Out Here, It's Ms. Kathy's Way or the Highway
Hey partner, listen up.
If you’re gonna drink at the Short Branch Saloon in the high desert outpost of Crystal, Nev., home to hookers, high hair and hootenannies, you best be forewarned — you gotta play by the rules.
Ms. Kathy’s rules.
Yep, she’s the owner of the joint, as sharp and lethal as a rusted nail.
What she says goes.
Don’t be fooled by this grandmother in blue jeans and strawberry-blonde hair whose signature meat loaf once brought them in for miles around.
Or that every Christmas she sponsors a cookie bakeoff, the results distributed among the road and utility workers who help keep life nice in the little settlement of 100 residents, not counting the working girls.
She runs a respectable place out here next to a shuttered brothel and a cluster of trailers, a community where the mostly-unpaved roads bear such cowboy-themed names as “Pinto,” Corral” and Bridle.”
Ms. Kathy, her regulars know, will as soon throw you out as look at you, as a few now-pitiable former patrons can tell you.
She slaps possible troublemakers with one-or-two beer limits, and after that they’re done, no arguments, she says, because they’ve shown in the past that that they can’t be respectful.
The drinker folks here call “Loosey” learned his lesson.
He’d run his mouth, used a few too many cuss words. But he was a big man, over 6-foot-4, and he climbs high-voltage electric poles for a living, so Ms. Kathy waited until he walked out and then locked the front door behind him.
He had car trouble and was back a few moments later, pounding on the door, demanding to be let back in.
Not on your life.
“Don’t mess with me,” Ms. Kathy says. “That’s pretty much fact.”
After two decades of serving drinks and not taking any lip, she owns the bar and motel outright, which gives her a bit of leverage in laying down the law.
She opens her doors Tuesday thorough Saturday, from noon until 7 p.m., or whenever she damn feels like closing.
Complaining that you drove all this way to find the place closed?
“Well then, come when I’m here!” Ms. Kathy says.
Her full name is Kathy Bragg and she bought the Short Branch in 1998, while working for Sears department store down in Las Vegas.
Don’t even ask her age: “You don’t need to know.”
Husbands? “No need to talk about them,” she says.
“I just don’t know how to pick men. I can’t even count the total, but they had this in common: They were bad.”
Ms. Kathy’s outspoken ways harken back to Nevada’s pioneer era, when single women had to look out for themselves or be taken advantage of by all those men.
This bar owner is no damsel in distress.
A poster hanging near the bar could very well define Ms. Kathy’s self-image, right there for all male drinkers to see:
There’s an image of a witch, along with the phrase, “Broom rides 25 cents.”
Other placards show, quite plainly, what Ms. Kathy thinks of men.
“Men are like parking spaces,” one reads. The good ones are taken; the rest are handicapped.” Or try this one on for size: “Men are like coolers. Load them with beer and you can take them anywhere.”
On another wall hang memorials to departed regulars now drinking at that big bar in the sky. Country music plays, a sickly Christmas tree leans year-round into a corner.
Ms. Kathy is a staunch Trump supporter.
Just sit down, shut your trap, and she’ll tell you all about the horrors of being a small business owner under that other party. “Only those people who don’t look around and read get in trouble in here,” she says, pointing to a sticker under that TV that read, “#Trump Train” and another disparaging U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
She also doesn’t cater to those sophisticated city-types who walk in ordering drinks with fancy names. You want a vodka and orange juice?
Then say so. She doesn’t want to hear the words “screw” or “driver.”
Over the years, Ms. Kathy has devised ways to pack the place. She sponsors the annual bordello run for charity and brings in thousands of bikers. But her movie day came to a screeching halt when the TV broke down.
On a Saturday, the regulars roll in like tumbleweeds.
There’s Charlotte LeVar, who once worked as prison warden’s secretary, and her husband, Dan, dressed in bib overalls. He says a visitor can use his name, “as long as you’re not from MSNBC or CNN, or else I’ll get in my truck and leave right now.”
Then Gordon and Jackie Steffek arrive with their dog Sadie.
“Hi sweetie,” Ms. Kathy coos at the animal. “Hi baby girl.”
Jackie walks behind the bar to peruse some women’s lingerie for sale, then walks away sighing. “My husband won’t let me buy one more stick of clothing, shoes or even a purse.”
Gordon Steffek says proudly he’s been coming to the Short Branch for 19 years “and I haven’t been thrown out yet.”
Yes, he adds, he and Jackie are married.
“Well, we were when we walked in here.”
They all rave about Crystal’s quiet life, seeing the occasional badger or long-necked crane on a winter morning, not to mention those gorgeous summer sunsets.
Ms Kathy also likes it here, despite the fact that the phone service is lousy and it’s hard to get good help. Mostly because she stays busy.
“There’s always towels to wash, floors to mop and nine toilets to clean.”
Wiping down the bar, Ms. Kathy laments that she might have wasted 32 years working at Sears; if she’d only known how much darned fun she’d have running the Short Branch out in Crystal.
Because this is no department store.
Out here, it’s Ms. Kathy’s way or the highway.