God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  Littell had left Angola sometime after midnight on January 21. The guard kicked at his bed and told him to pack his stuff. That was the way they always did it, late and without notice. Whenever an inmate was transferred to another facility—and the state treatment center counted as another lockup—the prison gave him no chance to call, or have anyone else call, his family or friends. That way the bus couldn’t be ambushed and the prisoner freed.

  There were no other transfers that night. The old school bus, requisitioned by the prison and painted blue and outfitted with steel mesh over the windows, was empty. Littell asked to sit close to the front so he could see out the windshield. The guard had no objections. Littell was cuffed and shackled.

  “I guess you’ve earned your choice of seating.”

  “You can believe,” Littell said, “I’m never going to see this road again.”

  No one spoke for the rest of the trip. On that night of gauzy rain, Littell watched the forest going by, the headlights of the few cars coming toward the prison, and, after twenty miles, when the bus turned onto another two-lane highway, a man getting out of his car at a gas station. Littell turned his head to keep that man in sight through the steel mesh. That vision—a man stepping toward the pumps in the glare of the station’s lighting—injected Littell with the knowledge that Angola was behind him, as though the awareness were now surging through his body rather than merely lying in his mind. Here was life.

  “I felt like I was coming out of a cave after being lost underground for a long time. I felt like weights had just been lifted off me. I felt like I could have jumped up and just flown right out the roof of that bus.

  “Because let me try to explain the way you feel in Angola. Can you remember the most upset, the most depressed you’ve ever been in your life? When a loved one died? Has your mother died? Or someone that close? Can you put yourself back into what that felt like? Well, that’s the way you feel at Angola. That’s the way you feel every day.”

  Over the years he had dreamt in his sleep, sometimes, of freedom. The dreams took repeated form: He sat under a tree, by a river, with friends he’d known, and suddenly he was alone beside a woman. The sensations were easy, fine, heated. But always, just before the actuad sex, another consciousness crept in, telling him this couldn’t be real. He woke to his cell, or to the rows and rows of cots in the dorm.

  That other consciousness crept in now, about the man at the gas station, about a traffic light, about the billboards and the stores on the roadside—This might be real but not for you; you will never touch it, never be out in it—and kept insinuating itself even after he had finished his final two months and was officially discharged from the state treatment center and the Department of Corrections, and was living on the second floor of O’Brien House.

  At O’Brien, a fragile gray building that stood across a vacant lot from a Greyhound depot, he slept in a cramped four-man dorm room bearing little resemblance, in his mind, to the dorms at Angola. The floor had carpet, his bunk a thick mattress. His locker box—the same size and shape as those at the prison—where he kept his clothes and his hair, was made of painted wood. He actually slept only a few hours each night. He didn’t dream at all. Until two or three every morning he lay awake on his left side, so he could stare out the window at Florida Boulevard. The headlights went by between the trees that framed his view. Car after car after car after car, it took hours for him to grow tired of those passing lights; they might have been meteors.

  Awake before dawn, he dressed in jeans and a new turtleneck. He’d bought the shirt with money from the bit of yard work he’d found through O’Brien’s director. He sat on the front stoop to stare at the dusty peonies in the flower beds or the Mardi Gras mask wired to a pipe or, with the fixation of an entomologist, at bugs in the grass. Sometimes he walked to the corner and back. In O’Brien’s voluntary program, from which he could legally walk away at any moment, he was permitted to venture past the corner only with a resident “buddy,” unless he was looking for work and had the director’s permission. The rule was stifling, but hardly a challenge after Angola, and he was half-grateful for the restriction. Listening to the other residents recount their crack binges at O’Brien’s group meetings, and glimpsing the drug trade in one of the buildings across the street, he recognized himself from fifteen years ago, knew that his unraveling drug life had been part of what had led him to stick a gun in that cashier’s face (though the immediate reason had been rage when she seemed to ignore his request for cigarettes), and he couldn’t be certain that old self was relegated to the past.

