God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  “No, Donald.”

  “She’s doing all right. You’d feel it if she wasn’t.”

  “She’s bad sick.”

  “You’d feel it, though. If she got any worse you’d feel it. Like my mama with that pancreas. Soon as she got it, I started getting them cramps. Started cramping up. We’re like twins. You’re the same way with yours. You’ll know. Trust me.”

  “Mine’s farther away.”

  “It don’t matter.”

  “She’s bad.”

  “Don’t start being all depressed now.”

  “I know.”

  “You better be strong.”

  “I know.”

  “You know, you lose your head they got places they’re going to put you. Places worse than them blocks.”

  “I received your brother’s card.”

  “He wrote you?”

  “You know.”

  “Yeah. I told him to.”

  “It was a nice Christmas card.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He say how special I am to you, sweetheart.”

  “Yeah. That’s true.

  “It was a very caring card.”

  “I told him about your mom and all.”

  As Alberto’s hour wound down, Cook said, “Turn around and show me your ass.”

  Alberto pressed his jeans against the chain-link, rubbed for a second against the metal. Cook did not reciprocate. Nor was he asked to. Whenever his lover made it back into the main population, their sex would follow the code: “There’s always a man and always a punk.” “He’ll take care of his own self,” Cook explained. “He better never disrespect me.”

  Within those parameters, Cook had found love at Angola.

  FIVE

  HE ORDERED ME TO HIS OFFICE. I HUNG UP THE phone in the range-crew headquarters. It was late January. In muddy boots, pants, shirt after a ride with Johnny Brooks, I drove right away to the administration building. I tried to brush the caked dirt from my clothes as I steered. I did not wish to keep the warden waiting.

  “Mr. Bugner,” he began, never quite having learned to pronounce my name, “I want to know what you’re up to.” His white hair was luxuriant. His voice was affable. His stomach, as he pushed away from his desk, made him look still more relaxed. “ ’Cause you might be hearing too much.”

  We exchanged smiles.

  “That depends what I’m not supposed to hear.” It was easy to keep my tone light. I hadn’t heard much that reflected badly on him. And I wasn’t hoping to.

  He chuckled, then let his smile fade. “I’ve given you the run of this prison. I haven’t put an officer with you. You’re out there driving from outcamp to outcamp. But why do you need so much privacy, anyhow? How much are you going to put homosexuality in that book? Or drugs? I’m starting to wonder. And what are you going to do if these inmates say bad stuff about me? You’re coming down here from New York. I don’t know who you are. How much are you going to believe what they say?”

  “Warden Cain—”

  He cut me off, politely. He radioed for two assistant wardens. He said he wanted their input, wanted them to hear my answer. This did not seem a good sign. Maybe I could reassure him during a long-winded, personal chat about religion, regeneration. But with a pair of Angola veterans to keep the talk on practical terms, I thought the meeting might end with me led permanently off the grounds.

  As we waited amid the dustless, gleaming surfaces, Cain turned his attention to signing documents. And I thought of the coverage he was used to in the national media. ABC, PBS, the Discovery Channel—in the past year they had each run programs featuring him as a warden unlike any other: balanced, sensitive, deeply thoughtful, a hero to anyone who still believed in the basic humanity of violent criminals. And it was no secret that he loved the publicity, adored the way he came out on camera. He’d urged the teams from ABC and the Discovery Channel to return for more stories. My book, he’d been certain, would bring him even more serious attention. He would be recognized as the leader of a “moral revolution” in criminal justice.

  What had triggered his nerves? We had discussed, up front, my dealing with all sides of prison life, homosexuality and drugs included. Those issues alone couldn’t have set him off. But the difference between me and a TV crew—maybe that had just dawned on him. No inmate was going to speak critically about him into a camera. With me he had no guarantees.

