God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  Through the early hours of the night on his top bunk, with the cracked concrete ceiling lowering close as the lid of a coffin to his face, he lived with his slaughterhouse boss, Mr. Denver Tarter. Terry had stood over him forever, it seemed now. So much returned to him so clearly, it was as if he had stared in order to memorize, not in disbelief. He saw the blood streaking parts of Mr. Denver Tarter’s short, thinning brush of hair but not others. Focusing on the memory of the clean tufts, Terry could half convince himself for a second that the man had only passed out drunk, that nothing permanent had ever happened. Terry longed to bend and place his lips over the bloody, severed throat, to “blow air back inside him.” That was what he longed to do now. But he couldn’t forget what he had done then. Nothing. Just shaken his head finally at the monotone question running through his brain, How did all of a sudden this happen?—just shaken his head and walked away in a weird calm.

  He stretched his hand toward the ceiling to assure himself it lay more than inches above him. There was no question of waking his cellmate to talk of what he heard and saw in his mind, though they got along well given the situation, played dominoes sometimes, even spoke of their children. Men at Angola just didn’t talk of their crimes. Terry tried to think of anything—a pornographic picture that had once been his favorite; the Student of the Week certificate his daughter had sent months ago—to distract himself. He had flipped the ax to the sharp side and swung over and over and over and over.

  He sat up off the drenched sheet and knelt facing the back of the cell, overlooking the steel sink and toilet. He shut his eyes. “Lord,” he prayed, “Mr. Denver Tarter hunting me down tonight. I need you please to get him off my mind. He’s on my conscience, Lord. Please do me this one thing, Lord. Please for tonight. Please put me sleep. Please take him off.”

  Terry told me he’d been put in the cell because he’d quit going to Sister Jackie’s services. Whether he meant that God was punishing him for his absence with this false charge and unfair sentence, or that his lapse in worship had led to weakness, and to his getting high and getting caught, I was never sure. But I knew that his avoiding her Camp D church (because he was unforgivable) was a failure that, in itself, told him again how unforgivable he was.

  Then, during the summer, he experienced a series of good turns—all because of the rodeo. First, an officer in charge of the field lines expressed dismay at the sight of Terry, with the others from his cellblock, swinging a hoe.

  “Hey, crazy man,” he yelled, stopping his truck. “Is that you, crazy man, crazy man from the rodeo? Come here. What are you doing out here with a ditch-bank blade?”

  Terry stepped over. “Shakedown team got me bad. Said I was messing with marijuana. You know I don’t mess with no marijuana.”

  “Crazy man, I can’t have you sweating so bad out here. Got to save your energy for those bulls. How many times you grab that token last year?”

  “Just once. Was the only one did it, though.”

  “I saw you that first Sunday. Bull had you up there, huh?”

  “Won the Convict Poker last year, too.”

  “You’re the one to watch, crazy man. Bull had you up there like a little girl on a trampoline. You hold on for today. Tomorrow I’ll get you a layout.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Be out there in October, won’t you?”

  “Long as they got money between them horns.”

  “All right, crazy man. I’ll get you that layout.”

  And the officer was true to his word. Starting the next morning, Terry filed tools. Or, rather, he sat at the roadside sharpening a hoe blade occasionally, as needed, and periodically, when the mounted guard beckoned him, Terry hauled water for the rifleman’s horse.

  Next, the rodeo freed him from his punishment cell. At the late June meeting Warden Cain had called to bless my book in front of the inmates I’d been following, Terry, in the cuffs and shackles required whenever he was out of his cell and not working, approached the warden. He informed Cain, in a deferential mumble, of his recent marijuana charge, of his innocence, and of the fact that if the review board didn’t lift his sentence soon, he would be barred automatically from this year’s rodeo. That, he said, would prevent me from finishing my book.

