Last Call at Randy's#

Episode One: Tuesday Rules

1. The Second Fall#

The pool cue came apart on the second swing, which everybody agreed later was the cue's fault for being a house cue, and Wade Hutto finished the motion anyway, holding half a stick like a man conducting the worst orchestra in North Carolina.

"Table Two has a dead rail," Wade announced, to the room, mid-swing. "It has had a dead rail since the Clinton administration. You bank off a dead rail, you call the dead rail. That's the rule. That has always been the rule."

Ricky Sizemore, who had not called the dead rail, came up off the floor with a bar stool held sideways like he'd read about doors but never seen one. "You don't get to invent rules when you're losing, Wade."

"I'm not losing. I'm being cheated. Those are different sports."

It was nine-forty on a Tuesday night at Randy's Tavern, which meant the fight was neither early nor late. It was on schedule.

Doug Walker watched from the bar with his boots hooked on the rail and a Busch Light sweating a ring onto a coaster that said something else. He had money on this. Not on who won. Nobody sane bet on who won. The regulars bet on duration, on furniture, and on whether Heather would end it with a word or have to come around the bar, which cost extra and paid double.

"Two minutes forty," Doug said. "And the stool survives. Wade respects that stool. He slept on that stool through most of his second marriage."

"The stool's already airborne, Doug." Walt said it without turning around. Walt occupied the corner seat that had spent a decade molding itself into the exact shape of Walt, and he watched all fights in the back-bar mirror, reflected, like history.

The stool was airborne. Ricky had thrown it with the form of a man who peaked in a sport nobody could name. Wade sidestepped, the stool met the jukebox, and the jukebox, an institution that had survived a flood, a repossession, and the nineties, took the hit on its chrome corner and kept playing Waylon without dropping a note.

"Oh, shit," Wade said, honestly grieved. "Sorry, June." The jukebox was named June. Wade put his knuckles into the top of the cabinet, twice, affectionate, the same spot every regular touched for luck, and then his face changed, because affection is how you find out a jukebox is made of steel under the walnut veneer.

"That's two knuckles," Doug said. "That's splint money."

Ricky closed. Wade grabbed him by the flannel. The two of them went into Table Two in a slow, committed tangle, and the dead rail, subject of the entire dispute, absorbed both of them without comment, the felt taking a beer, an elbow, and somebody's hat.

And then the stranger was in it.

Nobody saw where he came from, which was strange in a room where everybody saw everything. He was just there, between them, in a trucker hat so new it still had the sticker sheen, and he pulled Wade and Ricky apart with a hand on each chest. It looked gentle. Both men traveled four feet.

"Friends," the stranger said, and smiled with every tooth at once, "conflict elevates no one's experience."

The room went quiet in the specific frequency it reserved for out-of-towners who used the word "experience."

Ricky, to his credit, was too committed to notice. He grabbed the fallen half of the house cue and swung it into the stranger's ribs. The sound it made was the sound a cue makes against a dock piling. The stranger did not exhale, did not bend, did not blink. He looked down at the point of contact with polite interest, as if a bird had landed on him.

"Okay," Ricky said, backing up. "Okay. Fuck this. We're good. Wade, we're good."

"We're good," Wade agreed instantly. Their differences on the dead rail resolved in under a second, the two of them shoulder to shoulder now, staring, allies in the ancient bond of men who have just hit something that didn't move.

Heather Alvarez had come around the bar. She hadn't hurried. Heather never hurried, because hurrying told a room something she didn't want it to know. She stopped at the stranger's elbow, close enough that he had to choose between looking at her and looking at everyone else, and he chose her, which was the choice everybody made.

"Sweetheart," Heather said, warm as a heat lamp, "this one's finished. You want to sit down and drink something, or you want to keep improving everyone's experience?"

The stranger looked at her for a moment too long, like something buffering.

"I would like," he said, "a flight."

"Baby, this is Randy's," Heather said. "We don't have flights. We have beer, and we have the door."

The room laughed. The fight was over. Fights at Randy's ended the moment the room laughed, and every regular knew it, and Heather could produce the laugh on demand, which is why nothing at Randy's had ever escalated past furniture.

The stranger ordered a Busch Light. He drank it in even sips of identical volume, alone at the end of the bar, while Randy emerged from the kitchen with a broom, a dustpan, and the ledger.

2. Replacement Plus Labor#

The ledger was green and older than Ricky, and Randy opened it on the bar with the sound of a gavel.

"Glassware," Randy said. "Four pints and the good pitcher. That pitcher was a Christmas gift from my sister, so I price it emotionally. Cue, one, house, which was dying anyway, so I'll only charge you for the funeral. Felt cleaning on Table Two. And June took a hit, which I don't charge for, because June is family, but you're both going to stand there while I check her."

He checked her. June was fine. June had outlived better fights and two of her original owners' marriages.

"Replacement plus labor," Randy said, writing. "Twenty-two each, by Friday."

"Randy, he banked off the dead rail and didn't call it," Wade said, holding his beer in his left hand because his right had two knuckles already going the color of a storm system.

