Shootout at the Not So OK Corral
The aptly named Land’s End RV and Trailer Park sits near the end of the island back off the road just before it hits the Head and slingshots back north again. The state park sends folks with travel trailers down there when they’re full up, but that advice has ruined more than a few vacations. Johnny Reddick runs the place, mostly into the ground. Back in the late ‘70’s it wasn’t too bad. A dozen or so single wides were spaced out on concrete pads and an old caboose sat in there too. There was a small area for tents and some gravel for the RV’s. Rents were reasonable and the public showers and toilets were kept clean and operational. The tenants, mostly elderly folks on small fixed incomes, were content down there even if it was the end of the road. In more ways than one….
But old man Jensen had a stroke and Mrs. Jensen sold the kit and caboodle to Johnny in ’82. Johnny was looking for an investment, something he could use a small inheritance to parlay into a substitution for working, and the trailer park seemed an ideal fit. Jack up the rents, pull a few more trailers in he’d snagged cheap, collect the rents and drink the rest of the day. If Johnny hadn’t been a bad drunk, things might’ve worked out for everybody, but like a lot things on the South End, things went downhill.
Most of the original tenants left after the shootout in ’88, just picked up their belongings and moved on, something they’d been thinking of doing for years once Johnny leased half a dozen dilapidated RV’s on the weekly or monthly basis. Dangerous looking men showed up in rusted vehicles with broken windshields and missing fenders and dogs they kept on chains outside. They never seemed to work, other than under the hoods of their jalopies, not totally uncommon on the South End, but their worried neighbors sensed whatever money they got was somehow suspect. Apparently the sheriff’s deputies did too. Land’s End became part of their drive-by route even before the gunplay.
Johnny says the gentleman in the last trailer was drunk when he knocked on his vinyl door to inquire about that month’s rent. Johnny most certainly was. What Delores in Lot#6 testified in court as ‘3 sheets to the wind.” When the door finally opened after prolonged pounding, Johnny was staring at his delinquent tenant wearing nothing but a pair of black briefs and pointing a small caliber pistol at Johnny’s head. Apparently interrupted in a 3rd rate romance, the man was noticeably displeased. He suggested Johnny remove various anatomical parts immediately from his doorstep. Which Johnny did.
Maybe Johnny would have been wiser to go home, let things settle, collect the rent in the morning. Instead he went back to his own trailer, finished a 5th of Jim Beam, pulled a chrome handled .38 out of his sock drawer and hauled down to the last trailer with dogs snarling and barking, lights popping on, but before anyone could get to a window, shots broke the night wide open. Andy Watson called 9-1-1 and told his wife to get on the floor behind the kitchen counter. Still on the telephone, he watched Johnny stroll back to his own place, gun in hand. He was pretty sure he’d killed the kid at the last pad.
When the first deputy arrived, the entire Trailer Park was awake and terrified. Bill Traxton, the cop, jumped out of his cruiser, gun drawn. He’d called for back-up, but he knew that would be half an hour. Nothing moved. No one came outside. The only noise was barking dogs, half crazed. Bill Traxton turned his spotlight along the line of trailers, one by one, until he hit the last one where a man in his underwear sat on the step. “Don’t move!” the deputy yelled. The man didn’t. “Put your hands where I can see them,” he commanded. The man did.
Carefully, Bill Traxton approached him. Finally he saw the pit bull, bleeding beside the nearly naked man where Johnny Reddick had shot it point blank, hitting it in the shoulder. The dog was breathing hard. The man watched Bill watch the dog. Finally Bill asked, “You hurt?” The man shook his head no. “Just my dog.”
The deputy took Johnny away, cuffed and swearing, in the back of the squad car. The man in the underwear took his dog in his pickup god knows where. No one at Land’s End ever saw him or the dog again. Johnny got a $500 fine for animal abuse, same as the rent he hadn’t been paid, and a year’s probation for reckless endangerment. Most of the dog owners moved along pretty quick. Some of the single-wide folks stayed, but not many. And not because they wanted to. They just hoped, like a lot of us down here, things would get better.
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Tags: Bad day at the RV Park, South End Tailer Park Shootout