God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  Inside the arena, on the third Sunday, Johnny Brooks absorbed everything the bull tried. Between its contorted leaps he seemed to loll peacefully in a trough between cresting waves. Because so few inmates had lasted the needed eight seconds, this day the standard was lowered to six. Brooks kept his chest out, his weight centered, his free arm, perpendicular at the elbow, cutting the air in classic rodeo style for balance and points from the judges. When the six-second whistle blew, he was still in full control, and for several seconds longer he worked his arm with immaculate form, to show that he could do this forever, to make clear to everyone his expertise, how much he’d learned in the years he’d been locked away.

  There was applause from the spectators. It was not the loud roar he’d described to me back in September, but it lasted a few seconds. He waved his hat and walked back across the arena, surrounded by fading approval.

  And on the fourth Sunday he rode still better, on the bull that was the toughest of this year’s stock. It gyrated, heaving its tremendous mass into the air. Brooks rose three, four, five times with the animal; when it came down, wrenching, his body snapped but held out against the spin. Then, tipped suddenly to horizontal, he could not right himself. He was on his back on the dirt. Five seconds—not six—had gone by. The rodeo, for him, was over. He would win no all-around buckle. Yet in the crowd’s diffuse clapping there was one last measure of acknowledgment, an agreement, perhaps, with what many of the lifers said to me constantly, like a mantra: “I’m still a citizen, and I’m still one of God’s children.” There was the most fleeting welcome back into the world.

  He strained to hear, as well, a single voice among the spectators. Three hours ago, just before the rodeo, while the range crew looked over the bulls in the pen, the wife of an ex-inmate had called Brooks over to a chain-link fence. Through it, she introduced a friend, Belva, a tall, sturdy woman with high cheekbones and a delayed smile, a smile made arresting by the delay and by a slender gap between her front teeth. She wore white stretch pants with a white sweat shirt, and she and Brooks spoke as shyly as homebodies forced to a singles party.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” he said.

  “It’s nice to meet you. Are you riding in the rodeo?” The question was scarcely audible.

  “Pardon?”

  “Are you riding in the rodeo?”

  “Yes I am.”

  That was where conversation ran out. The women returned to their places in the stands. Brooks did not have vast experience with emotional relationships. He had no visitors. Based on this exchange, he decided that he and Belva would fall in love. He went on believing it, though he could not hear her voice in the bleachers.

  Buckkey Lasseigne, face like an old rancher’s, felt hopeful, too. Toward the end of the third Sunday, he was in the running for the all-around. If he won the buckle, maybe his son, Chris, would come see him, maybe their hours together would be easier than the twice-a-year visits of recent times. The last one had been in the park built for trusties to picnic with their families. (Like Johnny Brooks, Buckkey had trusty status and was a member of the range crew.) Buckkey and his only child had played their usual sullen game of one-on-one basketball on the packed-dirt court. As the afternoon ended and the bus came to collect the visitors, Chris, who had Buckkey’s blond hair but who was three or four inches taller, responded to some piece of fatherly advice, “Okay, dude.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Buckkey had said.

  “What do you want me to call you?”

  “Dad would be just fine.”

  “Cool,” the boy had agreed. “Dad. I’ll call you anything you want me to call you. You want me to call you inmate, you want me to call you convict, you want me to call you Louisiana State Penitentiary?”

  Still, the boy had said once over the phone, “I’d sure like to get one of those buckles.” So the father had told me. When I spoke with his wife, who had stuck with the marriage throughout his imprisonment, making her all but unique at Angola, she said, “That’s just Buckkey.” Chris didn’t want the buckle at all.

  Perhaps Buckkey understood this. Thirty-six years old, his handsome, square-jawed face was so wrinkled, especially across his forehead between his curly hair and hazel eyes, it could have belonged to a man twice his age. Thorough resignation lurked behind the energy that seemed to go with his nickname. He knew the things still said to his son in their small town, the town where Buckkey had grown up, the town of the murder. “Hey,” a substitute teacher had yelled out to the boy a few weeks ago, trying to control him in class, “I know where your daddy’s at.” He knew that outside a Wal-Mart the victim’s mother had shrieked her undiminished rage at Buckkey’s own mother and then, fury blending with futility, swung at Buckkey’s mother’s thighs, over and over, with a plastic shopping basket. He knew he could do nothing for any of them. He knew he had destroyed them. He knew what he had done.

  And refused to know. He told me it hadn’t been him, that it had been the friend he was with, that the two of them, high on PCP and weed, had stopped to get gas, begun arguing with the attendant, a boy they knew vaguely who’d been a few years behind them in school, and that the next thing he remembered the .22 wasn’t in the glove compartment and his friend had shot the attendant behind the station. (The murder had been prosecuted as resulting from a robbery. Buckkey had made a videotaped confession, before recanting at trial.)

  Just a few minutes before rendering his story to me, Buckkey had said, “I don’t consider myself a murderer. Murderers are born. They come out of the womb killing.” It was a way of distinguishing evil men from bad acts, of claiming some innocence at his core if not in his deeds. But it seemed an admission that he had done the killing, and the tale blaming his friend made me wince. You murdered someone’s child, I wanted to scream. Can’t you do any better than this lame bullshit? I thought: It is a good thing that you will spend the rest of your life here, that you have had your life taken away. I wondered if it shouldn’t literally be taken, and I knew, imagining the victim to be my own son, that I would want Buckkey’s mother and wife and child to suffer as I did, that I would want Buckkey killed.

  Now he climbed from the rail onto the bull. “Ready?” The animal jabbed its head against the boards, and Buckkey, determined to ride one-handed because others had lasted the six seconds, clutched with his free hand to the wall. “Ready?” the gate man urged. Buckkey lifted his hand. “Outside!”

  Convulsing, the bull lunged forward twice and hooked left. It rose off its hind legs and whipped the rider’s forehead into its own skull. Buckkey crumpled and slid, unconscious. The clowns rushed to lure the bull from the ring. The prison’s emergency medical team hurried out to immobilize Buckkey’s neck and belt him to a stretcher.

  On the fourth Sunday the hope was also this: A rider named Danny Fabre wanted a new pair of ears. He believed that if he mounted a bull, showed he would “do anything for him,” Warden Cain might approve cosmetic surgery.

  Danny had killed a neighbor of his brother’s ten years ago, a woman who tried to help him, this five weeks after he’d been released from Angola following a short stint for simple robbery and probation violation. (His arrest record had been long: armed robbery, assault, burglary.) He killed the woman for questioning his honesty, though he had indeed knocked on her door and asked her for a ride to buy jumper cables, but instead directed her to a house where he “scored some weed.” He “exploded,” he told me, when she pulled over and said in the car, as he remembered it, “ ‘You been to the penitentiary, you ain’t nothing but a con man, you ain’t never going to be nothing.’ ” He punched her in the face and punched her again, four or five times, then began choking her, while she fought weakly and said quietly, almost no voice available, “Danny, you’re hurting me.” He remembered those words, and his strangling her to death. He dragged her body into the woods and, in the moonlight, mistook the shifting of her limbs over the rough ground for signs of life. He found a stick and drove it through her eye nearly to the back of her s
kull. He covered her body with pine straw. He set it on fire.

  Danny Fabre believed he deserved the death penalty. He felt fortunate for his life sentence. Yet he wanted surgery on his ears. And they did in fact protrude comically, at virtual right angles to his head. He tried to style his longish blond hair to conceal them, but no matter how he combed, the disks of bright pink cartilage sliced right through.

  “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.

  THREE

  “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.