I slow down in front of the Snowbin residence. It’s Lon, alone, no wife, no family. He was here when I bought Utopia Gardens and I was warned he was fickle. In particular, the old owners, a consortium of bored energy dealers out of Maumee who wanted to dabble in Michigan real estate, had created a quasi-intuitive internal system of red and yellow cards to denote tenants who proved, over time, problematic. Snowbin flitted between red (most severe) and yellow (rather severe) with no discernible rhyme or reason. He was not seasonally late or early—winter or summer could produce similar lulls—and none of it seemed to depend on work, which he had reliably picked up at Quaker State, where he changed oil on weekends and some weekdays. This is the third time his rent has been late since I took over and this will be the second time I’ve visited his trailer, a gray-striped single-wide with a customized porch in faux oak. An American flag flies on a diagonal from a bracket screwed into a panel next to the framing of his front door. A second flag, that of the Michigan State Spartans, hangs in a neighboring bracket. There is no wind, so the flags are quiescent; from my vantage point behind glass, they may as well be plastic. I step out of the vehicle and head to where I need to be, ready to knock and knock.
The first time I met Lon Snowbin, I was not asking for rent. I was introducing myself at Menard’s, where we were both coincidentally skittering through the lumber section, as his new landlord, though I didn’t refer to myself in that fashion. I used the term property manager and was sure to let him know I was the pastor at Trinity of Pine Haven and he was always welcome. By then, I knew about the red and yellow cards, and considered it a stroke of luck I could strike up a conversation with him in a space shuttle–sized hardware chain. Snowbin had a shag goatee then and purpled rings beneath his eyes; he smiled up at me with ocher-tinted teeth, specks of tobacco plain enough. I shook his hand, thick and calloused, and he held mine a second too long.
“If you have any problems, feel free to come to me,” I told him. “Don’t hesitate to call.”
Snowbin never called and I didn’t expect him. As far as I could tell, he attended no church, and divided his time among Quaker State, his home, and the Log Cabin, Pine Haven’s longest-tenured bar. For a time, I almost prayed for his redemption, that he would be, for me, the tenant who never earned himself a red or yellow. I ended up scrapping the system entirely for a simpler internal checklist, no colors required, and there seemed to be a number of months where Snowbin intuited a system switch and behaved accordingly. He approached the status, briefly, of a model tenant. Then slippage. I’d like to think, contrary to scripture, he wasn’t born with sin.
I reach his doormat, a dark brown monogrammed forty-eight-inch, soft underfoot. If he’s smart, it’s one hundred percent coir. A tongue of beige paint is peeling off the door. I knock, shave and a haircut, adding two bits for good measure. There’s no sound of a television playing. Snowbin’s cranky maroon Camaro is parked out front. He’s here. It’s just a matter of waiting.
No sound, and then footsteps. There’s an unseen rustle and additional movement. I half expect him, cinema-style, to press apart the blades of his dusted venetians and peek one yellowed eye through the window. But the door is shaking and opening and there he is, in an imitation mohair and denim jeans, staring. A swollen pair of black Bose headphones are wrung around his neck. He heard me, to his chagrin, because they weren’t yet around his ears.
“Yeah?”
“I wanted to say hello, see how it’s all going, make sure everything’s all right. I haven’t heard from you in a little bit.” Heard from you is the personal check hitting my mailbox. I offer my hand for a shake. He reaches out and shakes back, his grip far looser this time.
“All good over here, Pastor,” he says, his ruddiness almost welcoming. I can’t place Snowbin on any internal ethnicity matrix. English? Scotch-Irish? He’s shaved his goatee, leaving behind a dark starfield of stubble. I don’t smell liquor.
“Well, I am glad to hear it. I really am. I was just over at the Unger residence . . .” I’m not certain why I’ve told him this or why it matters. “And I wanted to check in here. It seems you are a bit behind on the rent. I wanted to make sure everything was well with you and see when we could be expecting the rent.”
“We?”
“The management company. I’m the principal, but we have employees, a board, an accountant, an attorney. I like to think of it as a team and we are one.”
“A team, huh?”
“Like the Tigers, except we can’t all hit quite as well.” I remember the Tigers, from my cursory interest, are playing below .500 ball and are inevitably not hitting all that well. This may be why Snowbin is not smiling. “We’re not fireballers either.”
“What happens if it stays late?”
“The rent?”
“Yur.”
