Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Read online

  "I have full faith that you and your men will do what must be done," Wayne said. "And I promise you, once this factory is operating, the entire police force of Bridgetown will be outfitted with the very latest. A car for every man on the job."

  Sheriff White didn't verbally acknowledge Wayne's promise. Nevertheless, Wayne knew he had him.

  At the Lotus Boys' camp, Jesse watched the others drink the lotus brew and fall under the spell of Black's violin. He did not partake himself. Instead, he elected to stay at the edge of the tumbleweed society, keeping his mind free from distraction. An anxiety gnawed at his core. The sense of victory that had coursed through him after the screening had proven temporary, for the anesthetizing shock he'd experienced after shooting the man in Los Angeles had worn off.

  Now he heard the man's death-gurgle in his nightmares, and he knew he needed to talk to Black.

  One by one, the bandits' hallucinatory jabberings gave way to sleepy murmurs half-spoken while they laid on their sides. In a few more minutes, the camp was quiet at last, and Jesse allowed himself the pleasure of listening to the campfire's crackling.

  He could go to Black now. He got up, walked over to Black's tent, took a breath, and entered.

  Inside, he found Black sitting, cross-legged, his back to Jesse. That strange little antique mechanism sat on his desk, as did a journal of notes scribbled in a cuneiform-like shorthand Jesse didn't recognize.

  "Evening, Jesse," Black said, still turned away from him. "Something is on your mind. What is it?"

  "I know things are going to get rough," Jesse opened with. "We all feel that Bridgetown is going to split into two. What happens to my brother when it does?"

  "You know the game we're all playing," Black replied. "I can't make any guarantees about his fate."

  "What if we just put him in a crate, stick him on a train, and send him to Mexico?"

  "Jesse, your brother's will is as strong as his intellect." At last, Black turned to face him, and he could feel Black peering into his soul. "After you shot that man, you began to have second thoughts about this campaign, didn't you?"

  "I'm not a killer, Black."

  "Yet, judging by your actions, you are."

  It wasn't a personal slight. It was a bare statement of fact, and for that reason, it was all the more a punch to Jesse's gut. "I can't pretend what happened out there didn't," he replied. "I've played it out in my mind over and over again. But I have to draw a line in the sand, here, now. Wayne's my brother. I can't conspire to kill him, if that's what you have in mind."

  "Then make him listen," Black countered. "Convince him to abandon his misguided aspirations and live a modest life. Show him he must get out of the way of the world."

  Jesse felt as he did in dreams where he was on stage before thousands and suddenly forgot how to play his guitar. He felt like he'd gone off-script, and had no words.

  "You are free to say anything in my presence," Black reminded him.

  "Okay," he said. "What happens when the factory opens next week? I know we're going to disrupt it. When all hell breaks loose, how do I know Susanna will be safe?"

  "You'll get her to follow you. You two have a history together."

  Jesse knew better at this point than to be surprised whenever Black revealed the extent of his knowledge.

  "Bring her here," Black continued. "Where she can do no harm to herself or the world."

  The outlaw's words were beginning to rub Jesse the wrong way. He couldn't shake the feeling that Black was no longer asking Jesse how the Lotus Boys could help his cause, but was instead telling him what to do.

  "Why are you keeping me around?" Jesse asked.

  "How do you mean?"

  Jesse tried to put his discontent into words but found himself coming up short. "Nothing," he said at last. "Never mind."

  "You feel coerced." Black deduced, interlocking his fingers and rested his chin on his hands. "I want you to realize you're not my pawn, Jesse. You've offloaded any sense of responsibility for actions you find distasteful. It's a classic coping mechanism," Black went on, "But not a reflection of fact. You made the choices that led to you shooting that man in Los Angeles. It would be nothing short of cowardice to abandon your greater goals now."

  Jesse told Black that made sense to him, and returned to his tent. That night, he felt colder than he had since he fell through the rabbit-hole into the Darkness.

