God of the Rodeo (20 page)

But the big problem wasn’t height, it was pressure. While the Mississippi sat just a foot or two below the main levee at Camp C, while alligators lolled near Camp F and hundreds of white pelicans converged on the fish that had been sucked over when the outer levee became a waterfall, it seemed that an unusual northern snowmelt had added as much to the river as it could, and that the local rains had stopped, that the Mississippi couldn’t rise much more. So it tried to break through. The main levee couldn’t hold the force of all the extra water. The banks were saturated and starting to let the river tunnel in. Brown water boiled up from the ground on the prison side. Tiny lakes formed around the percolations. There were fifty, sixty, seventy of them, the count growing every hour. Teams of inmates stacked sandbags around the pools, trying to create enough counter-pressure to stop the inflow. Then the river drove at another spot. If the levee caved, the prison would be under twelve to twenty feet within twelve hours.

If there was time, the convicts would be trucked to tent cities, one on Angola’s only high ground, beside the administration building, the other in the forest six miles outside the gates. The inmates were almost finished building them. Vets Incarcerated, one of the convict clubs, directed the staking of tents, while hundreds of prisoners raised new cyclone fences around themselves and then, with long poles, hoisted coils of barbed wire to the fence tops. It was a delicate
business, the placing of that barbed wire. If one man wavered with his pole, the length of coil would come down like a net of razors. But the inmates were careful. And they built the makeshift prisons to specifications. Above them, guards poked their rifles from temporary towers made neatly with planks and two-by-fours, all cut and nailed together by the lifers.

No one tried to escape. Convicts were driving tractors and trucks out the gates of Angola, down the state highway and onto the dirt road that led to the forest site, and they were driving them back out of the woods, but no one turned left at the highway instead of right, no one tried to make it to some bus depot or to a house where he could steal a car; they went to pick up their next load of lumber or barbed wire. Nor did anyone bolt past the sleep-deprived guards into the trees. When I asked if he ever thought about fleeing, one man laughed hysterically, rolling backward on the plywood floor he was building under a tent. He had to catch his breath before he could answer. He had to wipe away the raucous tears. “Man, I thought about running every day I been incarcerated. And when we out here, and that fence ain’t finished… But where am I gonna get to? Just ’cause we outside the gates don’t mean we outside Angola.” He elaborated the theory, so often mentioned, that the prison property extended far beyond its supposed lines, in this case all the way to the nearest town, St. Francisville.

Most of the inmates hoped only that they wouldn’t have to move from their dorms to these tents, that they wouldn’t be forced to live for months here, that they wouldn’t lose the photo albums in their locker boxes, and, if the levee did give way, that they would be let out of their dorms before they drowned. Every morning, when they were taken to their work sites, they saw the exodus from the guards’ village, the two-hour traffic jam at the front gate. The guards with mobile homes were driving them out. The rest had their TVs and kitchen tables and box springs stacked in their pickups.

On Monday evening Cain called a meeting of convict leaders—the club presidents and inmate counselors and editors of the
Angolite
. Angola’s wardens had always sent word outward through this group, and Cain loved the tradition. “I want the inmate leaders in A Building,” he said into his prison radio, and all over Angola assistant wardens passed this down to captains and lieutenants and finally to the low-level guards who barked into meeting rooms and kicked at bedposts and told the men Warden Cain wanted to see them right away. Once the inmates had funneled into the Main Prison visiting shed, once they’d settled themselves in the plastic chairs and waited a while, slouched indifferently but dutifully silent, Cain walked in, with his assistant wardens trailing behind him.

“The other night,” he started, his voice big and relaxed and needing no microphone for this crowd of seventy-five, “I was out with our man from the Corps of Engineers. We were standing on top of the levee and looking out over those sand boils. That’s where the Mississippi is seeping through, and we’ve got ninety of ’em now. And we were hoping no alligators were going to climb up and bite us, and we were putting sticks in the ground to check how damp that levee was getting, and he said to me, ‘Warden Cain, I feel the Mississippi River right under my feet, and there’s only two people I know can walk on water. That’s Jesus Christ and you.’”

He smiled and waited for the laughter. It came.

