Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Page 20

"Good lord in heaven," he bellowed. "Now, I repeat my previous inquiry. Just what in the hell is going on here?"

  The crowd before him parted, and a schoolmarmish woman in a floor-length grey dress drew a beelined for him.

  "Ah-hah!" she exclaimed. "The devil's agent presents himself at last."

  "Now, just waitaminute—what?"

  "You swear allegiance to money that is stained brackish with crude oil, Errol Lyman White," she said. "Stolen. Crude. Oil. And the good people of Bridgetown have awakened to that fact."

  White's eyes went wide. "The good people of—What? Who are you to speak for Bridgetown? I have never laid eyes upon you, Ms.—"

  "Carlyle," she said. "Jane Carlyle, Socialist Labor Party of America."

  "I see," White replied.

  "The working people of Bridgetown have expressed solidarity with the SLPA, and, in turn, me. So that is who I am to speak for them, Sheriff. It's my job."

  "And the rest of your friends back there?" White asked, gesturing to the other unfamiliar faces. "Did you all come in on the morning train, or—?"

  A number of concerning facts have come to our attention," Carlyle went on. "For one, the collusion between the mayor's office and you," she said, digging her index finger into his jacket's soft leather.

  "Hey," White said, moving her finger aside with his own. "That 'collusion' is called the rule of law," he said. "Efforts to make a dying community prosperous again. Bridgetown did nothing illegal or improper. Every owner who agreed to sell their land was compensated," he said. "Fairly," he added.

  "I'm sure," Carlyle said, pointed. "We shall see."

  White didn't like the open-endedness of her statement. Were they planning to sue the city? Sue him?

  He shook these thoughts from his mind. She'd almost succeeded in distracting him from his objective. "Now I need you to back away, Ms. Carlyle, and clear this crowd you've got fulminatin.' I'm here on official police business, and I need to get through."

  Carlyle turned to her supporters, probably to make a big, mocking face. White began to push past her, and maybe he caught the length of her dress on his shoe. Or maybe she faked it. Either way, he was pretty sure she exaggerated her resulting tumble. It got her crowd going, though. They looked at him with daggers in their eyes, and again pushed in towards him.

  "Hey! Hey!" White shouted. "Back away."

  He raised his gun into the air again, and fired once more. "The next time won't be a warning shot," he barked at the activists. "Now get the fuck out of my town."

  With that, White moved through the crowd as easily as Moses through the Red Sea. A few minutes more, and Clayburn's saloon was just up ahead.

  He stepped foot over the barrier to the vice quarter. It was invisible, of course, an informal line drawn in the earth. To an outsider standing here, as he was, at ten in the morning, it was unlikely they'd even know they were in the red light district. The buildings looked the same on either side of the line. The dirt was the same dirt; the air the same air. But on the eastern side of the line, the drink was more potent, the girls' plunging necklines more enticing, the opium haze more intoxicating.

  For a lawmen, this place was anathema. And yet he could never hope to shut it down. It had been a key part of Bridgetown's economy for as long as there had been a Bridgetown. Long ago, before the coal mines had given up their last blackened breath, the workers had come to here out of necessity. They needed those releases to cope with the conditions of their working lives. Even White had to admit that. But now? As Bridgetown set about its great quest to remake itself as a place of invention and manufacture, White could only hope it would wither and fall away in time. In his days as sheriff, he'd seen its unyielding hunger for flesh and blood consume man and woman alike, in ways as different as they were similiar.

  He came upon the entrance to the saloon. The red door was propped open with a doorstop. Rubberneckers were gossiping out front, and White caught just enough of what they were saying to know they were talking about the dead man inside.

  It dawned on them that the local sheriff was fast approaching. Their slack postures straightened and more than one of them tipped their hat in his direction. White tipped back, though it was a courtesy more than anything. He could scarcely fathom the lowly prospects of any man sidling up to the bar before noon. He couldn't wait for Wayne Cole's factory to open—maybe then a few of these fellows would have something to keep their hands busy besides a glass of beer.

