God of the Rodeo (21 page)

The following afternoon he convened another audience of inmate leaders. He radioed an officer to bring me to the meeting, and I was pulled abruptly away from an inmate interview and rushed through Main Prison. After his speech of reassurance to the convicts, Cain led me outside to the Main Prison parking lot.

“I want you to sign that editorial agreement,” he said beside a row of white D.O.C. vans. “I want you to sign that piece of paper or sign out.”

I had, in fact, seen no actual piece of paper, no actual agreement, and he had none now—it seemed he’d realized suddenly, that day, that I might write about his retirement and barn-building plan, about our Amherst meeting, and the agreement had become a matter of full panic. “It’s going to be real simple. You’ll have it in the morning. So you just be ready to go ahead and do the best thing.”

I told him I couldn’t.

“Warden Peabody,” he called.

His pallid and dour first deputy stepped over.

“Is this fence galvanized?” Cain asked rhetorically, turning from me to run his thumb over the nearest chain link.

“Yes, it is,” Peabody answered.

“Does this fence looked galvanized to you?” he asked me, brushing at the metal.

I concurred that it did.

“Well, sure as this fence is galvanized you’re going to be on the other side of it if you don’t sign that piece of paper.” He spoke metaphorically, as we were nowhere near the front gate.

It amazed me that he was willing to threaten so hard in public, that he didn’t worry I would turn to his deputy, or to his press secretary, who stood close, or to the few other employees passing by in the parking lot, and describe his demand for money. But, apparently, he didn’t worry, not within his universe.

I made no accusations. My only hope was to win back his favor.

I told him I would think things through overnight. He told me to think hard.

“I love you like a brother,” he said, “but this is just business.”

The next morning, Thursday, one of Cain’s men walked me silently to my car, then watched to make sure I drove out the front gate. And as I headed away from Angola, knowing that I could never sign what the warden needed, I tried not to see too much significance in my own loss. When he had first requested money, I had been at least as panicked about my project as I should have been outraged by his use of the prison and its inmates in attempted extortion. (And I hadn’t thought about the human spirit or the possibility of God. I had thought about my book.) Driving past the bloated swamps, I was no defeated champion of inmate concerns.

Yet I felt that the convicts I knew were now underwater behind me. Littell Harris was out. Littell I would spend time with. But the others would remain forever where they had already been for a decade or much longer, submerged. Voiceless, unknown, they existed far below the surface, on a deep river bed.

L
ITTELL UNWRAPPED HIS DREADLOCKS
. T
HIRTY
-eight years old, free from Angola after serving fifteen years, he lived, that Easter, at a halfway house in Baton Rouge. There, in a narrow vestibule, he brought out his cut hair to show me how he had saved it. He was clean-shaven now, the slight cleft in his chin exposed, his jawline hard, the corners of his lips almost undetectably yet constantly retracted in a suggestion of universal disgust. His short Afro revealed small patches of gray.

While I thought wildly of how I could soothe or trick or fight the warden, Littell was all I had. I’d wanted to know something about human possibility. It was this.

The dreadlocks, two feet long, he protected within a sheet of newspaper surrounded by a tissue-thin piece of plastic that seemed to have been torn from a dry cleaner’s bag. It had about that resiliency, and was dingy and streaked, as though he had taken it off the street. The wrapping was closed by a single bit of masking tape, which Littell removed slowly with his long fingers so as not to damage too much of the plastic. Stooping, he set the bundle at our feet. He crouched and parted the wrapping. He turned to glance up at me. Then he gazed back down.

“There it is,” he said. “There’s my hair.”

Other residents squeezed past us. They had not come from Angola. They were, most of them, not ex-convicts; they had arrived at O’Brien House, in this run-down neighborhood adjacent to downtown Baton Rouge, to shed their drug and alcohol addictions. Littell had found his way here from a state-run treatment center he’d asked to be sent to back in January, when he was two months short of completing his sentence.

He hadn’t considered himself an addict in prison. He had only smoked marijuana when he could afford it and drunk Angola’s white lightning (mashed rice or fruit fermented in his locker box, with a bottle of bleach beside it to kill the smell) once in a while. But he worried about his enemies taking revenge during his final weeks, when he would hesitate to defend himself. The treatment center was a way out. There, he told his counselor about his life before prison, years dominated by drugs, mostly angel dust and an injected synthetic called “T’s ‘n’ Blues” that had been popular in Lake Charles before he was put away. His counselor, afraid he would fall back as soon as he was free, helped to place him at O’Brien. Littell was eager to go. He didn’t know if he was still an addict, but he knew that his mother wouldn’t want him living with her. He never called her as his release date approached. He knew that once he completed his sentence he would have no home.

As he spread the dreadlocks, laying the ropes of hair side by side, he didn’t seem aware of the men and women edging by. Perhaps his lack of embarrassment came from all those years in a place where nothing was private. Perhaps it came from knowing that these people, too, had so little, had begun without much and lost nearly everything, and that they would see nothing strange or shameful in his adoring some long-nurtured hair preserved within a sooty plastic cocoon. But also it was because the loss from cutting that hair went so deep.

“This is the first time I’ve actually taken it out.”

There were seven or eight ropes, each with a sort of bulb where the hair had bunched near his head, then a long, thick tail that looked like strips of old rug-backing or a worn and matted alpaca blanket. The bulbs were tinged with gray.

He arranged them evenly in straight lines, on the newspaper. He ran his hand along the ropes to smooth them.

“There’s me in that hair.”

He shifted, from crouching to kneeling. He lifted one of the ropes, brought it to his face, smelled it, kissed it. He set it back down.

