Identity- Lost by Pascal Marco

Author:Pascal Marco [Marco, Pascal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608090150
Publisher: Oceanview Publishing
Published: 2011-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

A freshly carved-out community in the Arizona desert about thirty miles northeast of Phoenix, the town of Fountain Hills was still in a somewhat secluded part of Maricopa County. Developed as a haven for snowbirds in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Fountain Hills bordered both the Fort McDowell and Salt River-Pima Indian Reservations. On its other sides, the town bumped up against the outreaches of the ever-growing city of Scottsdale.

If the intent was to become or remain anonymous, then this town fit the bill as the perfect place. Fountain Hills was a place where a person could live and never have to talk to anyone; it was a place where someone could stay distant from his neighbors, and nobody would ever ask why. Holding true to its reputation, when the Overstreets arrived there the night of the last day of the Fleischman murder trial, the town’s less than two thousand residents—still virtually 100 percent white—didn’t pay much attention to the black family’s appearance.

The first few weeks after they arrived, James read a notice delivered to their mailbox, warning residents to be on the lookout for a black bear that had roamed down from the high country in search of food. The bear’s unwelcome visit brought out the news media as well as excited neighbors into the town’s oft-deserted streets. The surprising result: for the very first time folks met each other, some after spending years of living together as strangers on the same block of homes.

At night, wild javalina roamed the town’s mostly unpaved streets. Once, his mother found a diamondback rattler huddled inside the front screen door to their house. The family was warned by another flyer that those with swimming pools should be on the lookout for bobcats intruding their secluded, brick-walled yards in search of scarce water from their sparkling pools. Left outside unattended, pet cats or small dogs became easy prey for not only the bobcats but for foraging coyotes and hungry owls.

James remembered how his teacher, Miss Burns, had described Arizona as being a place that was “sparsely populated” and filled with all types of cactus. He also remembered how his best friend, Clayton, then asked Miss Burns if parsley was the only vegetable that grew there besides the thorny plants, and how the class laughed after Miss Burns explained the definition of sparsely versus parsley.

On that day back in May, some seven months ago now, she had gone on to tell them during their geography period that the 1970 U.S. Census had counted only 900,000 people residing in Arizona and that the vast majority lived in Maricopa County, home to the state’s capital, Phoenix. Comparatively, she explained, the county they lived in—Cook County, Illinois—boasted a population of over five million. She wrote the large number with all the zeros side by side on the blackboard, and James daydreamed about what it would be like to live somewhere so uncrowded, so distant from your neighbor. It all seemed so unreal to him as Miss Burns described to her class that day long ago all about “our nation’s forty-eighth state.

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