Usually, when the Founder sat in the Media Res drinking, he thumbed his phone, but this night was different from all other nights. The phone sat on the bar and the Founder stared at a space behind the mirror that covered the wall behind the bottles of gin, single-malt Scotch and high-end bourbon. It is time to stop drinking gin, he remembered, when the lady on the bottle starts to look good.
‘It is presumptuous of you to cut me off’, he told the bartender. ‘You’re a pink flamingo.’
The bartender ruffled her tail feathers and said, ‘This is the last one.’ The Founder rolled the liquid the bartender poured into his glass and reflected that it smelled like eternity cut short.
Legal crept up from behind, unannounced, clapped the Founder on the back and said, ‘Dude’.
‘Are you a Gurkha’, the Founder said.
‘No.’
‘Well, stop doing that, then.’
Legal ordered a Guinness. The Founder drained his mezcal.
‘The Epp eviction happened today’, the Founder said.
‘Did Boot have to tase him’, Legal asked.
‘And I found Vergil on his back in the snow.’
Legal set his pint-glass down and looked at the Founder.
‘Vergil, the cranky old bastard in the park in central New York you mean’, he asked
‘Correct.’
‘The guy who taught you how to run mobile home parks?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Your manufactured housing Jedi master?’
‘Yes.’
‘Doesn’t he have Alzheimer’s now?’
‘He does.’
‘And doesn’t he shuffle as if he were wearing leg irons when he walks?’
‘Hey’, the Founder shouted as he banged his glass on the bar. ‘Who do I have to sleep with to get another?’ He waved his glass at the bartender.
‘In your dreams’, the bartender said.
‘I dream of a pink flamingo’, the Founder said to Legal. ‘It is a pleasant dream.’
‘Stick to your species.’
‘After the events of today, mammalia disgust me.’
.
‘What do Vergil’s fall and the Epp eviction have to do with each other’, Legal asked. ‘They are different parks, different people, different types of events.’
‘Nothing’, the Founder said.
‘So, why do you mention them together?’
‘Because they illustrate two of the ways a resident can leave a mobile home park.’
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‘Hey, Schuckiputz’, the Founder said the next time the bartender walked past. ‘You know what Waldheimer’s disease is?’
‘Kiss my ass’, the bartender said.
‘You’re an avian’, the Founder said. ‘You don’t have an ass. That’s what I love about you.’
Legal glanced toward the bouncer, who was large, bald and Russian. ‘Knock it off’, he said to the Founder.
‘Bitch doesn’t want to hear the punchline’, the Founder said.
‘So, what happened with Vergil?’
‘I went to check up on the home where the dead guy used to live in the park in central New York’
‘How’s that going?’
‘Don’t get me fecking started. Then, I drove past Vergil’s place and I saw him lying on his back in the snow next to his driveway like Gregor Samsa. He couldn’t turn himself over and he couldn’t stand up’.
‘Oh, Jesus.’
‘So I helped him get up. When I asked him how long he had been there, he said ten minutes, but his sense of time is not what it used to be. He is heavy. I had to stand behind him, put my hands under his armpits and lift from the knees.’
‘What was he doing out there?’
‘He said he had left the house to clean the snow off his car.’
‘Where was his wife?’
‘She parks him in front of the TV when she goes to work.’
‘Where does she work?’
‘Ford dealership in town.’
‘How much of the day is he alone like that?’
She works eight to twelve five days a week.’
‘What does he watch, when he sits there?’
‘Gunsmoke and hunting shows.’
‘So, what happened?’
‘He got restless. It happens with people with Alzheimer’s. They get up, walk into town, look for a coffee shop that burned down forty years ago in another city. He looked out the window, saw the snow on his car, and decided it needed to be shoveled.’
‘I mean – what happened after you brought him inside?’
‘I called the Ford dealership, they put his wife on the phone, I told her what happened, she came home. I stayed until she showed up. I told her that Vergil had dangerous tendencies toward independence and deserved a spanking. I looked for an opportunity to say that she shouldn’t worry because he is too mean to die, but I thought that that would be in bad taste.’
‘Who would have found him, if you didn’t?’
‘Nobody, probably. It was late morning on a weekday.’
.
The bartender walked by and the Founder said, ‘Hey, Feathers. You know Kurt Waldheim? President of Austria, secretary general of the UN, Nazi war criminal?’
The bartender wiped some glasses, looked away and walked off toward the end of the bar, where some guys from the military base were trying to impress a couple of grackles.
‘I’m coming up empty here’, the Founder shouted after her. ‘Zsa Zsa Gabor? You know she was Paris Hilton’s great aunt?’
‘Dude’, Legal said. ‘Leave her alone.’
‘Flamingos live twenty to thirty years in the wild, but can live up to forty years in captivity.’
‘She looks wild’, Legal said.
‘I think she is too young to know who Paris Hilton is’, the Founder said. ‘Shit.’
.
‘The Epp eviction’, Legal said. What about it?
‘The horror’, the Founder said. ‘The horror.’
‘That line has been used before’, Legal said.
The Founder did not answer. He had re-discovered the space ten feet behind the mirror behind the bar.
‘Did Deputy Boot do the eviction’, Legal asked.
‘He took point’, the Founder said, ‘But the other deputy showed up, too. The guy who is six-two, fifty-five years old and bald.’
‘Did Boot watch midget porn while you cleaned the place out?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘What did the other guy do?’
‘He joked with Boot about getting a vodka IV drip.’
