God of the Rodeo (35 page)

“Take care of my babies,” he would tell her, meaning herself and LaShae, when the prison bus came to end the visit.

“No,” Marie would say, “you take care of
my
baby,” meaning Myron.

And soon, in a letter, she seemed to be proposing. The question wasn’t exactly straightforward, and the next time he called, after asking how she was, he mentioned the sentences and the suggestion they seemed to contain.

“Oh God,” she said, with a spurt of girlish laughter. “I didn’t think you’d actually pick up on that.”

“Marie, let me get some numbers. Right now I got these alphabets. With numbers I can see some daylight. With alphabets I can’t see nothing.”

The laughter ceased, replaced by the raspiness. “I’ll do the seeing. Even if nothing else works, you’ll get your pardon as soon as you get in enough years to apply. So how far away is that?”

“About six years.”

“Well, there’s a number.”

They met with a prison chaplain for approval. A black man in a meek-looking, textured white sweater, he was hard as armor. In an office alongside the chapel’s sanctuary, behind a sliding glass door, he sat them down and stared cruelly at Marie. “You can’t possibly love this man enough to marry him. You cannot. His sentence is life. L-I-F-E. How can you love him that much? Tell him you love him that much.”

“I love you that much.”

“Tell him again. Can you do it twice?”

“I love you that much.”

“ ’Cause you’re going to have to keep doing it. Right here in Angola.”

“I love you that much.”

“But do you hear what he’s saying now, Marie?” Myron cut in. “The law of Louisiana doesn’t feel like I’m so special. They feel like I’m a murderer. I’m an outcast from society and I’m right where I’m supposed to be.”

“Next Christmas.”

“Marie.”

“It’s not going to be all that long.”

“L-I-F-E,” the chaplain spelled again.

“Yeah, I understand.” Marie turned on him. “Myron Hodges has a life sentence. He may never get out of Angola. And I never thought, never ever, that I’d fall in love with a man in prison, and I never thought I’d marry a man in prison, I never imagined it in my wildest dreams. But I did always say that if I ever marry a man I would love that man, and that my marriage would be for better or for worse, and that I would love that man for the rest of my life. No such thing as divorce or separation. Not if I can do anything about it.”

“And you,” the chaplain fixed on Myron.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve got all the time in the world to sit down and figure out what this woman wants to hear.”

“No, sir.”

“Don’t tell me no. You can say it just right. I’ve seen inmates, they can say it better than Shakespeare. And what you’re really saying is you love her so much you want to use her. You want her to be your errand person now. You want her to be the go-between, between Angola and your freedom. You’re not serious about this woman, you don’t love this woman, and if you ever get out you’re going to walk off and leave her.”

“No, sir, that’s-”

“And when you get her putting money in your account, and when she’s all used up and she comes complaining, they’re going to put state charges against you. Add a few more years to that life. And they’re going to put you in J so you can’t ever do it again.”

“No, sir.”

“Then share with us why exactly you proposed to this woman.”

“Sir, I didn’t propose. She proposed to marry me.”

The chaplain coughed, chuckled. “Well, that’s something new. Well. All right,
she
proposed. But what is your motive to
marry
her?”

Suddenly, with the chaplain’s cross-examination slamming around in his head, Myron had no doubt at all about going forward with the wedding. He didn’t hurry to answer. “I don’t have a motive,” he said finally. “The way Marie and I met, it was a way that seemed actually meant to be. Because up to then I made myself feel nothing. Nothing. That was my way. And my thoughts about marriage in prison were, It’s totally ridiculous. It’s out of the question. But in this particular case it’s like we’re already married. And a marriage is much bigger than a contract. It’s stating that we love one another and we’re going to love one another and that’s just the way it’s going to be. I need Marie to be there for me forever, whether I’m in this prison or not. So I really don’t have a motive, so to say. But I more or less have a reason. My reason is that I love her, and I realize I need her more than I knew at one time.”

James liked to have his face rubbed down with the Vaseline lotion afterward. Myron spread it over his own hands, and massaged James’s cheeks and the rise of his cheekbones, his chin and his temples. The guitar-trained fingers moved in forceful, rhythmic circles. They crossed the forehead and smoothed over the bridge of the nose. James kept his eyes closed. Myron worked back toward his ears, followed the channels of the lobes, then with the third finger of each hand grazed over the eyelids. Though that was always the end of the massage, James kept his eyes shut. Myron dampened a washcloth, and slowly dissolved and cleaned the crusted mucus from the edges of James’s nostrils.

Two members of the band serenaded the wedding in the Main Prison chapel, the keyboard player and the lead singer doing a soft “You and I” before the service. Marie wore a white, knee-length dress with a hairpiece and a short veil. She’d highlighted her shoulder-length hair a half-shade toward blond. The chaplain who’d interrogated them now made them both cry with his sermon, his talk of compassion and his calling down of blessings. The keyboard screamed Mendelssohn as they walked back down the aisle.

Regulations kept children from the interior of Main Prison. LaShae waited with a friend of Marie’s in the visiting shed. The girl never wore a dress—she liked shorts or leggings or sweat pants so she could run, liked her hair in braids, off her face, so she could see where she was headed. Today she charged over in polka-dotted leggings and a red leotard top. “Mommy and Daddy is husband and wife!” she announced, the slivers of her black eyes glowing. “We’re one big family now!”

Myron gave LaShae a wedding gift: a snakeskin belt with a
snakehead buckle. It was the second or third such belt he’d commissioned for her, along with a snakeskin pocketbook—not that she was fond of pocketbooks or in much need of belts to hold up the elastic waist of her pants, but she liked anything having to do with snakes, and she loved popping up and trying to scare people with the buckles. In the park she would even rush at the guards, waving her fangs.

