Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (3 page)

"It was called Bridgetown," he continued.
"There were mines out here."

Maybe that building next to them had once
been a post office. Or the police department, or a genuine Old West
saloon. At any rate, it was now just the wind-weathered suggestion
of material ephemera.

Susanna noticed, in the distance, oil
derricks slowly bobbing their hammerheads in rhythm, dotting the
horizon.

"And oil, eventually," Jesse went on. "But by
then, this place was long dead." He let out a dry little laugh.
"Too bad no one told 'em about it before the mines tapped out."

"Where's the wood?" Wayne shouted out to
Jesse from the other side of the Jeep. Susanna released Jesse, who
walked over to Wayne. She watched the two brothers in their first
direct interaction for what seemed like the first time in
hours.

Jesse pointed to a tarp that was billowing in
the high-altitude winds. Jesse and Wayne began to untie the corners
of the tarp, and peeled it back to reveal a large stockpile of
pinewood two-by-fours.

Susanna looked down at her watch.

1:45 PM.

They were the first ones here.

No one's here.

Nearly two hours had passed, and it seemed
they would be the only ones coming.

Jesse was quiet again. Susanna could tell he
was fuming.

Was it his flock, whose absence—probably the
product of an ongoing drug haze—was tantamount to mutiny?

Or was it Wayne, whose told-you-so demeanor
in the couple of hours since their arrival had only gotten
worse?

Wayne sat next to Susanna on a pile of the
two-by-fours.

"Sorry you're wasting your Saturday," Wayne
said, just within earshot of his pacing brother. Susanna glanced at
Jesse to gauge his reaction, but Jesse continued his silent routine
unabated by his brother's needling.

She watched Jesse dig his right Chuck
Taylor's toe in the sand for a moment. He went back to work hauling
lumber himself, dropping more two-by-fours with a mad clatter into
piles outside the tent. He no longer appeared to be counting out
how much wood went where. He was just stewing.

"I feel really bad," she said after him. No
reply.

She'd never seen him so evidently vulnerable.
Embarrassment didn't suit him; he was supposed to be the paragon of
cool. Conversely, she could tell that Wayne was relishing the
moment with a petty joy. The sting he'd known from long-smarting
locker room punches and verbal fire bombs was going the other way
in the wind, for a change.

Susanna looked out to the highway. It receded
towards the vanishing point of the desert horizon, but was obscured
by heat waves dancing on the surface before it could ever quite
reach it.

Something smudgy arose from the heat
waves.

The smudge grew larger, its colors more
pronounced.

A red-and-blue Volkswagen Type II bus.

Susanna recognized it from the parking lots
of Jesse's shows in the dive bars of Hollywood. It was always
there, every time he played. A mark of loyalty.

"Jesse," she said. "Look!"

All three of them turned to the bus.

Jesse began walking towards it, then sprinted
into a run.

He waved it down, laughing.

The bus came to a halt, kicking up a cloud of
dust. Its doors swung open, its side hatch slid back, and a dozen
of the shepherd's most faithful sheep emerged from within the
Teutonic tin can of a vehicle.

Jesse's shoulders were confident, his chest
out, a swing in his step. He greeted his followers with laughs and
sincere, full embraces. These people—well, maybe "friends" wasn't
exactly the right word for them, but they made him feel whole.

Susanna couldn't help but smile. She snuck a
peek at Wayne, sitting beside her. He was quiet. So much for his
little victory. Now the elder brother was stuck out here,
babysitting a bunch of perpetually late, drugged-out hippies, for
God knows how long. Susanna started to laugh.

"What's so funny?" Wayne asked, pointed.

"Nothing, nothing. Just the look on your
face."

A couple of the girls from the bus gazed upon
Jesse with doe eyes, stuck in coquettish postures. Susanna wanted
it not to bother her, but she was human after all. It was the one
facet of his popularity amongst this crowd that put her on edge.
But it wasn't his fault. He had his values and he was upfront about
them. And Susanna believed him when he said she was his girl.

