God of the Rodeo (7 page)

Five men went. They lined before her. The praise team stood at their backs, hands spread in the air a few inches from their shoulder blades, to catch them in case their knees buckled. “For the wages of sin is death,” she recited, and asked the congregation to repeat. “But God showed his love for us while we were yet sinners.

“Do you hear that?” she broke off to ask. “We
all
fell when the Spirit left Adam in that garden. We
all
sank into our tombs…”

Terry was not among the five. He felt he was not qualified.

Next, she wandered down the center aisle. The electric organ stabbed out instrumental hymns, making the room itself bend with longing. “Someone,” she said, “is having circulation trouble tonight. I don’t know what kind of trouble, but it’s somewhere, I can feel it, where the circulation flows. Someone—”

A hand went up. She heard the details, laid her palm on the inmate’s kidney. “I speak the mind of Christ. I call out infirmity in Jesus’ name. God wants to strengthen you, yes, that’s it, that’s it, yes….”

Someone else suffered with “reoccurring thoughts, so many reoccurring thoughts you can’t even depressurate things”; she asked who that person was, curved her fingers over his forehead. “In the name of Jesus I stay your thoughts!” And someone ailed with one leg longer than the other and with pain in his ribs, someone who did not want to make himself known. Her gold chiffon shoulders drifted through the room. She crossed the border again away from English, then returned. “Someone, O Lord.”

It was not that Terry didn’t recognize his own injury from the first Sunday’s rodeo, but that his legs were perfectly normal. He said nothing. She came behind him. She touched his shoulder, leaned him forward, brushed her hand across the back of his rib cage. “It’s going to be all right,” she said, calmly as the best mother would, before groaning, “We
adore
you, O Lord.” She stepped around to his row, moved the empty chair in front of him, and, bending, held one white
leather Converse in each hand, drawing his feet toward her on the floor. She paired them, and revealed that the left did not reach as far as the right. The bottom of its sneaker did not match with the other but came only to the seam where leather and tread met. “It’s going to be all right,” she said again.

She returned to the pulpit and asked the minister in floral to bring Terry up to the front. He didn’t need the help, though his thighs felt watery. He laughed to himself. Nothing was going to happen. Sister Jackie asked the other minister to bring a chair, and told Terry to sit down. She told him to stretch out his legs. She told him to lift his arms above his head. She straddled his shins, her black skirt touching them like the hem of a curtain. She prayed half intelligibly, half in that other language. She stepped back, took his ankles, slid his legs apart on the tile. She brought them together. He saw that now they matched exactly. She straddled him again, large body tipping forward, glistening neck near his face and breasts close to his shoulders and palms pressed to the sides of his ribs. His arms in the air were shivering. He felt his chest vibrating, his lips trembling, his chin about to shatter. She hugged him. “It’s going to be all right,” she said once more, “that’s just the Spirit moving through you.”

The next day, the third Sunday in October, without pain in his ribs and, conceivably, with legs more evenly aligned, Terry Hawkins won the Guts & Glory. Whatever the physical improvements wrought upon him, they played no role in his triumph. To grasp the chip he simply let the bull knock him down—and was lucky enough to come up in one piece. But he felt himself to be a slightly different person, with different prospects. The money was part of it. “What you need?” he joked with a guard behind the stadium. “Fifty bucks?” The money may also have been the least of it. He felt that between Rev and Sister Jackie he had been drawn down a new path. He was
going to “get off into that Bible.” He was going to please Ora. He was going to become a good person. And for this, and for his bravery in winning the Guts & Glory and, earlier, the Bust-Out, he would be rewarded. Warden Cain and all the assistant wardens had seen what he could do, what he was willing to do, with those bulls. He would be made trusty. There would be a job with the range crew. He would be assigned his own horse and the freedom to ride along the levee at the edge of the prison grounds. He would rise to the top in this life he was sentenced to.

That Sunday and the next were filled with promise. The sun was bright, and the crowd, overflowing the bleachers, claimed the dirt beside the ring. Earlier they had thronged the hobby-craft tables, bought the cowhide belts, the strange sculptures—shaped like a giant’s fingers—made from cypress limbs and etched with scenes of leaping deer, the wallets, the birdhouses. The inmates would make enough money to order wood and leather and dye to last most of the next twelve months. Even the convict who told me his customers haggled over prices as though he were subhuman, as though “something gross” were attached to his body, seemed to be enjoying his brisk sale of zodiac key chains.