She thanked him, but put the cobra aside on the table.

“Daddy,” she said, “you sit right here, and I’ll sit here, and, Mommy, you stay where you’re at.” She arranged herself between them and turned toward Myron.

“Daddy, I need to talk to you.”

“Oh, okay, baby. Let’s talk.”

“You’re going to have to sit still.”

“Okay, baby, I’m still.”

“From now on,” she wrinkled her forehead sternly, “and I want you to listen real good, from now on you’re going to be my real daddy.”

“I know, baby, I—”

“I’m not finished. I had a daddy, but…” She seemed to lose track of her thoughts. She turned toward Marie. It was clear LaShae couldn’t remember what had happened with her father, what she’d been told about his drifting off, but before her mother could supply an explanation LaShae peered again at Myron. “Well, we lost him. So from now on you’re going to be my real daddy.” After which she became a five-year-old again, bounced out of her chair, attacked with the cobra, and struck a deal that if she let Myron and Marie have a few minutes of quiet he would, at their next park visit, spend two nonstop hours dueling with her on the thousand-foot rooftop….

“Take care of my babies.”

“No, you take care of
my
baby.”

… When the band was abolished by Warden Cain’s decree (and its members forbidden to play a note), Marie convinced Myron that the band had been a danger anyway. Its freedoms brought too much
resentment, from inmates and staff, that in prison could lead quickly to trouble, fights you were goaded into and charges that were trumped up. Myron’s chances with the pardon board could be ruined. It was lucky the band was finished, she said. Now he could fill his prison folder with more signs that he should be let go. He would play guitar again someday.

He joined the CPR team, took the training, carried his three-ringed manual constantly, kept a calendar of the team’s teaching schedule as meticulously as he had the band’s gigs. Not only did he give instruction to school bus drivers and church congregations and, once, to the residents of O’Brien House, blowing air into his plastic dummy and demonstrating chest compressions and the Heimlich maneuver and quizzing his students, “Are you supposed to roll a conscious or an unconscious person into the recovery position?”—he also took over a course for inmates. He corrected their mistakes carefully, without riding them too hard, and had thirty showing up to study in A Building where there had been only ten.

“Do you know how the CPR team got started?” he asked, keeping them inspired. “It was ’Cause of a convict named Big E. He had a heart attack in his dorm, in the TV room. And do you know what the inmates did? The very same ones that went and started this program afterward? They did everything they knew how to do. They opened a few buttons of Big E’s work shirt and turned the fan in his direction.”

And he enrolled in GED school. When he called to check on LaShae’s grades, he told her that now he, too, was a student. “And Mommy’s in college, and LaShae’s in third grade—what do you think about all that?”

“Well,” she said, “it means we’re all smart cookies.”

“Yeah, and it means if you keep your grades up, Daddy’s going to have to get you another snakeskin something.”

He brought his own grades up and, after two setbacks in math on the qualifying test, studied all night and made it to the GED
exam. On the phone, when his exam scores came in, he told Marie, “I blew that little simple test to the moon.”

“That’s great. That’s just so great, baby.”

“I got my degree.”

“I knew you would.”

“Yeah. I’m a smart cookie, aren’t I?”

“Yes, you are.”

And she put LaShae on to say, “I’m so proud of you.”

A nurse came in after making her rounds on the ward. Myron pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. The nurse drew the sheet away. She checked James’s diaper for urine and for any discharge that hadn’t reached the colostomy bag. She opened the front of the diaper like a flap—it was never fastened, as he could never shift to disturb it. His penis looked strangely normal, dangling senseless but unwasted.

The knees were irrevocably contorted. A rolled blanket divided them, to keep them from gravitating yet further toward each other, to keep his legs from twisting inward, for his body was trying to close in on itself as though to eliminate limbs altogether, as though to become a single ball. And like his arms, his legs appeared polished, polyurethaned.

Myron lifted one of James’s legs off the mattress while the nurse unwound the gauze wrap from his calf. The gauze secured medicated pads to his bedsores. Myron took care to hold the old pads in place as she unwrapped, a precaution against their fingers grazing the fluid from infectious sores and spreading the bacteria. Their hands weaved around each other, he all the while keeping the bent leg in the air. James’s calves were not glassy. In patches the sores were as dense and raw as a rash abraded by a metal file. In places you could see straight to the muscle. Otherwise the sores were shaped like stars, a whitish red, moist like the inside of a lip.

“Run me another ep.”

“You want another?”

“Yeah. Give me an ep.”

“All right. I’ll give you one.”

Back in February, after three and a half years of marriage, Marie had quit visiting.

It was August now.

“But you said your family was doing good,” James protested. “You been telling me that for months.”

“That’s all you’re getting of that ep. I’ll have to run you another.”

In June, he had quit the CPR team. One of its leaders, jealous, it seemed, over Myron’s success with his class, had begun correcting him at every opportunity—during presentations outside the prison, in front of free world people, and during team meetings—and Myron, counting the months and weeks and days since he’d last seen his wife and daughter, could barely endure it. One morning the man leaned his shaved, bullet-shaped head into Myron’s A Building classroom, then stepped inside to observe. He signaled Myron out to the hallway while his students waited at their desks.

“You’re telling them wrong information.”

“How am I doing that?”

“You told them: Look for the sternum notch. That’s misguiding.”

“How’s that?”

“There ain’t no sternum notch.”

“What the”—Myron edited himself with James’s nurse in the room—“do you call this right here?”

“That’s the xiphoid process.”

“It’s the sternum notch. Go get your book while I teach my class.”

“I don’t need no book. Xiphoid process. Ain’t no such thing as a sternum notch. The sternal notch is up by your neck. You ain’t teaching according to American Heart Association standards.”