God of the Rodeo (27 page)

“I just told hello to a nurse on hospital call and told her she looked beautiful this morning.”

“Well, you know, babe,” the chaplain said, understanding what had probably happened, that the man had told her hello and started jerking off, “next time just say hi and skip the rest of the verbology.”

He asked the man if he wanted to pray. They held hands and, leaning together, their foreheads almost touched. “In nine months you could be out of here, back in population,” he encouraged afterward.

“All right.”

“You want some reading?”

“All right.”

He slipped through the bars a paperback of big-print advice and biblical quotations called
You Were Born a Champion, Don’t Die a Loser
. They held hands once more, and the chaplain moved on to the next convict. This was his day, this was his life, cell after cell after cell.

I reckoned, too, with programs of Cain’s that complemented the new opportunities in shoe shining. Before Cain, car washing had been enjoyed by staff informally, the way Johnny Brooks washed the trucks of the freemen on the range crew. It was Cain, I learned, who
had created the official operation—covered carport; maroon and yellow sign reading
ANGOLA
CAR
WASH
—positioned beside the front gate. There he stationed two or three convicts full-time with a hose and buckets. (He appointed a car washer for himself as well, at the Ranch House.) Staff could tell the inmates exactly how they wanted their vehicles cleaned and waxed, and could expect the service to match their desires. Again, cigarettes were paid, so the car wash was, to some, a treasured assignment. The warden had no trouble locating convicts who would buff hoods and wipe headlights energetically.

But Cain’s greatest flourish may have been the reintroduction of mule-and horse-drawn wagons to the vast farming operation of Angola for the first time since the 1950s. The long wooden carts joined and partly replaced tractors and trucks in transporting the peppers and corn and squash picked by the line crews. From late spring through the fall of my year, when I stared out across the cropland into the heat haze, I saw the ramshackle wagons inching up the rows, driven by inmates perched high in the sun.

“He likes it to look like slavery times,” the inmates observed.

And so, that summer, the miraculous father figure, the improbable savior, was long gone from my vision. I could focus only on what was possible in a world where nothing wonderful was promised. On their own, what goals could the convicts cling to? What meaning could they build into their lives? How far could they rise?

J
OHNNY
B
ROOKS
HAD
ASKED
,
DURING
THE
SPRING
, to be transferred from the range crew to the car wash. The shorter hours allowed him time to run and work out, to devote himself to taking the all-around in this year’s rodeo. In July I watched him on a rickety weight machine behind Camp F. His thigh muscles erupted as he straightened his legs. He’d always been the strongest of the riders, but last October he’d been slack in his training, hadn’t capitalized on his edge. When he thought back to that failure, he felt it “right here, right here,” he said, fist on his chest. His failure still hollowed it.

This time he was going to give those bulls everything he had. He was going to give an all-around and a bull-riding buckle to Belva’s sons, who would be, officially,
his
sons by then. And he was going to give Belva what she’d only glimpsed in his five-second near-miss ride on last year’s final Sunday, what had made her start to fall in love, what had made her write, in her first letter, that she couldn’t believe how well he rode.

The quad machine rattled with his fifteenth rep. I tried not to stare at the jagged pronouncement of his muscles. The workout area was a concrete slab surrounded by mud. Nearby, beside the ancient, broken trunk of a fallen oak, a gospel quartet rehearsed its harmony:

Standing and setting a barbell across his shoulders, Brooks told me that if he got out of Angola he would try to compete on the pro circuit, no matter how old he was. “They going to look twice,” he imitated the double take of the rodeo world, “and say, ‘Where’d this nigger come from?’ ”

Brooks had been sentenced to the electric chair in 1975. That was before Louisiana had devised a death penalty statute acceptable to the United States Supreme Court. So he had wound up serving life for a murder, he claimed to me, he did not commit.

I had been to the parish court clerk and read the “Statement of Facts” signed by the judge after the trial:

The document went on to say that Brooks, eighteen at the time, had been dropped off near the store at about 11:15, and that, around noon, he had given an acquaintance a dollar bill showing traces of blood. This led the police to search Brooks’s grandfather’s house, where Brooks lived. They found bloodstained jeans and shoes and, in an overgrown lot behind the home, a blood-splattered shirt. The blood was type O, the same as Mrs. Boston’s.

“No suh, I didn’t do it,” Johnny Brooks told me, at the car wash beside the front gate. “I just found the body.” This, he said, was how the blood had streaked his clothes, and I did not have the heart to interrogate him. His flimsy denials, which I’d heard whenever I’d asked about the crime, made me quick to change the subject, partly because I would never know the truth for certain, but mostly because I felt I knew the truth already and wanted more from Johnny Brooks, at forty-one, than an eighteen-year-old’s desperate defense.

Yet he was no less desperate now. After twenty-three years he still hoped the appeals court might overturn his conviction on grounds he could not explain. “I got an inmate counsel working on my case. I paid him some cigarettes and he’s working on it,” he said. “They got me bad.” Around Angola, that was the expression for false charges. And that was about as explanatory as Johnny Brooks could get.

