Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (13 page)

That led Jesse to another thought: even
assuming this Mr. Black was the desert mystic Earl claimed he was,
there'd be a tit-for-tat involved. Jesse would have to give the
hermit a reason to trust him.

"Excuse me," he said. Without further
elaboration, he headed towards the rear of the bar. The floor
continued to bend and ripple through the lens of the acid fog.

As he walked, he began to formulate his plan.
He'd convince the Lotus Boys here at the bar to take him to Black.
He'd tell Black the truth of his identity; and he'd offer to be a
mole for the gang. And in exchange, Black would help him get
home.

He could feel the eyes of every one of the
Lotus Boys on him. Who did this guy think he was, crossing the
invisible barrier that demarcated their private haven?

He passed their poker table—no need to
interrupt their game. He went straight over to the group of four
remaining by the back door. The men were difficult for Jesse to
differentiate in the dark, their features blending together in a
motif of scruffy beards, scowling mugs, and sunken-in cheeks
complemented by their charcoal attire. But they all seemed young,
younger than Jesse.

"Gentlemen," Jesse said, "I have information
I think Mr. Black would be very interested to know. But I can only
share it with him. You can pat me down, make sure I'm clean, and
then I'd like very much to speak with him."

The four gangsters glanced amongst one
another. It was clear to Jesse none of them quite knew what to say.
At last, the one nearest the back door stepped forward, and put
both hands on his belt, feet apart in a wide stance. His face
puffed and shifted in its dimensions.

"You don't go to Black," he
uttered with a Mexican accent. "He comes to
you
."

A real charmer, this one was. He was the
paragon of a nameless, disposable henchmen. Which made Jesse
wonder—what was in it for these guys? Sure, maybe this Black really
was a desert mystic opposed to Wayne's factory because it was built
on an Indian burial ground or whatever, but how was he getting
these hard-drawn banditos and orphaned small-time crooks to do his
dirty work for him?

"Okay," Jesse said. "Okay, I get it. But tell
him that if he'd like to do business with someone who's currently
residing inside Wayne Cole's mansion, he should come find me."

The gangster said something brief to Jesse,
but Jesse missed it. He was experiencing an auditory hallucination,
sounds clipping and repeating themselves over and over one another
in a snowball effect. Everything was turning to white noise. The
acid was taking hold at last.

He turned on his heels and began walking
towards the saloon doorway, trying hard to do so in an
inconspicuous fashion. Earl gave him a nod and a tip of his glass.
To Jesse, his face appeared to be rippling with intense
microvibrations.

Jesse passed the doorway
and found himself on the midnight of a deserted Main Street. He
began to run. His mind was sputtering, the way it had whenever his
alarm clock woke him mid-dream with a chatterbox radio broadcasting
from deep within his thalamus. His dream logic was a runaway
train.
My feet are moving because my
muscles are expending energy because I ate a cheeseburger that had
energy because it was once a cow that ate grass that had converted
energy from the sun that created energy in a fusion reaction that
happened because of the diffusion of matter and energy in the Big
Bang. The energy I am burning off through the movement in my legs,
sending scattered kinetic impulse into entropy has channeled
through the universe since the beginning of time. My actions are
not my own.

He saw himself running then. A bit player. A
marionette puppet on the strings of cosmic tragicomedy. He tried to
outrun a black tide of ego loss that, like a tsunami, was at his
back.

He had to get back to the ranch. Back to
bedsheets, and a roof over his head. Someplace he could close his
eyes and not worry about being eaten by a coyote. The stars danced
and vibrated as they radiated their cosmic energy towards him,
endless messages in bottles that made it across eons to smash into
the photoreceptors at the back of his head.

Did the journey to the ranch house take him
minutes? Hours? Days? He had no idea. But he saw the house. He
staggered up the hill. It hadn't been this steep before. No
way.

He fumbled in his pockets for the keys. The
lights were off. He walked past the front gate, past the garage
that housed Wayne's cars and up to the side entrance that attached
to the kitchen.

He walked as quietly as he could up to his
room, creeping so as not to arouse the attention of others.

