RE: Trailer Trash, 66 pt 1 (Patreon)

    “Roger,” Mr. Moore asked into the phone. “Are we still on for today?”

    “Whoos’dis?” Roger slurred. “Gawdamn, y’know what time it is?”

    “Alan Moore,” Mr. Moore reminded him. “Wasn’t sure I’d catch you if I called to the school later, so—”

    “Ah, fuck,” Roger swore. “Yeah. Yeah, okay I remember. I’ll uh. I’ll get that old shitter hauled out and up into my truck. Damn, good thing you caught me ‘fore I headed out. Hah! Alright, hell yeah brother. I’ll meet you at uhhh. Shit. Seven good?”

    “Seven works,” Mr. Moore said. “There aren’t gonna be any problems with the school?”

    “Oh? Nah,” Roger assured him. “We’ll be all good. Anywhere else I’da had to think up some bullshit excuse maybe, but out there in athletics? Won’t be no one around to give a fuck. Separate water shutoff there, I’ll get it. Well hey man I’m norm’lly still asleep right now, so uh, so I’ll catch you when I see you in there at seven, awright?”

    “Yeah, thanks a bunch,” Mr. Moore said. “See you there.”

* * *

    “Whelp,” Roger made a show of dusting off his hands beside the bed of his truck. “This ‘un was the best of a lot. Should work. Have eight or nine of the sumbitches still in there, but looks like couple of ‘em split or cracked at some point over the winter. Fuckin’ thermal shock or all that, not meant to all be sittin’ out there in my fuckin’ shed, I guess. Fuck. We’ll uh, we’ll give this ’un a good test run or two once we get the water switched back on, make sure there aren’t no uhh, hiccups or nothin’. Sound good?”

    “Well, it sure is pink,” Mr. Moore chuckled. “Damn, you weren’t kiddin’.”

    He slid the movers cloth and the porcelain throne the whole way out onto the open tailgate of Roger’s truck, and then carefully turned it around so that he could examine the bowl for any hairline cracks or fractures.

    “Hey now, she’s ‘salmon,’ not pink,” Roger laughed. “She was pink, I coulda sold her off last year easy, heh heh.”

    “Looks pretty pink to me,” Mr. Moore looked from the toilet to Roger and back again. “Isn’t this pink?”

    “Nah, ‘salmon’s’ like an orange pink, see?” Roger slid the tank and its lid out next to the bowl and gave them a slap. “Shit, ain’t you married? You should know salmon ain’t fuckin’ pink pink. They’ll lose their fuckin’ marbles at you over the different shades of everything, my friend, and that there’s a losin’ argument no matter which way you sit and spin it. Girls got this whole separate color wheel from the normal stuff—s’like they see in a different fuckin’ spectrum. But, see this? You can tell the difference a bit. See how it’s kinda more… hell I dunno, orangey?”

    “...No?” Mr. Moore couldn’t tell if the man was messing with him or not. “Just looks pink to me?”

    “Well sir, I envy you that,” Roger chuckled with a leer. “Haw, goddamn. Ignorance is bliss, s’all I’ll say. Alright, you give her a look over, I gotta cart I can swing on out here so we don’t gotta lug ‘em the whole way over. Almost dropped the fucker tryin’ ta wiggle an’ finagle it out past them busted ones in my back shed this mornin,’ so watch it. These’re slippery sumbitches, an’ if it breaks? Hell, I don’t got that thirty bucks to give you back no refund or nothin’. Turned into beer money and long gone already, heh heh.”

    After going over the bowl and tank and checking the haphazard grocery bag of parts Roger had thrown in, Mr. Moore returned to his truck and pulled out his own plastic grocery bag. A mostly new toilet tank kit, some spare lengths of PEX he’d kept handy—flexible cross-linked polyethylene plastic pipe that was just getting popular in Kentucky this past year, as well as a handful of loose copper and PVC fittings, since he wasn’t sure what kind of mess he’d be walking into back there under the stadium seating.

    Commercial restroom plumbing used one inch lines to deliver high pressure to a flush valve, because the school toilets in there would originally be tankless. This salmon-colored commode here was a normal gravity-fed tank you’d find in any house, so he was going to be converting that one inch pipe to either a three-eighths or half inch residential one. Alan took a moment searching through the jumbled bits and bobs he’d gathered up into the bag at the end of the week to determine which. What he found looked to be a copper three-eighths inch reducer bushing, and he turned it over in his fingers and then checked it against the other parts he had on hand.

    So, gonna have to pull out their flush valve, since we’re goin’ over to a fill valve, Mr. Moore considered the project. Roger said these were old as hell floor-mounted flushometers, so less worries there with gettin’ the wax seal right. No, shouldn’t think that—probably where things’re gonna go wrong, with my luck.

