God of the Rodeo

by Daniel Bergner

  The backup begged high:

  Go on ahead

  And the lead singer told her:

  Get lost in the wings of another

  The harmony begged:

  Fly away

  And the lead singer told her:

  Along the way you are bound to discover

  The saxophone climbed:

  Another man

  And left the lead singer beneath it:

  You’re going to need to be your lover

  The harmony:

  I understand.

  Finished with the first phase of shaving James, Myron dabbed away the excess lotion with a washcloth. He emptied the plastic bowl and filled it again with fresh water. The room was quiet except for a few droplets falling back into the bowl when he wet his fingers to start again. A blurred and crackling voice, volume low, came from the walkie-talkie of a lieutenant passing by in the hall. “Can you give me a 21 at 2257?” Across the hall an open ward of twenty or thirty beds held the lifers dying of cancer, of AIDS, of other diseases and complications people die of anywhere. James’s room was a lock-down cell for patients deemed violent or obscene. The heavy steel door had an eight-inch slot where food trays could be passed through. James’s door stayed open. His prison record had been poor, but he was, oddly, somewhat upbeat now, and certainly he was no risk to expose himself or attack anyone.

  Though Myron’s life as a travel-approved trusty had been far from what James had known as a big-stripe, James had no trouble believing the scenes Myron described: crowds pressed to the stage; the manager of a Jordache factory and his wife half-adopting him and filling his locker box with jeans; a woman reporter from Channel 9 covering the studio session and predicting that he would, truly, play his way out of prison. Once, James had heard Mega Sound, the in-house version of Big River, perform at Camp C. The band played Prince and Maze and then Mardi Gras music that started the inmates second-lining, all the men dancing in frenzied New Orleans tradition (minus the umbrellas), shaking and fast-footing wildly, competitively, waving bandannas in the air. He knew what Myron was capable of, both the groove and the speed.

  And on the road Myron’s looks couldn’t have hurt either: the perfectly molded features, the round wire-rimmed glasses that made him look thoughtful, the V-shaped torso.

  Myron spread the lotion over both sides of James’s face this time; the second, touch-up shave would go more quickly. With the new blade, he rounded the jawbone. A pinhead of blood appeared.

  “Man, I’m gonna need minor surgery,” James said.

  Myron winced, blotted, twisted his lips in mock worry as though staring at a major wound. “Minor? I don’t know about minor, but you’re going to need some surgery.”

  “Run me another ep.”

  “All right.”

  “Wait. Take the edge of the sheet and rub my eyebrow. My eyebrow’s itching.”

  Myron brushed across it.

  “Rub it.”

  Myron pressed down.

  “Rub it harder, man. Don’t be scared to rub it. Rub it.”

  “Hey. I’m trying to be sure I don’t break it.”

  “Man,” James said, “you can’t never break me.”

  Through his first six years in prison Myron had made himself numb. He had kept in contact with his mother, who visited every few months by taking the special Batiste Company bus, twenty dollars per ticket, that ran through the Seventh Ward of New Orleans and onto I-10 and 61 and 66 to Angola. And he arranged to speak occasionally with his older brother, Felton, who was in Angola for the same killing. But gradually his brother had grown incoherent and erratic—schizophrenic, Myron thought, and very, very paranoid-and he’d spent years at J and later been sent to the prison’s mental-health unit. Often, Felton had no grasp on reality, scarcely knew where he was.

  These were Myron’s close relationships, until Natchitoches. There, a little girl who looked like an Eskimo yelled up to the stage, requesting a song by MC Hammer. Her mother wrote to Myron a week later. She had seen his picture in the newspaper the day after the gig; it was now taped to her daughter’s wall between MC Hammer and Big Bird.

