Last Call at Randy's#

Chapter One

1#

Randy's Tavern opened at eleven because Randy said anything earlier invited breakfast people, and breakfast people asked too many questions about cleanliness.

By ten-forty Doug Walker was already under the back booth with a socket wrench in his teeth and his reading glasses pushed up where he could deny owning them. The table had a wobble. Nobody had complained about the wobble. Doug had decided the wobble was an insult.

"You're going to fix the leg," Randy said from behind the bar, not looking up, "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 around the wrench.

The floor of Randy's had, over forty years, negotiated individual truces with gravity. It sloped toward the men's room in a way veterans of the place accounted for without thinking, the way you account for a step you've taken a thousand times in the dark. The jukebox played four songs reliably and a fifth only when insulted. A regular named Walt sat in the corner where the vinyl had, over a decade, taken the exact shape of Walt. None of this 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, set the table down, and pressed a thumb to the corner. It held. It still leaned, but it held while it leaned, which was the most you could ask of anything in here.

"Sign's next," Doug said, climbing out. He nodded at the neon over the back bar — RANDY'S in cursive, dead for a year, a gray glass scrawl that buzzed for nobody.

"You said that last March," Randy said.

"I'm saying it better this time."

He wiped his hands on his jeans and looked around for the next visible enemy. That was the trouble with adult life. Nobody had warned him about cold solder joints, grease interceptors, and stools that failed one quiet screw at a time. When Doug was a kid, every third hazard had been quicksand, and every fourth problem had required an antidote carried across town in a glass vial by a man with three minutes left. The world had made a lot of promises about the kinds of danger a person needed to prepare for, then mostly delivered paperwork.

Randy had the register tape out and was reading it the way a man reads a forecast he doesn't like, looking for good news he already knows isn't there. Doug didn't ask about the number. You learned not to ask Randy about the number the same way you learned about the floor.

Heather came through from the back with a rack of glasses on her hip and started setting the room without being asked, because the room did not set itself and both men in it would forget that until it was a problem. She clocked the repaired booth, the wrench, the ladder Doug had not yet dragged toward the dead sign, and said nothing, which was its own kind of grade.

2#

The trouble came in sideways, the way trouble preferred.

It came as a flyer somebody left on the bar — heavy stock, the kind that costs money to feel like it doesn't, soft sage-green ink, a logo of a wheat stalk bent into something that was either a wave or a handshake. HERITAGE GRAIN COLLECTIVE, it said. Community flow. Heritage-forward fermentation. A third place for the new Bellwether.

Heather read it once, turned it over, and used it as a coaster.

Randy read two lines and lost interest at third place, on the grounds that he already owned a first place and didn't see the need for the other two.

Doug read the whole thing twice and got quiet, which everyone who knew him understood was worse than loud.

"Third place," Doug said, finally.

"It's a marketing thing," Heather said, not looking up from the well. "Home, work, then the place you go that's neither. Coffee shops use it."

"This is the place you go that's neither," Doug said. He set the flyer down very gently, the way you set down something you'd rather throw.

Over the next few days the name kept surfacing the way a name does once you've noticed it. A delivery driver mentioned the patio. 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.

It was nothing. It was a brewery across town. 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.

3#

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.

"The bartender at the place we just came from said this was, um —" the woman 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.

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

"It's a feeling," Jerry told him, two days later, at the shop. "You're swinging at a feeling."

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

He printed the parking signs at the shop because the shop had the equipment and the moral cover of being a place where machines were already loud. He printed three:

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."

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, who had made the mistake of riding along, 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.

The signs bought exactly seventeen minutes of genuine chaos outside Heritage — a delivery van idling, a confused couple circling the block, a brief and beautiful standoff over a spot nobody was legally barred from — before a tourism-bureau volunteer in a BELLWETHER RISES polo pulled them up and recycled them, because of course they recycled them. The only lasting effect was two more disoriented visitors and a story Randy would tell for the rest of his life, improving it each time.

It was petty, and small, and a little sad, and that was exactly what it was. 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.

He was called out to a diner near the district — a walk-in throwing a temperature alarm at three in the morning, which to a diner is a four-figure emergency, a freezer full of next week's margin going soft. 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.

Then 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 — the needle on the low side ticked. Not drift. Drift he knew. This had intervals.

A pulse, and a wait. A pulse, and a wait. Then two close together, then the wait again. 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 recorded it on his phone. Then, because he distrusted any fact that existed only once, he made a note of the time and the location and the line pressure in the little waterproof book, and he did not, under any circumstances, tell Doug — because Doug would make it about the brewery, and Jerry had nothing yet, and a man with a theory and no evidence is just a man with a worse version of a feeling.

