Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Page 12

  Jesse rang the intercom buzzer, and Martha let him in. He entered the foyer, and found Susanna was on the opposite end, watching him with a cautious distance.

  "You're okay," she said. She sounded surprised. "What happened?"

  "I spoke to Black."

  "You did what?"

  "I went to their camp. The Lotus Boys. I spoke to Black, their leader."

  "Why the hell would you do something like that?"

  Jesse thought about this. "I felt it might be valuable."

  "And he just, what, let you come back here?"

  Jesse walked the distance across the expanse of the foyer to be near her. "Susanna, we're going to have to leave. We don't belong here."

  "That nutcase gave you his bullshit about Pandora's Box, didn't he?"

  "He's not crazy, Susanna. I—" he searched for the right phrase, but there was no sane-sounding euphemism for what he needed to communicate. "He showed me the future. I saw it with my own eyes. The factory, the company, all of it—you're moving things forward too fast. The world's not ready for the knowledge you're about to unleash."

  "If us changing things was going to destroy the future, we'd have already disappeared. Jesse, advancing the world doesn't just mean the bad stuff. Think about what we can do with disease prevention. Eradication of polio, whatever else. We've put too much blood, sweat, and tears into this company to give up on what we can achieve here."

  "But Black can help us get back." Jesse stopped himself. He felt strangely embarrassed, for he'd accidentally let slip a secret truth he'd rather hide behind more altruistic goals.

  An odd clacking sound came down the hall now. Jesse turned, and saw the perfectly angelic vision of Wayne Junior, walking at his father's side. The strange noise was the sound of a leg brace like the kind polio victims wore—W.J.'s leg brace.

  It impacted in counter to each step he made with his good leg. Jesse found himself unable to make sense of this pathetic sight at first. The boy had been fine just yesterday, when Jesse had first seen him with his mother by the side of his...bed.

  Of course. He's had no reason to suspect the boy was sick.

  Wayne and Jesse locked eyes. "Go see your mother," Wayne told the boy. "Your uncle and I have some words to exchange."

  Susanna took W.J. in her arms, and set his miniature crutch along the wall. She carried the boy outside, through the front door.

  Jesse watched them leave the room. Martha shut the front door behind them.

  "I suppose I never told you," Wayne said.

  Jesse turned to face him, but said nothing.

  Wayne went on. "I overheard what you were saying to my wife just now."

  "And?"

  "I just don't understand it, Jesse. I take you in, I give you a bed, and food. You're my own brother. And first chance you get, you go out to the middle of the desert where a bunch of radical gangsters eke out a miserable, hateful existence, and you...I don't know, come back babbling about the future." He paced across the foyer. "Now that I hear myself saying it, it sounds exactly like you. I've lived another half a decade, but you haven't changed a day."

  "Wayne, for God's sake, we went into a molten hole in the Earth and got spat out seventy years into our own past. That's the reality of the world now. You can't just take advantage of that shit when it's convenient for you, and go on being ignorant when it hurts your bottom line."

  "Oh, I see. Of course. Of course you're gonna cast me as the big, bad businessman. I'm The Man. I'm Tricky Dick Nixon. I'm the robber-baron. And you're, what, exactly? Robin Hood with a touch of beatnik?"

  "You're taking, taking, taking, because you think things weren't fair in your old life. And now you're Mr. Moneybags, just because you learned how to build a radio when you were a kid, so now you're gonna just steal other people's ideas and, fuck it, cause a nuclear war in the meanwhile! But who cares, right? Because it wasn't fair how the world treated you back then, so now, it's look out, everyone, the Wayne train is pulling into Asshole Station—"

  "You think this is just about making money for me, Jesse? Take a look at my son," he punctuated this last word with a finger pointed out the front door. "He can't walk. He'll never be able to walk right. This world is harsh on all of us. But he wouldn't be able to even survive in it. Medicine won't fix him, it's too late for that. But money can fix him, Jesse. Money can level the playing field."

