Archie woke up the sounds of bagpipes exploding from his mother’s bedroom. Sweaty, dry mouthed, he chewed the taste of sour beer on his tongue. He stumbled to the bathroom for a piss. Archie had work today, and dear god of all days to have to do anything, let alone work. It was wrong, he thought, to force a man into the wheels of capitalism. On a day like this? Oppression. 

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There wasn’t time for a shower. Customers at The Ranch would just have to take the night stench as it came, billowing warm and pulpy and right into their fat little nostrils. He threw on his bright orange polo and slid into a pair of crusty khaki pants. He shuffled into the kitchen. The bagpipes grew louder. Offkey notes punched through the air, some lingering for a painful extra second or two. An octopus being tickled to death ashore. 

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Archie wasn’t really a breakfast person. Well, he had never truly enjoyed the egg part, mainly because they looked like loogies coughed up into a hot pan, crackling and slimy, yellowy clear, sizzling and bursting on impact in a golden ooze. Plus, there was a baby in there somewhere. He chugged some orange juice and poured the remaining crumbs in a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos down into his mouth, shaking the bag. 

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“Mom!,” he yelled, his mouth full of salty dust. “Headin out, kay?”

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The bagpipes held their breath. 

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“What? Archie’s mother Gladys said too loudly. 

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“I’m leavin’ for work,” Archie said. “Can you feed Draco for me?”

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She let out an audible sigh. “I guess so, but look here, Archibald, you gotta take care of that thing yourself more, ya know? If I find a dead lizard in my house, I swear to God.” 

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“He’s an iguana, Mom, Jesus,” Archie said, cracking open the back door.

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“What?” Gladys said.

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“He ain’t gonna die, I’m tellin’ you. They’re resilient as hell. Like rhinos,” he said. “Okay, I gotta go. Look, his food’s under my bed in the blue box. NOT the purple one, the BLUE one, kay?” 

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“I got it, I got it,” she said. 

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The bagpipes busted into a frantic chorus. 

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Archie drove a busted husk of a hard-top jeep. It had been a burnt orange in its youth, but now looked more like a pale yellow after a decade and a half of use. The windshield wipers no longer worked, and the spare tire had been missing for about six years. His uncle Garrett had gifted it to Archie before he left for Alaska to start a school for CODAs (children of deaf adults). It must not have been safe for the kids, Archie had thought. 

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The jeep screeched to a halt in a spot near the back of the shiny black tar of The Ranch’s parking lot. It was June, and he was late. He walked into the back door, past the greasy line cooks and steam and metal of the kitchen. Most of the staff spoke Spanish. A busboy named Miguel perched in a corner by the dishes, waiting for his next table. He smirked at Archie and said something very fast and high-pitched, and when he finished, he let out a screeching laugh and did that snapping thing with his fingers that some people can do. Archie pulled his long black hair into a ponytail and gave him a wink. 

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Archie was tall. He’d tried playing high school basketball, but despite his height, he lacked the center of mass to stay on his feet. It wasn’t all too uncommon for him to trip over his own pair of thin, white spindly legs and helplessly hit the court like a baby giraffe. He’d had fun, though. Every couple of months, he’d still grab a pick-up game at city park. It was always fun until he got dunked on by 6-foot-7 UPS drivers, leaving breathless after a disappointing 15 minutes. 

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He snuck past his boss, a thick-waisted black man named Arnold, who was wearing a shiny leather cowboy hat and tapping on a tablet next to a waiter. Archie ducked down and made his way behind the bar. He popped up alongside the hostess stand. The host of this shift was Amanda, an Hispanic college student with light brown hair and saggy cheeks who wore too much eye shadow.

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“Yo, gimme a table,” he whispered from behind Amanda, who shrieked and dropped her clipboard. 

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“Jesus christ, Archie, you always freakin’ me out like that,” she said. “Where you been?”

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“My bad. Can you just hit me up with a table real quick so Arnold doesn’t come slobbering all over me?” 

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Amanda rolled her eyes underneath her deeply magenta-painted eyelids and clicked a set of banana yellow nails across the hostess stand. 

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“Okay I’ma put you on table three. Old couple with a little kid. They need a highchair. Go, go,” she said, wiping a bit of marker off the laminated sheet on the clipboard. 

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Archie blew her a kiss, grabbed two menus, a Lil Rancheroo coloring book and a highchair from the door near the kitchen, just as Arnold waddled over to the hostess stand to check for silverware. 