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

5#

The notice arrived on a Thursday, in an envelope with a county return address and the unhurried menace of official paper.

Doug read it aloud at the bar like charges at a sentencing. If the Council approves the Heritage redevelopment package, properties within the proposed Fermentation District shall conform to district standards, to include: facade improvement, exterior lighting to specification, off-street parking provision, updated grease interception and handling, signage review and compliance, and applicable permitting fees.

He got quieter as the list went on, which Heather noticed, because Doug got loud when he was scared of a thing and quiet when he understood it.

"How much," Randy said. Not a question. The only thing left to be.

Heather had already run it. She'd run it the night before, on the back of a guest check, because she'd seen the envelope come in and known what it was the way you know weather. She gave him the number.

Randy sat down on the stool behind the register, which Doug had never once in twenty years seen him do during open hours, and looked at the dead neon sign as though it had finally said something.

And there it was — the thing turning over. The brewery Doug had been swinging at was never the fist. The brewery was a knuckle. Behind it was zoning, and money, and a committee that met in three weeks, and a whole arm he hadn't been able to see because he'd been so busy laminating. The parking signs. God. The parking signs.

"This is how they get you," Doug said, very softly. "They don't fight you. They change the rules of the room until you're the one who's out of code."

It was, Heather would think later, the smartest thing she'd heard him say. He'd say six dumb things after it, but that one was true.

6#

Jerry, when he heard about the notice, did the thing he'd been refusing to do, which was put two pieces of paper next to each other.

He pulled Heritage's permits — public record, twenty minutes at the county office and a polite lie about a bid. The electrical service on file didn't match the operation. The connected load was wrong for a brewery that size, wrong by an order that wasn't a typo, the way a grocery list with one (1) industrial transformer on it is not a typo.

He followed the rest of it the way he followed everything, on foot, with a flashlight, in the off hours, looking like exactly what people assumed he was, which was a maintenance guy with somewhere to be. From the diner cooler the interference ran — he could chase it, faintly, on a field meter — through the alley service panels, syncing for a half-second across coolers that had no business knowing about each other, a harmonic walking the glycol lines of the whole block like a finger trailing a banister.

It ended behind Heritage's production building. He put one hand flat on a conduit there and felt it. The pulse. The intervals. A wait, and a pulse, and the same patient arithmetic he'd heard at three-forty in a diner walk-in, running now through a wall that cost more than his truck.

Inside, though Jerry couldn't see it, the same rhythm was rolling through the tanks.

In the Heritage taproom that afternoon, Tucker Vance was three sentences into a staff meeting about weekend coverage when he stopped. He didn't decide to stop. He simply found himself not talking, his mouth open on a word he'd lost. For one full second every glass behind the bar rang at the same pitch, a thin clear note like a finger on crystal, all of them at once.

A new hire — a kid, four shifts in — looked around and said, "Is that normal?"

"Expansion stress," Tucker said. "Stainless does that with temperature."

The kid nodded. Tucker nodded. The note died. And under the part of Tucker that was already moving on to weekend coverage, a much smaller part stood very still and asked: Why did I know to say that? I don't know that. Who taught me that?

He let the question go, the way he'd been letting questions go for almost a year now, ever since the recipes had started coming easier than recipes had any right to come.

Jerry, behind the wall, recorded the pulse on three devices, because two was better than one and three was the number that let him sleep.

7#

The Council chamber filled past capacity and kept filling.

The Heritage people wore matching shirts — BELLWETHER RISES in that same sage green, an actual designed thing, a logo with a point of view. Randy's regulars wore whatever had been clean enough to sit in public, which on Walt meant a shirt with a collar and on most of them meant they'd tried. Kayla Boone stood at the back with a camera on a little gimbal, Randy's niece, recently returned from a media career that had not survived contact with the industry, filming because she didn't know what else to do with her hands or her degree.

Priya Shah ran the meeting tightly and fairly, which was the worst possible thing she could have done to Doug, because fairness took away his best objection. She gave everyone their time. She gave Heritage their time, and Heritage used it well.

Tucker presented. He had renderings — the district at golden hour, planters and string lights and a version of Bellwether that was recognizably nicer than the real one. He had a jobs number and a tax-revenue projection and letters from nine local businesses who wanted the district to happen. He was not smug. That was the part that gutted Doug. A smug man you could beat. Tucker stood up there earnest and a little nervous and clearly, genuinely believed he was helping the town he'd grown up in, and the room believed him because he was telling a kind of truth.

When Doug's turn came he brought a poster board.

