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From the outside, it doesn’t look like a bar.
That’s sort of the point, though, because the Irishman who owns it isn’t looking to get raided. It looks more like a basement, and tucked underneath an unassuming apartment complex, it passes for one easily. The doorman of the complex is in on the whole deal, he nods patrons to the back staircase when they come sniffing. And winding down the stairs into what seems like pitch darkness, their customers instead come into one of the few places in the city they know they can get a stiff drink.
With Prohibition passing eight years before, their choices became limited. And there were the politics; god, were there ever, between the Irish and the Italians, as if it really matters when the bottle is involved, but money is money and certain hands learned to snatch at it when they can.
Lupe, for one. She’s Mexican, and she knows it looks on her when a person squints with the right type of distrust, on top of that, she’s a woman. When she moves up to Chicago in 1926, she knows her options are limited. And she spends a few months living off her savings and asking around for any kind of work.
It’s not a good time for a woman to want work. There’s not been a chance since the boys settled back in from Europe years before, and most of those boys come home have such a shadow in their stare that it’s not fair to take away their shot at normalcy. Lupe’s not even got family to lean on in Chicago, certainly no one to sweet talk into supporting her.
Finally, the wife of her landlord takes pity.
“You think you could help David out with his business?” She asks. “And we can, oh, work out a pay that’ll cover your rent and your needs. Maybe even some things to perk you up again.”
“Yeah,” Lupe says, thinking she could make being a landlord’s secretary work for long enough. “Yeah, what does he need me to do?”
Then, she learns that he’s got a secretary already. What he offers Lupe is to be the backbone of his night business, the friendly face at the bar and the hands that pour drinks for their neighbors. The first few times she does, those hands are shaking, uncertain. She’s sure at any moment the police will knock their way in. But that day never comes, and Lupe grows into her role as bartender, and lawbreaker.
It doesn’t matter that she’s a woman, either. David thinks it’s for the better, assuring her that the cops find women unassuming, and innocent, and that he trusts having someone with a woman’s intuition to make sense of his customers. He’s also helped to spread the story she told him about being a war widow. Now every customer who sits in front of her for a drink knows that she’s heartbroken about losing her husband and son in the trenches in Germany.
Lupe spends two years learning the bar as well as she knows herself. She has to be the best at everything she does, has to prove to the people around her that she’s got what it takes to be one of them. She can smell when there’s too much ethyl in a bottle, and it should go down the drain. She learns to mix cocktails that haven’t been popular since before the law passed.
And she learns, despite some hard efforts against it, how to meet the smugglers. Her boss has family in Canada, where the prohibition has been ended for as long as America has had it. And they use the trains, and their farming business, to run liquor between Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and Chicago. Lupe becomes quite familiar with Tom McCready, a cousin on her boss’s mother’s side. He comes down on the weekend train, pulling into the station on Mondays with a freight car full of wheat, barley, and flax, carefully arranged to lie over pallets of liquor. Lucky for them, the McCready’s had already been known for their grain transport on the Soo Line - it’s never been suspicious for the family to smooth over their travels.
Lupe’s gone to the station with her boss to pick him up. Mostly, she acts as a lookout while Tom hauls bottles over to the car, and they slip them into the concealed compartments in the trunk and under the seats. They’ve never been stopped or raided, but Lupe does think the system is pretty well designed to prevent discovery. The McCready farm is actually an import source for grain, and they’ve been crossing the border with their harvests for decades; long before the liquor laws.
And it isn’t until she does that for the first time that Lupe realizes the business is much, much bigger than a basement bar she tends every night but Monday. There are more bars than just the one she works in, and a system that sells to - well, everyone. Her boss sells to the pharmacies, to restaurants, to factories. She hears the name Capone thrown around, and Lupe doesn’t know if he’s the head at the top of the ladder she’s sitting on, or if he’s a rival to the business. Keeping her head down is the bare minimum. Making money enough to stash under her mattress is a perk.
“Lupe,” her boss tells her one night, as she’s counting out the cash for him. “I won’t be able to meet the Dominion at the station tomorrow night. Do you think you could take the car down 12th Street and pick my cousin up for me?”
“Deliver, too?” Lupe asks. She’s wary of how many places there are to get caught after the pickup.
“Nah,” he says. “You can bring the car right back, and I’ll see to it.”
“Suppose I can,” she says. It’s her day off, after all, and there’s nothing else she’s got to do.
“Thank you,” David says. “I’ll leave the keys when you close up tonight.” He nods, takes the cash she’s sorted, and slides a stack to her. Then he thumbs a few more bills out of his stack, and adds them to her pile. “Gas,” he says gruffly. “And your troubles.”
Lupe snorts, but she pockets the whole of it and factors it into her night. The Dominion comes in late on Monday nights, after nine, and it’s best to bring Tom back for the night. After that, McCready isn’t Lupe’s problem - he gets back on the train when his business is done, and he’ll reappear every month or so with a new shipment.