“We assess a fifteen percent late fee, which would be a real shame, since you’re paying a fee you really shouldn’t have to pay.”
“And?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are there more fees, after the fifteen percent?”
“Well, it’s fifteen percent on the month, and another fifteen on the subsequent month until the duration of your lease expiration. It’d also be within our legal rights to initiate eviction proceedings. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I know you to be a good, respectable—”
“Cigarette?”
Snowbin slips out a pack of American Spirits from the front pocket of his mohair. He pinches one and lights up, blowing a small cloud to the side, away from me.
“No thank you, I don’t smoke.”
“A pastor, right.”
“And I struggle with the taste. Once in a while, a good cigar.”
Snowbin continues to smoke. He leans against the siding of his trailer, taking in a scene that might be of more interest to him than to me, his eyes falling to the roadway. He is my height, give or take a quarter inch, and his hard belly gives him an extra twenty pounds. His hair, which I’ve seen pressed beneath ball caps in the past, is an unruly thatch of chestnut.
“A good smoke on a cold morning, you don’t know how good it is.”
“Listen, I really don’t want to intrude. I hate doing this. It’s just you’re very late.”
“And you need the rent.”
“That’s right.”
Snowbin takes another drag on his cigarette. When he’s done, his chest inflates slightly, as if his next point must germinate there first, among the blood vessels and tendons swirling around his breastbone.
“My daddy used to take me to church. Every Sunday. He was a church elder. Maybe you knew of him, Ray Earl Snowbin.”
Snowbin must know I’m barely forty. Few ever assume I’m older than I am. A meticulous skin care regimen and careful sun exposure has kept wrinkles at bay, absent genetic frown lines. My hair has yet to thin. Yet Snowbin imagines I was a contemporary of his father’s. I consider whether to make this point gently, that his curiosity is implausible. A light correction. Snowbin is older than me.
“I didn’t know him, no, though it’s fantastic whenever someone decides to give back to the church community like that.”
“My daddy talked to God every day. Do you, Pastor Starr, talk to Him every day?”
“I do, yes.”
“Talk. Do you talk?”
“Yes, I do.”
“What is it you talk about?”
“Questions of faith and the soul.”
“Questions of faith and the soul,” he repeats, turning the sentence over in his teeth, infusing it with his own syrupy fury. “Those are large questions. You get your money’s worth.”
“I hope you’re talking to Him too. He’s always listening, you know. Even when you think the door is shut. He wants to hear you.”
“God wants his lot rent.”
“There are temporal matters we do have to tend to, from time to time.”
“If I pay now, do I owe you the fifteen percent?”
“Not yet. But very soon, you will. That’s why I try to stop by. I don’t want anyone in Utopia Gardens paying a late fee. I know, sometimes, money can slip anyone’s mind. I know I’ll forget about a utility bill, the water.” I’ve never forgotten any of these bills. “It does happen.”
“Indeed, life does happen, Pastor Starr.”
“I’m glad you understand.”
The cigarette now dangles from Snowbin’s lips, desperado-style, and his left hand is toying with the pack, bopping it against his denimed thigh. I struggle to imagine what it is, right now, he’s actually thinking.
“There’s a smell here, you know,” Snowbin finally says. “A smell all around.”
“I don’t smell anything in particular. Do you mean in the whole park, or inside your home, or a gas leak?”
“All around, man. You smell it once, you smell it always. It’s like the burnt ass of a thoroughbred. You ever smelled that?”
“I’ve never, no.”
“Here’s what we’ll do. You want a check. You’re a pastor who wants to get paid. I can respect that. The last owner, he just sent us angry letters. You come in for the personal touch.”
“Listen, we’re all people here, and I just want to make sure you’re all right, Mr. Snowbin. I want to be of help.”
“You want to be of help, Pastor Starr?”
“Yes, of course.”
Snowbin stubs out his cigarette. He has me in his sights now. No glancing right or left, no surveying a mythical scene beyond my shoulders. His left hand has steadied and the pack of American Spirits is back in his front pocket. A pair of northern cardinals wheel overhead, their feathers a filmic red. The sky is still quite blue.
“Why, you can pay it for me.”
