God of the Rodeo (22 page)

Even now, giving a demonstration, prying at his lips with his fingers and, in the process, pushing at his cheeks in what should have been a comic moment, he did not smile. The other residents did not laugh. He seemed to make them uneasy. He did not belong among them. Their vulnerabilites floated around them like an atmoshpere they exhaled, while he seemed inviolable. Through the entire meeting, hunched on the two steps leading down into the room, a woman in white stretch pants kept flicking her cigarette lighter and running the flame along the hairs of her forearm, up and down, up and down, as though to distract herself with imminent singeing from the drugs she would rather be taking or the alcohol she would rather be drinking or the thoughts about herself she wished would burn away. A man whose round head seemed to sit directly on his round torso had spoken for ten desperate minutes about his television needs for the coming weekend; no one so much as sighed with impatience. There were sizable men in that room who might have shrunk away and drowned themselves at a critical word. But Littell’s expression looked unchangeable. The cigarette-lighter woman could have held the flame against his mouth, and his lips would have kept their harsh composure.

“But I’m learning,” he said. “I’m trying to learn how to bend my lips the right way, do that smiling thing. Just give me a little time. I’m just a little throwed off. But I’m learning.”

“All right, Littell!” the director, Miss Katherine, bony, exuberant, one of the few whites in the room, burst out. She was a recovered alcoholic herself.

Her piercing optimism had no effect on his face. Nor did the residents’ applause.

“Thank you, Littell,” she spoke more calmly. “Those issues that
you talked of, that feeling that you just can’t allow any positive emotion, might be masking all kinds of things, all kinds of hurt. And feelings of abandonment, because of where you’ve been…”

Still his features showed no reaction.

“And this community
can
help you.” She leaned forward in her chair. “We’re here for support. If we’re trying to understand ourselves on our own, we’re going to go nowhere fast. My best thinking when I was on my own was getting me into trouble. Into that downward spiral. We need each other. You just give
us
a little time.”

Her voice, even in her calmer moments, had the insistent energy of someone still fighting off her own collapse, though earlier in the meeting she had mentioned her fifteenth anniversary without a drink. However precarious her own life, she sounded undaunted by the lives of her clients, by the isolation of Littell. Her graying hair a helmet of feathers around gaunt, animated features, she threw herself at them.

“You all ready to link arms?” she asked, and answered herself, “Yes, you are, because I am the Boss Applesauce!” She let out a trill of nervous laughter.

Everybody stood in a tight circle, elbows intertwined, and prayed in unison:

And then, still joined, chanting like rappers, the residents gave their own incantation:

“Man, I need this place.”

From the stoop, Littell and I watched a few neighbors sipping beer, at dusk, at a foldout table they’d brought to the empty lot of gravel and patchy grass across the street. “If I wasn’t here, I’d be under a fucking bridge. And you know something? I know I
could
go home. I finally called my mother the other day, and she asked me why I didn’t call when I first got out. I wasn’t expecting that. I haven’t seen her in ten years. I figured I wasn’t welcome.” His voice faded away for a while, as if he wasn’t satisfied with what he’d just said, but hesitated to say what he meant.

“Sometimes I feel guilty ’Cause I think I should feel that love that’s hard for me to feel. Even with my mother, even before prison, I didn’t have that emotion for my family. It’s nothing my parents did. They didn’t beat me, they didn’t abuse me. They tried to teach me all the right things. I just didn’t develop that strong bond. It’s like something missing in me. I’ve never had a real solid relationship with any woman. Just wayward types, ho’s. That’s who I always went for. Never that feeling. Never like we were on the same page. If I think about the fucking situation I’m in now, some way it’s all tied together.”

A gleaming red sports car drove onto the vacant lot. Its driver left the engine running and the door open and hip-hop music on low, and joined the beer drinkers.

“I want that type of relationship with a woman so bad, I know I could be bamboozled. I want to lean back—I mean, all the initial phases have to be over with, all that—and sit behind her on the couch, just talking. She’s leaning back against me, right against my chest, with my arms around her like this.” He demonstrated with arms held outward, encircling air, and added, “Whenever problems
came up, I’d have the perspective and knowledge to deal with them. I’d stay calm and handle things.”