  Jesse shook his head. He spat at Wayne's feet, oblivious to how closely he was echoing the mayor's gesture just an hour before, and went down the hall to the room that had been provided to him.

  He sat in the guest room for a long while after that. Nobody came to disturb him. Five years of absence and it was like both Wayne and more painfully, Susanna, would have just as well had it he'd never returned.

  He looked out the window as the shadows grew long and the sky a deep purple. On the lawn of the estate, Susanna and Wayne played with Wayne Jr.

  Watching them, Jesse understood how his sudden presence in this place had been an intrusion. Of course he was trouble. Of course he was a disruption.

  Martha called supper and the Cole family came in from outside. Martha came around to Jesse's quarters and asked if we would be joining them that evening; Jesse declined the invitation.

  There was a quill pen on the desk, and a small supply of paper inside. He began to draft a letter, and he was overcome with a feeling of deja vu. He'd seen this moment before, when Black had granted him the ability to peer into days yet unlived. Except that this time, the words on the page were perfectly visible to him.

  Dear Susanna,

  I know my arrival has been disruptive to you and your family, especially in this time that requires you be intensely focused on your professional success. For that I am sorry.

  In pursuing the opportunities that knowledge of future events has given both of you, you have lost sight of what once brought us all together and made us happy.

  I still love you, Susanna. And I am willing to fight for you.

  Even if it doesn't make sense right now, I am confident that you will one day see things my way. Wayne, on the other hand, I do not know if I can convince him. But I am willing to try.

  I will fight to get back the future we once had. I can promise you that.

  Love forever,

  Jesse

  He sealed the envelope and left the room, as quietly as he could. Laughter echoed from down the hall.

  Jesse exited out the back of the ranch house, walked to the garage, and placed the letter on the seat of the Mark II.

  Then he took the tarp off his Jeep, inserted the key into the ignition, and brought the engine to life. He pulled out of the garage. Just as the sun was falling behind the desert, he began the trek back to Black's camp.

  When he got there, he was given passage to the leader's inner sanctum.

  When Jesse entered his tent, Black was working on a cigar. Jesse reached for his own pack of cigarettes, but remembered he was fresh out. Without having to say a thing, Black offered him a cigar.

  Jesse lit it with his Zippo. "Thanks."

  Black's knowing expression was not lost on Jesse. "I take it you had about as much success with them as I did," the man said.

  "I don't begrudge you for what you have to do," Jesse replied. "But you won't be killing Susanna—I'll see to it that she comes with me, one way or another."

  "You realize," Black said, with a puff of his cigar, "She may learn to hate you."

  Jesse watched the tip of his cigar slowly burn away. "Let me ask you something, Black. I saw something, in my future. At first it didn't make much sense, but then I got to thinking. What we need is a people's revolt. We need to show the people of Bridgetown that Cole Company doesn't have their best interests at heart, no matter how many jobs and shiny toys Wayne promises to bring with that factory. And where I come from, there's no better way to talk to the people than through the screen."

  Black's eyes lit up. "You're talking about a propaganda picture." He blew a smoke ring. "I might know
just the man who can help."

  4.

  Susanna's alarm clock woke her at 4:30 AM, just as it had every weekday for the past year and a half. She threw on her work outfit, from her bloomers to her oil-stained denim jumpsuit. Then she scarfed down her steel-cut oats, topped with strawberries she'd picked from the ranch. These rituals had provided the makeup of her morning routine since ground was first broken on the factory. She liked it this way, for anytime before the sun rose, Susanna didn't much care for surprises. Besides, the simple repetition meant her mind was freed up for more meaningful pursuits. This morning, most of her thoughts were with Jesse.

  Was Wayne awake? She tiptoed to their bedroom to find out. No, he was still snoring. She proceeded towards Jesse's room, and put her hand to the knob, not quite sure what she was hoping would happen.

  She cracked the door open, just a few inches, and peered into the room.

