God of the Rodeo (32 page)

“Littell’s going to make it,” Mr. Cameron said, as we left.

Miss Katherine had told Littell the gates of Angola were opening wide, and a part of him had worried she was right. When the Greyhound bus heading from Baton Rouge to Lake Charles had climbed and descended the long, arching bridge that crossed the Mississippi, Littell was on the other side of the river for the first time since he’d been driven across that same bridge, in the opposite direction, on his way to prison. Once, while living at O’Brien, he had walked through downtown to the levee, sat on the bank, and stared across the water. Over there, 120 miles beyond the opposite shore from Baton Rouge, his past waited, everything he had done, as a teenager and in his early twenties, to destroy himself. He knew that. At the halfway house he was safe. “It was a hell of a step,” he said, remembering the day he’d left O’Brien for the only other place he could live, his mother’s house. “But it was a step I had to take.”

During the month before he quit the program, he had begun sleeping with a young woman, an addict at O’Brien. This violation of Miss Katherine’s rules, and the suspicion he felt constantly around him (“Everyone staring into my mouth whenever they saw me having a conversation, all the residents, thinking it was their business, just like rats at Angola”), reminded him of all the other house rules, from the schedule that would keep him from combining a full-time job with college, to the way the house held what little money he earned, to the sign on the pay phone that warned of a write-up for anyone who talked longer than ten minutes. A write-up! This was
exactly what he’d lived with in prison, exactly the words! Every little thing controlled, fifteen years of feeling like a child.

“I’m not going through those gates again,” he told Miss Katherine during their last meeting. “That’s the one thing I know.”

And in Lake Charles, he had found work. His brother had a temporary job with the Conoco Oil Company, for $8.50 an hour, and managed to get Littell on the crew. At first, Littell described the work to me only as “construction,” then as “laying pipe.” Eventually, as we drove at dusk to the fence of the Conoco plant, so he could show me the site on a waterway leading to the Gulf of Mexico, he explained more accurately. He cleaned sludge from under the pipes that ran between the storage tanks and the docks, where the transport ships came to have their holds filled with petroleum.

The tanks were gargantuan cylinders, and the hulls of the ships swept outward and loomed above us. They made me faintly anxious, made me direct my gaze unnaturally high, tipping my neck, to be sure the darkening sky still existed, that the tanks and ships weren’t able to blot everything out. Beneath them, in a fire-retardant suit, Littell dug with his gloved hands at the sludge. The pipes had been leaking for years. Chemicals had been seeping into the soil, and from there into the Gulf water. The sludge was like a cross between black oatmeal and black Jell-o. Littell had been hired to clean away the poisoned ground before the company laid concrete beds under the pipes.

Soon he hoped to be working on an oil rig offshore, making a thousand a week. Either that, or studying in business school. He’d gone to the Delta School of Business to ask for information, and ever since they’d been calling his mother’s house, “recruiting me, almost begging me,” he said proudly.

He’d been to his first interview for an offshore job. He’d seen an ad in the paper and reported to a conference room at a Best Western motel wearing his fire-retardant suit, to let the interviewer know he was already employed, that he was serious. He filled out the application
in an anteroom, waited to be called in, and told the man, “I’ve been in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

Littell spoke the words “armed robbery”; he said, “Angola.”

“For how long?”

“Fifteen years.”

The man glanced back and forth between the application and Littell in the blue jumpsuit. He said they were looking for dependable people. He said it was obvious that Littell worked hard. There was a chance he could be hired as a galley hand. He would be taking a cut in pay, to minimum wage, but the job would get him familiar with the rigs. Littell asked when he could start. The man told him ten days.

On the twelfth day Littell called. The interviewer apologized; they just couldn’t take a chance with an ex-con on the rig.

As we stared at the hulls and tanks, Littell told me he would keep at it, stay with his job at Conoco, maybe lie at his next interview.

I asked if he was worried about the close quarters offshore, out in the middle of the Gulf, that would resemble Angola.

