Before inheriting his old car, a concrete-walled room at MCAS, a daily 200-mile round-trip to Parker, a father dying of melanoma in Yuma Regional and one hell of a physical, and fiscal, mess in Parker to clean up, I remembered thinking, “What a hell of a way to use up leave time.” I had no clue!
When I drove into La Paz County for the first time, I was impressed with the green farms, orderly ranches and progressive look of construction. I was especially surprised when I found Parker was so small. La Paz had been formed from about half of what was previously Yuma County and was one of the newest counties in the nation. I guess they wisely counted on the growth of towns north of Parker like Lake Havasu City to bring in future tax revenue. Things were a little screwed up at the new County Seat, but they were getting by like people usually do.
In retrospect, the confusion of developing a new county worked in my favor. The court-appointed attorney made it absolutely necessary to meet with him to start the fiduciary ball rolling. I found his office, via a sheet of paper taped to his door indicating he was the one and only La Paz “County Attorney”. He was a genuinely nice guy if not an experienced lawyer, and the same person who’d sent the notification of my father’s impending death. He apologized for the office switching which seems to continuously bedevil government offices, and gave me the keys to my father’s shack and to the old Datsun. Of course, I had to sign some papers and listen to his rendition of how my father was found crawling around in his shack, subsequently ordered a ward of the County and moved to the hospital in Yuma.
When I finally, with much trepidation, opened up my fathers’ padlocked front door, I was overwhelmed with the stench of rotting flesh. I quickly closed the door, went to the nearest hardware store and purchased face masks. I used several while taking a cursory inventory and developing a list of what I would need to clean up the place. Nothing could keep the smell out, but at least I didn’t have to worry about pathogens. Much later into the cleanup I realized the smell had apparently kept everyone else out as well, including the Sheriff, the human leeches (which included my father’s ex-prostitute ex-wife and her new family), and even the county attorney. The contents seemed to be untouched. They’d apparently just tossed my father on a stretcher, whisked him out of the stench, slapped a big lock on the front door, walked away and waited for the dumb-ass Army guy to come and clean it up. Although I’d smelled much worse, I couldn’t fault them much.
The stench of rotting flesh is not one many Americans have to encounter, thankfully. Also, everyone in Parker had more to think about than some sick old desert rat. Since Parker was the new county seat, it was still building infrastructure to a degree, and didn’t have time to waste.
They sent my father to Yuma for cancer care, so I was glad I could save a bit by billeting with the Marines. Parker was entirely inside the Colorado Indian Reservation, so development of the county government had proceeded with caution and patience, especially in light of Native American ownership. All the good citizens in the northern part of Yuma County thought they were being neglected by the County Seat in Yuma, so they wanted out of Yuma County. I’m not sure they could foresee the hurdles, but everything seemed to be going fairly well when I arrived.
For several years, my father had lived on 10 acres in the desert outside Quartzsite, close to the California border. He’d moved back into Parker when his cancer began consuming his face and neck. He prepared income tax returns for people for over forty years and also dabbled in real estate and tax consulting, although I doubt he had a license to do the latter. Still, he must have been good at it. He made a good living, had lots of friends and helped quite a few reservation folks who lived around Parker; had a “falling out” with some Parker “City Fathers” and moved to Quartzsite purely out of spite. When people asked about the crusty black spot on the left side of his face, he told them it was a birthmark. When it began to make a small cocktail onion out of his left eye, I guess he knew he couldn’t fool people any longer, and probably guessed he couldn’t beat the melanoma either.
Prior to his being moved from his shack to the hospital, the cancer attacked his cervical spine and he’d been unable to walk properly. He’d been crawling around on the shack floor for weeks, we guessed. He was “prepared” though. Everything necessary for survival was at floor level. There was several hundred pair of clean underwear, over a hundred bars of soap, hotplates for cooking, water via a hose for washing and for cooking, piles of canned and dried foods, a mattress on the floor and a loaded 30:30 rifle close at hand. I guess his genes are where some of my tenaciousness comes from.
All the windows had been covered with green film that let in a certain amount of light, but no curious stares. When I entered the building for the first time it hadn’t been occupied for over four weeks and all the food in the refrigerator and elsewhere had rotted. Of course, thankfully, that’s where the smell came from. You haven’t lived until you’ve cleaned up an Arizona refrigerator that’s sat in ninety degree heat and hasn’t operated for over a month. Yes, ninety-degree heat in November!
With one of the face masks firmly in place, I began the task of sifting through his life. A labor of love, it wasn’t. However, since La Paz County named me fiduciary, I felt a military duty to properly account for everything of value. The trouble was he had thoroughly hidden most everything he considered valuable.
I found turquoise nuggets and other semi-precious things crudely buried under a rickety, tin-covered shed attached to the rear of the house. I was moving some boards away from a rear door to get some strategic cross ventilation and noticed the shiny crescent of an old peanut can barely sticking out of the dirt.
As I dug out and dusted the clinging dirt from one can, another would be exposed. They were hastily buried and contained many small treasures from a frugal life. Obviously, these were things he wanted to hide, but couldn’t leave the premises. So, there they were, six cans full of Mexican and American coins, turquoise, lapis lazuli, silver and gold trinkets and a miserable collection of old buttons. It took several “baths” to get the caliche powder off everything.
There was plenty of stuff in that little shack, which I thought had little or no intrinsic value. I made a list and called my cousin (of dubious reputation) in Phoenix. In the interest of fairness, to say that my first cousin Ron V. James is a “tough” guy is to encompass several meanings of the word. He has many scars over his body; all caused by something very painful, but alleviated somewhat by a tendency to imbibe various kinds of alcoholic beverages and a nefarious plant that grows wild on the “reservation”. All this is for strictly “medicinal pain relief” however. He’s a grandfather now, and was always a loving father and husband, plus a great journeyman carpenter. However, if someone were to make the mistake of thinking that his beer belly might slow him down, well ... it could be a strategic, and perhaps fatal, error.
He feels little pain, except from the improper placement of a mechanical knee. He can still bench-press over 200 pounds, is ruggedly handsome with a fairly full head of sun-bleached hair, and has wrecked more cars and motorcycles than Evel Knievel. He still drives like a damn maniac though.
He’s made many friends of every color and persuasion by giving everyone a fair deal and a friendly shake. I thought he might know someone who could use the majority of my father’s stuff. If he took possession, I knew there would be no waste, and I sure couldn’t take it back to Virginia with me. No way were the creeps I ran across in Parker about to get something my cousin or some needy reservation kid could use. Blood is always thicker than water, even in Arizona.
After shooting the breeze with Ron a bit, it was going to be off to Phoenix, fully intending to renew some other old acquaintances, see a special old friend and get my cousin to help me transport anything of value back to Phoenix in his big truck. However, as luck goes, one of my father’s old friends came sniffing around just before I left. I’d filled my father’s old rusty trailer with a lot of paper trash and clutter, including many worn and torn issues of National Geographic.
My fathers’ old friend said he simply wanted to inform me that at one time my father kept one hundred dollar bills hidden in the pages of his treasured National Geographic magazines. I thanked him profusely for his information, and offered to take him inside