  His eyes took a moment to adjust to the dim light inside the saloon, but the sweetwood scent of cigar hit him right away, distributed evenly by the languid belt-driven fans overhead. The hardwood was covered by a sea of spent peanut shells that stretched back to the rear of the room. In the middle of that sea, a white blanket with blood seeping through it covered a body. A pair of muddy boots stuck out one end.

  White huffed a hot breath. Let's get to work.

  "Colonel," a voice called just to his left. Harry Broadburn, his chief deputy. Harry was an imposing man. Tall, broad, with an aquiline nose and dark features courtesy his Navajo mother. His right hand wore a collection of turquoise that White had seen leave its mark on more than one troublemaker's jaw. Yet Harry was a man of reason and order; he was a natural successor to White. Maybe he'd be the one to get the sheriff's jacket after he hung up his hat for the last time.

  "How're we looking, Harry?"

  "Fellow under the sheet was Marty Fitzgerald. Local who came into town last year with his family looking for work. Had been laying bricks at the Cole factory," Harry said in a low hush. "It was an argument that got heated. You know old Earl McInnis?"

  "Earl McInnis," White repeated, sounding it out in an attempt to conjure an identity.

  "Drunk with one leg," Harry helpfully added. He pointed his thumb back over his shoulder discretely.

  White leaned to see behind Harry's head. McInnis sat at the bar, wearing a hangdog expression of fear and, perhaps, confusion.

  "McInnis?" White blurted in surprise. "He killed someone? He looks about as dangerous as a newborn piglet."

  "Tell me about it," Harry said. "We already got a statement, but you can talk to him yourself if you'd like."

  "Harry, I'm just curious enough that I will." He gave his deputy a little nod and walked over to McInnis, whose bushy eyebrows quivered. White could smell the whisky on his breath from six feet away.

  "Morning, Earl," he said.

  "Sheriff," McInnis responded.

  White sat down at the stool next to Earl. "My deputy told me he already got a statement from you, but would you mind telling me what happened again, while I'm here?"

  "The knife came out right quick," McInnis said, his eyes looking past White in a thousand-yard stare. "'Fore I knew what I'd done, he was on the ground and bleeding."

  "What did he do to make you take your knife out?"

  "My knife?" McInnis asked, furrowing his brows. "Not my knife, Sheriff. Marty's knife. I suppose I may be short a leg, but I'm still quick with my hands. Turned it around on him. Old trick that's saved my hide once before."

  "I see," White said. What made him attack you?

  McInnis took a deep breath, and searched his addled mind for the right place to begin. "You know that moving picture show that came into town last week, all lit up?"

  "How could I forget? Damn near the whole town's been talking about it."

  "Yessir," McInnis said, "An' Marty more than anyone. Marty hated it! He hates the Lotus Boys, hates that new Cole brother, hates them all! Calls 'em un-American, he did. Says every penny he earns he owes to Mr. Cole and that company. Says without the factory, this place would be a graveyard."

  "And you disagree?"

  "Sheriff," McInnis said, looking to do an eggshell dance around the issue, "I'm sure that everything you do, you do because it's your job."

  "I'm a big man, Earl," White replied. "I can take a little criticism. It's important to me I know what the people of Bridgetown are thinking. So tell me the truth."

  "I th
ink it's a goddamn tragedy what's happened to this place," McInnis blurted. "We used to be a community of farmers, of miners! Of men who set out into the great wide West to forge their own livelihoods, their own destinies. And now we've been bought out by industry, by tyranny. We're just a bunch'a wage-slaves without a deed to our names. We'll all be choking on the exhaust of our own smokestacks." The words sounded prepared, as though McInnis was parroting something he'd read in a political pamphlet. The effect was a bit chilling, for it suggested to White that McInnis was tapping into something deeper. Channeling a hive mind opposition that White was just beginning to recognize.

  A long pause followed, and McInnis looked like a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders. "I told Marty as much, and, well, you can see what happened."

  White looked over at the body under the sheet. With great care, the coroner and his assistant slid a gurney under it and lifted it up. They transported the body out through the front door and around the corner, as onlookers watched.

