I hung up and sent the pictures to Street.
His response came back in under a minute.
Street: That’s your baby bro! No question.
Then one minute later…
Street: Damn. This is crazy.
I looked at that message and then put my phone in the cupholder, drove and let the city move past my windows.
I had a daughter.
I didn’t have the results yet. The test was sitting in my pocket and I wouldn’t have confirmation for over a week or two. But I didn’t need a piece of paper to tell me what I already knew from the second she put her little hands on my face and looked at me like she recognized something about me.
She was mine.
And everything about my life was about to change because of it.
Ishot up out of my sleep so fast, I woke up in a cold sweat. Everything that happened these past couple of months was catching up with me. I had a war wound to prove that. I reached over and grabbed my bottle of water off my nightstand.
After I gathered myself, I sat there in the dark of my bedroom at my moms house. My chest was heaving, sweat soaking through my shirt and my arm throbbing where the bandage was still wrapped tight. The room was quiet. The house was quiet. Just the sound of the AC running and the neighborhood outside was quiet as I expected for 3am.Being home for the summer didn’t go nearly as I had planned. My moms was getting suspicious of how I’d been acting lately, but no way I could tell her thatI’d gotten shot or what I was doing that led up to this shit happening. I was still trying to figure out who the fuck did it. Niggas I worked for wanted to convince me that it was a coincidence and just some hood shit with no target. I wasn’t buying that.
I put my face in my hands and stayed there for a minute. The dream happened again. It’s like, I knew every night that I closed my eyes, I was more than likely about to have the same one.
The dream was always the same. I could see my father’s death vividly, like I was standing right there watching it happen. I was one year old when my father died.
I didn’t have a memory of it, nor was I there to actually witness it. But, ever since I read those files in Legal’s office I had been dreaming it like I was there. Like my mind had built the scene from the documents, the photographs and the voicemail transcript. Now, my mind had decided to play it back for me every night whether I wanted it to or not.
I laid back, stared at the ceiling and thought about how I got here.
—
It started during spring break.
I had come home from Austin for the week to chill with my moms. A nigga couldn’t lie, I was homesick and missing my moms like crazy. We’d never been away from one another more than a few days. College was a whole new life for me, and I just had to adjust. I was for sho’ a mommas boy, she was all I knew, but I kept that shit in the house. Outside, niggas knew not to play with me. On the field or in real life. Melo had gone to see some girl he’d been talking to in Houston instead of going home with me, so I had a few days to myself. Yeah, I loved twin, but we ain’thad time apart since we came into this world. I wanted to do my own thing at times, and so did he now.
Things moved fast once I touched back down in Dallas for my break. Legal called me the second day I was home and asked if I wanted to come by his office, catch up on how school has been and earn a lil money working with him while I was here. That was Legal’s way of saying he wanted to spend time without making it into a big deal. He was like that. Always had been. He showed up in ways that didn’t announce themselves loudly. He wanted to put some money in my pocket, but wanted to make it seem as if I was working for it, although I knew he wouldn’t want me to do much.
I rode over there the same day that he had called. We ordered food and talked for a couple hours about school, football and where I saw myself in five years. Legal was one of the few people in my life who talked to me like I was a full grown man with a real future and not just Street’s little brother or one of Hood’s boys. He had always done that with me and Melo both. I loved him for it even when I didn’t say it.
I was kickin it with him at his office when he got a call that pulled him into court unexpectedly. He told me to make myself comfortable and familiar with everything in the office. He’d told me that I could start organizing all his files in alphabetical order, all except for the large file cabinet in the corner of the office. That one was already sorted and off limits. He left me the code to his filing cabinet and said that he’d be back in a few hours.
I wasn’t looking for nothing. I was just working like he’d asked me to.
That’s what I need people to understand if they ever found out what I did. I wasn’t snooping or going through his shit. I wasn’ttrying to get into something that wasn’t my business. I was cleaning up around his desk at first because Legal kept papers thrown around, unorganized and that shit bothered me. I knew he was a busy man and had to do multiple things at a time, so I was just going to fix it up for him. I was straightening files and putting folders back where they belonged when I saw a name and file number on a sticky tab that he had underneath everything else on the desk.
Xavier Hood Hendrix Sr.
I stood there holding that tab for a while. I realized, the tab had the exact location of which file he’d placed my father’s folder in. I thought about it long and hard before I decided to go into that file cabinet. It just so happened to be the one that he told me that he didn’t want me to touch.
What was inside changed everything for me, and that moment led up to the position that I was in now.
—
Legal had been building a file on my father’s murder for years. Decades. There were documents in there going back to right after my father died. Legal had police reports, witness statements that went nowhere, photographs of the murder scene that I had to put face down on the desk because I wasn’t ready for what they showed. There were notes in Legal’s handwriting on yellow legal pads. Pages and pages of them. Names, dates, connections he had traced, lost and picked back up again over the years. From what I could see, Legal was trying to solve his best friends murder but kept hitting dead ends.
My father had been one fight away from becoming a legitimate heavyweight contender. The biggest fight of his career was scheduled and if he won, a title shot was right there in front of him. Hood had been the real big name, and everyone who knewmy father had always told us that. Everybody who saw him fight said it. Legal’s notes confirmed it. He had the hands, the power, the heart, everything Street has right now but twenty years earlier.