“So we’re prepared to move out if we have to, but meanwhile we’re working to save this prison. Everyone is working together. Inmates and freemen, side to side, man to man, even friend to friend. We had a little scare last night, where one boil looked like it wanted to make us run, and we had inmates working underwater, all night, to stop that leak. And that leak is stopped. We’ve got Warden Bonnette out there driving a front loader, and we’ve got Wilbert taking those
Angolite
pictures, documenting all this for history. Wilbert’s scared of heights and he begged me not to make him go up in that
helicopter to photograph, his knees were shaking and his teeth were chattering and he was just begging me—isn’t that right, Wilbert?” And Wilbert Rideau, who had been in Angola thirty-four years, and whose articles in the
Angolite
had won some of the nation’s most prestigious honors in journalism—the George Polk Award and a National Magazine Award nomination—nodded and grinned. Or rather, grimaced, his face stiffening. “But Wilbert went up there. And we’re going to blow up an aerial shot of the tent cities, put ’em up in all the visiting sheds, so y’all can show your families what you built. We’re going to do that.”

As soon as he stopped, the convicts wanted to know how quickly they would be let out of the dorms. “How do we know we’re not getting trapped inside there?”

“Isn’t there a guard in there with you?” Cain answered.

“He doesn’t have the key.”

“Well, we’re not going to lock him in there to drown. Think about it. If you’re hearing we’re going to leave you in there, that’s just rumormonger, rumormonger, rumormonger.”

“What about the ones can’t swim?”

“Can’t you swim?” Cain joked with his questioner.

“I can.”

“We’re not going to be swimming. We’re not going to let it get that far. Everyone’s going to be safe. That’s what I’m thinking about first. I’ve got a commitment to you all.”

The men asked what they could bring if there was an evacuation.

“Take your blankets. Take all the clothes you can put on your body. Wear two pairs of jeans if you can. And bring your Bibles. That’s everything.”

He asked for more questions. He was in no hurry to leave. He enjoyed standing before them, responding to the same worries again and again. He recounted the reinforcement of their prison, praised the shoulder-to-shoulder effort, promised he would protect them. He
confided, “Two nights ago I went out on a boat, and I yelled to that water, ‘Kiss my ass, River’ three times. And last night we had that scare, that boil. So I won’t yell at the river anymore.”

He announced that when the crisis was over there would be a day of unlimited Coca-Cola served at all the camps, and that every inmate would be given a Moon Pie. With that he left for the prison radio station.

The inmate deejay, in his cubby of albums, stood from the turntable when Cain walked in, and faded out Otis Redding when Cain was ready. The warden delivered the same message he had to the inmate leaders. “Well, sir,” the deejay broadcast, summing things up, “you’ve been with us all along. And we just want to thank you for stopping the rumormongers, and for all you’re doing to stay on top of the situation. I think you’re our greatest asset, Warden Cain.”

Otis Redding faded back in.

“You deejays been asking to expand, play your music all night instead of like you do now?” Cain asked.

“We would like that, sir.”

“Well, that’s good. We’ll make that happen.”

At the end of that evening, Warden Cain led me into the Ranch House bedroom. Motioning me to a chair, he sat on the unmade bed where he’d been catching what sleep he could during the crisis. We discussed money once more. At first he backed away from his earlier demand. “It might not be ethical.” Then he claimed he’d found a publisher for his own book about his leadership of Angola. I asked which publisher. He wouldn’t say. I asked again. He admitted he’d spoken with no publishers at all, approached none. He asked what percentage of my royalties I would be willing to pay if we did arrive at some arrangement. He asked and asked and asked.

“Warden Cain,” I kept saying, “it’s been a long, long day.” I extricated
myself without answering, and managed to avoid any time alone with him for the rest of my visit.

Gunshots echoed across the fields at night, the only ones I’d heard at Angola since September. The guards hunted beavers and any other animals that might gnaw at the precarious levee. They rode the embankment in pickup trucks, searching with floodlights and taking aim. They had a grand time, razzing one another when they missed into the water.