He entered his room, undressed, and climbed
into the unfamiliar sheets. They were cold. He pulled them tight
around himself. It was comforting enough.

On the other side of the wall, Jesse heard
something. Rhythmic thumps, over and over again. A creaking bed
frame.

This was a show of power.
His brother was rubbing it in his face. Jesse could hear Wayne's
voice.
She's mine now
.
Mine to fuck as I
please.

Jesse's fists clenched the bedsheets,
catching wads of cotton. He stared at the ceiling, trying to focus
on the glow of his high. Trying to distract himself by watching the
wallpaper's ornate forms twist and melt as the acid coursed through
his brain. But it was to no avail. All he could hear, all he could
think about, was his brother fucking the woman who was supposed to
be his wife.

His mind's eye played out a revenge
fantasy:

White's revolver, in my hand.

I open the door, to Wayne's room.

I fire every shot loaded in the
revolver.

Slow-motion ribbons of blood arc across the
bedroom; across the sheets; across the walls; across her startled,
but relieved, face.

And then I take her by the arm. Take her
away from this place. I take her back to the light in the
desert.

The desert opens up, and swallows us.

And we awaken, once more in reality.

Jesse shut his eyes, then, feeling guilt for
relishing the thought of the murder. But still, he could hear the
rhythmic creaking on the other side of the wall.

Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!

His eyes were closed tight, as tight as could
be. Colorful fractal shards danced in his mind, a kaleidoscope of
his own making. He willed himself to be distracted into the
fantasy, to be transported away from this place. For a while, at
least.

Jesse awoke in an instant
the next morning, short of breath. He was still tense. A shower
sounded more essential than anything else in the world. He peeled
the sheets off his grime-and-sweat-coated, half-naked body, and
proceeded across the hall to the bathroom. Once inside, he fumbled
for a few moments, figuring out how to work the shower.
Why can't they all be the same?

Finally, water began to flow, and he ran his
hand under its high-pressure shower head until he'd found just the
right kind of hot. He stepped into the shower, and found himself
sitting in the tub. Only now did he realize how badly his muscles
ached, and how tired he was despite sleeping in. He stayed under
the shower head, keeping out the world beyond the bathroom, for as
long as he needed to.

Once sufficiently soaked through, he toweled
off, and threw on the clothes he'd acquired hours earlier. He
looked in the mirror, took a deep breath, and set about searching
for Wayne. Help came in the form of Martha, who was cleaning up the
kitchen after a breakfast which, it was apparent, everyone else had
been content to just let Jesse sleep through.

"Mr. Cole is leaving for the factory
grounds," Martha told him with a characteristic smile. "If you
hurry, you might still catch him."

"Thanks," Jesse said, and walked out the side
door to the garage.

The four walls of the garage consisted of
metal doors that rolled up into the ceiling, like the security
gates Jesse was used to seeing on storefronts in rough
neighborhoods during afterhours. Three of the four walls were
retracted at the moment, making the garage a kind of open-air
stable.

This was Jesse's first good look at both of
Wayne's prototype automobiles. He walked up to the Mark II, and put
a hand to its hood, finding its slick lacquer pleasing to the
touch.

Wayne popped up from the other side like a
Punch & Judy puppet. "Oh, Jesse!" he exclaimed. He wore an
unexpected grin on his face. "Come here!"

"What is it?"

Wayne motioned for Jesse to follow him, and
pulled back the tarp on the third vehicle in the garage.

Jesse was dumbfounded. It was his Jeep, just
as he'd last seen it. The tires had been replaced with wooden
wagon-style wheels, sure, but otherwise it seemed in perfect order.
Seeing it struck him now in a way he didn't quite expect.

"I don't believe it," Jesse said.

"Yep," Wayne added, with a satisfied pat of
his own midsection. "She came in handy when we had to
reverse-engineer her in order to make the other two."

Jesse ran his hands along its sides. He
hopped into the driver's seat; he couldn't help himself. Wayne just
leaned his arm against it, watching Jesse as he ran his hands along
its interface.

"How do you explain this thing when people
ask about it?" Jesse said.

