The Black Train (8 page)

Collier laughed at the surprising, bold remark. He didn’t really care for the product, either, but the question nagged,
What the hell is a dishwasher doing drinking an obscure smoked beer?
“Well, sometimes business has its demands. Every now and then I have to give a nod to a beer that’s not all that great.”

Now she smiled. “Oh, I understand. Advertisers.”

“Bingo.”

“I have to do the same thing, too. It kills me to post a Bud happy hour…but if we run the special we get a discount. Don’t know how people can drink it.”

“But more people drink it than anything else,” Collier noted. “Business is business. One has to accommodate the market. But let me just say that this house lager is excellent. Could you please pass my compliments on to the brewer?”

“You just did,” she said.

Collier was stunned. “You—”

“That’s right, Mr. Collier,” she said with no arrogance. “I’ve got a master brewer degree from the Kulmbach School, and I took supplemental courses at Budvar in Budejovice and Tucher in Nuremberg.” She pointed between two of the service tuns. There hung the certificates in plain view.

“That’s incredible,” he said. In fifteen years of beer writing, he’d never met any American to graduate from Kulmbach, and perhaps only two or three women with master brewer certificates from anywhere. Suddenly, to Collier,
she
was the celebrity. At once, he felt invigorated.
This fiery little woman with black hair and rough hands is the one responsible for what has to be one of the finest lagers in America…Dominique Cusher.

Jiff seemed content to be out of the conversation as
he swigged more beer and shoveled in the rest of his burger. Dominique leaned over on her elbows, smiling. “I guess you’re on vacation, right? I can’t be arrogant enough to think you came all this way to try my Civil War Lager.”

“Actually, I did. A couple of fellow beer snobs told me about it.” He took another sip and found no trace of monotony. “It really is fantastic.”

“Mr. Collier here’s finishin’ up a book,” Jiff barged in.

Collier nodded. “I need one more entry for my Great American Lagers project. I don’t want to jump the gun, now, but I’m pretty sure this is going to be it.”

“That would be a true honor.” She tried to contain the thrill. But her eyes sparkled. “No palate fatigue yet, huh?”

“None,” Collier admitted. “I’m not finding any deficits. Let me buy
you
one. It’s known as good luck—”

“To buy the brewer a glass of their own beer,” she finished. “Goes all the way back to the Reinheitsgebot Purity Law.” Dominique poured herself one, then clinked glasses with Collier and Jiff (though Jiff’s slopped a bit out of his glass).

“Prost,”
she and Collier said at the same time. “Who’s he?” Jiff said.

“It’s German for ‘cheers,’ Jiff,” she informed.

“Aw, yeah, that’s right…”

Collier smiled at her. “I’d try some of your other selections, too, but I should wait. I don’t want anything to interfere with my initial impressions of the lager. Is there anything unique about the recipe that you could tell me?”

“It’s a family tweak,” she said. She seemed to nurse her glass in exact increments. “A variation of Saaz hops and some temperature jinks in the worting process. But please don’t tell anyone that. My ancestors would crawl out of their graves to come after me.”

“So you’re a family of brewers?”

“Yep. This tavern’s been here in various incarnations
since the beginning of the 1800s, and the Cushers managed to hang on to it all that time, even through the war. When federal troops captured the town in 1864, they burned every single building downtown
except
this tavern. When the Yankees tried the beer, they didn’t dare put a torch to the place.”

“Good sense.”

“The only other structure they didn’t burn was the Gast House, now Mrs. Butler’s bed-and-breakfast.”

“I wonder why they didn’t burn that, too,” Collier questioned. “They were pretty torch-happy once they started to win.”

“Jiff can tell you that,” she said.

Again, that pained look on Jiff’s face. “Aw, come on, Dominique. I been tryin’ hard not to let any of that creepy B.S. get ta Mr. Collier.”

“I knew it,” Collier said. “Ghost stories. Haunted folklore.”

“The way it goes,” the woman began, “is that when the Union commander sent a team of men up to the Gast House, he had to wind up putting them in the stockade.”

“The stockade? What on earth for?”

“Because they refused to carry out their orders.”

“They refused to burn the house, you mean?”

Dominique nodded with a mischievous grin. “They said they were too afraid to go inside, said there was an ungodly presence.”

Jiff frowned, as expected, but Collier wasn’t impressed. “That’s all?”

