Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (4 page)

Everyone else was laughing. Not at him, but
amongst each other. Which was, in its own way, worse. They all got
the joke, whatever the joke was, and he didn't. Why did he always
feel so alone at these things?

How was it that he—a UCLA mechanical
engineering grad student, for crissakes!—found the simple act of
standing around, drinking a beer, so goddamn stressful?

He looked down at what he was wearing—a
button-up cotton shirt and slacks. In the desert.

He cursed his own sense of propriety. Why
couldn't he just throw on a tee shirt like a normal person?

Everyone else was dressed like they just came
in from Haight-Ashbury. Blue jeans. Loose-fitting batik tops.
Scruffy faces.

Yet, in this moment, he felt inferior to all
of them. Why should he? Maybe it was because there were so many of
them here, now. Maybe anyone in his position would feel so out of
place.

No, it wasn't just that. There was something
more.

He spotted a couple of waifish girls, flowers
in their hair, sitting on an old torn sofa someone had loaded up in
the back of an old Chevy and brought along with them. One of the
girls was making the other laugh almost to the point of tears.

They looked adorable.

Graceful.

Carefree.

Totally and utterly beyond his reach. They
were happy. They all were, everyone here. Everyone but him. But
why?

He was satisfied with his life.

Wasn't he?

Successful. Proud in many respects, and with
a secure future. But he couldn't remember the last time he'd
laughed like those girls were laughing.

"Looks like you're losing your beer there,
man."

Wayne turned to see a sweaty, chubby guy of
truly indiscernible age. He could have been eighteen, could have
been forty. This man, who for some reason was wearing a Hawaiian
lei, extended a hand out to Wayne. But it wasn't to shake. He was
offering him a joint.

Wayne was about to issue an automatic "No
thanks," but took another glance at the scene around him. He
couldn't last another hour here sober. Just couldn't.

"Thanks," he said, and took the joint from
the man with a curt nod.

He held it up to his lips, and sucked in,
taking a long, deep drag. He held his breath for several moments,
until the urge to cough issued forth a series of convulsing hacks.
He handed the joint back to the man, tears in his eyes.

"Like a champ," the portly boy-man said. He
was clearly getting quite a kick out of this. "You know, we weren't
too sure about you when we first saw you here. Kinda thought like,
'Hey, maybe this guy's just here to babysit us.' But you're
alright!"

Wayne, still coughing, could only offer him a
thumbs up and another nod.

Finally, Wayne started to settle down, though
now he began to feel the horizon shifting.

He looked back at the two girls on the couch,
their faces even more perfect in the flickering campfire light than
they had been moments earlier.

The anxiety was melting away. Not in a
figurative sense—it felt physical, like a waxen patina of shame was
simply dripping off him, and his skin was touching fresh air for
the first time in eons.

Wayne was content to just absorb the scene
for a moment.

He noticed the girls were glancing back at
him while they conversed. He looked away, back to his new buddy
with the lei.

"Thanks, man," Wayne said.
His voice sounded funny. It was like the words had come out before
he'd had a chance to form them. He said something else to the guy
after that, some
kum-bi-ya
platitude he'd once heard Jesse say. But whatever
it was, he wasn't paying any attention to it.

Wayne got up and headed over to the communal
bucket of beers. He pulled the top off a can of Schlitz. Dusting
off what little frat-house experience he had, he downed the can in
a few gulps.

He let the buzz kick in, and ambled over to
the girls' couch, weightless, with a previously undiscovered
swagger in his step. The girls saw him coming—Blondie to his left,
and Ginger to his right.

"Jesse's brother, right?" - Blondie.

"Yep, yep, yep, that's me. Wayne." He held
out a hand for them to shake. Suddenly, he felt like talking more
than he ever had. He was confident that whatever was about to spew
forth would be positively wrought in a golden wit that would just
bowl these girls right over.

