John Kaufmann is an attorney and mobile home park owner who lives in southern New York State. His writing has appeared in Off Assignment, Ep;phany, Channel Magazine, The Journal of the Taxation of Financial Products, The Journal of Taxation of Investments, and Tax Notes. Kaufmann blogs at https://dirtlease.com.
Good Night and Good Luck
By John Kaufmann
Dee Dee didn’t like to talk to Trudi because she didn’t have half a day to set aside whenever she picked up the phone. You say Hiya, Trudi, Dee Dee would say, and there goes the afternoon. Korda, the owner of the park, didn’t have that problem, because he was never there and he was a prick. Who are you? Trudi would ask Korda when she would see him by the mailboxes when he visited. Sammy would say,
-Sammy Korda, Trudi. Same as last time you asked.
-Well, my lord, Sammy.
Trudi would look at Korda with her large brown eyes and suck on her water bottle straw. Sammy would say,
-I’d love to talk, but I gotta go. Busybusybusy.
All Korda cares about is money, Charli would say to Dee Dee. They’d be outside Charli’s trailer, one of the kids from DCS playing out back, another on her hip. He has a business to run, Dee Dee would say. She took Korda’s side because she managed the park for him. But, yeah. All he cared about was money.
Trudy was eighty-two, alone since Al died. Dee Dee was fifty-five and alone since Bill ran off with some bimbo he had rescued from an abusive husband. Bill had originally managed the park for Korda. When he left, Dee Dee kept the job.
I don’t know what tunes Korda’s motor, Dee Dee told Charli. I smile at him and giggle, nothing. I show him my gun, nothing. As she spoke, the barrel of the gun was digging into the bone at the bottom of her spine and the handle was pushing into her lumbar. Dee Dee continued,
-What did that old pervert Vergil tell you?
-He said, you like rug more than wood.
-What else?
-He said, no sperm bank. Direct deposit only.
-Hah, hah.
-Lynn hasn’t kicked him out yet.
-Heh.
-But you’re right, I think Korda only cares about money.
When Trudi would knock on Dee Dee’s door, Dee Dee would hide. She’d turn of the lights, go into the bedroom, lie on the floor, breath quietly. When she spotted Trudi in the dollar store, she would crouch behind a row of shelves like a soldier in a trench. Sometimes, she would use a makeup mirror as a periscope to track Trudi’s 20. Once, Abishek, in the cashier’s booth, saw her crouched over and padding toward the front with nothing in her basket. Dee Dee put her fingers to her lips, pointed to an endcap that held fly swatters and makeup, mouthed Shhh – Thank You and sprinted quietly out the door. When she entered the store now, Abishek would say, Be careful, Mrs. Dee Dee – Trudi in the store.
Vergil didn’t like or not-like Korda. Vergil had run a business once himself, building log homes for guys from New Jersey who wanted vacation homes in Moravia and Genoa until his back gave out and social security kicked in, so he understood about money. Lynn called his social security check his welfare check. Korda said, That’s what it is, isn’t it? Vergil said,
-Heh.
-I mean –
Vergil was in his armchair, watching Gunsmoke. He said,
-I used to hear Trudi fuckin guys down to the crick.
-That must have been a few years ago.
-You could hear them acrost the gravel pit!
Korda would talk with Vergil whenever he visited the park. He took his shoes off at the threshold and was polite to Lynn. Vergil said, That aint lemon juice she drinks, you know. She puts a quart of vodka in that water bottle. The sofa that Korda sat on was over-stuffed and gray, and the air conditioning was – Korda was glad – blasting. Korda said,
-She seems nice enough. I just never have time to talk, when I am up here.
–Nobody has time to talk to Trudi.
Dee Dee had once said about Lou Shepler, He’d be a good looking guy, if he gave himself a chance. Those clear blue eyes. In the summer, Shepler went around shirtless showing a body that was lean and muscled, but mostly lean. Charli and Dee Dee said that there were two seasons in the park; Shepler-shirt-on and Shepler-shirt-off. Why do you like men? Charli asked Dee Dee once. Dee Dee said,
-Why do you want children?
-It’s not the same.
-It is, kind of. You don’t choose either.
Shepler did odd jobs for Korda, and almost anything for Dee Dee. After Bill left, he built a wheelchair ramp for Dee Dee’s mother who came out to live with her from Oklahoma after her brother passed her off to her. He re-framed her windows, built a door for her shed and re-pitched her gutters. When Korda offered him a job doing maintenance for the park, he said, No sir. I think it would hurt our relationship. What relationship, Korda thought. It’s money. Korda said to Shepler,
-I think Trudi needs to move. Her kids were up last week, Dee Dee told me. They want her to live near them, in South Carolina.
