The Sparks Nugget

Pete Kellerman walked off the long shift at the Southern Pacific roundhouse on the night of February twenty-sixth, 1955, washed up at the locker room sink, pulled on his coat over his work coveralls, and stepped out onto B Street to find the block in front of him lit up brighter than he had ever seen it.

He was thirty-five. He had hired on at the roundhouse in 1939, gone overseas in 1943, come back in 1945, and gone right back to the roundhouse with the same number on his locker. He lived four blocks from the yard with his wife Doris and his two boys in a small house his father had paid off in 1947. He worked the swing shift on weekdays and the day shift one Saturday in three, and B Street was the street he walked home on six nights out of seven, in all weathers, for sixteen years.

The B Street he was looking at now was not the B Street he had walked home on yesterday.

A long electric sign was running along the front of the new building across the street, the bulbs racing one after another around the letters of the name, NUGGET, in the slanted lettering of a casino marquee. The doors of the place stood open and held open with sandbags. A small crowd was clotted around the doors waiting to get in. A man in a tuxedo, who Pete did not recognize, stood on the sidewalk holding a clipboard and counting heads as they entered. Music was coming out, a small house band, and the smell of fried food, and the round bright glow that casinos in their first hour have, before the smoke and the carpets and the human weight of an afternoon have softened the light to its working color.

Pete stood on the curb. He had known the Nugget was opening tonight. The whole roundhouse had been talking about it for two weeks. Dick Graves, a man who had run small Nuggets down in Yerington and Carson City, had bought the lot on B Street and put up the building over the winter, and the foreman had said at the morning meeting that Graves was a serious man and that the place would not last but might be worth seeing once. Most of the day shift had said they would walk over after work. Pete had said he would see.

He crossed the street.

The man with the clipboard nodded to him without checking the list. Pete went in.

The room was not large. A bar ran along one wall, a row of slot machines along another, a small coffee shop counter at the back, and a single blackjack table near the front window where a woman in a dark dress was dealing to four men in suits, smiling, calling out the count in a clear unhurried voice. The crowd was a B Street crowd. Most of them Pete knew. There were two men from his own crew, in their work coats, drinking beers at the bar. There was the postmaster from the substation on Fifteenth, in a tan suit with a carnation in his lapel. There was the manager of the corner grocery and his wife. There was the conductor he had worked the same shift with for the better part of a decade, standing alone by the slot machines with his hands in his coat pockets, watching the room.

At the back of the room, near the kitchen door, a man stood with two men in dark suits who were probably bankers. He was a tall man in his late forties, in a single-breasted gray suit, with a quiet face and the alert posture of a man who was hearing every conversation in the room without looking like he was listening to any of them. Pete had seen pictures in the paper. The man was Graves.

Pete did not approach him. He went to the bar and ordered a beer.

The bartender, who he did not know, drew the beer.

“Quite a night,” the bartender said.

“It is.”

“Are you a Sparks fellow.”

“Born and raised.”

“Then welcome. The boss said tonight is the first night the town has had a Nugget. Hopes you will come back.”

“I will tell my wife about it. She might come down on Friday.”

“She’ll be welcome. Coffee shop opens at six in the morning starting tomorrow. Twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours,” Pete said.

“That is the plan.”

Pete drank half the beer slowly. He looked around the room. He nodded to the men from his crew. They raised their bottles back. The conductor by the slot machines saw him and lifted his chin in greeting and went back to watching.

He thought about what the conductor was thinking. The conductor was a careful man and slow to speak. Pete suspected the conductor was thinking what Pete himself was thinking, which was that a place like this on B Street meant something for Sparks that the men who worked the yard had not yet entirely understood. Sparks had been built around the yard and had been a yard town for fifty-one years, since the railroad had moved its operations east from Wadsworth in 1904. The yard was still the largest employer in town and would, Pete believed, remain so for as long as freight ran across the Sierra. But for the first time, in the small lit room he was standing in, Sparks had a place that was not about the yard. The new place was about people from somewhere else coming to Sparks on purpose. It was a thing the town had never been before.

He finished the beer.

He paid the bartender a quarter and left a dime tip on the wood. He said good night to the men from his crew. He passed Graves without speaking and Graves did not look up. He went out through the open doors.

On the sidewalk he stopped. The lights were still racing around the marquee. The crowd at the doors was still clotted. A late arrival, a man in a topcoat, came past him into the building.

Pete pulled his coat tighter and turned for home. The sidewalk was cold under his work boots. From half a block down he could still hear the band. He walked. After fifty yards he stopped at the corner and turned back, once, to look at the building before he turned again and continued west.

He did not look back a second time.

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