  Terry’s words surprised me. But I didn’t interrupt to tell the warden that my project would survive whatever Terry’s fate. Cain, nervous that any complaint from me might arouse Polozola’s ire, turned to one of his assistant wardens and told him to look into the situation. By July the review board sent Terry back to the dorms, to Walnut. He was also promoted from filing tools in the fields to a job unloading and storing vegetables under the shade of a zinc roof.

  A few times each day one of the warden’s horse- or mule-drawn carts, piled with eggplants or squash, would plod away from the crops and approach the zinc shed. The wheel spokes revolved slowly and the horse shoes clomped deliberately along the road. At the driver’s listless tug on the reins, the animal would veer along its own gentle, sleepy curve toward the shed and the vegetable crew. Divorced from what they symbolized to many of the inmates, the wagons were one of the most serene visions on Angola’s soothing landscape. When I spent time with Terry, the sight of the long spokes turning and of the horses knowing, on their own, exactly where to park at the loading bay could slow and deepen my breath.

  The vegetables were washed in metal vats. A vague assembly line sorted the produce and bagged it by size. Above, an air-conditioned guards’ office stood on a platform. And soon the guards welcomed Terry from the shade into the air-conditioning.

  “Hey, Terry! Terry Hawkins!”

  He was hauling sacks of eggplant into a storage shed.

  “You want to get yourself a layout?”

  “What you need me to do?”

  “Come get up here.”

  Terry stowed one last sack and climbed the wooden stairs.

  “Get yourself some a.c, Terry,” the guard said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Major called yesterday. Said we should give you a new job.”

  “What you need?”

  “Says you should stay cool and shine shoes.”

  Terry hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know nothing about that.”

  “Major’s orders. He’s looking out for you.”

  “I never shined a pair of shoes in my life.”

  “Never shined a pair of shoes? We saw those cowboy boots you were wearing last week,” a second guard encouraged. “Those were shined plenty. You trying to tell us you didn’t shine those?” The two guards laughed. “It’s a layout, Terry. We’re not going to tell you to do ours but once in a while. Just set up here and relax. I got your wooden box right here. Your polish. Brush and rags. It’s nothing but a layout.”

  And again, the staff carried out its promise. Terry spent a minimum of time squatting on the wooden box, polishing. They gave him a chair, allowed him to sit through the day in the office. With the guards’ walkie-talkies crackling behind him, “TC1 to Camp J sallyport… Control center TC1,” he watched as the crew below dunked and rolled the eggplants in the water so the dust disappeared and the skins glistened, then sent them along the line. The elevated view relaxed him: the tops of men’s heads as they worked, their hands dipping in and out of the dark water. It was mesmerizing to watch the inmate who’d replaced him hauling sacks into storage. And from overhearing the guards, Terry knew the exact moment when count would be taken, and when precisely they would head in for lunch. It was faintly like controlling these things himself.

  He worked mostly when other staff dropped by, either to check on production or just to pick up a few vegetables to take home for dinner.

  “You need your shoes shined, Captain?” one of the guards asked.

  “Is that Terry Hawkins you got here?”

  “That’s him. The bullfighter.”

  “Well, shoot yes, Terry. You gonna make my shoes look pretty?”
>
  “All right.”

  “You seen his belt? Stand up and show him your belt.”

  Terry straightened his six-foot-three body off the eighteen-inch box.

  “Turn around, Terry. Show the captain what you got tooled in back.”

  “Bullfighter,” the captain read.

  “You should see how careful he cleans it. Brushes it with cornmeal and water.”

  “Cornmeal?” the captain asked. “What’s that for, crazy man?”

  “That’s the best thing for it,” Terry answered, body refolded as he applied polish in quick circles to a shoe tip.

  “You going to wear that in the rodeo?”

  “I’ll have it on.”

  “That’s your good-luck belt?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well, that’s important information. ’Cause I’m putting ten on you in that Guts & Glory. Makes me feel better to know I’m going to win it.”

  “You’ll win it.”

  “I figure you’re getting rich I might as well make a little money, too. Right, crazy man?”

  “You’ll make it.”