One of the drinkers jumped onto the table and did an old break-dance move, spinning on his shoulders, somehow frictionless, whirling, whirling. He retook his seat as if he’d done nothing.

“But I got to establish myself first. I got to get out on my own. Some kind of apartment and a vehicle. You see, I don’t know if I can get started getting those things here at O’Brien, ’Cause you’re not allowed to miss but so many meetings. I’m thirty-eight years old. I ain’t no fucking teenybopper anymore. But you know what’s worse? You’re not allowed no fucking sex. They tell you none for six months. They suggest not for a year. When I heard that? At my first community meeting? When Miss Katherine said that about the Boss Applesauce and does someone want to tell the new residents the rules? She says it’s because relationships is part of what got us in trouble in the first place, and we don’t know how to choose the right ones yet, but she’s not used to dealing with nobody who’s spent fifteen fucking years in prison, fifteen years without even
looking
at a pussy. I wish I was in Lake Charles. I know some ladies there, I could take care of my business, take this pressure off. Baton Rouge is too clean. Where’s the tenderloin, where’s the stroll? The other day I went out, I told Miss Katherine I was looking for work, and I couldn’t even find a store selling that porno. I wish I’d brought my shot magazines from Angola. I gave them all away when I got short. I need to get near some pussy. I need to smell it. It’s a pressure on me. Fifteen years!
Fifteen years! I’m
looking for the dirt, man, I want to see the fucking dirt.”

A month later, still having tried nothing to fight my way back inside Angola (as though the warden had depleted my will the way the geography of the prison affected many of the inmates’), I joined an
audience of sixth and seventh graders. Littell, along with five current Angola convicts, sat before the church youth group. We were in a part of Baton Rouge far from O’Brien—those Episcopalian youth in that church basement wore short pants and the whitest, cleanest socks I had ever seen. I kept staring at those tube socks. It was as if their mothers bought them a new pair after every soccer game, every tennis lesson.

The church minister gave a monthly service at Angola, and Miss Katherine was fairy godmother to the CPR team, booking their classes around Baton Rouge. Tonight they had arranged for a group of five lifers-escorted by two guards—to give testimonials. The speeches had a theme: “Choices.” The convicts were supposed to be warning these kids away from the wrong decisions, but given the cleanliness of their socks (and the bands and bows in the girls’ glossy hair, the polo shirts on the boys’ skinny bodies), it was hard to imagine their bad judgments could be too dire. It seemed the minister and Miss Katherine had scheduled this event so the inmates could have a few hours to convince these children—anyone outside Angola—that they were not evil. Littell was there because, amid his talk of “establishing” himself, he spoke vaguely of wanting to work with kids.

Behind the six speakers, the youth center’s drip-painting project hung on the wall. Each kid’s miniature experiment with Pollock-style scattering was taped up neatly, the pictures mounted squarely on blue construction paper.

“The choices you make today are going to determine who you are tomorrow,” one convict said precisely, his blue work shirt tucked in tight and buttoned at the collar. He had been in Angola twenty-five years. After describing his progress from drug abuse to shooting a policeman, he walked along the rows of twelve-and thirteen-year-olds. In front of each child he stopped, bent over, opened his mouth wide so that he seemed to breathe emphatically on each milky face, and displayed the .357 bullet hole in the roof of his mouth, the result of a dispute somewhere between choice one and inevitability.

Another man recalled the bar fight that had ended in his murder charge. “I should never even have been in that bar to start with.”

They seemed to explain the ruin of their lives by a single, not so terrible mistake—a first tab of LSD; a drink in a bar—perhaps because it was easier for themselves or because it kept even these kids a little worried: A few missed homeworks and the road led straight to Angola.

Littell stood last. His story had less focus, no single turn. “I’m staring at this little kid,” he began, and the second-row boy must have been terrified. Littell wore a striped shirt as neatly ironed as the child’s, but Littell’s lips, with their tightness, their retraction at the corners, were all hostility, and his black eyes did nothing to work against his mouth. “I’m looking at this kid, and I was just like him, fishing, bike riding, that’s all I cared about. That’s who I was. And this is me now.”

