The Color of Law_ A Novel - Mark Gimenez [44]
“Well, Mr. Fenney, me and the Feds, we got some, uh, outstanding issues, if you know what I mean.”
Scott knew what Louis meant. He noticed the peephole in the door turn dark. And he heard a tiny voice: “That the lawyer?”
“Yeah,” Louis said.
The peephole went light again and Scott heard the sound of a heavy object being pushed away from the door, then the releasing of five deadbolts. The door opened a crack and a small brown face with big brown eyes gazed up at Scott.
“You gonna save my mama?” she asked.
“Pajamae. That’s a, uh, different sort of name.”
Her face glued to the Ferrari’s air-conditioning vent, the little black girl said, “Mama says it’s French, but it’s really just black. We don’t do names like Susie and Patty and Mandy down here. We do names like Shantay and Beyoncé and Pajamae.”
“My daughter’s name is Boo.”
She smiled. “That’s different.”
Scott smiled back. “She’s different. You’d like her.”
Scott had relaxed considerably once they had left the projects and turned onto Martin Luther King Boulevard, the main thoroughfare through South Dallas. His heartbeat was near normal and his body wasn’t sweating like a sprinkler hose. He wasn’t even slouched in his seat. He was sitting upright, looking around at this strange environment like a Japanese tourist at a rodeo. On one side of the street was the tall black wrought-iron fence that guarded the Fair Park grounds; inside were the Cotton Bowl stadium where the Cowboys had played until they struck out for the suburbs, and the historic Art Deco buildings dating back to the Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936 that now sat abandoned and decaying like an old movie set. On the other side of the street were overgrown vacant lots that apparently served as the neighborhood’s unofficial dumps, and boarded-up structures with broken-out windows and black men loitering outside.
“Crack houses,” Pajamae said.
Run-down strip centers offered pawn shops and liquor stores. Ramshackle frame houses slanted at twenty-degree angles, their paint peeling like skin from a badly sunburned body. Sofas sat on droopy porches, old cars were jacked up on cement blocks in the yards, garbage was backed up at the streets, and black burglar bars guarded every door and window of every house and storefront as if each structure were its owner’s personal prison. The entire landscape was dull and colorless, except for the graffiti adorning every wall and fence and the thick-bodied black women strolling by in colorful skirts and shorts and heels.
“Working girls,” Pajamae said. “Mama says they work down here because they’re too fat to get white tricks on Harry Hines.”
Scott was imagining living in this neighborhood, walking these streets with Boo, or worse, Boo walking alone, when his peripheral vision caught a commotion at the side of the road, and he slowed…a little.
“What’s going on?”
On the sidewalk outside a dilapidated apartment complex was a massive pile of belongings, everything from a microwave to clothes, a basketball to dolls, as if someone had backed up a truck and dumped the stuff there. Sitting on the curb were two black kids, their elbows on their knees, their chins cradled in their palms, looking like their world had just come to an end. An obese black woman in red stretch shorts and a white T-shirt was yelling and gesturing wildly at a skinny black man wearing a short-sleeve shirt and a tie. Pajamae strained her neck to see, then slumped back down.
“Eviction day,” she said matter-of-factly.
“They got evicted from their apartment?”
“Yeah. Happens first of every month.”
As a young lawyer, Scott had appeared in J.P. court numerous times on behalf of landlords to evict deadbeat tenants. But he had never witnessed firsthand the law in action—a family’s personal property removed from their apartment and dumped on the sidewalk out front, exactly as the eviction statute mandated. He glanced back at the scene and then accelerated away. When the Ferrari’s expensive racing tires hit the interstate heading