God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  She hit 3. How sweet the sound of that touch-tone note!

  “It’s lovely, Johnny,” she said.

  “It’s so the time passes for you. Just think about me and you.”

  “It’s passing too slow.”

  “But listen here. Why didn’t you make it up here last week? You said you was. Chaplain Comeaux said come find him and all. For our meeting.”

  With his forehead pressed against the cinder block and the noise of the nearest fan screening him in, he forgot everything in the dorm behind him as he listened for her answer, praying that if she had no explanation she would invent one, and dreading, in the instant before she spoke, that when she’d said “It’s passing too slow” she’d meant something much more than the time between visits or the time before the wedding, that she’d reconsidered the years and years in front of them.

  “I had to work a double shift.”

  “You tired?” He accepted the reason instantly, asking this question that made no sense-the double shift had been days ago.

  “I’m worn down.”

  “You need to move to Baton Rouge, like I told you. Cut down on your ride.”

  “Then who would I ride up with?”

  “You need to get you a car.”

  “And how am I doing that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, then added gallantly, “but I can get you a job. You can just let me handle that part. I’m about to talk to Gerry Lane. Next time he come through that gate. I’ll be looking out for him. I’ll wave him down. He’ll get you a job right there in Baton Rouge.”

  “I’ll think about it, Johnny.”

  “This call,” came the periodic warning, “is from an inmate at a correctional facility.”

  “Think about it? I’m talking about Mr. Gerry Lane, Gerry Lane Chevrolet. Gerry Lane Enterprises. He’s going to find you something. He liked how good I took care of Little Man. He’s gonna do it. He’s the one brought us those Chevrolet sweat shirts out on the range crew last Christmas.”

  “I’ll be up to see you Tuesday.”

  “I’ll handle getting you that job. You remember those sweat shirts I showed you? They was nice.”

  “I can ride up with Sandra on Tuesday.”

  “I’ll tell Chaplain Comeaux.”

  “All right.”

  Hanging up when the fifteen minutes ran out (she, like so many at the other end of the inmates’ calls, could barely afford this, let alone another fifteen; within weeks her phone would be shut off for overdue bills)-hanging up, he wished she’d sounded more certain. He wished she’d said yes about moving to Baton Rouge. He wished she’d said yes about that job. And that she hadn’t already missed those two visits.

  But she was the one paying for the rings, he reminded himself. She was already wearing hers. At least, she was the last time he’d seen her. She had been, hadn’t she? Right there on her third finger. Hadn’t he seen it when she put her hand down on the table in the visiting shed, put her hand down for him to hold? Hadn’t he slipped it on his own pinky for a minute, the way he always did? Hadn’t he? He could still feel where it always pinched at his knuckle, where he always forced it down a little harder, twisting it, to remember the sensation. He could still feel that from last time, not the visit before, couldn’t he?

  She must have been wearing it. She had to be serious. She couldn’t be backing out. If she was, she wouldn’t have sounded so excited about that clock. If she was, she wouldn’t have said, “It’s passing too slow.” She must have meant only about the time between now and September. She couldn’t have meant anything else. She couldn’t have, because they’d already talked about the years he might stay here. He’d already told her about that, been up front about that, told her it was no-parole and that he’d been denied the last time he’d applied for pardon. She’d known that all along. She’d known since their first visit.

  She wouldn’t back out now. She was a strong lady. She was going to fight with him. After that judge gave him the death sentence he’d said to himself, I’m going to give it right back. That’s what he’d said. And he had, hadn’t he? Well, he was about to do the same thing now. Give back these alphabets. Get some numbers. Or get the whole charge thrown out. That’s what would happen, most likely. Pretty soon, he’d have it going in the courts. Pretty soon, he’d be working for Gerry Lane himself, raising Belva’s kids like a regular father, straightening out her daughter and making sure the rest of them stayed on the right road. Pretty soon, he’d have a son of his own. Pretty soon he’d be lying in bed next to Belva with all their letters piled up between them, all their letters from when he was in Angola, to read over how they got started.

