Read Online B Is for Beer by Tom Robbins - Free Book Online

all day.” She ’d led Gracie 87
     
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    out onto the loading dock, where delivery trucks would eventually come to pick up the kegs or the cases of bottles. On the dock there ’d been a splash of sunlight, like a puddle of spilled lager, and Gracie went and stood in it. Her jaws quit banging their drumsticks.
    Hovering like a miniature helicopter, a rescue chopper for wounded ladybugs, the fairy, with a serious face, announced that the time had arrived “to learn the truth of beer.”
    Gracie, who’d recently been paying studious attention to all the tanks and tubes and materials, was surprised and confused.
    “But I already learned…”
    “No, no. You’ve learned something about the chemistry of beer, the technology of brewing, that ’s correct, but a brewery doesn’t define beer any more than a shoe factory defines dancing.”
    “I dance in my sneakers,” Gracie volunteered.
    “Good. But it ’s not about the sneakers, is it?”
    “No, ’cause sometimes I dance barefooted.”
    “Would you say you dance because you’re glad and dizzy?”
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    “I don’t know. I guess so. Uncle Moe says that when I dance I look like a blissed-out monkey.”
    “You’re not alone, kiddo, you’re not alone. When civilized people dance they reconnect with their old animal nature. It reminds them that they aren’t mechanical chess pieces or rooted trees, but free-flowing meat waves of possibility.”
    Gracie looked as blank as a crashed computer, an empty wading pool, a stuffed owl; leading the fairy to say, “Well, enough about dancing. Our subject is beer. If beer is more than the sum of its parts, if the truth of beer lies beyond the brewery, where do we go to find it, and why should we care?”
    Immediately upon posing the question, the Beer Fairy had thrust her wand at Gracie, who automatically took hold of it.
    Within minutes, or maybe even seconds ( poof! whoosh! ), the brewery was out of sight and the pair of them were seated on a grassy hilltop, overlooking, on one side, fields of ripe grain that stretched into the distance like gulfs of whiskered honey; and on the other, a village that may or may not have been Creamed-Beef-on-Toast.
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    It was nice to be outdoors again. The day remained quite sunny, although shuffling along the horizon was a big bumpy cloud the color of the bruises that decorated Gracie ’s shins whenever she played soccer.
    When you look at the sky, do the shapes of particular clouds remind you of animals or furniture or various objects? You’re not alone. Gracie, for example, thought this blue-black cloud resembled a bag lady, it being ragged and droopy and slow and dirty looking, with occasional darker bulges of suspended rainwater that could be viewed perhaps as Dumpster diamonds or wads of bag-lady underwear. She imagined the sun giving the poor cloud a handout to buy itself a cup of coffee—or just go away.
    Briefly, Gracie wondered if this cloud might actually be lumbering above Seattle, way off in the distance, and she felt a pang in her heart. It was a twinge, however, that could not accurately be described as “homesickness,” at least not in the usual sense.
    Turning her back on the cloud, Gracie directed her gaze to that village that clung to the banks of a river in the valley down 90
     
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    below. Some sort of festival was in progress there, and the cobblestone streets were teeming with noisy merrymakers.
    There were carnival games and dancing. There were flags fluttering, sausages smoking on grills. The music that drifted up the hillside was polka music, a style with which Gracie was unfamiliar and which struck her as more than a little goofy.
    She saw a great many people seated at tables in tavern gardens, while waiters in long white aprons rushed from bars to tables, back and forth, bearing whole trays of mugs that overflowed with foam. Obviously, large quantities of beer were being both consumed and spilled.