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Archie had been working at The Ranch for three months at the behest of his mother, who had given him the big bad ultimatum: get a job or take the bus to his dad’s house in Reno. Archie’s dad was a real estate agent and amateur vineyard owner named Greg Rutkus. He had left Archie’s mother for a man named Ollie four years ago when Archie was 24. Having one’s husband reveal to them that they have been a closet homosexual after dozens of years in a seemingly above-average marriage took a toll on Archie’s mother. She began picking up strange hobbies and making new friends and going on long trips with no one at all.  

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Table three was a nightmare. A set of portly, wide-eyed grandparents ordered waters and sent most of the dishes back, even their granddaughter’s microwaved chicken nuggets. Archie worked the six-hour shift without too much fuss, and helped the week’s night shift close the empty place down. The Ranch was one of the most popular restaurants in town, playing second banana to Whistle Hop and, as of this summer, the new pop-up Chili’s in the mall. All the managers wore fake leather cowboy hats and big, silver belt buckles with their names on them. Every two hours, a handful of the waitresses would ring a thick, golden bell to call attention to themselves as they performed a line dance in the middle of the waiting area, their tapdance-boots clicking and clacking on the shiny flagstone floor in between claps and wild shrieks.

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Archie didn’t mind the work, and he didn’t necessarily mind the people, either. Except for Reggie. Reggie was a 45-year-old divorced ex-cop who claimed someone in his family had invented Febreze. He was a bear of a man, lumbering in between tables and giving the girls slightly too many compliments. Archie had gotten in a fight with Reggie during a smoke break two weeks ago. Several of the Ranchers had been sitting on crates in the fenced-in gravel pit, surrounded by cleaning supplies and tools, as Reggie told a story about “kickin’ the shit out of some queer fella at the car wash.” 

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“You know, when I was in the force, we tried to put a stop to all that gay shit from happenin’ round here,” Reggie said, chiefing a menthol and letting thin streams of smoke slip from his nostrils. “One of ‘em try and touch me the other day and I bout knocked his teeth straight out his head.”

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“Sounds like you’re scared of the gays, huh, Reg?” Archie said. 

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Reggie shot up and flicked his cigarette toward Archie, embers exploding from his hands. His face crumpled and his eyebrows became one as he heaved across the gravel.

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“The fuck you say to me, boy?” Reggie grunted through gritted teeth. 

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Archie stood up. “Easy there, officer,” he said slowly walking closer to Reggie. “I’m just sayin’. You talk like someone who's worried he might catch somethin’....” Archie was only a foot or two from Reggie now, towering over the red-faced man. “...if he gets...too close.” 

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Reggie reared back and swung a meaty fist into Archie, who ducked to dodge it. Down below, Archie kicked out Reggie’s legs from under him, causing him to land face-first into the gravel. Reggie squirmed and wriggled to his feet and tried to charge at Archie before Arnold, the manager, came out and held him back. Archie laughed and put his hands up as Reggie screamed and spit at him, an asparagus-sized vein pumping from the middle of his marinara forehead.

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After that, Reggie gave Archie the dead eyes every time they passed each other, and Archie blew kisses at him, which only fueled Reggie’s rage. It was actually one of the best parts of coming to work, Archie thought.

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It was almost midnight when the night crew finished putting away all the dishware and made preparations for tomorrow’s lunch shift. Archie hopped in the jeep and drove downtown, past the white-column, red-brick government buildings and the homeless tribe in the park and the abandoned furniture stores that lined the small one-way streets. 

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Downtown was quiet at this time of night. There were only three bars in town. There was Pratt & Mary’s Irish Pub, which was frequented by former high school goths, community thespians and thinly bearded IT workers. It was the sort of place that held screenings of vintage movies and where neckbeards would play checkers against each other. 

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There was also Reflexxion, which was a strobelight hell of off-duty strippers and divorcees sipping vodka. A side-gig DJ pounded 80s synth remixes into sparse crowds. More of a niche establishment.

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Then there was the Bayview.

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The Bayview was an old warehouse on a nearly empty street. It sat lazily in between a laundromat and an old, hollowed out motel. A small, unassuming watering hole, it was filled to the brim with thick smoke and ancient men who stared at the wall. There were framed pictures of regional celebrities, like three-time state championship winning basketball coach Charlie Dodger, who had stopped by the Bayview 12 years ago after a home game to eat a sweaty burger and scream over the jukebox. 

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Archie was a regular at The Bayview. He’d been coming here since high school, sneaking in with his childhood friends using fake IDs and their parents’ money to buy cheap beer. They smoked Virginia Slims from their mothers’ purses and hit on 50-year-old waitresses with bad teeth. When the bar closed, they walked down to the park and rolled down the house-size hills in a frenzy. Scrawny, freckled children laughing into constellations through slow, glazed eyes.

