What’s sauce for the gander ought to be sauce for the goose, my criminal defense lawyer’s mind tells me. But it doesn’t work that way, and with Cunningham being black, if this case goes to trial he’s got an uphill battle. Unless there’s been a racial migration I don’t know about, Washington County, in the northwest corner of the state, is overwhelmingly white, and I don’t know of a single case in Arkansas where a black male was acquitted of raping a white woman.

Maybe there are some, but they didn’t teach them in law school.

“Sorry, boy,” I say inside the house to my dog, who looks at me with the tragic eyes of one who is perpetually wronged.

“We’ll go later.” Sure we will. He slinks into the kitchen to point out to me his empty food dish. A terribly neglectful master. He misses my daughter. So do I. But if I get this case, it will be a chance to see Sarah more often this year. Actually that still may be hard to do, as busy as she is. Sarah, a sophomore who has aspirations to be a varsity Razorback cheerleader, is cheerleading for the junior varsity (a necessary step, she tells me), and is working part-time for a professor in the sociology department What a great kid. She has every reason to be roy ally screwed up, with her mother dying from breast cancer when she was thirteen and me half nuts during that time. Instead, she’s got her head on a lot straighter than most kids her age I know. They would be crazy not to make her a cheerleader. Part Hispanic, Indian, and black as a result of her Colombian mother’s ancestry, Sarah would not only help solve some cultural diversity problems but she is also a knockout. Voted a campus beauty her freshman year, she is the picture of her mother, who, even at the end of an eight-hour shift at St.

Thomas Hospital, where she worked as a nurse, could look stunningly lovely. My only real complaint is that occasionally Sarah does get on a soapbox. Her senior year in high school she was on a fundamentalist religious kick.