  6.

  I'm becoming the third wheel in my own story, Susanna thought. This is bullshit.

  She got up from the table and looked out the kitchen window, in time to see Wayne dash off to the factory in the Mark II. She turned to face Martha, who was helping W.J. down from his seat. The way Martha bent down to reach the boy was, well, creaky. It was the movement of a woman whose joins had worn down with overuse.

  Susanna tried to imagine herself in forty years' time. Could she do it? Could she be like Martha? It would be 1937 by then. If history proceeded along its known course, she'd be living in the deep throes of the Depression as a sixty-three-year-old woman. Of course, she'd probably be insulated from that terrible crisis, assuming she managed to hold on to her fortune.

  But that was just it, wasn't it? Wayne taking her title away from her had shattered any illusion she'd labored under that it was her fortune.

  The truth in this time was that it wasn't her fortune, it was her husband's. He could make or break her at will. If he divorced her, she could be left penniless. And where would she get employed? She had the skillset, and the pedigree, but no other man alive in this world would ever give her the opportunity to live up to her ability.

  She was, in short, fucked.

  With almost scientific detachment, she observed Martha gently help W.J. along on his crutch. Susanna loved her son, more than just about anything. She would never stop loving him. But she had to be honest with herself, not in spite of that love but, in fact, for it: she was not a natural mother. It's why she paid Martha for her services. Susanna could not make her son into a project to replace the factory; it wouldn't be healthy for either party.

  Instead, she needed the factory to dote on. She thrived on the ambitiousness of the project. She knew it would be so large and so sturdy that no wrecking company in a hundred years would deem it viable to demolish. Future generations would see the work she'd erected, a monumental middle finger to the patriarchy she was in bondage to. She had to have her name on it.

  The last wisps of dust kicked up along the dirt road by Wayne's departure dissipated. Susanna knew she could no longer stand by, idle, as her future was ripped from her hands and given to Howard Rimmler on a silver platter. It had been two weeks since she'd been ousted from her role for the sake of gender politics, and the resentment had built within her all the while. At this rate, she'd end up murdering Rimmler with an axe before the gala ever came to pass.

  So she marched up the stairs, to her bedroom, and shut the door behind her. When she needed to concentrate, she always shut the door, even if no one else was home.

  Her desk drawer held a stack of white, non-acidic notation paper with a fountain pen stashed alongside it. Susanna now knew what to write in the speech she was expected to deliver at the factory's opening.

  She had to concede that, since Jesse's arrival, she had slipped into the role of supporting player. But she relished an ascension to protagonist that she would no longer wait for permission to seize. The story of the Cole Automotive Plant would be her story, history be damned.

  "Harry?"

  Errol White rubbed the sleep from his eyes while he waited for his deputy to respond.

  "Colonel? Tell me you're not waking me up just to tell me you had your dream again."

  "I did, Harry."

  'Well, do you at least remember what it was this time?"

  Bridgetown's sheriff thought hard. He did remember it. He had remembered it, anyway. Just a moment ago. It was there in his mind, firm, concrete, as he had waited for the switchboard girl to put him through. But it had slipped a
way from him just now, when he'd turned his back to it. Save for one detail...

  "There was a door," he said. "I remember the door."

  His deputy sighed. "Okay. A door. Good to know."

  White's face went flush with embarrassment. "Never mind me, Harry. I'm beginning to feel like an old fool. Shucks, maybe I'm just losing my marbles. Pay me no mind." He almost put the receiver back on the hook, but added: "Get some rest. This week is going to feel very long."

  "You too, Colonel," the deputy responded.

  The receiver made a satisfying click when he returned it to its cradle. White pulled the sheets up around him.

  That door...

  The next time he awoke, it was because he thought he'd heard the telephone's infernal ringing. Justice for waking Harry in the middle of the night, perhaps. He was beginning to regret having the thing installed by his bedside.

  He must've been in communion with the spirits, because the telephone did begin crying out just a few moments later.