  Or maybe, I thought, he’d been remembering one of the few print journalists, a reporter for the Boston Globe, who had displeased him. The man had written about the food can relabeling plant the warden had tried to establish at Angola. He had mentioned, too, private business brought to D.C.I. while Cain was warden there. The writer’s suggestion of corruption, of kickbacks, had been unstated and without proof. But the suggestion had been unmistakable. For months I had tried to keep that article out of my mind. I recalled it now, as the assistant wardens, forearms thick below the short sleeves of their sportshirts, took chairs close on my right. “We’ve got his name at the front gate,” I’d heard Cain say with easy satisfaction about that reporter. “He won’t ever be back here again.” I didn’t want my name recorded there.

  “All you have to do,” the Warden set aside his documents and resumed with me now, “is put me in my comfort zone.” He leaned far back, seeming to speak past his belly, which had grown during the months I’d known him.

  “I’d like to.”

  “Well, that’s good, that’s good. ’Cause all I need is an editorial agreement. So I can read through your book before you turn it in to your editor, and make sure it’s all accurate, and make any changes I need to make, ’cause I want it to be a good book.”

  “I understand your worries,” I said, trying to stay calm as I imagined what his sanitized treatment might look like. Warden Cain no longer entering in his chariot. Terry Hawkins no longer getting that blowjob in the shower, no longer needing to be “inside some warm flesh.” And none of my fear, growing minute by minute as I sat in Cain’s overly air-conditioned office and sensed the extent of his desire to keep something hidden, that the Globe reporter had been right and, worse, that the corruption wasn’t a mere human flaw but might be the defining quality of the man. What if all the humanitarian talk was a smoke screen?

  “I understand how important it is to represent Angola and your administration correctly,” I went on, keeping my voice steady. “I know that books and movies usually turn prisons into sensationalized places, with all kinds of rapes and killings, and wardens are always sadistic villains. But I haven’t seen any rapes, and what I’m hearing about you is eighty percent good. Eighty percent’s not bad when you’re dealing with inmates talking about their keeper. So I really do understand, but I think it would be a mistake for both of us if we had any kind of editorial agreement.”

  “But it would put me in my comfort zone.”

  He sipped from his Dr Pepper, and I entered into a long explanation: Everything positive I wrote would be put into question.

  “You don’t have to tell anyone about the agreement,” he offered. “I won’t. All it’ll be is a piece of paper.”

  “But everyone will ask. How did he get such access inside a maximum-security prison? How did he convince the warden to let him roam around for a year? And I’m not that good a liar.”

  “All right. Well, you’re an honest man. In that case I’m going to have to put an officer with you. But you don’t have to worry. It won’t be a man in blue. It’ll be someone from classification. Because I don’t want to intimidate the inmates. I really don’t. I want them to talk to you. I do. I want this to be a good book. But they’re inmates, let’s remember that. They’re liable to say any old thing. So let’s put someone with you, to make sure they say what’s right.”

  “I am skeptical of what they say every second.”

  “All you have to do is give me editorial review.”

  “That would be another kind of book. ‘Warden Cain as told to.’ No one would take it seriously.”
>
  “Then,” he looked to the stone-faced veterans, “shouldn’t I put someone with him? To make sure they don’t say anything too bad about us? Isn’t that the right thing to do?”

  They nodded.

  “It would be much better,” I turned back to Cain, trying to keep the plea out of my voice, “if I could write on the acknowledgments page, ‘And many thanks to Warden Burl Cain, for allowing me unlimited access to the prison and unmonitored time with the inmates.’ Then everything that really matters to you, the humanity of the convicts and the value of your programs, all your accomplishments, will be trusted by the reader.”

  “You can write that anyway,” the warden said, finishing his Dr Pepper. “That way we’ll all be comfortable.”

  The air-conditioning was turned way too high. I wanted a sweater, I wanted a cup of coffee. I was freezing. I couldn’t give him editorial control, but a staff minder was nearly as impossible. It didn’t matter if it was someone from classification. How well could I get to know Terry Hawkins, how well could I get to know Danny Fabre, with a prison employee sitting beside us as we talked, and following me as I followed the inmates through their days? Everything I wanted for my year would be lost.

