God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  Everyone did.

  The warden’s move had particular significance. He had encouraged an ABC news program—one of the shows that had portrayed him so favorably in the past—to film the rodeo. And the cameras were coming. Were the stripes some involuntary gesture of self-exposure on Cain’s part? An unconscious effort to announce to the world who he really was? Or was his message much more conspiratorial, was he seizing his chance to whisper—to a TV audience of millions—that he could fulfill some of our most fundamental wishes? For as the rodeo began, and the inmates started flying and crashing for the fans in the stadium and for the cameras that would broadcast their catapulted bodies all over the nation, the stripes served us in two ways. They helped to tell us that those bodies belonged to convicts, that the natural desire to see a man bloodied or demolished could be indulged, in this case, without much guilt. And then, too, the uniforms helped to gratify another longing just as basic: that murderers and rapists and armed robbers-the worst of sinners—be not at all like us, that they be largely inhuman. So we could indulge our violent instincts and purge them at the same time. We weren’t the animals; along with the rodeo stock, the animals were out there, in the stripes, in the ring.

  The Cowboys for Christ minister arrived at the chapel around the same time as Belva, but no one had worried that he wouldn’t show. Rick LeDoux, with his own oversize belt buckle (embossed with a Bible and a dove), belonged to an organization of three hundred preachers devoted to missionary work among cowboys worldwide. LeDoux proselytized at horse shows and led evangelical trail rides and came to Camp F twice each month to hold services. A horse trainer by profession, today he wore a black neckerchief and gray Wrangler jeans. He touched the couple’s shoulders and asked if they wanted their ceremony to include anything special.

  Brooks and Belva looked at each other, laughing shyly. “Just getting married,” Brooks replied.

  So in the quiet, nearly empty sanctuary the groomsmen offered their arms and led the bridesmaids up the aisle. One of the men returned for the bride. The procession moved as deliberately as if a wedding march resounded to the ceiling, as if two hundred guests filled the red chairs.

  A bridesmaid started to sing a cappella, got through one verse before choking up.

  I believe that every night

  A candle glows….

  Then LeDoux, tall and reedy, unzipped his little black Bible case and began. “Well, I’m not your traditional preacher. But Johnny’s a cowboy and I guess it’s right that he have a cowboy to marry him.”

  How fine that must have sounded to Johnny Brooks!

  “I guess it’s right that he have something a little different.”

  Yet what has stayed with me, in the time since, is how much of the wedding was like countless others, once it came down to those three people—minister facing the attentive couple—with the groomsmen smiling and the bridesmaids snuffling in the background. LeDoux read the standard passages: the creation of male and female; the path of man from parents to wife; the warning, “What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” And half deaf with nervousness, the bride and groom heard what few words they absorbed as if those phrases had never before been spoken in quite this way.

  Look therefore carefully how ye walk, not as unwise, but as wise; redeeming the time, for the days are evil…. Be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns.

  Johnny and Belva turned to each other and held hands, his cradling hers. They repeated, “I pledge my heart and my love to serve you all of my days.”

  They exchanged rings, repeating, “As you wear it, let it continue to remind you of the vows you have said to me.”

  Johnny’s gaze was steady and Belva’s voice was cracking and the bridesmaids’ snuffling had become open weeping. The bride and groom kissed. The groom hugged the groomsmen, the groomsmen hugged the bridesmaids, and the minister kissed Belva and hugged Brooks. It was over. Everyone filed to the back and no one knew what to say. The women giggled over something—or nothing—and the men stared at their cowboy boots. There was the distraction of signing the marriage license at a chaplain’s desk, and of having me find the right angle to memorialize the moment with my small camera. “Missus Brooks!” a bridesmaid announced, and there was the distraction of thin laughter.

  Then someone remembered:

  “You got to cut the cake!”

  “We want to eat that cake!”

  “You got to feed each other!”

