God of the Rodeo Read online

  And meanwhile the convict club called the Toy Shop would give away 2,500 handmade wooden trucks and push-along grasshoppers through Head Start and Louisiana’s State School for the Deaf this Christmas! And the CPR team was even teaching policemen! Cain was the most unlikely healer, the most unlikely savior, a man whose very existence—warden inspiring respect and redemption in his inmates—defied my father’s rationalism.

  Just outside Baton Rouge, Cain pulled into a McDonald’s. When I looked confused, he explained that he had to talk business with a friend there before going on to his meeting with the state’s Civil Service Commission, to which he had been elected the sole employee representative. “I love McDonald’s,” he said with exuberance, pushing himself out of the car. “Those fries are killing me!”

  Then, as his press secretary trailed us inside, he handed her a ten-dollar bill. “You all treat yourselves.” It was the only meal of mine he ever paid for, and if it was a bribe for favorable writing it was the smallest one I’ve ever heard of. The moment was strange. He ordered and went off to talk business in a Formica booth, while we, the press secretary twenty-four years old and me nearing forty, took our trays to our own corner of the restaurant, as though to the children’s table.

  Before Cain and I separated, I mentioned something Johnny Brooks had told me: that he’d given Cain the buckle he’d won for all-around runner-up in last year’s rodeo.

  “That’s right. That’s a cherished gift. I couldn’t win it. I couldn’t win it in all my life. I keep it in my other office up at the Ranch House. He walked up to me and told me, ‘Warden, I want you to have this buckle. I want you to have this from me.’ It was all he had. I know that. I just told him thank you. He just wanted me to have it, and that felt really great.”

  Cain’s metamorphosis from high school agronomy teacher to warden was odd but not unique. Early in the century one man went straight from running a Baton Rouge hardware company to running Angola. A more recent predecessor had started his career selling fertilizer for Allied Chemical; a customer introduced him to the secretary of corrections, who appointed him to manage the business end of penitentiary farming; he rose directly to warden from there. For Cain, more solid personal connections had played a role. His brother was a long-entrenched state senator. Edwin Edwards, governor until recently, was a longtime associate. Cain, too, was made head of agribusiness for the Department of Corrections; then, after running Dixon Correctional Institute, a smaller prison in the state, for thirteen years, he became Warden of Angola.

  His rule extended over the prison’s 18,000 acres, grounds larger than the island of Manhattan. And those grounds were lovely. Coming through the gate you drove down a corridor of trees, oak and cypress and crab apple. Farther on, in season, the dark pink blossoms of crape myrtle lined the road, and, year-round, flowers bloomed in neat beds beside the white slats of corral fences, flowers that seemed impossibly large and vibrant, bright yellow balls twice the size of a fist and purple spears long as hay grass. Then came the tall magnolias, budding white.

  The road arrived at Main Prison, but it was easy to look away from the barbed wire, at the fields. Long ago the flooding of the Mississippi left behind a sediment that made this low-lying acreage among the most fertile in the South. The darker, heavier earth of the surrounding areas was good; the alluvial soil of Angola was superb. Lift both in your hands and you could feel the difference in weight. It was easier to till. Gaze around and you could see what its minerals gave rise to. Okra and corn, eggplant and peppers, snap beans and tomatoes, and soy plants that started wispy and grew swiftly broad, so that within weeks their leaves merged into an endless cloud of green three feet off the ground, seemingly thick enough to walk on. And there was cotton, chest-high, in resilient, spiny rows running toward the levee.

  After the crops the graze land went for miles. Almost three thousand cattle fed in fields sprayed yellow with wildflowers. One hundred horses worked the prison, and a herd of mustangs owned its separate pasture. The tall, pitched banks of the levees held back a rushing bend in the Mississippi, which bordered the prison on three sides, but there was plenty of water on the grounds. Every road seemed to hit some shore of Lake Killarney, giving the constant chance to glimpse blue herons taking off in ungainly, graceful flight. In front of Camp F, where prisoners with the best records had unofficial freedoms, inmates fished for perch under the delicate leaves of pecan trees, and, in the fall, gathered up the thousands of pecans to shell and eat.