  “My name is Littell and I am a drug addict,” he said when everyone else had awoken and O’Brien’s day had begun and its first meeting gathered in a sunken room two steps down off the first floor hallway, a room with two cheap prints of birdlife on the walls and some old board games on a shelf and a Formica coffee table in the middle and not enough tattered couch space for all the residents, so that the coffee table was a crowded bench. Littell’s voice was hoarse with tension and low on volume. He sat near the door to the backyard.

  “I was out on the stoop thinking, like I do all the time, and I know I don’t say a whole lot in these meetings, but I want to tell you all thank you for your support. I’ve been incarcerated for so long, and I’ve done a lot of things up there I don’t even like to think about, but I know I can establish myself. If I just stay away from drugs. And I know I can. ’Cause when I was coming up I got into that angel dust, that was the thing back then, and my daddy got so frightened of me, so frightened of his own son, he run me off with a pistol. I just hope you all can understand. I been in Angola. There’s no love up there. There’s no support like this here, like Miss Katherine tries to give us. So sometimes I just don’t know how to speak. I don’t even know how to smile. People ask me, ‘Why do you always look like that? Why is your mouth always looking like that?’ And I try to undo it. I try to pull at my lips to make them look some other way.”

  Even now, giving a demonstration, prying at his lips with his fingers and, in the process, pushing at his cheeks in what should have been a comic moment, he did not smile. The other residents did not laugh. He seemed to make them uneasy. He did not belong among them. Their vulnerabilites floated around them like an atmoshpere they exhaled, while he seemed inviolable. Through the entire meeting, hunched on the two steps leading down into the room, a woman in white stretch pants kept flicking her cigarette lighter and running the flame along the hairs of her forearm, up and down, up and down, as though to distract herself with imminent singeing from the drugs she would rather be taking or the alcohol she would rather be drinking or the thoughts about herself she wished would burn away. A man whose round head seemed to sit directly on his round torso had spoken for ten desperate minutes about his television needs for the coming weekend; no one so much as sighed with impatience. There were sizable men in that room who might have shrunk away and drowned themselves at a critical word. But Littell’s expression looked unchangeable. The cigarette-lighter woman could have held the flame against his mouth, and his lips would have kept their harsh composure.

  “But I’m learning,” he said. “I’m trying to learn how to bend my lips the right way, do that smiling thing. Just give me a little time. I’m just a little throwed off. But I’m learning.”

  “All right, Littell!” the director, Miss Katherine, bony, exuberant, one of the few whites in the room, burst out. She was a recovered alcoholic herself.

  Her piercing optimism had no effect on his face. Nor did the residents’ applause.

  “Thank you, Littell,” she spoke more calmly. “Those issues that you talked of, that feeling that you just can’t allow any positive emotion, might be masking all kinds of things, all kinds of hurt. And feelings of abandonment, because of where you’ve been…”

  Still his features showed no reaction.

  “And this community can help you.” She leaned forward in her chair. “We’re here for support. If we’re trying to understand
ourselves on our own, we’re going to go nowhere fast. My best thinking when I was on my own was getting me into trouble. Into that downward spiral. We need each other. You just give us a little time.”

  Her voice, even in her calmer moments, had the insistent energy of someone still fighting off her own collapse, though earlier in the meeting she had mentioned her fifteenth anniversary without a drink. However precarious her own life, she sounded undaunted by the lives of her clients, by the isolation of Littell. Her graying hair a helmet of feathers around gaunt, animated features, she threw herself at them.

  “You all ready to link arms?” she asked, and answered herself, “Yes, you are, because I am the Boss Applesauce!” She let out a trill of nervous laughter.

  Everybody stood in a tight circle, elbows intertwined, and prayed in unison:

  … Thy kingdom come

  Thy will be done…

  And then, still joined, chanting like rappers, the residents gave their own incantation:

  Keep coming back

  ’Cause it works if you work it

  If you don’t you die

  So live it, everyday One day at a time

  Whoops, there it is!

