God of the Rodeo Page 11

“They threw away the mold,” Mr. Mike, with his squashed-down, stocky, resilient body, would say.

  “Yassuh.”

  “Do what you do when that bull comes out of the chute,” Mr. Mike would request, as employees and inmates stood around the barn getting ready to start their day.

  And Brooks would bug his eyes and stiffen his neck and quiver his head and quake his knees in fear, and Mr. Mike and everyone else would laugh.

  “Threw away the mold!”

  Mr. Mike had requested him for the range crew after watching him in the rodeo years ago. Brooks had taught himself to ride long before that. There had been a pasture, with a few horses, across the dirt road from the small clapboard house where he’d grown up. A field of sugarcane grew behind the house, and every fall Brooks’s parents made some extra money by cutting the cane for their landlord. They had lived that kind of existence, putting together bits of income. The horses in that pasture were the joy of Brooks’s childhood. Their owner lived somewhere else in town, and at nine years old Brooks coaxed one of the animals to the fence. He leapt on without saddle or halter. He was thrown fast. With a clump of grass in his hand, he lured the horse back to the rails—he needed the height of the slats in order to jump on. He was pitched again. But soon, with scavenged hay string for a halter and reins, he stayed on; soon he had won over all the horses. Every day, checking to make sure their owner wasn’t around, he stole across the road, prepared his chosen mount with the hay string, and galloped from fence to fence, imagining himself like the cowboys he’d seen on TV.

  He had become that cowboy at Angola, on the range crew. Showing him around the prison’s graze land, Mr. Mike had galloped after a dodging calf, slung his rope, and lassoed the neck as neatly as if both horse and baby cow were standing still. “Think you’d like to do that?” Brooks heard, and was schooled, first, on the ground, with a bucket for a target. When he could fling his rope around that every time, he graduated to calves held within a pen, and quickly to the open land. It took two years, he said, for him to “get good” out there. By the time I met him, and watched him work, he was easily the best roper on the crew, far better than any other inmate, far better than any employee, far better than Mr. Mike.

  And his boss took a certain pride in having found him, in having trained him. That was part of the sentiment in Mr. Mike’s refrain, spoken as the crew herded cattle or groomed horses or stacked hay, “Only one Johnny Brooks.” The other part was that among the group of trusties he controlled, only Brooks, the quickest and most muscular athlete, was so completely his boy.

  When I rode out with the crew, I watched Brooks, in prison waders, charging across a puddled field on Sonny, the quarter horse permanently assigned to him, reins in one hand, rope in the other, and tag held in his teeth. The sky was low and dark with clouds, its ceiling close to the tall trees out toward the river. Otherwise things seemed, for a moment, limitless, as though we weren’t in a prison at all: The pasture was so huge no fence lines were visible and, steering around scrub growth, we came to hidden rivulets and deep gulleys, and staring into the distance we saw the hills, so densely wooded; it was as if we were riding across some unclaimed western territory of the nineteenth century, rather than a penitentiary farm. The hooves of Brooks’s horse skidded three or four yards on the waterlogged ground as he stopped, then chased a calf again, and for an instant, the hooves hydroplaning, Brooks had no connection to the earth.

  Seconds later he had maneuvered the young cow exactly where he needed it, in front and to his right and away from its mother. Still galloping, and with his target still sprinting, he flicked his wrist, aiming the loop at a spot five or six yards from him, aiming perfectly. Seemingly in one motion with halting the calf, he leapt from his saddle. He did this so quickly, in fact, that I never saw it. The next thing I registered he stood over the young animal. “It’s a bull calf, Mr. Mike,” he called up.

  “All right, Johnny.”

  With a tagging gun Brooks clipped a numbered tag through the calf’s right ear. Then he flipped the animal onto its back. He straddled it, splayed its legs with his own knees. From the pocket of his waders he took his boss’s jackknife, given him for the day. He pinched the calf’s scrotum. He sliced, yanked the testicles from the sac, and tossed them onto the mud, a pair of elongated blue-gray bulbs with silvery tubes trailing behind them.

  The calf was the fourth or fifth in a row Brooks had roped on the first try. During the next few minutes, though their interchange was somewhat playful, it was hard not to think in symbolic terms of what Brooks had just done for his boss: strung the animal up, and cut its balls off.

