God of the Rodeo (34 page)

It was, perhaps, the closest thing to a miracle at hand: the provision of time, the possibility of quietness, the difference between “tear him apart” and “stay there forever.”

I
ASKED
M
YRON
H
ODGES—THE
GUITARIST
L
ITTELL
had once heard playing “The Wind Cries Mary,” the guitarist I had once heard playing the same wistful Hendrix song, the guitarist I had hoped to hear at last year’s rodeo, the guitarist whose band had woken late for a rodeo rehearsal and been told by Warden Cain the day before the event, “Y’all won’t touch an instrument again as long as I’m warden of this penitentiary!”—what advice he would give Johnny Brooks about getting married in prison. I don’t know why I have waited so long to write about Myron Hodges. Sometimes I think I have put it off, postponed it until so near the end, precisely because Myron, of all the inmates I knew well at Angola, was the man I imagined freeing. Johnny Brooks or Buckkey Lasseigne may have been equally safe bets for a second chance. But for me, Myron was the one. Despite the warnings I gave myself about fantasies of pardon-board heroics, I often imagined helping him out of Angola, helping him to a new life as a musician.

As my year wound to a close, Myron emptied trash cans and mopped floors at Angola’s hospital. When cellblock inmates were brought to be examined, they waited their turns in one-man cages; sometimes one masturbated to the sight of the nurses walking by.
Myron mopped up the semen. But he also helped to change the bedsore dressings on a man who’d broken his neck in a prison football game two years ago and was now a quadriplegic. James, the quadriplegic, often requested Myron’s help. He liked Myron to shave him as well. Myron was careful, and Myron told him stories about his music and about his marriage.

“Get that yellow pan right there from under the cabinet, and rinse it out and fill it with water,” James had instructed the first time the nurses sent Myron in to do the shaving. “Now get the lotion from out the top drawer.”

These days James said only, “Run me another ep.”

Another episode. Another installment of Myron’s Angola story.

James didn’t have to give any other instructions. Myron came into the room easily now, without hesitation or revulsion or fear, saying, “Well, looks like you’re about ready for a nice tight shave,” and going straight to the cabinet for the bowl and the lotion and the washcloths, and setting them on the bedside table. Myron knew to ask for two disposable razors at the nurses’ station, not just one, and these he placed next to the other things. Then he sat on the edge of the bed. With wet fingertips, he painted the Vaseline Intensive Care, which James preferred to shaving gel, over the left side only of the paralytic’s face, because the shaving was slow and otherwise the cream would dry before he reached the right side.

The face had plenty of movement. Between strokes of the razor, as Myron dipped the blade in the warm water, James smiled often, gold caps on his front teeth. Plaited hair, with balls of frizz at the ends of the braids, lay on the pillow.

Movement ended completely at the neck. A nursing home, to which James’s care had been farmed out for a while, had failed to perform any therapy on his dead limbs, so the muscles in his arms had contracted irreversibly. His right forearm lay across his chest, the wrist bent beyond 90 degrees, as though the palm were trying to flatten
itself to the arm. His left hand, half-fisted, lay permanently just below his throat.

His hands might have modeled for a dishwashing liquid, except that they far exceeded any woman’s dream of elegance or delicacy or smoothness. The slender, atrophied fingers were a caricature of femininity, and the backs of the hands, contracted to the width of a child’s, were barely wider than the wrists, adding to the effect of hallucinatory grace and uselessness. The atrophic skin glowed. It was like a dark and grainless wood, polished to a glassy extreme. And at his folded elbows, infant-size joints on arms that looked like toxic deformities, you could almost see a reflection of the room in his waxy flesh.

