God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  In fact, Cook’s understanding was closer to three-quarters true. The chase-team guards were extremely devoted. For their weekly practice they sent one of their own members along with one of the dog-tending trusties into the woods, and while this partnership tried to flee or hide, the guards did indeed charge through thickets and bogs, heedless of scratches and sinking and snakes. When I had gone out with them, they offered me the experience of taking the leash. I returned it quickly. I didn’t want to plunge first through any of that terrain. One guard reassured me that he hadn’t been bit by a snake in two years. I wasn’t reassured. And I grew tired. My city exercise routines didn’t seem to matter out here, where their bellies, tanked with the pecan pies they’d devoured before we left, kept them barreling forward. They found the two men in about ninety minutes, though sometimes the mock chases lasted into the night and they had to navigate these woods after dark. Once caught, the two men “loved up” the dog that found them, petting it and scratching it behind the ears. This, the guards said, was what the real escapees had to do. No more pistol-whipping, no more pummeling. That was the past. Now the trapped inmate was simply told, “Love up the dog, you better love him up,” and made to stroke the bloodhound that had put an end to his flight.

  As Cook sat on his bench, he thought of what he’d seen on the TV news yesterday morning. A convict had tried to escape the previous night. The tower guard had been asleep while the man had climbed two fences and pried apart the concertina wire. Word around the prison was, the man had been planning to swim a narrow part of the Mississippi. Sandbagging during the flood, he’d scoped out the river. But when he ran up the levee, razor-blood streaming along his arm, he saw that the flood hadn’t gone down as much as he’d figured. There was too much swamp. And alligators lurking in it. He couldn’t see a thing. After going a short ways, he couldn’t make himself push his luck. He edged back toward the levee. He crouched down carefully in some bushes. He waited for the dogs.

  When Cook had heard, yesterday evening, that the man had been caught, it hadn’t affected him. He said it hadn’t seemed to matter to anyone. Most of the inmates would never try to run; they dreamt of pardon hearings and appeals. And Cook knew he wouldn’t try his escape the way that fool had. First of all, snakes were better than alligators. So you went to the hills instead of the river, especially since there were plenty of snakes in those woods across the water, anyway. And second of all, you had to plan. You had to maximize your chances. You couldn’t just go without thinking things through. You had to find the right job that would take you to the right spot on the grounds, so you could reach those hills unseen before the next count. And then you couldn’t freeze up as soon as you got scared. Which that stupid motherfucker had in the swamp. And which Cook knew he wouldn’t.

  Cook stayed on his solitary, sun-assaulted bench through lunch, remembering how he’d escaped once from a parish jail about eighty miles from his home in Alexandria, after an arrest for burglary. He’d begged a dollar from a Cuban in the pen with him, then yelled for the guard. “I need a col’ drink.” On his way to the soda machine in the front room, he made a quick survey. There were only the barred gate to the pen, the door into the front room, and the door out. The doors weren’t locked.

  He returned to the pen and shared his drink with the Cuban. Two hours later he asked for another dollar. The Cuban looked at him like he’d lost his mind. Cook whispered what he planned to do. The Cuban wanted the entertainment. Cook went with his money to the bars, yelled for the guard, whined about the heat. He needed another drink. He backed up as the guard unlocked the gate, and as the man tugged it open with his weight off balance, Cook drove at the bars. The guard reeled. Cook ran through the front room and down the street, gunshots behind him briefly. He cut down an alley, hid between shacks in the black section of town, stole a bicycle, rode through the rest of the night, lay flat beside the shoulder whenever a car passed by, slept the next day in a soy field, stole a truck, and almost made it home before he was caught.

  That was all he wanted to do now, get home to Alexandria. To see his ex-wife.