  Marie, a thin, pretty white woman with light brown hair and a low, raspy voice, a medical technician soon to enroll in college, and LaShae, the chunky four-year-old with long black pigtails and puffy cheeks and yellow-toned skin, started visiting. In the trusty park, LaShae devised a game with sticks and paper cups: Run a stick through a cup and you had a sword with a handle. She and Myron dueled on a slab of concrete that was supposed to hold another picnic table. The table had never been built; the slab, LaShae announced, was the roof of a skyscraper. If she forced him off, he fell one thousand feet to his death. If he forced her, she turned instantly into Spider Woman.

  They had plans, he and LaShae. A boy on her street had been to a farm in Canada, and reported seeing lots of animals. She wanted to move to Canada. He was going to take her. They would travel in an eighteen-wheeler, which he would teach her to drive. (He had no idea how to drive one himself.) At the picnic tables and in the visiting shed, he described to her how the lessons would go and how the journey would feel and how, after Canada, they would swing back into the States and stay on the road, he the star musician and she his manager. To seal the pact, she gave him an empty, torn-open plastic sack stenciled with Power Rangers—she decided to keep the fighting figures themselves.

  He folded the sack and saved it in his locker box. He dreamed recurringly of their trip to Canada. He was driving the eighteen-wheeler, she in the cab next to him. Things were exactly as intended, except that they weren’t on a highway; they were in an eighteen-wheeler speedboat on the Mississippi River. Other speedboats passed them by. He felt, in the dream, that something was terribly wrong, though he and LaShae were laughing, she bragging about how much better she could drive the truck than Myron and telling him to pull over so they could switch places, and he promising he would, just as soon as they were out of the river. The boats kept zooming by. He kept shifting gears. “You can’t drive any faster than that?” she kept giggling.

  During the visits, with LaShae persuaded to hunt bugs if they were outside or sent to the Pac-Man machine if they were in, Marie and Myron spoke of how inevitably he would be released, because of either his music or the errors in his trial. Or both. No question the errors were cause for reversal. It was open and shut. And once the judge saw that he was a member of the Angola Big River Band, and realized how talented he was and how much joy he’d brought to people all over the state, and noticed how good his conduct had been in prison-never running off, never causing a bit of trouble despite all the freedoms the administration had given him; never breaking a trust—he would suggest to the prosecution that Myron be allowed a manslaughter plea. And with the judge’s discretion on resentencing, Myron would be out in just a few more years. Marie’s grainy voice made this future seem full of substance, already almost real. And whenever he doubted it, whenever he listed all the other inmates he knew clinging to all their certainties, she told him, voice even lower and raspier, “You’re special. You’re going to get out of here. You’re not the type to be in prison.”

  “Take care of my babies,” he would tell her, meaning herself and LaShae, when the prison bus came to end the visit.

  “No,” Marie would say, “you take care of my baby,” meaning Myron.

  And soon, in a letter, she seemed to be proposing. The question wasn’t exactly straightforward, and the next time he called, after asking how she was, he mentioned the sentences and the suggestion they seemed to contain.

  “Oh God,” she said, with a spurt of girlish laughter. “I didn’t think you’d actually pick up on that.”

  “Marie, let me get some numbers. Right now I got these alphabets. With numbers I can see some daylight. With alphabets I can’t see nothing.”

  The laughter ceased, replaced by the raspiness. “I’ll do the seeing. Even if nothing else works, you’ll get your pardon as soon as you get in enough years to apply. So how far away
is that?”

  “About six years.”

  “Well, there’s a number.”

  They met with a prison chaplain for approval. A black man in a meek-looking, textured white sweater, he was hard as armor. In an office alongside the chapel’s sanctuary, behind a sliding glass door, he sat them down and stared cruelly at Marie. “You can’t possibly love this man enough to marry him. You cannot. His sentence is life. L-I-F-E. How can you love him that much? Tell him you love him that much.”

  “I love you that much.”

  “Tell him again. Can you do it twice?”

  “I love you that much.”

  “ ’Cause you’re going to have to keep doing it. Right here in Angola.”

  “I love you that much.”