“No. Then another squad of men were sent up to the house, and…” Her eyes shined at Jiff. “Jiff, tell Mr. Collier what happened.”

“Shee-it,” Jiff said under his breath. “The second squad never came back, so’s the Yankee commander went up there hisself and saw that the whole squad hanged thereselfs.”

“From the same tree that Harwood Gast had hanged himself a year and a half previous. The tree’s still there, too, right Jiff? That giant oak next to the fountain.”

“Yeah, but it all ain’t nothin’ but a bushel basket full’a horse flop, Mr. Collier.”

Collier chuckled. “I’ve got to tell you, Jiff, it’s a fascinating story, but…I don’t believe any of it. So you can relax.”

“Thank God…”

“Regional folklore has always interested me, but at the end of the day,” Collier said, and paused for effect. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“But Jiff’s right,” Dominique added. “There are a lot of ghost stories around here, typical of any Civil War town. Funny thing is,
our
stories are a bit harder-edged than most.”

“Harder-
edged?
” Collier asked.

Jiff butted in again. “So, wow, that’s really interestin’, that this beer’s been around since the war. I didn’t even know they
had
beer way back then.”

Collier knew Jiff was desperate to change the subject.
But why would silly ghost stories bother him so much?
Another Southern cliché? Were people from the South more superstitious than anyone else? Collier doubted it. But the pedant in him couldn’t resist the deflecting remark. “Actually, Jiff, beer’s been around for at least eight thousand years, and in earlier civilizations, it was the main carbohydrate staple. Before man figured out that they could turn grain into bread, they were turning it into beer.”

Dominique accentuated, “Early nomads discovered that they could boil ground-up grain, like barley, wheat, and millet, and eat it as a porridge. But when they accidentally let it sit around, or when rain would saturate their grain stores, it would ferment and become ale. It had the same nutritional value as bread but it wouldn’t
go bad, like bread does, because of the alcohol content. And let’s not forget the additional fact. You don’t get a buzz from bread…”

Collier and Dominique spent the next half hour bantering more about beer. When he offered to buy her another, she declined with a comment that struck Collier as odd: “No, thanks. I never drink more than one beer a day.”

Collier found this astonishing. “But you’re a brewer, for God’s sake.”

“Well, that’s sort of the point.” She said it all very non-chalantly. “I’m a Christian. I don’t let myself get drunk. You know, the body’s a temple of the Lord, and all that.”

Collier’s eyes shot back to the cross around her neck.
What an odd thing to say
…He struggled for a response that wasn’t stilted. “Well, Jesus drank wine, right?”

White teeth gleamed in her grin. “Yeah, but he didn’t get shit-faced and swing from chandeliers.”

Collier had to laugh.

“And that’s the kind of stuff that happens when
I
drink too much,” she went on, “so…one’s my limit. I figure the least I can do is not insult God by getting pissy drunk.”

Collier was intrigued by the strangeness of it all. The mild profanity mixed with a matter-of-fact religious sentiment. “My own personal rule is no more than three a day; it’s no fun to write about beer when you’re hungover.” Then he looked at his glass and realized that he’d just finished his fourth. “But I’m being a hypocrite today. One more please. And another for Jiff.”

“Thanks much, Mr. Collier,” Jiff said, slurring “much” as “mlush” and “Mr.” as “Mlister.”

When Dominique returned with two more, Collier felt the need to continue. “But I’ve never thought of having a few beers as much of a sin. At least I hope it’s not.”

“Inebriation leads to temptation,” she said. She was unconsciously fingering her cross now.

“I’ve definitely been guilty of that,” Collier admitted.

“Sure, and we all have. Making an effort to stay sober is a form of repentance”—she frowned as if irritated with herself—“but I’m not trying to Holy Roll you. It’s just my personal view. Spiritual beliefs are individual. When you’re in the bar business as long as I’ve been, you learn fast—”

“Never talk about religion in a bar.” Collier knew.

“You got that right. Anyway, I don’t want you to think I’m a Holy Roller. Telling other people how to live is the worst hypocrisy. I think it’s best to show your faith by example, not chatter and finger-pointing. If you’re a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, whatever. Live it, don’t talk it is what I try to do.”

This girl is cool,
Collier realized. He also realized he was half drunk.
Don’t make a dick of yourself!
“You weren’t telling me how to live, you were just explaining why you only drink one beer a day. Beer snobbery is a sophisticated science. If you drink too many, you might as well be guzzling domestic draft—”

“Because no one can appreciate the nuances of fine beer, not with a load on.”