The rest stayed under the sheet as Myron edged carefully with the white plastic razor around the goatee—James’s special pride, because one of the nurses had said she liked it—and told him about the beginnings of the traveling band. The group had been through other incarnations going back in prison history, but this one had received Warden Whitley’s support, in 1991, after Myron taught himself an old Led Zeppelin song. He had grown up in the New Orleans projects; he had not grown up on Led Zeppelin, nor had any of the other musicians who hoped to get the traveling band off the ground. But they knew their warden had been a Zeppelin fan since his days in classification in the seventies, and when they got word that Whitley would show up at one of their rehearsals, Myron made sure to learn every progression, the nuance of every high-volume, high-necked note that lanced the air above the bass line. Zeppelin wasn’t, in the end, all that far from Hendrix, and before turning to Funkadelic and George Benson, he had grown up on Hendrix.

Whitley called him aside. “If I make you trusty and then approve you to travel, are you going to run off on me?”

Myron was only twenty-six years old then, had been at Angola only five years, was serving life for killing a nightclub owner during a robbery. “I can’t answer that question,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because if I say no, you’ll think I’m just telling you what you want to hear. And if I say yes, I’m not going to be in that band.”

“You’ve got a point,” Whitley said, and approved him.

The Big River Band performed all over the state, pulling up in its mesh-windowed schoolbus, with one guard for an escort, at the Baton Rouge State Fair, at the Trade Days in Natchitoches, at the Rayne Frog Festival and the Four Rivers Raft Race, at schools and nursing homes (where the elderly clapped along to Michael Jackson tunes), playing five or six gigs every month. They recorded four original songs in a Baton Rouge studio, the first Angola inmates to record their work while serving time since 1934 when Leadbelly, discovered by a musicologist, had sent a blues song to the statehouse and won a pardon.

Myron dreamed he could play his way out of Angola, that someone powerful would someday hear him and be so moved by his talent he would convince the governor to give him clemency, but the song he chose for the studio was a different kind of plea. It went back to something that had happened when he first came to prison. His girlfriend, six years older than Myron, a singer he had grown up admiring and finally begun a relationship with four years before his arrest—the woman he had planned to marry—had tried to visit him, to keep things going. He had refused to put her on his visiting list. And then he had stopped calling.

The backup begged high:

And the lead singer told her:

The harmony begged:

And the lead singer told her:

The saxophone climbed:

And left the lead singer beneath it:

The harmony:

Finished with the first phase of shaving James, Myron dabbed away the excess lotion with a washcloth. He emptied the plastic bowl and filled it again with fresh water. The room was quiet except for a few droplets falling back into the bowl when he wet his fingers to start again. A blurred and crackling voice, volume low, came from the
walkie-talkie of a lieutenant passing by in the hall. “Can you give me a 21 at 2257?” Across the hall an open ward of twenty or thirty beds held the lifers dying of cancer, of AIDS, of other diseases and complications people die of anywhere. James’s room was a lock-down cell for patients deemed violent or obscene. The heavy steel door had an eight-inch slot where food trays could be passed through. James’s door stayed open. His prison record had been poor, but he was, oddly, somewhat upbeat now, and certainly he was no risk to expose himself or attack anyone.

Though Myron’s life as a travel-approved trusty had been far from what James had known as a big-stripe, James had no trouble believing the scenes Myron described: crowds pressed to the stage; the manager of a Jordache factory and his wife half-adopting him and filling his locker box with jeans; a woman reporter from Channel 9 covering the studio session and predicting that he would, truly, play his way out of prison. Once, James had heard Mega Sound, the in-house version of Big River, perform at Camp C. The band played Prince and Maze and then Mardi Gras music that started the inmates second-lining, all the men dancing in frenzied New Orleans tradition (minus the umbrellas), shaking and fast-footing wildly, competitively, waving bandannas in the air. He knew what Myron was capable of, both the groove and the speed.

And on the road Myron’s looks couldn’t have hurt either: the perfectly molded features, the round wire-rimmed glasses that made him look thoughtful, the V-shaped torso.

Myron spread the lotion over both sides of James’s face this time; the second, touch-up shave would go more quickly. With the new blade, he rounded the jawbone. A pinhead of blood appeared.

“Man, I’m gonna need minor surgery,” James said.

Myron winced, blotted, twisted his lips in mock worry as though staring at a major wound. “Minor? I don’t know about
minor
, but you’re going to need some surgery.”

