Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (28 page)

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 dampening 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?

"Wasn't until that brother of his showed up
last week with his movie picture that folks got to talking. Got to
thinking that maybe the time's right for the vermin of Town Hall to
get cleaned out." She added, "No offense."

"None taken," White added. It seemed they
could both agree there was an infestation in Bridgetown. The
question was, which way was it? The Lotus Boy termites, or the rats
in Town Hall?

Footsteps clanked along on the squeaky
floorboards of the Jameson home, and White could see someone
approaching in the darkness.

"Momma, who's there?" came the voice of a
young woman.

"I'm talking to the sheriff," Mrs. Jameson
replied, in the short-tempered short hand with which he'd known
parents to address their children.

"The sheriff?"

"Yes."

More footsteps. White watched the figure step
into the light. She was tall—nearly as tall as he—and built for
farm work. She had a jawline that looked as strong as her forearms,
and one slightly lazy eye, and yet her masculine attributes worked
to highlight what remained of her feminine qualities. Her soft,
wispy blonde hair clung with to her face with beads of sweat.

"You son of a bitch," the younger Jameson
said, sneering.

This jolted White back to the unpleasant
business at hand.

"Shut your mouth!" her
mother exclaimed, and snapped back to face her daughter. "Now, I
may think Sheriff White here is a son of a bitch, but I run a
respectful home. And cursing will
not
be tolerated!"

"But he is what he is, Momma," the girl said.
"And folks like him is ruinous to folks like us."

"Thank you for your time," White interjected,
looking for an out before this scene got any more heated. He put
his hat back on. "And for your honesty." With that, he turned away
from the porch and began his walk back.

On his way out, he took one last look at the
oil derrick pumping behind the Beaumont property, and the old
farmhouse with that hole in its roof. Then he started back up the
gully wall.

Susanna gazed upon her form in her bedroom
mirror. She wore a floor-length light blue dress, ruffled and lacy.
Her neck was constricted in a high collar, just like the
geese-women of the Ladies of Bridgetown. She hadn't had the chance
yet to pin up her hair, and at the moment, there was little she
wanted less to commit the time to, for it was the morning of the
gala to inaugurate the Cole Automotive factory.

She knew what Wayne expected of her today:
she was to ride with him to the factory, allow herself to be helped
down from the Mark II before the crowd gathered outside the
factory, and stand at her husband's side. Then she was to say a few
words, perhaps some niceties to the Ladies of Bridgetown for their
help, and then clear the way for the men to stake their claim as
pioneers of industry.

The bedroom door opened with a crack. Wayne
entered. Susana turned to face him, and found he looked amped up
for the day's events, a slightly manic gleam in his eyes. He
sweated beneath his tuxedo, and the buttoned-up collar seemed
poised to make his head pop off. He drank in her appearance with a
wide grin.

"You look lovely," Wayne said. He gave her a
big hug, a less reserved show of affection than was usual for him.
Then he planted a kiss on her forehead with a loud smooch. "Are you
ready for today?"

"I am," she replied. But it sounded like she
was bracing, and even she heard it.

Wayne's smile tempered a bit, but he didn't
say anything. They'd gone around this carousel for weeks.

"I appreciate the dress, Wayne," Susanna
said. "I really do. But I'm not going to wear it."

"Okay," he said, plainly. Perhaps he had
feared worse. The dress he could deal with. "What's wrong with it?"
he asked.

"I'm wearing my jumpsuit."

Her husband looked like he was stifling a
laugh just picturing it. "You can't be serious."

"Why not?"

"Because this is a formal event, Suze," he
replied. "A black tie affair. I'm in a penguin suit, look—tails!"
He flapped his jacket tails in mock ceremony.

"I know, Wayne, and, listen, that's great for
you. This is your chance to stand up and take a bow. You should.
But I'm not gonna have that chance."

"Sure you will."

"No," she affirmed. "Not like I ought
to."

"Oh come on, Susanna, don't politicize this.
Let me have today at least—"

"I have to politicize it," she retorted. She
felt her toes curl up. "The people should see me in the clothes I
labored in. The grease stains, the rips in my denim—I want them to
know that I wore them out. That I put those holes, and those
stains, in them. I can't be up there looking like your china
doll."

Wayne pursed his lips. All the same, to his
credit, he didn't fight her on it. "If it's that important to
you."

Susanna had a sudden recollection of the last
time she'd seen her father, when she told him she was leaving with
Jesse, and the way he'd similarly conceded to her will with a shrug
of his shoulders. She couldn't help but smile.

Wayne saw her grin, and returned it. "You
love giving me a hard time, don't you?"

"Just you wait, Wayne W. Cole," Susanna said.
"I haven't fucked you over for good yet. We'll see whose name
history really remembered. When you and I are nothing more than
dust, we'll see who really won."

Wayne took her in his arms and kissed her,
such that she could not have escaped if she'd wanted to. "You're
just a rich woman with an overactive sense of self, and delusions
of grandeur," Wayne said, with a saccharine sweetness that
testified he was being playful.

Susanna mussed his hair with her hands, and
pushed back against him. She threw him to the bed. "And you, my
dear, are nothing more than a rich man growing fatter every day,"
she said. She began to unbutton his shirt, feeling a sudden lust
for conquest. "And one day, when you're choking on a chicken bone,"
she said, straddling him atop the bed now, "I will inherit your
fortune and remake your empire in my name."

She pulled off his pants, and felt his
manhood through his undergarments. "This is mine," she said, giving
him a light squeeze. "You can take my glory from me now," she said,
as though bellowing from the rooftops, "but I can take this from
you any time I want. I can cut it off in your sleep whenever I
choose."

Relief coursed through her system, and seemed
to be met in Wayne's. Weeks of pent-up aggression had suddenly
found a release.

A part of her hated Wayne. A part of her
loved Wayne.

A part of her saw him as her chief villain.
An equal part of her saw him as her only ally in this world.

He worked to destroy her career. To undermine
her. So too, however, did he give her the chance to make that
career in the first place.

She was ruled over by him, suffocated by him.
And yet here she sat, atop him now, witnessing his private
vulnerability in a way no others did.

"You are a great man," she said, "And a
pathetic creature. And I will fuck you into subservience."

With that, she pulled his pants off
completely, and proceeded to give the best blowjob she ever had.
When her husband came, a minute later, she spat it onto his tuxedo
jacket. Then they laid there, in each other's arms, silent for some
time.

Ten til noon.

Susanna looked up from her wristwatch and
watched her factory grow ever-nearer. Its impressive brick form
stood out against a silvery-gray sky. The humid, cloudy weather was
unusual for California's August. She'd have expected it in May or
June.

She sat in the passenger seat of the Mark II,
victorious in her dirty old jumpsuit. Wayne drove. Ahead of them,
Sheriff White sat atop his horse, point man for security. They were
flanked on both sides and at their rear by White's team.

There would be opposition here, of that she
had no doubt. The usual protesters she'd grown accustomed to, as
well as Jane Carlyle and her merry band of SLPA operatives. White
had had a lengthy conversation with her and Wayne about what to do
if there were any problems—or more accurately, if there were any
problems that seemed to Susanna like they were about to spiral out
of control. They'd established an exit plan out the rear of the
factory. And, of course, she knew the intestinal inner workings of
the factory better than just about anyone else. She could make it
out if, say, the Lotus Boys came crashing in through the
windows.