God of the Rodeo Read online

  The chaplain gave thanks to the warden, thanks to God. He asked Jesus to bless this rodeo and to bless all the riders with protection. “Heavenly Father, you have favored us with this day and with the hope and beauty of this Creation…. Bless all of us with an appreciation of the joy of living.” Littell wasn’t feeling too joyful. He stared hard—without pleasure—at any attractive woman he found in the stands, his main purpose for being here. But as the chaplain’s words seeped in, he figured he did have something to be thankful for. At least he knew what he should about that flag. At least he wasn’t like the men around him, illiterate. At least he’d educated himself. Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, he’d read about them all since that moment on Camp J. “And at least I’m getting ready to take my GED,” he said. “I’m getting ready to establish myself.”

  At least he was getting out of here.

  So he tried to enjoy himself, ignore the guards barking down into the convict section, “Caps off! Get your hoods off!” as the loudspeaker introduced “the greatest song ever written,” ignore his own thoughts about pride and nationhood as the inmate band played the national anthem. A young horsewoman, sent by the car dealership that sponsored the rodeo, rode around the arena bearing the American flag through the day’s drizzle, the rhythmic sloshing of hooves on the wet turf audible beneath the band, a slow and strange percussion. Littell tried to concentrate on the woman’s body in her blue spangled jumpsuit.

  The black guys hurt him the most, but the whites—who made up about half the rodeo’s participants—sickened him, too. They were all willing to price their lives at zero. They were all willing to turn themselves into a joke. “Waiting in Department of Corrections bucking chute number one, serving lllllife…” he heard the mounted emcee (like the clowns, hired from the pro circuit) announce the six riders in the first event. “Waiting in Department of Corrections bucking chute number two, serving LLLLLIFE…”

  “LLLLLIFE,” the emcee bellowed. “LLLLLIFE! LLLLLIFE!! LLLLLIFE!!!!!”

  All chutes opened at once, and six convicts on six bulls churned into the arena. This was the “Bust-Out,” a special feature of Angola’s rodeo. The name was a play on “escape,” the event designed for futility. It was hard enough for an untrained man to avoid injury when riding a bull alone in the ring; with five other animals and five other hapless contestants all bounding and tumbling at one end of the arena, the risks multiplied. Johnny Brooks wanted to score points early. He wanted Angola’s all-around cowboy belt buckle when the month was over (the all-around champion’s only prize, though first place in each riding event would bring fifty dollars). Wearing elaborate suede chaps in turquoise and black, a matching vest, a black felt hat studded with moons and stars, all commissioned from a convict who did his tooling in a prison hobby shop, Johnny Brooks spurred frantically and kept from keeling as his bull twisted and leapt off all four hooves. But he couldn’t control where the animal went amid the chaos, not at the last instant, when another inmate, a rodeo veteran and past belt buckle winner, sailed sideways. Brooks’s bull trampled across the man’s back, injuring him badly enough to keep him out of the rest of the month’s competition. Thrown in the process, Brooks scored no points at all.

  Soon a small wooden table was carried out to the center of the ring. It was time for “Convict Poker,” a new event that year, another special feature, the inspiration of the range-crew bosses. The table was painted bright red. Four folding chairs were placed around it, and four inmates jogged out to occupy those chairs. Johnny Brooks was one. There were no cards involved. The men would merely sit as though playing poker. The emcee boomed, “Brrrrring on the dealer!” and in one of the chutes, an inmate delivered an electric prod to a 2,000 pound black bull with perfectly sweeping, perfectly pointed white horns. The animal bolted into the arena. The last man sitting would win one hundred dollars.

  The trouble was that bulls aren’t attracted to stationary targets. And the men were stationary, palms flat and fingers spread on the table, never turning to check on the animal as it circled behind their backs, knowing that if the three minute whistle blew with more than one convict left, the one who had moved least, who had kept his trembling under control, whose fingers hadn’t so much as twitched, would win. The crowd—all those fans who’d waited for hours along the shoulder of the road to buy their eight dollar tickets; the prison staff; the inmates in their section of the bleachers; the few members of the media in their ramshackle press box; me—wasn’t going to get its payoff.