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After high school, most of Archie’s close friends left town. They went to college upstate and across the country, eventually finding their way to bigger cities with more. More money, more girls, more noise. They got nice corporate jobs, married nurses and real estate agents and bought too-big houses in the quiet mazes of suburbia. A few of them would come back to town for holidays and funerals and their little nieces’ birthdays. They used to come to The Bayview when they were in town, but now it seemed that time had passed. Archie had been left here, alone, to find his way through the damp, dark nights. The forgotten boy, whose friends had become men, had remained isolated on his own planet, slowly spinning in the baltic black of space. 

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Archie’s jeep whipped into the parking lot next to the old motel, the gravel crunching beneath the tires. He made his usual grand entrance at the front door, bowing to Ross, the bouncer, like a world-famous magician and waltzed up to the bar. 

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“The usual, Rhonda,” Archie said, adjusting himself on the barstool. 

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Rhonda, a red-headed, middle-aged, former prison guard slammed a bottle on the edge of the bar, removing the cap in a sweeping motion that resembled a gunner reloading some kind of launcher. She didn’t quite smile, but curled up the side of her lip in a display of belittling amusement.

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Archie sloshed down a throatful of the bright brown bubbles and turned to survey tonight’s non-champions, wiping foam from his mouth like a bushed hyena before the rush. 

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There were some familiar faces. 

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Leo, the gap-toothed accountant and Matthew “Goldie” Fuller, who wore cheap plastic jewelry from vending machines, were playing pool against each other at the back table, eyeing each other down in between green bottle sips. 

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At the middle table, Jarrod and his girlfriend Tanya were only half-playing each other underneath the pale grey lights, guiding the sticks in between arms and around waists in slow, long lessons. 

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The front table, where the real games happened, where things usually heated up, was empty. There was a game already racked, but no one was around to claim it. The colorful pyramid of balls lay at one end, the shiny white cue on the other. Archie looked around for a sign of any smoke breakers or bathroomers getting ready for a stickin’. No one. He swiveled out of his stool and toward the stick rack, where his reserved stick usually stood waiting in its set of holes at the end of the row. 

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His secret weapon — the Limited Edition Athena Glider™ with a white and red Irish linen wrap, 13mm professional leather tip and pro taper on the shaft — was missing. There were only the plasticky sticks and the specialty shot sticks and the cone of chalk along the small table next to the rack. Archie began frantically looking underneath the tables and behind benches, breathing heavily. 

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He had saved up all summer for it, putting cash aside from tips and paychecks, even selling painkillers to a few high school kids last summer. He had become a student of the game, spending thousands of hours clipping balls across the felt, chalking his hands and kneeling at eye-level to ensure crisp, perfect pocket shots. 

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His journey had started off slow, but this was a game of patience. He began winning close calls against a few regulars every now and then, just by a ball or two. Of course, when fresh blood came into the bar, unaware and fully funded, Archie would pull out the multi-game scheme, going down and back up again in double-or-nothing. 

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He wasn’t sloppy, though. In this kind of place with these kinds of people, you had to be subtle, or you’d wind up with a broken nose. Archie had gone months before he even played for money. He’d built up enough of an average profile in the joint that on any given night, the room of watchful buzzards wouldn't've noticed the longer game, the slower kill, happening right beneath their pink, bulging eyes. Twenty dollars down, thirty-five dollars up, and round and round he would go, putting enough cash under his bed to get him out of town for good. 

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He was mid-panic when he heard a high-pitch, gargling squeal followed by deep breaths in and thunderous, full-bodied laughter, well up from behind him. Archie turned around to find Reggie, hunched over in mid-hilarity, trying to catch his breath. He wiped tears from his blood-red cheeks using the back of his hands, and stood up suddenly to face Archie. 

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“Whew, Arch, I dunno why that really got me goin’, but hot damn watchin’ you scramble round here like a lil sad, silly bitch was just too good,” Reggie said, shaking his head and smiling again. 

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“What the fuck did you do with my cue, Reggie?” Archie said, clenching his fists. 

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“Me? Nah, son, you got it all twisted. I ain’t do nothin’ to nothin’,” Reggie said. “Swear on my mama.” 

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Archie could feel his face getting red, and his arms started to twitch underneath his shirt. He closed his eyes. 

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“I’m gonna give you one more chance to come clean, Reg, or—” 

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“Or fucking what?” Reggie said, suddenly serious. He took a step forward. 