  Saying that Brooks’s head was getting too “swoll,” Mr. Mike flicked his own rope near Brooks’s face. Brooks laughed. He kept laughing as the rope whacked a few times against his shoulder, in a way that couldn’t have hurt much, but that made him flinch. “Only made one like Johnny Brooks,” Mr. Mike said, and went on cracking the rope. Brooks stopped his horse to let his boss continue out of striking distance. Mr. Mike stopped too, and went on snapping. Brooks voiced no objection.

  Later that afternoon, as Mr. Mike and I rode back alone, he said to me, “It must surprise you how well we get along with the inmates, fooling with each other.” We were just passing one of the large barns. On the outside wall, under the peak of the roof, hung a painting done on plyboard. Buckkey had made it: a cowboy roping a calf. Everything about it was predictable. But back when Buckkey had started it, Mr. Mike had wandered by and seen that the cowboy was going to be black. He had told Buckkey to change this. “Shoot,” he had said, with Johnny Brooks standing beside them, “I don’t want no nigger on the side of my barn.”

  Johnny Brooks believed, perhaps rightly, that his boss appreciated his skill. He believed that his boss’s brother, Mr. Darrell, a man with a softer edge who was one of Angola’s assistant wardens, cared for him as a person. During Brooks’s first years at the penitentiary, Mr. Mike’s and Mr. Darrell’s uncle had been Brooks’s supervisor elsewhere on the farm. He believed their entire family felt a certain indebtedness. He believed that Warden Cain respected him and valued him and felt affection for him.

  Whatever the link between his beliefs and reality, it was true that Brooks’s faithful service paid off in small dispensations and liberties, in a life closer to normal than the average inmate’s or even the average trusty’s. He could breach the dress code to wear a royal blue T-shirt with a large, jersey-type number 1 stenciled between his shoulder blades. Sometimes he wore a cap with the bill turned backward. These tiny allowances were grand by prison standards, especially for someone who’d been measuring his life by those standards for almost a quarter century. But there were bigger dividends, some that added to his intimacy with Belva, that gave this reformed convict the chance to build some fraction of a full existence. There was the possibility of sex in a state where conjugal visits were illegal….

  Brooks’s relationship with Belva had grown, at first, mostly through letters. She knew three or four women with boyfriends or husbands at Angola, so while she was terribly shy with Brooks in person, she was not uncomfortable with the idea of loving a prisoner. She pushed things along by mail. “Hi, Johnny,” she wrote. “How are you doing today I hope find…. Me and my girlfriends stayed up late talking about how they found happinniss there and they are feeling good about themsefe and hearing the girls talk it make me feel even better…. Bonnie said she told Billy that I said something about your hair and that not true however you choose to ware you hair dose not worry me at all becase hair dose not make a person. I wont to get to know Johnny and only you. Like you said you need someone you can trust and I wont to be that woman to share every thing life have to offer us life is so precious….”

  After work, Brooks would put Marvin Gaye or Isaac Hayes or James Brown into his Walkman, lie back on his cot, and read and reread Belva’s most recent letter. Often he took the entire stack from his locker box and read through those as well. Every other evening he wrote back, going to a frie
nd, Derricks, an inmate tutor and librarian at the outcamp’s closet-size room of torn paperbacks, for help with phrases and spelling. Sometimes he went so often Derricks would lock him out of the library. (Brooks’s nickname among the convicts—used sparingly—was “Ignorant.” He insisted he didn’t mind.) Lately Derricks had convinced him to take a few sessions of Saturday tutoring. If he wasn’t needed with the range crew, Brooks spent an hour on Saturday mornings with his spelling, then returned to his Walkman and his wishes.

  The visits with Belva became easier. He was almost as reserved as she was, and conversation could be a struggle, but he was at least used to prison’s absolute lack of privacy, and could feel some self-assurance in drawing her out, urging her, “You can’t hold back ’cause of all these people around. If we’re going to be together, we’re going to be visiting like this for a long time.” They talked about the two men who had fathered her children. The second had been violent, had hit her. Brooks ducked his head as they sat kitty-corner, holding hands under the edge of a table.

  “I’ll leave you before I hit you,” he promised, imagining some future life outside Angola.

  She looked at him, her high-cheekboned face expressionless. She tilted her head to one side. She pursed her lips slightly, almost sadly, then smiled. “I’ll kick your ass,” she said.