"Then you should've beat him at pool," Randy said, and closed the book.

That was the whole justice system, and it worked. Wade and Ricky paid by Friday. They always paid by Friday. Doug had once tried to explain the Tuesday economy to a cousin from Charlotte, how a bar could run on scheduled violence and a ledger and a woman who could end a fight with a laugh, and the cousin had said it sounded like a failed state, and Doug had said no, buddy, it's the only state around here that hasn't failed.

At the end of the bar, the stranger finished his last identical sip, stood, and set money on the wood. Then he left, through the front door, into a Tuesday night, without one glance back at the room that had been studying him for twenty minutes.

Heather picked up the money and went still.

"What," Doug said.

"Tab was fourteen fifty." She laid it out on the bar. A ten, four ones, two quarters. "Exact. And this." A twenty, folded once, crisp as a new map. "That's two dollars and ninety cents. That is exactly twenty percent."

"So he's an accountant."

"Doug. Nobody tips twenty percent exact with coins. Drunk people round up. Cheap people round down. People are a mess in one direction or the other. Nobody," and she tapped the quarters, "is this fucking tidy." She turned the twenty over. "And smell it."

Doug smelled the twenty. It smelled green and wet and growing, like a greenhouse, like a garden center in April. Like fresh hops, though it would be months before anyone in that room would have picked the word.

"He took a cue off the ribs," Ricky said, from down the bar, quiet, still processing his new religion. "Full swing. I put my hips into it."

"You did, baby," Heather said. "We all saw. You want ice?"

"I want to know why it felt like hitting the walk-in."

Doug looked at his own right wrist and elected, for the moment, to say nothing. The stranger had caught him there during the untangling, one courteous second of contact, moving Doug out of the path of Ricky's airborne hat. The grip had been dry and room temperature and had shut his whole hand down like a breaker tripping. There was a bruise coming up already. Doug turned his wrist in the bar light and counted the marks and then counted them again, because both counts came up wrong.

"Hey, Walt," Doug said. "How many fingers has a man got?"

"Depends on the man," Walt said. "Table saws."

"Sure," Doug said. "Table saws." He pulled his sleeve down.

3. The Wobble#

Wednesday, the bar got its real personality back. Wednesday was maintenance day, which was not a designation Randy had ever made, it was just the day Doug showed up at ten-forty with the socket set and his reading glasses pushed up where he could deny owning them.

The back booth had a wobble. Nobody had complained about the wobble. Doug had decided the wobble was an insult.

"You're going to fix that leg," Randy said from behind the bar, "and the floor's going to lean it right back. That table's been losing to that floor since the first Bush."

"Then the floor's been cheating," Doug said, from under the booth.

"Forty years," Randy said, delighted. "Nobody's caught it yet."

The floor of Randy's had, over those forty years, negotiated individual truces with gravity. It sloped toward the men's room and veterans corrected for it without thinking, like a stair taken a thousand times in the dark. Two pool tables held the back half of the room, Table One honest and Table Two crooked, and the house rules for both were older than some of the people playing on them and posted nowhere, because posting them would imply they were negotiable. The dart board by the kitchen door had eleven years of county bracket taped beside it, updated in pencil, defended like scripture. Over the back bar hung the neon, RANDY'S in cursive, dead for a year, a gray glass scrawl that buzzed for nobody.

None of it was wrong. That was the thing Doug could never quite say out loud, the thing he was actually under the booth defending. Nothing here was wrong, and it had taken a long time and a lot of people to make a place where nothing was wrong.

He torqued the last bolt and came up for his beer. "Sign's next."

"You said that last March."

"I'm saying it better this time."

What Doug said next, he said to the room, because the room was where he worked things out. "You know what I got promised, growing up? Quicksand. Quicksand was everywhere. Every show. You couldn't get through a Tuesday without somebody going down in it to the hat. I did drills, Randy. I had a branch-reaching technique. And you know how much quicksand adulthood has produced?" He held up a thumb and finger, zero. "Grease traps. Cold solder. Permits. Not one damn antidote. Somewhere across town, no vial, no man with three minutes, nothing. A whole childhood of preparation, wasted."

"The antidote never makes it across town in time anyway," Jerry said. Jerry Collins had been there for six minutes, at the end of the bar with coffee from home in a thermos, because Jerry did not pay for what he could bring. "Traffic on 9. It dies at the light by the Baptist church, same as everything."

"That's why you route around the light," Doug said. "That's the whole skill, Jerry. That's why you train."

"Nobody trains, Doug."

"I train."

Jerry drank his coffee and let that stand, which between the two of them was agreement.

This was the game, and everyone in the room knew it was a game, and nobody treated Doug like a fool for playing it, because thirty years in, the game was the friendship. Doug's brain simply ran an extra render pass on the world. He saw a strange thing, and for one bright frame he saw the version of it his VHS collection had promised him, and then he said the sincere line out loud so everyone could live there with him for a second. The room had learned to visit. It was a good place.

Which is why, when Doug went quiet that afternoon and stayed quiet, Randy noticed. Quiet Doug was rarer than fights on a Wednesday.

