Open Gaming

Joseph Toná walked down Virginia Street on a Thursday night in March 1931, the desert wind carrying the smell of sage and disturbed earth. The Bank Club was lit up like something out of a magazine, its windows blazing. There were automobiles parked three deep along the curb. Men in suits stood in clusters on the sidewalk, talking with the kind of urgency usually reserved for emergencies. It was barely eight o’clock.

He had heard the news that morning, working on a ranch five miles outside town. The governor had signed the bill. Open gambling, legal now, effective immediately. The ranch owner had slapped him on the shoulder and said the whole state was about to change. Joseph had nodded and gone back to mending fence.

He stood across the street and watched men move in and out of the Bank Club’s entrance on Commercial Row. Through the windows he could see the edge of a roulette table, the green felt glowing under the lights. A woman in a dark dress stood near the entrance, and he watched a man press his hat to his chest as he passed her, some old courtesy that did not matter much anymore.

His grandfather had come to this valley before the railroad. Joseph had heard the stories his whole life, the way the old man told them. Open country, the river running clear, the land belonging to nobody because it belonged to everybody. The grandfather had lived long enough to see the town built on it, watched the Truckee turn into a working thing that powered mills and moved commerce. He had died in 1918, while Joseph was away working cattle in Elko County. They had not been able to bring him home quickly, so his grandmother had handled the burial herself, in the old way, on the hill east of town.

Joseph’s own life was the life that came after. He had been born in a house on the edge of Reno, educated in the public schools with the other children, learned English before he learned anything else. His mother had worked in a hotel. His father had died when Joseph was twelve, a pneumonia that took him in three days. Joseph was thirty-one now. He knew how to work with his hands. He knew the land, not the way his grandfather had, but in the way a man knows a place he has lived his whole life.

The legalization felt like a punctuation mark. Like something that had always been true was now being made official.

He had spent the last two years watching the depression deepen. The ranches that hired him were cutting work. The construction jobs in town came and went. Every week there seemed to be fewer cars on Virginia Street, fewer men in new suits, fewer women in good dresses. The town had been selling itself on divorce and loose enforcement since before he was born. Now it was adding gambling to the promise. The same legislative session had shortened the divorce residency to six weeks, down from three months. Both changes aimed at the same thing. Making it easier for people to come to Reno and leave something behind, whether it was a marriage or their money.

He thought of his grandfather watching the first trains arrive, the iron horse coming down the Truckee canyon, carrying settlers and speculators and the weight of change. The old man had probably understood, in that moment, that nothing would remain as it was. That the world that had belonged to his people would become something else, something managed and measured and divided into parcels and percentages.

Joseph did not have his grandfather’s gift for carrying memory as both weight and responsibility. He lived in the present, mostly. He worked when there was work. He had a room in a house on Sierra Street. He had a sister in Carson City. He had no wife. There was a woman who worked at one of the restaurants on Second Street who had smiled at him more than once, but he had not pursued it. He seemed to lack some necessary ambition, or perhaps what he lacked was the belief that ambition would produce results different from what he already had.

The crowd outside the Bank Club was growing. The grand opening. Word had spread through the town in the hours since the governor signed the bill into law. Men were arriving with money they did not appear to have yesterday. There was a smell of whiskey and possibility in the air.

Joseph walked up Virginia Street, past the Bank Club, past the other clubs and establishments that had operated in a kind of legal shadow since the twenties. The back rooms and the careful arrangements, the protection payments and the turned heads. All of that had been a performance, and now the performance was over. Now it was legal. Now it was permitted. Now it was business.

He understood what this meant for the town. Reno would become a place built on the certainty that people wanted to risk their money, and that the town would profit from that certainty. It would become a place built on the idea that marriages could be dissolved as easily as they were made, and that men and women would travel a thousand miles to arrange the transaction. The depression was hollowing out the country. Banks were closing. Men were riding the rails without destination. And Nevada, which had always been a place where people came to do what they could not do elsewhere, was doubling down on that function.

He walked past the arch at the intersection of Commercial Row. The Biggest Little City in the World, the letters glowing against the dark. His grandfather would have found the phrase strange. The idea of a city being proud of its smallness, proud of its willingness to accommodate what other places would not.

Joseph walked south toward Sierra Street, toward home. Behind him, the Bank Club blazed with light. Inside those windows, men were placing bets, discovering the particular feeling of risking money they might not recover. In the morning, some of them would leave the town having won or lost, and Reno would take its portion of both. The cards would fall. The wheel would spin. And the town would go on, built on the certainty that people would always come here to do what they could not do at home.

His grandfather would have understood this as another crossing, another threshold. Joseph simply walked home through the cool March night, his boots on the sidewalk, the wind carrying sage and the faint sound of music from the open doors of Virginia Street.

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