God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  The food truck was here. On the road leading to Angola, Chris and his mother had stopped to order groceries at the store behind the gas station. There was a system, determined by the prison, for the park visitors. They turned in their lists at the register, were allowed to touch nothing themselves.

  “I’ll do the barbecue,” Chris said.

  Buckkey, picking up the sack of charcoal, glanced at him sidelong—the offer was a first. You will? he almost teased, but caught himself. “All right. That would be good.”

  Emily, loose blue turtleneck doing what it could to help her depleted eyes, short hair working to lighten her face, started on dessert. It had to be constructed at the park, from prepackaged and sealed ingredients, so no one could slip contraband into the filling of a pie. Emily sliced horizontally, twice, across a pound cake, then spread vanilla pudding and cream cheese on each layer. She fit the cake back together, dabbing the excess from the sides, scalloping white icing on top with the back of a spoon.

  She had been eighteen when she married Buckkey. She had seen him for the first time water-skiing on the canal that ran behind his town, the town next to hers. He could ski on his hands, on his knees, on his butt with his legs in the air. Back on his feet he spun and swooped so his elbow almost scraped the water, and then he tipped the other way, rooster tail of spray as perfect as something painted before he righted himself and spun and spun and spun.

  She couldn’t ski at all, and months later, when he showed up at her job to ask for a date, she remembered him. She told him to call her at home that Friday night at six, that they would leave at seven. He forgot to call. “Oh, I’m ready anyway,” she said when he appeared at the door, and he told her, “You know, you’re just like a little paper doll—you just throw something on and you’re ready to go.” That had become her name between them, Paper Doll. It still was. Never Emily. Only Paper Doll.

  It was the late seventies; he took her to a disco. “He was a good-looking guy and he could dance,” she recalled, her voice as resigned as his wrinkles. On the floor he held both her hands, crossed them and turned her and pulled her toward him. Then he lifted her arm, guiding her away, guiding so she began to spin. She just kept going.

  And found herself two years later with a drug-abusing husband and an infant boy and soon a barrage of headlines: SHERIFF’S OFFICE INVESTIGATING MAN’S DEATH… MURDER TRIAL SLATED… DEFENDANT TESTIFIES COMPANION KILLED STATION ATTENDANT… HENDERSON MAN GETS LIFE IN PRISON.

  Carey Lasseigne, 22, of Henderson was convicted here Thursday and the jury recommended life imprisonment for the first-degree murder of an 18-year-old service station attendant….

  Lasseigne took the stand Wednesday and claimed that it was a companion who shot Russell Landry, who worked at the Hungry Hobo restaurant and service station….

  Before he testified, the jury viewed a videotaped reenactment of the crime…. Lasseigne demonstrated in the videotape… how the victim was led behind the station where he was forced to kneel before he was shot from behind…. The jury Wednesday also heard Lasseigne’s voice-recorded confession to the slaying…. In both recordings, Lasseigne said he put gas in the car and then used the butt of a .22 caliber pistol to unsuccessfully try and knock Landry unconscious. He then showed how money was taken from the cash register and Landry was led behind the station…. “He kept saying, ‘Don’t shoot me. Don’t shoot me,’” Lasseigne was heard saying in the voice recording…. “He just turned his head down and I shot him…. He just kind of groaned, and… I shot him again. I don’t even know why I shot him the first time. I just did it.”…

  The defendant testified that he confessed to the killing because he feared that his wife would not be willing to accept him again….

  He was separated from his wife the month after the killing, and they have since divorced.

  But they had been back together since his first year at Angola. When she and I had spoken about the crime, she was quiet about the innocence he still maintained, saying only, “I couldn’t just leave him alone there” and “The Buckkey you know now is the real one.” She recalled his crying over a dog they’d had to give up because the owner of the first house they rented wouldn’t allow pets. His mother, a red-haired woman sitting with us that afternoon at the gas station restaurant they’d chosen, told me, “He didn’t commit that murder. It’s still like a dream. I’ll never believe it.”

  Paper Doll let that go. “I’ll always love him,” she said.

