyed,” he added, with a dry little chuckle.
    That gave Saffron another idea. How about taking some nude photos in her studio, and having the geniuses at the lab transform them into ghostly images against the grim, looming walls of the fort? A little nudity never hurt anything. And how about a bit of softcore porn as well? With all those randy males around, surely the jailed hookers found some way to ply their trade, prison or no prison. She could fabricate some sex scenes, pale forms suggesting the repressed passions of men and women locked up under a discipline that made captives of the soldiers as well as the prisoners.
    Ghosts Along the Mississippi was fine as a model. But her book would be a lot more salable if she put a bit of Robert Mapplethorpe into it as well.
    The afternoon was advancing and the sunlight hot when she and Corman wended back through the vaulted gateway into the Parade. She was tired and sweaty, and the walls shut off the breeze from the Gulf. In her bag, along with two more cameras and some extra lenses and filters, she'd brought a couple of small Evian bottles. She gave one to Corman and downed the other herself. Sharing the water completed their transformation from strangers into companions, even collaborators.
    "You were saying that the men actually welcomed the Headsman's arrival as a break in the routine,” she reminded him.
    "Yes. And just a few days later came another."
    A dot appeared on the southern horizon and turned into a steamship called the Floradora —an old-fashioned side-wheeler that had survived into the age of the screw propeller. It tied up to the floating dock, and the soldiers who were off duty began to swap tobacco and gossip with the crew. Sergeant Schulz politely invited the captain into the officers’ quarters he'd commandeered for himself and Corporal Quant, and poured him a glass of whiskey he'd commandeered too.
    The ship had come from Habana (as it was spelled then) and the captain had a bit of disquieting news to report: when they left the harbor, hurricane flags had been flying on the walls of Moro Castle. Schulz duly noted this information, then asked if yellow fever had broken out in Cuba, as it usually did during the summer. The captain said no, not to his knowledge, then swallowed his whiskey at a gulp and said he must be getting his ship underway. Something furtive in his manner roused the sergeant's suspicion, so he accompanied him to the dock and cast a sharp eye over the Floradora' s crewmen. All he could see appeared lively and healthy enough.
    Yet when the ship arrived at the Head of Passes, an army medical inspector descended to the lower deck and found a sailor