  They would be a family. They were already. He hadn’t met the two daughters, but the two boys had been to visit once, when there had been room in Sandra’s car. He played Pac-Man with the boys. The four-year-old, Marcus, was crazy for it. He kept going back to Belva, saying, “Mama, give me some more money to put in there again.” Brooks propped him on a chair so he could see the screen. Brooks stood behind him, bending down and holding him around the waist. The little Pac-Man munchers snapped their jaws, and Brooks urged, “Gobble ’em, son, gobble ’em, move that stick,” and Marcus squealed, “Coon ass things! Coon ass things!” He seemed to think the Pac-Man prey were Cajun rednecks.

  “Coon ass things?” Brooks laughed.

  And Marcus saw that it was funny. “Coon ass things! Coon ass things!” He cracked himself up, and Brooks put his cheek next to Marcus’s jittery, giggling head.

  The boys had sent Brooks a Father’s Day card, and after his phone call with Belva he took the card from his box, along with her letters. He lay back on his cot, head turned to the side so he could read with the ceiling light. Two bear cubs were pictured on the front of the card. Each read a newspaper, one called Modern Grizzly and the other The Daily Growl. Below this scene, the poem began:

  No one chooses a Dad

  From a magazine ad

  Or a paper with classifieds in it….

  But if we’d had the chance

  For a choice in advance

  You’re the Dad we’d have picked in a minute.

  Tight to the top of the inside page, the thirteen-year-old, Kenny, had drawn a smiley face and written, “You are the father we did not have.”

  Staring at the card reminded Brooks of another call he’d made to Belva’s house. He’d dialed the number, and heard Marcus’s faint hello. Then came the automated operator: “You have a collect call from”—pause—“Johnny”—pause—”at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. If you will pay, dial 3 now.” Marcus had no idea what to do. “Dad?” he said.

  “Push 3, son,” Brooks almost yelled, but remembered that the boy couldn’t hear him; only at the inmate’s end did everything come through. “Go get your mama,” he said quietly, uselessly.

  “If you will pay for the call, dial 3 now.”

  “Dad?” Marcus started hitting buttons. “Dad?”

  “If you will pay…”

  “Dad? Dad? Dad?”

  In his dorm, with the 64 cots and 128 locker boxes behind him, Brooks held tight to the receiver and wished the boy would go on saying it forever. But the call was cut off.

  TWELVE

  “WHEN I GOT LOCKED UP,” BUCKKEY SAID, LAST year’s runner-up buckle still in the box where his wife kept it for his son, in case he might decide he wanted it, “Chris was a little baby. And I thought that I didn’t have to gain his respect or his love or his like, because I felt as though he didn’t understand that anyway. You catch what I’m saying? So my main concern was holding on to my wife. And by doing that, I—I didn’t avoid Chris, I just didn’t pay as much attention to him as I should have. I guess the best way for me to explain what I thought was, If I keep the mother, I keep the child. That’s what I felt. Because I was a kid too when I got locked up. I really didn’t know any better. I was raised here. At Angola. All the things that I learned about my wife, I learned here. I never learned anything about Chris. I
don’t know Chris. I don’t know what Chris likes, I don’t know what he does. And that’s my fault.”

  One July morning Buckkey taught me about horse feeders. They have two compartments, a trough for oats below and a slot for hay above. Preferring the oats, the horse always empties the trough first, then mouths the hay in sloppy bunches. Plenty of straw falls to the stable floor.

  Buckkey had come up with a solution to the littered hay, and that morning he built a feeder of his own design. On the range crew, he spent much of his time as a welder, constructing trailer hitches or fencing in an open-sided shed at the crew’s headquarters. Through the gnarled cypress trees he could see Lake Killarney and the narrow, white-railed fishing pier that stretched elegantly out onto the water. A transistor radio sat on a shelf amid his tools, set to a country station, volume low. When he shut off his torch to check his progress, the wispy, doleful music was the only sound. The other inmates on the crew, along with the bosses, were spread out over the farm.

