Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (24 page)

The voice was getting closer.

Jesse hopped onto the coach as it pulled
away. Two of the bandits grabbed his arms and helped him up.

A Chinese man emerged from the open utility
gate. Jesse couldn't understand his words, but his message was
clear. The man held a shotgun in his hands. He aimed it at the
coach.

A shot rang out. Jesse glanced around to see
if one of their crew had been hit. No one had been.

Instead, the Chinese man fell back onto the
dirt.

As blood seeped from his wounded chest, he
continued to scream at the bandits. His voice was getting hoarse,
wet.

Soon his words were just the shriek of a
dying soul.

Gunsmoke wafted from the business end of
Jesse's rifle.

One of the Lotus Boys patted him on the
shoulder. "Great shot."

Great shot.

Jesse's mind raced. Try as he might, he
couldn't recall pulling the trigger. It had been second nature.
Instinct, almost.

The others were elated, excited. Clearly, the
adrenaline rushing through their system was enough reward for
nearly getting killed.

But Jesse was keeping a tally of those who'd
ended up in his warpath and fallen. Two dead from the theft of the
stagecoach, and now this man at the garment shop.

How many more would have to die before this
war was won?

Jesse was quiet on the return trip. In his
introspection, he realized there was something he'd yet to tell any
of the others. And given his current popularity, it seemed as good
a time as any.

"You want to know something about me,
guys?"

The others turned to him, surprised to hear
him speak at last.

"Sure," Eli said.

"Wayne Cole is my brother."

The others were silent. They just stared at
him, trying to process this new information. Trying to understand
what it meant.

"Well," Eli said at last, "You're a Lotus Boy
now, all the same."

The first light of day was beginning to show
when their stagecoach made it back to camp.

Jesse saw that Black was already there to
greet them. As he stepped down from the wagon, the tower of a man
approached him, and put a hand to his back. "Nicely done. I suppose
you do have it in you, after all."

Jesse was quiet.

"What's troubling you?" Black asked, the way
a parent might ask a child when they already damn well knew the
answer.

"I shot a man."

"Is he dead?"

"I don't know. I think so."

Black sighed. "It's difficult to bear the
burden of what we do, but would you really feel any better if it
had been one of those poor souls?" he asked, indicating towards the
other gangsters on the wagon. "If, say, it had been young Johnny
who had to pull the trigger, and who had racked up another debt to
his society?"

"It would be easier," Jesse replied.

Black made a face that
said,
I understand
. "Now, go on. Finish what you've started with the
stagecoach." Black outstretched his hands, as if gesturing towards
an as yet-unrealized monument. "When that screen rises high above
the heads of Bridgetown's people, we will at last taste the fruits
of our labor."

"Okay," Jesse said. "Absolutely," he added,
hoping it would sound emphatic.

When he returned to the stagecoach, Eli and
the others were still relaying the night's events to one another,
as if they hadn't all been there to witness it firsthand. They were
like comedians trying out new material on one another, prepping
their bits for an eventual audience.

"Hey, guys," Jesse interjected. They turned
to face him.

"The man of the hour!" Buddy said.

Jesse didn't show much of a reaction one way
or the other. "Would a couple of you mind helping me out with the
coach?"

He indicated to the nearest two to come with
him to get some tools.

"Wait up," Eli started.

Jesse turned. "Hey, Eli."

"I'm sorry for having doubted you earlier,"
the bandit said, his eyes to his boots. "When I saw your movin'
picture, an'—and then when I saw you shoot that chinaman, well, I
knew you were an invaluable brother in our mission."

Jesse was at once heartened
and revolted. "Thanks," he said. Eli's phrasing—
our mission—
struck him. "Eli, can I
ask you a personal question?"

"Well, shoot."

"I have my own reasons for being here—but
what about you? What keeps you a part of this gang? Besides the
lotus?"

Eli pursed his lips and took a breath. He
began to pace away from the others, and Jesse followed. "Well, I
suppose we all have our reasons. Mostly, for me anyways, Mr. Black
has given my life purpose. I was nobody 'fore. Nuthin. But ever
since I first tasted that flower, I knew I could see more—be
more—than any of those folks in back in Bridgetown. More than your
brother, certainly, if you don't mind my meaning."