  He went back to his dorm for count, sat on his cot while the guard walked the aisles and made checks on a clipboard. Cook looked through his three-ringed photo album. A picture of his son-hair parted crisply on the side, cheeks fleshy in smiling, the boy around seven years old—had surfaced in his mother’s trailer. She had mailed it along this week. She and Cook had no contact with his ex-wife, or with his son and daughter, who, he thought, might be in foster care. But sometimes relatives sent his mother snapshots. Next to this new one, photos of the children as toddlers, as infants, beamed up from the pages. He had cut them smaller than passport size, cut them tight around the puffy faces, because their mother had been in the pictures. The child faces were all the more otherworldly, all the more angelic, for their isolation.

  “I want to take that chip off him,” off God, I remembered him saying, as he told me about cropping his ex-wife from every photograph. The cropping was meticulous. No sign of her presence—not a fingernail—intruded on any of the pictures.

  The count had to clear in every dorm before any door was opened. All it took to hold everything at a standstill was one innocent mistake in verifying the two thousand inmates at Main Prison. Twenty minutes, half an hour, forty-five minutes went by. Cook filled a few sugar bags while the guard sat at his corner table in the one o’clock heat, all his energy focused on keeping his eyelids from lolling shut.

  “Count clear!” The words traveled, echoed by guards at gate after gate, up the Walk.

  Later that afternoon, sitting with me on the concrete ledge and telling his drug customers he would deliver soon enough, Cook related that he had just called his mother. He saw her about twice each year; during the visits he would pull his chair beside hers, touching hers, and hold her hand for such long periods that other inmates occasionally mistook her for his wife. But making conversation could be hard, especially on the phone, especially because today there was information he needed to bury in case security was tapping in.

  “Let’s not both talk at the same time,” he told her, their standard joke whenever the silences lasted.

  She laughed. “You’re my heart, Donald Lee.”

  “I just thought you might be getting sick, ’cause I caught them cramps again last night. But I guess not this time.”

  “No, not this time.”

  “I was right with them headaches, though.”

  “I’ll probably feel it tonight.”

  “Mama, I’m sending you some money. I been selling some belts and things I made in the hobby shop. Dude’s people are going to mail you a check.”

  “You been making some belts?”

  “Yeah. Just a little money for you, is all.”

  “And I’m going to put it right back in your account.”

  “No. Don’t you do that.”

  “Right back.”

  “It’s for you.”

  “You need it worse.”

  “No, if I did I’d keep it. It’s for you.”

  “You’re my heart. You staying good?”

  “Yeah, Mama.”

  “ ’Cause you know everything you do at that prison is wrote down.”

  “When you coming?” he asked, relieved to steer away from his drug money, which neither she nor the monitors could know about.

  She said she had wanted to visit last weekend, but that her cousin wouldn’t drive her, because they had just been to see Cook’s brother at Winn Correctional.

  The recorded voice came on to warn them: “You have one more minute for this call.” Cook could phone her back for another fifteen, but he knew she couldn’t afford it.

  “All right,” he said.

  “I’m going to be there soon, I’m going to try.”

  “Write me something.”

  “I will, you know that.”

  “And thanks for sending that picture. I almost forgot that.”

  “You put it in your album?”


  “I did. I love you, Mama.”

  “I love—”

  The line went dead.

  Then, after our talk and after delivering the sugar bags and borrowing a cassette from someone on his dorm, he would go running. The music on the cassette was unknown to him; he couldn’t name the group. He paid no attention to the music. When he’d first asked his dorm-mate for a tape, Cook had said only, “Give me something loud.” And that was all he knew about whatever he put into his Walkman and played twice over during his long run, that it was some kind of hard rock and that he kept it loud. “I really couldn’t tell you,” he said when I asked if the man gave him the same tape every day. He couldn’t recite a single lyric or reproduce a line of chords. It was just a wall of sound, and he ran right through it.