Taking the car to the station isn’t difficult, except the next night, when Lupe waits in the dark where Tom usually meets them, and Tom doesn’t show up. She gives a few glances down the rail yard, looking for his familiar form, and sees nothing.
Lupe pulls her jacket a little tighter, and stamps her feet. She’s left the car a little further back, where she can still see it, but Tom would meet her here every time. He knows to.
Finally, when she’s about to give up and head home, or to a pay phone, she sees someone hurrying towards her. A woman, unusually, but a woman who bears herself confidently and wears features that are familiar to Lupe - a McCready, surely, but she doesn’t know which one.
And when this new McCready comes to a stop in front of her, there’s more in her that Lupe finds herself recognizing. McCready is in a sharp suit, more businessman than farmer, or at least attuned to how to draw less attention in this city. Her hair is slicked back, some kind of pomade holding it tight against her head where it pulls into a thin braid.
“Hey,” the stranger says. She’s tall and handsome, blonde with big teeth that show in her easy smile. “Are you Guadalupe?” And she’s holding her hand out. Her other hand is tight on the handle of a small suitcase.
“Lupe,” Lupe corrects, and she takes the stranger’s hand, gives her a firm shake in return. “You’re not Tom.”
“I’m Jess. Tom’s my brother,” says the woman, who does look remarkably like Tom from the times Lupe has met him. “The Mrs. Tom McCready popped out their third baby a coupla weeks ago, so I’ll take over this shipment route.”
“You usually do a different route, then?” Lupe asks. It’s probably because Jess is so interesting that she asks, because she hates thinking about all of the really shady sides of this business - the ones that easily become criminal. It’s one thing to sell liquor, and safe, quality liquor at that, to your community under the table. It’s another to run a smuggling ring across the border, bribing customs officials and carrying guns.
“I’m usually on Twin Cities,” Jess confirms. She tilts her head at Lupe, allows herself a familiar sort of look. “But let’s us get unloaded before my contact here is off the clock.” She looks around for the contact in question, a squirrelly looking railman that she whistles at slowly. He starts at the sound, then gives her a wave.
“The car’s in the usual spot in the lot,” Lupe says. She remembers the cigarette that’s hanging from her fingers like it’s an afterthought, brings it to her mouth slow. Jess watches her do it, from the corner of her eye, like it’s not obvious.
Fuck, Lupe hasn’t met someone else in a while.
She gets to lean on the car and smoke while Jess and the railman unload the freight car that packs the grain from the McCready’s farm inside it. Underneath tightly wrapped bales of wheat and barley are dark bottles of what Lupe knows are bootleg liquors - plenty of gin, some whiskey, others beer.
The glass bottles are dark, brown and black that hides their contents, but there’s no mistaking them. Jess’s hands handle them expertly, running her fingers over them to make sure the glass is in one piece, the seals are unbroken.
There are many compartments in the car; the trunk has a false bottom, the seats pull up, there are spaces over the wheels and under the hood. Jess seems to know them all. In the morning, customs officers will go through the freight cars, rummage through the crop that Jess has now cleared into Lupe’s car. They’ll find nothing. Jess has been counting it all.
“Thanks,” Jess tells the man who has allowed them back here, and shakes his hand. Something is exchanged in the move, money, Lupe guesses. A thank you is nice, but it’s not worth as much.
Then Jess opens the driver’s door. Lupe thinks she might want to take the wheel, since it’s her cousin’s car, but Jess just gestures for Lupe to get in, closes it behind her, and then goes to the passenger side.
It’s almost like being courted, Lupe thinks. She bites her lip on the grin that’s curling upwards.
“You’ll stay in Tom’s apartment?” She asks Jess, who makes herself comfortable.
“Sure will,” Jess answers. Tom’s apartment is just a vacant one in Lupe’s building that Tom McCready makes use of on his business trips. But she supposes any McCready could stay there, and Jess had loaded her suitcase into the trunk.
Lupe nods, and starts the car.
“Thanks for acting as my chauffeur,” Jess says a moment later.
Lupe starts, and laughs. “I was paid to,” she says. “It’s not any problem, though.”
“Mhm,” Jess hums. “No husband to get home and put dinner on the table for?”
Lupe waits several beats before answering, enough to give Jess a different answer in the silence before she speaks. “Lost him in the war,” she says. She doesn’t even give it an affected tone, so Jess knows she’s lying. Giving her the right story. “And a son, too.”
“Sorry to hear it,” Jess responds. She’s professionally courteous to the untruth. “It wasn’t an easy time for the men. But I’m glad to have your evening instead.”
There it is, Lupe thinks. She drums her fingers against the leather of the steering wheel. She meets Jess’s eyes briefly, and nods.