  They laughed. Brooks gave a mock pout. They kissed with the guards looking on. Belva told him, “Johnny Brooks, you have a beautiful personality.”

  The oversize Christmas card she chose for him had not a bit of white space in its design—baubles and candles and garlands and stars and an effusion of gold light filled every millimeter. The card he sent in return was a hand-me-down, because he had so little money in his account. He bought it from another inmate. Brooks borrowed some Wite-Out, dabbed it over the date and name, and mailed it with his declaration of love.

  The visitors were always bussed to the sheds first, then the inmates brought. When he walked into the shed the next weekend, he didn’t see her in the cavern among the thirty or forty people. It took him a full minute. She was at a back table, just waiting.

  “Wow! That you, baby?”

  “Yeah. That’s me.”

  “Wow!” He had a way of saying that, half laughing with pleasure. “You look beautiful today.”

  She wore a long, glossy blue dress with high heels. She paid $2.50 to the guard handling concession money, and she and Brooks had a Polaroid taken in front of the mural with the stream and the low, luminous shafts of light. They sat down, held both of each other’s hands, his under hers, cradling her palms. They talked of her daughters, the oldest of whom, at fourteen, had just been sent to a detention center, and of her sons, the youngest of whom, Marcus, at four, couldn’t wait to meet Johnny. Brooks said he couldn’t wait to meet all of them. He promised that as soon as he had money in his account, the next time his sister sent thirty or forty dollars, which she did on occasion, he would have someone in the hobby shop make belts for the boys and pocketbooks for the girls.

  And next year’s rodeo wasn’t going to be like this last one. He had let himself get overconfident. He had quit running three or four miles after work. That wasn’t going to happen again. By spring he would ask to be transferred from the range crew, because the long hours didn’t always allow time to stay in shape. He would work at the car wash by the front gate, and jog and hit the weights. And next October he would win an all-around and a bull-riding buckle for Belva’s two boys.

  “When you bringing them up here to visit?” he asked, for the third or fourth time that morning, partly because they still ran low on conversation, but also because he wanted badly to be part of her family, fantasized himself called “Father,” and because he needed to be more deeply inside her life, that much less easy to abandon, to just quit seeing, quit visiting, one day, any day.

  “As soon as there’s room in the car, Johnny.”

  She rode up—it was a two-and-a-half-hour drive, each way—with the group of women from near her town who had men inside the prison. She reminded him, yet again, that she did not have her own car. Then, ignoring the guards and the inmates and the families around her, she touched his newly shaved head, held it between both hands, stroked it.

  Brooks said, “I sure would love for you to be the mother of my child someday.”

  She searched his face for many seconds, head tilted, lips midway between uncertainty and one of her wide, reluctant smiles. She needed to know something, that he wasn’t talking about the special visits she’d heard about, that he was trying to ask something else.

  “I would love for me to be the mother of your child someday,” she said, finally knowing.

  And that was the way he proposed marriage, and that was the way she accepted.

  As for the sex, I do not know what Brooks and Belva did over the coming months, or did not do. I know only what almost everyone at the prison was aware of. Down the road from the Ranch House, Butler Park, with its dozen or so picnic tables and bits of playground equipment, had been built eleven years ago to give trusties something to aim for if they avoided all write-ups: surroundings less bleak than cinder block for them and their families. There, some convicts led their women to the crest of the gentle hill, just outside the guard’s vision as long as he didn’t look too hard. He rarely did. He knew that no one wanted him to, not the administration and of course not the inmates. Mostly clothed, couples could seize a fast physical intimacy on that knoll, with no more privacy than the oblivion of their own love or lust could afford, with other couples doing the same hurried thing around them.

  The prison’s tradition of sex at the park may well have been the only way to allow conjugal visits in a state so rabidly harsh in the sentencing of its convicts. And surely the inmates weren’t complaining, were happy to take what they could get. They and their women may even have felt some—maybe even a great deal of—extra electricity in their lovemaking, because of its speed and setting. Every touch may have been fraught. And afterward, during the weeks or months when the couples didn’t see each other, or couldn’t schedule a day at the park, the memory of every touch may have carried a powerful reverberation. No routine, bored, forgettable sex here. But not much dignity, either. As the prison had designed it, the convicts fucked under the trees, furiously, amid other humping couples.

