God of the Rodeo (25 page)

Donald Cook’s surprises began when he opened his mouth to show me the sugar bags of marijuana between his teeth and tongue.

With his shirt off on that 90-degree June afternoon, sweat shone on his tattoos: the lion-monster, the helmeted woman, the spiderweb, the declaration
LOUISIANA
CRACKER
. Sweat trickled below his short black hair. Facing the Main Yard, we sat on a concrete ledge outside the dorms. Two of his customers lingered separately at a distance, waiting for our talk to end. Occasionally one would circle close, then wander ten or twenty yards away, letting Cook know they were impatient. They wanted to make their buys.

“Be cool,” he told them. “I’m having a conversation. I’ll find you by the hobby shop. You’ll get it before chow time.

“These guys are pathetic,” he said to me, smiling with his bright, slightly overlapping front teeth, and indeed his customers seemed it. One, bearded and paunchy and slack-shouldered in his V-necked T-shirt, looked more like an old hobo than a dangerous convict, though undoubtedly he had destroyed someone, murdered or raped someone, sometime.

“Back last fall,” he went on, “I told myself I was going to quit dealing, ’cause of my mom and all. I didn’t want to get caught no more. I didn’t want her thinking about me in the cells. It was killing her, thinking I was doing so much wrong. But I missed it. The thrill. That’s really what it is. It’s the money, that’s part of it, but it’s the thrill. It ain’t having it to smoke. I see some dude coming down the Walk and I’m supposed to deliver? I drop the bag right there on the concrete when he’s just that far in front of me? So he can pick it right up when we pass by? The timing’s got to be just right. I got to watch him and the freeman, both. That last second? When I’m just about to drop? When I got to take my eyes off the freeman up ahead and I got no idea anymore whose eyes are in back?” Cook smiled with those overlapping teeth, then shook his head, exhaling through narrowed lips. It was clear what he meant without his saying anything:
Always, at that moment, his heart was locked rather than beating, and he loved the fight to overcome that dread, loved hurling himself at chance, proving his will greater than his fear. This was his self-discipline, this was his strength, this was what made him the opposite of the slack men circling him now, just pining to stupefy themselves and, with their indiscretion, adding to his risk of getting caught, keeping his adrenaline high even as we sat there and he recounted his day.

That morning he had woken at about three A.M. This was from habit, the routine that had taken hold during the fall when he’d quit dealing and hated the dorm, wanted to put some distance between himself and the person everyone else expected him to be. He still liked to get out while almost everyone slept.

A few other men, having returned from their night shifts, moved like ghosts under the blue security lights. Their slippers scraped on the cement floor as they walked toward the showers. The industrial fans vibrated. Beneath these constant baseline sounds, it was easy for Cook to unlock his box, turning the key gingerly, and to dress and walk up the aisle, keeping his steps tight, without anyone hearing. His “bed partners,” the men with cots on either side of him, always asked how he could get out so quietly; they were amazed that he never once disturbed them. He was amazed that they were impressed. There was enough noise to cover anyone. His care with his lock and footsteps wasn’t even necessary. That was just something he did. “You just disappear,” they said, as if they felt betrayed by his refusal to sleep as late as possible, to minimize the hours of consciousness.

Leaving the dorm that early morning, Cook had gone, as always, to the Toy Shop. Inside, just one man sat at a workbench, glueing blocks of wood to make flatbed trucks. He and Cook said hello, nothing more. Cook started painting the flatbeds a baby blue. He painted some pull-along rabbits the same shade. He was meticulous.
Any section designed to be a different color was left ungrazed by his slender brush. Every edge was sharp, all surfaces smoothly coated. He set the trucks and rabbits in evenly spaced rows to dry. The deaf toddlers who received these next Christmas would be thrilled.

