Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Page 7

  "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 w
ere 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.

  Any rules in the seventy-year-old institution of cinema were due to be stripped off the walls like so much old paint. The film students, therefore, viewed their professors as a formality, a minor impediment to be dealt with in the course of finally getting their hands on cameras, and time in the edit bays.

  Film was spliced, slashed, chopped, scratched, and burned. Permits were disregarded. Juxtaposing man-on-the-street interviews with scripted narrative became a trope trotted out by so many students, eager to do something new, that it just as quickly became old hat. The shelf life of novelty was infinitesimal in this cauldron.

  It was in this environment that Jesse Cole began his final year of undergraduate study.

  Well, Jesse told people it would be his final year, though it wasn't the first time he'd made that claim. At twenty-six, he was beginning to notice his interests diverging from those of the younger students. They were so engaged in the aforementioned intellectual dick-measuring contests that they'd forgotten cinema had a utility beyond the confines of the department's own screening rooms. They'd neglected to consider that in these times, if you didn't have something to say, you might as well just stay home.

  This concern was occupying his mind as he sat in a too-tiny classroom desk chair and watched Kevin Morris' last project for the semester. Kevin Morris, the irritating, self-satisfied douchebag whose record producer father had more money than God.

  Kevin's film was a series of static shots of still photos, titled Still Life No. Seven:

  A photo of a bird, a potted plant, a girl's eye, a naked breast.

  Then Kevin himself appeared in celluloid glory, his eyes flitting back and forth.

  The last frames of the film ran through the projector, and abruptly cut to scratchy gray leader film.

  "I hope installments one through six weren't such bullshit," Jesse muttered under his breath, just loud enough for those around him to hear.

  The professor shot Jesse a look. "I encourage intellectual disagreement in this classroom. But I do expect it to be intellectual. You're going to have to clarify your thoughts on Mr. Morris' work."

  Jesse considered his words for a moment. "It's not just you, Kev. Everyone who's screened tonight is trading in cinematic masturbation."

  The professor held up his hands. "Jesse—"

  "Humor me," Jesse said. "We're sitting here in our trust-fund privilege, patting ourselves on the backs for how much we can fucking talk about Godard, and meanwhile, kids in Vietnam are getting burned to death with American napalm."

  The class was quiet.

  "But you sit here and clap, and regurgitate the same art theory bullshit that's been getting passed around for twenty years because it's something new and shiny and you've just discovered it."

  The professor huffed. "Alright, alright, Jesse. I think we all understand what you're saying," he said. "But don't criticize everyone else for doing what they've been asked to do—to experiment, to learn to use the language of the form—" He got up from behind his pedestal and took a few steps forward, to the center of the floor. "We all have to push the boundaries, we all have to learn to wield the instruments before us, before we can hope to make a real difference. And if you feel you are ready—and I say this with full sincerity—than I look forward to seeing what you have to show the class."

  Jesse could feel the angry glare of the others upon his back. He shrugged. "Gladly."

  "What day are you showing? Thursday?"

  "Yeah, Thursday. But, uh, there's going to be a little sneak preview, if any of you are interested. Tomorrow night. At the Hard Rock."

  They weren't interested.

  After the professor dismissed the class that night, a girl Jesse hadn't met before hurried out to catch up to him.

  "Hey," she said, tapping on his shoulder. He looked over at her. She was fresh-faced, girlish, with sandy hair. She wore a long-sleeved lacy white top and a blue skirt that rode up high, and had a white canvas bag slung over her shoulder. He liked her already.

  "Susanna," she said with a smile.

  "Nice to meet you. I'd apologize for insulting you just now," Jesse said, "But I know you're not actually in that class."

  She laughed. "Oh yeah, how would you know that?"

  "Well, for one thing," he said, "I'd have noticed you before if you were." He could see her smirking out the corner of his eye. "But besides that, I know your type."

  "Really, now," she said with raised brows. "And what's my type?"

  "The type who skips out on her actual lecture just to follow some guy to his class."

  "You think I followed you here?"

  "No, I didn't say that. I said you followed some guy."

  "Well, who, then?"

  Jesse gave her a look-over, as though probing her physical cues for any hints. "Kevin Morris."

  "Kevin Morris," she repeated. "The same Kevin Morris you just tore into in front of the entire class."

  "Yep," Jesse said, with a smug grin. "You hoped to get in good with him, maybe bring up some small detail about his project at a party later tonight, you know, ask him some softball question about visual metaphors."

  "Until I heard what you had to say, and decided to fawn over you instead?"

  Jesse stopped up in the middle of the hall. "Hey, you said it, not me."

  Susanna smiled, and looked down at the floor for just a moment. "So you wanna buy me a drink or something?"

  "Sorry, can't. I got work to do. Tell you what though, you want my attention, give me your number. I could use some help tomorrow getting set up at the Hard Rock."

  "What's that all about, anyway?"

  "You'll just have to find out."

  Susanna
laughed again, and shook her head. "Alright," she said with a shrug. "What time?"

  At six o'clock the following evening, the West Coast sun had already set behind the December Pacific. Had Jesse arrived just a few hours earlier to the dingy, Skid Row bar by the name of the Hard Rock Cafe, he'd have rubbed shoulders with the Doors while they posed for photos that would show up on their album release the following year. But he hadn't, and instead heard the story second-hand from the bartender as he plugged his amp into the bar's power source. He wasn't into celebrity worship, but it would have been at least novel to have a run-in with Jim Morrison.

  "You know," Jesse said to the bartender, dangling a cigarette between his lips, "he graduated from the same program I'm in right now."

  "Oh yeah? What's that?"

  "Film," Jesse replied. "At UCLA."

  The bartender laughed. "No shit," he said. "I didn't know they had school for that now. What do you do, watch movies all day long?"

  Jesse forced a laugh, rolling his eyes out of the bartender's sight. He turned to Susanna, who was sitting on a stool in the corner. She had opted to wear a bright blue top with a matching skirt that barely went past her ass. "Hey, Suze," he said. "Could you grab me the stinger out of the back of my car?"

  Susanna got up and went to his car, parked in front of the bar.

  "Jeee-suz," the bartender said, his eyes tracking the girl. "Say, how old is she, anyway?"

  Jesse paused for a moment, and looked up at the bartender. "I hadn't asked."

  The bartender raised his brows. Jesse went back to work setting up.

  Forty minutes later, and the evening crowd had begun to file in. Drinks were flowing, money was changing hands, and the room was filling with smoke. Jesse's bandmates were here, too, sound-checking while Jesse warmed up the crowd.

  In the corner of the dive, Jesse wailed on his yellow Strat, and gave Susanna the signal.

  "Alright, everyone," he said into his mic, his voice fuzzy with low-level analog interference, "Let's start the show."