God of the Rodeo (8 page)

“Hey,” another inmate had suggested lately, “you could leave here any time you want.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just flap your ears and fly away.”

That was what they called him, “Ears.” But he’d learned that the teaching hospital at Tulane University in New Orleans might reshape the disks for free, for the education of its students. “Look at me,” he pleaded right there in the arena, as we talked amid the convicts waiting to ride. “Look at me. I don’t want it for beauty. I got a life sentence. My looks don’t really matter. But I’m tired of waking
up every day, Ears this, Big Ears that, Dumbo the Elephant—it hurts, man, it hurts.”

He was intent on holding my gaze with his own. His eyes were green but flecked disturbingly with yellow. He said that in September he had joined Toastmasters. The captain who sponsored the club had finally given him permission. For months the captain had put him off, told him to go longer without a write-up. Danny was famous among the guards I spoke with. They didn’t want him in their camps. Anything could set him off. He’d spent years in the cells, for fights, for burying knives all over the Yard, for painting battery acid over his own feet. Sometimes he’d chosen to stay locked up, broken rules on purpose, because to him the cells felt easier than the dorms. Terry Hawkins’s record was rated poor by prison authorities; Danny Fabre’s was off the charts. But now he’d done everything the captain asked. He wanted to learn how to give a speech. He’d given a talk once for the inmate chapter of the Jaycees. The subject he’d picked was butterflies and reincarnation. People had told him he had talent.

And he told me of enrolling in school. A year ago he had started with a fourth-grade reading level. Now he was near seventh. His teacher gave him twenty-five new words every week, and on his bed he copied them out thirty times for spelling, looked up their definitions, and wrote sentences for each. He thought he could pass his GED by the end of the year.

But the ears were his first wish, and despite the fact that he was wound extremely tight, despite the disconcerting quality of his yellow-flecked eyes, I couldn’t fault him for his perspective. If I’d had ears like his, I would have wanted a new pair, too.

Danny had already begged one of the prison doctors to deem the operation a necessity; now, on the fourth Sunday, he appealed to a higher power. He got himself a slot in the bull riding. With the warden watching from above the chutes, Danny straddled the animal. It tried to scale the chute wall. Danny scrambled off. “Don’t be a coward,” a clown yelled.

“One thing about me,” Danny answered, “I don’t fear death. But I ain’t stupid.”

He tied in with two hands, somehow lasted the six seconds, heard the bull let out a sputtering breath through its nostrils, lost his hold with the next buck, landed face first, pushed himself up to get out of the way. The bull’s hoof came down on his back and nailed him to the ground. The following day, three of his ribs snapped badly enough that I could feel where they overlapped, Danny coughed blood onto the gray concrete of the Walk and waited to be remade.

Buckkey, coming to after being knocked unconscious, managed to avoid the medical paperwork that would keep him from riding. On the fourth Sunday, he won more points in the Wild Horse Race, an event in which six unbroken horses were sent into the ring dragging ropes behind them. Three-man teams dodged high-kicking hooves while attempting to grab the ropes, then hold on long enough for one man to leap on and ride. At the end of the day, the end of the month, Buckkey stood second in the all-around. The runner-up buckle was his.

And Johnny Brooks was right. A week after they met, Belva sent him a letter. “I’m writing to let you know I would love to go see and viste you… I know you may get a little lonssome and time-after-time you may need a friend to talk to…. Ruby said you were a very nice person and that why I decide to drop you few lines…. You was great at the rodeo. I could not belive how you ride a bull lack that.” Within a month she started visiting. They talked of her four children, her job as a kitchen-worker in a Cajun restaurant, her desire to become a nurse’s aide. Letters were exchanged, three or four every week. “It been a long time now I share my thought with a man and I hope you would let me consider letting our relationship grow and I’ll always be there for you.” By Christmas they were engaged to be married.

“DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?” CAIN ASKED
.

We sat, two days before Christmas, in the small, denlike office in the building everyone called the Ranch House. It was down the road from “B-line,” the village where two hundred guard families lived on the grounds, and down the road, too, from the inmate cemetery. With its long bleached-wood porch and mounted deer heads, its stocked pantry and fruit bowl piled high on the kitchen counter, the house borrowed from dude ranch and hunting lodge and fifties suburbia. Cain liked to run the prison from there. (He didn’t live on the grounds, as all past wardens had. He preferred the layout of the warden’s house at Dixon Correctional, and compelled his successor there to find other quarters. The warden’s official residence at Angola remained empty, but the Ranch House served as a daytime home and informal control center.) Outside, horses grazed in a hillside pasture. In the kitchen, a lifer named Forty-Five-the number on his football jersey when he’d starred at LSU—kept the serving trays filled with fried steak and mustard greens and jambalaya and corn bread throughout the afternoons.

Hearing the warden’s question, I thought, This is crazy.

I was supposed to be the one asking questions. And if we were
going to have a two-way conversation, this subject, for me, was the most intimate starting point.

And sometimes the warden did seem a bit crazy, erratically homespun and overly simplistic, but, finally, he made sense.

“Look,” he had reiterated a few minutes earlier, “people have to see that it costs thirty dollars a day to incarcerate a man who committed a crime twenty years ago and is not the same person. We could be spending that same money to change young predators. There’s only so much room in our prisons, I don’t care how fast you build them. Why not let the changed man go, and put the kid with the rap sheet in Angola for enough time to rehabilitate him, instead of passing him in and out of the system until he goes out and kills someone?”

He leaned back behind his desk, eating Forty-Five’s creamed corn from a Styrofoam cup, spooning it out until the cup was scraped clean.

