portly and unshaven man in his mid-thirties who was liked by almost everyone in the trailer park. Donny was already refusing to pay Tobin, not because he didn’t have the money, but because he felt disrespected. He put his rent in escrow, citing his leaking roof and the black mold under the sink. Said Donny to his neighbor, Robbie, “You know what he tells me? ‘You rented it as-is.’ Tobin is just too ignorant to know that there are people in here that don’t live off Social Security.”
“Damn right!” Robbie spat. “He asked me if I had a job. I said, ‘Motherfucker, I work for the union!’ ” Robbie was a deep-tunnel miner and a member of Local 113. “You gonna treat me like shit, I sure as hell ain’t going to pay you. I don’t care who you are. You’re not gonna sit there and discriminate me. You know what I mean?”
“ ’Cause I’m a redneck.”
“ ’Cause you live in a trailer court, period. You’re still a fuckin’ human.”
Lenny was a redneck too, and understood where the men were coming from. He agreed that the old man was “losing it.” But he also pushed back. “A lot of people say, ‘Tobin, he’s an asshole.’ But why is he the asshole? You’re the one who owes him.” What Donny, Robbie, and the rest of the trailer park didn’t know was that Lenny had a financial stake in them paying. Each month, he received a $100 bonus if he collected $50,000. He’d receive an additional $100 for every $2,000 collected after that.
—
Some days would find Lenny walking alongside Roger from the Department of Neighborhood Services, finishing his sentences. Roger the Inspector glanced down at his clipboard, reviewing notes from his last visit. “Let’s see, W-45 was—”
“The shed,” Lenny cut in. “We got it out of here.”
“Ah.”
“Hey, Roger,” a tenant called out from his porch. “See anything?”
“Do I see anything?”
Most park residents knew Roger, had his business card tucked away in a kitchen drawer. When they got fed up with some housing problem, they would not threaten to call DNS but Roger, specifically. A balding white man with a well-trimmed beard, Roger wore a white DNS polo shirt and 33/30 Levi’s.
“Any violations?” the tenant clarified, trying to be helpful.
“Well, it’s not country living, but if it’s habitable inside, it looks good to me.”
“So, there aren’t any violations?”
Roger shrugged and kept walking. Of course there were. He had noticed the pile of trash behind the tenant’s trailer and a plywood slab where a window should have been. There were trailers with several cracked windows, large steel barrels used for nighttime fires, and trash floating in standing puddles and overflowing from the two giant Dumpsters on either end of the park. Tobin had refused to pay for individual trash cans, but the Dumpsters would fill up days before they were emptied, attracting raccoons and possums. One resident had stabbed a possum dead a few nights before Roger’s visit. Lenny had shot one once. When the garbage collectors came, residents whose trailers faced the Dumpsters would try to convince the truck driver to move them to another spot. They would point to a trailer, saying, sometimes truthfully, “That one’s empty!”
Roger sighed. “Man, you gotta keep me from writing up so much shit.”
“Well, don’t let that hand go, then,” Lenny replied, telling Roger not to record violations.
“Best of intentions, Lenny, best of intentions. Every time I walk through here, there’s always something.” And that was only from the outside. Roger’s inspections usually did not take him inside trailers, where he would have seen sunken bathtubs propped up with car jacks or water heaters disconnected from ventilating pipes.
Roger stopped in front of a trailer. “These windows look like they’re shot.”
“Well,” Lenny replied, “they don’t have the money to buy new windows. So what do you want me to do? I don’t want to buy ’em for ’em.” The trailer was owner-occupied, meaning its residents were responsible for upkeep.
“I don’t want you to have to either.”
“So are we okay?”
“I’m okay with that.”
Back in the office, Roger sighed and lowered his head into his palms.
Tobin hung up the phone. “Okay. What’s the matter? What do we got?”
“Look,” Roger began, “if you’re going to let trailers that look this bad into your trailer park, you have to make it habitable.” Roger began listing off some of the bigger problems: garbage, open storage sheds, broken windows.
Lenny cut in. “It’s been a tough winter.”
“I’m not going to write you up on that,” Roger replied, speaking
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