The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You live in a remote backwash like we do, you might think life is passing you by.  But even for those of us sitting still, the world keeps spinning.  Live long enough and you’ll have a book or two of stories, I guarantee you.  Even Little Billy.

Little Billy lives in the While-a-While trailer park that Ralph Wissmach set up back in the ‘70’s, not really zoned for it, but that was back when the South End was a little wilder and regulations were flaunted with impunity if not relish.  Ralph owned most of the single wides, hauled them in as rentals, then leased them PLUS added power and water surcharges.  If Ralph hadn’t acquired a ferocious taste for blended whiskies, he might have done okay, but he drank most of his rent money and neglected upkeep in the park.  By the turn of the century the While-a-While was a ghetto, tenants made payments only occasionally and the sheriff steered clear if possible.

Little Billy’s castle was the trailer at the end, leaning partly into the woods, curtains always drawn.  The adjoining trailer was vacant, curtains fluttering tattered out its broken window, allowing Billy even more privacy.  Cats by the dozen came in and out at Billy’s through a pet door he had cut into the fiberglass back door of his abode.  His neighbors saw more of the feline herd roaming the park than they did of Billy.

The Trouble began when the Carter brothers rolled in one windswept monsoonal day late in November, off-loaded their rust-eaten 4×4 trucks, then, over the next week, were joined by their kin and girlfriends until the trailer was wild with metal rock and constant fighting.  Strange cars and grungy people came night and day.  Billy kept an imperious silence through the next couple of months.  Except for the cats the Carter clan would’ve suspected his place abandoned.

Then, one drizzly night after New Years, the Carters decided to amuse themselves by shooting at Billy’s cats with a couple of .22’s.  By the time Billy stepped out on his rickety porch step, three of his felines were dead or bleeding next to the trailer.  Billy stood stock still, just a silhouette in the backlit doorway, and watched silently as Joel Carter, drunk on Jack Daniels, stoned on grass and cranked on meth, lifted his rifle to his lips and pretended to blow the smoke away.  Before he laughed and went back inside.

What went through Joel Carter’s empty head when Billy came knocking, nobody will ever know.  “Wuzzup, asshole?” he muttered to Little Billy who was standing on the porch with a .38 in one hand and a bleeding cat in the other.  When he saw the pistol, he smirked.  “What now, Wyatt?   We gonna shoot it out at the OK??”

Billy, apparently not much for light banter, put a slug in Carter’s kneecap, eliciting a howl that could be heard out to the highway.  He watched the backrooms of the trailer erupt into activity, the entire tribe now gathered and shrieking like deranged Banshees.  Billy held his gun up for silence and got it immediately.  Then he shot a writhing Joel Carter in the other leg, brought the weapon to his lips and in an ironic gesture lost on the assembled trailer trash, blew smoke off the end of the barrel.

In the novel that won’t be written, Billy might have driven off into the night, never to be heard from again.  But this being real life and not Hollywood, the sheriffs arrived 15 minutes later and took Billy away.  He gave no resistance and the only words anyone heard him speak were when they shoved his head down before he was put in the back seat of the cruiser.  “Someone needs to care for those cats.”

Hits: 16

I picked up a fellow South Ender hitchhiking this morning on my way into town. Not untypically, he was a little down on his luck. No car, license rescinded for DUI, out of work, all the usual…. He was living in a friend’s camper, he told me, now that he’d moved out of his mom’s place. “Not a real good situation,” he said. The mom’s place. He’d been shacked up with her — he searched for the right characterization and finally hit on ‘boyfriend’ — out in a trailer in the backyard. She was, if I understood correctly, living in the house with her husband, apparently not my rider’s dad.

Extended families on the South End, you may have surmised, are slightly more, oh, elastic, than those further up island. But the ties are no less binding, I’m sure. His roommate, the mom’s beau, was a bad drinker, he confided, and arguments were becoming more heated in the late evening hours, so he decided to move along before the Law was necessitated. I said that seemed prudent to me.

My passenger said his mom was upset at his departure. Misunderstanding him, I mumbled something insincere about mother’s milk or some equally half-assed sentiment. To which he said she’d thrown his belongings out in the yard during the previous day’s rain squall. “Kind of a bummer…” he admitted. “All those wet clothes, man. A real drag….”

We discussed the weather awhile. Sun was out, the rains had subsided. Life was good, we decided, just two Gentlemen of the Highway cruising the backroads of Camano. I dropped him at the Elger Bay Grocery. He was, he grinned, getting some snacks and beer, and then “I’m gonna go home, kick back, enjoy the afternoon, man.”

Yes indeed, sometimes life is as simple, as pleasurable, as uplifting as a friend’s warm camper, some dry clothes, a working TV, a bag of Cheetos and a ride back to what, temporarily, is Home. Pop a cold one before noon and say goodbye to those morning blues. Attitude — and you can inscribe this over the trailer door — is everything.

Hits: 40