‘Arizona Dreams’ — the rest of the story

At my signing last week at The Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, my editor Barbara Peters told the story about how she had stripped the last paragraph out of my 2006 book, Arizona Dreams. It was too much, she argued, and I went along. She knows much more about mysteries, having edited some 600. Such is the give-and-take in book publishing. But some readers have asked to see the "real" ending. If you haven’t read Arizona Dreams, stop reading the post now.

As you recall, the book as published ends with the wine glass shattering in Bobby
Hamid’s angry hand. But the ending as written reprised the transitional
"choruses" that intersperse the story. They are:

The city kept growing. Forty-eight thousand new houses a
year. One hundred twenty thousand new residents annually. Five hundred
square miles of urban area with Phoenix, the nation’s fifth largest
city, surrounded by two dozen suburbs and two Indian reservations. They
called the suburbs “boomburbs”: Gilbert from 10,000 to 200,000 in
twenty years; Mesa, with 450,000 people, now larger than the cities of
St. Louis, Minneapolis, or Atlanta. To accommodate all this, the growth
machine that is the Phoenix economy ate at least two acres of desert
every hour. The swimming pools and golf courses, landscaping and water
taps consumed millions of gallons of water daily, virtually all coming
from manmade reservoirs and canals. The experts predicted only more
growth. But all that seemed somehow removed from my life. I was
embedded in the old city – old meaning the part of town that existed
prior to 1950. I lived in a 1924 house and worked in a courthouse that
was built in 1929, right on the brink of the Great Depression.

and

The city kept growing. Mile-long trains brought lumber and
steel that soon became buildings. Eternal desert turned into ephemeral
subdivisions, offices and retail strips. Sixteen billion dollars in new
highways. Four thousand new construction jobs a month. From mountain
reservoirs and a canal from the Colorado River came 400 billion gallons
of water a year to support a megalopolis in a place that received a
mere seven inches of rain a year. The growth lept over mountain ranges
and rerouted rivers. It inspired new policy centers at the university
and lively debates in the newspaper. You heard it in the rhythm of
heavy equipment and nail guns, and the music of melodious Spanish
spoken by the framing crews in a hundred developments. You saw it in
the ubiquitous pickup trucks of contractors and tradesmen, lined up in
traffic on the freeways and ornamenting subdivision driveways. As May
turned into June and the temperature shot above one hundred ten, I was
reminded that our summers were getting longer and hotter. But hardly
anyone in Phoenix had been around long enough to know this.

And

The city kept growing. Slogans and euphemisms played as big
a role as “Go West Young Man” did in the nineteenth century. Now it was
selling a dream “set within a stunning landscape…As rare as the
splendor of the Sonoran Desert…Designed for your active lifestyle… A
distinctively styled collection of homes…Draped with lush greens and
rolling fairways…Miles of walking paths and hiking trails.” Lowly
subdivisions had been upgraded to “master-planned communities.” Add
gates to the subdivision and it became even more alluring.  The city
grew on glowing articles in the newspaper about Phoenix leading the
nation in job creation and in attracting Californians who were cashing
out the equity in their houses and moving here. Other words were less
welcome: the occasional warning of a real-estate bubble or threat to
water supplies, the regular reports that showed per-capita income was
below the national average, that most of the jobs being created paid
badly, and Phoenix lacked the diverse economy needed for a big city to
compete. No, this was a story about promise and hope, floated on
thirty-year mortgages or ARMs. It was the American Dream. The people
who moved in didn’t remember the citrus groves or desert that the
houses replaced, and they didn’t miss what they couldn’t recall.

All these appear in the book as published. But here’s the epilogue graph that ended the original manuscript, after the scene between Mapstone and Bobby Hamid:

The city keeps growing. The temperature has gone up ten degrees in my lifetime. The citrus groves and flower fields that once helped cool the evenings have fallen to subdivisions and parking lots and freeways. Centuries-old saguaro forests have been bulldozed. It takes ten years for a saguaro to grow one inch. Hohokam ruins are violated to build Wal-Marts. Every inch of private land in central Arizona has been platted for development. The economy is real estate and newcomers, growing on the backs of underpaid workers, including hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants with no chance to join the mainstream. They’re down there in the city lights that make such a view for the wealthy on their mountainsides. My city is beautiful at night. My haunted, wounded metropolis. In the light of day, the air is dirty and the politics are extreme and mammon is god. It breaks the hearts of people who care about it. But 120,000 new people come every year, and most of them just want cheap housing and hot weather. And the sharpies and hustlers and land boys are convinced this big casino will never, never stop paying out the winnings. The city keeps growing, but it stopped being my city long ago. It’s my hometown, but it’s not home anymore. I just work here.

THE END

And now you know the rest of the story.