Dry Town

Frank Kellerman stood behind the bar on a Friday evening in December of 1918 and poured a whiskey for a cattleman from Lovelock and thought about the fact that in three days he would not be able to do this anymore.

Nevada had voted itself dry. The state prohibition law would take effect at midnight on December 17, a full year before the rest of the country caught up, because Nevada, which had a talent for being first in matters that other states approached with caution, had decided to lead the way into sobriety, or at least into the legal appearance of it.

Frank was thirty-eight years old. He had run the saloon on Virginia Street since his father Otto died in 1911, and Otto had run it since 1871, which meant the Kellerman saloon was older than most of the buildings on the street and older than some of the streets themselves. Otto had opened it when Reno was a railroad camp with ambitions, and he had served miners and cattlemen and railroad workers and, later, the divorce women and their attorneys and the men who came to Reno for reasons they did not discuss and left for reasons they did not explain. Frank had inherited the business and the building and the long wooden bar that Otto had shipped by rail from San Francisco in 1873, a bar made of walnut that had been polished by fifty years of elbows and forearms until it had the dark, rich sheen of something that has been touched by ten thousand people and remembers all of them.

The cattleman from Lovelock drank his whiskey and set the glass down and said, "What are you going to do?"

Frank had been asked this question approximately four hundred times in the past month. His answer had evolved from anger to resignation to something that was not quite acceptance but was closer to it than he liked.

"Soft drinks," he said.

The cattleman looked at him.

"Soda water. Lemonade. Sarsaparilla. Coffee."

"That's not a saloon."

"It's a soft drink parlor."

"That's not the same thing."

"No," Frank said. "It is not."

He had spent the past three weeks preparing. He had moved the liquor stock to a location he did not discuss. He had ordered cases of soda water and ginger ale and a syrup dispenser that he had seen advertised in a catalog from Chicago. He had painted a new sign for the front window that said KELLERMAN'S SOFT DRINK PARLOR in letters that were dignified enough to be taken seriously and large enough to be read by anyone who might be interested in the legal status of the beverages served within.

His wife, Nora, had watched these preparations with the particular patience of a woman who had married a saloon keeper and understood that the saloon was not merely a business but a location in her husband's mind, a place where he was most fully himself, and that what was happening to him was not merely a change of inventory but something closer to a small death.

On the last legal night, December 16, the saloon was full. Not celebratory, not exactly. There was no toast to the end of an era, no dramatic last pour. The men who came were regulars, and they drank the way they always drank, steadily and without ceremony, and when midnight approached Frank did not make an announcement. He simply stopped pouring at eleven forty-five and said, "That's it, gentlemen," and the men finished what was in their glasses and put on their hats and left, and Frank locked the door and stood in the empty room and listened to the silence, which was different from the silence of a closed saloon, because a closed saloon would open again in the morning, and this one would not, not as what it had been.

He washed the glasses. He wiped the bar. He performed the closing routine he had performed six nights a week for seven years, and his father had performed six nights a week for forty years before that, the ritual of shutting down a place where people came to drink, a ritual so familiar that his hands did it without instruction from his mind, the way a horse walks a known trail.

The soft drink parlor opened on December 18. The sign was in the window. The soda water was cold. The ginger ale was adequate. The sarsaparilla was, Frank conceded privately, not terrible.

The customers came. Some of them were the same men who had been there two nights before. They sat at the same bar and occupied the same stools and ordered soda water with a particular inflection that communicated nothing that could be repeated in a courtroom but that Frank understood perfectly, and he served them soda water, and if the soda water was occasionally accompanied by something in a coffee cup that was not coffee, this was a matter between Frank and his customers and the walnut bar, which had seen worse and said nothing.

Frank missed the honesty of it. That was the thing he had not expected. He did not miss the liquor itself, not particularly. He missed the straightforwardness of a man walking into a saloon and ordering a drink and receiving it and paying for it, a transaction so simple and so old that it predated the town itself, predated the railroad, predated everything except the human desire to sit in a room with other people and drink something that took the edge off the day.

But the bar was still there. The walnut bar that Otto had shipped from San Francisco, the bar that was older than Frank and older than the century and that held, in its dark grain, the memory of every hand that had rested on it. Frank wiped it down each night the way he had always wiped it down, and the wood was warm under the cloth, and the building was quiet, and Virginia Street was quiet, and Reno was dry, officially, and Frank Kellerman ran a soft drink parlor, officially, and the arrangement held, the way arrangements do when everyone involved agrees not to examine them too closely.

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