God of the Rodeo (37 page)

“How you doing?” Brooks asked, slipping between the other women to stand cautiously beside his bride in the sanctuary’s entry-way.

“I’m all right, Johnny,” she said slowly. She looked drained by the two-and-a-half-hour drive and by a delay while the women lined up, in the hut outside the gate, to be scanned with a metal detector and patted down by hand, and she looked dazed by the fact of this moment in this place, deeper inside the prison than she had ever been, down the Walk on this cloudless, dry-aired, gorgeous morning,
through internal gate after gate after gate, past the disciplinary cases in their jumpsuits dusting the cement walls and the yard orderlies slapping listlessly with their hoes at the already-tilled ground and the library man tugging his crate of old law dictionaries toward the cellblocks, casters squeaking as he pulled the fraying rope. There was, between bride and groom in the chapel, a prolonged hush. There was nothing.

“Hi, Johnny,” she said for a second time since arriving. And then her smile materialized—a smile that remained almost without interruption for the next half hour-heightened by the flowers and the earrings and the necklace and the dress against her brown and smooth and glowing skin.

The stripes—for Johnny Brooks, for Buckkey Lasseigne, for all the riders—were Cain’s idea. Before the rodeo he put out word that he wanted the previous year’s participants brought to the Main Prison visiting shed. “Right away.” There he told his audience of his vision, what an improvement he thought it would be, how well the riders would stand out. “But we’re not going to force y’all to wear them. We’re going to put it to a vote. How many of y’all want to wear those uniforms? Raise your hands.”

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.

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.