  Because he was such a favorite among the authorities, Johnny Brooks could expect not only that his applications for park visits would be readily approved, but that if, as infrequently happened, the guard did look too closely, he would not be severely punished for any indiscretion. His faithful service had brought him the chance at a certain quality of closeness with Belva.

  It also brought them a constructible dream. Like a reliable chorus running through the sporadic conversation of their visits, Brooks described their future. Mr. Gerry Lane, the Baton Rouge Chevrolet dealer who sponsored the rodeo, who sent the cowgirl in the blue-spangled jumpsuit to ride around the arena during the national anthem, and who kept his favorite horse at the range-crew stables, had promised Brooks a job whenever he was set free. Brooks wasn’t the only one who saw his future in Lane’s hands. Many convicts believed that the car dealer, who drove up from Baton Rouge to trot his jet black quarter-horse stallion along Angola’s levees and to take part in cattle drives as though on a dude ranch, wielded so much influence with the governor that he could guarantee a man’s pardon. Lane had, to be exact, arranged the pardon of one lifer under a previous administration. Yet he was going to win everyone’s freedom. And Brooks could believe he was first on the car dealer’s list. Not only had Lane admired how well he handled the livestock, not only was Lane a good friend of the warden’s (which meant that he’d heard Cain speak highly of Brooks’s character), but Mr. Gerry Lane had entrusted his stallion, Little Man, to Brooks’s care.

  Little Man had tremendous jaw muscles, articulated veins, a deep cleft dividing the muscles of his chest. He was strong and quick enough that, working the cattle, he could lift a calf into the air wit
h his teeth, swing it around, and set it on its way in the right direction. But most enchanting to Lane and Brooks and everyone else who dealt with the horse, Little Man was unruly. He would not let himself be ridden unless you knew exactly how to manipulate him, as Lane and Brooks did. The stallion’s father was said to have stomped a man to death. And Little Man himself, when breeding, was almost uncontrollable, even with the chain rigging that could be cinched into his nose to force him back. Most stallions, when put in with a mare who wasn’t quite ready, would give up when she kicked out with her hind legs. Not Little Man. His approach, as one of the range crew put it, was “I don’t care. I’m going to stick it in you anyway.”

  When Lane called the range-crew bosses to say he was coming up for a ride, Brooks shampooed the horse, then applied ShowSheen to his coat to make it gleam. The coat wasn’t really a pure black. It was an extremely dark brown with a white streak over one nostril. Lane liked the stallion kept in its stall as much as possible to preserve the appearance of black, and to minimize the white hairs that grew pronounced with the sun. Brooks sanded Little Man’s hooves to remove the grain, and painted on layer after layer of polish to blacken them. When Lane arrived Brooks presented him with the sleek, gorgeous animal, then outfitted Little Man with Lane’s red saddle that was studded with antique silver coins.

  As soon as he got out, Brooks told his bride-to-be, he would go to work for Mr. Gerry. He wasn’t yet sure what the job would betaking care of Lane’s other horses, working in his dealership, it didn’t matter. And he would start at minimum wage if he had to, climb his way up. But he would be working, that was the definite thing, and at the end of every day he would arrive home to play with the kids in their backyard, to make sure they did well in school, to make sure Belva was always happy. A life of family bliss was just a year or so away, just on the other side of his next pardon-board application.

  By January Belva had bought their wedding rings on a layaway plan. She wore hers to the visiting shed, making it double as an engagement ring. Because of prison regulations about the wearing of gold, Brooks would get his on their wedding day. In a kind of ceremony of engagement, she slipped her chiseled band halfway down his pinky finger, where he turned it at the knuckle, digging it into the skin, to leave a mark. They discussed, not for the first time, the preparations they had to make, the procedures they had to go through. Brooks had already asked Rick LeDoux, the Cowboys for Christ minister who came to preach at Camp F, to officiate at the wedding. They had to get a list of possible dates from LeDoux, then set a definite one with the warden’s office. They were aiming for early September, because in that time they could get to know each other better, track down a copy of Brooks’s birth certificate, which they needed for the marriage license, have the required interview with one of Angola’s staff chaplains, and request approval from the warden. Even with Brooks’s favored status, these procedures could take time. Not much happened fast in Angola’s world of lifers, but Brooks and Belva were sure that their wedding would, eventually, happen.