Under a full moon Cain delivered sandbags in an army personnel carrier. He’d bought two such carriers for the penitentiary when he took over; he liked to drive them along the dirt roads in the Tunica Hills. Now, happier than the riflemen on the levee, beaming behind the wheel of the immense, tread-borne, open-bed tank, he bounded across the prison, a general at war. He stopped at the levee’s edge. Tank idling loud, he yelled down at a crew of inmate sandbaggers, yelled down to the base of the hill, “Where you want your drop?”

Whose voice was that? Was that Warden Cain up there in the cab window? Yes, lit by the moon, that was him! That was his white hair! That was his wide face looming out! And he was talking to
them
, not to their guard; he was asking
them!

He was asking Buckkey.

Errant strands of blond hair lit by the tank, and his rubber boots covered in muck, Buckkey climbed the levee’s hill. He stood at the rear corner of the tank, raised his gloved hand. He signaled tentatively. “Pull back a little, Warden Cain.”

“What’s that?”

“I said, pull back a little,” he risked shouting at the warden.

The face floated out again from the window. “You just tell me where you need me to go.”

“Come on back a little more,” Buckkey motioned with his hand, then held it flat. “Wo. Okay. A little more. Wo.”

The inmates started to unload, passing the white sacks down the levee to the boil. At the bottom they were thigh-deep in water, setting the bags at angles atop one another, building the walls. From the dark pool a neatly squared white fortress rose to the surface. Cain gazed down, and soon put his tank into gear and went for more supplies. An hour later they heard and then watched him return out of the darkness, the carrier approaching across the sodden, glistening fields. Buckkey directed him again, waving easily. “Right there, right there is good.”

It was every boy’s dream, being indispensable to his father, guiding him into the parking space. Except that this was eight times better and eight times worse; here they were saving the kingdom, here they were saving the prison. The cab door opened. Cain stepped down. He walked around to the back, where Buckkey was the point man, swinging bags from the tank. “You guys really do good work,” he said, before his radio called him: “Angola One. Angola One.” And afterward, at midnight, riding in a pickup back to their dorm, Buckkey looked at the inmate who’d stood right below him on the bank, the man he’d handed the bags to, the man Cain had been talking to along with Buckkey.

“Yeah, I know,” the other said, catching Buckkey’s glance.

But Buckkey wanted it spoken. “It was like we were needed. It was like we weren’t prisoners.”

The evacuation began two hours later.

The Corps of Engineers had spotted something more than seepage—a part of the levee seemed to be softening toward collapse. The lights were turned up in the dorms, the guards announcing, “All you need in your hands is a blanket and a Bible.” Loaded
onto cotton trailers and cattle trucks, the inmates began the seven-hour journey to the tent cities. There was lots and lots of waiting. Armed convoys had to be formed, because no weapon-and for that matter no guard—could be put amidst the throng on the truck beds. And the inmates had to be counted as they were loaded, and counted when the trucks were ready to leave, and counted as they were unloaded and marched, all of them, to the tents outside the administration building, and counted before half of them were sent down the highway to the tents in the forest. “Spruce One… Ash Four… Hickory Two…” the guards called out the names of the dorms, followed by the name of each convict. The front gate was plugged tight, a mobile home steered poorly and wedged across one lane and all the pickups full of kids’ bicycles and old chests of drawers lined up in front of the other. The morning sun was bright. The fields were serene with yellow blooms and white clover. Jammed within the fenced siding of the cotton trailers or the slats of the cattle trucks, the inmates felt a numb lethargy beyond the palpable depletion of will that seemed to affect every one of them, always, even the most tightly wound or determined. They wondered if the evacuation was really necessary, and at the same time wondered if the few things they owned, everything they’d been forced to leave behind, would be ruined. They hardly spoke during the seven hours. The place they inhabited seemed larger than it ever had, the land already being limitless and the Warden supreme and now the Mississippi coming alive to tell them, once and for all, that they had no control.

Cain marshaled them to the tents and, almost immediately, back along the same seven-hour route to their dorms. The danger had been declared a false alarm. But the evacuation had been, he would soon announce, the largest mass movement of prisoners in U.S. history. The river hadn’t whispered any message of submission into his ears. His will was historic in scale.