  He pulled down his welding mask and started again on the feeder, running the flame slowly along a joint, melting a perfect bond between the iron surfaces, a beading flawlessly even. He coaxed the bond partly by sight, mostly by habit and intuition. The darkened eye-protecting window in the mask distorted everything, made the flame small and far away and the metal almost invisible. Blindly, knowingly, he stroked with the slender jet of fire.

  Hearing tires on the dirt road, he stopped, lifted his mask: Mr. Jimmy’s D.O.C. pickup.

  “Say, Buckkey, you got a visit.”

  “All right, boss.”

  While the convict stowed his equipment, Mr. Jimmy walked over from his truck. He had little in common with Mr. Mike. Mr. Jimmy took on the role of a reticent but kind father with his inmates, and in Buckkey’s case he looked closely related as well. Mr. Jimmy’s tan face had canyons for wrinkles above his blue eyes and dry rivulets below. Buckkey’s leathery skin was collapsing the same way. At times he seemed to have aged five years during the months I’d known him. But at moments his hazel eyes still dominated his face with a child’s need.

  Mr. Jimmy inspected a feeder Buckkey had already finished. To me, its red iron seemed strangely animated, with the two arms that would hold the trough reaching outward in a shallow curve, and the spindles that formed the slot looking like giant teeth in a monster’s mouth. It sat on the ground just outside the shed, solitary. It might have been a whimsical sculpture, the arms faintly supplicating, the face a child’s rendering of some nightmarish creature, and the body without legs—the beast, if it ever moved at all, propelled itself only by wobbling.

  The feeder would hang in one of the horse stalls.

  “It’s nice work,” Mr. Jimmy said. If Buckkey’s face hadn’t been so worn, his boss would have looked like his grandfather instead of his father; Mr. Jimmy’s silvery hair, when he took off his cowboy hat, picked up a scintillation in his eyes, the goodwill of a contented old man. “It’s real nice.”

  “Yeah, hay’s not going to fall all over the place, anyway,” Buckkey said. “It’s going to fall back in the trough. So after the oats get finished, the hay’ll start filling up and-” Buckkey stopped himself. He twisted his lips to the side and rolled his eyes. “Pretty clever, huh? I’m a regular genius.” He gave a grunt of self-mockery.

  “It is smart. Can’t think why no one’s thought of this before.”

  “I’ve got a lot of time to think about feeders.” Another grunt.

  “We’re gonna use ’em. Keep building ’em. We’re gonna use ’em.”

  “Did I show you how the trough pops out?” Buckkey smiled. He knew he had. “So you can clean it? And so the whole thing’s lighter?”

  “Yeah, you showed me.”

  “Go ahead, Mr. Jimmy. Pick it up. Make my day before I go on my visit.”

  Mr. Jimmy grasped the top bar of the feeder and hoisted the contraption off the ground.

  “It’s lighter, all right, Buckkey. You ought to patent the thing.”

  “Yeah. Whatever. We’ll just make ’em the special Angola horse feeders. My way of saying thanks for room and board.”

  “Well, you done good.”

  Two years ago, when Buckkey had lost his job after being accused of stealing wood from one of the range-crew sheds, Mr. Jimmy had lobbied to have him returned to the crew. “You home?” Mr. Jimmy had asked when Buckkey was back welding, and Buckkey had answered, “I’m home.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Jimmy,” he said now.

  “Let’s go on that visit.”

  His back to the road, Chris sat on a picnic table as Mr. Jimmy dropped Buckkey off at the trusty visiting park. Buckkey had figured it would be his wife, Emily, with maybe his mother or one of his sisters. He spotted the boy right away. He knew the back of his son’s neck below his short blond hair. Even from a distance, that was all he had to see.

  Not that there was anything special about the neck, or the hairline or blue T-shirt that framed those two inches of skin. It was, simply, Chris’s. After months and months of waiting, the runner-up buckle had worked—or hadn’t made a bit of difference. But Buckkey’s only child was here.

  The father saw nothing else. Not his wife, who sat on a picnic bench facing him as he walked up the slight hill. Not the other trusties with their families at the dozen little pavilions with their tables and green roofs set on concrete slabs. He saw nothing else and said nothing at all, didn’t call his son’s name and wished, in fact, that the seventeen-year-old boy would never turn around, that he, Buckkey, could, that he could return immediately to his job while his son returned home, that there would be no chance of things getting worse than they already were.