  Hands overlapping on the knife handle, the newlyweds sliced into the pale green icing. Pretzling their arms, they stuffed each other’s mouths and left dabs of green on each other’s lips and chins. The minister cut more pieces and the groom passed out Dixie cups of water from the yellow-and-maroon cooler and after everyone ate I lined them up for a photograph in which Brooks smiles and tips his head back. He is blissful.

  In stripes they mounted their bulls, their broncos. In stripes they waved to their families in the stands, those whose families had come. Buckkey waved to his wife. His son was not there. He had not visited since that time at the park months ago. “The little—” Buckkey cut himself off, aborted his own bitterness, as we spoke near the chutes. “He’ll come. He’s going to start coming,” Buckkey decided. “I know he will. He’ll take pity on his old man.” He laughed.

  “But you know what, Dan? I’m not doing this for him anymore. And I’m not doing it to prove anything to them.” He gestured with the back of his hand in the direction of the range crew staff. “I don’t know why I’m doing it. I guess it’s just something for me. I guess I want to do better than runner-up. I guess I want to win it for me.”

  Then he walked into the ring for the Wild Horse Race. As teams of three struggled to hold their broncos by a single rope while one man tried to mount and ride, Buckkey, in stripes, was kicked in the thigh and knocked to the ground. But he kept his hold on the rope. He pulled himself up and edged forward. He maneuvered again to throw one leg over. The animal snapped a kick like a black belt’s, driving its hoof into his stomach. Buckkey was on all fours. He couldn’t stand up. Other horses thrashed nearby. No one wanted to get too close. Someone opened a chute gate, and he crawled ten or twenty feet across the arena. He crawled inside. The gate was pulled shut. From above, I stared down into the wooden well that was horse-size, bull-size, and that made Buckkey look tiny. He waited for the event to end, curled on his side like a fetus on the dirt.

  Shucked, hurled, strewn. Danny Fabre, in stripes, somersaulted off a bull, and in stripes, on the second Sunday, he got his hand caught the wrong way in his rigging, cracking the bones along the back of his palm.

  He had been thinking, still, that the warden might authorize the remaking of his ears. But in the days following his injury, his hand and lower arm in a cast, he came to a decision. He’d had enough. Other inmates, he knew, would have gone on competing.

  “I’m not going out there to get killed for these people,” he said. “I’m not going to give them what they want.”

  Alone among the riders, Donald Cook—who went on biding his time, planning for escape, and dreaming of destroying his ex-wife’s face with acid—didn’t mind the stripes. He was in favor of them. “I was thinking about how we should do this myself, even before Cain brought it up.”

  He was kicked in the forehead—half an inch from his eye—as he crept up on a bronco in one Wild Horse Race. With blood streaming into the eye, he collected himself, approached again, took another kick to the head, blacked out, came to, pushed himself off the dirt, and began yet another attempt before collapsing unconscious and being dragged away. At the hospital he received thirty-odd stitches in an arc from eyebrow to temple, and then lobbied a lieutenant to overrule his duty status so he could go on riding. On the final Sunday, in the Bust-Out, a bull trampled over him, shattering his ankle and foot. Still, before he allowed himself to be driven off by the EMS truck and casted at the hospital, he hobbled toward yet another wild horse as his teammates held a rope that could do
nothing to keep the animal from planting a hoof that would pulverize him.

  Besides the stripes, Cain had brought another innovation to the rodeo: He redesigned the competition. Always, every Sunday, twelve inmates were given places in the bareback and the bull riding. Traditionally, many of the slots had gone to the marginally experienced men, the convicts on the range crew and those who worked the few other livestock jobs at the prison. This year, Cain ordered that the regulars not be favored over the completely inexperienced. The new system, he said, made the rodeo more fair. It gave everyone a chance. But it also reduced the minimal aspect of skill within the spectacle—and increased the chances of injury. It made more likely what happened to one rider, in stripes, who sailed from a bronco and landed directly on his back, breaking a vertebra, and what happened to another, whose inner-tube belly and chunky, flaccid thighs marked him as so clearly unqualified to ride. His horse reared and rocked forward as it left the chute, flipping the heavyset man into a kind of backward pike. He landed on his head. His neck folded under him. He lay unconscious, motionless but for one quivering leg. Independent of his limp body, the leg went on twitching, as though attached to its own electric cable, until the EMS team strapped him down and carted him off.