  “What kind of job you think I should get when I graduate?” Chris asked abruptly, forking the chicken on the barbecue pit. He prodded and flipped the pieces far too often.

  “I don’t know.” Buckkey kept himself quiet, made himself wait. “I know your mother told you that I suggested you join an Armed Force.”

  “Yeah. But I can’t leave Mom, can I?”

  Buckkey absorbed the blow. The breeze had shifted; smoke billowed into his face. He didn’t move, just let the cloud sting his eyes. “Well, what do you think?” he asked.

  “I might want to-”

  “You know,” Buckkey cut in, edging away from the smoke, “if you did join you get to travel. You get to go all over the world. They put you through school and—”

  “Be all you can be.”

  “Well, sometimes the ads say it best.”

  “I got enough school.”

  A year after his own graduation, Buckkey had signed up for the Air Force. He’d told me with his typical mix of self-deprecation and pride that he’d passed the test to get in, then another after boot camp to qualify for air traffic control training. He’d left with a dishonorable discharge when marijuana was found in his locker.

  “I might want to learn to weld, though,” Chris said. “I might want to go to trade school for that.”

  “Really?” It was not good news.

  “I might want to.”

  “Give me that for a second.” Buckkey took the fork, took over with the chicken. It gave him something to keep himself in check. Because all he knew about welding he’d learned in Angola, and the thought of his son in a welder’s mask made him feel Chris’s life would be crushed. “There’s a lot more money you could make with an education.”

  “I told you I’m not-”

  “And a lot easier and a lot cleaner jobs.”

  “I’m not—”

  “It’s just nothing. That’s all welding is. Nothing. Over and over, back and forth with that little torch. Over and over and over, nothing, your whole life. Can you handle that?”

  “I want to build things.”

  It made Buckkey stop. He heard his son describe watching some work done at his uncle’s body and fender shop. It made Buckkey remember the feeling of joining surfaces together, of gliding the flame, of keeping his hand steady, knowing just which hydrogen rod to use for just which thickness of metal, leaving a uniform bead and a connection that could take any pressure. It made him think of the feeders he had invented.

  “Well, I guess you know already it’s not the best-paying job in the world,” he said, as they sat down to eat.

  “I just feel like it could be a good trade.”

  “It could be. You’re right, Chris. It could be. As long as it’s what you want.”

  “It might be.”

  “ ’Cause you don’t want to burn your life on something you don’t want.”

  “I know.”

  “ ’Cause your life would be burnt.”

  “That’s why I might want to weld.”

  “Well, that’s the right reason.” Buckkey went on battling his own uneasiness, his own hope that Chris would enter the military, earn a degree, and leave the Navy or Army or Air Force in a way entirely different from Buckkey’s exit. “You do something ’cause you enjoy it.”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

  “All right.”

  “That’s just what I’ve been thinking,” Chris said.

  It was, Buckkey knew as the pudding and cream cheese pie disappeared, and as the guard wal
ked by to give Paper Doll and all the other visitors their passes to turn in at the gate, the best talk he could remember having with his son. They scraped the chicken bones into one of the blue barrels, fifty-gallon plastic drums that had held the prison’s cleaning fluid. As they turned back toward the table Buckkey reached up and clung on. It didn’t matter that Chris was taller. It didn’t matter that he was heavier and stronger. Like a basketball center with arms that long, Buckkey wrapped him in, loosened his hold only slightly to kiss the boy on the side of his neck, then clutched again. Chris couldn’t have gotten free had he tried. “Please,” Buckkey groaned into the boy’s neck. “Please. Please. Please. Please. Please.”

  “All right, Dad. It’s all right.” The boy’s voice was half comforting, half crazed by his father’s vise. Buckkey released him. Chris looked around for the basketball, found it on the grass, started shooting. Mr. Jimmy drove up before the bus arrived that would take the visitors to the gate.

  “Take your time,” he yelled.

  Buckkey apologized to Paper Doll for not spending more of the day with her.