"I don't."

"See, it's like this, Mr. Jesse. When I taste
the lotus, I'm a little bit closer to heaven. Just a little, but
enough. Which makes Mr. Black my priest, of sorts. And what we have
here—the Lotus Boys, and this camp—it's like a church. And every
day is Sunday. You get my meaning?"

Jesse nodded. "I think I do." He shook Eli's
hand.

No longer would any Lotus Boy doubt Jesse's
value to the cause. The Lotus Boys obliged his commands, his master
vision. He was both auteur and agent of faith, and they were
beholden to deliver his sermon.

Over the next several hours, the congregants
assembled a wooden mast and rigged it onto the back of their
stripped-down stagecoach, hinged to spring up like a trebuchet. A
rope pulley was assembled to shoot up the canvas screen in an
instant.

Once they'd successfully tested this system,
the men set about painting the wagon a flat black, and adorned it
with a hodgepodge of available gas lamps.

The plan, as Jesse devised it, was
simple:

As the wagon rode into town, lit up like a
flaming chariot, a crowd would form around it. Srawn like moths to
the flame by the unusual display, they would call out others from
their homes and businesses.

Then the trebuchet would shoot up, the screen
would rise, and moving images unlike anything the people might have
seen in carnivals or kinetoscope houses would play over their
heads. They would be swept up in its calling.

And so it came to pass, the following
day:

It was July 30th, a Friday. A good night for
a movie premiere.

Jesse walked down Main Street. There were
people about—men, women, children, going in and out of shops and
offices. They'd reserved their tickets to the picture show just by
being there.

Like an expectant father in the waiting room,
Jesse was anxious. He needed a smoke. So he walked into the general
store—that first place he'd gone, the day he'd fallen from the sky.
He rang the bell for service, and that old man in his green visor
appeared once more from the back.

"I'll take a pack of cigarettes, please,"
Jesse said.

"Which brand, sir?"

Jesse considered the options on the shelf by
the shopkeep. A peach-colored pack read, "Admiral," and he
remembered one of the film reels he'd watched in Scoble's lounge.
It had been, plainly, what a modern man would call a commercial. In
it, an American in a top hat, an Indian, and a European soldier
were bickering with one another when a giant carton of Admiral
cigarettes splintered apart. From it, a Napoleon lookalike emerged
and began showering the men with hundreds of cigarettes. The
strange bedfellows all stopped fighting, and, now happily puffing
away, unfurled a banner that read, "WE ALL SMOKE."

It was odd. But effective enough that Jesse
remembered it.

"I'll take the Admirals," he said.

"That'll be five cents," the shopkeeper told
him. Jesse fished for a nickel and handed it over.

"Have a good one," he said, and walked back
out into the street.

The walk-up balcony above the saloon looked
like a prime viewing spot. Jesse began up the stairs, savoring the
creaking underfoot as he took one step after another. He was
beginning to appreciate the way this town was built, how each
building was crafted from what was available.

Someone was cooking. It seemed they were
doing so inside the saloon, which was unusual. The smell of pig
roasting on a spit wafted up through the second floor of the
building, through the whorehouse, and out to the balcony where
Jesse now stood. The sun felt warm and pleasant on his skin, and he
enjoyed the first long drag on his cigarette.

He realized, with some satisfaction, that he
did not feel lost or out of place. He felt like he hand a handle on
things at last.

"Hello, Mister," came a girl's voice.

Jesse turned. She was a comely brunette, long
tressed ringlets cascading over her bare shoulders and down to her
Spanish-style dress.

Jesse nodded to her.

"You like watching the people?" she
asked.

Again, he nodded.

"I do, too," she said. "Sometimes, I make up
little stories about each of them in my head. Other times, I don't
have to. The husbands like to tell me all about their troubles at
home. I feel bad for the wives, when I see them out here together.
I wonder if they know."

Jesse considered this young girl's life while
he looked out to the flat desert horizon. He noticed that the sun
was finally setting.

