A teakettle reached boiling point, and began to sound out. White and Black both turned their heads towards it, and the sheriff noticed the little gas burner in the corner. As Black broke away to tend to the kettle, White looked down at the desk. Papers on it bore a writing he had never seen before. The characters looked ancient to him. Perhaps it was a cypher, part of some secret society that Black bore membership to.
"Sheriff," Black began, pouring water from the kettle into porcelain cups, "If I told you in words why I do what I do, I'm afraid it would not yet make sense to you. Imagine trying to explain the invention of the cannon to an indigenous people who only have flinthead arrows. They would think it a divine weapon from an angry god. A device capable of transmitting thunder. You would not only have to explain the properties of gunpowder, but show them it was possible to extract metal from the earth to forge the cannon itself."
"Get to the point."
"What I'm saying, Sheriff, is that if you wish to understand who I am, and why I do what I do, there are new aspects to existence that I must first show you."
Black held out a teacup to White, and beckoned for him to take it.
White gave him a look of suspicion.
"It's not poison," Black said.
"I didn't say it was," White retorted. He took the cup, and smelled its contents. The tea was fragrant. Just its aroma was pleasant in a sweet way, and made him a little lightheaded for a moment. "What is it?"
"The tea is ground up from the buds of a flower called the lotus," Black responded. "Not the lotus flower from the Orient that you might be familiar with, but a more exotic specimen."
"What's it do?"
"It allows you to see that which you are otherwise blind to. To tap into an antenna you already have, let's say."
White set the cup down on the table without taking a drink from it. He couldn't explain the feeling he had—it wasn't anger, it wasn't fear exactly, but he was having to steading his shaking hand anyway. He felt like he was on the cusp of some moment too big for him to see fully, and he was about to plunge headlong into destiny.
He resolved then to tell Black something he'd not told a soul in the world. He hoped Black might know its meaning.
"Five years ago," White began, "I saw what I thought was a falling star shoot across the sky and land in the desert just outside town. I was curious, and it was a slow night like was usual back then, so I went out to track it down.
"But what I found out there that night wasn't a rock. I saw a man emerge from the wilderness. He said he was just coming from Los Angeles, and I gave him directions and sent him on his way. And you know what that man was?"
"Wayne Cole," Black responded, grave.
"I didn't tell anyone what I had seen," White continued, "Because my wife had recently passed on and I was drinking more than I should've been, and I didn't want people to start thinking I wasn't fit for my post anymore.
"Pretty soon, I'd convinced myself I imagined the whole thing. Never paid it much mind after that night. Until now. But now it's clear to me that things around here only really started to change after that night. That our fortunes reversed. That I first heard your name, and that the Lotus Boys showed up."
He looked around the plaster-walled hideout, taking in the sheer oddity of its existence. "And now I find this, this place, this secret chamber of yours," he continued. "And you've got strange writing on your desk that looks like it's from Mars, and I realize you've been operating here right under my nose this whole time, and I want to know what in the good green fuck is going on in my city. And who in the fuck you are, Mister Black."
Black took a moment, perhaps to allow White to fully absorb what he was saying. He took a drink from his teacup, then responded: "The answers to your questions, Errol, lie in the bottom of that cup."
White took his eyes off Black long enough to contemplate the cup. He hadn't come all this way for nothing. He hadn't dreamed of that doorway for nights for nothing. No matter how little sense it made, he knew he had little recourse but to take the leap of faith.
He put the cup to his lips, and knocked it back in one go.
He wiped his chin, and set the cup down on the desk.
His head began to spin, and a lightness filled his chest.
Then he began to cough.
The cough turned to a hack, and he realized he could not breathe. His throat was seizing up.
"You poi—poisoned—" He tried to complete the sentence, as though at least accusing Black would grant him a final moral victory.
But Black's face filled with fear and confusion. He rushed over to White's side as the sheriff fell to his knees, and tried to shake him into cognizance.
"No, not poison," Black said. "Tell me what you're feeling. What's happening? What's wrong?"
But White could no longer speak. He felt like his ears were filling with fluid.
Then the fluid broke, and his ears filled with something else.
Music.
He tried saying as much to Black. "Music. I hear—"
The walls were closing in around him. He saw only Black's startled face, and a moment later, that, too, was gone.
Afterword.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this first issue of Bridgetown, and I’d like to take a moment to give you a view for the lay of the land.
First, let me say a few words about where the idea for the book came from. Every story begins with a little kernel—just an image, maybe, or something someone once said that was the right kind of evocative—which set off an exploration in the creator’s mind. In this case, it was the mental picture of a bunch of Jeep Wranglers tearing through the Old West, gunslingers exchanging shots with each other from aboard their machines. I liked the thought. It was just askew enough in a way that appealed to me. I began to investigate the implications of that moment—where did the Jeeps come from? Was it a cargo cult kind of thing, or did they have the means to produce and understand this technology? What would an Old West with cars mean for the geopolitics and business of the era? To the price of oil, for instance?