"Come on," Susanna told Wayne, giving him a
little punch on the shoulder. "Let's introduce ourselves. No point
in sitting on a pile of wood the whole weekend."

She got up and began walking towards the
crowd. Wayne followed, a reluctant pause preceding any action on
his part.

The fifteen people now at the campsite got to
work. They dug foundations, hammered A-frames together, and helped
one another prop them up to assemble self-standing structures. But
they weren't alone. As the afternoon wore on, more and more cars
and trucks showed up. The gang formed a kind of crescent-shaped
parking lot around the nascent collection of building frames. All
told, there were fifty-five people at the site, by the time the
shadows grew long and the desert heat of the day cooled into the
desert chill of the night.

By eight o'clock, work was over, and play was
about to begin.

The summer sun had dropped
beneath the horizon, and the
hiss-crack
of beer cans popping open
broke out over the fuzz of bong rips and AM radio. It was a choir
of nightmare music for the church ladies back home.

Susanna was busying herself making small chat
with some of the guests, trying hard to recall some of their
names—to no avail—when Jesse took her by the hand and led her away
from the main group of revelers.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"Let me surprise you."

He led her down a winding path in the brush.
"Keep an eye out for snakes."

"Great."

"I carved out this path a week before. I
wanted to show you something spectacular."

"Well, you've got my attention."

They were hiking towards Devil's Peak.

It was too dark for the
mesa to be visible by anything other than the cutout of its
familiar silhouette in the night sky. A mesa-shaped void of
no-star
where elsewhere
there was
star
.

Jesse stopped in front of her, and she nearly
tripped over him.

"What is it?"

"I think—this way," he said. "Yeah, this
way."

He turned to his right, grabbing her by the
arm, excited. He was moving faster now.

They went down into a ditch, having to
balance against one another as they progressed into the
crevasse.

Jesse flicked on his Zippo lighter, casting
just enough light to illuminate a decaying old wooden board against
the mouth of an opening in the earth.

"Is this a mineshaft?" Susanna asked.

Jesse handed the Zippo to Susanna. "Hold
this. Keep it burning."

She did so, as Jesse loosened the board of
rotting wood from its moorings and set it aside.

"Okay, let's go."

She followed him into the shaft, without
question. She was too curious to turn back.

The passageway was only barely big enough for
them to make their way through. It was narrow and short.

"Some mine this was," she said. "You can't
even get a cart out through this opening."

"I think it's a service entry. Or an
emergency exit."

Susanna kept her hands along the walls to
guide her and keep her balance. The texture was chipped, sharp
even. And sort of glassy, which she wasn't expecting. It didn't
feel like rock.

They proceeded along a steady downward
gradient. She was putting her weight on the balls of her feet, and
while she wasn't exactly in danger of tumbling forward, she
wouldn't trust her stability if she had to go running full bore
ahead.

"Look straight ahead," Jesse said.

"I can't see anything. It's pitch black."

"Wait a sec, let me move out of the way."

Jesse squatted and pressed up against the
wall. With him out of the way, Susanna could finally make out an
inkling of why he'd brought her down here. It made her gasp:

Half-there dots on her retinas danced as she
made out that the corridor was not, in fact, pitch-black. An
otherworldly violet light shimmered at the end of the hall, before
it curved out of sight.

"What…what is that? Where is that coming
from?"

"Come on, let's keep moving."

Jesse led her on further. With each step, she
could make out more and more. At last, the end of the tunnel was in
sight. Susanna could see now that the narrow shaft opened up into a
much larger chamber.

Jesse looked back at her, a loving grin
spread wide across his features. He was bathed in the purple light.
He took a step out beyond the tunnel, into the cavern beyond, and
beckoned Susanna forth once more.

"Holy shit," she muttered.

They were standing in a mammoth cavern of
glimmering stalactites, like rock candy formed over a millennia of
natural precision engineering.

It was, without hyperbole, the single biggest
place Susanna had ever been.

