Last Call at Randy's#

Episode Two: Yeast Abatement

1#

Over the next week the name kept surfacing the way a name does once you've noticed it.

A delivery driver mentioned the patio. A supplier's invoice arrived with a cheerful sticker announcing new "district routing." A regular admitted, with the guilt of a man confessing an affair, that he'd gone once and the beer was "honestly fine," then bought a round for the bar as penance. Doug filed each mention away like grievances waiting to be issued a category.

Even Kayla brought it home. She came in Tuesday with her camera bag and a look Randy recognized from her mother, the look of somebody deciding how to say a thing.

"Heritage offered me work," she said. "Their launch people. They want 'authentic local content.'" She put the quotes on with her fingers, then seemed embarrassed by her own fingers. "Somebody gave them my reel."

"You need the money?" Randy asked, which was Randy for are you okay.

"That's not the point."

"It's a point."

"They have a content calendar, Uncle Randy. For a town." She took the camera out anyway and shot the taps for a while, like rinsing her mouth. "Who builds a content calendar for a town?"

It was nothing. It was a brewery across the way in a building nobody had loved for thirty years. Doug knew it was nothing. He could not leave it alone, and the not-leaving-it-alone had no name yet, which was the part that itched.

2#

The two tourists wandered in on a Tuesday, the way the lost do, blinking at the dimness like they'd walked into the wrong year.

"Is this — sorry — is this part of the district?" the man asked. He had a tote bag and the specific cleanliness of someone who'd parked far away on purpose.

"This is Randy's," Heather said, which answered a different question and was meant to.

They were friendly. They were oblivious in the total, weather-like way of people who have never once been the locals. They sat. They asked, with real hope, whether yeast abatement was a flight option. Heather set two domestic bottles in front of them without breaking eye contact and watched them try to find a polite way to ask for something else.

"We did the Heritage tour at noon," the woman offered. "The fermentation gallery? Where you can feel the tanks?" She put her hand flat in the air, demonstrating. "They let you put your hand on the tank and you can feel it working. It's kind of amazing. It's like it knows you're there."

"Uh-huh," Heather said.

"And the bartender there — well, fermentation guide, they're called guides — he said if we wanted the full Bellwether experience we should come see this place too. He said it was, um—" she glanced at her partner for backup, found none, and committed — "authentic in a pre-curated way? Which I think was a compliment?"

Heather pulled a guest check from her apron and wrote the phrase down. She circled it. She did not yet know why it mattered. She knew only what forty-two years and twenty behind various bars had taught her: people who manage their words that carefully are usually managing something larger, and they are usually managing it on someone else's behalf. Pre-curated. Somebody had been handed that phrase. Somebody had handed it to them.

She tucked the check into her apron with the tabs and the names and the small debts, into the part of her that never closed out.

The tourists drank their domestics, left a tip calibrated to an experience, and took a picture of the dead neon sign on the way out.

Doug, when he heard about it that evening, did not file it.

Doug treated it as a formal declaration of war issued by a place that had not noticed he was alive.

3#

"It's a feeling," Jerry told him, two days later, at Walker Small Engine & Repair. "You're swinging at a feeling."

"It's a campaign," Doug said. He had the laminator going. The laminator was never a good sign.

The shop occupied a former tire store and had accumulated, over twenty years, the sediment of every project Doug had ever started: engine blocks, skateboard decks, a VHS library organized by which tapes were load-bearing, and a laminator he'd bought at a school-district auction for reasons he had never been asked to justify until now.

He printed three signs, official-looking, county-shaped, in a font he'd chosen by holding printouts at arm's length and squinting until one of them felt governmental:

MUNICIPAL FERMENTATION OVERFLOW ZONE

RESIDENTIAL YEAST ABATEMENT ONLY

PARKING RESERVED FOR ACTUAL LOCAL BUSINESSES

"That last one's just you being mad in a font," Jerry said.

"Confusion is a tool, Jer. You read Red Dawn as a comedy. I read it as a manual."

"Red Dawn isn't a manual for parking."

"Everything's a manual if you're paying attention."

Jerry rode along. He would say later, and often, that he rode along to limit the damage, which was true, and also that there was nothing else worth watching in Bellwether on a Thursday, which was more true.