He wore a white straw cowboy hat while waiting for cars. When they pulled up, he set the hat delicately on his chair, tugged on rubber wading boots over his cowboy boots, and transformed from dapper rancher (dapper as could be, anyway, on his budget) to ready servant. The staff brought him cleaning fluids and leather revitalizers and hubcap polishes, and he heeded their instructions—“Yassuh,” “All right, suh,” “Oh, yassuh”—and went to work. He lavished their truck beds with soap, and cleaned and dried their windshields repeatedly to avoid streaking. He polished their fenders the way a butler would a set of silver, rubbing at every spot.

The job brought him tips, packs of cigarettes, from the employees. And it put him in contact with an array of administrators and ranking officers, people who might somehow, he could believe, help him win a commutation if he ever came before the pardon board. People who, he told me, cared for him.

“You know I got my wedding coming up now, Mr. Darrell,” he said as, running out of rags, he used newspaper to blot Mr. Darrell’s hubcaps. He stooped over and rubbed so hard, to prevent water marks, that he was out of breath.

The assistant warden, Mr. Mike’s brother, a small, smiling leprechaun of a man who truly did seem as nice as Brooks thought, stood to the side. He waited for his truck to be finished and joked, “How you know she’s showing up?”

“She better.”

“You better put her in lock-down, from what I hear. Get her a cell till that date rolls around.”

“Aw, Mr. Darrell.” Brooks grinned but looked faintly worried: he was an inmate, she part of the free world; there was no telling what Mr. Darrell knew.

“How many dates has she missed for y’all to get your approval from the chaplain?”

“Her friend’s car broke down.”

“That’s one.”

“She works, Mr. Darrell. And she got four kids.”

“Johnny Brooks. Family man!”

“Yassuh. You coming to the wedding, ain’t you?”

“You let me know the date.”

“September the fifth.”

“You let me know
after
she makes it up here for that chaplain’s approval.”

“We already have the preacher. Mr. Rick LeDoux, Cowboys for Christ Ministry. He already set off that day.”

“That’ll make two of you waiting on her.”

“Aw, Mr. Darrell.”

“Johnny Brooks,
in
love!”

“Yes, I am. Yes, I am.”

“Lost his heart.”

“Ain’t lost it.”

“All right, Johnny.” Mr. Darrell climbed into his truck.

“September the fifth. You can put that down.”

The assistant warden put his truck into drive. “Only one Johnny Brooks!” he called out the window.

Late as the day had gone on the range crew, and demeaning as his relationship had been with Mr. Mike, I thought Brooks must regret his change in jobs. I remembered him galloping across the fields one dank evening. His long green rain slicker had been black in the dusk and had shuddered in the wind and looked as though it might tear open and fly out behind him like a cape. I remembered what the newest inmate on the crew, a man nicknamed Gumby because of his likeness to the tall, skinny, bendable children’s toy, had told me with Brooks standing there: “One day I hope to be as good a cowboy as Johnny Brooks.” And I recalled something that
had happened the afternoon we went out tagging and castrating, the afternoon that ended with his playful whipping at the hands of Mr. Mike.

When Brooks flung his rope and leapt from his horse and sprinted toward a calf, the mother’s instinct was to attack, sometimes viciously, sometimes in such anxiety and outrage she frothed at the mouth, and Mr. Mike and a convict named Bear had to keep Brooks safe. They positioned their horses like a wall; they shifted with the cow and urged Brooks to hurry; they never left him exposed. Mr. Mike was highly skilled in directing this interference. In a sense, to watch their three-man team at work was to see Mr. Mike saving Brooks’s life, perpetually. That was touching enough. But that day they came across the rare mother with no protective inclinations. During the tagging she wandered off, hundreds of yards away, and when Brooks released the black calf it was lost.

“Maahh. Baahh,” Mr. Mike called out, mimicking a calf’s sound, trying to draw the mother back, for the calf seemed used to being abandoned and gave no cry of its own.

“Baahh,” Brooks called.

“Maahh. Baahh,” Bear, a giant of at least 275 pounds, gave out.

“Maahh. Baahh. Baahh,” all three men tried together.

Meanwhile the calf, bewildered, had trotted away and slipped under some barbed wire into a separate field. Now the mother couldn’t reach it, no matter how possessive she suddenly became.

“Go on out there and get him, Johnny. Put him in your saddle and take him to his mama.”

So Brooks ducked through the barbed wire, roped the stray and passive calf from the ground, tied its legs, cradled it under his arm, and carried it back through the fence. Then he mounted his horse and, with the baby resting peacefully across the saddle, started slowly toward a gully where the herd had congregated.

“Maahh. Baahh,” he lured. “Maahh.” And at last he caught the
mother’s attention. Fifty yards away, to be sure he wouldn’t be trampled, he swung himself down with the calf.

“Get on,” he told it. “Get on.”

And finally spotting its mother, the calf scooted forward. The mother didn’t approach, only waited, as though nothing had gone wrong in the first place. Reunited, they ambled off. For the time being, anyway, Brooks had made their little family whole.

But he had no desire to reclaim his old position on the range crew. Besides paying for his legal work, the cigarettes he earned at the car wash allowed him to commission the belts and pocketbooks he had promised to send Belva’s children. And recently, in the visiting shed, Belva had seen another convict give his girlfriend a wooden clock with a heart-shaped picture frame beside the face.