  Jesse wasn't there. He hadn't made himself seen or heard at all the prior evening. At the time, Susanna had to admit, this had given her a bit of relief. She'd figured he was just having a drink in town. Now, though, a knot of worry formed high in her stomach.

  She considered using the room's guest phone to dial Sheriff White at his office, but something held her back. Susanna tried to brush various concerning scenarios out of her mind. The gnawing sort of thought that usually meant she was dead-on accurate clung to her, though. In this case, it was her concern that Jesse had gone back to Black.

  Jesse wasn't on the patio, in the barn, or in the garage when she checked. But it was in that last location, on the driver's seat of the Mark II, that Susanna found a letter sealed shut with the crest of her own estate in red wax.

  She tore it open, and read it three times. She could have allowed herself to feel sad, concerned, or angry, but she did not allow herself to linger on such feelings. She had a job to do, and she would be strong. She would keep her priorities in line until Jesse eventually, inevitably, returned from wherever he'd run off to.

  Susanna put her keys in the ignition and started up the car. She backing out of the garage and took off down the small path towards the main road beyond the gates. The sun was beginning to crest over the horizon, and she didn't like getting to the factory after sunup.

  Jesse's actions confounded her. Was it stupidity? A petulant desire to make her worry about him? Should she even worry about him?

  Maybe she was the foolish one. Maybe Jesse had every right to want out, seeing her with Wayne. For the first time, she considered the full weight of how difficult Wayne's sudden business success must have been for Jesse. His whole life, he'd been the cool brother, after all. And now, he was an outcast. He knew nothing about this place, had nothing to his name. No status. Even if Susanna hadn't been a factor at all, it would have been one hell of a horse pill to swallow.

  Her attention snapped back to the here and now—to the factory. The scorched crater where the Lotus Boys had pierced the outer wall with dynamite days earlier was still visible. This was not supposed to be the case. Just yesterday, there'd been a temporary fence erected around it, to keep out prying eyes. A bit of face-saving, to at the least obscure the embarrassment. But worse, the hole should have been fixed by now. Why wasn't it fixed?

  Susanna careened into a staging of flattened earth, soon to be paved into a parking lot. Then she exited the vehicle, and stormed through the double doors that led to the factory floor.

  The enormous interior of the factory was akin to that of an airship hangar, so cavernous that it generated its own weather system. Those who were installing lighting near the catwalk-latticed ceiling found it almost unbearably humid, while at the floor it was cool. Breezy, even—courtesy of the unfortunate boat-sized hole punched in the wall.

  Susanna's eyes were locked onto this yet-to-be-rectified embarrassment. Each stomp she took towards twisted metal and scorched cinderblocks was a proclamation of her supreme displeasure.

  She came to stop just at the outer edge of the blast radius. The damage to the wall had been relatively superficial, even if it was the most obvious effect from the outside. The bigger problem was at her feet. Like a sinkhole, there was a crater about fifteen feet deep. The Lotus Boys' dynamite had blown a hole in the first floor, leaving an unsettling bird's-eye-view straight down into the basement. She could all too easily imagine a worker, his nose buried in outstretched blueprints, taking one step too far into this abyss.

  Why hadn't work to fix this so much as begun? She'd assigned the cleanup task to Howard Rimmler and his team the day before. She had mixed feelings about her working relationship with the hard-nosed Rimmler. She'd once heard him describe his duties, at a philanthropic fundraiser that Cole Co. put on the previous Christmas, as "real brick-and-mortar masonry." At the time, she'd found the subtle posturing of this statement a little odd. It held within it some coded polemic; after all, if there was such a thing as "real" brick-and-mortar masonry, it stood to reason there was such a thing as "fake" masonry. This had stuck out in her mind, and working over it, she had realized that Rimmer regarded Susanna and Wayne as high-falootin' urban dandies. She figured Rimmler didn't put much stock in her word. Maybe it was because she was a woman, but she didn't get that feeling from Rimmler. No, Rimmer didn't respect her, she realized, because he didn't think she had any experience.