Apart from that, I had this separate hypothetical that was tugging at me. If you were separated for five years from those closest to you, during which time they naturally grew closer without you, how would the whole lot of you deal with it upon your return?
When I put those two ideas together, I had the seeds of Bridgetown. But there was a lot more to be done before the story would come into its own. Working with my friend and writing partner Alex Moskowitz, I spent a few weeks in early 2010 breaking the story. Originally, our goal was to write a feature-length screenplay centering on the increasingly violent story of Jesse, Susanna, and Wayne’s outsized egos. But it was a tough nut to crack. Too tough, and too byzantine. Our ideas grew and grew, like vines creeping up the sides of a Southern gothic mansion. The story seemed to suffocate itself. Clearly, it was far too big for the economy of a two-hour running time and the necessarily terse prose of the screenplay format.
I put the story, which we’d been referring to alternately as The Magnificent 4x4s and Of Guts and Glory, away for a while. I finished school in spring of 2011 and went on to start a career in Los Angeles media production. I took the daily Metrolink train into Glendale, where I worked at DreamWorks, and spent my rides back and forth writing. The Cole Brothers’ story was, by 2012, settled enough into my memory that only the important broad brushstrokes remained in my mind. It was as though the mere passing of time had done the legwork of trimming the outline down for me, and I could begin to write. Prompted by Alex’s cousin Sara, who I was living with, I decided to tackle it as a prose novel.
So that’s the story, in immediate terms, of where Bridgetown came from. But as to why it is what it is? I’ve lived in the American Southwest my whole life, having been born and raised in the suburbs of North Orange County outside of Los Angeles. Stay within a twenty-minute radius of my hometown, and you’d see little more than the history-free manicured sprawl and arterial freeways you’d expect. But venture an
y farther east, or an hour and a half to the north, and you realize that underneath all that post-war development, you live in a wilderness. A frontier so mighty and fundamentally inhospitable to humankind that it is little changed from how it must have looked when my European ancestors first “discovered” it centuries ago. It’s a place where bizarre rock formations, shaped by eons-long processes, cast monstrous shadows over highway-side outpost communities. Where stories of Bigfoot and UFOs seem to weave together into a local folklore, perhaps fueled by peyote and cheap beer as much as by an imaginative need to explain a general creeping unease. And why shouldn’t these stories thrive here? Out in these places, there can be little sense of control over one’s domain. Everything is ripe with mystery.
This sense of the unknown has long worked its way into the mythical subtext of the Southland’s local expression. Some of my earliest and most vivid formative memories took place at Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. In both these places, hollow man-made mountains house eerie, stalactite-filled caverns that bubble with a sense of Technicolor life in their plaster bowels. No doubt Devil’s Peak owes as much to Knott’s Calico Mine Ride as it does to the actual, awesome mesas of the American Southwest.
Mysteries run deep, too, in Bridgetown. Susanna and the Cole Brothers have only begun to probe them. Jesse seems to be the only one of the three willing to investigate why they traveled back in time in the first place. There’s clearly more going on with Black than he’s yet given up—what were his crimes for which he was made human? Who had the power to force him into mortality? Were they the ones who made the rabbit-hole at the heart of Devil’s Peak, and for what purpose was it originally built?
Will Susanna at last get the recognition she deserves, or is she destined to be consumed by a time and ideology that disregards her contributions to society? Will Wayne be able to hold onto the woman he loves? Does he truly love her, or does he only have room in his heart for his own glory?
Has Sheriff White met his end? And what will happen to Bridgetown, now that the town has been fractured in two by the warring brothers and their respective armies of support?
We’re only one issue in, folks. There’s still a lot left to tell in the story of our trio, to say nothing of the entire world they will have left in their wake once they are little more than dust.
Thanks for coming along for the ride. It means a lot.
Giovanni Iacobucci
About the Author.
GIOVANNI IACOBUCCI is an author and media producer in Los Angeles. He’s been building a sprawling saga for years, of which Bridgetown is only the first part. He is the founder of Modern Mythos Media, a digital media imprint for narrative artists interested in telling compelling stories. ModMyth’s daily habit is LA Revivalist, where the team shines light on what’s going on in the Los Angeles independent cinema scene.
Connect with the author online:
Website: http://www.modmythmedia.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/gioiacobucci
Final Thought
Thank you for reading my book. If you enjoyed it, please take a moment to leave me a review at your favorite retailer!
Thanks!
Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Page 23