Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (9 page)

Only Susanna did. And, somewhere, Jesse.

But neither of them
understood
it.

She stopped walking a hundred or so paces
from the factory, Devil's Peak still far in the distance. She fell
to her knees, kneeling before it like a pilgrim facing her mecca,
and let the high desert wind blow through her hair.

It was quiet, when she got far enough away
from the factory. Quiet enough to think. It reminded her of that
last night at the commune site.

"Please," she whispered. "Tell me why I feel
this way."

On the hill that Wayne's ranch house sat
upon, the same winds whistled through dry California brush, as
Jesse walked past. The sun was starting to set, the sky a champagne
tint.

Footprints in honeycomb patterns cut through
the hills, their illegible Chuck Taylor logo stamped in the dirt
hundreds of times in a breadcrumb trail along the path.

The modern ranch house was long, flat, and
unlike the other Neoclassical mansions beside it. Jesse had no
doubt that this was the palace his brother called home.

How could this have happened? How did Jesse
end up so far removed from his two companions? He dared not think
what might have transpired between her and Wayne. A house like the
one before him wasn't built in a few weeks. That meant a lot of
long nights spent missing home, with only one set of sympathetic
ears who could possibly understand her plight. This Modernist
structure, out of place and time, was a portent of bad news for
Jesse.

He managed a slow march up the winding paved
road to the front gates of the ranch.

A machined metal button sat dead-center upon
the left column of the perimeter gate. Jesse pressed it. After a
few moments, static leaked out of a speaker hidden somewhere.

"Who is it?" — an unfamiliar voice.

"Tell Wayne that Jesse is here to see him."
He put extra emphasis on his own name. He tried imagining what the
look on Wayne's face in a few moments would be. Maybe he had been
expecting him all along. Would he be joyed? Resentful?

After an extended few moments of silence, the
voice returned. "Mr. Cole says to meet him in the parlor room."

The gates remotely unlocked, and Jesse pushed
them open. He walked the path to the front door. A rotund,
gray-haired older woman with cherubic features let him in.

"Welcome to the ranch, Mr. Cole," the woman
said, with the trace of a distant Irish accent. "He'll be waiting
for you, just down that hall. I'll show you the way."

Jesse wiped his dirt-covered shoes on the
mat, and walked past her. He turned around and asked her, "What was
your name again?"

"Martha," she said, with a little dip.

"Pleased to meet you, Martha. Jesse," he
said, and shook her hand.

Martha led Jesse deeper into the impressive
estate. The foyer held the unmistakable touch of Wayne's pragmatic
sensibilities. From high on the farthest wall, a black and white
portrait of Nikolai Tesla seemed to observe them.

Martha took him to the parlor. Inside, two
men stood on opposite sides of a wet bar.

Jesse's heart skipped a beat. Behind the bar,
tonic in hand, was Wayne.

Wayne's hair was a little thinner, his skin
much tanner than it had been when Jesse last saw him. He had
allowed a little stubble to grow in, and he had trimmed some of the
paunch that had traditionally filled out most of his features.
Wire-framed glasses befitting the era sat upon his nose.

Wayne raised his glass to Jesse. The ice
sloshed.

Both brothers hid something—sadness, elation,
maybe something else entirely—behind their eyes.

"Jesse, it's been too long."

"Yes it has. How long has it been?"

"Five years and change."

Five years.
The news hit Jesse hard. Did that mean he'd been
asleep for five years? Did it mean Susanna was five years older,
now, too?

The brothers did not embrace.

Wayne broke the silence. "Where are my
manners? Jesse, this is Sheriff White. He's been securing the city
and our industry for years now."

White pantomimed tipping a hat to Jesse. "How
do you do?"

Wayne, to Jesse: "Can I get you a drink?"

"Yeah, sure." Considering everything that had
transpired today, it was the only reasonable course of action.

He pulled a stool up to the bar and sat down,
next to White, while Wayne poured his drink.

The sheriff took a sip of his libation. "So
how do you two fellas know each other?"

Both took a sip of theirs in a bid for extra
time.

Wayne was the first to answer. "We're
brothers."

"Brothers! Well, fancy that. Always a good
time for a family reunion."