It was covered in photographs of taprooms — six of them, from six towns, Asheville and Greenville and a couple Doug couldn't have found on a map — all of them the same. Same Edison bulbs. Same reclaimed wood. Same chalk font. He'd run red yarn between them, pinned to the foam core, and he'd printed one image so large the pixels had broken down into colored squares, which made it look less like evidence and more like a ransom note.

"This is not local," Doug said, and his voice was steady, and for one sentence he was right and everyone could feel it. "This is the same place wearing different hats. They come into a town that already works, and they sell it back to itself, and they charge admission, and they call the people who were already here pre-curated."

It was the truest thing he'd said in a month. And he'd built such a bad object to say it over — the yarn, the pixels, the trembling foam core — that somebody near the front laughed, and then the laugh spread, because a room will laugh at relief.

Jerry stood up to help. This was the mistake.

"There's a frequency," Jerry started, which is a sentence no public meeting has ever recovered from. He had a portable speaker. He played the pulse. The room heard a low wet warble, then the speaker found its own feedback and screamed, and Jerry fumbled the volume, and the warble came back smaller and somehow worse.

"Is this a health concern?" someone asked.

"Is that his ringtone?" someone else asked, delighted.

Doug, drowning, grabbed the rope nearest him, which was the worst rope. "They're using illegal beer frequencies," he said, into a live microphone, in a county building, on the record.

Then, because his mouth had found the bottom and decided to keep digging, he added, "And if it is a health concern, somebody ought to be asking where the antidote is."

Priya called a recess.

Randy put his face in his hands. Kayla, at the back, kept filming, because some part of her that had survived the media career knew that this — the warble, the laugh, Doug's face — was the realest footage she'd shot in years, and she hated that she knew it.

8#

Heather didn't fight the recess. She used it.

She didn't watch the front of the room, where Doug was being right in the stupidest available way. She watched the edges, the hallway, the folding table with the coffee, the choreography of who drifted to whom. This was the only arena she'd ever needed. People thought information lived in documents. Heather knew it lived in who refilled whose cup.

Three residents had spoken in favor of the district. During the recess all three ended up, separately, by the coffee, and all three used the same phrase — she heard authentic in a pre-curated way twice and the new Bellwether three times, in the flat confident cadence of lines that had been given to people who then made them their own. Two of the three had been at Heritage's soft opening; she knew because she knew one of them, knew her tab, knew she'd come into Randy's the next morning with a Heritage tote and a drink token she'd been too cheap to not mention. One of them worked for an events company that Tucker, in his presentation, had described as "just handling the decor."

Heather found Priya in the hallway, between the chamber and the women's room, which was the only private place in a public building.

"Your support's being managed," Heather said. No preamble. Heather didn't waste preamble on people who could count. "Three of your speakers tonight are running the same script. Two got comped at the soft opening. One's on the payroll of the company that's supposedly only doing decor. That's not a community asking for something. That's a launch."

Priya didn't flinch and didn't dismiss her, which Heather respected. "Can you prove any of it in a way that survives a meeting?"

And there it was. Heather had names. She had times. She had two tabs and a tote bag and a thing a woman had said over a hangover. She had everything except the one form it needed to be in.

"Not by tonight," Heather said.

"Then tonight it's three of my neighbors who like a brewery," Priya said, not unkindly. "I can't vote on what you know. I can only vote on what you can show me." She paused. "Bring it to me when it's the second thing. I'll still be here."

That was the problem with knowing people, Heather thought, walking back in. It was not the same as evidence. It was better than evidence, in every way except the one that counted in this room.

9#

The Council approved the district package with conditions. Randy's received ninety days to comply or file for hardship review.

Doug wanted to call it rigged. He had the breath for it, standing there, the word loading.

Priya got to him first, quietly, while the room emptied around them. "You were right to be worried," she said. "You were wrong in every way that would have helped." She let that sit. "If you'd come to me in March with the parking and the fees and the facade math, I'd have had to listen. You came to me tonight with yarn and a scary noise. Do the first thing next time."

It landed harder than the gavel had. The gavel was procedure. This was a person telling him the unbearable thing, which was that the loss had his fingerprints on it.

Out in the lot, Tucker caught up to Randy and offered, with real and useless kindness, to connect him with a grant writer who handled hardship applications.

"She know how to fix a fryer?" Randy asked.

Tucker laughed, a beat too fast, the laugh of a man who needed the moment to be fine. "I don't think that's her — no."

"Then I'll consider it," Randy said, which from Randy was a closed door.

Doug stood at the edge of the lot with the poster board under his arm, the yarn trailing, and told Tucker it wasn't over. He believed it. He always believed it; that was both his disease and the only good thing about him.