  “This might sound crazy,” I started, “but if you want to be sure I’m not on some muckraking mission, why don’t you give me a lie-detector test? Why don’t you hook me up right now, and ask whatever you want to ask about my intentions?” I held my jaw tight, my teeth clamped shut, to keep from shivering.

  “A lie-detector test?”

  “I’m serious. Your investigations unit must have one. Put the machine right on your desk. Hook me up. Ask whatever you need so this project can go forward the way it should. Let’s clear the air.”

  He smiled. “How much are you getting for this book?”

  “How much?”

  “How much is your publisher paying you?”

  I had been surprised back at Christmas by his question about God; now I was caught completely off guard. We had gone from the intimacy of faith to the intimacy of money. I laughed nervously. “All right,” I heard myself say. “I guess I owe you an answer.”

  Why? Why did I owe him anything? I felt I did, I suppose, because he had let me into his kingdom, because, in a country whose laws and courts gave him nearly unmitigated say as to who in the media his prisoners spoke with, he had given his prisoners to me.

  But my playing along in what became a guessing game—“More than twenty—five?” he asked. “More than forty?”—came, as well, from a need to retain some feeling of strength. My advance was neither large nor small, but it was about the same size as his yearly salary.

  “Well, that’s good, that’s good,” he said. “That’s more than I thought.”

  He ruminated silently on the figure.

  “Look,” he continued, “here’s what we’ll do. We’ll let you finish your visit like you want. You can have your privacy. And then next month, I’m going up to Amherst, Massachusetts. To the university up there. They want me to come speak. It’s a symposium. So what we’ll do, we’ll meet up there. That’s your country. That’s Yankee country. So I’ll meet you on your grounds, and we’ll work out all this editorial business. We’ll get it straightened out. It won’t be any problem. Everybody’s going to be happy. You’re going to write a good book. The right book. I know that.”

  We would work it all out in Amherst, and then I could drive with him to the lecture hall. There he would speak on a subject that tore at his heart, the death penalty.

  I spent the final day of that trip to Angola—my last day at the prison before the warden opened himself up to me—with Danny Fabre. Hair newly cut, making no attempt to conceal his unconcealable ears, he sat before a computer in his GED classroom.

  On the screen, a wolf leapt off a cliff, pounced toward a house belonging to little pigs. One pig popped up onto the roof with a bow and arrow. Danny searched the multiple-choice answers in his computerized study course. If he picked the right one, the arrow would glide across the screen to annihilate the wolf. There were ten questions in each section—math, science, history, and spelling and grammar. There were ten wolves waiting on the cliff, three pigs in the house. If Danny missed three questions, the house was destroyed.

  Math, at the moment, was a good subject for the wolves. Common denominators had just arisen in the curriculum. One third plus three fourths, four fifths minus two tenths-more than one home was consumed. Danny switched programs to one that awarded fork-toting devils for every correct answer. If he did well, he could assemble an entire satanic legion. He amassed a squad of three.

  “Can you ask your teacher for help?” I suggested.

  “I might,” he said. And didn’t.

  Twenty computers were placed around the perimeter of the room. The twenty students worked independently, on whatever subjects they chose, each facing a screen and, behind that, a bit of blank wall. The teacher, one of the handful the prison employed through the state education department, sat at the front of the room and did not move. Not once, in the hour I sat with Danny that morning, did the teacher lean over a student’s shoulder to guide him through a problem; not once did he address the class from his desk, which was mostly walled off from the inmates by a book-lined hutch. Yet Danny spoke highly of him. Danny spoke, in fact, with gratitude and affection. Two months ago, the man had taught him to use the mouse.