  Johnny Brooks, on the first Sunday, drew a piebald bull that vaulted off its hind hooves right out of the chute. Then it yanked Brooks forward, almost clapping his forehead into the top of its skull. Belva was in the crowd. Kenny and Marcus, Brooks’s new stepsons, were at home, awaiting the bull-riding and all-around buckles he had pledged to win them. But for these seconds of riding, even the yearning to impress his bride and children was driven from his mind. Everything was driven from it. Brain useless with fear, body owned by reflex, Brooks was excellent and helpless, free. With his left arm held high in classic rodeo position, he sliced the air and regained his balance. The bull leapt and Brooks’s ass floated off the hide. Two feet of atmosphere divided him from the animal. Yet, even airborne, he kept control of his body. Landing on the animal’s spine, he stayed with the bull as it lunged and twisted. He kept spurring, fighting the spin. He sliced and sliced with his left arm against the pull of centrifugal force. He lasted.

  Under Cain’s system, Brooks was given only one more bull ride for the rest of the month. By that second ride, on the final Sunday, he had broken his wrist in another event and was competing in a cast. Belva had signed the plaster, and printed the names of his children and her parents, his new family. Brooks’s second bull dispatched him within two seconds.

  But he had accumulated enough points to win the all-around. The prize was awarded without much ceremony. Just before the Guts & Glory, the emcee announced Brooks’s name. Quickly, almost covertly, Cain handed him the buckle at one end of the ring, near the chutes. The crowd applauded indifferently. They didn’t know Johnny Brooks from any other Angola convict. They wanted to get to the Guts & Glory. But before the hurried presentation ended, and the bull with the red chip was sent into the ring, Johnny Brooks, in stripes, spoke to the warden. “Warden Cain,” he said, as he had two years ago, “this is for you. To show my appreciation.” And Brooks gave him the all-around buckle.

  A short while earlier, Cain had been standing with the judges in their crow’s nest. He liked to gaze down on the rodeo from there. During a break between events, he stepped toward the back of the perch and leaned against the railing. “Now listen up!” he called down to the convict riders in their section of the bleachers. “Y’all put on such a good show, made this such a successful rodeo all month, that I’m going to put an extra hundred dollars on the bull’s horns today. Give y’all some added incentive in that Guts & Glory.”

  As I stood with the inmates, I lifted my eyes toward the bloated body, the small hands spread confidently on the railing, the luxuriant white hair swept elegantly across the forehead. My eyes met Cain’s. For months he had been avoiding my attempts to interview him, scheduling and then breaking appointments. I could seize this moment, yell up to him. With the inmates all listening, he might have to ask me up to the crow’s nest for a quick round of questions. I averted my gaze.

  “And we thank you, Lord, for Warden Burl Cain,” the chaplain had spoken during the rodeo’s opening prayer. What did I really need to ask the warden? Two things, I suppose: What is in your mind? And what is in your heart? And given that these questions were, ultimately, unanswerable, I could let myself off easy. I could tell myself that my understanding of him, as he sweetened the bait for his striped men, was complete. Because I really didn’t want to talk with him. Indeed, I really didn’t want to watch the rodeo anymore. I wanted to go home.

  Then Terry Hawkins went out to grab that Guts & Glory chip. During the month, he had used both of his strategies: He had taunted the bull and run away along a tight curve; he had stood and taken the direct hit. The bull had run over him, hoof cutting his cheek and grazing his throat. It had sent him into an airborne cartwheel. And now Terry found himself too close to the fence. He knew he was too close, that if he didn’t flee he would be isolated and trapped, with nothing to distract the animal once it came for him. He stayed. He held the fence with one hand, thinking maybe he could force himself between the steel cords, escape that way. With his other hand he reached out toward the bull. It charged.

