The Gigafactory Announcement

Tom Reinholt was two beers into a Thursday afternoon in a downtown bar off Virginia Street when the television over the bottles cut away from the ballgame to a press room in Carson City, and he watched the governor of Nevada shake hands with the man who ran Tesla, and he understood before the crawl at the bottom of the screen even finished spelling it out that the thing everybody in his business had been holding their breath over for six months had just come down on the right side of the line, that it was coming here, and that the town he had spent his whole life in had just, in the space of a handshake, become a different town.

It was the fourth of September, 2014. The bar had maybe a dozen people in it, day-shift casino workers and a couple of contractors and Tom, and for a second nobody said anything because the sound was down and the ballgame had just been there, and then one of the contractors down the rail said the word out loud, the factory, and somebody else said Storey County, and then the whole low room came up at once the way a room does when a thing everyone privately wanted turns out to be true. A man Tom had never met clapped him on the shoulder as if they had won something together, which, Tom thought, watching the screen, they sort of had.

He was forty-three. He was a developer, which in Reno in 2014 was still close to a confession, because he was one of the ones who had been standing in the smoking crater of the last boom for six years now. He had come up in the good years, the early two-thousands when the money was loose and the condos went up on Virginia Street and everybody was going to get rich turning old casinos into lofts, and then he had watched all of it stop between one quarter and the next in 2008, the cranes freezing, the phones going silent, the projects he had signed for turning into personal guarantees that nearly took his house. He had spent the years since doing small careful honest work, a strip building here, a warehouse rehab there, keeping the lights on, and he had stopped, somewhere in there, believing that the town was ever going to catch a wave again in his working life.

And here it was on the television. The state had beaten out four others for it, California and Texas and the rest, had put up something north of a billion dollars in tax breaks to do it, and the legislature was going to go into a special session the next week to make it law, and the plant was going to go up out east past Sparks in the industrial land in Storey County, off the interstate, in the sagebrush where there had been nothing at all his whole life. Thousands of jobs, the crawl said. A battery factory the size of which nobody could quite picture. On the screen the man from Tesla was saying something Tom could not hear about the future, about the whole point of the thing being to change how the world moved, and the governor stood beside him looking like a man who had just landed a fish he had been fighting for a year.

Tom’s first thought, before the second one caught it, was clean and greedy and glad. He knew, the way he knew his own hands, exactly what was about to happen to every acre of dirt and every empty building between here and that plant. He knew that the people who owned land right now, today, this afternoon, before the rest of the country understood, were about to own something else entirely. He had four small things under contract and a fifth he had been too scared to close on, and he thought, sitting there, that he should not have been scared, that he should go close on it tonight.

The second thought came in behind the first and sat down heavier. He thought about his sister Jess, who had opened her gallery two years back on the cheap dead end of South Virginia because it was the one place in town a person with no money could still get a room, and he thought about the rents down there, which were going to stop being cheap now, fast, and about the painters in her shows who could barely make them cheap. He thought about his great-grandmother Clara, who had come to this town with nothing in 1920 and opened a dress shop, and about his father Dennis selling records to broke kids on the same street, and he understood that his family had always made its living in the low years, in the cheap rooms, off the people who did not have much, and that the wave now coming was going to be very good for the people who already owned things and was going to be something else for everybody else, and that he, Tom, was on the owning side of that line for the first time in his life, and did not entirely know how he felt to be standing there.

There would be meetings about it. There already were, quietly, before the announcement, and there would be a flood of them now, about water and roads and where forty thousand new people were supposed to live, and Tom knew most of the players. Maria Morales would be in some of them. She had been at the city half a century, had drawn the maps back when they bulldozed her own family’s river neighborhood for the freeway, was old now and long retired and got asked onto commissions because she remembered every promise the town had ever made itself and broken, and Tom had sat across a table from her enough times to know she would look at this the way she looked at everything, which was to ask, before anyone else got to the good part, who exactly was going to pay for it and who was going to get moved.

He put money on the bar. The room was still loud behind him, the ballgame forgotten, a couple of the casino guys already talking about applying out east, about what a factory job paid against a pit job, and Tom pushed out through the door into the flat white heat of Virginia Street in September and stood on the sidewalk with his phone in his hand. Downtown ran north from him toward the arch, the old casino corridor half of it dark, and south behind him toward the river and Jess’s street and the dead motels beyond that, all of it, every foot of it, worth more now than it had been an hour ago.

He should call the seller on the fifth deal. He stood there in the sun with the number already up on the screen, his thumb over it, the whole tilting town at his back, and for a long moment he did not press it.

---