Sierra Beer

Frank Kellerman stood in a line on East Fourth Street a little before midnight and thought that he had waited longer than most of the men around him, and had less to say about it, which was usually the way.

The line ran along the front of the Reno Brewing Company, the five-story brick pile down at the corner of Fourth and Spokane that had been making Sierra Beer since 1903 and had spent the dry years making near-beer and orange soda and seltzer under a different name and biding its time. It was biding it no longer. At midnight the law changed. The Congress back east had decided that beer of a certain modest strength was no longer a crime, and the change came due at twelve o’clock on the seventh of April, and there were men in this line who had driven in from Fallon and Loyalton to be able to say they had bought the first legal glass in fourteen years.

Fifteen, for Frank. Nevada had gone dry a year before the rest of the country, in the winter of 1918, and he had been standing behind his father’s walnut bar on Virginia Street the night it happened, pouring a last whiskey for a cattleman from Lovelock and wondering what he was going to do. He had found out what he was going to do. He had turned the saloon into a soft-drink parlor, the way fifty other saloonkeepers in town had turned theirs, and he had sold coffee and sarsaparilla and sandwiches across the bar Otto had shipped up from San Francisco in 1873, and for a while, in the back, for the men he trusted, he had sold other things, until the risk got to be more than the money was worth. Mostly he had kept the doors open and the bar polished and had waited. He was good at waiting. It was the family trade under the family trade.

The dry years had not been dramatic, which was the thing nobody wrote down about them. They had been long. A man imagined Prohibition as raids and tommy guns and the stuff coming across the line in the dark, and there had been some of that, and Frank had touched the edge of it and pulled his hand back. But mostly it had been fifteen years of pouring coffee for men who wanted something else and pretending along with them that coffee was what they had come in for. It had been the slow going-quiet of a room that used to be loud. Men had courted their wives across that bar and mourned their fathers across it and settled arguments and started new ones, and then for fifteen years it had been a lunch counter with a great sad walnut altar behind it that no longer meant anything, and Frank had polished the altar every morning anyway, because you did not let a thing like that go dull just because the law had lost its mind for a while.

He was fifty-three now. His hands had gone heavy and his hair had gone, and Otto was more than twenty years dead, and the town on the far side of the tracks was not the town Otto had opened his saloon in. There was an arch over Virginia Street with lights in it that said the place was the biggest little city in the world, and there had been open gambling for two years, legal now, the wheels turning in the front windows where a man could see them from the street, and there had been six-week divorces since the same spring the gambling came in, so that the trains brought women who stayed exactly long enough and then went home. Frank had watched all of it arrive. He was not sure the town had gotten better. He was fairly sure it had gotten louder.

The line moved. Men came out of the brewery carrying cases against their chests like children, grinning, and other men in the line cheered them, and somewhere a truck was already loading at the side dock, the big brewery trucks that would run the stuff downtown by six in the morning to every place that had put in an order, and Frank had put in an order. He was here for himself. He wanted to carry the first case out with his own arms and set it behind Otto’s bar and open it there, in the place where he had poured the last legal drink, so that the circle would close in the one spot in the world where it meant anything.

The brewery smelled of malt and wet grain, a warm bread smell that leaked out into the cold street and that Frank had not smelled in years and had not known he missed. Inside, past the counter, men were working under the electric lights, rolling barrels, and one of them, an older man with a brewmaster’s apron and a German set to his shoulders, stood a moment in a doorway looking out at the line with an expression Frank recognized, because he had worn it himself the night the doors closed. The look of a man watching his own long patience pay off and not entirely trusting it. Frank did not know the man’s name and did not need to. They were the same trade.

When his turn came he paid and took the case and it was heavier than he expected, or he was older than he remembered, and he carried it out past the cheering and down Fourth Street toward the bridge with the bottles knocking gently against each other, brown glass, SIERRA on the caps. The night was clear and cold off the mountains and the Truckee was running loud under the Virginia Street bridge and the arch was lit above the empty street, and the gambling houses were open the way they were always open now, and Frank Kellerman walked back up into the town his father had helped make with the first case of legal beer in fifteen years held against his chest, thinking that Otto would have had opinions about all of it and would still have opened a bottle.

He got the parlor door unlocked with one hand and set the case on the walnut bar and stood there a minute in the dark, not turning the lights on yet. He could sell it in the morning. Right now he pried a cap off against the edge of the bar the way you were not supposed to and poured one out into a glass and held it up to the little light coming in off the street, the color coming up gold and alive in it, and he had gotten this far, all the way to the glass in his hand, before he understood that he did not have anybody left to drink it with. He set the glass down on the bar where his father used to stand. He would drink it. He just wanted to look at it first.

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