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Tumbleweed Terrace Desert View Homes, somewhere south of Tucson, Arizona - “A nice place to raise your kids,” as promised by a faded billboard usually used as a vulture perch - is broiling under a blazing sun. The land all around is empty except for cactus and sagebrush, mostly shades of rust and gray, and the only green for many miles are the squares of lawns in Tumbleweed Terrace, which, from a vulture's point of view, probably looks as alien as a place to raise your kids on Mars.
Tumbleweed Terrace had burst upon the defenseless desert with snarling trucks and roaring bulldozers, screaming saws and thudding air hammers, during America’s last housing boom, but then a bust had broken its back and the project has languished for over a decade with most of its houses unoccupied - those that have actually been built - while others are still only skeletons of slowly shriveling two-by-four bones. The huge shopping mall has never opened, its doorways boarded with sheets of plywood, its signs of Sears, Footlocker, Best Buy, The Gap, Ross, and Starbucks, fading and never lighted at night. The wide but mostly empty streets, laid out in aesthetic meandering patterns and lined with sun-bleached sidewalks that have never known the rattle of skateboards, wander though acres of blank-windowed empty or only partly completed homes; and there are many dusty lots with only barren concrete foundations and raw earth holes for swimming pools.
Dustin Rhodes and his mom and dad are not only one of the very few families who live in this nice suburban ghost town - the only dwellers on Trader Rat Lane - but also the only black people. Dustin home-schools online, while his father, a Fed-Ex pilot, and his mother, a train dispatcher, are usually away; and Dustin has known mostly solitude for all his thirteen years, though he has a TV and computer, a love of reading books, a "not-dog" named Spot, and most of the coolest video games, including one called Magic Rats, which he frequently plays with a cyber-friend. Perhaps he thinks he's not really lonely, but after he shows kindness to an elderly Apache shaman, someone moves into the house next door. At first they appear to be only a middle-aged man-and-wife, friendly and seemingly nice, but Dustin soon discovers they seem to be hiding someone in their house. Dustin begins to investigate and comes to the conclusion that it must be a boy of around his own age… but why is he being hidden?
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Subjects
African-American, black kids, fat kids, Arizona desert, Kaiser M715, ghost townsPeople
Dustin Rhodes, Spot, Jesse James, MarshalTimes
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He’d been dressed in awesomely ragged jeans, tattered sneaks without any socks, and an equally ragged Lee Storm Rider jacket, open and without a shirt, his coppery body as lean as a coyote’s – at least one in its natural state -- and hard as a sheet-metal roof. A little leather medicine bag adorned his chest on a strip of buckskin, and a battered old galvanized cowboy canteen was slung by its strap on one shoulder, a rolled-up blanket over the other, while a huge Bowie knife in a leather sheath was secured to a loop on his jeans. His almost waist-length iron-gray hair was tamed by a faded red bandana, and except for the dusty old sneakers, he could have walked out of a time-warp like in a Twilight Zone episode.
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- Created February 15, 2015
- 22 revisions
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August 22, 2024 | Edited by Jess Mowry | Updated cover |
August 22, 2024 | Edited by Jess Mowry | Update covers |
August 22, 2024 | Edited by Jess Mowry | //covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/14687627-S.jpg |
August 22, 2020 | Edited by ISBNbot2 | normalize ISBN |
February 15, 2015 | Created by Jess Mowry | Added new book. |