He took a nap, curled on the vinyl couch. When it was time for work—he had been promoted again, from the kitchen paint crew to kitchen maintenance—he woke automatically. The job was often a matter of waiting for parts, which was why he considered it a promotion. That morning the crew was supposed to replace a drainage pipe. But they had no pipe, so after slouching outside the kitchen from 7:30 until 10:00, they were dismissed for the day. He walked out across the Yard, past the basketball court, where two inmates played a sluggish game of 21, past the weight pile and the little gazebo where one of the Main Prison barbers had set up shop. A guard in camouflage fatigues, one of the shakedown team, wandered the grass, waving a metal detector in front of him. Far off, at the other end of the complex, one of the field lines was being cleared back in for lunch, their boots checked for weapons.

A few scattered benches stood by the softball field, two farther out. Cook chose the one closest to the perimeter fence, absolutely by himself. He didn’t mind baking in the sun (the Yard was without trees, to maximize surveillance). He was glad to sit with the nearest shade back at the gazebo hundreds of yards away, the price for both solitude and this particular view. He stared at the Tunica Hills.

Recently he’d done some maintenance work on one of the Main Prison roofs, and he’d had his first look at Angola’s geography. He made it a very long look. Because the landscape was so flat, he could take in almost everything, from the river to the front gate. Behind the administration building, the hills rose up and the prison ended. He believed in Angola’s buffer zone, but he, unlike many of the inmates, imagined an area of only a few thousand acres. Angola, to him, was not endless.

Today, from his bench, he gazed at the dark trees on the hills against the filmy, overheated sky. This had become a ritual, performed at least once each week. He considered those hills. He didn’t doubt what everyone said, that pigweed and thorny vines grew everywhere. He didn’t doubt what everyone said about the copperheads and rattlers. And he understood that what they said about the dog team was probably at least half true: that every week for practice they sent an inmate out with two hour’s head start, that the dogs picked up his scent and just wouldn’t stop, that they would track straight through brambles and even quicksand bogs, that those guards on the team were the craziest, meanest motherfuckers the penitentiary could find, that they didn’t care if their partners got sucked under the mud and drowned as long as they got their inmate—and got to pistol-whip him if the chase was real—that every week the team caught the convict within a few hours.

In fact, Cook’s understanding was closer to three-quarters true. The chase-team guards were extremely devoted. For their weekly practice they sent one of their own members along with one of the dog-tending trusties into the woods, and while this partnership tried to flee or hide, the guards did indeed charge through thickets and bogs, heedless of scratches and sinking and snakes. When I had gone out with them, they offered me the experience of taking the leash. I returned it quickly. I didn’t want to plunge first through any of that terrain. One guard reassured me that he hadn’t been bit by a snake in two years. I wasn’t reassured. And I grew tired. My city exercise routines didn’t seem to matter out here, where their bellies, tanked with the pecan pies they’d devoured before we left, kept them barreling forward. They found the two men in about ninety minutes, though sometimes the mock chases lasted into the night and they had to navigate these woods after dark. Once caught, the two men “loved up” the dog that found them, petting it and scratching it behind the ears. This, the guards said, was what the real escapees
had to do. No more pistol-whipping, no more pummeling. That was the past. Now the trapped inmate was simply told, “Love up the dog, you better love him up,” and made to stroke the bloodhound that had put an end to his flight.

As Cook sat on his bench, he thought of what he’d seen on the TV news yesterday morning. A convict had tried to escape the previous night. The tower guard had been asleep while the man had climbed two fences and pried apart the concertina wire. Word around the prison was, the man had been planning to swim a narrow part of the Mississippi. Sandbagging during the flood, he’d scoped out the river. But when he ran up the levee, razor-blood streaming along his arm, he saw that the flood hadn’t gone down as much as he’d figured. There was too much swamp. And alligators lurking in it. He couldn’t see a thing. After going a short ways, he couldn’t make himself push his luck. He edged back toward the levee. He crouched down carefully in some bushes. He waited for the dogs.

When Cook had heard, yesterday evening, that the man had been caught, it hadn’t affected him. He said it hadn’t seemed to matter to anyone. Most of the inmates would never try to run; they dreamt of pardon hearings and appeals. And Cook knew he wouldn’t try his escape the way that fool had. First of all, snakes were better than alligators. So you went to the hills instead of the river, especially since there were plenty of snakes in those woods across the water, anyway. And second of all, you had to plan. You had to maximize your chances. You couldn’t just go without thinking things through. You had to find the right job that would take you to the right spot on the grounds, so you could reach those hills unseen before the next count. And then you couldn’t freeze up as soon as you got scared. Which that stupid motherfucker had in the swamp. And which Cook knew he wouldn’t.