  “How much you betting, Sarge?”

  “I can’t do but watch. You saw the first weekend last year? No telling what Terry’s liable to do to get himself killed before he gets it. Thought he was going to get himself spiked clean through.”

  “He’s out to win it, aren’t you, crazy man?”

  “I’m winning.”

  “Please take him off,” Terry prayed late at night, in Walnut. “He’s hunting me down again.”

  His bedtime ritual had been performed hours earlier. On his cot, he had read the verses he’d highlighted months ago during his Bible group back at D. He turned the thin pages to find the neat orange markings.

  Lord, I cry unto Thee:

  make haste unto me;

  Give ear unto my voice,

  when I cry unto Thee.

  Let my prayer be set forth before Thee as incense….

  Incline not my heart to any evil thing.

  Then, twenty feet from where the man had lost his sneakers and gained a long, scythe-shaped scar on the left side of his face, Terry knelt beside his own cot and closed his eyes and lowered his head to his folded hands. Steam from the inmates’ evening showers gathered dense in the air, almost a palpable substance around his shoulders. The huge fans hummed, dropping a kind of veil in front of the world, making it distant, creating something strangely like silence.

  Our Father who art in heaven

  Hallowed be Thy name,

  Thy kingdom come

  Thy will be done

  On earth as it is in heaven.

  “Lord Jesus,” Terry went on, with a persistent hope that he was heard though he had failed to be saved, “thank You for looking over me; thank You for helping me be through this day safely; thank You for watching over my family; I love You, Lord; thank You for looking over Jamonica in school; thank You for looking over Quiana and her baby; thank You if you can put Mama in not so much sickness, Lord; I love You, Lord; I love You, Lord; please keep an eye on me, Lord; can You take some of this away, Lord?; can You forgive me, Lord?; I love You, Jesus; please lead me, Lord; can You help me a way out of this penitentiary, would You do that, Lord?; I love You, Jesus; could You do that, Lord?; keep an eye on me, Lord; look over me; look over me; thank You, Lord Jesus; thank You, Lord; amen.”

  But after midnight something had woken him, and now Mr. Denver Tarter wouldn’t let him return to sleep. So Terry knelt again. The steam had cleared. The vibration of the fans was only that, a relentless noise.

  “Please take him off. Please make him go away. Please just this one thing.”

  FOURTEEN

  WE STEPPED AWAY FROM THE HOUSE, A SHABBY BOX of pale green wood, the house Littell had been born in, that his mother still lived in, that he had returned to. A corroded swing set stood in front, then a low, wilting cyclone fence, then a stack of four torn tires like a welcoming statue beside the fence gate. This was where I visited Littell, in the city of Lake Charles, a month after he had left O’Brien House. He hurried out front, his shirt still unbuttoned, when he heard my car. He never invited me inside, and I have always wondered what level of decrepitude or disarray he preferred not to show me. He led me away from the stack of tires.

  Across from his house a vacant lot occupied half the block, a reminder of the property facing O’Brien, except that there the grass was cut low, while here saplings crowded one another amid shoulder-high reeds. An abandoned nightclub buckled behind the saplings. Within the tall grass were the charred boards of two houses leveled by arson while Littell had been at Angola. A pair of tremendous oak trees, draped with Spanish moss, had once shaded those houses. The trees still thrived, though now the effect was different, the dangling webs of moss no longer gentle but looking like an onslaught of chaotic growth spilling from the sky.

  “This neighborhood was no Fifth Avenue,” Littell said as we passed between the lot on one side and homes like his mother’s on the other. “But it looked good. Fifteen years ago, a lot of these houses were still pretty new. Now it’s like nature’s taking back over. When people move into a community they build up on nature, and now it’s like nature’s coming back and the will of man is losing out.”

  At moments when he spoke like this, it was hard to believe Littell had read with his finger in the Social Security office.