"Then next time," Heather said, taking the poster board out of his hands so he'd stop gesturing with it, "bring something better than laminated panic."

10#

That night Randy's was quieter than a Thursday should be.

Nobody made a speech. Doug didn't have one in him, which was new. He dragged the ladder out from behind the kitchen, set it under the dead neon, and opened the back of the sign for the first time in the year he'd been promising to.

It took him four minutes to find it: a cold solder joint at the base of the RANDY'S, a single connection that had cracked from heat cycling, a gray bead of metal that had quietly stopped doing its one job. Ten minutes of work, total. He had avoided it for a year. He understood, balanced on the ladder with the iron heating, exactly why he'd avoided it — because as long as the sign was broken it was a project, and a project is hope, and fixing it meant admitting it had only ever been ten minutes and a little courage, the same as most things he was afraid of.

He reflowed the joint. He closed the sign up. He came down the ladder and flipped the switch.

The neon stuttered, caught, buzzed — and held. RANDY'S, in cursive, red, the exact ugly warm red it had always been.

Walt looked up from the seat that was shaped like Walt. "Looks the same as always," he said.

"Good," Doug said. And meant it, all the way down.

Nobody applauded. That was the point. He hadn't fixed it to be seen fixing it. He'd fixed it because it was the one fight in the whole long day that was actually his size, the one thing he could put right with his hands, and somewhere between the Council chamber and the ladder he'd stopped needing the fixing to be a performance. The sign didn't make Randy's matter. It just told the street the truth about a place that already did.

Jerry came in around eleven. He didn't drive out to the shed to be right alone, which is what he'd have done a month ago, what he'd done a hundred times — go sit with his binders and his arrows and the cold company of being unbelieved. He sat at the bar instead and waited for the room to thin, and when it was just Heather closing out, he set his phone on the bar.

"I'm not done with this," he said. "I want that clear. I don't have the theory yet. The power draw, the cooler, the — I've got pieces. I don't have the shape. I'd normally not show anybody until I had the shape, because the last six times I showed people pieces they—" He stopped. He'd been about to add the caveat. He didn't add the caveat. It cost him something visible to not add it.

He played the pulse.

The wet patient rhythm filled the empty bar. A pulse, a wait. Two close together. The wait.

Heather listened to it all the way through, and then she listened to the silence after it, which was the part Jerry hadn't expected anyone else to know to do.

"Bring me the rest when you have it," she said. "I'll find out who else has heard it." She slid a clean glass toward him. "There's always somebody else who's heard it. There's a hotel night-shift guy, there's a girl who closes the coffee place, there's whoever empties the bins behind Heritage at four a.m. Somebody's heard your noise and thought they were crazy. I'll find them."

She wasn't waiting on Doug to tell her to. Somewhere in the recess, between the coffee table and the hallway, she'd stopped treating Doug's alarm as noise to manage and started treating it as a lead to work — which was a different thing than following him, and the difference was hers.

11#

Late, in the shed behind his house, Jerry played the pulse again, slowed down, the waveform crawling across his cracked laptop screen.

It was clearer at quarter speed. It wasn't one signal. It was two. A pulse, and then — after the patient wait that wasn't a wait at all, that was listening — a different pulse, shaped not quite the same. A call. A response. A question and an answer, though he couldn't prove that to anyone who wasn't already willing to hear it, which at the moment was nobody and a bartender.

At Heritage, the last employee had gone home an hour ago. Tucker walked the production floor alone because he couldn't sleep, and lately the floor was the only place the not-sleeping felt like company instead of failure.

He stopped in front of Tank Seven.

The staff called it Temperamental. It never matched the software. The sensors swore it was at one temperature and the beer that came out swore it was at another, and the beer was always, somehow, better — the batch everyone fought to be assigned to, the one that tasted like Tucker had finally gotten good instead of lucky. He stood in front of it with his hand not quite touching the stainless, the way you stand in front of something you suspect is awake.

What do you want from me, he thought. He did not say it. He would have been embarrassed to say it, alone, to a tank.

The tank knocked. Once. From the inside.

Then something pushed up through the foam line at the top, a sound that found shape as it came, wet and unhurried and patient and almost — almost — Tucker's own voice, the way a voice sounds played back from a machine, familiar and wrong at once.

"Expansion," it said.

Tucker stood very still in the empty brewery and discovered he was not, after all, surprised. That was the worst part. Some much older part of him had been waiting almost a year to finally hear it answer.

Across town, Doug's sign buzzed red over an empty bar, telling the dark street the same true thing it had always told it.

They had ninety days.