against the concrete it sounded like high-powered weapons discharging- boom boom boom. Their torsos were knotty with muscles and glistening with sweat, their sinewy arms etched with barbed-wire tattoos, their expressions sullen. They were wearing long shorts hung low on their hips and those $100 Nikes Scott couldn’t afford as a boy and looking on Scott Fenney as prey, which no doubt he would have been but for the presence of Louis. Scott avoided direct eye contact with them like they say to do with wild animals for fear of inciting them. He wanted to cut and run back to the car and drive full throttle out of here. But he’d never make it to the Ferrari: the image of a pack of wolves pouncing on a fat little rabbit flashed through his mind. So he closed the gap with Louis and followed in the black man’s shadow. And he had to admit to himself, he who had never felt fear on a football field felt it now. Scott Fenney was terrified. By the time they arrived at apartment 110, Scott’s heart was beating against his chest wall like a jackhammer and he had broken a full-body sweat. Louis knocked on the door.
“Pajamae, it’s Louis.”
No answer. Louis knocked again. Still no answer. The front window was covered with thick drapes inside and black burglar bars outside. No light was visible from within the apartment.
“Maybe she’s not home,” Scott said.
Louis’s body shook with a chuckle. “She home all right. She afraid to come outside. Don’t even open the windows even though ain’t no air-condition in there. She ain’t come outside since Shawanda arrested.” He leaned down and lowered his voice and said, “It’s a good thing you doing, Mr. Fenney, taking Pajamae to see her mama.”
Scott’s mind was busy considering his chances of making it back through the gauntlet alive so the words, “Why didn’t you?” were out of his mouth before he realized what he was saying. But Louis didn’t react angrily. Instead, his big round face folded into a gold-toothed smile.
“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 Beyonce 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 north to downtown Dallas, he breathed a sigh of relief.
“My daddy, he was white,” Pajamae said.
He glanced over at the girl in the passenger’s seat. She was a cute kid with facial features that were more white than black. Her hair was done in neat rows braided lengthwise and snug to her scalp with long braids hanging to her narrow shoulders; she was wearing a pink T-shirt, jean shorts, pink socks folded down, and white Nike sneakers. Other than her light brown skin, she was no different from all the little girls Scott had seen in Highland Park-except for the cornrows.
“Where is he?”
“Dead.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. He hurt my mama.”
“How did he die?”
“Po-lice shot him. He was dealing.”
She ran her finger lightly over the dash, as if checking for dust, and then she turned to Scott.
“Mr. Fenney, did my mama kill that white man?”
“No, baby, I ain’t killed no one,” Shawanda said through the glass partition, her right palm plastered to her side of the window and matched by Pajamae’s left palm on the other side. Both mother and daughter were crying and aching to hold each other. When Shawanda had said she had a child, Scott had naturally assumed she was a lousy mother-she was a prostitute, for God’s sake. But seeing them together now, it occurred to him that this woman loved her daughter as much as he loved his. He turned to the black guard.
“Can’t they be together?”
The guard’s eyes dropped; he scratched his chin. When his eyes came back up, he said, “You here to discuss her defense?”
Scott caught on quickly. “Yes.”
The guard gestured at Pajamae. “She a material witness?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
The guard led them to the small room where Scott and Shawanda always met. He patted Scott down, but he only patted the top of Pajamae’s head. When he brought Shawanda in, she dropped to her knees and embraced