-Have you seen Al’s place? He needs to move.
Al lived across from Shepler, was maybe forty, weighed three hundred plus, not mobile. Shepler continued,
-His legs look like some Game of Thrones shit. He has that gangrene. I don’t know what you’ll do with that trailer when he moves. It just smells like death.
Parked in Shepler’s driveway were an old Jaguar and a large pickup with a bumper sticker that read Dodge the Father; Ram the Daughter. Shepler’s wife was his age, plump and pleasant. His daughter was eighteen and still lived at home. Korda asked,
-How much is that Jaguar worth? More than your home?
-I got it for free. It doesn’t run.
Once, Korda asked Dee Dee, What does Shepler like to do more? Smoke weed or play video games? He does good work, when he tries. They were seated at her kitchen table and she was giving him the download. Dee Dee said,
-He’s forty-seven or forty-eight, I think.
-He is lacking in some kind of oomph. You see it when you talk to him. My mother called it drive and common sense.
-Called what drive and common sense?
-Whatever Shepler doesn’t have.
Shepler didn’t mind Trudi, but she talked too much. She would corner him at the mail boxes or at the Agway and that would be it. I seen your cousin in Newfield, she would say. She would continue,
-Something has to give.
-What do you mean?
-You know. This,
Trudi would sweep the back at her hand at the world and the park. She would continue,
-I remember when you were this tall.
She would put her palm down, level with her hip.
-Your mother – I don’t know how she put up with that man! Did I hear that Charli is pregnant? Those DCS kids are a handful. One of them came into my lot and put a bucket full of rocks on my steps! How has your cousin been? Not the one with the truck. I mean her daughter?
It didn’t matter if Shepler had smoked a blunt before they spoke or not. If anything, that made it worse. He would look at the ground or over her shoulder and her face would look like a deer’s head, lips moving and black flies instead of words coming out. He would start itching and say, Gotta go, Trudi. Sorry, but I gotta go.
When Trudi’s kids came up from South Carolina, they knocked on Dee Dee’s door. Can I help you’, Dee Dee said. The daughter asked,
-Could we please come in? We just drove up from Myrtle Beach.
The daughter was Dee Dee’s age, the son a few years younger. They stood on the steps, next to each other. Like that picture American Gothic, Dee Dee thought, if that had been brother and sister instead of. The daughter said,
-We have found a place for her. It’s near where I live, and full of people like her.
-Would you like coffee or a beer? You’ve come a long way.
Dee Dee sat them at the table. A pile of deposit slips sitting on the table rustled under the daughter’s elbow. Her contact lenses budged when she blinked. The daughter said,
-She doesn’t want to leave. She says everything from our father is still in that trailer. She doesn’t want to leave him. His cologne is still sitting on the sink. She hasn’t touched the pillows on his armchair or the glass that was in the holder.’
-How is she holding up?
-She drinks. She falls and forgets things. I don’t know if that’s her or the vodka. Do you have a key to her place?
-She gave it to me after Al died. She said she didn’t want to be alone.
The son spoke.
Could you please do us a favor? Keep an eye on her. Here’s my phone number, and my sister’s. Call us if anything happens.’
Dylan thought Mrs. Trudi was creepy. He liked living at Charli’s place. She had the new baby and he had to share a bunk bed with Caleb until Caleb went back to DCS because he stabbed Charli’s stomach with a pencil when she was pregnant. Charli didn’t scream at Dylan and nobody smacked him, except Caleb sometimes at night when Charli couldn’t see, and that hurt less than when a grownup hit him. After Caleb left, nobody hit him. Charli took them paddling in the kayak, taught them how to use the lawn mower and the weed-whacker and played frisbee with them. Mrs. Trudi would watch them and then come over and talk. The skin under her eyes was bagged and crinkly but soft and very white, almost clear, and the skin under her chin looked like a turkey’s and wobbled when she spoke. In the summer, she wore sleeveless shirts that showed you the skin sagging under her arms like bat wings and what Dylan thought used to be breasts. She always had a water bottle with a straw pointing out of it. She would grab his hand and say,
-Aren’t you a handsome one.
-Uh-Huh.
-I’ll bet you have lots of girlfriends.
He put a bucket full of gravel on her porch because he wanted her to stay in her home. Ms. Trudi complained to Charli. Charli asked him, when they were alone
-Did you put that bucket on Mrs. Trudi’s porch?
