December, 1919 – Chapter 11

Welcome to chapter eleven of “December, 1919″, a serialized novel written by Oliver Gray. New chapters will be published every week, unless the author has radical arm surgery. Links to all published chapters can be found here. 

Chapter 11

I flipped the big German’s card over and over in my hand, staring off at a darkening Philadelphia skyline. The clouds hung low, pregnant with snow due any day now, hugging the city in a cold embrace. The weather matched the mood; all the talk in the taverns felt muted and melancholy, like the entire city was collectively mourning those last few drops of booze left to die too young in the bottom of barrels. I’d cloistered myself on the roof of the brewery, tucked back behind the second stacked brick chimney where I thought no one could easily find me.

There, in the shadow of my father’s legacy, I cried. The wind slapped so fierce against my face I thought my tears would freeze, freeze like my spirit had as I watched the flames lick at the wood of his coffin. Threats and shadows finally snapped my last thread of stoicism, and I sat, like a child lost in the sprawling maze of a rush hour downtown, unsure what to do, or how to do it.

Berman and Moore never left my mind, but now, given Ritter’s insistence and insinuation, I saw demons in every shadow of every street corner. Protection? From who, and how? Legally, physically, emotionally? I looked down again at the crisp edges of the card, tracing my fingers over the elongated fours of the accompanying phone number. I hadn’t called. Not yet. I needed time to understand the danger, and know if it was only me who needed protection.

At the thought of my decisions putting my mother or Virginia or sweet William in danger, I abandoned any attempt at stifling my sadness. My sobs meandered upward on the draft between buildings, disappearing forever into the grey as my body purged itself of all the pent up fear and frustration.

“Crying won’t solve anything.” The voice startled me into action, and I jumped up, drew the small knife I’d been cradling like a paranoid vagrant, and turned to face its owner.

George looked terrible. Worse than terrible. His face pallid and sickly with huge, dark circles under each eye that made it like he’d just gone ten rounds with Jess Willard, and then another ten with Jack Dempsy. He’d lost weight, too, but still towered over me, imposing and austere. I moved back, keeping the knife out in front of me like a kitten brandishing its underdeveloped claws at that the maws of an hungry timber wolf.

“No need for that, Jack.” He lowered himself onto a brick outcropping across from me. “I’m not here to hurt you. In fact the opposite. Sit down.”

He motioned casually for me to pocket the knife and lower my guard. I put the knife back into its little leather home, but kept my hand wrapped around the handle, my nerves too cautious to trust anything or anyone.

“Heh, this prohibition might be the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Haven’t had a drink in two weeks. Was pretty rough at first, but I think the light’s finally coming back into my soul.” He held out his large, gnarled hand flat, palm down. It shook violently for a second before he closed it into a fist, brought it to his face, and blew warm air into the hole in the middle. He shivered, too, shoulders involuntarily shrugging despite a very heavy canvas coat.

“I can’t apologize for what I did. It happened and the consequences can’t be undone.” He didn’t make eye contact as he spoke, just stared off at some point behind me. “Virginia won’t talk to me. I understand, of course, but it’s killing me. Her mother doesn’t know anything, and the lie, or at least the lack of truth, eats away at me every day. I haven’t touched a drop since. The whiskey transforms me into a man I can’t trust.”

“George…” I said, trying to be gentle.

He cut me off. “You don’t have to do that, Jack. So like your dad. Try to make everything better even when it isn’t,” he said as he shivered, or shook, again. I couldn’t tell whether he was fighting the DTs or the cold, or some awful combination. “Your dad was like a brother to me. Losing him, then losing the brewery, then losing my entire identity to this temperance movement…I just couldn’t cope.”

I relaxed my grip on the blade and let the tension slide out of my muscles. He seemed sincere, and from his demeanor, it looked like the cold turkey detoxing had left him too weak to be a threat to me. My fear at being caught alone with him suddenly shifted to pity. Strange, I thought, how our emotions can flutter so ephemerally from one extreme to the other.

He sniffed, wiping his nose. “I never expected you and Ginnie to…well…you know. Andrew always joked about it, but she’s my girl, and I never accepted that she’d grown up. I want you to know…” his voice dropped, like he couldn’t figure out what to say, or was very reluctant to say what he needed to. “I’m happy for her. For you. Who better for my girl than my best friend’s son?”

He took his hand out of his coat pocket, and held it forward. The last hand I’d shook was Ritter’s, that massive, powerful paw that made my hand feel like it was made of tissue. George’s hand felt strong, too, but less assertive, less mighty, more connected and forgiving, like the callous digits, scarred and dry, were forgiveness and embarrassment incarnate. I took it, shook it. He coughed and flipped the collar of his coat up against the stubble on his neck.

“Let’s get down,” I said, shaking off a shiver myself. “It’s going to start snowing any minute now, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to climb down a slick, frozen ladder.” George forced a smile, and weakly got to his feet. As he shuffled toward the steel railing that lead back down to the brewery floor, he turned back to me.

“I know it won’t matter, but can you tell Virginia that I miss her?” It was hard to tell in the bluster, but for a moment I thought I saw a tear well in his eye.