“Not really,” he said. “And you know what? I
draw
on those years. I know what I’ve already gotten through. Offshore is nothing. You’re getting paid. You’re eating the best of food. I’ll stay out on that rig six months if they’ll let me. They’ll have to call the Coast Guard to come make me take my break.”

By October, he predicted, he would be able to buy his own car, maybe a ‘94, maybe even a ‘95. He would drive to Baton Rouge, to O’Brien, to see Miss Katherine. “I’ve got nothing to prove to her,” he said, “but I just want her to know how I’m doing.”

The week after I left Lake Charles, Littell broke his self-imposed curfew. One night at ten, a woman called him from a motel room. He went.

Two days earlier, he had noticed her at the edge of the overgrown lot, the shell of a nightclub, the cascade of Spanish moss, the chaos of saplings and charred boards beside her. Weaving, she made slow progress toward the corner, now leaning against a parked car, thoroughly drunk—that was what he noticed first; then, that despite her staggering she looked good: light brown skin, lush body in a blue-jean skirt. He watched her long enough to see a driver stop to run his chatter while she walked on, keeping her path a bit more straight. Littell left his yard and turned up the street, away from her.

He heard his name, unslurred, voice loud. Not a drunken woman’s voice, though he knew there was no one else behind him it could be.

“Littell! Littell!”

She had crossed to his side of the street. She wore a jean vest—just that—to go with the skirt. She looked
very
good, but she was no one he knew. Two men he recognized huddled at the far end of the vacant lot; he figured they’d told her his name, put her up to this.
Get the drunk bitch to mess with Littell. He been so pussy-starved
.… He kept going.

“Littell! You don’t remember me? Littell Harris!”

He turned again, let her come close, checking down the street and waiting for the two men to bend with laughter. No matter how much the vest revealed, the sour breath and veiny eyes repelled him, and when she leaned forward, inches from his face, he had an urge to put his hand behind her neck and shove her to the pavement.

“It’s Deborah. And you’re Littell Harris. You can’t say you’re not. You know me. You
know
me. You do, you know me. You know me.”

She started to laugh, as though
he
were playing an innocent trick on
her
, and when he still said nothing she doubled over, upper body almost parallel to the pavement, and took little mincing steps backward, shaking her head and making a sound that was part gurgle and part snicker:
“Kch, kch, kch, kch, kch.”

“I don’t know who you are,” he said.

She straightened, stared, doubled over again, and backpedaled farther from him,
“Kch, kch, kch.”

And then a man he did know emerged from a nearby house.

“You don’t remember her?”

“Don’t fuck with me, Mako,” Littell said.

She leaned against another parked car, arms folded, looking almost sober, looking satisfied to be under discussion. “That’s Debbie Foster.”

“Who?”

“Who’s been drinking,” Mako asked, “you or her?”

It clicked. Maybe because of what Mako had just said. Maybe because in high school she hadn’t touched anything, no booze, no drugs, while Littell had barely
been
in high school between detention centers.

“You dated her, man.”

Yes, Littell realized. No sex, just some sort of puppy love—holding hands in the halls—amid the unraveling of his life. And it was strange that he hadn’t recognized her. He saw now that she didn’t look much different. There was the pointy, turned-up nose, unmissable on a black woman’s face. There were the wide caramel eyes, no matter how threaded, and the short Afro, same as ever. How could he have forgotten? He felt off-balance, as though he’d cut his own life in half, amputated everything before Angola. Since returning home he’d avoided everyone, suffered through the sodas they bought him when he refused their beer, suffered through the conversations they wanted when he’d run into each of them for the first time outside the grocery or on the street, hardly nodded hello when he’d passed them since. And now his brain had done something with Debbie Foster. He felt he had no past whatsoever, nothing to stand on except prison.

Cautiously, he stepped toward her, told her how pretty she still looked.

But she, without keeling, had fallen half-asleep, and murmured, “Thank you, Mako.” Littell caught the rank breath again, saw the slack mouth, and any desire to reclaim some bit of his past dissolved. He asked the man to do him a favor, to walk her home.

She called late the next afternoon. She sounded sober, or at least he couldn’t tell otherwise. They talked, not about where he’d been but about her. Married, divorced, drinking, losing custody of her kids, still keeping a job as an attendant at a convalescent home. She still had that.