  Their relationship scarcely existed. Over sixteen years Buckkey had stayed bound with his wife, his mother, the rest of his family. His youngest sister had used the wedding invitation he had designed. But with his son he merely hoped for change, afraid, when they spoke on the phone, to say much more than “I love you,” afraid even to say that, afraid that if he asked Chris about school or gave anything that sounded like advice the boy would go mute and hand the phone back to his mother. She had practically forced Chris to talk in the first place. The boy’s life was lurching out of control, Buckkey felt, and he worried Chris would wind up living the way he himself had between the end of high school and Angolano direction except wildness. “And if I hadn’t come to Angola,” he told me, “I’d be dead.” Lately Chris had bought a used truck, been pulled over going 90 in a 50 zone. His mother had pleaded with Buckkey to say something, pleaded that she was losing control, already had none, that Chris needed his father’s discipline in any way Buckkey could give it. Buckkey couldn’t bring himself to intervene. He felt he couldn’t fix anything, couldn’t risk everything.

  On the tabletop, with his feet on the bench, Chris sat hunched over and didn’t turn fully until his father stood at his shoulder. The blond hair was Buckkey’s, but the face was closer to his mother’s—the openness across his forehead, the softness of his jaw. Buckkey noted the difference from himself: It brought the same surprise and relief every time.

  “Hey, Chris.”

  “Hey, Dad,” the boy mumbled. He stood.

  “Damn!” Buckkey said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t even reach up that far to hug you anymore.” It was a way of requesting permission. Chris granted it in silence. So the father wrapped his arms around the boy’s shoulders, slapped once, and let go.

  “I see you’re getting a lot of use out of that buckle I sent you,” Buckkey tried to joke, for Chris was not wearing it.

  “I’m not a cowboy.”

  “I’m not much of one, either. Your mother saw me out there. She can testify to that.” He smiled at his wife.

  “She can tell you to quit that rodeo before you get killed,” Emily said. She looked, already, drained by Buckkey’s efforts to talk with their son, futility sapping color from her own blue irises—deeper blue, Buckkey usually thought, than anyone’s he knew.

  “You
want to play some basketball?” Chris asked.

  “All right.”

  Buckkey did not want to: it was what they always did. They stepped down toward the road, toward the court. A little girl in overalls and a gold LSU cap flew past them, up past their picnic table, arms pumping and legs churning as the incline got steeper near the trees at the crest of the hill. Her father chased and caught her, lifted her into the air.

  “You can’t go up there, Denise,” the father said.

  “Yes, I can. I can because I want to.”

  “Come on and play down here with me.” He tickled her.

  “But why can’t I?”

  “There’s adult things on that hill.”

  Buckkey couldn’t look at his son. If he were Chris, he wouldn’t come more than twice a year, either.

  The court was a patch of dirt with a steel backboard. Two jagged, sun-baked clefts, channeled by rainwater, ran outward at angles from the pole. Buckkey and Chris’s one-on-one game was constricted by those gullies—trying to dribble over them usually meant losing the ball. Chris backed his way straight to the basket. In past years it had been his father who did this, Buckkey letting go of all restraint, all hesitance during their games, his wish for Chris’s love turning inside out. He’d muscled the boy for rebounds, shouldered him aside for lay-ups. When Chris, trying to free himself for a jump shot, had dribbled off a rift and out of bounds, there had been no second chances. If the boy managed to keep the score close Buckkey started blocking shots, stealing the ball, forcing him toward the clefts, to remind him who was stronger, in control, a father, to remind him he had no chance of winning.

  Taller now, heavier, Chris leaned in. Buckkey set his legs, but the boy bent his father backward. Two-one, seven-four, eleven-seven, fourteen-eight, Chris pushed his lead wider, pried the game open as though with a wedge. Both players sweating through their shirts, they spoke only to mutter the score.

  “Lasseigne!” The guard’s yell saved them.