  So the clown, usually a figure of protection, started taunting. He tossed his floppy hat into the bull’s face. Imitating a bull on the verge of attack, he stooped down, snorting, and scraped the dirt with his hands. He grabbed Brooks’s cowboy hat and waved it behind Brooks’s shoulder blades. He climbed up on the table, made a racket with his feet, ready to jump over the inmates’ heads to safety as the bull charged.

  It didn’t. It only convinced one man to leave his seat with a side-caress of horn, and ambled off to a distance of four or five yards. The clown picked up the vacated metal chair. He lifted it over his head and hurled it into the bull’s snout. It clattered against the horns, and still the men did not shift. At last the animal processed the message, drove forward to deliver on the promise of its size, on the promise of those gorgeously sweeping and immaculately pointed horns which slammed, by one convict’s pure good fortune, into the minimal back of his folding chair instead of into his kidney. The man was now down, the bull ready to spear or stomp. But at that moment Johnny Brooks lost his nerve or gained his sanity, leapt out of his seat, and began sprinting for the fence. The bull caught motion in the corner of its eye. Fleeing across the arena, Brooks stayed five feet, two feet, twelve inches ahead of the horns. Arms and legs pumping, and back arching away from his own death, he looked like a cartoon character in comic escape. As if a firecracker had been lit under his ass, he scrambled up the rails of the fence.

  “How did you enjoy the Convict Poker, ladies and gentlemen?” the emcee asked. There was some applause. And laughter. I’m sure some of the reaction to the event was electrified, exhilarated, the thrill of watching men in terror made forgivable because the men were murderers. I’m sure some of it was racist (See that nigger move), some disappointed (that there had been no goring), and some uneasy (with that very same disappointment). I’m sure nearly everyone, including me, felt some measure of each of these things. But I know as well that many people were not laughing, were too bewildered or stunned by what they had seen, even if they’d heard about the new event named Convict Poker and it was exactly why they had come. Angola’s stadium is an intimate place. There are no faraway seats. And just outside the arena inmates sold Cokes and hot dogs and cotton candy. They sold what they made in the hobby shops—key chains and purses, dollhouses and oil paintings. Some were allowed to deal directly with the customers, others called out from a fenced bullpen while prison employees stood with the craftwork. The spectators had bought these handmade things. There had been brief transactions, the briefest of dialogues. The convicts at the center of the ring had become men, only men, to at least a degree.

  Or perhaps this was only a wishful, sentimental perception on my part. Since September I had begun to know the inmates. I felt a confusion of reactions, electricity and revulsion and disappointment and discomfort and, as Johnny Brooks took flight, a tinge of racism: certainly it was easier for me to watch—and be curious and analytic about—a black man in danger and fear and abasement, precisely because he had that adjective next to him, black, was slightly less close to being me. Perhaps my sense of the crowd was only projection. I spoke with few of the public. Perhaps I should limit myself to saying that the crowd, overall, was quieter than I thought it would be. Quieter than two concessions across from the Cokes and cotton candy suggested. At one, fans paid a dollar to get themselves locked inside a freestanding jail cell and have an inmate snap a Polaroid through the bars. At the other, for the same price, a convict took their pictures while they stuc
k their heads up from a wooden body with a cut-out neck, the body painted with a prisoner’s old-fashioned striped jumpsuit and adorned with a ball and chain on each ankle.

  The bull riding came second to last. Here was an event that replicated the pro tour. The rider had to stay on for eight seconds to score points; the better his form, the more points he would receive. Here was the chance for Johnny Brooks to prove himself, to rise above the helplessness and degradation of contests like the Bust-Out and Convict Poker, where pure luck and sheer craziness played such overwhelming roles, the chance for this forty-year-old man, who would most likely never leave Angola, to prevail on skill and reveal his grace. He could show himself no different from J. W. Hart and Tuff Hedeman and Ted Nuce, the stars of the pro circuit, whose rides were hailed weekly by the ESPN announcer not only as demonstrations of talent but as testaments to integrity and good values. He could be those figures. And he could be, in front of the public, what he was at least part of the time in his job at Angola, a cowboy.