  Throughout Angola’s idyll the convicts lived in several fenced compounds, Main Prison and the outcamps. Barbed concertina wire, the coils piled three high, lined the tops and bottoms of the chain-link fences. Guard towers stood at the edges of the exercise yards. Cinder-block buildings, most of them one-story, most built in the 1950s, housed all the inmates. They contained the cavernous dorms, where the cots, with their inch-thick mattresses, stood two feet apart, and where each inmate lived out of two state-issued locker boxes, about 18 by 18 by 24 inches. The noise of huge industrial fans (there to reduce the risk of tuberculosis), and of the industrial-sounding steel toilets (partitionless and utterly exposed to the dorm-the men squatted in public), and of a single shared TV blaring above the fans and the flushing, and of a manual typewriter pecking out a convict’s seventy-second writ, all of it echoing off the cinder block, was relentless and difficult to talk over. Steam wafted nonstop from the showers, thickening the already hot, humid air, stagnant in the many places the fans didn’t reach. The fluorescent lights, too, were constant, lowered only to a security level blue after ten at night.

  Inmates convicted, in “D.B. court” by Angola’s disciplinary boards, of violations committed within the prison—sex offenses, drug offenses, violence, vandalism, or repeated disrespect—were removed from the dorms and put in cells, sentenced for months and kept for years if their attitudes didn’t change. The Camp J cellblocks received no natural light. Ancient bulbs barely lit surfaces of chipped, gray-painted cement. Behind their recessed bars the convicts felt no circulating air. None. The fan down by the guard missed them entirely. In their white boxer shorts they lay, through most of the day and night, in fetal positions on the cement, for a slight evasion of heat in spring, summer, early fall. As for their occasional movement, Littell’s cocktail warfare was relatively undisturbing. Dark, linear scars—fifteen or twenty of them—streaked the torso of one inmate I talked with. He had slashed himself with a razor blade. Shaving was then forbidden him. When shaving was allowed again, he had resumed. He hopped to the bars to speak with me, having recently tried to cut his foot off, to saw with a razor through the bone.

  Once, as I accompanied the Camp J chaplain on his rounds, he warned that we might find a particular inmate posing nude for no one, flexing his muscles at the bars, his own excrement smeared over arms and chest.

  About 1,500 inmates, at any given time, were kept in cells, under lock-down ranging in severity from Camp J to the prison’s many “working cellblocks,” from which the convicts were let out for daily labor and recreation. The rest of the 3,500 inmates were divided into two classes, trusties and big-stripes. The 700 trusties had earned, through years with minimal infractions, the privilege of jobs as orderlies in the administration building or as ranchers on the range crew, as clerks or keepers of the chase dogs that went out on escapes, or as “counsel substitutes,” the inmate paralegals who argued for defendants in the D.B. courts. The trusties could move unsupervised outside the fences of their compounds.

  Angola’s perimeter had no fence at all. But the current of the Mississippi was strong, and the Tunica Hills, that bordered the prison’s fourth side, were almost thick as jungle with vines and snakes. On the other side of all that it was a long way to anywhere. And many of the inmates believed it was even farther than it was. They spoke of a twenty-mile buffer zone before you even reached the end of prison property. No such zone existed. But the immensity of Angola’s actual land was enough to bend the mind and slow the breath. It had a subduing effect.
It seemed unbeatable. There were only two or three attempted escapes each year. There had never been a riot, and no guard had been killed since a small and isolated racial protest had left one officer murdered and another badly burned a quarter century ago.

  The majority of big-stripes (called by the old name, though everyone at Angola now wore jeans with a white T-shirt or blue work shirt) were marched a mile or so from their compounds each weekday at dawn in double-file lines. They were ordered to pick crops or, with those long-handled hoes, to clear weeds from ditches. Or they might be brought to the hilly terrain behind the prison cemetery-where unclaimed bodies were buried by the inmate grave-digging crew beneath the simplest white crosses—and told to mow the grass with those same unwieldy tools.

