Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival by Giovanni Iacobucci

But that was all he could muster.
So he left.
    He didn't feel like going back out onto the
patio, but didn't know what else to do. He certainly couldn't go to
sleep. He briefly used the bathroom and went back to the deck.
There, he sat with his brother and the sheriff, and dutifully
accepted a cigar.
    Wayne and White were deep in a friendly
debate over the ethics of the Tammany Hall political machine. Jesse
was lost, but he did manage to infer that the president was Grover
Cleveland. When White asked whether Jesse thought there was such a
thing as a difference between "honest graft" and "dishonest graft,"
he excused his indifference as the result of having spent the last
seven years in Ireland. Unfortunately, this shifted the topic of
conversation back to Jesse's exploits overseas, for which he had to
rely on a wellspring of carefully modulated creativity to talk his
way out of.
    Soon they had whiskey summoned, and White
regaled the brothers with his tales of what it had been like
fighting for the Union as a young man, and then several years
later, moving out west to Bridgetown.
    "I was always too rough for proper Eastern
society, and too straight to be anything but a sheriff out West,"
White said with a smile. At that, Wayne and White shared a
laugh.
    The stars shined bright in the sky—brighter
than Jesse had ever seen them over Los Angeles. Wayne told them
both they were welcome to stay in the ranch's guest rooms.
    That night, Jesse stayed wide-awake. He was
exhausted, yes, but he didn't dare sleep. The clock on his
nightstand fed him the time. He wasn't sure if it was a "normal"
clock, or another perversion that Wayne had introduced to this
era.
    There was so much about this place that was
alien. And it was alien not for any outrageous exoticism. Far from
it, what made this place so alienating were the little details that
were different, or off, and how their quiet insanity seemed to him
a history test.
    He watched the little hands tick inexorably
towards midnight.
     
    Susanna counted the ceiling boards while
Wayne snored softly. It wasn't the first time she had committed
herself to the activity of board counting, but never before had she
done it with such urgency. She so badly wanted it to be midnight
already. She had to get everything she was thinking out of her
system. To put into words the complex brew of emotions Jesse's
arrival had wrought within her. She knew, though, that however
strange and upended her feelings were, Jesse's must've been ten
times as intense. He hadn't had five years to process what was
going on, nor five years to carve out a life in this place to
anchor himself onto.
    Finally, with less than ten til on the clock,
and certain that Wayne was in a whiskey-aided reverie, she slipped
out of the bed, grabbed her shoes, and went down to see if Jesse
was already outside.
    He was, waiting for her.

3.
    The first week of December, 1969, foretold a weak
winter—even by the standards of what normally passed for the season
in Los Angeles. One of Southern California's occasional, obstinate
warm spells was in effect, and a balmy breeze gusted its way
through the UCLA campus as the nights fell.
    The film program here was budding, clamoring
to escape its crib in the halls of the Theatre Arts department.
Freshmen who had so far only read textbooks were happy to get a
shot at threading delicate strips of celluloid scrap through the
mechanical innards of a 16mm Bolex camera. Sophomores and juniors
argued the finer points of auteur theory, speaking with an unearned
sense of authority over their first-year peers.
    Opportunity lingered in the
air, and optimism infected the students. This might have seemed
paradoxical, for theater attendance in America had dropped to a
third of what it had been in its glory days. But then again, the
old vanguard of cigar-chomping studio bosses, who'd made their
names in vaudeville when dinosaurs walked the earth, had at last
thrown their hands up in the air and given the keys to the