Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (2 page)

When she awoke, it was to the sound of a car
backfiring. She lifted her head and willed her eyes to give her the
scene:

They were at a gas station. The pumps were
the old-fashioned, gravity-fed kind. Most of the paint on them had
long since curled up and flaked off. In fact, the entire complex
seemed a rust-red relic of a civilization long since abandoned.

Jesse's not in the driver's
seat
, she thought.
He must've gone inside the shop.

"Good afternoon," came a voice from the back
seat.

"Hey, Wayne," Susanna said. She turned
around, still blinking the sleep from her eyes. Her head was
floating in a post-nap high of groggy numbness.

Wayne turned his eyes away from hers, quick.
Susanna could count on one hand the number of times Wayne had been
able to maintain eye contact with her through a conversation. She
wondered if he was that way with all women, or just her.

"I'm surprised you agreed to go along," he
said. "But I'm glad."

"Oh. Yeah. Well, I've just sort of been
needing to get away from my folks."

Wayne nodded, pretending to be examining the
old gas pumps from the back seat. "Jesse told me things have been
tough in your house. I didn't realize it was so serious."

"It's not," she was quick to reply. "It's
just—it's just that they still think of me as a kid, you know? I
needed to show them I could get out on my own, that I was capable
of making decisions for myself."

Wayne's gaze shifted to the floor. "Well,
listen, Susanna. Jesse can be a little overbearing at times." At
last, he looked up at her directly, if only to drive his next point
home. "I mean, I'm his older brother—and sometimes he intimidates
even me!"

Susanna laughed. It was a tiny, harmless
laugh, calculated to be that way. "I don't believe that."

"Oh, absolutely!" Wayne wore an earnest grin
on his face now. "Look, the point I'm trying to make is, don't be
afraid to tell him what you think, if you don't agree with him
about something. He's a good guy. Just, a little overbearing is
all."

A pause. Wayne looked back at the convenience
store. Susanna looked, too—no sign of Jesse yet. Wayne turned back
to Susanna. "And I want you to know that you can talk to me about
anything. Anytime, I mean it."

Susanna found this all a
bit odd, which was fair. It
was
odd. "What are you getting at, Wayne?"

Wayne grimaced, and wiped the beads of sweat
off his brow with a pocket square. "Well, I just mean, with where
we're going—"

"Where are we going, again?"

Wayne paused, a bemused grin creeping across
his face. "You mean you don't know? Seriously?" It was plainly
clear this tickled him, and he delighted in the opportunity to
tease her a bit. "Do you always just get into cars and go on long
trips? To destinations unknown?"

"I dunno, I was just happy to get out of my
house. I mean, Jesse told me to pack enough things for a few days
when I was talking to him on the phone last night, so I did. Who
knows? I like to go on adventures sometimes."

"Well," Wayne started in,
with his hands pointed out like he was ready to start a business
pitch, "since you're positively bereft of information on the
matter, we're headed to a place called Devil's Peak. To the land
Jesse bought with his part of the trust. We're starting
construction on
the
compound
."

He said this last term with
a hint of derision, then went on: "And all of
Jesse's—
followers
, or groupies, or whatever you call them—they're all going to
be there, too. At least, according to Jesse. We'll see if they show
up." He snorted. "They're not exactly the most reliable
bunch."

"So it's really happening," Susanna said. "I
always just thought the compound was a pipe dream."

"Tell me about it," Wayne said, with another
snort.

"I mean, not that I don't believe Jesse is
capable of making it happen," she interjected. "I do. I just—I've
been hearing about it for as long as I've known him. I sort of
figured it was fantasy."

"Susanna, I really mean what I said," Wayne
said. "Don't feel pressured in any way to stay at the compound
longer than you care to. The only reason I'm coming along in the
first place is because I love my brother, and I want to make sure
that if he's going to spend his share of our inheritance on some
utopian playground, that there's someone responsible overseeing the
project."