"Normally, I'd be really self-conscious about
talking to you girls," he began. "You know, 'sweaty palms' AACK!"
He guffawed, and the girls looked at each other and both giggled in
turn. "But, you know, it's like, we're all out here under the
stars, it's gorgeous, you people are all so cool and hip, and it
makes me want to be like—"

The girls leaned in, waiting for him to
finish his thought.

"It's like,
fuck!
, you
know?"

The girls both slow-nodded in unison. "Yeah,"
Ginger said. "I totally dig what you're saying."

Wayne leaned against the side of the Chevy
truck. "So, tell me about yourselves. What's your names?" He
brought his fist to his mouth, thinking he was discretely covering
a beer burp.

"Laura," Ginger said.

"Gwen," Blondie said.

"It's nice to meet you—Laura, Gwen." A
moment's pause. "Am I being really loud right now? I can't tell, I
think I'm being really loud!"

"You're fine," Ginger—ah, no, it was
Laura—dismissed his concern with a wave.

"Do you have any pot?" Blondie—what was her
name again?—asked.

"Only in my lungs!" Wayne slapped his knee.
He really felt he'd landed that one.

The girls giggled, and glanced at one
another, as they had before. They kept going on like that, like
they had to check on each other's story to make sure all the pieces
lined up.

"We're students," Blondie said. "We go to
SLO."

Wayne gave an impressed face that was,
perhaps, a little too Kabuki in its exaggeration. But he was
feeling good, so, fuck it. "San Luis Obispo? What are you two doing
all the way down here, then?"

"We're here for the month," Laura said.
"We're both big fans of your brother's music. We wanted to come
check out his scene and he told us we could hang out. We love it
here!"

"Well, you know," Wayne began, "I'm basically
Jesse's manager. Well, I mean—" he searched for his words, making a
sloppy grasping gesture with his hands. "I'm not like a manager per
se, but more of a mentor. I'm his big brother, so you know, he
really trusts me. And I just want what's best for him. What's best
for all you guys."

"Wow," Blondie said. "That is so
righteous."

"I was the one who told him, 'Jesse, Mom and
Dad would've wanted you to use your half of the money to invest in
something important to you.' Six months later, here we are!"

"So, you're like, his record producer, or
something?" - Laura.

"Yeah. Yeah, I suppose you could say that. I
mean, totally."

That was about the time a man with an afro
stepped into the picture and interrupted Wayne's flow. The man
started chatting up the girls. Wayne tuned out of life for a
minute, fixated on his own cozy buzz, bobbing his head from side to
side to the music.

This is great. I don't know what I was
worried about. I'm having a great time.

When Wayne came back down to Earth, the couch
was empty. The girls were gone.

Hmm. I'm gonna go find some more weed.

A few hours later, and Wayne was really
enjoying himself. More than he could remember having enjoyed
himself in years, as a matter of fact.

He was the life of the party! He never knew
how funny he could be.

He had entire groups of people transfixed, as
he regaled them with barely-lucid tales of frat boy hazing,
off-the-cuff quasi-metaphysical observations he'd gleaned from
years of study, and everything in between.

He's so funny and
smart
, he could swear he heard one of the
girls say.

Sometime deep into the night—he saw little
reason to check his watch at this point—he found himself in a
rather heartfelt sidebar with the Hawaii boy-man.

One or five beers too far
into a haze of bad judgement, Wayne decided this would be the place
and time to unload on his buddy how he
really
felt about his brother and
his brother's relationship with Susanna.

She's like, a goddess, man. I know how to
take care of a girl like that, better than Jesse can. He doesn't
care about anyone else, you know? But girls always go for the wrong
guys, you know? I don't know what that's about.

It's like, what—huh?

I'm not being too loud.

Am I?

I mean, we're outside. I don't need to use
"inside voice."

Jesse? He can't hear me. I haven't even seen
him for, like, the last three hours.

He's probably bending her over the back of a
truck or something. He's disgusting.

He's behind me? Jesse is?

Suddenly, Wayne realized a circle had formed
around him and his new friend. He scanned the crowd, looking for
Susanna. To his relief, she wasn't present.