  From a railing above the chute, he moved to climb onto the animal. With a cord tied against its belly and near its balls to add hostility, the bull tried to hurdle the wall. It braced its forelegs over the top. Quickly, before he fell backward inside the chute that was just big enough for the bull, Brooks levered himself off. “Get down there,” someone prodded at the animal. Brooks tried again, set himself. The bull jostled, slammed its head into the wooden slats, drove Brooks’s knees into the boards. The hide of the back was loose, sliding, and Brooks struggled to get his balance. Under the excess skin the bull’s muscles contracted and rose—a fast series of giant ripples shuddering along its spine.

  A convict pulled the bull rope tight as Brooks had dreamed. His palm faced upward, and the pressure of the rope across it dug the back of his hand inches into the hide. “Ready?” the inmate manning the gate called. “Ready?” The answer was the most minimal nod, the brim of the studded hat moving almost imperceptibly. The gate was tugged open, the man who’d helped with the rope cried, “Outside!” And so Brooks was. Outside. The bull thrashed and spun out of the chute, and Brooks was out under the gaze of the crowd, his mind shut down and Angola gone from it.

  Three seconds later he was on his knees in the mud.

  A parade of failed rides came after: one first-time contestant sent airborne immediately; a gray-haired sixty-two-year-old bank robber launched into a twisting, Olympic-style dive. Finally a convict named Carey Lasseigne, who went by Buckkey and whose bushy blond mustache and weathered skin made him look like he would do well-made him look, at least, like a typical cowboy—decided to grab the bull rope with two hands. This would have disqualified him in professional rodeo, but here, because not one other man had lasted the required time, a mere completed ride would earn him points. Which was all he wanted. He wasn’t after quite the same kind of glory as Johnny Brooks.

  Lately his son, Chris, refused to visit him more than once or twice each year. The boy was almost seventeen. He had been two when Buckkey began his life sentence for murder, for killing an acquaintance just one year older than his son was now, shooting him in the back of the head while he pleaded for his life. If Buckkey could win the all-around prize, that silver-plated buckle reading “All-Around Cowboy,” if he could send it to Chris for his seventeenth birthday at the end of the month, he felt that Chris, his only child, might come soon.

  The first time Buckkey had tried for this present, the bull had rammed and pinned him repeatedly against one of the wooden gates. He received 142 stitches to his scalp and later went into seizure on the shower floor. Two years ago he had broken his left hand; before the following weekend he had cracked open the cast and taken it off so he could ride.

  Today was the day, this was the year. He needed those points. He didn’t care about style. He just clung to the bull. And when the whistle blew announcing eight seconds, he was three Sundays away from that gift.

  In the afternoon’s finale, the “Guts & Glory,” a red chip worth one hundred dollars was strung between a bull’s horns. This was yet another inmate rodeo tradition. Thirty convicts poured into the ring on foot, then tried to pluck the chip without being trampled or gored.

  And I was still searching for what I had glimpsed with Johnny Brooks in the saddle shed-possibilities of exaltation, hints of triumphant skill, of tremendous self-control in men who’d wound up here because they’d had little self-control at all. I sought such visions of redemption, even as I knew that the perversity of the rodeo was thoroughly at odds with what I hoped to see. Promise hung in the air above the grandstands, extraordinary promise. If these men could rise within a spectacle so troubling, and within a prison atmosphere crushingly weighted with dead victims and families destroyed and convicts put permanently away… if these men could somehow flourish… My search was surely marked by a self-indulgent need for a soothing parable within circumstances so dispiriting. But I couldn’t help wishing. And my desire would keep me at Angola long after the end of rodeo month. It would carry me deep inside the prison. It would take me to levels much more abject than those of the rodeo. And it would leave me knowing men whom no amount of distance—and Angola is far, far out there—can banish from my mind.