  Mounted, armed guards watched the work from above and at least five yards away, guns never being allowed too near the prisoners. Other officers, “pushers,” stood among each crew to be sure the rows of okra or cotton were picked clean, that the hand-mowed grass was left lawn-mower even. Often, though, there wasn’t enough work to go around, and the pushers merely kept the hoes swiping at air. The big-stripes earned a salary of four cents per hour. (Some of the trusties made as much as twenty.) The prices in the prison commissary were about the same as on a supermarket’s shelves. Half of every convict’s earnings were set aside by the state into mandatory inmate savings accounts. Given the inmates’ odds of leaving, it was unclear to everyone I asked, convict and staff alike, what rainy day they were saving for.

  After work, they were marched home.

  Home: where Terry Hawkins, specialist in the Guts & Glory, made their dinner. Before the rodeo he had graduated out of the fields to the position of fry cook. It was better than being A.D.H.D. (A Dude with a Hoe and a Ditch)—after stirring fried rice or flipping hotcakes on a stove ten feet long, he could grill hamburgers, bag them, and stuff them down his pants to sell in the dorm. Sometimes he snuck out with fried chicken under his shirt and cuts of cheese in his socks. Payment came in cigarettes, the prison’s currency. Later he would stand outside the canteen, and trade a few packs for shampoo or soap or deodorant, or “zoo-zoos”—snacks of candy bars or sardines. He knew which guards would allow the stealing, the selling. He made sure to send them plates of fried chicken.

  Cigarettes from food sales also kept him in needle and thread from the commissary. Since coming to Angola eleven years ago, he had discovered a talent for sewing. Built powerfully enough that he didn’t worry about the effeminate connotations, he did occasional business as a seamster, fashioning sweat pants from worn-out state-issued sweat shirts. He charged two packs per job. Hunched on his cot, he cut along a pattern he’d drawn onto a stray manila file folder. The ribbing of the sweat shirt became the waist of the pants, the arms became the lower half of the legs, and the elastic from an old pair of boxer shorts became the waistband string.

  Besides the new job in the kitchen, Terry’s life had recently changed in another way. An inmate named Rev, shaved head a light brown and voice light in emphasis, had begun cropping up at his side. One morning after the first rodeo Sunday, on Terry’s way out of the classification office, he heard the man asking, “You still thinking?” Miss Mary, the classification officer, the person assigned to inmate needs and referrals, was a fan of The Young and the Restless. Terry had just stopped by her office to fill her in on episodes she’d missed. He was devoted to the soap, one of Angola’s most-watched programs. He had told Miss Mary the latest doings of Cassie and Grace and his own favorite, Victor, who for years had claimed every woman on the show. Miss Mary, soft and motherly, speculated on Victor’s next prey. They laughed, Terry didn’t stay long. He was like the ne’er-do-well student proud to be bantering with the guidance counselor, and meanwhile, in the back of his mind, angling for any advantage he could get. And then, in the hall: “You still thinking? You still thinking?”

  He heard the easy, insistent voice again as he sat on his cot that evening, digging in his locker box for his photo album. It was made from a decrepit textbook, An Anthology of American Literature, bartered for this purpose. The pages inside were covered with pictures he’d taped on: his thirteen-year-old daughter, Jamonica, and his pregnant sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Quiana, the two of them standing in a visiting room, wall mural behind them. The painting showed a stream and low, luminous shafts of light streaking outward from the landscape to envelop whoever posed there. That visit had been months and months ago. Most of Angola’s inmates received none at all. He knew he was lucky. He turned the anthology pages and stared at a snapshot of his mother, mailed sometime in the past few years, since he’d last seen her. Smiling on her birthday, she stood in a kitchen doorway under a sign that read, “Not Older, Better.” And Rev strolled by his cot, saying, “You’re a good dude, you ought to take that chance.”

  “I’m thinking on it.”

  “Still? Still thinking?”