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“Or I’ll fucking kill you, you cocksucker,” Archie said, his trembling voice echoing across the near silent room as a faint guitar solo railed on from the speakers behind the bar. There was a crowd gathered around now, and the two fuming men sat staring wildly at each other, both chests rising and falling.

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Archie lunged across the pool table, leaping wildly at Reggie’s throat with outstretched hands. He grabbed Reggie’s face and the two of them sailed toward the hard linoleum floor together. Several onlookers dashed into the chaotic pile to separate the mess, clawing the two men away from each other as spit and curses shot between them. 

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“You think we don’t know what you’re up to, Archie?” Reggie exhaled, shaking off two trucker gentlemen holding him back. “Comin’ up in here tryna hustle good, workin-class people.” 

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“What the hell are you talking about?” Archie said, looking around at the crowd. “You stole my cue and now you’re gonna accuse me of hustlin’ people?” 

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Reggie looked around at the bar, putting his hat back on and pointing at Archie. 

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“This motherfucker took fifty bucks off my cousin last week. Acted like he could barely slide a stick for two games, then all of a sudden he can sink six balls in a row?”

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“That’s not even—” Archie jumped in, holding up a hand to Reggie and walking toward him once again.

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“You know what’s so great about all this, Archie?” Reggie said, smiling to himself. “You thought you was so smart, sharkin’ people and duckin’ outta here like a lil’ rat. But then you gon’ still play games with a fancy poolstick, like you on ESPN er somethin’. That’s just fuckin’ stupid, if you ask me.” Reggie let out a thick, burpy giggle and slapped his stomach hard. 

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Rhonda approached the crowd from behind the bar. 

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“Archie, is this true?” she asked, throwing a towel over her shoulder. “Are you takin’ people’s money like that?”

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“Rhonda, hell no, come on,” Archie protested. “You can’t even bet on pool no more around here? What is this? Reggie’s just mad cuz the gays are after him or someth—”

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“Shut your dumbass up, Archie.” Reggie spat across the room. 

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“Archie did beat me a few weeks ago in a two-outta-three,” Carson Jeffers spoke up from the back of the room. “Won ‘bout $45 off me, in fact.” 

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There were grumbles and deep inhales of cigarettes all around the freshly frustrated mob, and more accusations came hurtling out into the open. Rhonda pushed Archie toward the back door and closed it behind her. She lit a fresh cigarette. 

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“This can’t be happening again, Arch.” Rhonda said, blowing a plume of smoke over her shoulder. 

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“Rhonda, come on now, be reasonable. So what if I’m winnin’? I’m still losin’ plenty, too.” 

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“You can’t keep doin’ this. This is all I got.” She gestured toward the back of The Bayview, a late-stage moon beaming down onto the tin roof and rusty chain-link fence. “I’ll be losin’ regulars over this, and I’m strugglin’ enough as it is.”

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“Reggie’s just cryin’ because he doesn’t like me. He’s got a beef with me over somethin’ stupid at The Ranch.”

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Rhonda smoked in silence, shaking her head and staring at something in between her shoes.

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“Don’t be like this.” Archie said, holding his hands up. “I promise I’ll do a better job of hidin’ it this time. I’ll lay low for a while and let Reggie blow off some steam. No one in there is gonna remember this a couple of weeks from now.”

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“You’re done, Arch. I’m sorry. We can’t keep goin’ through this like we have. You’re officially banned from The Bayview for hustlin’ customers and stealin’ money.”

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Rhonda headed back toward the door, but Archie stepped in front of her. 

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“Whoa, whoa! Hey, please. Just gimme a chance to make this up. Look, I’m sorry, I mean it. I’ll quit doin’ what I’ve been doin’. I’ll play it straight.” 

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“Baby, you don’t get it. This is over. I know you’ll find a new way to get your rocks off, but it won’t be in my bar.”

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“You don’t understand,” Archie said, his throat thick with fear and his voice breaking. “I don’t have another way to— I mean, I don’t, I can’t, get out of here unless I—”

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“Good luck, kid.” Rhonda said, flicking the cigarette out into the night. She opened the door, letting golden, smoky light flood the alley. “And Archie, a word of advice — you’re never gonna find what you need if you keep lookin’ in places like this.” 

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The door slammed shut, and Archie was alone. 

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He left the jeep in the parking lot and walked to the park, past silent intersections and empty parking lots and street lights buzzing with gnats. He climbed to the top of the highest hill that overlooked the neighborhood below. Everything was beginning to wake up in the cold, still air before sunrise. 

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Archie closed his eyes and held them shut. For a second, he hoped that it might stay dark forever, that the night would stay awake and the next day would never come. 

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