So, Sully Baker got off the train in Placerville. Something happened, though, according to the story; he decided not to get back on the train. Instead he bought a house near the railway station. During the war, Sully had been an ambulance driver. He tried to get work driving deliveries, but those jobs were already taken by people who’d gotten shipped back before Sully, who’d volunteered to be one of the last out. He railed about that all the way to his deathbed, people say. “Them damn deserters” he called them, “profiteers and weak-wristed sons-of-whores!” he was known to yell after too many beers.
The only other thing Sully Baker had learned to do during the war was to brew beer. He never told anyone the secret, though. “Bad for business,” he’d say and then change the subject to the White Sox, his only other area of expertise, they say. So he ordered some seeds, did some planting, and eventually started brewing his own beer. Turned out that most of the local men became very fond of that particular beer, and most liked Sully, himself. They started coming by asking for bottles of it, and Sully started to stack up money, always with a smile. He was getting one over on those “damn deserters”. After a time, he married a local girl, and was putting away enough money to buy the house they lived in. Kids came along and one day the wife said that she didn’t like the men always coming around, talking loud and spitting on her porch.
So, Sully bought a nearby house, moved his equipment over to it, and the men started showing up. He put some tables in, got a television, bought a few cases of this, a couple of bottles of that, and in no time had men coming from two or three towns over. Word got out, and because it was so close to the tracks, people could get off the train, have a beer or two while they waited, then catch their connecting train right as it was leaving. Sully’s, they started calling it for obvious reasons, and it became known to a lot of folks as the first decent place to grab a beer before heading home (or the last decent place to grab a beer before heading north). Sully hired a girl to be nice to the men, then hired another when Friday nights got too much for the two of them to work alone anymore. Important men were known to stop there, and Sully always had them sign their bar tabs, which he never let them pay. Most of those famous papers are still mounted on the wall to this day.
Eventually, of course, Sully died. I’m thinking about all this as I round the last bend and see the dilapidated old building ahead. The odd thing is that he never really named the place. It was always “Sully Baker’s place” to people of his generation. No neon sign out front saying anything. Of the four kids he had, only one, the next to last, was interested in the bar. That boy was named Dwight, “after ol’ Ike” Sully had always said. Dwight did what he could, but had no head for business, so he nearly ran it into the ground. It was his wife who stepped in and kept the place running. She caught him with one of the barmaids, and it maybe should have shocked people that she got the bar in the divorce, but it didn’t. She was the one who put the sign up that said, simply, Sully’s. Since then, the Baker family (through Dwights kids and their kids) had always owned it. All the town kids whisper about it when they’re younger, try to sneak in when they’re high school age, and forget about it when they go off to college and discover whatever the new, hip micro-brewery is for whatever town they end up in. ‘The ones that go off to college, that is’, I thought. The ones who stay? Sully’s is where they go Friday nights. Thursday nights, too, most of them, I thought, and smiled. I’m about to open the door when I notice that the sign has either not been turned on, or has burned out. For some reason, that feels important to me; it feels right.
I opened the door. Neon signs colored the drifting smoke from gray to red or blue. Something that sounded like a country singer who’d gone surfing was playing on the juke box. The five tables were crowded with overweight men and the corner booths with younger men with trimmed beards trying to impress women. The whole place smelled like an empty beer glass left out in the sun too long.
At the bar, five guys and one woman sat. None of them was under thirty, or two-hundred and fifty pounds. It reminded me of being in the break room at the garage. Behind the bar was one of Sully’s great grandkids. I hadn’t been here a lot even when I lived here, so I didn’t know his name. He seemed familiar, though, in that way some kid who was a senior and played football when you were a freshman does twenty years later. I walked toward the bar and, at the far end, a group of three men burst into laughter. One of them pounded the bar with the flat of his hand. I noticed one of them wasn’t laughing so much as smiling, like he’d just done something important. It was Bud Gantner.
He waved me over. I realized, as I walked, that people’s eyes followed me. Not in a mean way, but just in a ‘who’s this guy?’ way. They knew who the regulars were, and I wasn’t one of them.
Bud turned around on his stool and extended his hand. I took it and smiled. “Glad you could make it,” he said. The other men he was sitting with turned a bit, but kept their backs mostly to me. Bud gestured to his left at a bulky man in a gray pullover. “Mikey Kendall, this is Bart Tipton. Bart does contracting work here and in Eukiah.” The big man wiped his huge hand off on his pants, then extended it to me. I took it and smiled. Bud gestured to the other man, smaller but larger through the middle and with a beard. “This is Ed Kawalcek. He drives trucks for the bottling plant.” His grip was strong and I don’t know why, but I tried to grip back just as strong.
“Pleasure,” I said. Both men smiled, and Ed tipped his mug up to finish his beer.
“This here is Albert Kendall’s boy,” Bud said. Ed hid it fairly well, but I saw his eyes roll.
“Oh, yeah?” Bart asked. I heard it in his voice, too; my father wasn’t a popular guy.
“Yeah,” I said, “but don’t hold it against me,” I shot in. The men grinned some, and Bart chuckled once. I’d heard someone say something like that once, and I thought maybe it would work here. It seemed to. It looked like the tension in both men’s shoulders eased some.
“Find a stool,” Bud said.
Ed pushed his mug forward and stood, “Here, you can have mine. I gotta’ get home before the wife decides I’d look better stuffed and mounted,” he said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
He nodded, did a sort-of half serious salute to Bud and Bart. Bart stood at that moment, too. “I gotta get, too, I suppose. Supper’s done cold and in the microwave,” Bart said. He turned to me as I watched Ed walk away and extended his hand, again. “Pleasure to meet you. Say hello to your dad for me,” he said. I shook his hand. He patted Bud on the back and walked away. I sat down where Bart had been.
The bartender came over and before I could answer, Bud said “Sully’s for him, and I’ll have another.” It smelled like he’d had a few already. I didn’t mind, though; he seemed very relaxed.
“So, Mikey, how the hell are ya’?” he asked. Two mugs full of light golden beer appeared in front of us. Bud took his to his mouth immediately.
“I dunno. So-so, I guess. How about you?” I took a sip of my beer and it was exactly what I remembered; sharp and cold.