  “But do you hear what he’s saying now, Marie?” Myron cut in. “The law of Louisiana doesn’t feel like I’m so special. They feel like I’m a murderer. I’m an outcast from society and I’m right where I’m supposed to be.”

  “Next Christmas.”

  “Marie.”

  “It’s not going to be all that long.”

  “L-I-F-E,” the chaplain spelled again.

  “Yeah, I understand.” Marie turned on him. “Myron Hodges has a life sentence. He may never get out of Angola. And I never thought, never ever, that I’d fall in love with a man in prison, and I never thought I’d marry a man in prison, I never imagined it in my wildest dreams. But I did always say that if I ever marry a man I would love that man, and that my marriage would be for better or for worse, and that I would love that man for the rest of my life. No such thing as divorce or separation. Not if I can do anything about it.”

  “And you,” the chaplain fixed on Myron.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ve got all the time in the world to sit down and figure out what this woman wants to hear.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t tell me no. You can say it just right. I’ve seen inmates, they can say it better than Shakespeare. And what you’re really saying is you love her so much you want to use her. You want her to be your errand person now. You want her to be the go-between, between Angola and your freedom. You’re not serious about this woman, you don’t love this woman, and if you ever get out you’re going to walk off and leave her.”

  “No, sir, that’s-”

  “And when you get her putting money in your account, and when she’s all used up and she comes complaining, they’re going to put state charges against you. Add a few more years to that life. And they’re going to put you in J so you can’t ever do it again.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then share with us why exactly you proposed to this woman.”

  “Sir, I didn’t propose. She proposed to marry me.”

  The chaplain coughed, chuckled. “Well, that’s something new. Well. All right, she proposed. But what is your motive to marry her?”

  Suddenly, with the chaplain’s cross-examination slamming around in his head, Myron had no doubt at all about going forward with the wedding. He didn’t hurry to answer. “I don’t have a motive,” he said finally. “The way Marie and I met, it was a way that seemed actually meant to be. Because up to then I made myself feel nothing. Nothing. That was my way. And my thoughts about marriage in prison were, It’s totally ridiculous. It’s out of the question. But in this particular case it’s like we’re already married. And a marriage is much bigger than a contract. It’s stating that we love one another and we’re going to love one another and that’s just the way it’s going to be. I need Marie to be there for me forever, whether I’m in this prison or not. So I really don’t have a motive, so to say. But I more or less have a reason. My reason is that I love her, and I realize I need her more than I knew at one time.”

  James liked to have his face rubbed down with the Vaseline lotion afterward. Myron spread it over his own hands, and massaged James’s cheeks and the rise of his cheekbones, his chin and his temples. The guitar-trained fingers moved in forceful, rhythmic circles. They crossed the forehead and smoothed over the bridge of the nose. James kept his eyes closed. Myron worked back toward his ears, followed the channels of the lobes, then with the third finger of each hand grazed over the eyelids. Though that was always the end of the massage, James kept his eyes shut. Myron dampened a washcloth, and slowly dissolved and cleaned the crusted mucus from the edges of James’s nostrils.

  Two members of the band serenaded the wedding in the Main Prison chapel, the keyboard player and the lead singer doing a soft “You and I” before the service. Marie wore a white, knee-length dress with a hairpiece and a short veil. She’d highlighted her shoulder-length hair a half-shade toward blond. The chaplain who’d interrogated them now made them both cry with his sermon, his talk of compassion and his calling down of blessings. The keyboard screamed Mendelssohn as they walked back down the aisle.

  Regulations kept children from the interior of Main Prison. LaShae waited with a friend of Marie’s in the visiting shed. The girl never wore a dress—she liked shorts or leggings or sweat pants so she could run, liked her hair in braids, off her face, so she could see where she was headed. Today she charged over in polka-dotted leggings and a red leotard top. “Mommy and Daddy is husband and wife!” she announced, the slivers of her black eyes glowing. “We’re one big family now!”