“You know what I thought about all last night?” Littell asked. “How conservative you were in high school. Intelligent. And now I’m listening to you talk,” he heard Miss Katherine’s counseling as he spoke, “and you’re covering up some tender places with that booze. Losing your kids and all.”

He asked if she was “doing that other stuff.”

“No. I used to. But not anymore.”

Then, the following night, she phoned from the motel a few blocks from his mother’s house—another functioning business besides the dim, mesh-windowed supermarket. A red-painted cement bunker, it held eight or ten rooms. Littell had stayed there once since returning home, paid the twenty dollars through the bulletproof Plexiglas just for the chance to be completely alone. Now Deborah said she needed someone to talk to.

And he had been daydreaming, since their first phone call, about getting her away from Lake Charles, getting her a job offshore. Littell still believed he himself would find one, and in the motel room, sitting on the grayish-white sheet (there was no bedspread), leaning against the headboard with her leaning against his chest and his arms gently around her waist and the two of them staring at the TV that was turned off and talking over the vibrations of the a.c. that was sealed with duct tape to the window, he laid out a plan, told her about seeing women at the Best Western interview, said she would
have to clean herself up because the rigs were absolutely alcohol-and drug-free and they gave everyone breath and urine tests to make sure, promised to start taking her to substance-abuse meetings to put her on the right track, said he really ought to go himself, anyway, on account of his past, talked about the kind of money she could earn. “Out there,” he said, “you can reestablish yourself.”

They walked to the grocery to buy orange juice; they would toast their plan. Strolling back, he heard a car slow alongside them—the driver and the woman next to him knew Deborah, and they asked if she and Littell wanted a ride.

“I tried to keep her moving, not even stop,” Littell explained to me over the phone. “ ’Cause I saw what make of car it was, and it was after midnight, and I was reading the signs. You know, I was getting to where I could see the signs out there. And I knew I didn’t have no identification. I knew I shouldn’t even be out there, and I knew there was drugs in that car. But I’m not lying to you, Dan. I was thinking about some pussy.”

Deborah leaned down to the driver’s window, chatted awhile. She turned toward Littell. “Don’t you want a ride?”

“No.
Hunh-unh
. We was just out walking.”

She leaned down again, elbows on the window, ass in the air. Littell backed to the pavement’s edge, glanced toward the corner. If the police cruised by now, if they rounded the four of them up, there wouldn’t be any distinction between who was outside the car and who was in.

“Can I get just one?” She stepped over to him.

“What the fuck?” He grabbed her arm. “What—? Just start walking.”

“Come on, baby.”

“Fuck no.”

The woman in the car bent across the driver, called toward the curb, “Y’all sure you don’t want a ride?”

“Nah,” he said. “We don’t need no ride.”

Inside the motel room again he opened the two pint cartons of orange juice.

“You going to let me get one?”

“Look-”

“I’m only talking about just one.”

“Deborah, I’ve known you since the second grade. The second grade!”

She looped her arms around his neck. She wore loose, billowy pants, but the same jean vest from when he’d first seen her. It snapped down the front. Three of the snaps were already undone. There was, between her pressed-together breasts, a line for his tongue to follow. She said, “I’m talking about ’Cause we’re making plans. A thousand a week!”

“You’re a fucking waste.”

“Please, Littell.” She let go. “You
know
me. You know who I am.”

“Would you cosign—”

“I’m not—”

“Would you cosign if I put a .44 Magnum next to my head?”

“I’m not talking about that.”

“Would you?”

“You can’t say you don’t know me.”

“So what? So I know you, I know you.”

“So you know it’s just one.”

She stood with her back to the door now, framed there. The turned-up nose, the short Afro. The snaps would come apart with the softest tug. He could let her, first, go and make her buy. She could smoke it somewhere else. He could remind her not to bring it here. And she would come back, and they would get things going through the last few hours of the night, and they could work the rest
out tomorrow, and soon she would be in a program anyway, getting ready to go on those rigs….