Susanna tensed a bit, though she barely
realized it, as Wayne leaned in closer to her now. He continued:
"This isn't my 'scene,' and I don't think it's yours, either. If
I'm being honest."

Susanna wondered for a moment where the shy,
soft-spoken Wayne she'd known him to be had gone. But then his
cheeks began to turn an apple red, and she smiled at him, hoping it
would comfort him. Coming from just about anyone else, she would
have been annoyed to have someone tell her how she ought to spend
her time. But coming from Wayne, she knew he must have really been
speaking from the heart.

Besides, he was harmless. "You don't think I
can get my hands dirty?" Susanna hoped the playful lilt in her
delivery would make clear she wasn't offended by his being
forthright.

Wayne retreated to his seat in the back, and
again averted his eyes. "These are tough people he hangs around.
Desperate people, living on the fringe of society. I just don't
want to see you get hurt."

"Well, I appreciate your concern. Really. But
I'm pretty sure I can take care of myself."

A bell rang, and they both glanced at the
door to the convenience mart attached to the gas station. Jesse
emerged, carrying a carton of cigarettes and a 24-pack of beer. He
eyed Wayne and Susanna, acknowledged them with a single nod of his
head, and threw the beer in the back seat next to his brother. He
climbed up the driver's side entrance, lit a cigarette, and
wordlessly started up the car before pulling back out onto the
highway.

Susanna wanted to say something to break the
silence. But she wasn't sure what was the matter, if anything. She
was a little disappointed, she had to admit, to see him drinking
and smoking. She had nothing against either one, per se. But when
Jesse was feeling optimistic, he stuck to a "your body is a temple"
mantra—not that this precluded pot or all manner of hallucinogens,
of course. But if Jesse was buying relatively pedestrian booze and
cigarettes, it could mean he was feeling anxious about the big
build this weekend. Or it could mean nothing at all. He was hard to
read like that.

"What'sa matter, babe?"
Susanna cooed. She retched a bit at her own choice of words, only
after they'd already left her mouth. Having Wayne in the back seat
made her more self-conscious of her own forced affectations of
maturity she used when interacting with Jesse; having an audience
made her feel like a fraud. Maybe she
was
just that little kid who didn't
want to be in the Girl Scouts anymore, only now pretending to be a
grown-up.

"Nothing's the matter," Jesse said. "I'm
fine." To prove his point, he turned to face her, locked eyes with
her, and smiled with pursed lips.

"I'm fine."
The words reverberated in her head. Maybe he
really was fine. Maybe he was just nervous about the work that
would await them, once they arrived at the barren patch of land
that Jesse hoped to turn into the last bastion of West Coast
countercultural optimism.

What if they got there, and none of Jesse's
flaky groupies were there to meet them?

What if the promise of free
drinks, drugs, and sex wasn't enough to get them to commit to a
long-haul drive and weeks of manual labor under the hot desert sun?
Susanna didn't want to think about the depths of foulness Jesse's
mood might plunge into, nor how uncomfortable
that
ride back home would
be.

Maybe Jesse just didn't like the idea of his
engineer brother watching over his affairs, reminding him of the
empirical, mechanized, capitalized outside world at a time when he
was supposed to be building a place where he could be king.

Susanna closed her eyes again, and again
nestled her head in that ill-fitting crevice that could've really
used a pillow. All the sounds around her blurred into signal noise.
Once more, she felt herself falling into the abyss.

For months, L.A. rocker/guerilla artist Jesse Cole
has been talking about building a commune in the Los Angeles high
desert to anyone who will listen. He's even taken to having a
collections plate—passed around by a roadie in a priest costume—at
his shows. Listen to him speak on the issue, and one senses a
mounting tension in his demeanor. The Sixties are now officially
over, he seems to be saying. Everyone who has latched onto the
promise can feel the waves of history shifting once more.

"It's the media that's done it," he says,
punctuating his point with a long drag from his fourth or fifth
cigarette of the interview. "The clothes, the lingo, it all meant
something more real just a few years ago. Now it's like Halloween
or something."