  His lips, as always, were in that slightly retracted position of disgust. He had shaved his head bald. He had lost weight-twenty pounds, he said, since Angola—and when he had come outside with his shirt unbuttoned I saw the bony plate of his chest. Will was most of what he was.

  But he felt more threatened than I did, walking me around the neighborhood. Up ahead, three or four teenagers sat on the unrailed porch of a shack with boarded up windows. “They think you’re here to buy drugs,” he said, their eyes tracking us past the house. “They think I’m bringing the white dude around.”

  “I know,” I said, and quietly laughed it off.

  It was no joke to him. Problems with a 1978 speeding ticket had kept him from getting his driver’s license, and, thinking he would clear this up any day, he hadn’t applied for a state I.D. He had nothing to show the police if they stopped him for questioning. I assured him that I would explain, vouch for what we were doing together, but this did little to change the way he walked: a rigid and subtle strut that held an odd hesitance, his weight further forward on his feet than seemed normal, almost as though he were barefoot and didn’t want to stab his heel on a piece of gravel.

  “Every evening, I try to be back inside by eight o’clock,” he said. “ ’Cause all I need is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They ask me for some I.D., they see I got none, they run a check, see I’ve been to Angola, that’s it. Any unsolved robbery, they can pin it on me. You see, Dan, the new thing is that crack. And that’s everybody. It’s seldom you see anyone around here who’s straight. Sometimes it makes me thankful for Angola—all the guys I grew up with are wasted on it. This block we’re walking on right now is where I spent all my time as a little kid. I used to play basketball right over there.” He pointed to an area unrecognizable as a basketball court, the fence and backboard long gone, torn down and sold for scrap by crackheads, and the pavement split apart by weeds and saplings.

  “And the neighborhood’s full of these little youngsters, they’ll juke guys, they’ll shoot guys, and if I’m with the wrong people, people I used to know that’s buying those drugs?—I don’t want to get in a situation where I’d be forced to do something crazy to somebody.”

  I told myself he was exaggerating, that trouble with the law would come only if he broke it, that nearly all these houses were filled with struggling, hardworking people. I told myself he spoke with an ex-convict’s feelings of entrapment and self-pity: The world was worse than he was; the cops were out to get him; the world might cause him to do wrong again.

  Then I listened to the neighborhood. At six-thirty
in the evening it was silent, almost motionless. The dealers on their porch weren’t speaking. Nor were the women in their dingy yellow or powder blue knee-length shorts, sitting on a stoop propped up on cinder blocks. They only stared. No cars drove by, so that Littell and I thought nothing of walking in the middle of the street. A few rickety bicycles drifted past, with grown men riding them. The supermarket where we went to buy sodas had steel mesh over every window and, inside, scarcely any light; the shriveling oranges in the fruit rack and the ice cream bars in the freezer lay in semi-darkness, and the cashier stood in a greenish gloom. The grocery seemed to be the only operating business around. Driving in, I’d passed a dilapidated store whose owner had advertised his best product by spray-painting in large, uneven letters across a side wall: TIGER ROACH SPRAY. Sometime later he had painted across the bare plyboard door: CLOSED.

  The place was like a ghost town, still inhabited. Littell wanted me to meet one of his brothers, with whom he’d reestablished a relationship. We found him on the porch of another squat house with wood nailed over several windows. He sat with two men, drinking beer. Did someone actually live inside? Did his brother? Or was this merely a lost building where three middle-aged men came to pass the evenings? Littell and his brother were awkward with each other, almost wordless, at least with me there, and I didn’t know how to start conversation. Suddenly I was thinking with relief that my year would be over soon, that I would be far away from this kind of life. Suddenly I didn’t have the energy. Their poverty was so thorough.

  And it became possible to think that Littell wasn’t exaggerating much, that most of these homes held someone doing or dealing crack, that it was the only source of energy left in this corner of this small city. It certainly wasn’t hard to think that in such a degraded place even the most fair-minded policeman would assume an ex-Angola inmate was guilty of any crime he was caught near.