And over at the photo concessions, where the fans got themselves locked in that freestanding jail cell—young couples; fathers and sons; toddlers coaxed to press their noses to the bars—the convict photographer looked pleased. In this way, he raised money for the Angola Sober Group. I asked if he was bothered by the element of mockery. “No, it’s not like that,” he answered with what seemed a twelve-step graduate’s rigid oblivion. “This is my chance to have a little contact with the public. I’m not an inmate for today. Today I’m free.” Minutes later, two round women smiled uneasily behind the bars. “You remember us from last year?” one of them asked. And the other said,
“Yeah, now you got to hug him, Charlene.” Holding her half-clarified Polaroid between two fingers, Charlene wrapped her arms momentarily around his neck.

Inside the arena, on the third Sunday, Johnny Brooks absorbed everything the bull tried. Between its contorted leaps he seemed to loll peacefully in a trough between cresting waves. Because so few inmates had lasted the needed eight seconds, this day the standard was lowered to six. Brooks kept his chest out, his weight centered, his free arm, perpendicular at the elbow, cutting the air in classic rodeo style for balance and points from the judges. When the six-second whistle blew, he was still in full control, and for several seconds longer he worked his arm with immaculate form, to show that he could do this forever, to make clear to everyone his expertise, how much he’d learned in the years he’d been locked away.

There was applause from the spectators. It was not the loud roar he’d described to me back in September, but it lasted a few seconds. He waved his hat and walked back across the arena, surrounded by fading approval.

And on the fourth Sunday he rode still better, on the bull that was the toughest of this year’s stock. It gyrated, heaving its tremendous mass into the air. Brooks rose three, four, five times with the animal; when it came down, wrenching, his body snapped but held out against the spin. Then, tipped suddenly to horizontal, he could not right himself. He was on his back on the dirt. Five seconds—not six—had gone by. The rodeo, for him, was over. He would win no all-around buckle. Yet in the crowd’s diffuse clapping there was one last measure of acknowledgment, an agreement, perhaps, with what many of the lifers said to me constantly, like a mantra: “I’m still a citizen, and I’m still one of God’s children.” There was the most fleeting welcome back into the world.

He strained to hear, as well, a single voice among the spectators. Three hours ago, just before the rodeo, while the range crew looked
over the bulls in the pen, the wife of an ex-inmate had called Brooks over to a chain-link fence. Through it, she introduced a friend, Belva, a tall, sturdy woman with high cheekbones and a delayed smile, a smile made arresting by the delay and by a slender gap between her front teeth. She wore white stretch pants with a white sweat shirt, and she and Brooks spoke as shyly as homebodies forced to a singles party.

“It’s nice to meet you,” he said.

“It’s nice to meet you. Are you riding in the rodeo?” The question was scarcely audible.

“Pardon?”

“Are you riding in the rodeo?”

“Yes I am.”

That was where conversation ran out. The women returned to their places in the stands. Brooks did not have vast experience with emotional relationships. He had no visitors. Based on this exchange, he decided that he and Belva would fall in love. He went on believing it, though he could not hear her voice in the bleachers.

Buckkey Lasseigne, face like an old rancher’s, felt hopeful, too. Toward the end of the third Sunday, he was in the running for the all-around. If he won the buckle, maybe his son, Chris, would come see him, maybe their hours together would be easier than the twice-a-year visits of recent times. The last one had been in the park built for trusties to picnic with their families. (Like Johnny Brooks, Buckkey had trusty status and was a member of the range crew.) Buckkey and his only child had played their usual sullen game of one-on-one basketball on the packed-dirt court. As the afternoon ended and the bus came to collect the visitors, Chris, who had Buckkey’s blond hair but who was three or four inches taller, responded to some piece of fatherly advice, “Okay, dude.”

“Don’t call me that,” Buckkey had said.

“What do you want me to call you?”

“Dad would be just fine.”

“Cool,” the boy had agreed. “Dad. I’ll call you anything you want me to call you. You want me to call you inmate, you want me to call you convict, you want me to call you Louisiana State Penitentiary?”