  “Man, I need this place.”

  From the stoop, Littell and I watched a few neighbors sipping beer, at dusk, at a foldout table they’d brought to the empty lot of gravel and patchy grass across the street. “If I wasn’t here, I’d be under a fucking bridge. And you know something? I know I could go home. I finally called my mother the other day, and she asked me why I didn’t call when I first got out. I wasn’t expecting that. I haven’t seen her in ten years. I figured I wasn’t welcome.” His voice faded away for a while, as if he wasn’t satisfied with what he’d just said, but hesitated to say what he meant.

  “Sometimes I feel guilty ’Cause I think I should feel that love that’s hard for me to feel. Even with my mother, even before prison, I didn’t have that emotion for my family. It’s nothing my parents did. They didn’t beat me, they didn’t abuse me. They tried to teach me all the right things. I just didn’t develop that strong bond. It’s like something missing in me. I’ve never had a real solid relationship with any woman. Just wayward types, ho’s. That’s who I always went for. Never that feeling. Never like we were on the same page. If I think about the fucking situation I’m in now, some way it’s all tied together.”

  A gleaming red sports car drove onto the vacant lot. Its driver left the engine running and the door open and hip-hop music on low, and joined the beer drinkers.

  “I want that type of relationship with a woman so bad, I know I could be bamboozled. I want to lean back—I mean, all the initial phases have to be over with, all that—and sit behind her on the couch, just talking. She’s leaning back against me, right against my chest, with my arms around her like this.” He demonstrated with arms held outward, encircling air, and added, “Whenever problems came up, I’d have the perspective and knowledge to deal with them. I’d stay calm and handle things.”

  One of the drinkers jumped onto the table and did an old break-dance move, spinning on his shoulders, somehow frictionless, whirling, whirling. He retook his seat as if he’d done nothing.

  “But I got to establish myself first. I got to get out on my own. Some kind of apartment and a vehicle. You see, I don’t know if I can get started getting those things here at O’Brien, ’Cause you’re not allowed to miss but so many meetings. I’m thirty-eight years old. I ain’t no fucking teenybopper anymore. But you know what’s worse? You’re not allowed no fucking sex. They tell you none for six months. They suggest not for a year. When I heard that? At my first community meeting? When Miss Katherine said that about the Boss Applesauce and does someone want to tell the new residents the rules? She says it’s because relationships is part of what got us in trouble in the first place, and we don’t know how to choose the right ones yet, but she’s not used to dealing with nobody who’s spent fifteen fucking years in prison, fifteen years without even looking at a pussy. I wish I was in Lake Charles. I know some ladies there, I could take care of my business, take this pressure off. Baton Rouge is too clean. Where’s the tenderloin, where’s the stroll? The other day I went out, I told Miss Katherine I was looking for work, and I couldn’t even find a store selling that porno. I wish I’d brought my shot magazines from Angola. I gave them all away when I got short. I need to get near some pussy. I need to smell it. It’s a pressure on me. Fifteen years! Fifteen years! I’m looking for the dirt, man, I want to see the fucking dirt.”

  A month later, still having tried nothing to fight my way back inside Angola (as though the warden had depleted my will the way the geography of the prison affected many of the inmates’), I joined an audience of sixth and seventh graders. Littell, along with five current Angola convicts, sat before the church youth group. We were in a part of Baton Rouge far from O’Brien—those Episcopalian youth in that church basement wore short pants and the whitest, cleanest socks I had ever seen. I kept staring at those tube socks. It was as if their mothers bought them a new pair after every soccer game, every tennis lesson.

