God of the Rodeo Page 12

  If it did, it would not merely be what some of the ten or so weddings performed each year at Angola clearly were: attempts, on the inmate’s part, to secure a link to the outside world, to needed legal papers, to a lawyer who might be convinced to appeal his case, to a source of money. Partly for this reason, several of the prison chaplains were reluctant to approve or perform the ceremonies. But this marriage would bring together a woman who, however shy, had said, “I’ll kick your ass,” and a man who had said to me, “Ever since I been here I wondered if anything like this could ever happen. She done changed my life. I love her, Mr. Dan. I love her.”

  Between visits he counted the days, and once, waiting for the prearranged time when he would call her collect, I had sat with him on his cot as he counted the minutes and checked his watch every twenty-five seconds. How many of these intervals would there be until September?

  He began to picture the ceremony in detail. He wondered who would be there inside the chapel. He hoped his two sisters would come; they were the only family who kept any contact. He wasn’t sure they would make the drive from their coastline town three hours away. They no longer visited. But he knew that his boss’s brother, Mr. Darrell, the assistant warden, would be there for him; he knew how that man felt about all the work Brooks had done for his family. In fact, Brooks planned to ask him to be his driver, to take him in the assistant warden’s long, white Department of Corrections pickup truck, the closest thing around to a limousine, from Camp F to the chapel at Main Prison.

  And Brooks knew that on his biggest day, when he held Belva’s hands and spoke his vows, Warden Cain would clear his calendar to be there.

  I had to find one last convict I’d met before the rodeo, a rider who’d embedded himself in my mind. I wanted to follow him through the year.

  “What made you come here tonight?” I’d asked Donald Cook back in September, standing at the rear of a Pentecostal service in the Main Prison visiting shed, as a hundred inmates sang along with a convict choir.

  “The a.c.,” he had answered, leaning toward me across a pinball machine, a spiderweb tattoo on his wrist, other designs devouring both arms.

  Then, at the rodeo in October, determined though all the other men were, Cook had seemed even more so. One Sunday, in the Wild Horse Race, he hauled himself partway up onto the animal’s back and rode the bucking horse with his body pitched sideways, virtually parallel to the ground. He was simply unwilling to let himself fall. As he crossed the finish line he did fall from that fully vulnerable position-for the rest of the day he couldn’t move his left arm at all. Yet he walked out into the ring for the Guts & Glory, stalking the chip with his useless arm held straight to his side. “I want to take that chip off him,” he had told me, pausing before that pronoun, seeming perhaps to capitalize it, as if he felt himself in a battle with his maker.

  Cook’s dorm guard told me I could find him in the Toy Shop. I went along the Walk to track him down. After building and giving away 2,500 toys just before Christmas, the members were catching their breath. Over the past year, the club had grown from a temporary, November-December group that constructed a few hundred toys in a hallway outside the prison gym to a year-round organization with its own workshop. Its collection of tools had expanded from the makeshift-a hammer made by welding a piece of compressor motor to a stray metal cylinder; a meat saw found in the kitchen’s Dumpster and rigged for cutting wood—to the traditional. Now there were table saws and a full tool closet. Local businesses had donated some of the equipment; Toy Shop fund-raisers (a cheeseburger, potato salad, and a PG video shown to any inmate with three dollars to pay) had bought much of the rest.

  The club was still hardly sophisticated or well supplied. Material consisted of scrap lumber, of scavenged mop handles that would be turned into stick ponies. But those ponies were beautiful! Their spotted wooden heads were like something you might hunt for in expensive boutiques. And the cars and trucks and dragsters and military tanks—all their wooden wheels were impeccably balanced and had been made, one at a time, by inmate and saw. All their gleaming surfaces, their racing stripes and camouflage spots, had been painted by hand.

  The workshop was almost deserted when I looked in. Two inmates geared up for next December, aiming past 2,500. A saw shrieked. A hammer pounded. Donald Cook lay curled on an old vinyl couch, amid the sawdust and noise.

  I was surprised Cook had been accepted into the organization. It was a selective club. You had to show good discipline to be approved by the members and the security sponsor. And just four months ago, he had finished a year in the punishment cells for dealing marijuana.

  Six years earlier, in the small Louisiana city of Alexandria, Cook had lured a man from a bar with the promise of sex. A friend of Cook’s drove them to the Red River levee. Cook was married, had one child and another coming, and for several years had been letting men suck him off, partly for money, partly for pleasure. Burglary supplied the rest of his income. He had been charged with at least thirty separate thefts. Once, a group of tavern owners had arranged to have him beat up, they were so tired of his daytime break-ins. He spent his nights in those same rough bars. And once, at a place called Cleve’s Lounge, when a man stroked the belly of Cook’s pregnant wife, Cook had taken the gun from his belt, shot between the man’s feet, and then shot out the ceiling above the bar mirror.