Charli was wearing pink Crocs and shorts that showed the picture of the rose on her leg. Next to her foot was a divot in the crusher run.
-Yeah.
-Why?
-She’s creepy.
-She creeps everyone out. But you don’t hurt someone just because they are weird. What do you think the world would be like if everyone did that?
-I don’t know.
-Well, think about it. And don’t do that again.
When Trudi was alone, she would talk. Sometimes she would talk to Al, sometimes to Ben Smalley, sometimes to her mother. She would stand at the kitchen sink, look out the window, move her hands and move her lips. Around eleven thirty she would look at the clock on the wall and say, My Lord, I need to eat something, and then continue for the rest of the day. She would tell about the first time she smoked cigarettes or drank wine, or about the teenagers who had broken into her shed. She would speak about politicians, the way the park was going downhill or the price of gas. Most mornings, she would wake up at 4:30. The school bus stopped at the corner of her street at 7:30. By that time, she was on the porch in her housedress, with the water bottle in her hand, waving at people dropping their children off, going to work, mowing lawns, fixing potholes. By 8:00, she was inside, talking to the window.
She spoke better, she thought, when she was alone than when she spoke with other people, but it felt so much better when someone was there. But since Al died, people rarely stopped to talk. That meant that she spoke well, but by the end of the day it felt like a river had passed through her hands and she had not bothered to drink from it. At eight or nine at night O’Clock, she would realize that she had been standing at the sink, looking out the window and moving her lips the whole day. Then, she would say, My word, suck on the water bottle straw, and lie down on her side of the bed.
The night it happened, Shepler had just taken out his Nintendo Switch and a blunt. When Trudi’s number showed up on his phone, he thought, I will call back after I blow these guys away. Dee Dee was arguing with her other boss at the other job because he wanted to fire Ashley Simms for missing a double because she couldn’t get someone to look after Lilly, when Lilly’s father got sick. Charli was coming back from the lake with Dylan and the baby. Vergil was in his armchair, watching Gunsmoke. Korda was down-state, counting his money. Trudi poured the vodka from the jug into the water bottle and stuck the straw in the hole, as she always did. The tip of the straw pricked the tip of her tongue and she wiped a bit of lipstick away from the shaft. She poured the pills from the bottle into the palm of her hand, looked at Al’s chair and looked at the empty pill bottle. She had left the pillows on the chair to retain the imprint of Al’s back and legs since he left her. She had visited the shed beside their home that afternoon. She never used the tools before Al died, and she did not use them now. Vergil mowed her lawn and a boy from town plowed her driveway and shoveled snow. Because of that, the lawn mower, the snow blower, the snow shovels and the roof rake were where Al had put them after he used them last. His side of the bed no longer smelled like him, but his teeth and National Geographic were where he had left them on his night stand. The slow cooker was where he had put it after he had made short ribs the night he died. She had not moved or washed his toothbrush, which sat in the cup next to hers on the right side of the vanity Al had installed after they bought the home.
After she swallowed the pills, she took a swig of vodka. Then she took another. Then, she called Lou Shepler, Charli, Dee Dee and Ben and Toni Smalley in 7B to say goodbye. When she called Korda’s number, the message was, Thank you for calling Leisure Living Estates. Your call is important to us. Please state your name, phone number and the time of your call. Leisure Living – yours to call home! Shepler’s phone said that three one five six two six seven five seven six was not available. Dee Dee’s said, Hi! I can’t speak now, but I will call you back! Byeee! Charli’s was the same as Shepler’s, with a different number.
The vodka tasted like vodka. She had never taken the pills before. The doctor had prescribed them because she had told him that she couldn’t sleep. After she swallowed them, she stared at the seam in the floor where Mike Speach married the two sections of her home after she and Al had bought it and before Mike died. She felt pleasantly drunk.
A double-paned window, some two-by-fours and vinyl siding separated her from kids riding bicycles on the street in front of her home. One shouted Hey!, and another, Wait up! The McCarthy kids, she thought. Devin is the good one, but Liam is a problem. Always pushing the others at the bus stop. The shaft of the straw reminded her of Al and Ben Smalley. She thought, How can a woman like Charli love children that much but not like men?. She wiped her lipstick off the straw, the way she had wiped it off of Ben’s shaft. He liked it when she did that. He was thick and shy, almost too shy to say more than ‘hi’ to her in the hallway in high school at first. It’s almost as if I were married to Ben as well as Al, she thought. Toni was a little bitch when she first married Ben, but she got better. I thought about him all the time., Trudi thought. I used to think about him when I would close my eyes and when I got out of bed. Now, Al is all I think of. I could use at least two husbands. A gay man and a little boy, too. That would be a full house. That would be nice.