On the way to Heritage with the signs under one arm, Doug passed a utility crew cutting a neat square out of the street. One of the workers was wearing a Mexican wrestling mask under his hard hat, bright blue with silver lightning around the eyes, holding a stop paddle with the bored authority of a man who had been stopping things since sunrise.

Doug slowed without meaning to.

"Somewhere," he said, "there's a concrete guy in a wrestling ring right now getting folded up by a man named El Compactor."

Jerry looked over the top of his glasses. "That is not how employment works."

"Then explain the mask."

"Sun protection. Dust. Personal preference. Any answer that doesn't require an identity swap."

Doug considered that, found it disappointing, and kept walking.

Foundry Street had been repaved so recently it still smelled like tar, and the old furniture plant sat at the end of it wearing its new life: sandblasted brick, black window frames, a mural of a wheat stalk four stories tall bending into that same wave-or-handshake. The parking lot was full at two in the afternoon. Doug stood at the edge of it for a moment, taking in the reclaimed wood and the string lights and the garage door rolled up to expose a taproom glowing like a terrarium, and Jerry watched his friend's jaw do the thing it did when Doug was consolidating a grievance into a position.

"Ten minutes," Doug said. "In and out."

The signs went up fast — one at the lot entrance, one on the side street where the overflow parked, one bolted with genuine hardware to a post that had recently held something official, which was the sign Doug was proudest of and the one that did all the work.

Then they sat in the truck across the street with gas-station coffee, and Doug watched his plan meet the public.

It was, for seventeen minutes, magnificent.

A delivery van slowed at the lot entrance, read MUNICIPAL FERMENTATION OVERFLOW ZONE, and simply kept driving, refusing on principle to be involved. A couple in a crossover circled the block three times, the driver's window down, reading RESIDENTIAL YEAST ABATEMENT ONLY aloud to his phone in the tone of a man gathering evidence for a dispute he could feel coming. Two men in nearly identical trucker hats stood in front of the third sign having the kind of polite standoff Bellwether specialized in, each insisting the other take the last legal-seeming spot, neither willing to gamble a tow on ACTUAL LOCAL BUSINESSES, whatever those were, wherever they parked.

"Look at it," Doug whispered. "It's working."

"Nothing is happening," Jerry said.

"That's what working looks like."

By minute eleven, a young man had come out of the taproom to help — a fermentation guide, apron and all — and stood at the lot entrance trying to wave the crossover in past a sign he could not immediately disprove. The driver rolled his window down and asked to see something in writing. The guide, who had been trained extensively on tasting notes and not at all on municipal signage, went back inside to find a manager. The crossover left. Doug made a small sound like a man watching a putt drop.

"We should go," Jerry said.

"We're not doing anything. Two men are allowed to drink coffee in a truck."

"Two men drinking coffee in a truck across from a crime is called surveillance, Doug. It's in the name of the charge."

"It's not a crime. It's signage. Worst case it's littering, and they'd have to prove the litter was ours, and the litter is laminated, which—" Doug stopped, hearing it. "Okay. The lamination is traceable. That one's on me."

At minute seventeen, a young woman in a BELLWETHER RISES polo came out of the taproom with a clipboard, read the lot-entrance sign twice, photographed it, made a call that lasted forty seconds, and then pulled the sign up out of the ground with the practiced ease of someone whose job description had a section for this. The other two came down inside of five minutes. She stacked all three by the recycling, neatly, and went back inside.

They recycled them. Of course they recycled them.

"Seventeen minutes," Jerry said, starting the truck.

"Seventeen minutes of doubt," Doug said. "You plant doubt, Jer. You don't harvest it the same day."

But he was quiet on the drive back, and the quiet had a flavor Jerry recognized. The lot had been full. On a Thursday. At two in the afternoon. You could laminate a lot of things, but you couldn't laminate your way around a full parking lot, and some part of Doug — the part that fixed tables nobody complained about — had done the math on the way past and hated the answer.

It was petty, and small, and a little sad, and Doug knew all three of those things without being told. A man throwing rocks at a glacier he could not see, certain he'd heard it crack.

4#

Jerry would insist, later and often, that the cooler had nothing to do with any of it. That was important to him. He needed it on record that he'd come to it clean.