“Crying won’t solve anything,” I said, flashing a cheeky smile.

He sniffed and nodded, before disappearing down the ladder, into the dark shadows of the brewery floor below.

To be continued…

The Session #93: Mendenhall

(This month’s session comes to us from Brian, Maria, and their RV, Stanley, over at The Roaming Pint. The topic asks us to walk a slightly different path than normal and not talk about “what” beery places we’ve visited, but “why” visiting them is important.)

Enough salmon crowd themselves into the creek that you think you might be able to walk across their silvery backs to the other side. The sockeye slide and bump in an teeming mass of scales, wriggling onward in nonstop reproductive pilgrimage even when the water doesn’t look wide enough for ten of them, never mind a hundred. Tenacious to a fault, those fish.

A short bus ride and a brief hike past black bear warnings deposits you in front of an alien wall of ice; eerie blue glow and otherworldly jagged geometry like features from a Lovecraft fiction. A glacier cuts slow through nature like a cold, sharp blade, sparing no rock or tree, staring out onto the world in unstoppable defiance. Even when a chunk of ice the size of a monster truck cracks and falls from its face, Mendenhall does not flinch.

The air doesn’t like tourists. It whips and hisses, stinging eyes and ears and anything exposed. The gentle waterfall in Mendenhall’s left hand throws icy mists at anyone foolish enough to get close. Groups of tourists talk about bears and wolves, and best practices to avoid being mauled. If not for the awe of it all, being a spec and blip in front of a force of nature that defies geology physically and temporally, this lake would be a terrible place to visit.

Your throat hurts. You’re pretty sure you picked something up from that guy who was coughing in the buffet line on the ship. The constant blustering keeps you alert, but you want nothing more than to curl back up in your cabin, let the lapping of waves against the hull be your Alaskan lullaby. But you’ve only got one day in Juneau. More like eight hours. Four hundred and eighty minutes to take in the entire spirit of a town, a state, a wilderness; a place you may not see again for a long time, if ever.

So what can you do? Tired and sick but racked by the guilt of potentially missing a once-in-a-lifetime adventure?

Go have a beer.

Your cab driver didn’t know there was a brewery in Juneau. You show him the star surrounding the “Alaskan Brewing Company” logo on the poorly detailed cruise ship map, and he chuckles playfully; an audible admission that he probably should have known it was there. The yellow Ford bobs down Glacier highway, ending between two evergreen-decked hills bigger than most of the mountains of Maryland. The building is quiet; no one moves barrels outside, no steam betrays a boil at roil, even the sky darkens from coming storm. You think for a moment that you misread the hours, that in the fog of fever you’d forgotten what day it was.

But the lights are on, and you seem movement on the bottling line. The door to taproom swings open, and you’re greeted by three employees but no one else. In that moment, you have the brewery, basically, all to yourself. You admittedly don’t know all that much about beer. You just started reading about it, buying, trying different beers, so you feel like sort of an impostor smiling for a picture between two towers of stainless. But it’s all Willy Wonka to you. The lovely barkeep lets you sample everything; the ham and bacon of the smoked porter, the overwhelming hop of the IPA, the crisp just-to-your-taste finish of the iconic Alaskan Amber. For a moment, in the cozy wood-lined room, surrounded by the welcoming warmth of the familiar in a faraway land, your sore throat goes away, you relax, and you feel like you understand a tiny bit more about a place you’d always regarded as rugged and remote.

Why do we visit the places our beer is made? To meet the people who make it. The people who have, by luck or by default, made their living brewing and peddling beer. The people at the brewery are a cross-section of the culture; locals, families, pieces of the town arranged together and presented in a mosaic liquid that’s representative of what it means to live there, now. Sure, you get to wash new tastes across your tongue and see marvels of engineering, but a visit to a brewery isn’t rooted tangible takeaways. The tree’s roots run deeper.

We visit these places to get to know them outside of our preconceived notions. Outside of how they’re represented on TV or the internet. Outside of the polished veneer of marketing and social media posturing. A taproom is real; filled with the actual people behind the beer that brought you there, not field representatives or only tangentially related distributors. To travel for beer is to forge a connection that’s deeper than lips and pint glasses, to learn more about the kinds of people and places that value their product, their business, and making people happy.

It’s fun, yes, to say “I’ve been there” or “I’ve seen that,” but the real reason for our own salmon-like pilgrimage to breweries far and wide is to be able to say, “I met them” and “I get them.”

 

Review: Troegs Sunshine Pils

He wore a wide-brimmed hat to keep his fair skin out of direct light. Long sleeves covered his existing, blistering burns, and he sweat like a mobster taking a polygraph. His thick white clothes were his only armor against the rays that bombarded plant, stone, and man.

His garden was wilted. The plants struggled to grow with what little water they were provided, and lost most of it to the heat of the day. The shade of his wooden shed gave them some respite, but the sun moved quickly and consistently. He lost a whole row of beets to a wildfire a few weeks earlier. He sat and watched as their above ground leaves burst into flames, spontaneously combusting under the midday sun. All that was left were blackened husks. The fruit below the earth dry and hard, unfit for human consumption.