  In bare feet. Ten miles around and around the Yard, wearing cutoff jeans, no shirt, no sneakers. And he watched for the few stones, to come down on them. To toughen him. Not that he planned to take those hills without shoes. But he knew he would have to keep running, no matter where he was cut, no matter what bone he had broken, no matter if a snake bit into his leg. He needed to stay free only long enough to reach Alexandria. The last escape, before the murder, had been to be with all his family. This was to find his ex-wife and the friends who had turned him in. The music was nothing to him. The stones were nothing. Ten miles did not wind him. Every day for the rest of their lives, he wanted those people to think of him. “Because I’m going to be in Angola for the rest of mine.” He would break into his friends’ houses while they slept, and he would cut their right hands from their arms. He hadn’t yet decided exactly how. He imagined a few options. But every time they reached for something, every time they went to open a door or pick up a cup of coffee, there would be Cook, remembered.

  “I don’t blame them for what I did,” he said. “But I blame them for me being here.”

  And later that night, before the police caught up with him, he would pick the lock on his ex-wife’s front door. He would climb the stairs quietly. He would stand over her bed while she slept. He would pour acid over her face. It would eat at her cheeks, her nose, her lips, her chin, her hair, her neck. He would be careful to avoid her eyes. Every time she looked in the mirror, there in her everlasting disfigurement, she would see him.

  Part of me had believed, when I had found Cook in the Toy Shop back at Christmas, that his entire life was changing, and that the change would be solidified by the shop’s charitable works. Now my hope—and the fact that I liked this man, despite what he seemed quite capable of doing—left me faintly sickened. I was sickened, too, by the immediate knowledge that I would write everything he told me, and that my words would probably cost him years at Camp J. But nothing ate at me quite so much, over the coming months, as my early ideas about Warden Cain.

  Through June and July, I struggled to substantiate that my initial vision had been, at least partly, right. I tried to make the Huey Long version come true. I talked not only with inmates but with staff at all levels, asking again and again about Cain’s role in the programs—Toastmasters, the Toy Shop, the CPR team, education—he advertised. The employees stared back at me quizzically, as though I might be demented.

  They were happy enough to talk with me. I’d expected hostility when I returned after the lawsuit; instead, I received smiles and jokes, quietly spoken. Men who’d once told me Cain was the best warden in their long memories, now quoted to me from the newspaper’s account: “ ‘I love you like a brother,’ “ they mumbled or winked as I passed by. “ ‘Just business, just business.’ ” When I ran into a group of guards in a bar down the road from the prison, they couldn’t get enough of their favorite punch line: “Dan, listen,” they leaned forward, breaking off from the topic of conversation, “I’m trying to build a barn for my wife….”

  I began to feel like Dorothy, her house having just fallen on the Wicked Witch. The staff celebrated my victory. The only problem was, they were still besieged. The witch wasn’t crushed, only bruised. Cain, worried that one of his staff might have the temerity to finger him for something that wouldn’t dissolve, governed as he always had, warning his employees by flaunting his power, perpetually demoting, shunting aside, and firing lifelong personnel. And the staff had no recourse. Cain held a seat on the civil service commission and seemed able to influence a majority of its seven votes.

  But now that the staff knew I wasn’t his man, they were glad to answer my questions. So after searching my face for signs of dementia—how, after what I’d discovered firsthand, could I go on inquiring about his mission at the penitentiary?—they told me about Cain’s commitment to Angola. Discounting for the fact that he didn’t live on the grounds, he spent far less time at the prison than any warden they could remember. To facilitate this, he had commanded the gate guards never to log him in or out. Cain said that because he lived outside Angola, he needed to enter unrecorded so he could surprise employees who were up to no good. The staff found this wildly funny. If a criminal or abusive guard had a friend at the gate, he would be much more quickly alerted to the warden’s presence by a call from the gate phone (or a message relayed) than by driving miles across the penitentiary to check the logbook. Cain’s order, those at higher levels said, allowed him to spend his time starting up a private prison business in neighboring Mississippi.

  “But what about something like the Toy Shop?” I asked. “Hasn’t he accomplished something there?”

  The shop was producing more toys now, yes, but only through the efforts of its convict founders and the assistant warden who was its sponsor.

  “What about Toastmasters?”

