In Time I Dream About You

by Gene Gant

  Puzzled, I pressed the thing to my ear. “Hello.”

  “Is this Gavin Goode?” The man’s voice on the other end was calm and steady.

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “I’m Dr. Radlowe. I work in the trauma unit at Detroit Receiving. You’re listed as the next of kin for Donald Goode.”

  My heart began to pound in my throat. “That’s my dad. Has something happened to him?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry to say that he’s been shot.”

  It was as if the bottom dropped out of my soul. I could feel everything draining from me. My dad had worked as an armed security guard at the First Detroit National Bank downtown all my life, and this was the very moment I had feared for as long as I could remember.

  “What?” I gasped. My mind was reeling, spinning out of control. “What happened?”

  “I don’t have all the details,” Dr. Radlowe replied. “There was a robbery at a bank downtown a couple of hours ago, shots were fired, and your father was hit twice, in the head and neck.”

  I squeezed the receiver so hard the nail on my thumb broke off down to the quick. “Is he… did he die?”

  “He’s alive,” the doctor said quickly. “He just came out of surgery, and he’s been stabilized. But the shot to his neck severed his spinal cord. He’s paralyzed from the shoulders down.”

  Something in me broke like a rope snapping in a tug-of-war. My legs grew weak, and still clutching the receiver, I sank to the floor, sitting numbly with my back against the desk. The doctor continued talking, his words indistinct and distant as the receiver slipped from my fingers.

  “I want my dad,” I mumbled, a plea to the God I was no longer sure I believed in. Tears pulsed from my eyes, streaming down my cheeks.

  The guard stood back and gave me space to cry. But after a few seconds, I choked back the tears, rubbed my forearm across my eyes, and struggled back to my feet. I grabbed the receiver and talked again to the doctor. Surgery had relieved the pressure in Dad’s skull caused by swelling of the brain, but he was in a coma from which there were no guarantees he would awaken. If he did wake up, it was a certainty that he’d never go back to work or walk or even feed himself again. The doctor promised someone from the hospital would contact me if there was any change in my dad’s condition. I thanked him and hung up the phone.

  It was hard to keep my emotions under control. I wanted to curse and scream, but I took a deep breath and held it until the urges passed. The guard still stood in front of me, waiting.

  I looked at him and said, “I have to talk with the warden. I have to talk with the warden now.”

  “The warden’s already asked to see you. Let’s go.” The guard gestured with his baton for me to walk ahead of him.

  THE WARDEN’S office was on the first floor in the main hall, directly across from the front entrance. It was one of the most heavily guarded areas of the facility, but she never met with inmates there. The guard escorted me upstairs from the basement to a small conference room at the end of the hall on the first floor of North Wing. That was the place where inmates usually got facetime with the warden.

  She was waiting when I walked through the double doors of the conference room with the guard close behind. Warden Sonia Sanchez sat at the head of a rectangular table; the other chairs were empty. She was a slender woman of average height who, in her white blazer and pink blouse, managed to look more imposing than the two uniformed COs standing behind her.

  I started to walk up to her, but the guard on her left pointed sharply toward the seat at the opposite end of the table. “Sit there.”

  I sat, and my escort took up a position behind me. Warden Sanchez was watching me closely, her dark eyes shielded like always. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking or feeling. On the other hand, I could sense my emotions—fear, anger, and anguish—shining from my face like heat.

  “Inmate Goode,” the warden said, her voice strong and steady, “I’m very sorry about your father. I’ve given authorization for you to receive any and all calls from the hospital regarding his medical condition. According to the news reports I’ve seen, police have tracked down the robber and taken him into custody. I hope it helps you to know that.”

  “Thanks, ma’am,” I replied, trying to keep my voice as steady as hers. “I appreciate what you’ve done, but I need to see my dad.” She raised her eyebrows and started to answer. I jumped back in before she could speak. “It doesn’t have to be long. An hour. A half hour, even. I just need to see him. He’s always been there for me. I have to be there for him now.”

