Seeking Sanctuary preview 2 - Quail Canyon

Quail Canyon offered a hot tub, 3 free pool tables, several bocci ball courts, and group activities. $1200 rented a campsite for 6 months. It offered a refuge from the cold winters of Minden, Winnemucca, and Pahrump. Edgar and Natasha no longer had to move the rig for propane. They were lucky to get in. The season was from October 1 to March 31. The camp became a ghost town during the summer when triple digit heat alternated with tropical monsoons. Someone had canceled at the last moment leaving an available site. Edgar liked the camp because the nearest liquor shop was a nice Chinese lady, five miles away. Natasha did not drive.

Edgar set up their DISH antenna. Natasha watched soaps, crime series--'The Young and the Restless' and ‘The View’--when she was not whipping ass on the bocci ball court.

Edgar monitored MSNBC from pre-market to the closing bell. As soon as they could have a telephone connection, he began seriously looking for a job.

They were not going to get out of this state without wheel bearings.

He applied for everything he could. Arizona did not support good pay scales. He applied to a pharmaceutical company as an entry-level chemistry aid. He met all the criteria. They did not want an entry-level employee approaching retirement age.

The same was true of Lockheed, the State Department, and many others.

He tried to land a job turning over old people in Gila Bend, but the listed address was incorrect.

He applied to be a correctional officer at the prison near Florence.

When he interviewed to be a clerk for the sheriff of Maricopa County, the interviewer laughed and said he would be better off with the sheriffs than he would with the prison. Nevertheless, Edgar had had to use glasses and a magnifying glass to pass the written test. Moreover, when he interviewed with his potential lady bosses, he said he had been clocked at over 40 words per minute. He did not tell them that that speed was clocked over forty years ago in high school. Lately his fingers had not worked so well. He was not sure as to whether his lack of motor skills was due to physical problems, nervous problems, or general old age. He had to admit that although he had compiled a 30,000 entry Spanish dictionary, he was not really ‘fluent.’ Before it was over, one of the ladies commented that his clothes looked like those of a street person. He was wearing polished shoes, a freshly ironed dress shirt, and pants that he had removed the tags from that morning.

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He remembered his last days at his old job. He had been given a task of analyzing code for a space shuttle mission critical function. Everyone on the project, except Edgar, had been told that they were scheduled to be laid off at the conclusion. Edgar had already scheduled a hernia operation. He had argued with his boss that there was no point in delaying surgery for a boss who offered no job security. Surgery cut his time available on the project to 8 of ten scheduled days. He was laid off January 30. His October Surgery allowed him enough recovery time to crawl under the car and attach the tow bar in February.

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As time went by Edgar realized that the odds of the two of them ending homeless under a bridge in Phoenix was rapidly increasing. Realizing that he only had months of security left. He worked on things he would never have another chance to work on. He researched his ancestry to find out he was largely Scottish, with a few Uzbekistanis, Jews, Ukrainians, and Goths thrown in to his 10,000 relatives. His database limit had been reached before he could find any Asians, or Mexicans. Although he found a few black Africans linked to Cleopatra.

He had so much fun writing about his ancestors that he decided to write a short story about lie detectors. Part of the reason he had lost his job was a lie detector. He felt that a lie detector was an invasion of his privacy. The old witch, who had complained when he tried to close the drapes to stay cool, had reported that she had seen Edgar stealing a case of glue sticks. The irony was that he had only taken 2 sticks in 15 years. The first one dried out from lack of use. He lost the second one. In fact, he thought of glue sticks as geek gear.

When the lie detector kept getting an inconclusive result on ‘stealing,’ his boss assumed the worst--secrets.

It did not help that Edgar had become frustrated with the system. He had told his examiner that as he grew older he had difficulty telling fact from fantasy. When asked what he meant, he told them about his recurrent Mao Tse Tung dream.

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Standing on Avenida Revolución, Edgar had observed beautiful young girls of apparent Mexican-Chinese extraction. They were congregating at the foot of a staircase. They mounted the staircase, and disappeared inside the building. Edgar had followed them and had found himself inside of a sumptuous banquet hall. He had helped himself to the grand buffet, with an eye to meeting one of the girls. He sat down to eat amongst a group of vixens and surveyed the room. There, on the far wall, he could not miss a magnificent tapestry of Chairman Mao.

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Edgar told his inquisitor that as time went on he had difficulty assigning the story to dreams or something he had really done.

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Edgar had assumed Natasha’s upper arm bump to be the result of her falling on a mesquite spine. It was now diagnosed as cancer. She had two surgeries--the aging doctor had left margins the first time. The insurance company only paid about the equivalent of one month’s premium. The anesthetist charged them ten per cent per month--highway robbery. This is when they first began to consider walking away from the motor home and fleeing to Mexico with whatever they could fit in the car.

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Christmas came and Edgar and Natasha sang carols with the Swedes. By Christmas, the die was cast. Edgar’s computer projections showed bankruptcy looming before another Christmas. He began to accept the inevitable and plan for past the big bang. He researched bankruptcy and discovered even the old bankruptcy laws were written to protect only the viable workers. Even if they moved to Idaho or Montana, they would only survive with their motor home and their life insurance. Were they young and healthy in a growing economy, they could find a job and keep the motor home. Moreover, unless Edgar could land the job with the sheriff’s department they were doomed.

Edgar decided to do something he wanted to do with his last days. He began to write--novels. He ‘finished’ his adventure story by the end of February--500 pages--and sent it to a big publishing house. He continued to write and completed three more novels by summer. Due to turnaround times and hoped for advances or royalties, their only hope was either the sheriff or the story.

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Edgar also tried to establish ties to his estranged son, Zach.

Zach lived on an obscure twist that Sidewinder Track took, before it bumped against the barbed wire fence of the Western Edition of the Saguaro National Park, where he prospected for gold.

Edgar, having dealt with too many hypocrites in his life, probed, even his own son relentlessly. He had every reason to believe that prospecting served his son’s hidden agenda of sabotaging food and watering caches left in the desert by Tucson congregations to sustain illegal aliens traveling the ‘Desert Night Highway.’ In fact, Zach all but admitted his obsession and possibly even guilt with seeking out and firing upon illegal immigrants in the desert for sport.

Edgar had always thought of Zach as a sociopath. If society ostracized Edgar just for growing old, why should he care that his son, whom he had played no part in raising, was a subversive. Edgar had too many personal problems of his own.

Years later, while researching the Ku Klux Klan in San Diego, Edgar would discover that the opinions of Zach and the Pennsylvania side of his family marched in lockstep with those of the Ku Klux Klan of 1930’s San Diego.

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As time ran out, Edgar counted the days left before they would be homeless. A bank statement showed that the check he had passed for a job interview haircut had bounced.

Natasha received an offer for a loan from Phoenix Bank.

The loan money would be available August 29.

Their money would run out in September.

The sheriff was due to hire Edgar by Labor Day.

The publisher was due to accept or reject his novel by Labor Day.

They decided to take the money.

Natasha, “Well we can’t leave Kermit!”

Edgar, “We’re broke--not heartless.”

‘He needs his kitty travel box!”

“Yes, I know!”

As the clutter inevitably grew around the motorhome, trucks came and went, mysterious rendezvous took place.