But still he farmed, or farmed as best he could. The animals had perished long ago, and the few cacti and longrasses that could survive the summers make for bland, unsatisfying meals. He dug his rows at night, when the temperature dropped to a tolerable one hundred and three degrees. This was the only time the ground was breakable; he’d ruined 3 good shovel trying to crack the crust of baked clay that covered his land during the daylight hours.

An eye dropper was his watering can. Each drop he placed was precious, so he made sure each plant got only what it needed to not die. The arid soil gulped each drop greedily, and he prayed that it would seep low enough to nourish the parched roots. The plants survived through his meticulous care, but they did not thrive.

One night while digging a row for the tomatillo seeds he had found in his basement, his shovel struck something hard. The reverberations rushed to his shoulders, causing him to drop the shovel and grab his right arm in pain. As he slumped to the ground, he could see the edge of what he had struck. Something big. Something metal.

The next night, he ignored his rows and began to dig up the newly found object. It could be anything from what he could see of it; an old car, a chest, a washing machine, or even part of some left over military ordnance. He worked unrelentingly to unearth whatever it was; this find was the first thing to break his routine in a number of years.

It took a week of nightly digging, taking a few hours each night to drop water on his existing plants, to dig a hole big enough to get a true sense of the thing. It was rectangular and heavy, roughly the height of a man, with the outline of what appeared to be two hinged doors, caked with dirt. He dared not open it. He feared its power.

The thing became an object of worship and wonder; a monolith that he admired as much as he feared. The world had been destroyed by the evils of men and machines, and it was entirely possible this massive metal block was a weapon that would put a quick end to him and his little patch of struggling life. But something inside of him burned to know its secrets, burned like the sun in the middle of the day, burned like the nuclear clouds that drifted across the planet.

The fire inside overwhelmed him one evening. He found himself standing in front of his god, shovel stuck in the crack between the doors, ready to pry them open and meet his maker. He stood at the ready for hours. Finally, with a breath of despair, he put his weight against the shovel. The doors swung open easily. He was hit by something he hadn’t felt since he was a just a boy.

Cold.

Smoke accompanied the drop in temperature, and he stood for a minute shocked at the relief he felt. Large bricks of smoking, translucent material sat in the bottom of the opening behind the doors, radiating a refreshing coolness. In the bright moonlight he strained to see what else was inside. It was a cavernous thing, this cold metal box, but the only thing that sat on a shelf in the middle were 6 brown bottles, all near freezing and almost painful to the touch.

He knew bottles from his childhood. He removed one and carefully used the shovel to remove its cap. A small hiss let him know its seal had stayed intact. He pressed it to his lips.

The rest he poured onto his plants.

9 out of 10.

It is incredibly difficult to take a picture of direct sunlight.

Review: Harpoon White UFO

As I stood staring out at the blue of Deep Creek Lake, cold wind ripping at my exposed flesh, water lapping aggressively against the shore, I heard the voice of the depths. It whispered to me its secrets; long untold tales of souls lost to its icy waves, ancient mysteries that lay in the murk and darkness of the lake bed. The voice echoed infinitely in my ears, like each individual drop was telling me the story of its journey to the clouds and suicidal plunge back to the Earth. For that brief moment I knew nature, and it knew me. I was at peace, and knew zen.

Either that, or I had been drinking. Heavily.

I was in fact standing on the lake shore; I nearly fell in twenty different times. The wind did indeed rip at my exposed flesh; I had forgotten my coat and decided wearing two hoodies was just as good. And I really did think I heard the voice of the lake,  but in retrospect, it could have been the fizzy-popping of the Harpoon White Unfiltered Offering (UFO) in my hand.

I love Harpoon Brewery. There is no other way to describe my attraction and relationship to their beers. They are cute a giggly, charming and warm. I’m pretty sure it is illegal to date a beer (or brewery) otherwise, I may have tried by now.

While Harpoon IPA (heart) is the flagship of this Boston-based brewing company, their UFO line (available in White, Raspberry, Pale Ale, and Hefeweizen) is something special. While I usually avoid wheat beers in an attempt to avoid yeast-related illness (my uvula tends to get all ornery when exposed to too much yeast) these are the exception. I tried the Raspberry variety first and I was hooked.

The idea of adding fruit to beer is arguably the single greatest anthropological advance in human history.

UFO White is a Belgian White style, unfiltered, sour, and thirst quenching. Other popular Belgian whites (namely Blue Moon) rely heavily on orange alone to add a citrus burst to their beer, but UFO White doesn’t. It adds lemon, creating and incredibly potent cirtusy beer that will probably meet or exceed your vitamin C intake for the day.

It pours with almost no lasting head, but leaves a pretty lacing of white across the top of orange-yellow body. It’s a particularly noisy beer; fizzing aggressively with little bubbles jumping wildly, trying to escape the glass.

This is a great conversation beer, as you can drink it as casually as a glass of orange juice. If you drink enough of it, you could probably even talk to things that can’t normally talk. Like lakes.

8.75 out of 10.

This picture makes it look warm outside. It was not warm outside.

Next up: Brooklyn East India Pale Ale!