A blue plumber in McCain country

We bumped into each other at the KC Korner, a little crossroads market in this northern Arizona farm town. I’d gone there to ask for directions to Sen. John McCain’s ranch -- a secluded 7-acre spread that, had the election gone differently, would have served as the Western White House.

He was there to buy a pack of Marlboros, a young man, dressed in T-shirt, jeans and scuffed boots, with a cellphone and folded knife on his belt.

He introduced himself as Justin Pettijohn, said he’d spent most of his 36 years around here, frequently stalked game in the brush-covered hills overlooking the McCain place and had bid for jobs at the homes of some of the senator’s neighbors.

What kind of work do you do?

“I’m a plumber,” Pettijohn said, handing over a card that promised: “If water runs through it, we’ll do it.”

So, I said, that makes you Justin the Plumber?

He smiled, as if he had heard that joke before.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”

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Many plumbers, it seems a safe bet, have found themselves identified this way since McCain introduced the nation to “Joe the Plumber” in the last weeks of the campaign. While it turned out Samuel J. Wurzelbacher was, in fact, not a licensed plumber, Joe the Plumber became a brief political sensation -- shorthand for the travails of working Americans.

Justin the Plumber did not pay much attention to the fuss over Joe. For the last few months, he has been preoccupied with a struggle to keep his business afloat -- a difficult passage brought on by a collapse in new construction jobs and, also, a plague of unlicensed plumbers.

“So many guys are out of work,” Pettijohn said, “that customers know they can get Joe or cousin Dave to come do whatever they need for $15 an hour. As a business owner -- a licensed contractor, bonded and insured -- I can’t afford to do jobs for half- or quarter-price.”

Which was one reason, the plumber said, that here, in what might be considered the heart of McCain country, in a county that on election day supported the home state senator by 61.6% to 36.9%, Justin the plumber voted for Barack Obama.

“I don’t tell everybody that,” he allowed. “It’s a very Republican state, and around a lot of the cowboys I hang out with, I just keep my mouth shut. But I figured a little change couldn’t hurt.”

Cornville sits surrounded by the American West of the cowboy matinees, a big-sky landscape filled with spectacular red-rock formations, exotic cactuses, low pines. The McCain place is tucked behind a hill in a narrow, winding valley of orchards and vineyards.

This is the closest town, but McCain and the media that covered him tended to say it was in Sedona -- a much tonier resort and retirement enclave 12 miles northeast. That didn’t thrill Cornville folks much, at least according to the talk at KC Korner.

Today, the roads that run through this corner of the Verde Valley are festooned with “for sale” signs -- owners trying to escape burdensome mortgages or drop second homes they can no longer afford. The signs, Pettijohn said, started popping up at about the same time his business began to slow.

He said: “ ’06 was my best year. I was making over $50,000 and employing three guys and myself. I was busy all the way through ’07 and much of the way through ’08. But in the past three or four months it has taken a cliff dive.

“I haven’t had a blueprint come across my desk in the last two months. I had been doing three or four bids a week. It wasn’t that long ago that I was turning away work. They were happy just to have me.

“But now there are so many guys out there undercutting you. They have got to feed their families too. I guess you could say these are kind of scary times.”

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Pettijohn, who’s raising four children, is a Democrat who has voted Republican “lots of times.” He opposes gun control and detests career politicians. He said McCain lost his vote when on the ground level it became clear the economy was tanking, and the Republican appeared not to notice.

By the time McCain rolled out Joe the Plumber, it simply was too late for Justin the Plumber. Though he’s hopeful Obama might turn things around, Pettijohn’s not waiting for the cavalry to come over the hill from Washington.

He’s expanded his territory, bidding for work all over Arizona. He’s taken on more of what he calls “service jobs” -- stopped toilets, burst pipes and so forth. His live-in girlfriend started a day-care center, and that has helped too.

Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. Joe the P., this month had a ghost-written book published: “Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream.” For his part, Justin the Plumber, like so many Americans, is just fighting to scrape by in a hard season.

“If somebody wants me to hang a gate,” he said, “I’ll come over and hang a gate.”

It’s not plumbing, but it is work.

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peter.king@latimes.com