  “I’m glad you didn’t. That’s how it was supposed to be. You know what he says now? ‘I been visiting him for sixteen years. It’s time he come.’ ”

  Buckkey climbed into the cab of his boss’s pickup. His arm dangling out the window, he lifted his hand almost casually toward his son. Then he leaned out, not only his head but his shoulders, like a dog, mouthing Come back silently as though to make it a subtle and pressureless message. Chris answered with a brief wave from the basketball court.

  “You all right, Buck?” Mr. Jimmy asked as they drove beneath the great bank of sweet gum and oak trees at the edge of the prison and turned toward Camp F.

  “Yeah. I’m all right.”

  THIRTEEN

  SETTING OUT TO BE SAVED AFTER LAST YEAR’S rodeo, Terry Hawkins had believed that his new involvement with Rev and Sister Jackie, and with his Bible, would help him “stay out of wrong and make everything happen better for me.”

  He would rise from big-stripe to trusty, from fry cook to a job with the range crew. He would ride a horse that would be his own, learn to rope, meet Mr. Gerry Lane. With the promotion, he would be moved from his dorm at Camp D to one at F, where the compound had no barred gate and the men just wandered out their front door, strolled across the road, sat alone under the pecan trees on the banks of a pond. Terry had heard a family of ducks was living there. He had heard you could fish. He had heard it was a whole lot nicer. And the promotion and move had been sure to be given. Besides his commitment to religion, he had the guarantee of what he’d done at the rodeo, body catapulted and crumpled yet hand seizing the chip in the Guts & Glory—in front of Mr. Mike Vannoy and his brother, Darrell, and in front of Warden Cain.

  But his effort at salvation had fallen apart. Since the day after his blowjob in the shower, he hadn’t been back to Sister Jackie’s church. It had been six months. And no assignment to the range crew or spot at Camp F had come his way.

  Instead, by July, Terry lived in a dorm on the west side of Main Prison, the Wild Side. The dorms of the main complex bore the names of trees—the softer woods, Ash and Magnolia and Spruce, to the east, and the harder, Oak and Hickory and Walnut, at the other end. The west held younger, tougher inmates, men who hadn’t yet hit bottom and had enough of J and begun to navigate some new approach to existing in prison. It held, too, older convicts who’d fallen back and been sent there, to begin working their way up again, after serving their terms in the punishment cells. In this, his twelfth year at Angola, Terry found himself living in Walnut.

  There, at two A.M. one night, Terry woke to see a man sliding a pair of sneakers from beneath another’s cot. While the second inmate slept under the soft blue of the security lights, the man pulled the high-tops onto his feet, laced them snugly, tied them, and, fully dressed now, walked up the aisle to his own bed. He removed the padlock from his box. Holding it, he returned to the sleeping inmate, knelt on top of him, and pinned his head to the pillow with one hand. Terry guessed he was about to deal out a whipping with the padlock, then saw he carried a razor in addition. Earlier in the day, Terry had overheard him complaining, in a high-pitched, half-whiny voice, about an unpaid debt, whether for drugs or gambling or the prostitution of his punk wasn’t clear. Now he carved with the razor. He sliced deep from temple to jaw. Then he dealt out the lock-whipping. And then the guard’s backup arrived.

  Terry’s route from Camp D to the Wild Side had begun one May afternoon when a shakedown team, in its military fatigues, had poured through D. The guards strip-searched the inmates, told them to dress, and sent them out onto the Yard while they tore through every box and turned over every garbage can. At a fence dividing the camp into sections, Terry watched a basketball game played on the other side. The shakedown team finished with the dorms and fanned out over the Yard. A sergeant, approaching the fence, saw Terry throw something—quickly—a few feet away into the grass. Terry insisted, to the sergeant and later to me, that it was a cigarette. With the sergeant, he pointed to a butt on the ground. The officer peered not far from that spot, bent down, and showed Terry a roach.

  Right away, the lieutenant in charge of the search offered him a deal. For tips on stashes of drugs and weapons, the nub of marijuana would be forgotten.

  “I don’t know nothing about any of that,” Terry said, abiding by the old code, though it was not so well abided or universally enforced anymore at Angola. The older convicts all said that with the safety that had come in the 1970s, the snitches had begun to proliferate. They didn’t even have to ask to live in the protection dorms.