"Well, if you like stories," Jesse told her,
"Wait here for just a few more minutes."

He put out the cigarette butt under his foot
and kicked it away to the earth below.

The girl stood there for a few heartbeats
longer, but then retreated beyond the doorway to the whorehouse.
Maybe she realized she wasn't going to get any business out of this
pensive stranger.

As the dusk sky dimmed to a dusky grey, Jesse
spotted a stagecoach on the long road into town.

His stagecoach.

One by one, the hundred-plus lanterns
dangling from all sides of it were lit up.

"Hey," the girl's voice said from beyond the
doorway, "What'd'ya see out there that's so much more interesting
than me?"

Jesse turned in her direction, wearing a
smile. "Take a look for yourself."

She emerged once more with a raised eyebrow,
and approached the balcony ledge. She pointed to the stagecoach,
now shimmering in the distance like a torch. "That wagon's on
fire."

"Fire?" came another voice from beyond an
open door. A middle-aged woman emerged, unapologetic in nothing but
her bloomers. She had copper-tinged, thin hair pulled tight against
her scalp and pushed up like a geyser of curls atop her head.

"—Esther, look," the younger girl said. "It's
coming this way."

Both prostitutes took off running down the
steps to Main Street.

Jesse found himself smiling. He watched the
pair as they merged into a gathering crowd of people.

More and more onlookers—shopkeepers,
vagrants, the young and the old—came out of the woodwork and into
the streets. Whether they were interested in the chariot of fire or
the nearly-naked woman now in their midst was an academic
distinction.

Four of Black's midnight-colored mares pulled
the wagon. In and of themselves, they were a sight to behold.

A gust of wind blew through Main Street's
wood-and-brick canyon. For a moment, Jesse could swear he heard the
low choral intonations of Dies Irae in the air. If Devil's Peak had
a voice, that would be it.

Something wicked this way
comes
, he thought.

The stagecoach was near enough now for the
gathered crowd to realize that it was not actually on fire. Still,
the sight of its peculiar oil-lamp bedazzling was enough to
maintain a captivating curiosity. The horses came to a stop,
commandeered by a figure in the Lotus Boys' identifying
monochromatic garb.

Once more, Jesse looked up to the sky. The
sun had set fully now, and the stars were beginning to pierce
through the veil. It was dark enough at last.

Showtime.

With a
whip-crack
sound, the trebuchet was
activated. The massive screen shot up and unfurled, the expensive,
billowing fabric majestic in how it pulled taut against its
frame.

Jesse's mechanism had been a clever one.

From his vantage point at the balcony, Jesse
heard a wave of gasps ripple through the crowd. Questions rippled
throughout.

Who's inside that thing?

What's going on?

The screen began to flicker with a crackling
electric energy, only adding to the crowd's excitement. The
projector was loaded up on a second wagon, clear on the other side
of Main Street, shooting its beam of concentrated light down the
alley between the saloon and the shop next door.

As the projectionist focused the light and
the leader film ran though, Black emerged from behind the left edge
of the screen, violin in hand. He wore a mask that concealed his
features even more than the deep brim of his hat managed to do.

He began to play a haunting, mournful piece
as the first scratchy frames of the film ran through the projector.
Black's music was eloquent, poetic. Angelic, even.

To Jesse's ears, it was clear that the violin
possessed a power no ordinary man's could. Even from high above the
scene, he felt lured into a kind of romantic trance. Women in the
crowd began to sob. Men hardened by lives on the edge of
civilization, too, became misty-eyed.

It was a beautiful, terribly powerful
synergy. Black's music opened them up to suggestion. But they were
spurred on by Jesse's images, and by Jesse's story of the robbery
of Bridgetown.

Onscreen, the prodigious Madame Ferris,
portrayed with wild-eyed glee by Floyda Marsh, threw her china
plates across the dining room. She'd witnessed an old man have his
oil-rich land taken from him by the corrupt sheriff, in league with
the industrialist Mr. King who had designs to own the entire city.
This was the moment where, sickened by what she saw and her
culpability in a life of excess, she shed her identity and joined
forces with the townspeople.