  One night after the second Sunday, Terry lay back mulling strategy for the next weekend’s Guts & Glory. Last Sunday he’d barely been able to chase the prize; his ribs, battered during the first Sunday’s attempt, wouldn’t let him move. For the second straight week, no one had taken the chip. He didn’t know if his ribs were broken. It didn’t matter and wasn’t worth finding out. If the X rays came back positive, he wouldn’t take duty status for time off work—that would bar him from the rodeo. Next Sunday he would grab that chip. The payoff was progressive, now worth three hundred. He would send money to his grandmother-in-law, Ora, whom he considered his mother, though he’d been divorced after his sentencing. And he would buy some things for himself. After last Sunday the clown had told him, “You got to just stand there and take the hit, Bullfighter, that’s the only way you’re going to get it.” So he would give up his special technique of sprinting away in a narrow curve; he would let the bull knock him down and run him over, hope the muzzle struck and not the horn. He would win.

  And then Rev walked by, told him, “You’re a good person.”

  Among the impediments to Terry’s believing this were his own recollections. Mr. Denver Tarter, his boss at the slaughterhouse, had asked him to work late on Quiana’s birthday, to clean out the meat locker; Mr. Denver Tarter had called him a “black son-of-a-bitch” when he refused; Terry had, as he remembered it, “started F-ing at him” and feinted a blow without any intention of following through; Mr. Denver Tarter had swung at him with the meat-ax that Terry then knocked from his hands and used against his employer. It was hard to know whether the self-defense part of Terry’s story was true. There had been no witnesses. Whether it was true or not, it didn’t change the way Terry felt. Mr. Denver Tarter had always treated him and his family well, stocking their freezers every Friday with sirloins and pork chops, ground meat and T-bones; Mr. Denver Tarter, he told me, hadn’t been a racist, had plenty of black friends in town, had only called him a “black son-of-a-bitch” out of aggravation and the Wild Turkey he’d been drinking that day; Terry had grabbed the ax off the floor and struck his boss in the head with the handle, and then—“before I knew it”—flipped the weapon around and swung it into his boss over and over with the sharp end. “I just whacked all the way out,” he said. “I can’t remember all where I hit him at, but I know I hit him too many times.”

  By the end of it, Mr. Denver Tarter lay on his back in the hall outside the butcher room—the place where Terry scalded the pigs in a tank and shot the cows and hoisted them up and put their heads in a rack to decapitate them and stuck a knife in their hearts to bleed them and skinned them and gutted them and sawed them in half—and Mr. Denver Tarter’s short, thinning brown hair was soaked in blood and there was a gash all the way through his windpipe. He was gasping, wheezing, blood spattering from the hole in his throat. His eyes were wide open. Terry bent over him, gazing at the blue uniform shirt with “Mr. Tarter,” just that, stitched in red scripted letters on the breast, at the heavy face, at the hand raised weakly toward him, reaching out to him. A question droned through Terry’s mind, �
��How did all of a sudden this happen? How did all of a sudden this happen?” He stared for a long, long moment before walking out of the building, raspy breath behind him.

  Even after eleven years Terry’s brain hadn’t found a safe place for this scene; the memory spilled forward often from the files. If the images—and the sound of that breathing—weren’t enough to convince him that Rev was mistaken, there was the fact that he’d spent time in another state prison on a robbery charge; he’d had his warnings before the murder. And at Angola, he’d been sentenced repeatedly to J and other cellblocks. He’d fought and fought, broken a man’s jaw and cheekbone, blackened a guard’s eye.

  And perhaps it wouldn’t be reading in too much to say that the circumstances of Terry’s upbringing didn’t make it any easier for him to hear Rev’s words, that his childhood hadn’t left him buoyant with self-worth. Once, I visited Ora, the old woman he adored and called his mama. I turned off a main road of large, well-kept homes within wide-open Louisiana farm country, and drove up a rutted lane. Before and after a family move to California, Terry had spent his childhood here. The dead-end street was an enclave of tiny houses, dilapidated or entirely abandoned, porches caving and paint long gone, and of structures that can only be called shacks. Until recently, Terry’s real mother had lived in one of the abandoned houses. I found Ora in a two-room shack. Her clothes hung from nails in the walls. The furniture consisted solely of a bed and two torn vinyl kitchen chairs. She spoke proudly of the way Terry had carried in water for her to drink and bathe in, before he went to Angola. Running water had come later. She recalled various children, most of them family and most doing relatively well, who had grown up on this lane. She also mentioned one grandson, two nephews, and one cousin all in prison. One of Terry’s brothers was in Angola for attempted murder.