  On the levee above the Red River, Cook wound up beating his trick to death with a tree branch after trying to rob him. He dragged the body down the embankment into the water. He hurled large rocks to make it sink. The corpse was found three days later. Meanwhile, Cook changed out of his blood-soaked clothes, hid at friends’ houses around Alexandria, discovered from the TV news that he was the prime suspect, and fled to Texas. He returned with the hope—grown quickly stronger than the wish to avoid arrest—of killing his wife and two friends who, he figured rightly, had told everything to the police. He was in what he called his “don’t-care mood.” He planned to torture them first, give them plenty of time to think about what they’d done to him, while he put them through pain. He found his wife at another friend’s house. She answered the door when he rang. He said, “Come to Texas with me.” She, sensing he wanted to get her alone to kill her, slipped off to call 911. The cops stormed the house before he could do any harm.

  From his time at Angola, as well as many stays in parish jails, his short, wiry body was covered with tattoos. The spiderweb was among the smallest. An animal half lion and half monster, with a mane of fire, occupied most of his back. A Viking dominated his chest, a helmeted woman his shoulder. From hip to hip across the bottom of his back, in fancy calligraphy, a tattoo read: LOUISIANA CRACKER.

  For each of these he had paid a convict artist to burn a plastic canister, usually of Speed Stick, with a paper bag held over the plastic to catch the rising soot. Scraped from the paper, the soot was mixed with toothpaste and water to make the ink. A steel guitar string was threaded through an empty pen shaft. The artist rigged a tiny motor, taken from a cassette player, to jab the steel string thousands and thousands of times into Cook’s skin.

  For work, Cook had not progressed off the field lines since coming to Angola, partly because of fights with black inmates. “I won’t let these niggers get racial with me,” he said, reminding me of an element of life here that I rarely saw or heard about. The blacks were so dominant in numbers that the whites never challenged them in any concentrated way. Yet the whites didn’t seem to feel overly stranded—there were enough of them, and enough mostly white clubs, to keep them comfortable. Quiet avoidance marked the relations. But the quiet didn’t mean the anger wasn’t around. Trying to capture the beauty of some property his brother owned in Missouri, fields he showed to me in pictures and spoke of like the Promised Land, Cook emphasized, “There’s no niggers up there.”

  Besides the tattoos and the fighting, he had spent his time in prison smoking and selling marijuana. The drug, like the harder narcotics, came in through guards (who might leave it behin
d one of Angola’s unused buildings, to be picked up by an inmate and buried in the fields, unearthed by another convict, and brought to the prisoner who’d made the deal with the guard in the first place), or it came in through visitors (who buried it in their rectums). When Cook heard of a new delivery, he put out word that he was willing to handle the sales if the inmate was too nervous to deal for himself. Cook divided the drug into sugar bags—the little packets meant for coffee, emptied of their contents. This was the prison’s standard measure. One sugar bag, scarcely filled, cost ten dollars, about four times what the same amount of marijuana would have brought on the street. It furnished what the inmates called a “mosquito” joint.

  The day he’d been caught, Cook had taken some sugar bags out to the fields to distribute. On a break between picking rows, a few men had huddled together to get high. They positioned themselves so the breeze would keep the smell from their guards, who chatted with one another and ignored what they didn’t see. At lunch, relaxed and hungry, Cook decided to risk the mess hall. He knew he might be frisked, but it was Wednesday, chicken day, and he didn’t want to miss his favorite meal. The lieutenant outside the doors stared straight into the face of every inmate. Cook glanced away.

  He knew he was finished. He prided himself on handling all pressure. He should never have let his eyes slip.

  The lieutenant told him to step out of line. He ran his hands over Cook’s back first, then his underarms, down his sides, his thighs….

  “What you got in your pocket?”

  “Chap Stick,” Cook said.

  More eye contact. This time Cook’s held.

  “Let’s see.”

  Cook drew it out, showed it, a tube of Chap Stick.

  Again eyes, again steady.

  The lieutenant ran his hand over the same place. “What’s this?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Empty it.”

  Cook leaned to the side, dug into his jeans pocket. He squeezed the sugar bags in his hand, swung up with his other forearm. The lean giving him extra momentum, he knocked the lieutenant into a wall. Cook ran up the mess line, through the open gate, across the Walk, and through another gate and onto the Yard, where he tossed the sugar bags under a ledge as he sprinted toward the basketball court, toward the softball diamond, toward the hundreds of yards of open grass, toward nothing but fence, he realized, with three or four guards behind him, as he leapt over a drainage ditch, slipped on some mud, fell and just lay there, waiting to be cuffed.

  They couldn’t find the sugar bags. When it came to sentencing in D.B. court, this meant the difference between J and a working cellblock, where he got an hour of communal rec time in the early evenings. The working blocks also had circulating air. Standing against the vent at the back of his cell, and knowing the guard had to walk his tier only once an hour, Cook went on getting high. He did it for the gamesmanship. Much of his life had been ruled by the pleasure of adrenaline. His childhood had been poor and disordered enough (his family’s trailer home, which I visited, stood in a weedy lot across from the railroad tracks, the worst house in a run-down, all-black section of Alexandria, and his schooling had ended in the ninth grade), but his crimes had been driven by more than poverty. He had liked robbing people he knew, sometimes while they were asleep in their houses. And he had liked robbing his tricks, men who could identify him and who he would see again afterward.