  This Fitzgerald fellow had walked in here just a few hours ago, looking to have a drink and, presumably, go to work. He would have been at Wayne's factory by now. White wondered what was going to happen to Fitzgerald's wife and children. Maybe as sheriff, he could talk Wayne into offering some kind of settlement to see that they were taken care of.

  "Well, Earl, I appreciate your candor," White said. He did mean it. "I just hope things settle down around here. I don't appreciate folk stirring up trouble in my town. I worry that tragedies like this one are going to keep happening."

  "Amen," McInnis said.

  "And, Earl?"

  "Yessir?"

  White wanted to tell McInnis he ought to think twice about spending all day sitting in here drinking. But the old man just looked so pathetic, still shaking with anger and confusion and fear—and he was still minus the one leg. "Nevermind," White said with a tip of his hat.

  As he turned away from McInnis, he caught the eye of Clayburn, behind the bar. White regarded the ghoulish-looking, bald-headed saloon owner with the reticence he would hold for a neighbor's noisy dog. He had no realistic designs of forcing him out, but his continued presence in Bridgetown was a kind of low-level thorn in White's side.

  "A word," White said to him.

  "Sure," Clayburn answered. He was polishing a shot glass with a rag, and White didn't think he'd ever seen him do anything but.

  "Are you planning on opening back up right away?" White asked.

  "Opening up?"

  "Yes. Resuming business."

  "Well, Sheriff, I never closed. I'm open right now. Could I get you a drink?"

  White resisted the urge to snarl. "You have a problem here, Mr. Clayburn, which I think you ought to address."

  Clayburn stopped his absentminded dishrag handiwork. He set the glass down on the counter, and slung the rag over his shoulder. "And what problem would that be, Sheriff?"

  "A problem of outsider clientele. Gangsters, dressed in black, from the hills beyond town."

  "There's nothing wrong with my clientele," Clayburn shot back. "They pay up and play fair. I'm not gonna tell any man who walks in here with good money and a civil disposition that he can't have a drink."

  White nodded, making a sour face. "Know that there's an infestation of termites in this town," he said. "And that I'm going to be cleaning house." He rapped his knuckles twice on the bartop, and began to turn from the counter. "Good day, Mr.—"

  He stopped mid-stream, his eyes fixated on what he saw at the rear of the saloon.

  That door.

  A wave of rememberance washed over him, from his spine to his extremities.

  "What is it?" Clayburn asked.

  "That—that door," White said, pointing with a finger that suddenly seemed quite bony. "Where does it go?"

  Clayburn was even more irritated. "The basement." Another moment passed, and when White didn't say anything, the bartender added: "Would you like me to show it to you?"

  The sheriff couldn't pin down what it was that troubled him so, other than a sense of recognition that attached that door and whatever lay beyond it to something unknown, but known all the same.

  "No, no," he told the bartender. "That won't be necessary."

  "Very well," Clayburn said, breathing heavy through his nose.

  "Good day," White added, and turned on his heels to head out the door.

  Any other day, any other moment, and White would have been compelled to go through that door. To find what lay beyond. But in this moment, whatever it signified seemed too monumental to tackle all at once. He promised himself he'd come back.

  White cut north through the red light district, then west, in order to avoid the crowd still demonstrating on Main Street. In truth, he ought to have been there, making sure a riot didn't break out. But he had a more pressing investigation to attend to, one of a more personal sort. He could trust Harry and his other men to make sure Ms. Carlyle and her troupe stayed civil.

  Walking up a dirt trail towards his neighborhood, White could make out the kachonk-kachonk of that oil derrick as it drilled into the dead onion farm. He approached the rocky ridgeline by his home and, gingerly, climbed over it. Then he made his way down the scrub-covered gully, towards the farmhouse Beaumont once lived in, with its upturned roof tiles and its broken windows.

  Scattered remains of farm equipment lay rusted into the earth, including a garden hoe that White imagined would crumble in his palm if he were to attempt to pick it up. Beaumont had only sold his property to the city last year; this farm must've already been on its way out long before then.