‘Did Epp go willingly?’
‘As willingly as anyone will, if the sheriff is at the door.’
‘Could you describe him?’
‘African-American, sixty years old, large belly, thick glasses, high voice. A licensed nursing home administrator. A vet and an anti-vaxxer. He lived alone but had a daughter at whose home, he said, he would stay after he left. While we were there, he was cordial and resigned.
‘What does he do for money?’
‘He says he extracts gold and silver from household appliances.’
‘Did Boot issue a write of possession?’
‘After we emptied the home of Epp’s belongings. We put some in a U-Haul that Epp supplied. The rest went to the curb.’
‘What was in there?’
‘Read.’
The Founder handed a list to Legal. The paper was soaking wet, like a piece of paper in a Marx Brothers movie.
.
1 sofa with built-in recliner. 1 armchair. 1 coffee table. 1 kitchen table. 1 bed, 1 box spring, 1 mattress. Pots, pans, dishes, silverware, Tupperware. 2 bread knives, 1 folding lock-back knife.
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‘Boot said that, while we were cleaning out the home, Epp could not touch the knives’, the Founder said. ‘We had to put them in a dish drying rack, which he handed to us to pack.’
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Several computer CPU cases. One gaming computer fabricated from a plastic drink cooler cut longways, a motherboard and a cooling unit wired to the exterior. A card from the Universal Life Church, ordaining Bradley Epp a minister of the aforesaid church. A pamphlet from the Universal Life Church entitled ‘By the Power Vested in Me’, instructing new ministers how to perform marriage ceremonies. Three cell phones, two laptops.
.
Legal looked up from the list and wiped his hands. ‘He left his cell phones and laptops’, he asked.
‘He took them’, the Founder said.
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A large flat-screen TV and three stand-up fans. Six straight-backed wooden chairs. A mini-vice, a pipe-cutter, a ball-peen hammer. A folder of rare coins including Indian head pennies, buffalo nickels and several older-looking coins inscribed with Chinese characters.
.
‘He left those’, Legal asked.
‘I was able to give them to him before he left’, the Founder said. ‘By the time I found the other coins, he had driven away.’
‘What other coins?’
‘Read on, dumbass.’
.
A toolbox with more rare coins, including a series of first-issue quarters, dimes and nickels. A Hong Kong dollar and a New Zealand dollar. A medallion with Cyrillic writing on it, including the inscription, ‘Moskva, 1986’. A hundred or more reusable grocery bags. A large aluminum box labelled ‘Forensic Analytics Machine’. Several car jacks. A functional snow blower. A can of chickpeas, an envelope of microwave popcorn. A functioning microwave. A large ziplock bag full of empty ring boxes. A full-sized fridge. Half-eaten and decayed organic matter inside same. Unopened mail from SeaComm Credit Union, DSS and the Veterans’ Administration. An unfilled-out application for rental assistance from DSS. A drawer-full of sex toys, including a very large, white, strap on penis, a butt plug, a bead ring, and miscellaneous other toys of unknown provenance or utility. A large unopened carton of MREs. Three iPhone covers, still inside Amazon packaging. Four Keurig-type coffee makers, none functional. One bottle of Miralax with a pre-colonoscopy prescription. Several bottles of other miscellaneous prescription meds. One blood pressure cuff, one COPD machine apparently functional, inside a black nylon carrying case. Three gallon-jugs of muriatic acid. Four jugs of distilled water. Several gallon-jugs holding dyed liquid of unknown provenance. A copy of a license issued by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania stating that Bradley Epp was a Licensed Nursing Home Administrator, with an issue date of 03/30/2017 and an expiration date of 06/30/2022.
.
‘Didn’t he have a shed, too’, Legal asked.
‘That was the meth lab’, the Founder said.
‘What does a meth lab look like’, Legal asked.
‘A plastic box feeding into a four-inch PCV pipe that vents out the roof. A bunch of five-gallon buckets on the floor. Countless gallon-jugs full of chemicals of unknown provenance.’
‘He was not Walter White.’
‘Nope.’
.
Legal handed the list back and tried to find the spot behind the mirror that the Founder was looking at. ‘I wish I could unsee the reference to the sex toys’, he said.
‘Dude’, the Founder said. ‘You only had to read that.’
‘So, what happens next’, Legal asked.
‘We took everything out and put it on the curb. He signed a release. Mike will gut the home and rehab it. He says he will finish it with wainscot and knotty pine. Someone else will buy it. With luck, I will have sold the park before the new resident is carried out.’
‘Being born and dying are ugly processes.’
‘Yes, they are.’
‘Mike does good work.’
‘Yes, he does.’
The two men started at the space behind the mirror for a bit. At the end of the bar, one of the guys from the military base – an older guy, likely an officer – said something to the bartender and she cackled. The Founder roused himself from his reverie and looked at Legal
‘You know, there was one thing that we did not find in that home.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We did not find a single book.’
Legal took the list from the Founder’s hand, laid it on the bar, and squinted. ‘You’re right’, he said.
‘You know what John Waters said about that’, the Founder said.
‘About what’, Legal asked.
‘John Waters said, if you meet someone at a bar and go home with them and they don’t have any books on their shelf, don’t fuck ‘em.’
An unsettled look passed over Legal’s face. ‘Too soon after the sex toys’, he said. ‘You don’t know what happened in there.’
‘The horror’, the Founder said. ‘Oh, my god. The horror.’