She doesn’t know a lot of other queers but she’s met enough to be familiar with this dance. The way they talk around each other, until they meet in the middle. Everything about Jess tells Lupe that they’re the same; butch, those sweet threads of masculine tied between them. Interested in women, certainly.
“How long are you staying out here?” She asks.
“A little while,” Jess tells her. “I’ve got to catch up with David, and talk a lot of business. See you at work, some nights.”
“What do you drink?”
She watches Jess’s smile grow, the way her lips curl back on all her teeth, the way it looks like Jess is grinning at something Lupe doesn’t even know.
“Beer’s great,” Jess says. “I like a Pabst lager, Schlitz and Guinness are great when we have them.”
“Hmm,” Lupe says. “If it weren’t for the laws, I’d give you some recommendations. You get better beers out of Mexico, you ask me, and some days I’d do just about anything to get my lips around a Sol, or a Pacifico. Corona’s not bad, either, they might have teeth.”
Jess leans back in the seat, turns to face Lupe with her full body.
“I don’t meet many other women who drink beer,” she says. “I like that about you.”
It would be too easy for Lupe to stop the car and give Jess more to like. She can feel it, the staccato humming of the air between them. But she holds back, just a little longer. It’s better to focus on her hands on the wheel of the car, the light clink of the bottles under her seat when she slows to a stop, the way she can feel Jess’s eyes on her–
“You been to Chicago before?” She asks.
“Yeah,” Jess says. “Gotta see my cousin every now and then.”
“But you’ve got the farm in you,” Lupe says. She could tell right away.
“Not dull at all, are you,” Jess says, but it sounds so admiring it couldn’t be an insult at all. “And you…”
“I get what I can get,” Lupe answers. The ranches were her home, once, the small towns with the church across from the saloon and the streets paved for horses, not cars. The heat of sun warming her as if she was a lizard in the sands, every spring, every summer, every fall, every winter. And then she’d gotten caught up in life in the suburbs, in strange limbos of invisibility married to a white man and giving every important part of herself up for it. That home had fit on her like dresses did; too long and she’d tear herself out of her skin for it.
Lately, it had been cities. They were easy to disappear in, an invisible life she could choose with comfort. This was anonymity; preferable to erasure. Lupe could get used to the noises, the cars, the constant presence of people for the surety it gave her in other ways.
“Yeah, you’ve got that in you,” Jess tells her. And if Lupe takes a few seconds too long to shift the stick back into drive, Jess doesn’t say a word for it, and they finish their drive in amicable silence.
When Lupe pulls in to David’s spot in front of the building, his wife is out there to greet Jess, and to give her a warm hug. She greets Lupe the same way, but Lupe isn’t family to anyone, and she turns to look at Jess one last time before she heads down to her apartment. And in a rare instance for Lupe García, her instincts are good. Jess is looking back at her.
It takes a few days for Jess to appear in one of the seats at her bar, but each day that week Lupe starts her shift with inventory, and works her way through the night, she wonders for it. Jess has clearly been there, because someone has been at the bar, someone has been in the stock, and she knows it so well, the slightest touch of a new hand is obvious to her.
She puts a Pabst up on the bar when the day comes, grabbing it easy when she sees Jess slide into a chair across from her. Lupe wants to put her best foot forward, cracking the bottle easily and sliding it on the bar to her.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey, stranger,” Jess answers.
“You made it,” Lupe says. There was never any doubt. Jess takes the dark bottle and tips it towards her in gratitude, rifles for some change. But Lupe shakes her head, and waves it off.
“How’s a place like this make money if the bartender’s giving free beer to every new face fresh off the train in here?” Jess teases. It’s light, and Lupe cracks a grin because she knows what Jess means.
“You think it’s every one of them?” She returns.
“Something special about me, then?” Asks Jess. And doesn’t she know it, from the spark in her eye while she sips at the Pabst. It’s a mediocre beer, that’s for sure, and Lupe would love to see Jess swallow around something worth tasting, a good Mexican lager to compete with what the Americans suffer on.
“Tell me about Moose Jaw,” she says, firmly. “What’s worth seeing up there?”
But then she’s flagged by a regular at the other end of the room, signaled to pour another outlaw scotch, and has to redirect her attention. She slides back to the ice bin, the glassware, and measures her pour steadily. The entire time, she feels Jess’s gaze on her.
Lupe drops the fresh drink off, and isn’t sure if she should go over to Jess again. But when she dares to glance over, Jess crooks her fingers at Lupe, beckoning her back to their conversation.
“You’re a good pour,” Jess says. “Shame they won’t let you do this for a proper living.”
“Proper living,” Lupe says, parsing it slowly in her mouth. “Not sure I’ve ever tended towards that.”