“Run me another ep.”

“All right.”

“Wait. Take the edge of the sheet and rub my eyebrow. My eyebrow’s itching.”

Myron brushed across it.

“Rub
it.”

Myron pressed down.

“Rub it harder, man. Don’t be scared to rub it.
Rub
it.”

“Hey. I’m trying to be sure I don’t break it.”

“Man,” James said, “you can’t never break me.”

Through his first six years in prison Myron had made himself numb. He had kept in contact with his mother, who visited every few months by taking the special Batiste Company bus, twenty dollars per ticket, that ran through the Seventh Ward of New Orleans and onto I-10 and 61 and 66 to Angola. And he arranged to speak occasionally with his older brother, Felton, who was in Angola for the same killing. But gradually his brother had grown incoherent and erratic—schizophrenic, Myron thought, and very, very paranoid-and he’d spent years at J and later been sent to the prison’s mental-health unit. Often, Felton had no grasp on reality, scarcely knew where he was.

These were Myron’s close relationships, until Natchitoches. There, a little girl who looked like an Eskimo yelled up to the stage, requesting a song by MC Hammer. Her mother wrote to Myron a week later. She had seen his picture in the newspaper the day after the gig; it was now taped to her daughter’s wall between MC Hammer and Big Bird.

Marie, a thin, pretty white woman with light brown hair and a low, raspy voice, a medical technician soon to enroll in college, and LaShae, the chunky four-year-old with long black pigtails and puffy cheeks and yellow-toned skin, started visiting. In the trusty park, LaShae devised a game with sticks and paper cups: Run a stick
through a cup and you had a sword with a handle. She and Myron dueled on a slab of concrete that was supposed to hold another picnic table. The table had never been built; the slab, LaShae announced, was the roof of a skyscraper. If she forced him off, he fell one thousand feet to his death. If he forced her, she turned instantly into Spider Woman.

They had plans, he and LaShae. A boy on her street had been to a farm in Canada, and reported seeing lots of animals. She wanted to move to Canada. He was going to take her. They would travel in an eighteen-wheeler, which he would teach her to drive. (He had no idea how to drive one himself.) At the picnic tables and in the visiting shed, he described to her how the lessons would go and how the journey would feel and how, after Canada, they would swing back into the States and stay on the road, he the star musician and she his manager. To seal the pact, she gave him an empty, torn-open plastic sack stenciled with Power Rangers—she decided to keep the fighting figures themselves.

He folded the sack and saved it in his locker box. He dreamed recurringly of their trip to Canada. He was driving the eighteen-wheeler, she in the cab next to him. Things were exactly as intended, except that they weren’t on a highway; they were in an eighteen-wheeler
speedboat
on the Mississippi River. Other speedboats passed them by. He felt, in the dream, that something was terribly wrong, though he and LaShae were laughing, she bragging about how much better she could drive the truck than Myron and telling him to pull over so they could switch places, and he promising he would, just as soon as they were out of the river. The boats kept zooming by. He kept shifting gears. “You can’t drive any faster than that?” she kept giggling.

During the visits, with LaShae persuaded to hunt bugs if they were outside or sent to the Pac-Man machine if they were in, Marie and Myron spoke of how inevitably he would be released, because
of either his music or the errors in his trial. Or both. No question the errors were cause for reversal. It was open and shut. And once the judge saw that he was a member of the Angola Big River Band, and realized how talented he was and how much joy he’d brought to people all over the state, and noticed how good his conduct had been in prison-never running off, never causing a bit of trouble despite all the freedoms the administration had given him;
never breaking a trust—
he would suggest to the prosecution that Myron be allowed a manslaughter plea. And with the judge’s discretion on resentencing, Myron would be out in just a few more years. Marie’s grainy voice made this future seem full of substance, already almost real. And whenever he doubted it, whenever he listed all the other inmates he knew clinging to all their certainties, she told him, voice even lower and raspier, “You’re special. You’re going to get out of here. You’re not the type to be in prison.”