Perhaps I should have prepped for this turn all along. Most tenants understand the logic undergirding real estate enough to never venture such a request, even of a pastor. They are properly accustomed. The Ungers know they’ve signed a binding lease. Snowbin must know too. I would ache for him if I had heard Quaker State decided, one week ago, they no longer needed men to cheerily change oil. I would ache if the job market were so loose that even handy men couldn’t labor at auto shops any longer. I would ache if I were an anchorite locked away from the world, with no comprehension of temporal economics. Lon Snowbin, with his American Spirits and T.J.Maxx denim, would have my charity, and I would rush to the Chevy’s glove compartment and find my checkbook.
But that is not his reality. He believes he is playing from a strength, not a weakness. He has money socked away somewhere, just not for today, just not for lot rent at Utopia Gardens. He’s betting I’ll fold in, that walking with God is somehow a sign that he can have what he wants and get back to his American Spirits and midday masturbation. I’ve met many men like him. They take the church for little more than an assemblage of rubes and suckers, worshipping the invisible, and they profess an interest in God only when it furthers whatever transitory political agenda they may pursue on the expressway to hell. They vote Republican and that, they figure, should be enough. They last opened the Bible when they were ten and they last spoke about the teachings earnestly when they were eight. Their grasp on the matters of the body politic is not any greater than their understanding of Jesus Christ. A pastor who collects rent isn’t to be taken seriously as a landlord; he preaches, so how can he be owed anything? Pastors are too busy unraveling Exodus to understand a land contract in the state of Michigan. Pastors don’t scrutinize pronouncements from the Federal Reserve or consider the ROI on a distressed property.
Pastors don’t stand in your doorway, unmoving. I grin back at him. There’s a band of warm sunlight hitting my neck just right. Snowbin doesn’t know how eager I can be.
“That’s an excellent suggestion. I’d be happy to take a peek into your accounts and tax returns sometime to see whether you qualify for rental assistance. You may be eligible, depending on your prior year returns. And if you don’t want the government involved at all, I can consider a bridge loan. It would be a favor from me to you because you’ve been at Utopia Gardens for a few years now.”
“A peek, huh?”
“I’d have our office review the paperwork and I’d personally oversee it all so we can process you in a timely manner, assuming you’d like to be processed.”
The gleam has faded. He has, like a butterfly forced backward into his cocoon, assumed his natural state, a man with a circumscribed aptitude for the affairs that involve any movement of money. Bar math is easy, and so is Quaker State math. Lon Snowbin is the kind of man who thinks it’s clever to ask your height and then tell you he didn’t know shit could be piled so high. I could save him if he let me, but he will never let me. He will slink through the years, maybe give the wrong state trooper the side-eye, and do a jail stint he’ll have to explain away when he’s sixty.
“I’ll have the money,” he says quietly.
“I very much appreciate that. And you know what? I think I’ll have a cigarette, after all. I’ve heard good things about American Spirit and it’s been so long.”
Snowbin does not want to reach back into his mohair, fondle the pack, and hand to me, the man extracting monthly lot rent from him, one of his prized cigarettes. He silently offers one, a light tremor in his fingers, and I give him the smile of a man with plenty. It’s my curtain-raiser, extra wide and bright, like the one I normally tuck away for the pulpit.
“And if you could give me a light, please.”
Snowbin passes his teal gas station lighter. I hadn’t noticed it until now. Teal is a color that holds your gaze. “Thank you.”
I hold the lighter in one hand, the cigarette in the other. I put the cigarette to my lips and slowly, slowly, raise the lighter. Snowbin is watching and I have to be sure he’s watching, that he doesn’t lose interest or drift behind his door, never to be seen again. But his cigarette is involved—he’ll keep on me, too despairing to look elsewhere. The cigarette is soft between my lips.
“Ah, well, you know what? I think I changed my mind, Mr. Snowbin. This may be rougher on me than I thought. It’s been so many years since I puffed one of these.”
I pass the lighter back and keep the cigarette cool and crushed in my mouth. If Snowbin had the wherewithal, he’d be calculating precisely how much money he had wasted on me. He would torture himself for days.
After the full second passes, I pluck the cigarette out of my mouth. “My apologies.”
I let Lon Snowbin’s worthless cigarette drop to the dirt and walk back to the Chevy, my time with him through.
Ross Barkan is the Editor-in-Chief of The Metropolitan Review.
“‘…assuming you’d like to be processed…’” Or consumed. I like how the power play creeps up slowly, subliminally, and almost unseen, until it’s suddenly the only thing you can see.
Do I detect a note of J.F. Powers in here? Really dug this.