  The warden leaned forward and folded her arms across a manila folder that lay on the table in front of her. “Inmate Goode, what you’re asking is not going to happen, and you know it.”

  “He’s my father! And he could be dying….”

  “I understand that, and I sympathize with you. I truly do,” the warden replied. “But you committed a crime. You’re a prisoner. You lost the freedom to be with your father.”

  “Please. There’s got to be a way I can see him.”

  “It’s not happening, Gavin. Aside from the fact that sending you to Detroit even for a short visit would be expensive and a logistical nightmare, your conduct since you’ve been here hardly earns you such a privilege.” She picked up the manila envelope and waved it at me. “This is yet another report on you. Dr. Burns cited you for violating sexual conduct policy again. How many times is this now? I’ve lost count. She also cites you for refusing to cooperate in helping her identify for treatment the other inmates you exposed to an STD.”

  “It didn’t happen that way.” Anger was boiling through me again, but I kept my voice quiet. “I didn’t violate any of the damn rules, and I told Dr. Burns exactly what—”

  Warden Sanchez waved me off. “I’ve gotten too many reports on you, Gavin, to just dismiss what Dr. Burns has written here,” she said, shaking the folder at me emphatically. “Once you’re released from medical isolation, I’m ordering you to serve one week in solitary confinement.”

  For a brief while, the warden and I looked across the length of the table at each other. Then I slumped in my chair, my head falling forward, my chin on my chest. I felt defeated and hopeless. There was nothing I could do to change the situation. I couldn’t even work up my anger again or curse at the warden. What purpose would that serve? I could only think about my dad and hate myself for not being there when he needed me most.

  The legs of the warden’s chair scraped across the hardwood floor as she pushed herself away from the table and stood up. “Officer, take Inmate Goode back to solitary.”

  Chapter 3

  HERE’S HOW I wound up netting twenty-five years behind bars.

  Detroit street gangs gained new members mostly through volunteers who stepped up for a variety of reasons—to earn money from selling drugs or committing other crimes, to be with friends who are already members, or to have protection while navigating the mean streets of the city. If members spotted someone they thought would be an asset to their organization, they’d recruit him. The Cold Bloods decided they wanted me.

  When I entered tenth grade at King High School, I was a five foot eleven, 180-pound speedy muscle machine thanks to all the workouts that came from being on both the football and track teams. I also had a reputation as a guy you didn’t want to mess with. That August, while heading home from a Saturday night party at a friend’s house, I saw a shiny red car pull alongside the guy walking ahead of me. I sort of knew him: his name was Denton, and we’d had a couple of classes together freshman year. Two dudes slid out of the car, and Denton visibly shuddered at the sight of them. He backed up a step, a move that seemed instinctive. The dudes jumped him before he could do anything else and started kicking the crap out of him.

  There were at least ten other kids on the street; some of them had just left the same party I’d come from. Several of them pulled out cell phones and started filming, others hooted with excitement, but none of them did anything to help De
nton. That pissed me off almost as much as the two-on-one fight. Denton was on the ground, curled up like a bean and covering his head against a flurry of kicks and punches. I ran up and started throwing punches of my own at the two assailants.

  Strong and fast, I hit one guy in the mouth so hard he stumbled backward and fell on his ass. Then I pivoted immediately and popped the other guy in the nose. He recovered his balance in a few seconds and, with blood now dripping from his nostrils, swung at me. I ducked and followed up with an elbow to his jaw. By that time the first dude was back on his feet, and I bounced over to light into him again. The two guys seemed to forget Denton entirely and focused their attention on me. I expected Denton to jump in and even the odds by taking on one of the bastards, but he stayed down. My fighting skills were pretty good, but I still found myself being overwhelmed in the two-on-one contest, which meant I was taking fists in the face, chest, back, and stomach. The blows hurt like hell.