  Myron gave LaShae a wedding gift: a snakeskin belt with a snakehead buckle. It was the second or third such belt he’d commissioned for her, along with a snakeskin pocketbook—not that she was fond of pocketbooks or in much need of belts to hold up the elastic waist of her pants, but she liked anything having to do with snakes, and she loved popping up and trying to scare people with the buckles. In the park she would even rush at the guards, waving her fangs.

  She thanked him, but put the cobra aside on the table.

  “Daddy,” she said, “you sit right here, and I’ll sit here, and, Mommy, you stay where you’re at.” She arranged herself between them and turned toward Myron.

  “Daddy, I need to talk to you.”

  “Oh, okay, baby. Let’s talk.”

  “You’re going to have to sit still.”

  “Okay, baby, I’m still.”

  “From now on,” she wrinkled her forehead sternly, “and I want you to listen real good, from now on you’re going to be my real daddy.”

  “I know, baby, I—”

  “I’m not finished. I had a daddy, but…” She seemed to lose track of her thoughts. She turned toward Marie. It was clear LaShae couldn’t remember what had happened with her father, what she’d been told about his drifting off, but before her mother could supply an explanation LaShae peered again at Myron. “Well, we lost him. So from now on you’re going to be my real daddy.” After which she became a five-year-old again, bounced out of her chair, attacked with the cobra, and struck a deal that if she let Myron and Marie have a few minutes of quiet he would, at their next park visit, spend two nonstop hours dueling with her on the thousand-foot rooftop….

  “Take care of my babies.”

  “No, you take care of my baby.”

  … When the band was abolished by Warden Cain’s decree (and its members forbidden to play a note), Marie convinced Myron that the band had been a danger anyway. Its freedoms brought too much resentment, from inmates and staff, that in prison could lead quickly to trouble, fights you were goaded into and charges that were trumped up. Myron’s chances with the pardon board could be ruined. It was lucky the band was finished, she said. Now he could fill his prison folder with more signs that he should be let go. He would play guitar again someday.

  He joined the CPR team, took the training, carried his three-ringed manual constantly, kept a calendar of the team’s teaching schedule as meticulously as he had the band’s gigs. Not only did he give instruction to school bus drivers and church congregations and, once, to the residents of O’Brien House, blowing air into his plastic dummy and demonstrating chest compressions and the Heimlich maneuver and quizzing his students, “Are you sup
posed to roll a conscious or an unconscious person into the recovery position?”—he also took over a course for inmates. He corrected their mistakes carefully, without riding them too hard, and had thirty showing up to study in A Building where there had been only ten.

  “Do you know how the CPR team got started?” he asked, keeping them inspired. “It was ’Cause of a convict named Big E. He had a heart attack in his dorm, in the TV room. And do you know what the inmates did? The very same ones that went and started this program afterward? They did everything they knew how to do. They opened a few buttons of Big E’s work shirt and turned the fan in his direction.”

  And he enrolled in GED school. When he called to check on LaShae’s grades, he told her that now he, too, was a student. “And Mommy’s in college, and LaShae’s in third grade—what do you think about all that?”

  “Well,” she said, “it means we’re all smart cookies.”

  “Yeah, and it means if you keep your grades up, Daddy’s going to have to get you another snakeskin something.”

  He brought his own grades up and, after two setbacks in math on the qualifying test, studied all night and made it to the GED exam. On the phone, when his exam scores came in, he told Marie, “I blew that little simple test to the moon.”

  “That’s great. That’s just so great, baby.”

  “I got my degree.”

  “I knew you would.”

  “Yeah. I’m a smart cookie, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, you are.”

  And she put LaShae on to say, “I’m so proud of you.”

  A nurse came in after making her rounds on the ward. Myron pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. The nurse drew the sheet away. She checked James’s diaper for urine and for any discharge that hadn’t reached the colostomy bag. She opened the front of the diaper like a flap—it was never fastened, as he could never shift to disturb it. His penis looked strangely normal, dangling senseless but unwasted.