Jess leans back in her seat, chuckles, and looks Lupe over again. Her gaze is warm to the point of hot. Lupe could shudder under it, but she stands firm and meets Jess’s eyes.
“Moose Jaw,” Jess starts slowly. “Has an interesting history. If you ever come out that way, I’ll show you the tunnels.”
“The tunnels?”
“Mhm,” Jess says. She taps her empty bottle on the counter twice and then flicks her finger towards Lupe. One for you, one for me, the gesture says. And as Lupe gets them from the stock, she continues. “Bout twenty years or so, when they were building the rails, they had a lot of Chinese American workers up there. Spurred some violence from folks who didn’t like them. There was a riot, and the whole lot of the railway workers went underground.”
“Underground?” Lupe asks. She leans on the counter, passing Jess one beer and cracking open the other. She tastes it, and it’s Pabst alright, classic beer standard.
“Built passageways and secret cellars under some of the buildings, and then grew out a whole tunnel system for them. It’s not something you can believe until you see ’em.”
“Are they still living in them?” Lupe asks.
“Nah,” Jess says. “Not for a while. They’re not the safest, and they’re kind of small. But round that time we had Prohibition laws in our town too, and just like y’all, we adapted around them. The bars, the brothels, the poker clubs. Used to be you could hire a boy to watch the streets for a raid, and he’d shimmy his way through those tunnels to alert every fine Moose Jaw establishment in advance.”
“That can’t be real,” Lupe says. She shakes her head, but she grins a bit, not sure if she can believe the stories Jess is spinning.
“Real as the gin I’m gonna ask you for at the end of this bottle,” says Jess.
“And if I question the quality of your gin?”
Jess puts a hand over her heart, mock offended at the suggestion. “Guess you’ll have to have one with me, in defense of my family’s honor.”
Lupe is moving back to the bar before she even registers it. She takes the chance to look around the room, see how the Thursday night crowd is thinning. There’s a good chance they’ll be empty by eleven, and then it will be her and Jess over two bootleg gins.
She sets them down in front of Jess when she’s poured them, and at Jess’s raised eyebrow, says “A good bartender knows to anticipate the next round.”
She thinks Jess will laugh, but instead, Jess looks at her with those bright eyes seriously.
“You are a good bartender,” she says. “My cousin likes you.”
“I like David too,” Lupe tells her. “Tom, when he comes down. Jess seems to get along with me well.”
This finally makes Jess laugh, and Lupe likes it a lot, likes how high Jess’s voice is and how her teeth flash. She wants to make Jess laugh again.
“She likes you too, sweetheart,” and it’s slipped out before Jess can stop it, before Lupe can cough over it. They’ve been flirting, sure, but now they both freeze, suddenly aware of the others around them. Even Jess looks startled for having said it.
It’s not that she doesn’t want it. But it’s been so easy with Jess that she’s forgotten to be careful. Clearly, she’s not the only one.
Jess jerks her head back to the bar. Lupe nods. She checks on some of the other patrons, daring a glance at Jess every now and again. The barflies are too soused to have noticed anything, and Lupe will be calling more than one wife to pick up her husband. But she leaves the temptation of Jess and the gin that Jess is leaving untouched for her.
And when the last of the patrons are gone, Jess flashes the door key at Lupe. Normally, David comes down to do the cash with Lupe, but it must be on Jess tonight. Lupe trembles a bit as she counts their take.
“I forgot, somehow,” Jess says. It’s a little sour in the way she twists her mouth. It’s a little sweet in the softness of her look at Lupe.
“I know,” Lupe says. “It’s not so often it feels like that.”
Jess sips her gin - the second one she’s had tonight. She had kept Lupe’s glass in its place, for Lupe to have when the night finished.
Lupe looks at it. She doesn’t want the drink as much as she wants Jess, so she settles the cash quickly and rounds the end of the bar. Jess seems to be anticipating it, turns to catch her, spreads her legs for Lupe to slide in between and they’re kissing—
It’s not so often it feels like that, Lupe had said. Kissing Jess feels natural, feels like the next step she hadn’t known to take. Jess’s mouth is chapped, and she tastes like liquor, like cigarettes, like the lager she’d had earlier in the night.
Kisses like that aren’t for Lupe. She brings her hands up to Jess’s face, thumbs to her cheeks, and lets herself want for Jess, to heat the something in between them.
They kiss until they’re gasping for breath, until Jess is sliding off her chair to be closer to Lupe, until Lupe finally lets out a noise that reminds them both where they are and what they’re doing.
They break apart, but this time it’s only to look at each other.
Jess touches her lips, crooked into a soft smile. “I think you’d really like visiting Moose Jaw sometime.”
“Yeah,” Lupe says, thinking of how often the train runs between the two stations, a four day trip, at $12.50 a ticket, the wheels in her brain already turning to Jess! and how they can make kisses like that happen more often. “I would, I really really would.”