Still, the boy had said once over the phone, “I’d sure like to get one of those buckles.” So the father had told me. When I spoke with his wife, who had stuck with the marriage throughout his imprisonment, making her all but unique at Angola, she said, “That’s just Buckkey.” Chris didn’t want the buckle at all.

Perhaps Buckkey understood this. Thirty-six years old, his handsome, square-jawed face was so wrinkled, especially across his forehead between his curly hair and hazel eyes, it could have belonged to a man twice his age. Thorough resignation lurked behind the energy that seemed to go with his nickname. He knew the things still said to his son in their small town, the town where Buckkey had grown up, the town of the murder. “Hey,” a substitute teacher had yelled out to the boy a few weeks ago, trying to control him in class, “I know where your daddy’s at.” He knew that outside a Wal-Mart the victim’s mother had shrieked her undiminished rage at Buckkey’s own mother and then, fury blending with futility, swung at Buckkey’s mother’s thighs, over and over, with a plastic shopping basket. He knew he could do nothing for any of them. He knew he had destroyed them. He knew what he had done.

And refused to know. He told me it hadn’t been him, that it had been the friend he was with, that the two of them, high on PCP and weed, had stopped to get gas, begun arguing with the attendant, a boy they knew vaguely who’d been a few years behind them in school, and that the next thing he remembered the .22 wasn’t in the glove compartment and his friend had shot the attendant behind the station. (The murder had been prosecuted as resulting from a robbery.
Buckkey had made a videotaped confession, before recanting at trial.)

Just a few minutes before rendering his story to me, Buckkey had said, “I don’t consider myself a murderer. Murderers are born. They come out of the womb killing.” It was a way of distinguishing evil men from bad acts, of claiming some innocence at his core if not in his deeds. But it seemed an admission that he had done the killing, and the tale blaming his friend made me wince.
You murdered someone’s child
, I wanted to scream.
Can’t you do any better than this lame bullshit?
I thought: It is a good thing that you will spend the rest of your life here, that you have had your life taken away. I wondered if it shouldn’t literally be taken, and I knew, imagining the victim to be my own son, that I would want Buckkey’s mother and wife and child to suffer as I did, that I would want Buckkey killed.

Now he climbed from the rail onto the bull. “Ready?” The animal jabbed its head against the boards, and Buckkey, determined to ride one-handed because others had lasted the six seconds, clutched with his free hand to the wall. “Ready?” the gate man urged. Buckkey lifted his hand. “Outside!”

Convulsing, the bull lunged forward twice and hooked left. It rose off its hind legs and whipped the rider’s forehead into its own skull. Buckkey crumpled and slid, unconscious. The clowns rushed to lure the bull from the ring. The prison’s emergency medical team hurried out to immobilize Buckkey’s neck and belt him to a stretcher.

On the fourth Sunday the hope was also this: A rider named Danny Fabre wanted a new pair of ears. He believed that if he mounted a bull, showed he would “do anything for him,” Warden Cain might approve cosmetic surgery.

Danny had killed a neighbor of his brother’s ten years ago, a woman who tried to help him, this five weeks after he’d been
released from Angola following a short stint for simple robbery and probation violation. (His arrest record had been long: armed robbery, assault, burglary.) He killed the woman for questioning his honesty, though he had indeed knocked on her door and asked her for a ride to buy jumper cables, but instead directed her to a house where he “scored some weed.” He “exploded,” he told me, when she pulled over and said in the car, as he remembered it, “ ‘You been to the penitentiary, you ain’t nothing but a con man, you ain’t never going to be nothing.’ ” He punched her in the face and punched her again, four or five times, then began choking her, while she fought weakly and said quietly, almost no voice available, “Danny, you’re hurting me.” He remembered those words, and his strangling her to death. He dragged her body into the woods and, in the moonlight, mistook the shifting of her limbs over the rough ground for signs of life. He found a stick and drove it through her eye nearly to the back of her skull. He covered her body with pine straw. He set it on fire.

Danny Fabre believed he deserved the death penalty. He felt fortunate for his life sentence. Yet he wanted surgery on his ears. And they did in fact protrude comically, at virtual right angles to his head. He tried to style his longish blond hair to conceal them, but no matter how he combed, the disks of bright pink cartilage sliced right through.