  Begun under John Whitley, it was the same size it had always been, twenty-five or thirty members.

  “The CPR team?”

  No different than when Whitley had started it.

  “But overall, is it possible that more inmates are involved in those kinds of programs now than before Cain took over? Is it possible that there are more clubs, more organizations? Is it just possible?”

  Maybe, I heard, Cain had played some role in the growth of the literacy program offered to the general prison population, from about one hundred to two hundred inmates. But the numbers themselves were suspect, and any expansion was due to the program’s coordinator, who was tireless in finding convicts to serve as teachers, in scraping together materials and staking out classroom space. Cain was uninvested.

  And no, there had been no overall increase in the number of inmate organizations. They were as scattered as they had always been, with no greater number of convicts involved.

  I thought, as the staff asked me what else I wanted to know, of Danny Fabre somewhere among the 5,000 men on the 18,000-acre penitentiary. He had access to one of Angola’s twenty or thirty student computers. He had his membership in Toastmasters and Captain Newsom’s words of encouragement, given in passing once every two months. He was one of Angola’s lucky few. He was on his own.

  “You want to know what’s grown?” one employee was asking. “It’s Burl’s lies.”

  The inmates, too, felt free to talk. One told me of a rumor that had circulated before the lawsuit: that I was Warden Cain’s spy. Why else, the convicts had reasoned, would I be allowed to roam the prison and hold my interviews without anyone listening in? Warning myself not to fall prey to the paranoid thinking that takes hold readily among lifers, I wondered nevertheless if Cain himself had been the source of the rumor. I’d heard that he had tried to do this once before, to one of Polozola’s court-appointed team. It was a way to make sure all comments were positive.

  The comments, now, were not. The grumblings I’d heard—from the abolished band and from others I’d dismissed, early on, as too self-interested or too driven by a prisoner’s flailing rage—grew louder and much more frequent. “Be fair,” I emphasized after the suit. “Don’t think I need to hear something critical. Wouldn’t you have said the same things about Whitley? Wouldn’t you have said the same things about Maggio?”

&nbs
p; “Maggio was the Gestapo,” one older inmate answered. “But he had a prison to clean up. And Whitley? No, Whitley had some kind of caring. I’m not trying to yeast things up, this complaining. I’m telling you, when it comes to positive morale around Angola, Cain is going to take whatever there is.”

  The changes Cain had actually brought to the prison, I learned, were represented by his expansion of Angola’s shoe-shining detail. Shoe shiner had always been a semi-official inmate job at the penitentiary. But the bootblacks, provided for staff only, had been spread thin. So Cain had told his classification officers that he wanted more appointed. It wasn’t necessarily hard to find volunteers. The job gave the inmate an opportunity to joke and beg for a few cigarettes, or a Coke, from the guard whose shoes he was polishing. And tradition had it that the guard would sometimes humor the convict by paying him in this way. I had assumed that the bootblacks had always been prevalent. But only under Cain had the work become a thriving program. At any hour, at one of the gateposts along the Main Walk, you might see a sergeant chatting with one of his colleagues, an inmate with rag and polish crouched at his feet.

  Or perhaps Cain’s style of leadership—and his approach to the humanity of the inmates—was best captured in his dealings with the Angolite. The bimonthly magazine called itself the country’s only uncensored prison publication, and while this had always been stretching the point (for the editors were kept by the men they might criticize), it had, since the seventies, been instructed to include any information it judged true. The result had been a number of national awards and a place as a symbol of transformation.

  Wilbert Rideau, the editor in chief, had arrived at Angola in 1962 with a ninth-grade education and a death sentence for murdering a bank teller. He had educated himself while on death row, had begun working on the Angolite after capital punishment was temporarily ruled unconstitutional in 1972, and had spent the last quarter-century making a prominent contribution to journalism. In addition to winning the George Polk Award and a National Magazine Award nomination, he had edited a collection of Angola writing published by Times Books, and had narrated segments on the prison for National Public Radio.