He was looking at his wrist again. The bruise had come up overnight, deep and specific, and he'd stopped showing it to people around the time Heather had looked at it too long without saying anything, and the count still came up wrong.

4. Intervals#

Jerry's Thursday started at the Starlite Diner at six in the morning, because their walk-in had been crying all night and the owner, Dee, trusted exactly one man in the county with refrigerant and it wasn't her supplier.

Jerry was a careful man. It said so on his invoices, in the itemization, in the photographs he took before and after, in the analog gauge manifold he still ran because digital gauges told you what they thought you wanted to hear. He clipped in, pulled the panel, found the leak in nine minutes, fixed it in twenty, and would have been gone by seven except the needle did something needles don't do.

It ticked.

Not wandered. Not fluttered, the loose-bearing shiver every tech learns to ignore. It ticked, hard little increments, tap tap tap, and then stopped, and Jerry timed the silence out of habit because timing things was free. Three minutes and change. Then tap tap tap again, same count, same weight, like a man knocking on a door he already knows is unlocked.

Compressors don't do that. Compressors are honest animals. They hum, they labor, they die. They do not keep appointments.

Jerry stood in the cold with his breath fogging, watching a needle keep an appointment.

"Dee," he called out, through the door. "You got anything new on this circuit? Anything the district put in?"

"District ain't put in anything but promises, sugar," Dee said. "Why."

"No reason," Jerry said, which was the first lie he'd told all week, and he wrote the intervals on the back of his invoice copy, 3:12, 3:12, 3:14, because writing things down was also free, and Jerry had learned the hard way that the difference between a crazy person and an investigator is documentation.

He did not mention it at the bar that night. He folded it into the binder in his head, into the section he kept for things that bugged him, which was a large section, well organized, and, he would have been the first to admit, mostly garbage. Grocery receipts and misidentified aircraft. But his central insight had never been garbage, and it sat up now and looked at the intervals with interest. Unrelated systems get dangerous when somebody powerful benefits from nobody comparing notes.

Nobody was comparing notes yet. That was fine. Jerry compared notes with himself for years at a time. It was cheaper than being laughed at.

5. The Flyer#

The flyer arrived on Friday, in the hand of a kid in a Heritage Grain Works T-shirt who came in blinking like the light was assigned seating, set the stack on the end of the bar, said "y'all have a curated evening," and left before the room could form a response.

The paper was heavy. Cream. The kind of stock you print on when the message is we can afford this stock.

HERITAGE GRAIN WORKS INVITES ITS NEIGHBORS, it said, over a tasteful rendering of the old furniture plant with its guts glowing amber, TO A COMMUNITY CONVERSATION ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE FERMENTATION DISTRICT. There was a date. There was a hashtag. There was, in the lower corner, a line drawing of hops on the vine, and the vine curled around the border of the whole page like it owned it.

"The hell is a fermentation district," Wade said, reading over Doug's shoulder, splinted fingers and all.

"It's when they franchise the block," Doug said. "It's a district the way a strip mall's a downtown."

"They" was doing new work in that sentence and everybody heard it and nobody challenged it, because for three weeks now the same reports had been drifting in with the regulars like weather. Surveyors on the block behind the lot. A man photographing the alley, not the buildings, the alley. Two tourists who'd wandered in asking if Randy's was "on the district trail" and whether the Busch Light was "a bit," and had been gently informed by Walt that nothing at Randy's had been a bit since 1981.

Doug read the flyer twice. Then he put it down and stood very still, and the room, which knew him, adjusted around the stillness.

Because here is the thing about Doug Walker that the county never got right, before everything. They thought he wanted quiet. They thought a man who fixed dashboards for the municipality and wobbles for free wanted the world to hold still and behave. It was the opposite. Doug had spent thirty years being over-prepared for a fight that kept refusing to show up, watching hazards he'd trained for get replaced by paperwork he hadn't, and somewhere under the socket sets and the sincere bits, patient as a seed, was the pure delight of a man who had finally heard a knock on the door he'd been guarding his whole life.

He went behind the bar, which he was not allowed to do, and Randy let it go, which meant Randy felt it too. He found the stranger's tab money still sitting in the till tray where Heather had left it, separated from the rest, nobody willing to say why. He took out the twenty and smoothed it flat on the bar, next to the flyer, hop vine to hop smell.

"Tuesday," Doug said, "a man walks into our fight, takes a cue off the ribs like it's a bird landing on him, orders a flight, tips exact, and smells like a garden center. Friday, this shows up on paper thick enough to deal a card game."

"So what's your theory," Heather said. It wasn't a challenge. She'd been waiting to see how long he'd take.

"Don't have one yet." Doug grinned, and it was the grin the room would follow into a great deal of trouble over the next two years, the one with all the delight and none of the sense. "But somebody should check if this county's ever passed a quicksand ordinance. Because something," and he tapped the twenty, then the flyer, "is finally happening."

Behind him, over the back bar, the dead neon buzzed once, a half-second of gray glass thinking about being a sign again, and nobody heard it but June, who was between songs, and kept it to herself.