  "Hello?"

  "Colonel, someone's been killed down at the saloon."

  "Ah, shit," White replied. "I'm telling you, Harry, this town is going to pull itself apart. Do we know who it was?"

  "You mean who died, or who killed him?"

  "I don't know. Either." White glanced out the window and saw the pale blue of the early morning sky, just past dawn.

  "I'm heading down there now to straighten it out," his deputy said. "Best you come, too."

  "I'm already dressed," White said, grabbing a handful of his threadbare night robe.

  "See you soon, Errol."

  White put the phone back on its hook and considered it for a moment. A phone in the sheriff's bedroom had been Wayne's idea, like a lot of the things that were weighing on White at that moment. He'd been sheriff for, what, seven, eight years? Never before in all that time had he felt afraid to walk outside his home. Never before had he feared the very people he'd sworn an oath to protect, and who had elected him twice over. But now he sure did. And he was beginning to think that might have been Wayne's fault. Maybe he'd pushed this town too hard, too fast, trying to remake it in his own image.

  Errol White needed to remain above the politics of the city. He needed to be an impartial instrument of justice and nothing more. He rubbed more sleep from his eyes. There was just one evasive corner of grit that wouldn't cede its territory to the tyranny of the waking hours. So he lumbered over to the adjacent washroom, his aging joints voicing their own resistance in alliance with that bit of eye-crust. He monitored the cold tap water with a finger, until it warmed to the point that he felt good about splashing his face with it.

  That tap had been a gift from Wayne, he noted. The miracle of hot water delivered to his sink on demand, all the way out here in Bridgetown. Maybe the crisis going on out there was the price they all paid for the miracles of modern living. Or maybe he'd just been bought out by Wayne, and made a patsy, only just now realizing it.

  His face sufficiently fresh, and that grit in his eyelashes at last vanquished, White pulled his night robe up and off over his head. He put on a fine button-up top and his slacks with suspenders, then he walked to the oak armoire opposite his bedside. It was a relic of a former life of his, one in which there had been a feminine presence in this home enough to select such a fine piece of furniture. Nothing else in his bare quarters still reflected that touch. This was all that remained, and he knew it would remain here until he died.

  He opened the cabinet, as he did every morning, and took from it his double-breasted, cream leather jacket.

  White's jacket was virtually iconic around town; he liked to think its unusual design had become emblematic of justice in these parts. Eight pairs of big brass buttons ran up its front, each the size of a quarter. The leather was soft beyond earthly touch, for the jacket might well have been older than White himself—and he thought of himself as old as dirt. When he put the jacket on, as he did now, its tight fit hugged him. He wore it partly because he found that fit comforting, the way a child might find a tight-wrapped blanket calming. He was not so proud he couldn't admit this.

  The jacket had presented itself to Errol almost four decades earlier, as a spoil of war for following Major General William Tecumseh Sherman on his long march to the sea. It had been the sole item he'd found in a burned-out barn, in a burned-out farm, in a burned-out Confederate state. Somehow, it had avoided the flames and lay discarded on a table. His seventeen-year-old self had taken it that twilight, replacing his own tattered sack coat with it, and it had rarely left his frame in the days since. It smelled of life. Of the animal it was made from, and of the million miles it had traveled since then. White knew, as it was clear by now he'd never have any offspring of his own, that he'd one day have to find a suitable recipient for the jacket. For the moment, it would see him brave another day.

  He took a deep breath, slung the Colt he hoped not to have to use at his side, and opened his front door to the vibrating light of the morning. Only then did it strike him that he hadn't eaten breakfast yet. Maybe he could get some peanuts when he got to the saloon.

