Mark Gimenez - The Color of Law

“Card won’t work,” Scott said. “Raise the gate.”

Osvaldo retreated a step and said, “No card.”

“No, I’ve got a card. It’s not working. Open the gate.”

Osvaldo was now shaking his head. “No gate.”

“Open the goddamned gate!”

Osvaldo held his hands up. “No card. No gate.”

“Jesus Christ!”

Scott backed out and parked the Ferrari on the street, pumped a few quarters into the parking meter, pissed off until he remembered that the Ferrari would be his for only nine more days. Fuck it. Two-hundred-thousand-dollar car gets scratched, it’s the bank’s loss. By the time he hit the front door of Dibrell Tower two blocks away, he was whistling.

Rebecca Fenney was crying. She was still in bed, hiding from Highland Park. She had bet her beauty on Scott Fenney and lost. Her house. Her car. Her status. Her life. Everything she had acquired over the last eleven years would soon be gone. And it hadn’t been lost to a twenty-two-year-old blonde with big tits and a tight ass-to a girl by the pool-but to a heroin addict, a whore, a…Rebecca never said that word because even in Highland Park such words are best said only behind the brick walls at the club, but she thought that word now: nigger.

Her husband had sacrificed her life for a nigger’s life.

There. She had said it. Or at least thought it. As everyone in Highland Park was thinking at that very moment-the town is so small, so insular, that nothing escapes notice. Not that this could have escaped the notice of anyone in America, her husband on national TV, for God’s sake! And today at lunch, her (former) society girlfriends would order Caribbean salad, tortilla soup, sparkling water, and for dessert, Rebecca Fenney. She would be today’s scandal souffle.

Oh, how they would gossip! And how they would laugh!

There’s nothing the girls love to sink their sharp teeth into more than a juicy scandal: a lesbian affair; a good Highland Park girl knocked up by a black SMU athlete; botched cosmetic surgery; drinking, drugs, and STDs at the high school; criminal fraud committed by a scion of an old Highland Park family; a Democrat in Highland Park; failure in Highland Park. They lapped it up like the family dog laps up leftovers.

Rebecca Fenney had gossiped so many times about other women’s scandals. Now everyone in Highland Park would be gossiping about her-at the Village, at the club, at the gym, at every restaurant and in every dressing room. They would all be gossiping and laughing-at her expense.

How could she ever show her face in this town again?

She was crawling back under the comforter when the phone rang.

Boo quietly pushed open the door to her parents’ bedroom and stuck her head in. She saw her mother sitting on the far side of the bed and heard her talking on the phone. Her voice sounded strange.

“ What?…Sleeping with Trey?…Where’d you hear that?…It’s all over town?…Everyone knows?… Oh, my God! ”

She hung up the phone and put her hands over her face.

“Mother?”

“Oh, God.”

“Mother?”

“Oh, God.” Finally she turned to Boo. Her mother looked like a frightened little kitten. “What, Boo?”

“Are you okay?”

“No.”

“Can I help?”

“No. What do you want?”

“Is it okay if Pajamae and I go to the Village? We’ll be real careful crossing the street.”

Mother waved her hand. “Fine, whatever.”

“Okay. See you later.”

Boo started to shut the door, but her mother said, “Boo, wait. Come in. I need to talk to you.”

As soon as Scott stepped inside the lobby of Dibrell Tower, he stopped whistling. A tidal wave of reporters and cameramen came rushing toward him, all shouting questions on top of each other.

“Mr. Fenney, what’s her name, the woman Clark raped?”

“What are the names of the other women he raped?”

“You brought down Senator McCall-are you happy?”

“Do you think Senator McCall will be indicted?”

“What about Tom Dibrell-will he be indicted?”

Scott squinted at the bright camera lights and ducked and weaved his way toward the elevator bank. But at the speed at which he was advancing against the mass of reporters defending their ground, he wouldn’t get into an elevator before noon. He was about to retreat when two enormous blue blazers stepped in front of him. Two black men, Dibrell Tower security guards, were now running interference for Scott Fenney. The reporters had a choice: get out of the way or get run over.

They got out of the way.

The two guards pushed forward until they arrived at the elevators where a third guard stood blocking the doors of an empty elevator. He stepped aside to allow Scott entrance, then again blocked the way. He was joined by the other two guards, three huge bodies in blue blazers protecting Scott Fenney from the reporters and cameras, black guards whom Scott had never before even acknowledged; they were just inanimate objects in the lobby, like the big bronze Remington sculpture. Scott reached over and punched the FLOOR 62 button, then fell to the back of the elevator. Just before the doors closed, the middle guard turned to him and said, “Thanks, Mr. Fenney.”

“For what?”

“Standing up for that girl.”

Pajamae followed Boo out the front door and down the walkway to the sidewalk. Boo said, “Boy, my mother was acting really weird this morning. The stuff she was saying.”

“Is she sick?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“’Cause Mama says weird stuff when she takes her medicine.”

They turned left down the sidewalk. Boo was talking, but Pajamae was watching. Mama had taught her to keep her eyes peeled when she went outside in their neighborhood, watching for strange people. Of course, in their neighborhood grown men hung around outside the liquor stores on every corner and drank malt liquor out of brown paper bags and peed right into the street whenever nature called, so strange here in Boo’s neighborhood was a different thing altogether. But Pajamae still noticed something strange.

A man in a car.

He was sitting across the street and down one house from Boo’s. He stared at them as they came down the sidewalk. He was a big man with a bald head in a black car. When she and Mama were outside and a white man looking like him drove into the projects, everyone would stop what they were doing and shout, “The man!” The police. The bald man in the black car looked like a policeman.

Pajamae noticed the car door open partway and the bald man’s black shoe come out. She was about to grab Boo and hightail it back to their house when an old man stepped out the front door of the house they were walking in front of. He came down the path toward them, but he stopped and picked up a newspaper on the grass.

Boo said, “Good morning, Mr. Bailey.”

The old man smiled and said, “Why, good morning to you, Miss Boo Fenney.”

Pajamae looked over at the black car. The bald man’s foot was back in the car and the door was shut, but he was still staring. They continued down the sidewalk and came to a busy road named Preston and turned right. Pajamae glanced back and saw that the black car was gone. She shook her head at herself for being so silly: You’re not in the projects, girl!

They walked on and Pajamae soon found herself enjoying the stroll through Boo’s neighborhood, what she called the Bubble. She always felt nervous and scared if Louis was gone and she and Mama had to walk alone through their neighborhood to the nearest liquor store to buy some bread or eggs, even in the middle of the day. Mama always told her, “If I say ‘run,’ you run, girl.” But she wasn’t nervous or scared at all in this neighborhood. The sidewalks were so clean, no beer cans or liquor bottles or syringes or those funny long balloons Mama told her never to touch. And no men hanging around outside liquor stores-in fact, there were no liquor stores. No pimps or pushers trying to recruit her or sell to her, no older boys driving by and yelling out nasty words, no loud rap music from cars and boom boxes, and nobody cussing each other ’cause they just got evicted. It was so quiet!