At this point, I still can't tell if he's wearing
his own tasseled leather jacket and bandana as an ironic statement
on this pageantry, or if he's as much caught up in it all as
everyone else.

"Altamont, Manson—it's all turned a lot of people
off to the promise, especially in L.A." Only he says it like 'the
Promise' with a capital 'P'. "The straights have fired back, and it
sounds an awful lot like the bullets at Kent State."

This is Cole's impetus, then, for making a utopia on
a plot of worthless land fifty miles outside civilization. A place
free from the press, free from the encroaching fascism of police
and government, free from the ideological influence of the
military-industrial complex. "A place for sense, sexuality, radical
thought, and life-through-art," he calls it.

This is to be Jesse's Xanadu, and he will bring his
flock with him to begin to build.

* * * *

Susanna watched the desert play out around
her and considered how quiet they were all being. Jesse still had
barely said a word; for her own part, she didn't feel like saying
much now. If she wanted to make idle chatter, she posited whatever
thought was on her mind to Wayne, eager as he was to lap up any
attention she'd send his way. Despite being the better part of
thirty, Susanna suspected he had never gone all the way with a
woman—and probably hadn't gone very far at all. It wasn't that
Wayne was unforgivably unattractive, nor that his personality was
so repellent. He had, at times, a nebbish, earnest charm. But he
seemed deathly afraid of others and of life itself. That Susanna, a
girl nearly half his age, intimidated him made her feel
powerful.

"There it is," she heard him say from the
back seat.

"There
what
is?" Susanna asked.

Wayne leaned in toward the front seat and
pointed his outstretched arm towards something on the horizon.

That's when she first saw Devil's Peak.

It was a mesa, a natural geological
formation. A flat-top mountain. Its peak, like all mesas, had been
dulled by eons of gradual elemental erosion. This mesa jutted out
of the flat earth landscape like something from an Italian
woodcutter's fever-dream vision of Hell.

"Why do they call it Devil's Peak?" Susanna
asked. "I mean, it's a mesa, it's got no peak."

"Exactly," Wayne said with a smirk. "The
story goes that the Devil himself took the peak back to Hell with
him, and made his throne out of it."

"Lovely."

The Jeep continued along the highway towards
the mesa. Its intimidating quality faded, and gave way to a
rounded, dimensional depiction. It no longer seemed like a haunted
supernatural specter, but a mere earthly protuberance in a part of
the state full of similar foothills and mountain ranges.

Susanna watched Jesse toss his cigarette out
of the side of the car. For a moment, she imagined it starting a
blazing inferno. Jesse spoke at last. "We're here," he said. He
pulled the Jeep off the highway, and they bounced along the dry,
brittle off-road desert floor. They went on like that for a few
minutes, and when at last they came to rest, they were just a few
miles from Devil's Peak.

Susanna jumped down from the Jeep and began
to explore:

Earthen clay lay caked over in chipped adobe,
sand-colored stone formations jutting out. These irregular shapes
were laid out in a kind of rough grid of ninety-degree angles. It
was obviously the work of people, not of nature. But it didn't make
any sense—who would have started the foundations of dozens of
structures and left them unfinished like this?

Or maybe they weren't unfinished at all.

Maybe they were ruins.

"Bridgetown," Jesse said from behind Susanna.
He put his arms around her waist and kissed her neck. She could
smell the cigarette tar on his breath. She didn't mind it. It gave
her a small thrill.

"Bridgetown?"

"Yep."

"Care to elaborate?"

Jesse took a breath, and pointed to the
building base nearest her. The bottoms of three walls still stood,
sort of. "I think that was a store," he said. "You know, like an
old-timey general store."

"So this was a ghost town?"

"
Is
a ghost town. It
was
a town."

"You know what I meant."

Jesse smiled, and took her head in his hands,
planting another kiss on her. She could tell he was proud of his
find.