God of the Rodeo (3 page)

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 flipped 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.

T
HE 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!”

About five foot seven, round, with full white hair swept across his forehead, Cain had waved to the rodeo crowd.

In September of 1996, a month before this year’s event, I had met him for the first time. Our introduction came at the end of a week I had spent at the prison, preparing what I’d thought would be only a magazine article about the inmate riders. “So you want to talk about the barbarism of the rodeo,” he said before hello, before we shook hands, when I was shown into his office. He smiled. His candor more than counterbalanced the pictures I’d seen and descriptions I’d heard of his grand entrance. Leaning back at the head of his long, polished conference table, he acknowledged that barbarism was a factor.

“Look,” he explained, “the rodeo, to us, is kind of like making a good cake.” He wore a white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and a colorful, unknotted tie draped around his shoulders like a minister’s stole. Now he sat forward, interlacing his pale, chubby fingers on the gleaming wood. “And so there’s all the ingredients in it. Some of the ingredients by themselves wouldn’t be fit to eat. But you put them all together and you have a nice cake.”

A nice cake? I had seen the rodeo once, as a spectator, several years before. In the Buddy Pick-Up a careening rider’s forehead had connected, at full gallop, with a metal post. I had learned that the man was carted off to the prison medical center, then shackled and shipped out to a hospital in Baton Rouge, where his head was rebuilt with a steel plate.

But I had heard nice things about Burl Cain. And the highest praise had come from those I expected to be his natural enemies, the state’s capital-defense attorneys. As warden, Cain carried out the executions. He stood in the chamber and gave the signal for the lethal injection. But he had made great changes for the men on death row. Given them regular contact visits with their families, something Angola had allowed only once each year and most prisons in the country seldom if ever permit. (At those others, the men awaiting execution
see their visitors through Plexiglas or glimpse them through perforated steel.) And offered them literacy classes. Literacy classes! For what? They were going to die! Cain insisted on their humanity, focused on the fact that they were living now. And he hoped to save them. Though they were free to read what they wished, he hoped they would read the Bible. He hoped they found faith. Cain’s own religious beliefs bred his compassion—and his deep misgivings about the death penalty. “I don’t know what God would have said if He’d been in that room,” a local reporter recalled him muttering, visibly shaken, after his first execution. At his second and most recent, as the convict lay strapped to the gurney and the technician struggled to find a vein, Cain had held the condemned man’s hand.

“I didn’t come to the rodeo for about eight years,” he went on, his head almost bowed over his folded hands, “because I saw a man stomped and paralyzed. And that grieved me greatly, and I wouldn’t come back. I don’t want to see the inmates hurt. I don’t want to see the blood and I don’t want to see the guts. But the rodeo raises thousands of dollars for the Inmate Welfare Fund. And the rodeo is good for morale, for those riders, for everyone involved. The rodeo brings lifeblood into this prison.”

So it was a necessary cake. The tickets, I knew, supplied much of the Inmate Welfare Fund’s account. And though the participants rarely mentioned this as a reason for signing up, the Fund helped pay for the GED program and the inmate-run magazine, the
Angolite
, for TVs and sports equipment, for security on the rare trip out for a family funeral if the convict could get permission—things the state wouldn’t appropriate money for, that made an entire life in Angola bearable and possibly transformative.

And he was right about morale. The riders, the concessionaires, the inmate artisans, all looked forward to the rodeo. As for lifeblood, maybe the occasion was, in a sense, sacramental. The men offered up their bodies, and in return the public came to see them, acknowledged their existence. For the rest of the year Angola was nowhere,
isolated in its own corner of the state, the nearest tiny town thirty miles away. The rodeo was a rite of grace, of barely perceptible reconciliation between the inmates and society.

Even the convicts who ran the
Angolite
, self-educated and sardonic men, had said something to affirm this. They were, mostly, harshly critical of the rodeo. One editor had told me, “Most of Angola’s inmates suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder,” by way of explaining the men’s willingness to be broken as long as they were noticed. “And whenever someone’s paid attention to them, it’s been to beat them up in one way or another.” A second editor had added, with laughing resignation, “One thing God gave all of us: a man’s allowed to choose his own path to hell,” meaning not that signing up for the rodeo was a sin, but that the whole spectacle was a goddamned shame. Yet they’d said that if it were up to them, the rodeo would continue. “It brings the public here. They lay eyes on us.”

Certainly nothing else would bring them. No one was going to drive hours for an inmate basketball game.

Cain’s light blue eyes, when they weren’t lowered toward his solemn, prayerful hands, were leveled on me. He talked of wanting society to see the inmates as people, “not as some devil with a fork and a tail,” of wishing the public would gain some common sense about sentencing, see it in terms of economics if not morality, tell their legislators to “cut these life no parole sentences and give a man the chance to get out, the chance for a hearing, once he’s at least forty and has served twenty years.” He spoke of the need for maintaining hope among the inmates, and of his effort to do so despite the lottery-like odds of a governor’s pardon. He tried to make life meaningful even here. He was fostering the GED program, nurturing a club that built toys for charity, an inmate CPR team that traveled outside the prison to give classes in local schools, a Toastmasters public-speaking club, the Forgotten Voices, that had just been honored by Toastmasters International. He talked of the work on the range crew, of men like Johnny Brooks learning to rope and tag, to
palpate cattle for pregnancy, and to birth baby calves. And he talked about religion, about the absolute forgiveness he extended, according to the Gospels, to every inmate as they entered the world of Angola, about the new clergy he’d added to the staff, about saving souls. “The first meeting I had when I came here to Angola, the first meeting I called on the first day, was with the chaplains. I told them that they are shepherds and that they feed sheep. And these inmates are our sheep. God put them in my charge and I’m responsible for them, just like they’re my children.”