    He was going to be committing a clear code violation, but hopefully a pretty pardonable one—after all, wasn’t it better to have two working toilets rather than just one in a girl’s locker room? He knew how catty high school girls could get with each other. It was all too easy to imagine them feuding or holding petty grudges over something as inconsequential as convenient access to the one lone commode available in there. Plumbing was often thankless work to begin with, but the thought that if he could somehow prevent—or at least alleviate—some problem like this that might turn friendly girls into enemies, it made the extra time out of his weekend worth it.

    Less for them all to squabble over, Mr. Moore told himself. Hell, between what I’ve got here and that bag Roger threw in, we MIGHT just have enough parts to get all three of the commodes in there working again. Girls are social creatures, we’ve got to do our part to reduce the pressure there with them anyhow we can. Not havin’ any of them waiting in line or hassling each other to hurry up when they go about their business? Will hopefully go a long way.

    When it came to the toilets over on the boys’ side in their locker room… Mr. Moore didn’t have any sympathy. If they’d broken all their toilets over there, they just plain weren’t responsible enough to have any, and they could hold it all in until they got back to the school building. He wanted to be as generous as he could and chalk up the issues on the girls’ side to neglect, whereas at least from what he’d heard with the floor drains, the boys had obviously been out to intentionally vandalize their fixtures over there.

    “Alright man yeah, I’ll lead ya on over,” Roger called as he wheeled out a cart. “Ain’t no one around, no worries.”

    “Yeah,” Mr. Moore said.

    Together they moved the tank and its lid off of the mover’s blanket and then used the padded cloth to wrap up and protect the bowl as best they could. The heavy porcelain was gently moved over onto the cart, and the tank lid was flat enough to place next to it without worrying about it falling off. The tank itself Mr. Moore carried, hugging it against his chest, with the shopping bag of tools and parts tucked inside. Like that he followed Roger out of the parking lot, and then down a paved side path towards the athletics field.

    The last few times he was here, he had only stopped by the parking loop and the administrative offices, and now that he was able to see the sheer scope of how much had changed here, it shocked him. It was hard not to look around everywhere across the emptiness of the paved track lanes and the broad football field without gawking a little—Springton High had changed a whole damn lot since he and Shannon attended in the seventies.

    What he remembered as their uneven ‘sporting field’ full of ruts and furrows was now the large expanse of proper graded and completely flat athletics field. In just a decade or two, the rickety two-tier wooden bench seating from his memories had become multiple four-tier aluminum bleachers on the far side of the field. On the home side, gargantuan grandstands of concrete had been erected with actual restrooms and locker rooms beneath, and even what looked like a miniature enclosed pressbox perched up there in the top corner.

    The gradual slope of forest he remembered leading on up behind the school there in the distance had been bulldozed away over the years, and now he saw only the barren stretch of a student parking lot one one side and then rows of those portable classrooms set up along paved paths. It used to be that hoodlum kids would hop a little fence during lunch and sneak off through the woods to access the street over on the other side where there were some restaurants—now, all the trees were completely gone. The high school campus grounds extended uninterrupted the whole way on over to meet the next city block there.

    Time just keeps marchin’ on and on, huh? Mr. Moore grimaced. Used to be the school felt like it was right NEXT to downtown—now it’s all part of the same sort of city center area. Springton ain’t even BIG, really. Just, it’s got to be three or four times the size it was back then.

     The chainlink fence around the track there was latched but not locked, and Roger didn’t have to produce his janitor’s keyring until all the way down when they reached the double-doors beneath the concrete stadium seating. He flicked on a bank of lights, and the sour smell of old sweat greeted them as they pushed the cart deeper inside. A quick stop to a maintenance closet and the water was shut off at the valve, and then the sweat smell was partially masked by hair spray and perfume when they entered into the girls’ locker room.

    There wasn’t much to see—banks of lockers, and past them a shower area and three stalls for toilets, with a bunch of different beach towels hanging up in between.

    “Hm,” Mr. Moore frowned at seeing several capped off and disconnected shower heads—a full third of the showers here were no longer in operation. “You have something for those? I didn’t—”

    “Ahhh, don’t even get me started,” Roger groaned, waving him off. “We gotta bust the whole way into the cinderblock to pull those out and get new ones in, s’gonna be a while.”

    “Not today, then,” Mr. Moore chuckled.

    “Not today, he says,” Roger groaned. “Not this month, not next month neither, if I can help it. Your baby girl’s goin’ here, yeah?”

    “Yeah,” Mr. Moore carefully set down the tank so that he could take a look inside the stalls. “Her first year, she’s a freshman.”

