Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (26 page)

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 away 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.