Susanna heard Jesse's voice before she saw
him. Walking each long step towards the parlor, she was acutely
aware of the wood creaking beneath her feet. Her chest was tight;
her head reeling. She didn't want to be here. She wanted to be
anywhere but here.

Suddenly, it all made sense. Her dream, the
night before. Her feeling of psychic unease all day long, and her
communion with the mountain. She had known Jesse had arrived at
last, five years late. She had felt it.

How would he react when he learned the
truth?

She was happy with her life, here—most of the
time. Jesse could wreck all of that.

She emerged into the room, the three men
facing her, expectant.

She locked eyes with him.

They stood there, half a room apart, staring
into each other's souls as if no one else was present. She didn't
know for how long.

She broke his gaze, and sat on the couch.

Jesse held a faraway stare towards nothing in
particular.

Wayne looked towards Jesse, gauging his
reaction.

"Are you alright, Mrs. Cole?" - White.

"She's fine," Wayne said.

Susanna was sure Jesse had picked up the fact
that the sheriff had addressed her that way.

"Merely weak with exhaustion," Wayne went on.
"Isn't that right, Susanna?"

Susanna said nothing. She could say
nothing.

"Susanna," Wayne continued, in a tone she
found rather patronizing, "Say hello to our guest."

Still she said nothing.

Wayne held his gaze at Jesse. If Jesse felt
anything at the news of their marriage, he didn't show it.

Wayne's eyes were on Jesse.

Jesse's eyes were on the wall.

Sheriff White was the only one truly present
in that room.

Dinner progressed in a predictable fashion.
After a time, Wayne's powers of bullshit, acquired through a
lifetime of confrontation avoidance and a few years of high-stakes
business dinners, managed to weave a tall tale: Jesse's arrival was
the product of a long-simmering dream to see the West, which he had
decided to act on, upon returning from a stay teaching humanities
in Dublin. White seemed to buy the story.

Susanna found herself surprised at how well
Jesse played along. He peppered in a few details about his stay
across the pond. Mostly, though, he let Wayne do the talking.
Susanna said hardly a word. She was still too bottled up, waiting
for the other shoe to drop. She left in the middle of the meal,
excused herself on account of feeling unwell, and disappeared down
the hallway. She needed the one thing that would remind her of her
own realness.

While Martha cleared the dinner table, Wayne
and the sheriff went out onto the deck for cigars. Jesse told them
he'd be right out, that he just needed to use the restroom.

He began scoping out the house, looking for
Susanna.

He walked up to the second floor, and heard
her voice. Delicate, deliberately quiet, but he knew it was hers.
He approached the door, and pushed it open.

Susanna turned and went wide-eyed when she
saw him. She sat in a chair beside a bed, book in hand.

Lying in the bed, next to her, was a child. A
boy, maybe three or four years old.

"W.J.," Susanna said, "This is your Uncle
Jesse. I've told you about him, remember? He's been away for a long
time, but he's come home now."

The boy, half-asleep, gave a weak wave.

Jesse returned it, with a wan smile. He
motioned toward W.J. The boy had Susanna's eyes, her nose, her
flaxen hair. But he could also detect Wayne's distinguishing
characteristics, and in that, his own.

W.J. stared back at him, wordless, perhaps
noticing their distant connection as well.

Jesse tried to look at Susanna. He
couldn't.

"I'm sorry," was all he managed to get out
before he had to sit down, and put his head up against the wall. He
felt a horrible, cruel, twisted-up ball of things at that moment,
none of them good.

"You're sorry? Jesse, you didn't do anything
wrong."

"No, no, I did," he said. "This is my fault.
My doing. None of this would've happened if I hadn't…"

He thought of the child, sitting on the bed.
How could he sit here and tell the love of his life that her son
was a mistake, a mistake he could have avoided? He hated himself
for hating the boy, but that didn't change a thing.

He stood up. He couldn't look her in the
eyes—it was too painful—so he looked just past her. "Martha said to
let you know the dessert's ready."

He walked out of the room.

A few moments later, Susanna came after
him.

Jesse turned around to face her. "Why didn't
you tell me?"

"I didn't know how."

