"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.
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?"
"Jesse," Susanna said. "You're drunk. And Wayne must be, too. Why don't you just have a seat—"
"Maybe if I can't provide enough for you," he slurred, "you can suck his dick instead."
Susanna pulled back, and glared at him. His eyes were glazed over, a lazy, crooked grin of malice etched onto his face.
She slapped him. It was the only time she'd ever slapped anyone like that and
meant it.
There was a collective gasp from the audience.
"I don't need anyone to provide for me," she said. "I can take care of myself just fine. And I get to choose who I spend my time with, not you or Wayne. You fucking understand that?"
Wayne got up from the dirt, wiped the blood off his face with his sleeve, and spun Jesse around by the shoulder, revving up to deliver a knockout blow. It was as if all the vigor that had been missing from Wayne a few moments ago, while Jesse had been slaughtering him, had been saved up for this moment.
Susanna tried to interject: "Wayne, wait!—"
The resulting blow was a good one, better than she had thought Wayne capable of. It sent Jesse ass-first onto the ground.
She was surprised to find herself happy for Wayne.
With Jesse still reeling, Wayne grabbed Susanna by the arm and began to lead her through the crowd.
"Wayne, what are you doing?"
"I have his keys," Wayne said. "I don't want him driving tonight."
"You're just as drunk as he is!"
From behind them, still within the circle of people, Susanna heard Jesse let out an animal howl.
"Where do you think you're taking me?"
"Anywhere but here," Wayne replied. "Civilization."
A crackle of static electricity shocked Susanna at the point of contact where Wayne held her by the arm. "Ow."
A rumble of thunder registered from somewhere off in the distance.
The winds, too, were even louder now.
Wayne pulled the keys out of his pocket and hopped into the driver's seat of the old Jeep. Susanna took one more look behind her, at the dispersing crowd. She didn't particularly care to go anywhere with Wayne, but at the same time, she didn't want to have to deal with Jesse or his followers right now. Best to let him sober up. Sort it all out in the morning.
She sighed. "Alright, I'll come with you to find a motel or something. But let me drive, at least."
Wayne stared at her blankly for a moment over the idle of the Jeep. After a moment, he conceded. He scooted over the gear shift into the passenger seat.
Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Page 3