Last Call at Randy's#

Episode Two: Yeast Abatement

1. The Name Keeps Surfacing#

Over the next week the name kept surfacing, as names do once you've noticed them.

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. The bar accepted the round in the spirit it was offered. Absolution had always been self-serve at Randy's.

"Fine like good," Doug asked, "or fine like fine?"

"It was beer, Doug. I drank it. I came home."

"That's all any of us can do," Randy said gravely, and pulled the man another one on the house, the way you'd hand a blanket to a shipwreck survivor, and the whole bar laughed at both of them impartially.

Doug filed the mention away anyway, like a grievance 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. Who builds a content calendar for a town?"

"What's on it," Randy said. "Am I on it?"

Kayla checked, because of course she had kept the PDF, and her face gave her away before she reached the second page. "Thursday is 'Meet the Grain.'"

Randy, who had not laughed on purpose since the Clinton administration, made a sound like a starter motor and had to set down the drawer he was counting.

"Meet the grain," Heather repeated from the well, filing it where she filed things, and for the rest of the week you could end any argument at Randy's by asking whether the grain had plans Thursday.

Kayla had filmed the whole thing. She'd gotten the starter-motor laugh, which no living cameraperson had gotten before, and she played it back twice right there at the bar, and then looked around the room with an expression Heather clocked and said nothing about.

"You know what their content calendar doesn't have," Kayla said, mostly to herself, and didn't finish the sentence, and turned the camera around to face the room, and left it running.

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. Two Tourists#

The two tourists wandered in on a Tuesday, as 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, taking her time with it, savoring it the way you savor a truly magnificent wrong answer. She circled it. Down the bar, Walt raised his bottle half an inch, which from Walt was a standing ovation.

She kept the check anyway, tucked in with the tabs and the names and the small debts, into the part of her that never closed out — because twenty years behind one bar or another had taught her that people who manage their words that carefully are usually managing them on someone else's behalf. Somebody had handed those two that phrase. That was a thought for later, and she filed it with a professional's calm and topped off Walt without being asked.

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. The Laminator#

"It's a feeling," Jerry told him, two days later, at Walker Systems & 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.

"It's a good font."

"It's a tremendous font. That's what worries me."

"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 at the mask over the top of his glasses and gave the question the consideration it deserved.

"El Compactor's a heel name," he said. "That's a blue mask. Blue and silver is a good guy."

"So he moonlights as a good guy."

"Then he's not folding anybody. He takes the beating for two falls and comes back in the third, and the crowd's chanting his name, and somewhere in the front row a county inspector is on his feet like everybody else." Jerry checked the crew's cone spacing as they passed, out of professional habit. "Also, nobody's wrestling at two on a Thursday. This is the day job. The ring is weekends."

"See," Doug said, "this is why I bring you places."

Jerry could have said sun protection. Dust. Personal preference. He'd had the real answer inside of three seconds, and he'd keep it in reserve forever, because the answer was cheap and watching Doug walk the next block like a man whose town was finally living up to its potential was not.

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."

Jerry did not answer. The crossover was coming around for lap three, and he didn't want to miss the reading.

By minute eleven, a young man had come out of the taproom to help — a fermentation guide, apron and all — and Doug's coffee stopped halfway to his mouth, because it was Marcus Delling. Ray's grandson. Doug had taught that kid to ollie in the tire-store lot. Doug had driven that kid to urgent care over the collarbone the ollie eventually cost him.

Marcus spotted the truck and waved — a big, uncomplicated wave, the wave of a kid who was glad to see you — before turning back to the crossover at the lot entrance and trying to wave it in past a sign he could not immediately disprove.

"Your enemy waves at you," Jerry said.

"He's not the enemy. He works for the enemy."

"He recommends us to the tour groups, is what he does. 'Come see the real Bellwether.' Who did you think was sending them?"

The driver rolled his window down and asked to see something in writing. Marcus, who had been trained extensively on tasting notes and not at all on municipal signage, squinted at MUNICIPAL FERMENTATION OVERFLOW ZONE, then looked back at the truck — at the two most reliable adults he knew — as if to ask whether it was real.

"Don't," Jerry said.

"I'm not doing anything."

"You were about to nod."

Marcus went inside to find a manager. The crossover left. Doug made a small sound like a man watching a putt drop, but it trailed off at the end, because the campaign had abruptly acquired a face, and the face had learned to skateboard in his parking lot.

"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.

"Next time we bring four signs," Jerry said, eyes on the road.

Doug grinned at the window, because that was Jerry for I saw the lot too.

4. Three in the Morning#

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 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 told himself the not-sleeping was the coffee.

And he did not, under any circumstances, tell Doug. Doug would make it about the brewery within one sentence, the sentence would have Red Dawn in it, and whatever this was would drown in laminate before anyone serious ever looked at it.

5. Certified Mail#

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.

The tote-bag man was there to see it happen, because the tote-bag man had come back the Friday after his tour, alone, with the caution of a man defecting. His name was Phil. He was an accountant. He had asked what Walt was having, and had what Walt was having, and when he left that first night he hadn't photographed anything, which Heather logged as the conversion it was. He'd been in four times since. Nobody at Heritage had told him to.

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."

"Could be a check."

"From the county," Randy said, in the voice of a man being offered a unicorn. "Frame it if it is."

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 like it always did, and the envelope stood there against the whiskey through all of it — through Walt's bottle and Gene's mail and Phil in his new usual seat and the fifth song on the jukebox — patient as a gauge needle, waiting to be read.