  White peered into the nearest window through a jagged hole in the glass. The other side of the windowsill was cottonish thick with cobwebs. It was dark inside the home, which was still full of furniture. It looked like Beaumont pretty much just picked up his stakes and went about his way, leaving his old life behind.

  What was he looking for here? What question was he hoping to answer?

  The sheriff looked to his right and saw only the open field stretching out to the wilderness beyond the town.

  He looked to his left, and saw, a ways down past the farm's bordering fence, the neighboring property. The vegetation looked more trimmed, more orderly. The home erected on that land was still lived-in. So he began to walk towards it, and tried to summon the family name of those who lived there. But Bridgetown was two thousand strong and growing, now that the factory had taken shape. White couldn't remember everyone.

  He checked the mailbox at the property's edge and saw, to his relief, "JAMESON" painted in big capital letters. A little satisfied smirk drew itself upon his lips, and he continued through the thick brush towards the plot. With ease, he hopped the fence and approached the front door of the house, which was tinted in a charming reddish wash. He knocked twice. After a moment, someone within opened it halfway.

  A leathery woman with the eyes of a jungle cat appeared from within the dark interior and gave him a once-over. "Yes?"

  "Sheriff White," he said, and removed his hat.

  "I know who you are," she quipped.

  Some morning for hellos, White thought.

  "Shall I let you in?" the woman—Mrs. Jameson?—asked.

  "Oh, well now, that won't be necessary. I'd just like to ask you a couple of questions. Curious about something, is all."

  Mrs. Jameson opened her door a little farther, enough to step out onto the porch. "Well, what is it?"

  "Mr. Beaumont, who lived next door to you—you wouldn't happen to know where he went off to, would you? I mean, where he's accepting mail now?"

  "He moved out just after he sold the farmland to you," she said. White detected a subtle accusation underlying that you. "Couldn't farm there no more, Sheriff. Needed to get out, he said. Soon as they built that oil pumper, said it drove him mad. Not that it makes us too happy, neither."

  The kachonk-kachonk still resonated behind them. Of course, White thought. Without the benefit of that big rock wall, there was nothing dampe
ning the sound for them down here in the gully. He felt a little guilty.

  "Went out to his cousin's in Ojai," she went on.

  "I see. You happen to know if he's still in Ojai?"

  Mrs. Jameson's gaze went out beyond him. "If you count the Ojai Boot Hill, then yes."

  "He's dead?"

  Her eyes returned to his, as if to add emphasis to her next point. "Done gone and hung himself from his cousin's oak tree a few weeks after he left."

  White's heart sunk. "I see."

  Mrs. Jameson let that linger for a moment. "Anything else I can help you with, Sheriff?"

  White was about to say no, but he realized the Beaumont line of questioning was only an oblique way of addressing what he'd really come here to ask her. "Actually, yes. I have one more question."

  "What?"

  "Do you think it was wrong? For us to buy up the land out here, I mean, and sell it to Mr. Cole?"

  Her expression actually relaxed just a bit, those feline eyes becoming a little less predatory. Maybe she could begrudgingly respect his asking the question to her face, at least, for now she was afforded the chance to tell him what she thought. "Well, Sheriff, the way I see, it's like this. We was practically starving around here. Whole town was dying. Ground was dry as dust that year and the year before it. Then you come around offering Mr. Beaumont a bag of money. Must be awful easy to strongarm a man into taking the cash, times being what they was. Didn't matter you was giving him next to nothing for it."

  "The city was very generous with its offer," White countered. "It was a small fortune."

  Her eyes narrowed again. "But it wasn't what that land was worth. You knew it, and Beaumont knew it. Must've weighed pretty heavy on him, such that he needed a noose round his neck to lift him back up again."

  White sighed. "Why...why didn't I ever hear anything from you people about how you felt at the time? When it was going on?"

  "Hunger makes folks quiet," Jameson said, icy. "Fear makes folk especially quiet. We could see which way the winds was blowing. Mr. Cole owns Bridgetown now. He owns you, Sheriff. Why speak out, when he might be our only chance to get a meal on our tables?