  There had been a time, just a few years earlier, where he could walk out his front door and hear the birds chirping. But now he just heard the rhythmic kachonk-kachonk of an oil derrick, faintly, in the distance. He walked towards the source, in spite of his task at hand. Whoever had died in the saloon would still be there when he arrived, and he needed a moment to think. He approached a rocky outcropping that normally obscured his view of the derrick, and climbed a few feet up its face to get a better view of the gully below:

  The noisy device towered forty feet over its surrounding plot of land, an old onion farm that had been dead for a year. A farmhouse overtaken with weeds sat a quarter-mile before the derrick. The house's roof had collapsed in now, and its dried-out, wooden tiles curled up like nail clippings. Sheriff White was staring at a vast sea of decay rendered in brown and grey. He wondered why he'd never before taken the half-minute required to walk from his porch to peek above the rocks—this vista was breathtaking, if only in its ugliness.

  He remembered that farmhouse in its better days, when old Mr. Beaumont had lived in it. The onion grower had been one of the last holdouts when Mayor Sheldon had gone on his land-buying spree. White himself had paid Beaumont a visit, and had given him a cash settlement in exchange for the deed to his property. And then...what, exactly?

  That had been the last time White had remembered seeing the genial fellow. It appeared that Old Man Beaumont had decided to take his money and retire on a South Pacific island.

  White climbed down from the rocks and turned back towards the road. His home was two minutes due north of Main Street, and ten minutes due west of the line separating civility from barbarism: the Bridgetown red light district, home of Clayburn's saloon and whorehouse. His destination, and a place that gave him palpable distaste.

  He whistled a little tune, one he didn't know the name of. He'd picked it up on Sherman's march. For the last forty years, then, he'd been whistling it whenever he walked alone. His thoughts drifted to the news of a death at the saloon. It's not that men dying with their boots on was uncommon around here, exactly. But spend half a century on this God-given earth, and a decade of those as sheriff, and one acquired a sixth sense about these things. However the poor sap had died, it was no ordinary 10:00 P.M. drunken brawl. Rare in Bridgetown was the day that a body bled out while the sun was still rising.

  The flat-front facades of Main Street were visible now, as was something White hadn't expected to see: A crowd forming, maybe three hundred people in all. They looked angry, ginned up. White's relaxed stroll became something rather like a military march—his back straightened, his chest went out, and he became acutely aware of the weight of the loaded revolver at his side. It was times like this that a sheriff needed to step up and command an audience's attention.

  As he came down the slight downhill grade of the west end of Main Street, those in the crowd nearest him began
to take notice of his presence. From his high ground vantage, he could see most the faces in the herd. Many he recognized, but some he did not. It appeared they were divided into two factions, for the sides were turned in on each other, their postures defensive.

  He continued his walk into the human mass with deliberation, keeping the lockstep pace he'd honed all those years ago in Georgia. Walk too fast, and he'd look frantic—and he'd never get the respect of the crowd after that.

  Sure enough, one side of the crowd greeted him with cheers and hollers. The other, with jeers and hisses. He felt like he'd skipped a chapter in the book he was reading, and would need to thumb back a few pages to figure out what the hell was going on.

  "Would anyone like to tell me what this is all about?" he called out.

  No one heard him, not even himself. His apparent loyalists just began cheering even louder, having heard whatever rallying cry they'd wanted him to issue without him having to do any of the work.

  The opposing force—many of whom, he noted, must've been out-of-towners—began shouting back with fervor to match.

  White put his hands up in a braking motion in an attempt to establish some kind of order. It worked as well as a paper washboard.

  "Enough," he called out. "I said enough!"

  The crowd continued its insanity, the two halves merging into one human wave that pushed in on him, surrounding him on all sides. He turned around to look for a way out, but he was closed off. His palms were sweaty, his heart racing. Somewhere, deep down, the war dead buried in his mind began to rise from their graves, the sounds and smells of battle creeping into his consciousness, as they were wont to do whenever he felt threatened.

  He reached for his .45, and unholstered it. He pointed it into the sky and fired twice.

  CRACK!

  CRACK!

  That got them to shut up at last. A cushion of space opened up around him as the people backed away.