  In desperation I switched to what my long-gone grandfather called the “throats and scrotes” defense. With all the force I could muster, I hit one guy in the Adam’s apple and the other between the legs. That made them back off for a moment, growling angrily over the debilitating pain I’d inflicted. They looked as if they were going to come at me again, but sirens began wailing in the distance, and they hopped back into their car and drove away.

  I turned and saw that Denton had run off. The other kids were also scattering. I wiped my sleeve across my bloody nose and mouth, dashed through a couple of overgrown vacant lots to the next street, and made my way home.

  That Monday was the first day of the new school year. I intended to track Denton down between classes and make him tell me what the hell the fight was about, but he was a no-show. I walked home from school with a couple of friends. After we parted company, I turned the corner onto my street, and the shiny red car from Saturday night—a ’70s era Grand Prix that had been meticulously restored—quietly pulled alongside me. All the windows were down, and I could see the guy whose nuts I’d cracked sitting behind the wheel. I almost bolted in panic, certain a gun was about to be pointed my way. Then I saw Denton in the backseat, sitting beside a lean-bodied, dark brown man who appeared to be in his early twenties. The man had a black baseball cap pulled low over his forehead and a pair of reflective shades covering his eyes.

  He turned his face to me and said, “Get in.”

  That didn’t seem the smartest course of action to me, but the only other option I had was to make a run for my house, and I didn’t want these dudes knowing exactly where I lived. Or maybe they already knew; they seemed to have been waiting for me. As I walked around the back of the car, Denton climbed out and politely held the door for me. After I climbed into the rear seat, he shut the door and got into the front passenger seat. There was a solid click as the door locks engaged.

  My heart was pounding, and I kept thinking, What the hell?

  The man beside me wore a black Nike sweat suit and a black pair of suede and leather Nike sneakers that probably cost more than my dad earned in a week. He was looking out his window at a shapely young woman who was ringing the doorbell at my neighbor’s house. Having never seen this dude before, I stared at him, waiting to hear what he had to say.

  It was Denton who spoke first. “Yo, Gavin,” he said coolly, turning to look at me over his shoulder. “That’s Apache.”

  The introduction intensified my fear. Word on the street was that Apache headed the Cold Bloods and chose his nickname to honor his Native American grandfather. I’d also heard he was ruthless. Among other supposed actions, he shot his own father for interrupting a drug deal—the man was trying to steer him away from crime—and he beat one of his own gang members into a coma after discovering the guy was gay.

  “Gavin,” Apache said without looking at me. “I hear you can throw down.”

  Instinct told me it was best to neither confirm nor deny my fighting skills. “You want something from me?” I replied instead.

  Apache turned to me. Even with his eyes hidden by the shades, the irritation in his face was evident. “That was Blood business you got into the other night. You messed up Little D’s initiation.”

  Oh, shit. “Hey, man, I didn’t know—”

  “Doesn’t matter what you didn’t know. You messed up Blood business. There’s gotta be consequences for that.”

  When it came to gang “consequences,” that usually meant death or, at a minimum, serious bodily injury. I wasn’t about to sit still and wait for it. In a hurried motion, I grabbed for the door handle and jerked it, but the door didn’t open. The car had been retrofitted with a modern locking system where the locks could only be disengaged from the driver’s seat. In the same moment I thought to launch myself through the opening at my right, all four power windows started going up. The guy at the wheel put the car in gear and drove off.

  “You scared, Gavin?” Apache asked. His mirrored eyes, locked on my face, were eerie. It was like staring down a bug-eyed being from another world.

  He waited for my response. There didn’t seem to be enough breath in my lungs for me to answer aloud, so I nodded.

  “That’s good. You should be. See, you could get your ass shot for messing up Blood business. But this doesn’t have to go that way.” The tight expression on Apache’s face eased, and he slid down a little in his seat, his whole body taking on a posture of relaxation. “You jumped in a fight that wasn’t yours to help out a friend. That’s heart, man. The Cold Bloods can use that kind of heart.”