The call came at three in the morning, eight days after the parking signs. The Starlite Diner, out by the county road — a walk-in throwing a temperature alarm, which to a diner is a four-figure emergency, a freezer full of next week's margin going soft. Jerry took the call because he always took the call. The night man let him in and went back to scraping the grill, and Jerry stood alone in the kitchen's fluorescent hum with his canvas roll and his gauges, and went to work.

He found the compressor fine. Charge fine. Defrost cycle textbook. The walk-in was, by every gauge he carried, a healthy machine having a healthy night.

That should have been the end of it. Reset the alarm, note the readings, bill for the visit, sleep. And Jerry was reaching for the alarm panel when his analog manifold gauge — the old one, the one he kept because digital gauges lied to you smoothly and analog gauges lied to you obviously — did something he had never seen a gauge do.

The needle on the low side ticked.

Not drift. Drift he knew; drift was weather. This had intervals.

A pulse, and a wait. A pulse, and a wait. Then two close together, then the wait again. He watched it for a full minute with his hand still hanging in the air over the alarm panel. It wasn't a pump cycle. Pump cycles were stupid; they just went. This was patient. This was the rhythm of something that had decided how long to wait before it spoke again.

Jerry stood in a freezing diner walk-in at three-forty in the morning with his breath hanging in front of his face and felt the specific, unwelcome calm of a careful man recognizing that he is the only person in the world currently aware of a thing.

He checked his own equipment first, because the most likely explanation for an impossible reading is always the instrument. He swapped hoses. He re-seated the manifold. He took the gauge out to the truck, let it sit five minutes in ordinary air, brought it back. The intervals resumed like a conversation he'd interrupted.

Then he did the thing that separated Jerry from every other repairman in the county: he stopped trying to make it stop, and started writing it down.

He recorded two minutes of the needle on his phone, the video shaking slightly because at some point his hands had gotten less steady and he declined to examine why. He noted the time, the location, and the line pressure in the little waterproof book. He walked the diner's back lot with a flashlight and found nothing but a dumpster and the county road and, far off past the dark fields, the glow of the district, faint as a porch light.

On his way out, the night man looked up from the grill. "Fixed?"

Jerry stood in the doorway with his canvas roll under his arm and considered the honest answer, which was that the machine had never been broken, and that something he could not name had been talking through it, and that the alarm would probably trip again the next time the something had more to say.

"Keep the log sheet," Jerry said. "If it alarms again, write down the exact time. Minutes matter."

"That a yes?"

"That's a favor," Jerry said, and let the screen door close behind him.

He did not, under any circumstances, tell Doug.

Because Doug would make it about the brewery. Doug would make it about the brewery within one sentence, and the sentence would have Red Dawn in it, and whatever this was would drown in laminate before anyone serious ever looked at it. Jerry had nothing yet. A needle and a rhythm. A man with a theory and no evidence is just a man with a worse version of a feeling, and Jerry had spent thirty years watching people file him under exactly that.

He drove home as the sky went gray, and did not sleep, and told himself it was the coffee.

It bugged him. It was a small wrong thing, and small wrong things did not leave a careful man alone.

5#

The envelope came to Randy's on a Thursday, two weeks after the flyer, by certified mail, which meant somebody had to sign for it.

Heather signed. The carrier, a woman named Dee who'd been on the route eleven years and drank iced tea at the end of the bar every Christmas Eve, held the clipboard steady and didn't meet her eye, the way a person doesn't when they've carried enough county envelopes to know the weight class.

County return address. Office of Planning and Development. Addressed to the business, not to Randy, which was somehow worse — the building being spoken to over the head of the man inside it.

Heather set it by the register, propped against the whiskey nobody ordered.

Randy came out of the kitchen, saw it, and stopped. He read the return address from four feet away, which was as close as he seemed to want to get. Then he picked up the register tape and went on with his count as if the envelope weren't watching him do it.

"You want me to open it?" Heather asked.

"Nobody official," Randy said, "ever mailed a bar good news."

He counted the drawer. He wiped a line of condensation off the bar with the side of his hand. He looked at the envelope one more time, and then he flipped the lights on for the evening, and Randy's filled up the way it always did, and the envelope stood there against the whiskey through all of it — through Walt's bottle and Gene's mail and the fifth song on the jukebox — patient as a gauge needle, waiting to be read.