  Swinging low with its horns, the huge animal struck Terry behind the thighs, upending him and flinging him into the air. His body spun on every axis. He gyrated and wound up falling with his belly facing the ground. It was almost the equal of last year’s flight, but it didn’t last as long. The bull didn’t launch him over and over. Terry came down on a horn.

  And of course, at times, I had thought that this was exactly what he wanted: to offer himself up to Mr. Denver Tarter, the slaughterhouse owner he had murdered. I had thought that this explained his devotion to an event no one else approached so recklessly. No matter. He discovered himself indestructible. The point of the horn met with the center of his chest, but he bounced off, the wind knocked out of him, and was left, after a week’s healing, with only a bruise to the bone and a ragged, silver-dollar-size scab.

  What would I have glimpsed had the horn somehow exposed the workings of his heart? What vision?

  Unseeing, unknowing, I had, instead, only a list of reasons why he kept doing this to himself, a list I struggled to arrange in order, as though by weighing the importance of his motives, by assigning a rough percentage to each, I could understand him at his core.

  Two hundred dollars.

  The range crew.

  Self-punishment and purging.

  And then, too, another kind of cleansing, a momentary washing away of everything about his existence, in a thrill of fear and adrenaline.

  How could I know what drove him most? And how, in the end, could it matter?

  For one thing was clear, that in these desires he wanted what anyone, anywhere, did: money, a better life, a clear conscience, and oblivion.

  And like anyone who climbs to some high, public precipice, ready to jump, like anyone who takes a handful of sleeping pills and leaves the bottle by the bedside, knowing that someone will come home, like anyone who has ever so much as imagined the wording of his own suicide note, Terry, beckoning the horns in front of five thousand people, wanted to be saved, whether he deserved it or not.

  This was his way of asking.

  AFTERWORD

  “THE DEVIL’S GOING TO GET HIM,” WARDEN CAIN set forth my destiny for Louisiana’s state senate judiciary committee.

  The Harper’s magazine article—about the rodeo—that had first brought me to Angola had just been published in the February 1998 issue. But the article, in its final form, included more than the rodeo. It included Warden Cain. It included Amherst. And the chairman of the judiciary committee had called hearings, wanting to know more about my allegations, and wanting to find out exactly what was going on up at the prison.

  So the warden and I sat side by side below the senators, answering their questions. When a microphone broke, we wer
e forced to lean toward the same mike, our shoulders all but touching. The scene was intimate and, with the state’s TV news teams in full attendance, very public.

  Cain testified, at first, that he’d never demanded payment from me, only asked my opinion about what sort of advance he might expect were he to write an autobiography. Then he allowed that he had requested money, but only because he’d believed my book was to be a personal portrait of him and his family, unrelated to his position at Angola. He elaborated that in pursuing his biography I had met with his wife and family, and that, early on, I had spent time at his home. How easy it had been, he told the committee, for him to misunderstand the focus of my book. And how surely the devil would seize me for my lies.

  And yet more important than the contradictions and comedy of Warden Cain’s alibis (I have never met his wife, never been to his home) was his success at silencing any testimony that might corroborate my own about his approach to the inmates and his standing with the staff at the prison. The committee chairman, having heard through his own sources that my portrayal in the article was accurate, had tried to line up supporting witnesses. No employee would testify against Cain. Nor would any of the inmates whose long records of good conduct lent them credibility. They all believed their statements would be futile, that the hearings would amount to nothing, that their lives would remain, as ever, his.

  They were almost certainly right.

  As it was, the cameras rolled and the hearings led the evening news and made the front pages of the Louisiana papers, and eight months later Cain retains all his power and looks forward to more. A recent federal law, the Prison Litigation Reform Act, driven through Congress to ensure that incarceration not be too costly to the taxpayers or too joyful for the convicts, will likely free Angola from federal oversight within the coming months. Judge Polozola and his court-appointed investigators will be removed as the only check on Warden Cain’s rule.