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.”

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If there was a place worse than homelessness itself, the While-a-While was it. Ancient RV’s, rusted out Winnebagos, Airstreams down on their axles — they all came to die, slowly sinking into the wetlands, grass up to their pitted aluminum windows that seldom opened anymore, a muddy trail leading to the communal restrooms and showers which occasionally all functioned but not usually.

In the summer the While-a-While offered tourists and fishermen some spaces, most without power, for $25 a night. Half the permanent residents had come and for reasons best left for late night binge talk, they ended up trapped there. Milt came 20 years ago in his reconditioned Cortez, a heavy 20 foot industrial RV built when gas was 24 cents a gallon but was now too much for Social Security retirement if he wanted to actually drive it somewhere else. And now it was a rusted relic, flat tires, busted front axle, long dead battery. Milt lived there with his menagerie of cats, half of them feral, all of them breeding like rabbits. Residents who’d ventured inside claimed the place smelled like one giant litter box over a gas burner.

Most inmates of the While-a-While gave Milt a wide berth. If familiarity bred contempt, with Milt it bred outright hostility. He was a hermit now among enemies, most of whom he’d alienated over slights so small they never really understood they were slights and so they concluded the man was a total asshole, a near universal assessment at the trailer park. If you were a dog owner, too bad if they growled or chased Milt’s feline herd. If your politics were left of Genghis Khan, too bad, you were a hopeless radical. If you drank or used drugs, he wrote you off. So what if he’d done more of those than half the park in a quarter of the time — he’d reformed, rehabbed and now was righteous as a born-again preacher.

Maybe we all end up where we deserve at the end of our ropes. If so, the poor souls consigned to the While-a-While probably wished they could have a do-over. But they were there, not to while awhile, they were doomed to quite awhile. With Milt as a neighbor.

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