  But for now, as the Guts & Glory began, my eyes turned to Terry Hawkins, serving his life sentence for murdering his boss in an argument sparked by a demand that Terry work late on his stepdaughter’s birthday. Already his participation in the rodeo was a bad joke: The job had been in a slaughterhouse; he had hacked into his employer’s head and neck with a meat-ax. But Terry didn’t see any strangeness or irony in his continued association with cattle. The Guts & Glory was his event. He planned to use his own well-tested strategy to beat the animal and snatch the chip: Goad the bull into charging, run away in an arc tighter than the bull could turn, and reach back behind his own shoulder to snag the prize. He had won the event several times in past years. “Terry’s learnt the know-how,” other inmates had told me with vicarious pride. “Watch him.”

  He had seemed, when we first met a month earlier, scarcely more than a teenager, though I knew he was in his mid-thirties. Six-two or-three, athletic, restless, he smiled both nervously and with bravado, slouched in a chair and jiggled his knees, appeared as naive and self-certain as the star of any high school team. A thin scar crossed his dark brown skin between his eyebrows, the remnant of his bachelor party years ago. He said his victories in the Guts & Glory were the best accomplishments of his life. I asked if that included the years before Angola. It did. I asked if he could imagine anything better in the future. He said no. I laid out a scenario, however far-fetched, in which he gained his freedom; could he imagine any better accomplishment then? No…. He showed me his cot, where he had written across the sheet and pillowcase, in large, crude red letters, “BULLFIGHTER.” He told me, “I’m going to look for you in the stands. I’m going to toss you that chip when I get it,” and, ridiculing myself both because this man was a murderer and because the contest was a gladiator show, I fantasized myself a part of his triumph, his happiness, a part of something that would be—however briefly, however sadly, however terribly—wonderful.

  Now an immense brown bull trotted into the ring. Wearing his good-luck red wristbands and tattered, red-ribbed T-shirt, Terry waited at the far end. He watched the commotion of other attempts. One man, rammed at the legs, was unable to stand or even drag himself away, and lay in the mud while the horns prodded at his shins. Others climbed the fence as the bull lowered its neck and came at them. Terry studied the animal’s moves. Then he emerged from the crowd, or rather the other men backed away. He feinted, froze, wavered off-balance, weight too far forward in the process of taunting. Paralyzed, he leaned five feet from the horns. But he steadied himself and lunged forward again, baiting, luring the bull, sprinting away along the sharpest curve. He reached behind. He was struck by the muzzle, caught between the horns. Terry flew ten or twelve feet into the air. He landed—the only wonderful thing—between the horns again, was vaulted and f
lipped onto his back. He came down once more on the animal’s forehead, was propelled upward yet again, floating and spinning, and for several seconds this went on, seconds I could count—one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one—thousand—his body for moments beyond gravity, suspended in midair, flopping and spineless: everything about his existence, the preservation of his life, utterly beyond his control.

  TWO

  THE PREVIOUS YEAR, HIS FIRST AS WARDEN OF Angola, Burl Cain had chosen to enter the rodeo arena in the closest thing he could find to a chariot. It was a wooden cart, lacquered and polished, with big white-spoked wheels, pulled by his inmate-tended team of Percheron horses. He circled the arena between the performance of the Rough Riders and the chaplain’s prayer. The Percherons were huge—a head taller and a thousand pounds heavier than the average horse. Their chests were broad and deeply muscled, the base of their necks looked as thick as oil drums, and across their black coats they wore harnesses studded with chrome medallions. Browbands and collars and backstraps all glistened.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the emcee announced, “Angola’s warden, Mr. Burl Cain!” The convict band gave a drum roll and a splash of electric organ. “He’s just arrived eight months ago from Dixon Correctional, and he’s the man in charge now. And, ladies and gentlemen, those are prize-winning Percherons from the Perche region in the country of France. Brought the knights into battle back in the Middle Ages. And Burl Cain’s got ’em now. One of his Percherons was rated the number one stallion at the National Western Livestock show in Denver, Colorado. Warden Burl Cain!”