“Man, that hurt me, it hurt me,” he almost whispered, thinking back to the cutting, as he began rolling the package again to store it. “My counselor at the treatment center convinced me. She saw I was determined to get myself established. She was a white lady, and she told me, people judge you by first impressions. She told me, ‘You can’t change the way people are going to judge that hair, but you can change your appearance.’ She told me I looked bizarre. And I hated to hear that. I hated
her
when she said that. But this woman was genuinely interested in helping me. I clung to her, man. So I did it. And I don’t regret it. I can’t wait to see me in a business suit. But after this dude clipped it off, when I went to my group session the next morning, I was like a dog when you shave him. You know how he’ll sit with his tail tucked between his legs? Right now, I’m living my life in the nude.”

Littell had left Angola sometime after midnight on January 21. The guard kicked at his bed and told him to pack his stuff. That was the way they always did it, late and without notice. Whenever an inmate was transferred to another facility—and the state treatment center counted as another lockup—the prison gave him no chance to call, or
have anyone else call, his family or friends. That way the bus couldn’t be ambushed and the prisoner freed.

There were no other transfers that night. The old school bus, requisitioned by the prison and painted blue and outfitted with steel mesh over the windows, was empty. Littell asked to sit close to the front so he could see out the windshield. The guard had no objections. Littell was cuffed and shackled.

“I guess you’ve earned your choice of seating.”

“You can believe,” Littell said, “I’m never going to see this road again.”

No one spoke for the rest of the trip. On that night of gauzy rain, Littell watched the forest going by, the headlights of the few cars coming toward the prison, and, after twenty miles, when the bus turned onto another two-lane highway, a man getting out of his car at a gas station. Littell turned his head to keep that man in sight through the steel mesh. That vision—a man stepping toward the pumps in the glare of the station’s lighting—injected Littell with the knowledge that Angola was behind him, as though the awareness were now surging through his body rather than merely lying in his mind. Here was life.

“I felt like I was coming out of a cave after being lost underground for a long time. I felt like weights had just been lifted off me. I felt like I could have jumped up and just flown right out the roof of that bus.

“Because let me try to explain the way you feel in Angola. Can you remember the most upset, the most depressed you’ve ever been in your life? When a loved one died? Has your mother died? Or someone that close? Can you put yourself back into what that felt like? Well, that’s the way you feel at Angola. That’s the way you feel every day.”

Over the years he had dreamt in his sleep, sometimes, of freedom. The dreams took repeated form: He sat under a tree, by a river,
with friends he’d known, and suddenly he was alone beside a woman. The sensations were easy, fine, heated. But always, just before the actuad sex, another consciousness crept in, telling him this couldn’t be real. He woke to his cell, or to the rows and rows of cots in the dorm.

That other consciousness crept in now, about the man at the gas station, about a traffic light, about the billboards and the stores on the roadside—
This might be real but not for you; you will never touch it, never be out in it—
and kept insinuating itself even after he had finished his final two months and was officially discharged from the state treatment center and the Department of Corrections, and was living on the second floor of O’Brien House.

At O’Brien, a fragile gray building that stood across a vacant lot from a Greyhound depot, he slept in a cramped four-man dorm room bearing little resemblance, in his mind, to the dorms at Angola. The floor had carpet, his bunk a thick mattress. His locker box—the same size and shape as those at the prison—where he kept his clothes and his hair, was made of painted wood. He actually slept only a few hours each night. He didn’t dream at all. Until two or three every morning he lay awake on his left side, so he could stare out the window at Florida Boulevard. The headlights went by between the trees that framed his view. Car after car after car after car, it took hours for him to grow tired of those passing lights; they might have been meteors.

Awake before dawn, he dressed in jeans and a new turtleneck. He’d bought the shirt with money from the bit of yard work he’d found through O’Brien’s director. He sat on the front stoop to stare at the dusty peonies in the flower beds or the Mardi Gras mask wired to a pipe or, with the fixation of an entomologist, at bugs in the grass. Sometimes he walked to the corner and back. In O’Brien’s voluntary
program, from which he could legally walk away at any moment, he was permitted to venture past the corner only with a resident “buddy,” unless he was looking for work and had the director’s permission. The rule was stifling, but hardly a challenge after Angola, and he was half-grateful for the restriction. Listening to the other residents recount their crack binges at O’Brien’s group meetings, and glimpsing the drug trade in one of the buildings across the street, he recognized himself from fifteen years ago, knew that his unraveling drug life had been part of what had led him to stick a gun in that cashier’s face (though the immediate reason had been rage when she seemed to ignore his request for cigarettes), and he couldn’t be certain that old self was relegated to the past.

“My name is Littell and I am a drug addict,” he said when everyone else had awoken and O’Brien’s day had begun and its first meeting gathered in a sunken room two steps down off the first floor hallway, a room with two cheap prints of birdlife on the walls and some old board games on a shelf and a Formica coffee table in the middle and not enough tattered couch space for all the residents, so that the coffee table was a crowded bench. Littell’s voice was hoarse with tension and low on volume. He sat near the door to the backyard.

“I was out on the stoop thinking, like I do all the time, and I know I don’t say a whole lot in these meetings, but I want to tell you all thank you for your support. I’ve been incarcerated for so long, and I’ve done a lot of things up there I don’t even like to think about, but I know I can establish myself. If I just stay away from drugs. And I know I can. ’Cause when I was coming up I got into that angel dust, that was the thing back then, and my daddy got so frightened of me, so frightened of his own son, he run me off with a pistol. I just hope you all can understand. I been in Angola. There’s no love up there. There’s no support like this here, like Miss Katherine tries to give us. So sometimes I just don’t know how to speak. I don’t even
know how to smile. People ask me, ‘Why do you always look like that? Why is your mouth always looking like that?’ And I try to undo it. I try to pull at my lips to make them look some other way.”