An ethereal glow filled the farthest recesses
of the space. A waterfall was audible somewhere in the distance,
though Susanna couldn't imagine where all that water could be
coming from. She looked around herself and saw they were standing
on a patch of moist earth at the bottom of the cavern, which was
easily several hundred feet tall. Around this little atoll upon
which they stood, a pool of water cast shimmering light on the
walls.

The purple light and bouncing reflections
were caught in a misty, foggy atmosphere that made the ceiling
difficult to make out. Susanna could see that hundreds of feet
above them, a spindly bridge of rock crossed the abyss.

Everything seemed blacklit, neon in its
psychedelic hyper-presence.

"This is impossible,"
Susanna said. "How can a mountain be
hollow
?"

"I don't know how," Jesse said. "But feel
that in the air," Jesse said. "That electric charge?"

Susanna looked down at her arms. Sure enough,
the little light-colored hairs on her arms stood up on their
ends.

There was a low hum to this place, too, one
which made her recall being a little girl on the Disneyland steam
ship, and feeling the engines pulse beneath her feet.

"This place is special," Jesse said. "I don't
know what it is. I don't know why it is. But what we're building
here—in the ruins of the old town, in the mountain's shadow…"

"Yes?"

"It's a calling. I know it.
I'm making something great." He swallowed, then corrected himself:
"
We're
making
something great." He took her hands in his, brought himself in
close to her. "You're as much a part of this experience as I
am."

"I haven't done anything," she protested.
"I'm just tagging along."

"Oh no," Jesse said. "That's not true at all.
You have a very special role here." He put one arm around her
waist, hugged her body as tight as he could, and began swaying from
side to side in a little mock dance.

"Oh yeah? What's that?"

"You're my muse."

She laughed. "Your muse?"

"Yes." He put his hand around her head, his
thumb gently grazing her ear, and ran his fingers through her hair.
"If I can breathe life back into this land, I want it to be with
you by my side."

"Of course. I'll always be by your side." She
wasn't sure what had come over him.

"That's not what I mean." Jesse took a step
back from her, breaking their embrace. He reached into his shirt
pocket, got down on one knee, and opened the box. The ring-set
jewel within glimmered in the light of the cavern.

She felt her head start to spin, and a twinge
of anxiety. This was so unlike Jesse, so unexpected. But suddenly,
his earlier nerves made a kind of sense. He might have seemed so
mature, so wise, so larger-than-life when his flock surrounded him,
but the poor thing was still only human. He was nervous.

"Oh, Jesse—I don't know what to say. I—I love
you so much."

His smile was anticipatory.

"It's just—" She searched for the words. "I
don't know if I'm ready for that."

He held onto his smile, but the light in his
eyes dimmed. Now it was more of a rictus grin. She found it
unsettling.

"I understand," he said with a nod. "You've
still got to establish yourself as your own person."

"Yeah, yeah," she was quick to say.
"Exactly—"

"You're young." He popped up back on his
feet. The ring was gone, like a sleight-of-hand trick. Had it ever
been there?

"I can wait," he said.

"You sure?"

"Yeah." A long beat.

Suddenly, the juxtaposition of their
otherworldly environment with the profoundly normal awkwardness of
this situation made Susanna want to laugh. She resisted the
urge.

"But you're gonna stick around," Jesse began,
"Once I get this town fixed up, right?"

"Of course," Susanna said. She took Jesse's
head in her hands this time, and planted a kiss on his lips. "I'll
be your Queen of Bridgetown. And this place will be our little
secret."

She backed away, put a finger to his lips.
"Now, let's get back to the others before they start to wonder if
the coyotes got us."

Then they left the strange and delightful
cavern of light and mist, and began their trek back up the narrow
shaft of darkness.

Meanwhile, back at camp, Wayne spilled his
beer.

He felt a burning anxiety. His eyes darted
around. No one saw. Thank God.

He began to blot the stain out, but it didn't
do much. He looked around again. Beads of sweat dripped down his
forehead. He was hot under the collar.