  I had to wonder just how much effort Warden Cain put into carrying out his mission. How much did he try to inspire his staff? So far, I’d never actually bumped into him on the grounds, never actually seen him stop in at the Toy Shop to offer his encouragement, never seen him stroll the Walk to remind his staff of his goals by his mere presence. Probably it was sheer chance that our paths hadn’t crossed. But one thing was certain: He hadn’t influenced this instructor. If he had, Danny might have learned to assume, at the late age of thirty-three, that teachers were there to assist him when he couldn’t figure out an answer.

  Yet Danny seemed able to thrive, or at least inch upward, on the minimal attention given him. And on the good fortune of a spot in that classroom. Since October he had climbed two tenths of a grade level in reading, from a 6.9 to a 7.1, and despite today’s demolition of the little pigs’ house, from a 6.2 to a 7.2 in math.

  Giving up on fractions, he moved on to science. He read a passage that would lead to questions, to another try at earning an army of devils. “Look at this,” he said. “Are you reading this? Did you know this? I think I’m going to use this tonight.” He copied down the three paragraphs in deliberate handwriting.

  School ended at ten. After count and lunch, he went to his job turning dirt on the yard. The job entailed a good deal of hoe-dragging, slapping at soil already turned, yet it involved occasional teamwork, or at least working side by side. Each man was given a “cut,” a section of ground about seven feet across, to till. The men worked in a line, but not all that close. Danny did not do well at such collaborative effort. He often felt the world was crowding around him, misusing him. The other convicts got in his way, the freemen planned the projects inefficiently. Usually, by around two in the afternoon, Danny wished the man next to him would say something, start something, so he could let loose. He wished the freeman would bark at him one more time—Danny would teach him a lesson in respect, the kind of lesson he’d quit teaching lately. He wouldn’t care what happened to him afterward; let them lock his ass up; he would do it; fuck Toastmasters and GED and all that; people didn’t call him Popeye for nothing.

  But today he chopped at the dirt without even noticing the crew he usually perceived converging around him. He thought of tonight’s speech, was thrilled by his topic. Until this morning he hadn’t quite known what he would speak on, a particular problem because this assignment, from his Toastmasters “Communication and Leadership Program” manual, was supposed to be written out and read aloud. There would be no hiding his lack of preparation. He’d almost been ready to find one of the Forgotten Voices executives, to
own up. The admission would not be treated with sympathy. A sonorous voice was Danny’s natural strength; preparation wasn’t. The members had urged him, after recent speeches, to spend more time organizing his thoughts and rehearsing key points in advance. If he admitted that he had nothing written at all, they might put him on probation. They would, at the very least, lecture him on his responsibilities, on the limited space in the club, on the Forgotten Voices’ goal: to prove to everyone the positive things convicts could achieve. Well, fuck them, Danny had been thinking over the past few days. Fucking rat checkout model prisoners. How many weak assholes were in that punk organization? All of them, it looked like.

  Now he thought that if this speech went well they might elect him to the team for their next outside competition. He might represent Angola at the next Battle of the Institutions against chapters from other Louisiana prisons. And if he could make trusty before the Forgotten Voices traveled to the Holiday Inn for the next District 68 Toastmasters convention like it had last year, he might step up to the microphone and hold that free-world audience spellbound.

  Back at his cot, he wrote out the paragraphs yet more carefully in his spiral notebook. I let myself speculate—because of his Toastmasters ambitions and his short haircut that granted his ears their extraordinary prominence—that his desire for cosmetic surgery might be fading. I knew he hadn’t heard anything more about approval for the operation, and I asked if he still thought about it.

  “Yeah. I think about it all the time. Have I ever told you about the way I got picked on when I was a kid?”

  He’d tried to give me the details. I’d deflected his attempts. I’d told myself it was because the phrases of torment would be so predictable. But I think I didn’t want to hear him out because I knew his pain would be absolutely basic, fundamental. I couldn’t bear to find myself standing with a murderer who was also a defenseless child. Now, again, I showed no interest in the specifics of his childhood.

  “Yeah, I think about it,” he said. “Wouldn’t you?”