“Now the men I’d let go—and they need to let
me
decide now, let the shepherd separate the sheep from the goats—one or two might fall back. But we’ll protect against that. We’ll use the parish jails. Use them like a halfway house. Let the convict go to work during the day, get locked back up at night. Till he’s definitely on his feet. And the one or two that gets out and does something bad, that’s a lot better odds than you’ll get setting those young predators loose every six months.”

He said that at least five hundred men, probably a thousand, should be released from Angola that day. He said there would be more once his programs took hold, once he instilled morality and a sense of accomplishment.

“These people that commit crimes, they’re basically—now there’s exceptions to every rule—but look at them, they’re poor. White or black, they’re poor, and they didn’t have the family values. Remember, we gave up the family, and we gave up the draft. We quit talking
our young people off the streets into the army, teaching them to say yes sir and no sir, training them for a job. Stopping the draft was one of the worst things this country ever did. Even when there was no war, we gathered them in—everybody had to either go to college or vo-tech school or go to the army, and wherever you went you learned a trade. We gave all that up. And Mama went to work, so we gave up the streets to the kids. Wasn’t
Ozzie and Harriet
great? I try to put back some of those values.”

I had to suppress my uneasiness with his dime-store analysis. I put aside, too, a suggestion of impropriety: a short-lived attempt, during his first few months as warden, to bring private enterprise to Angola, to allow a canned-food resalvaging company to use inmate labor without paying the state much of anything. And of course some inmates weren’t fond of him. I’d heard critical comments here and there. “He’s Pharaoh,” Littell said. “And he’s a businessman.”

Grumblings had come, too, from members of the traveling inmate band that had, until recently, performed at fairs and Knights of Columbus fund-raisers around the state. They had been scheduled to play at the rodeo, and I had looked forward to hearing them. Back in September, I had stopped in on one of their rehearsals as the lead guitarist, Myron Hodges, built a thrall of notes beneath the vaulting chorus of an old Motown hit. During a break, he played a rendition of “The Wind Cries Mary.” It was my favorite Hendrix song, and the way Myron weaved the quiet opening—one sad, questioning riff answering another—gave me chills. Agile as his fingers were, his throat was not. He was not the band’s singer. But he sang for me at that moment, and somehow his limited voice made the lyrics all the more crushing.

    The traffic lights turn blue tomorrow….

    The band didn’t end up playing at the rodeo. The first weekend in October they had been slow to wake for an early-morning
rehearsal at the stadium, a rehearsal that was supposed to help the rodeo livestock get used to the music so the animals wouldn’t spook during the event. And, depending on who was recounting the episode, one of the musicians had talked back at a senior employee. Immediately Warden Cain had substituted a haphazard outcamp group and abolished Myron’s band permanently. He’d announced, “Y’all won’t touch an instrument again as long as I’m warden of this penitentiary!” Yet while I sympathized with the musicians and felt almost bereft that I would never again hear Myron play the guitar, and while I wondered always about Cain’s excesses, I wondered equally why these prisoners, who’d been given the privilege of touring the state, hadn’t just gotten their butts out of bed.

And overriding everything was Cain’s intention to lead people who no one else wanted to deal with, men who society wanted to forget. He meant to lead them up from the bottom.

His hope was not based in naiveté. When he spoke of the heart of his program, when he recalled what his mother had once told him, “ ‘The Lord put you in that job—it’s a wonderful place to fish,’ “ he added, “You can never catch all the fish. You might not catch but a few.” When he talked of a “religious explosion” at Angola (“And I don’t mean just the Protestant religion, I mean all religions, I mean the Koran,” he said to me, whose Judaism, he teased, was “like unleavened bread waiting for the right ingredient to rise”), he acknowledged that many attended services only to win his favor. “But at least they’re going. At least they’re pretending. At least they’re acting like God-fearing people. And doing all that acting, they might change from the outside in.”

And to all the inmates, whether or not they took part in religion, he had announced his own slogan of behavior modification: “I’ll be as nice as you let me, and as mean as you make me.”

“If they’re going to act crazy and bad,” he explained to me, “I’ll make it so they don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t mean physically. I mean, take it to Camp J, do what you have to do. I mean, take
take take—to where they don’t get anything to put on but a paper gown, to where they don’t eat anything but the food loaf.” The loaf consisted of the ingredients in the regular inmate meal, minus all seasoning, put in a blender and whipped into a gelatinous log. It was served without a utensil. “I mean, take their dignity, and then say, ‘Here, you can have this back as soon as you behave.’ ”

Did I believe in God? All kinds of things rushed through my head when he asked that question. As with many of the inmates, I thought of the warden’s favor. I needed my own privileges at the prison. He could legally bar me from Angola, his world. Or, wanting only his own version of Angola written, he could decide abruptly that my time with the convicts would be spent with a staff escort, something we had agreed would not be necessary. There was plenty at stake in my answer. But also like some of the inmates, I had my own religious belief, regardless of my need to please. Yet it was never certain or solid; it was the flimsiest thing.

I couldn’t tell Cain, I hope to feel God’s presence at Angola—I wouldn’t sound like much of a journalist, and I might sound plainly manipulative. And because I had been raised without religion, surrounded by people who saw it as the enemy of human progress, expressing anything about God was the last thing I wished to do.

“Warden Cain,” I said, in the dark little office, “I come from a different place than you do.”

“Okay,” he said.

“For all kinds of reasons, my yes can’t be the same as yours.”

“I appreciate that.”

“But I do,” I said.

“Well, that’s good, that’s good.”

I knew I had given a self-serving answer. Still, I felt that I had spoken the truth to a man who, in his own way, understood.

Cain was a kind of apotheosis. So much before him had been so degraded. From the end of the Civil War until 1900, 10 percent of Louisiana’s convicts had died every year.