  The church minister gave a monthly service at Angola, and Miss Katherine was fairy godmother to the CPR team, booking their classes around Baton Rouge. Tonight they had arranged for a group of five lifers-escorted by two guards—to give testimonials. The speeches had a theme: “Choices.” The convicts were supposed to be warning these kids away from the wrong decisions, but given the cleanliness of their socks (and the bands and bows in the girls’ glossy hair, the polo shirts on the boys’ skinny bodies), it was hard to imagine their bad judgments could be too dire. It seemed the minister and Miss Katherine had scheduled this event so the inmates could have a few hours to convince these children—anyone outside Angola—that they were not evil. Littell was there because, amid his talk of “establishing” himself, he spoke vaguely of wanting to work with kids.

  Behind the six speakers, the youth center’s drip-painting project hung on the wall. Each kid’s miniature experiment with Pollock-style scattering was taped up neatly, the pictures mounted squarely on blue construction paper.

  “The choices you make today are going to determine who you are tomorrow,” one convict said precisely, his blue work shirt tucked in tight and buttoned at the collar. He had been in Angola twenty-five years. After describing his progress from drug abuse to shooting a policeman, he walked along the rows of twelve-and thirteen-year-olds. In front of each child he stopped, bent over, opened his mouth wide so that he seemed to breathe emphatically on each milky face, and displayed the .357 bullet hole in the roof of his mouth, the result of a dispute somewhere between choice one and inevitability.

  Another man recalled the bar fight that had ended in his murder charge. “I should never even have been in that bar to start with.”

  They seemed to explain the ruin of their lives by a single, not so terrible mistake—a first tab of LSD; a drink in a bar—perhaps because it was easier for themselves or because it kept even these kids a little worried: A few missed homeworks and the road led straight to Angola.

  Littell stood last. His story had less focus, no single turn. “I’m staring at this little kid,” he began, and the second-row boy must have been terrified. Littell wore a striped shirt as neatly ironed as the child’s, but Littell’s lips, with their tightness, their retraction at the corners, were all hostility, and his black eyes did nothing to work against his mouth. “I’m looking at this kid, and I was just like him, fishing, bike riding, that’s all I cared about. That’s who I was. And this is me now.”

  What came between was a list of detention centers. “I grew up in these places,” he said, hands ungesturing, unmoving at his sides. “I’m talking about where eleven-year-old kids have to prove themselves with knives or be raped. That’s what they call a cottage. They put all the younger kids together in their own cottages, and that’s supposed to keep them safe. These places, that’s where I went to school, that’s where I went to sleep. That’s where I a
te my breakfast every morning.” He recounted the months after every release, the time “with the fellas,” and two years of angel dust in the Marines. It all led to his being stabbed at Angola, “with a knife the dude soaked in garlic, and garlic poisons,” Littell informed. “It does something to your blood, and I had a fever and green pus leaking out of me, and I was laying on that bed in Earl K. Long Hospital where they brought me, and my father was dead, and my mother didn’t know where I was, and my brothers didn’t know, and my sisters didn’t know, nobody knew. I was nobody.”

  And who knew what was running through the minds of those kids with their impeccable socks pulled up around their calves? The minister thought it might be time to switch directions. “Why don’t you mention to these people what it is you want to do now.”

  “Well,” Littell told them, “I’m almost a hundred and thirty-five years old, but I took my GED test while I was at a treatment center right after Angola, and just last week I found out I passed.”

  The middle-schoolers laughed at the joke about his age, and whether or not they even knew what a GED was, they applauded because he’d passed a test.

  He laughed at his own joke, and found himself smiling with their applause.

  “I’m getting ready to go to college,” he added. “I’m an old man now, but I’m ready to get an education.”

  The clapping doubled in volume, and Littell sat down, nicking water with one knuckle from the corner of his eye.

  The next morning I drove him to the Social Security office. There were jobs he could fit around O’Brien’s schedule (the problem was his desire to combine a job and college, on top of O’Brien’s meetings). A few residents worked for minimum wage with a trash-hauling company—but to get hired he needed something besides his prison I.D., which would not be a selling point with employers. With a Social Security card he could apply for state identification at the Department of Motor Vehicles and, as soon as he’d studied the booklet for the written test, for his driver’s license.