What came between was a list of detention centers. “I grew up in these places,” he said, hands ungesturing, unmoving at his sides. “I’m talking about where eleven-year-old kids have to prove themselves with knives or be raped. That’s what they call a cottage. They put all the younger kids together in their own cottages, and that’s supposed to keep them safe. These places, that’s where I went to school, that’s where I went to sleep. That’s where I ate my breakfast every morning.” He recounted the months after every release, the time “with the fellas,” and two years of angel dust in the Marines. It all led to his being stabbed at Angola, “with a knife the dude soaked in garlic, and garlic poisons,” Littell informed. “It does something to your blood, and I had a fever and green pus leaking out of me, and I was laying on that bed in Earl K. Long Hospital where they brought me, and my father was dead, and my mother didn’t know where I was, and my brothers didn’t know, and my sisters didn’t know, nobody knew. I was nobody.”

And who knew what was running through the minds of those kids with their impeccable socks pulled up around their calves? The
minister thought it might be time to switch directions. “Why don’t you mention to these people what it is you want to do now.”

“Well,” Littell told them, “I’m almost a hundred and thirty-five years old, but I took my GED test while I was at a treatment center right after Angola, and just last week I found out I passed.”

The middle-schoolers laughed at the joke about his age, and whether or not they even knew what a GED was, they applauded because he’d passed a test.

He laughed at his own joke, and found himself smiling with their applause.

“I’m getting ready to go to college,” he added. “I’m an old man now, but I’m ready to get an education.”

The clapping doubled in volume, and Littell sat down, nicking water with one knuckle from the corner of his eye.

The next morning I drove him to the Social Security office. There were jobs he could fit around O’Brien’s schedule (the problem was his desire to combine a job
and
college, on top of O’Brien’s meetings). A few residents worked for minimum wage with a trash-hauling company—but to get hired he needed something besides his prison I.D., which would not be a selling point with employers. With a Social Security card he could apply for state identification at the Department of Motor Vehicles and, as soon as he’d studied the booklet for the written test, for his driver’s license.

The Social Security office was in a squat building with a shiny entry room, and there Littell confronted a machine that dispensed numbers to waiting customers. His mouth was in full disgust, full hatred, as he stared at the red plastic case. The numbered slip poked outward like a kid’s tongue. If he’d seen anything like this in the Lake Charles of his childhood he couldn’t remember it. He knew only what the sign said:
PLEASE TAKE A NUMBER AND
 … Was there a button to press? Was he supposed to wait until someone did something,
until the machine was activated? He didn’t want to break anything. He didn’t want any trouble with the security guard watching him from the back. He didn’t want anything to hurt his chances of qualifying for a card right away, or at all. Besides the guard, an Arab family and two reedy, disheveled women watched the drama.

“Just pull,” I said discreetly.

He did, barely stroking the paper.

“You have to pull.”

It didn’t tear.

“Let me get it,” I said. “For my small part in your official identification process.”

As we waited for him to be called, he read through a sheet of instructions. He read with his finger. It wasn’t a belabored, word-byword sort of reading, but there was his forefinger sliding steadily across each line.

His turn came. He went to the window, sat across from the clerk, a dwarfish blond woman whose head scarcely rose above the counter between them. She wore a formal blue dress with great puffy short sleeves. From the breast pocket of his shirt Littell took his proof of existence: three Angola I.D. cards, his most recent and two from years ago, and his Marine discharge papers. He removed the rubber band that bound them all together. The papers were torn at every fold, ready to disintegrate.

“I just got out of prison,” he confessed when she reached for his credentials.

She didn’t react. Her elaborate sleeves stretching up to the counter, she spread what he gave her and glanced over it. “Well,” she said without irony, without aversion, in a tone of beautiful indifference, “you definitely have enough identification.” And with that, though she did no more than pass him along to another clerk at the computers, the midget in the bridesmaid’s dress became, for Littell, that day’s figure of grace.