"Well, if anyone gets a peek, I tell them
it's a German car. Trust me, nobody around here has any idea what
they're supposed to look like, so it passes."

Jesse realized he was smiling. It was the
first time he'd smiled since he'd arrived. "Thank you, Wayne,"
Jesse said.

"Of course. I mean, we pulled her apart and
put her back together three times, so we had plenty of opportunity
to clean her up."

Jesse
was
happy to see his car in one
piece. It made him feel a little more connected to sanity, at
least, just as his wallet and his driver's license had. But there
was still so much to address with his brother. "Listen, you got a
few minutes to talk?"

"Afraid I can't," Wayne
replied, his face contorted to say
Gee,
wish I could help
. "Got to get to the
factory. Things are hectic down there so close to our
opening."

"Let me come with you, then."

Wayne didn't say anything for a moment.
"Sure. Yeah. That'll be great." He didn't sound quite
convincing.

The side door to the house swung open.
Susanna emerged. She saw the two boys by the Jeep, and gave a curt
nod to Jesse. Then she walked over to the Mark II and climbed
aboard.

"I may have to go off-site today," she warned
Wayne, not waiting for either one of the men to speak. "I'm having
to do more and more of the managing myself, I feel like. These
hired guns are just about useless sometimes."

"Gives me and Wayne some time to catch up,"
Jesse said. He looked at Wayne to gauge his reaction. His brother
didn't return his gaze.

Together, they watched Susanna pull out of
the garage and drive away towards the factory on the periphery of
Bridgetown.

"Come on," Wayne said at last. "Let's get
going."

A few minutes later, the brothers were
bouncing down a service road in the rickety, sputtering Mark I.
Jesse took note of Wayne's dark, circle-framed sunglasses. Another
fine Cole Co. product, bringing twentieth-century fashion
sensibilities to the nineteenth.

Jesse was pensive, increasingly lost in his
own head as they went. He didn't know whether to ask for Wayne's
help living in this place, or to punch him in the face for taking
Susanna away from him. Still, though, Wayne's voice found its way
into Jesse's stream of thoughts. It cut in like radio interference
from a pirate station. "...We'll be expanding into new markets,
too," he said at least three separate times. "Twenty-three in all
by the end of next year!"

It seemed Wayne was talking about everything
under the sun except the things Jesse cared about. The obvious
things. Jesse got the distinct feeling that Wayne was trying to
keep tight control over the flow of the discourse. Jesse's
irritation grew, and his goodwill for his brother was rapidly
wearing off. He began to think his brother giving him the Jeep was
a ploy to placate him for the time being.

"You know what, Wayne?" Jesse said at last.
"This is all very interesting, but fuck you."

Wayne made a sour face, and there was a long
silence. "Alright, you want to talk about it? We can talk."

"Good," Jesse replied.

"I fell out of the sky, nearly dried up in
the desert," Wayne began. "Then this fellow looking like he walked
off the set of a John Wayne movie found me, said he's the town
sheriff. So I came back to town. I was the second stranger to show
up in those hills. He asked if I knew a girl named Susanna. Turns
out they were getting ready to haul her off to the asylum. I
covered for her, said I was her husband."

He swerved to avoid a rock in the road.

"We ended up taking the only jobs we could to
earn a living. And it wasn't easy stuff. Backbreaking labor. But I
didn't leave for the city—where I was sure I could find a job
pushing papers. Why? Because I was trying to get us back home. I
was trying to get her back. For her sake, and for yours."

"Looks like you lost sight of that plan at
some point."

"I never saw another rabbit-hole like the one
we fell into that night. As best as I could tell, we were stuck
here. And meanwhile, I realized there's an untapped industrial boon
to be had. Bridgetown is sitting on oil. So I got some investors
involved, started work on the factory, and claimed the land while
it was still cheap." He put his hands out, indicating the oil
derricks that dotted the horizon. "We can do more good here now
than I ever could back home. And if we put automobiles in the hands
of Americans for next to nothing..." Wayne turned his attention
from the road to lock eyes with Jesse. "Well, it's just like
selling razor blades. You give 'em the handle cheap, you can sell
'em razor blades for a lifetime."