    “Well, to be completely honest—most of them girls don’t even use the showers,” Roger confided. “S’not like the old days, where the coaches’d make ‘em all shower in together. And, when it’s optional, and girls are fussy, and Betty Lou Who doesn’t want Stacy Stackhouse and her friends making fun of her for not bein’ all grown up yet—yeah. I’m not gonna say nothin’ inappropriate ‘bout underage girls, but damn, bullying don’t even describe it. You seen that movie, uhhh, Carrie?”

    “Carrie?” Mr. Moore shook his head. “Maybe?”

    “S’a horror flick, high school horror,” Roger laughed. “Like, they made all the girls shower together back then, this one gets her first period right then and there, freaks out—they all rag on her for it, throwin’ tampons and shit, pointin’ fingers, laughin’ at her.”

    “Girls are cruel,” Mr. Moore sighed. “Teenage ones especially. Seen a lot of that, recently.”

    “Well, if less of the little twats are usin’ them, less reason to fix everything,” Roger shrugged. “Uh, no offense to yer little girl, of course, I’m sure she’s an angel. The boys’ side is ten times worse, those guys’re fuckin’ animals. Ricky tell you ‘bout what they did? Old shirts and shit stuffed down the drains, water backed up so the whole fuckin’ place was flooding with gross shit?”

    “Yeah,” Mr. Moore nodded. “Sounds like a mess.”

    “Mess don’t even start to cover it,” Roger groaned. “We ever find that little shits that did it, we’re beating his ass. Don’t care if he’s just a kid or not. Ricky an’ me hadta be down on our hands and knees in that getting all the fuckin’ muck outta everything. Good God, the smell... well, you get the idea. When they say up shit creek and without a paddle, they’re talking ‘bout how that boys’ side was over there. Anyways hey—you got everything you need to get started?”

    “I should be good, yeah,” Mr. Moore said. “You stickin’ around, if I need to holler for you?”

    “I’ll be back out this way by athletics  ‘round… I don’t know, ten, eleven or so?” Roger said after a moment of consideration. “We gotta district guy comes out for mowing most of the big areas, then I gotta come back through myself with a weed-whacker, finish up some of the in-betweens and close up to the buildings he ain’t gonna cover with his zero-turn. ‘Cause, if I don’t—they’ll bitch. And oh, they’re always bitchin.’”

    “Hopin’ it won’t take that long, but I guess we’ll see,” Mr. Moore sighed. “Might be able to get all three of these commodes up and running.”

    “Ricky says you’re a real-life Hank Hill kinda guy, so I ain’t gonna look over your shoulder, or nothin’,” Roger warned. “Ain’t nothin’ round here to steal, and don’t go pokin’ around, neither. It’s the ladies locker room. No funny business, or Ricky and I’ll both beat your ass and then we’ll call the cops and have them beat your ass. Some of them other guys around town joke around ‘bout all the jailbait we must see everyday, or ‘bout peepin’ on girls changing and all that like you see in movies—yeah we don’t want nothing like that here, ‘less you’re fixin’ to try and eat corn on the cob with no fuckin’ teeth the rest of your life. Capiche?”

    “I’m married,” Mr. Moore shook his head. For a brief moment he was tempted to say he was married to THE Shannon Delaine, but those boasting years were behind him, and Roger probably wouldn’t have a clue who she had been. “I have a daughter goin’ here to Springton High, for Christ’s sake. Anyone joking around about peeking at high school girls, here? You just let me know—I got tools in my truck for that kinda problem.”

    “Hey, you’re alright, man,” Roger chuckled. “Good luck with that fuckin’ flush valve, heh heh. You just call me up anytime you want to work on somethin’ here and help get some bullshit off my list. Ricky say anything to you ‘bout getting you onboard official with the school district, here?”

    “Couple years back, yeah,” Mr. Moore nodded. “I’m doin’ okay independent, still. More hands-on stuff, less dragging a mop down the same damn hall, scrubbing down the same damn sinks and toilets every day.”

    “Hey, it’s a livin’,” Roger barked out another laugh. “Get all that usual stuff down to your routine, you don’t even pay no attention to it, after a while. Like my hands’re still workin,’ but my brain clocked out hours and hours ago, and all that. Heh heh, and Saturdays, Sundays? So long as I don’t smoke inside or have the whole place smellin’ like weed, they don’t give a fuck ‘bout what I do—just that I go on down the list and get it all done.”

( 65, Open invitation. | RE: Trailer Trash | Next, 65 pt 2 )

/// Not really a redemption arc, just me wanting to show more of what Tabitha's dad has always been like. More than willing to put in work for his family or help out in the ways that he can, even if it's not always something that will be noticed or really appreciated. A very simple man, and when it comes to being a father or with situations that have nuance or complexity he barely qualifies, but—I wouldn't say he's a bad person.