On the wall above the TV was a picture of her, Al, Ken and Barbara when Kenny and Barbara were high schoolers. When they started to bring up the topic of moving last year, she blocked their calls. Then one afternoon, she had looked out the window and saw the two of them in the flesh get out of a minivan with South Carolina plates, parked in her driveway. Couldn’t they call first?, she thought. She locked the door, turned off the lights, went to bed and ignored their knocks. She thought: They want to put their mother in a cage with other old people. They don’t even call them residents there. They call them inmates. Who wants to live like that? By the time the knocking had stopped, her jaw was sore from grinding her teeth.
She thought, I should call Sammy again. He might have been busy last time I called. He is a good man, despite what people say. He is busy. He has that exotic wife and those beautiful kids. Lou used to mow my lawn and stain my porch, when he was in high school. His father was quite a handful. Those big shoulders and hairy calves. Lou looks just like him now. He never answers his phone any more. I have to walk over and knock on his door when I want to speak with him.
Trudi’s feet felt numb and she saw flashes of light at the corner of her eyes. The headache that she woke up with no longer bothered her. She remembered the time when she was in middle school and two boys came to visit her. Her father sat across from them, drinking Jim Beam. When is the next idiot coming?, he asked. Trudi and both of the boys looked at the floor. They went to the quarry as quickly as they could.
Dylan wanted me to trip and break my leg when he put that bucket on my porch, she thought. I should have called CPS. But then what would have happened to him? His father is Tommy Gydesen. His mother is in jail. He has to live with that lesbian. When I see him, I want to grab his hand and eat him up.
Al’s butt imprint was on the chair cushion and dirt from his shoes was on the doormat. She knew that he was not there, but she felt that he was. When they were married, Al would rake the snow off the metal roof when it fell. He shoveled the driveway and a walkway from the doors. He re-caulked the tub and replaced the plumbing in the kitchen and both of the bathrooms. He cooked chicken, ribs and pork butt in the slow cooker. When it was quiet, they would sit on the sofa in front of the TV, watching the news or, and drinking. She would speak; Al would listen. After some time, she would go to bed. She would wake and Al would be in his arm chair, snoring like a chain-saw. She would close the door to the bedroom, put a pillow over her head, and sleep.
Trudi could not move her legs. Her hips and rear-end were numb in a way that disturbed her, but there was nothing she could do about it. She was unable to scoot over to her phone sitting on the coffee table or to stand up and walk to the door. The kids on the bicycles had passed and the light from the window warmed the inside of her chest.
The first time Trudi went to the quarry, she wore a tee shirt and cutoff shorts. After that, she wore a two-piece swimsuit. One of the older boys showed her the ledge they jumped from. She couldn’t move at first. The height froze her. The shale bit into her feet and the water looked like ice. The boy was wearing patterned trunks and was also barefoot. He had hair on his shins and under his arms and the hint of a mustache. She was fourteen. His hand was warm and strong when he put it between her shoulderblades and pushed her off the ledge. When she hit the water, it was so cold it was like a guillotine.
The phone rang. Lou or Dee Dee calling her back, or maybe a telemarketer or a scammer. Once, a scammer had called and said,’ Grandma? This is Bud, your grandson’, but she had known that wasn’t right because he had a foreign accent and Bud spoke like a southerner even though his voice sounded like his father’s. She usually liked it when telemarketers called. She would talk with them because talking was what she did. They would hang up after a while. Now, she did not feel like talking. The phone stopped and then rang again. If it was important, she thought, they would leave a message. She would call back later.
The kids on the bicycles had passed. Light came through the window that Al had re-framed after water had seeped through the caulking and fell, striated, on the floor beside the coffee table. Eight thirty and still light. July.
Her father had been laid off from the quarry when it closed, but he went to work at the gravel pit across the street shortly after that. You could see the one from the other. Trudi remembered drying off after the cold water and lying on her back next to the water and noticing how green and flat it looked. The same boy who had pushed her in was sitting next to her. Her hands were clasped above her head and the light warmed her from the inside. The boy put his hand flat on her stomach. He put the tips of his fingers underneath her swimsuit bottom line and said, Don’t be scared. She didn’t know why he said that. She wasn’t scared at all. If she looked past the boy’s head, she could see the sun and she could hear it. She thought that, if she bothered to raise her hand, she could touch it – the roar of the sun, not the sun itself – with one finger. Why would she be scared? She was happy to be there.
The Galway Review 
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