  “I couldn’t tell you about none of that,” Terry insisted.

  “Pack your toothbrush,” the lieutenant said.

  Angola’s judicial system worked like this: The inmate was handed a white jumpsuit to change into; he was shackled and cuffed and taken to a cell; he was brought to trial within a week. The prison held hundreds of such trials every week, in out-of-the-way offices just big enough to fit a pair of gunmetal desks. The inmates, in the shackles and cuffs and the torn or half-buttonless jumpsuits and the slippers they’d been told to pack with their toothbrushes, lined up in a hallway. A guard called them in one at a time to stand before two judges, a senior officer from security and someone from classification. “Would you like the assistance of counsel?” they asked the defendant. They meant the inmate paralegal on duty that day, who stood sandwiched between wall and file cabinet, and who had won his job through recommendations from security and classification. Whether or not the defendant accepted, the hearing started right away and ended within two minutes. Charges were read; a rebuttal was put forth. “122173, Counsel Substitute Mark Hall, we ask you to consider that those were prescription drugs the inmate had forgotten to take and was saving only because his prescription might not be renewed. That, simply, is our defense.” The paralegal tilted his head at a mourner’s angle as he spoke, though the reason seemed as much shame that his client had provided him such a lame argument as regret that his client was doomed.

  After the paralegal’s terse statement, or after the inmate himself gave his account—“I didn’t tell no guard no F-curse. I explained to the man it was the other orderly’s job, but I didn’t tell him no F-curse. Nah, I ain’t about all that”—while gesturing despite the cuffs, which were belted tight to his belly, so that his plaintive hands looked like seal fins flapping from his stomach—immediately after the defense fell mute, the senior officer told the two inmates, “Step outside.” The judges turned through the colored folder that held the defendant’s prior record at Angola, his “jacket.” They conferred for thirty or ninety seconds, called the accused and the paralegal back in, and rendered a verdict grounded in past conduct, a necessity since the present evidence consisted of a few sentences—or nonsentences—scribbled on a pink slip by the arresting guard. But most of the judges’ assumptions were surely right. The same convicts appeared in court again and again. Some shuffl
ed in ten or fifteen times a year.

  Terry argued that he’d demanded a urine test from both the sergeant and the lieutenant of the shakedown team, and that they had refused. He requested a test again now, in court. The judges replied that the charge was not for smoking marijuana but possessing it. The test, they ruled immediately, would be irrelevant.

  “Step outside.”

  Terry shuffled out.

  His jacket showed more than fifty write-ups over his twelve years. The violence seemed to have faded away—he hadn’t blackened the eyes of any more guards—but he had a marijuana charge only two years old.

  And he’d told the same story then. He’d been denied a urine test that would have proven his innocence.

  “Inmate!” one of the judges yelled, and the guard posted outside the door let Terry back in to receive his sentence.

  So in May, he’d been put in the Camp D punishment cells. Double-bunked, the cells were about six feet across, eight feet deep, eight feet high. Between them, Terry and his cellmate weighed over four hundred pounds. Terry, the second to arrive, got the top bunk. The heat rose. He lay on his mattress, sweating, sheet “rain wet.” Eventually he switched to the floor. His cellie allowed him the concrete. At Angola, the man with the bottom bunk always made this accommodation.

  Other accommodations involved the toilet. You warned your cellmate when you had to squat; he sat on the floor with his face to the bars, closest to the corridor’s air. And you kept flushing and flushing to cut down on the smell.

  It was a working tier. Every morning, after sixteen hours of lock-down, the guard yelled, “Get it together! Work call! Get it straight!” and Terry lined up his rubber boots and shower slippers against the wall, dusted the bars of the cell to pass inspection, and pulled on his work boots. The guard opened the cells from the end of the tier; the locks released with a thunk and the bars slid back with a grinding and clanging like an old train getting started in a railway yard. Terry was grateful for the sounds, relieved to be marched to the camp gate, handed a hoe, marched a mile down the road, and ordered to hack at weeds in a drainage ditch. Work was better than the sixteen hours before and the sixteen hours after.