None of the ten thousand words inside him
would come out. He turned and began walking again.

Once more, she followed.

"Look, I know you and I have a lot to talk
about," she said. "But we can't do it in front of my son, and we
certainly can't do it in front of Wayne."

"Then where can we?"

"Outside, tonight. Meet me by the barn. Wayne
will be asleep by midnight. We can put all our cards out on the
table then."

"Alright."

Jesse wished he had something better,
something more profound to say. But that was all he could muster.
So he left.

He didn't feel like going back out onto the
patio, but didn't know what else to do. He certainly couldn't go to
sleep. He briefly used the bathroom and went back to the deck.
There, he sat with his brother and the sheriff, and dutifully
accepted a cigar.

Wayne and White were deep in a friendly
debate over the ethics of the Tammany Hall political machine. Jesse
was lost, but he did manage to infer that the president was Grover
Cleveland. When White asked whether Jesse thought there was such a
thing as a difference between "honest graft" and "dishonest graft,"
he excused his indifference as the result of having spent the last
seven years in Ireland. Unfortunately, this shifted the topic of
conversation back to Jesse's exploits overseas, for which he had to
rely on a wellspring of carefully modulated creativity to talk his
way out of.

Soon they had whiskey summoned, and White
regaled the brothers with his tales of what it had been like
fighting for the Union as a young man, and then several years
later, moving out west to Bridgetown.

"I was always too rough for proper Eastern
society, and too straight to be anything but a sheriff out West,"
White said with a smile. At that, Wayne and White shared a
laugh.

The stars shined bright in the sky—brighter
than Jesse had ever seen them over Los Angeles. Wayne told them
both they were welcome to stay in the ranch's guest rooms.

That night, Jesse stayed wide-awake. He was
exhausted, yes, but he didn't dare sleep. The clock on his
nightstand fed him the time. He wasn't sure if it was a "normal"
clock, or another perversion that Wayne had introduced to this
era.

There was so much about this place that was
alien. And it was alien not for any outrageous exoticism. Far from
it, what made this place so alienating were the little details that
were different, or off, and how their quiet insanity seemed to him
a history test.

He watched the little hands tick inexorably
towards midnight.

Susanna counted the ceiling boards while
Wayne snored softly. It wasn't the first time she had committed
herself to the activity of board counting, but never before had she
done it with such urgency. She so badly wanted it to be midnight
already. She had to get everything she was thinking out of her
system. To put into words the complex brew of emotions Jesse's
arrival had wrought within her. She knew, though, that however
strange and upended her feelings were, Jesse's must've been ten
times as intense. He hadn't had five years to process what was
going on, nor five years to carve out a life in this place to
anchor himself onto.

Finally, with less than ten til on the clock,
and certain that Wayne was in a whiskey-aided reverie, she slipped
out of the bed, grabbed her shoes, and went down to see if Jesse
was already outside.

He was, waiting for her.

3.

The first week of December, 1969, foretold a weak
winter—even by the standards of what normally passed for the season
in Los Angeles. One of Southern California's occasional, obstinate
warm spells was in effect, and a balmy breeze gusted its way
through the UCLA campus as the nights fell.

The film program here was budding, clamoring
to escape its crib in the halls of the Theatre Arts department.
Freshmen who had so far only read textbooks were happy to get a
shot at threading delicate strips of celluloid scrap through the
mechanical innards of a 16mm Bolex camera. Sophomores and juniors
argued the finer points of auteur theory, speaking with an unearned
sense of authority over their first-year peers.

Opportunity lingered in the
air, and optimism infected the students. This might have seemed
paradoxical, for theater attendance in America had dropped to a
third of what it had been in its glory days. But then again, the
old vanguard of cigar-chomping studio bosses, who'd made their
names in vaudeville when dinosaurs walked the earth, had at last
thrown their hands up in the air and given the keys to the kingdom
over to Lenin-bearded, wild-haired youth with Something To Say.
This new set was driven as much by a thirst for mescaline and
intellectual cockfighting as it was by the promise of studio
dollars.
Butch Cassidy
,
Midnight Cowboy
, and
Easy Rider
had been the three highest-grossing films of the
year.