  This tempting of fate, along with plenty of anger, ran through much that he did: spraying bullets around Cleve’s Lounge; brutally robbing an elderly neighbor a few weeks before the murder; sleeping with his brother’s wife because he suspected his brother had slept with his; smashing the skull of the man on the levee, a man he’d had sex with at least twice before; vowing to torture and kill his wife and everyone else who had given evidence against him; phoning from the parish jail after his arrest, promising them that he would escape—from the jail before he was sent to Angola, or from Angola if he had to-just to get at them. His calls, as he knew full well, were recorded: “I will be out there…. There’s many a ways…. It might take me thirty or forty years, but I’m coming…. Arson….”

  And now he was curled sweetly, dark blue eyes opening slowly, short black hair rumpled, on the Toy Shop couch. He said he’d been part of the club for several weeks, that an inmate he knew from Alexandria had invited him in. He claimed he had decided to change, that at twenty-nine he felt worn down. “I know twenty-nine don’t seem old, but it’s old to me.” He spoke of his mother, who was sixty-three and sick with arthritis. He needed to give her some hope, some thought that in return for good behavior he would someday be released. “I’m going to die here,” he said. “I know that. But I don’t tell her. I’m the baby of the family. She’s living for me.”

  One of his brothers was in prison. Another had been. He showed me a picture of his mother in her cluttered trailer home: white, flowered housedress; cigarette; sunken mouth; the blue eyes. He said she’d run fairly wild in her day, spent as much time in bars as he later did. Now she tried to “garden,” though a picture of her yard showed more debris than greenery. “I’m living for her,” he added, and mentioned the certificate he’d received for participation in the Toy Shop—he’d sent it to her; she kept it on her refrigerator door.

  From his reluctant, inward speech, he seemed thoroughly honest. He said he’d gotten the certificate for nothing, that he’d hardly worked on any of the toys the club had given away. He had painted a few cars, that was all. Most he had done in simple patterns, according to other inmates’ instructions. But one racing car, as yet unfinished, he had begun to decorate with an underwater-looking design. He brought the car down from a private spot, on top of a high cabinet, for me to see. One side was painted a dark purple, almost black, and adorned with slender tentacles like seaweed that were only a few shades lighter than the background. They were nearly invisible, but the twisting, waving strands were beautiful. It was as though he was painting his version of the bottom of the ocean. It was as though in the slow painting he was purging a former self: one that sped wildly, as if in a racing car, through an ocean’s darkness.

  The car was, at any rate, an accomplishment, a hint of talent, but I saw even more hope in his mere presence in the workshop, in his sleeping on that ratty couch. He left his dorm every morning before sunrise, and napped or lay awake here. He remained in the workshop through most of the day. Much of that time was spent lying on the couch. A new job on the kitchen paint crew had him working odd hours, often in the evenings; between the job and the waking up at three A.M., he was in the dorm only a few hours each night. Which was how he wanted it. He needed to escape the men who knew him. His closest partner had started whispering “model prisoner,” but Cook could hardly be called a showcase for rehabilitation. So far, hibernation was about as far as it went. The workshop was a refuge. Like a dog on a familiar piece of rug, or a child who likes to nap in the living room, he rested amid the comforting tumult of life, was reassured by the accumulation of sawdust.

  If Donald Cook makes some sort of personal progress this year, I thought, Warden Cain will have worked a minor miracle. The credit would belong, as well, to the inmate who’d brought Cook into the Toy Shop, and to the assistant warden who supervised the organization and helped it grow. But finally, I reasoned, if Cain hadn’t put his energy and encouragement behind it, Cook—and surely others like him, in other stages of transformation—would have had no sanctuary. From his position as ruler over 5,000 inmates and 1,800 employees, Cain’s benevolence was filtering down to the bottom.

  The warden would have been less pleased by another development in Cook’s life. Cook told me he’d fallen in love with an inmate he’d met while doing his year in the punishment cellblocks. Alberto was one of the handful of Hispanics at the prison. Cook said Alberto’s accent turned him on.

  Every other afternoon, around five o’clock, Cook hurried to a fence at one end of the Main Yard. On the other side of the barbed wire and chain link was the Walk, then another
fence, then the area where the cellblock inmates were let out for exercise. Cook’s lover was still serving time in the cells, so they arranged to meet at their opposite fences, about fifteen feet apart. There were always ten or twenty men meeting in the same way—to catch up on news, or to run business of one kind or another, or just to sit and pluck at the lawn and let the time pass. Cook ignored the men around him. And though everyone had to call across such distance, all the conversations did seem intimate, even private, as though the convicts had honed some inflection of voice that mingled in a special way with the Angola air, muffling and channeling their words so that they barely carried outside a direct line.

  One warm afternoon in the last days of December, Cook asked his lover, whose buttery, unmuscled chest showed beneath a work shirt open to the belly, “You heard from your mom yet?”