He turned around.

There was Jesse, fuming.

The sound of his brother's fist impacting
with his jaw didn't sound like a punch in any movie.

It was more real, a sound from Wayne's
adolescence that he'd never been able to forget, but one that he'd
hoped was behind him.

At the moment of impact, every locker room
beat-down he'd experienced flash-fired across his neurons.

That's okay, for once I deserved it.

The ensuing contest was more or less
one-sided. Wayne's occasional punches, spurred on by only a
molecular sense of survival and not any real desire or expectation
to beat his brother, were just enough kindling to keep Jesse
punching.

They were just enough to make the pain worse
for Wayne.

Susanna didn't hear the fight playing out.
She was peeing behind one of those dry California bushes, the kind
that must be where tumbleweeds come from, a safe distance from the
campgrounds. And in the open plains of the high desert, sounds die
quick deaths. They dissipate in churning winds that blanket the
dusty earth.

One thing she did notice, though, was that
the weather was changing. It was cloudy now, humid, when it had
been dry and arid all day long. The winds were kicking up in all
directions.

And there was a strange smell, like ozone. It
was the same unnatural scent she'd noticed when her little brother
would play with slot cars when they were kids, or at the auto shop
where Jesse picked up some work hours during the daytime.

Her hair was beginning to defy gravity, like
she'd rubbed it against a balloon. Just like the hairs on her arms
had stood up in the cavern an hour earlier.

As she finished and hiked her pants back up,
she thought of the hike back to camp with Jesse just now. It had
been awkward; the kind of unspoken awkwardness where you're not
sure if it's the other party behaving oddly, or if you're
projecting your own discomfort onto them.

He seemed to understand her reasons for
rejecting his proposal for the time being. But as the minutes had
gone by, he'd become quiet again, like he had been in the car that
morning.

She'd give him some space for the night,
that's what she'd do. He could enjoy the party, enjoy the adulation
he always got from this crowd. Then, in the morning, she'd have a
heart-to-heart with him before the day's work. They'd patch things
up then.

She took one more glance at the sky, its
strange milky clouds ebbing and swirling around Devil's Peak. Then
she began walking back to the campgrounds.

Something was off. No one was talking; they
were standing around in a big circle. She could only barely make
out two people in the center of the ring, tussling on the
ground.

She cut through the outer ring of partiers,
bumping past the two girls from SLO. She didn't recognize them, but
they were close to the action, so she asked anyway:

"What's going on? What happened?"

Laura looked at Susanna
with an expression of contrived sympathy. The kind of pained look
that usually accompanies the phrase,
"I
hate to have to bring this up, but…"

"They're fighting over you," the red-headed
girl told her.

Susanna did a double-take,
her eyes finally putting the pieces together in the low
light.
Jesse and Wayne.

She understood now. And it made her a smile,
perhaps a little deviously, to know she held that influence over
them.

The ozone scent was getting stronger. "Do you
guys smell that?" she asked the SLO girls.

"Aren't you going to stop them?" Laura
asked.

Susanna considered it. "Yeah, I guess I'd
better."

She walked into the ring, towards the two
men. "Hey!"

Both brothers looked up at her at the same
time. The sight of her stopped them both dead cold. No doubt each
man realized how foolish he looked, caked in dirt and blood and
wrestling on the floor like this.

Jesse made the first move. He got up on his
feet, smoothed back his hair—it didn't really help—and dusted off
his hands with a clap, as if he'd just finished assembling a table.
He staggered over to Susanna. His legs were bowed with liquor. He
must've hit the bottle pretty hard in the short span of time since
they got back to camp.

He leaned in close to her, putting his lips
to her ear so only she could hear. "Is it true?"

"Is what true?"

"My
brother
here says you told him this
was all just a, ah, a '
pipe
dream
.' Says you two shared a good laugh
about me. My delusions of grandeur, he says. He seems to
think
he
can
provide better for you than I can. Well, what do you think,
Susanna? Can he?"