  In truth, he was right, of course. Susanna had planned to study civil engineering in college, if she'd had the chance to go. It was that fact, and her hours spent pouring over voluminous library texts in her first three years in Bridgetown, that had allowed her to convince Wayne she was the right man for the job. The two of them, already living a fabricated biography, had simply woven her qualification into her imagined pre-Bridgetown life narrative. It had been easy; they'd faked so many other things about their lives back east.

  That she didn't have any previous experience as a foreman was no longer a source of much insecurity for Susanna. She'd been performing her duties for over a year now, and had done a damn fine job of it. The project was on time and poised to revolutionize an industry. She was proving, out here in the still-to-be-tamed southwest of 1897, that a woman could do just as good a job as a man. So she didn't feel guilty for engaging in nepotism; in fact, she considered her success in the role a true achievement.

  Rimmler, though? She knew he didn't see it that way. She couldn't blame him; since he reported directly to her, she stood in the way of his promotion. But she could expect him to at least do his job and collect his paycheck. To respect her authority, and execute her directives when she issued them. The fact that she was standing at the lip of this fifteen foot chasm, face bathed in daylight pouring in from the massive crevice before her, was testament to the fact that he did not respect her. She could feel the anger roiling in the pit of her stomach. She turned to face the scores of men busily at work assembling the factory machinery.

  "Where's Rimmler?" she shouted, making sure that all could hear the indignation in her voice. Immediately, the din of the construction crew quieted.

  "I said, where's Rimmler? Tell me he's on-site, at least."

  A second-story office door opened and Howard Rimmler emerged. He was a broad-shouldered, bearded man who looked at home in the wild. If he'd been born fifty years earlier, he'd have been a gold prospector. But the 5' 3" Susanna wasn't intimidated by his frame. She was in charge here, and she was going to make sure he knew that.

  She watched, hands on her hips, as Rimmler slowly descended the long, metal staircase that led to the ground level. The other workers were silent, motionless, as Rimmler approached.

  "Yes, Mrs. Cole?" Rimmler said when he at last reached the floor. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with an oily rag he kept slung over his shoulder. It wasn't nervous sweat; rather, it was indignant sweat. Sweat that seemed to say, I'm working harder than you.

  Susanna pointed to the building's obvious, gaping wound. "What is that?" she asked.

  "That's where the bomb went off, M'am."

  "I know that, Howard," Susan
na said. "Does anything look wrong with that picture to you?"

  "Yes, m'am. The blueprints never called for a hole in the floor."

  A murmuring wave of chuckles rippled out amongst the crew, but this was quickly self-censored.

  "Why is no one fixing it? When I specifically gave you instructions to take care of the problem yesterday?" Susanna let her final word sit. She wasn't even going to bring up the small matter of why the fence outside had seemingly walked off.

  Rimmler let out an exasperated sigh. "Mrs. Cole," he began. "As I stated yesterday, we've got a lot to do to get ready. I've only got the manpower I'm given, and my schedules do not account for the possibility of bombs going off.

  "Now, obviously someone's going to have to take care of that. But if you want the job to get done on time, I recommend you hire additional manpower to patch that up. It's not a difficult job—you can contract the work out to a few extra hands for a couple of weeks."

  "You're missing the point, Rimmler," Susanna said. "You report to me. I weigh all of our options, I take into consideration all of the possibilities, I make a judgement call. Your job, then, is to help me make that judgement call happen."

  "I understand that, Mrs. Cole," Rimmler said, his volume beginning to creep up. Susanna was learning to hate how he addressed her, putting the emphasis on the "Missus" as he did. "But what you're asking is not possible. We can't do both things and still finish on time. So I have to make a judgement call of my own."

  Susanna was at an impasse with him. She wasn't going to spend her day arguing. She sighed. "Get the hole fixed, Howard. As a matter of fact, I don't want your crew to do a single other task until that hole is taken care of. Until I can't see straight through to the basement. You understand?"

  "Yes, m'am," Rimmler grumbled. His words were a concession, but a fire burned in his eyes.