God, I really dig her,
Collier acknowledged to himself. Even the way she talked—half colloquial, half philosophical—seemed sexy. She looked at her watch, then excused herself. “I have to go upstairs and check the wort. But please don’t leave yet.”

“Wouldn’t think of it. I might even have to have a sixth glass of your lager. See, my rules go out the window pretty fast,” he joked, “but I can only blame you.”

“Me?”

“For being the purveyor of one of the very best lagers in America.”

She smiled at the overt compliment, then slipped away through a door behind the bar.

Jiff leaned over, concerned. “Shee-it, Mr. Collier. She say she had
warts?
Man, you don’t want none’a that.”

Collier was quickly learning to frown and smile in amusement simultaneously. “Not warts, Jiff.
Wort.
Wort is beer before the yeast and hops have been added. After the solution ferments and is filtered of its excess proteins, it officially becomes beer.”

“Oh, yeah, well, now that I thunk of it, I’m pretty sure I knew that, and, yes, it’s a damn good thing she ain’t got warts. Not that I ever had ’em—you know, the sexual kind—” Jiff pronounced it “sax-shool.” “And I say it’s plain as barn paint she got a serious torch fer you.”

Collier’s unconfident eyes looked at him. “You…really think so, Jiff?”

Jiff’s head lolled back with a big shucksy grin. “Shee-it, Mr. Collier. Her face was plumb all lit up like a pinball machine when you and her was talkin’ all that beer talk.” Then Jiff wheezed a chuckle, and elbowed Collier. “And—aw, shee-it—I can tell ya someone else who’s got a fierce likin’ for ya, but don’t ya dare say I said so—”

“Lottie,” Collier supposed.

“Aw, yeah, sure, but I ain’t talkin’ ’bout that silly string bean. I mean my ma.”

Collier was duped.
This guy’s telling me that his MOTHER is attracted to me?
“Uh, really?” he said.

“And I gots to tell ya, there’s dudes twenty years younger asking my ma out all the dang time. Yeah, I know, she’s a bit raggy in the face but that’s some body on her, ain’t it?” And then another elbow jabbed Collier in the side.

Collier couldn’t imagine an appropriate response, so he just said, “Your mother’s very nice indeed, Jiff, and very attractive for her age.”

“Yeah, she is, and ya wanna know how I know she likes ya? Huh?”

“Uuuuuuum…sure.”

“It weren’t that she told me, now, but it’s ’cos whenever a single fella checks in that she’s got a twinkle for, she gives him room three. Your room.”

Collier’s brain chugged through preinebriation.
What the hell? What could my room have to do with
…“Oh, you mean because it’s better than the other rooms?”

“Naw, naw.” Jiff waved his hand. He elbowed Collier one more time and whispered, “It’s ’cos of the view. Bet she even told ya that, huh? That room three’s got the best view?”

“Actually, she did but—” The ridiculous conversation was growing
more
ridiculous.
I guess the view from my balcony is pretty good but it’s nothing really special.
“The view of the mountain? The garden?”

“Naw, naw,” Jiff wheezed in his own amusement. He slapped his knees. “I’m gonna leave ya in suspense, Mr. Collier.” A glance to the bar clock. “I best git my tail back to the house ’cos I still got some work to do.”

“Oh, well, let me drive you back.”

Another dismissive wave of hand. “Naw, naw, wouldn’t think of it. You stay here’n jaw with Dominique. It ain’t but a ten-minute walk and tell ya the truth I could use some fresh air ’cos I am more hammered than a hunnert-year-old fence post.” Jiff wobbled when he pushed his stool out. “But thanks again for treatin’ me, Mr. Collier. You really are a swell guy”—he winked—“and one I’d be proud to see datin’ my ma.”

I don’t believe it. This guy’s trying to set me up with his MOTHER.
“Uh, yeah, Jiff, thanks for coming out.” He awkwardly shook Jiff’s hand and bid him a good night.

Yep. Strange damn day—
the bar clock showed him it was only nine P.M.—
and it’s not even over yet.

He turned on his stool just to people-watch but noticed Jiff walking the wrong way up the street.
The inn’s in the opposite direction
…But what did it matter?
Probably bored shitless listening to Dominique and me talk beer facts.
Still…