The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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The South End, for more than a few of us xenophobes, has always offered an escape from our past. A chance to bury the dead and make a clean start here on the far reaches of reality. For some of us it was a place to return to, lay low awhile and hope the past had a short memory.

Ruby Reed belonged in the latter category. She was born here over one hundred years ago, went to school in the Mabana schoolhouse, even lived in our old shack with her mom and sister and brother. Not many neighbors back around 1915. Not much work either. Not much to keep a young person with dreams of the city life. Not much, really, too different than today, just more so.

Ruby left the bucolic and boring South End to become a burlesque dancer. We have a full size theater marquee of her we dug out of the shack walls in one of our many remodeling jags. Black leather bra with an X across the sweet spots, black leather bottom with laces on the sides revealing plenty of thigh. Not much else other than a come hither smile. She worked the strip tease circuit from Seattle and Gomorrah to Spokane, Portland to Frisko, married a vaudevillian with the lewd stage moniker Harry Reed. We’ve got newspaper ads of Ruby and Harry at the Temples of Sin. What a time they must have had! What a wild ride! You want to leave the banality of the South End, there you go.

In the mid 40’s she and Harry were sleeping in a hotel in downtown San Francisco when an intruder burst in, hogtied Harry and raped Ruby in front of him. Maybe unpaid gambling debts, maybe promises unkept, who will ever know? Shortly after this incident was reported in the Bay area papers, she and Harry came back to the safety of the South End. They built the house next to our shack which her sister now owned, raised chickens and ducks and geese, stayed home. Ruby taught dance classes in Stanwoodopolis, lord only knows what Harry did.

They didn’t last long. Not here, not their marriage. Way of the world, I guess. We bought their house, the one they built next to ours. We’re now the keepers of their history, we’re their caretakers. I wish we knew more about these two, but like most history, theirs is lost to rot and rust and ruin. Same as ours someday. Same as most of us on the remote South End. Probably for the best. Probably what we wanted in the first place.

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Back when I first got off the Mayflower south of Utsalady, I hitched my fortune to an unlikely looking piece of bottomland which had a shack, a large shed (or small barn depending on your agricultural perspective), a chicken coop, doghouse and a pen for some rabbits. Better than raw land, I figured. But not by much ….

Those early years I mostly hunkered down and tried to stay warm. Some folks would just look at this and shake their heads. Can’t say I blame them, but looking back now 44 years, I’m glad I bit it off. Occasionally I’d get friends coming up to see the estate. We were all pretty much layabouts from our days driving school buses in the Big City, not big dreamers, just slackers getting high on getting by, or so the song goes…. We were an aimless bunch, lacking in ambition and drive, plenty short on cash, but optimistic the future would play out all right for us. Why? I couldn’t say, just that a good positive attitude might, in the end, carry the day. I guess we drank the Kool-Aid —- or if we hadn’t, we were more than willing.

Some of those weekends, come nightfall, we’d load up the VW bus and motor into town, figuring to catch some Stanwoodopolis night life. Rudy the Banjo King played every Saturday night at the Hotel, but once was plenty and so we went to the other side of town to see what the Sportsman and the Sundance and the East Side had to offer a half dozen of us thirsty revelers. First tavern up, the Sportsman, we ordered schooners of tap beer. A minute later every barstool was empty and we were alone with the scowling bartender. Couple of beers, some pool, we moved next door. Our absentee barstool pals were all there, waiting, I guess, for us to bring the party.

We bellied up to the bar, ordered pitchers and watched our fellow revelers finish their beers and head for the door, about half a dozen fellas exiting. Was it something we said? The bartender took our money, but offered no clues. An hour later we were at the East Side, little shotgun of a place, shuffle board half its width. The locals kindly gave us their stools, tipped their hats and left. Once again.

Some places the drinking establishments are lively, a democratic conviviality. Alcohol has its negatives, but for loosening up inhibitions, it’s tried and true. I’ve lived here now 44 years. I’ve been to every drinking establishment that’s come and gone, lived and died. The mizzus says you can’t judge a town by its saloons … and she’s a historian … but I say you can. I could live here longer than Methuselah on scotch and soda and I tell you what, it’s way more fun to drink alone. Which is what we got in spades down here on the South End.

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If you venture back into the interior of the South End — and I guarantee you very few do — you’ll wander up on illegal buildings, Aryan nation signage, lost homesteads and small forests covered by English ivy, making it feel as if you’ve found some ancient civilization gone to rot and ruin. The last few miles of the island there are no roads running across from east to west, just a few dirt ones that lead to xenophobic neighbors. Most of the roads on the South End that pierce the interior give fair warning you’re not welcome. There are more No Trespassing signs than there are Trump/Pence, which is to say, there are plenty.

Behind our little Shangri-La-La there used to live a man who, if you met him, you’d think to be a very polite, well-mannered person, someone you might enjoy a conversation with over a beer late in any given afternoon. You’d be wrong. He holed up back in the woods, raised a few farm animals and shot anything that came onto his property. One of my neighbors, painter John, rang me up one day, this would be back twenty years or more ago, to ask if I’d seen his dog who’d run off. I said I hadn’t, but … and I hesitated to tell him this … but maybe he should go see Tyler, the man who lived behind us back in the nettle jungle.

“Why’s that?” John asked and I told him because Tyler would shoot his dog if he happened to wander onto his property. John, being a peaceful sort of man, declared that he doubted anyone would do such a thing. But he would ask, if nothing else, see if Tyler had seen his shepard. When John drove up there, Tyler said sure, he’d killed the sonofabitch, seen it menacing his chickens, put a bullet right into him, shot him dead. Now John loved that sonofabitch and you best believe he was upset to hear this turn of events, kind of a shock to his faith in his fellow man. John hadn’t even heard the story of two other dogs found near Tyler’s place, hogtied with baling wire and left to die. Shooting a dog for trying to kill your own animals is one thing, killing them in a slow heinous way is quite another.

However, John heard Tyler’s wife say to Tyler, ‘that dog wasn’t bothering the chickens’. One hard look from m’lord shut her up right then and there, little doubt that a beating was coming once John drove off, but it told John all he needed to know. ‘What you planning, John?’ I asked when he told me he’d found his dog.

I lived for a time in a hardscrabble place in Northern Wisconsin where my neighbor and good friend had found his beagle drag itself home after being shot. Eddie was ex-Marine, a kindly sort, but not when it came to someone shooting his dog Barney. Eddie followed the blood on the snow all the way down to where the road took a turn and knocked on the door of the guy who’d put a bullet in Barney. The guy said he didn’t shoot no damn dog and went to shut the door in Eddie’s face, but Eddie held the door open. ‘If my dog dies,’ Eddie told him, and I have no doubt, knowing Eddie, this was a blood vow, ‘you’ll be dead too. ‘

Barney lived. And so did the man who shot him. I told John this story, but John only shook his head. Like I said, John’s a peaceful man. He did take Tyler to court, got a settlement, if I remember correctly, of 500 dollars. I’m not sure he felt vindicated, I know I wouldn’t have been. I do know this, I’m glad it wasn’t my dog. I loved Gonzo more than most people I’ve met. Sometimes, I have no doubt, it’s best not to know what you’re actually capable of.

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