  “Wait.” I swallowed and my throat still felt dry. “I’m not joining your gang.” My dad had done everything he could to keep me on the straight and narrow. If he found out I’d become a Cold Blood, it would kill him—and then he’d come back to life and kill me.

  “There’s always a choice,” Apache said, “and there’s always a consequence. You turn us down, I’m gonna take you out of this car and break your leg. Then, after it heals, I’m gonna come back and ask you again to be a Blood, and if you don’t say yes, I’ll break your other leg. After that, if you turn us down, you get your arm broken. We’ll go round and round like that until you say yes or you’re so cripped up you won’t be any good to anybody. And if you move out of town or call the police, I’ll track you down and put a bullet through your head.”

  He said all that in a calm, quiet voice, as if he were ticking off the list of steps in changing a flat tire or something. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that the man meant every word. I’d probably be able to throw Dad off with a lie after the first broken leg, but if I kept getting hurt, he’d figure somebody was behind it. He wouldn’t just leave something like that to the police to handle because the police were notorious for sweeping what they considered to be minor cases under the rug. He’d go after Apache, and that would get Dad killed. Not to mention the fact that I loved playing football and running track, and I wouldn’t be any good at either sport when Apache got through with me. I didn’t see where I had much of a choice.

  “Okay, Apache. I’m in.”

  BECAUSE I was a recruit and not a volunteer, I wasn’t required to undergo the ass-kicking initiation. Apache dubbed me Triple X after deciding, for reasons that escaped me entirely, I was a player who went through girls like a kid eating candy. He took my cell phone number before I got out of the car and said he’d be in touch. Later that night, while I was lying across the bed in my room finishing up a reading assignment for my history class, he called.

  I actually shivered when I saw his name pop up on my caller ID. “What’s up?”

  “Yo, Gavin” came the reply. “Meet me at the corner of Sheridan down the street from your house. Five minutes.”

  The idea of going out in the middle of the night to meet up with a criminal was terrifying. “I can’t, man,” I said, my voice hushed. “My dad is in his room, right down the hall from me. He’s still awake. I try to leave, he’ll hear me. He’s not gonna let me out this time of night.”

  “Five min
utes,” Apache snapped, and then the line went dead.

  I climbed out my window and shimmied down a drainpipe in the darkness, scared every inch of the way. If I’d fallen and killed myself, it would have saved a lot of trouble all around.

  The red Grand Prix was parked on Sheridan at the corner, just a few feet from the stop sign. The left rear window slid down as I walked up, and there was Apache waiting in the backseat again. He was one of those sunglasses-at-night dudes, still wearing his reflective shades. Instead of Denton, another guy shared the rear of the car with him. Apache nodded toward his right. I walked around the car and climbed in.

  The same guy as before sat behind the wheel. I would later learn his name was Stone. He tipped his chin up to greet me. Apparently he wasn’t holding a grudge over my busting his nuts, which was one less thing for me to worry about, thank God.

  Apache wasted no time. “Triple X, this is Crazy E,” he said, introducing the dude who sat between us. He didn’t wait for Crazy E and me to exchange any pleasantries. “Crazy E’s been getting jumped in his territory. You’re gonna back him up. Take this.”

  Apache pulled out a huge handgun, and I almost screamed. He reached across Crazy E and, instead of shoving the barrel into my ribs as I expected, thrust the weapon into my hands.

  “You’re gonna be with Crazy E whenever he’s selling,” Apache continued. “And you’re gonna have that piece on you whenever you’re with Crazy E.”

  I stared down at the firearm in my hands as if it were a rattlesnake. I’d never touched a gun, let alone fired one. The only gun I’d even seen before was the one Dad carried on his job. That one was nowhere near as big as this thing, which was forged of black metal and weighed a ton. Hell, with that monster, I was more likely to blow my own foot off than to take down some badass.