Cook stayed on his solitary, sun-assaulted bench through lunch,
remembering how he’d escaped once from a parish jail about eighty miles from his home in Alexandria, after an arrest for burglary. He’d begged a dollar from a Cuban in the pen with him, then yelled for the guard. “I need a col’ drink.” On his way to the soda machine in the front room, he made a quick survey. There were only the barred gate to the pen, the door into the front room, and the door out. The doors weren’t locked.

He returned to the pen and shared his drink with the Cuban. Two hours later he asked for another dollar. The Cuban looked at him like he’d lost his mind. Cook whispered what he planned to do. The Cuban wanted the entertainment. Cook went with his money to the bars, yelled for the guard, whined about the heat. He needed another drink. He backed up as the guard unlocked the gate, and as the man tugged it open with his weight off balance, Cook drove at the bars. The guard reeled. Cook ran through the front room and down the street, gunshots behind him briefly. He cut down an alley, hid between shacks in the black section of town, stole a bicycle, rode through the rest of the night, lay flat beside the shoulder whenever a car passed by, slept the next day in a soy field, stole a truck, and almost made it home before he was caught.

That was all he wanted to do now, get home to Alexandria. To see his ex-wife.

He went back to his dorm for count, sat on his cot while the guard walked the aisles and made checks on a clipboard. Cook looked through his three-ringed photo album. A picture of his son-hair parted crisply on the side, cheeks fleshy in smiling, the boy around seven years old—had surfaced in his mother’s trailer. She had mailed it along this week. She and Cook had no contact with his ex-wife, or with his son and daughter, who, he thought, might be in foster care. But sometimes relatives sent his mother snapshots. Next to this new one, photos of the children as toddlers, as infants, beamed up from the pages. He had cut them smaller than passport size, cut
them tight around the puffy faces, because their mother had been in the pictures. The child faces were all the more otherworldly, all the more angelic, for their isolation.

“I want to take that chip off
him,”
off God, I remembered him saying, as he told me about cropping his ex-wife from every photograph. The cropping was meticulous. No sign of her presence—not a fingernail—intruded on any of the pictures.

The count had to clear in every dorm before any door was opened. All it took to hold everything at a standstill was one innocent mistake in verifying the two thousand inmates at Main Prison. Twenty minutes, half an hour, forty-five minutes went by. Cook filled a few sugar bags while the guard sat at his corner table in the one o’clock heat, all his energy focused on keeping his eyelids from lolling shut.

“Count clear!” The words traveled, echoed by guards at gate after gate, up the Walk.

Later that afternoon, sitting with me on the concrete ledge and telling his drug customers he would deliver soon enough, Cook related that he had just called his mother. He saw her about twice each year; during the visits he would pull his chair beside hers, touching hers, and hold her hand for such long periods that other inmates occasionally mistook her for his wife. But making conversation could be hard, especially on the phone, especially because today there was information he needed to bury in case security was tapping in.

“Let’s not both talk at the same time,” he told her, their standard joke whenever the silences lasted.

She laughed. “You’re my heart, Donald Lee.”

“I just thought you might be getting sick, ’cause I caught them cramps again last night. But I guess not this time.”

“No, not this time.”

“I was right with them headaches, though.”

“I’ll probably feel it tonight.”

“Mama, I’m sending you some money. I been selling some belts and things I made in the hobby shop. Dude’s people are going to mail you a check.”

“You been making some belts?”

“Yeah. Just a little money for you, is all.”

“And I’m going to put it right back in your account.”

“No. Don’t you do that.”

“Right back.”

“It’s for you.”

“You need it worse.”

“No, if I did I’d keep it. It’s for you.”

“You’re my heart. You staying good?”

“Yeah, Mama.”

“ ’Cause you know everything you do at that prison is wrote down.”