God of the Rodeo (36 page)

“No such thing as a sternum notch?”

“No such thing.”

“You a sorry excuse for a team leader.”

“You want to do me something?”

“I want you to keep your hard head out my classroom and let me do my job.”

“You ain’t
doing
your job. You risking lives.”

“Motherf—You need to look up ‘sternum notch.’ And you
need
to learn about communication before you go calling yourself rehabilitated.”

“I’m not rehabilitated? You calling the xiphoid process the sternum notch and I’m not rehabilitated?”

Things had grown louder-and much less elevated—from there. Until Myron had walked off, announcing his resignation.

“You want another ep?”

He had received his GED diploma a few weeks ago. It looked like nothing more than the 127 other certificates he’d earned since coming to Angola-the certificates of gratitude for every Big River concert (“We, Cavalier Festivals, Inc., hereby offer our sincere appreciation to your band for the performance you held on…”) and for every CPR class he’d taught outside the prison (“On behalf of the Girt Town Community Resource Center…”) and the “attendance certificates” he’d earned for a dozen two-day prison programs (the “Success Leadership Series” and the “Conference of HIV Prevention”) sponsored over the years by Angola clubs—these proofs nothing more than sheets of white paper printed with frilly borders and fancy script and a line where his name could be typed in. He’d saved them all, but he’d thought his high school diploma would look different. He’d thought it would come inside a leather folder. He’d thought, at least, it would be printed on a nicer kind of paper.

“You want another ep?”

Just about the only song he’d played in the past year, since last October, when Cain had shut the band from the music room, was
“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.” He’d been allowed to plunk that out on the electric piano, behind the mock singing of an inmate comedian at the Toastmasters Christmas Banquet.

“With Marie and without music, I was okay,” he told James, whose spirits he had tried, until lately, to bolster with his stories. “And without Marie but with music I would be too. But without both…”

The nurse squeezed fresh ointment onto clean pads, and these, as well, Myron held in place while she circled the lower leg with a new roll of gauze. They treated the other calf and ministered to the sores on James’s heels. He asked for Myron’s help in coughing. Setting two fingers against the gauze covering James’s tracheostomy, Myron jabbed the heel of his palm below the ribs, until James said, “Good. Good.” Myron held a Styrofoam cup for James to spit his phlegm into. The nurse changed the colostomy bag and left for another patient.

“Let me tell you that other ep.”

Myron didn’t know why Marie had stopped visiting. He didn’t know why she had quit writing. He didn’t know why she told him, whenever he called, that her phone bill was too high. No. He did know. It was because her car had broken down and because her mother was in the hospital and because she’d been studying for exams and because LaShae had poison ivy. And it was all true. But none of these things had ever stopped her before. She’d found a way to visit two, three times a month for years. And when she’d talked about the phone it was sometimes despair but never “Try not to call.” And she’d written. That was what the chaplain had told them: Communicate. “No matter what else is happening, no matter how bad things get, no matter when MCI cuts off your long distance, put something on paper. Keep that line of communication.” And now it had been six months. Not one letter in response to his own. And
when he called to ask why, she pressed 3 and told him he just couldn’t call again for a while and assured him nothing was wrong, that it was only because she’d been busy and because LaShae had been wearing her ragged and that if he put in for a park visit they would come next month. They didn’t. Which was all right, he told himself, because it was a long drive and you never knew what could happen on the road these days and he didn’t want her to exhaust herself, especially when she had to take care of LaShae, who honestly was a handful-it was better that she didn’t visit. Really, he was glad. But he wished she’d write. Just that. And he wished that on Mother’s Day he didn’t feel so timid about calling that when the automated operator told him to record his name he said, “Happy Mother’s Day,” instead, so Marie would know she didn’t have to press 3 at all. And he wished that the few times he’d had the courage to supply her with explanations for what was happening, that either she’d found someone else or was simply beaten down by a marriage to someone who couldn’t provide for her in any way-he wished she’d had the courage to answer yes.

“Between you and me,” he asked LaShae during one phone call, when Marie had handed her the receiver quickly, “do you think Mommy still loves me?”

“Of course she do, Daddy. She’s been grouchy with me, too.
All day.”

How shitty he had felt for asking, for putting LaShae in that position. And did he really not know enough of the truth? That it was those alphabets, L-I-F-E; that it was a governor who still, twenty months and counting, hadn’t signed a pardon, a governor who had two and a half years and then another term remaining; a state that wasn’t going to elect anyone less conservative; a pardon board that had just decreed a six-year waiting period between applications, so that if you were rejected once you could forget about the future for a good long while; a parole board dominated by a victim’s rights
advocate so that if you did, somehow, get what was impossible—the governor’s gold seal on a commutation to fixed years—you were going to serve
all
those years, all twenty or thirty or forty of them, which meant that even with the impossible, he, Myron Hodges, would be fifty or sixty or seventy before he got out.

He knew perfectly well what was happening with Marie, and he spent his hours, when he wasn’t at the hospital, lying on his cot. Not sleeping. Sleep wasn’t all that easy to accomplish. But reading. Romance novels. A cardboard box of used Silhouette and Harlequin paperbacks had somehow found its way to his dorm, a detoured donation to the library. The stories always began with an unexpected, magical love he couldn’t quit following, then swooped into misery and back out into a happy ending that left him angry but eager to start another.

He imagined a final scene with Marie, if she ever showed up again at the park. He would pick her a handful of roses from around Main Prison, and these he would present to her along with his GED diploma and all her letters from the years before this one and the first picture they’d ever taken in the visiting shed in front of the streaking light—Marie in a pink sweater and LaShae in a darker pink top, Marie and Myron with their arms around each other, and LaShae in front holding their free hands—and his wedding ring.

In the meantime, on his cot, he took off the band and placed it in his locker box, inside LaShae’s empty sack printed with Power Rangers. It stayed there for two days. But knowing he might never see Marie or LaShae again, that they might already have vanished permanently from his life, he needed the ring back on. He unburied it.

They were still married, weren’t they?

And he sent LaShae a homemade card for her birthday, an eight-frame comic strip drawn in stick figures: Myron baking a birthday cake and burning it; Marie taking over, placing nine candles in a perfect creation of angel food; Daddy charring the ribs in the yard
behind Marie’s trailer; Mommy bopping him with a spatula to chase him away again; she and LaShae cooking, warding off Daddy’s help; Daddy and LaShae sword-fighting with sticks and paper cups; Daddy knocked off the skyscraper and falling a thousand feet; Daddy climbing back up.

Myron had two answers to my question about advice for Johnny Brooks. “I would tell him not to,” he said emphatically, at first. And then: “I used to be numb. I used to not feel anything.”

He left the room sometime after the dressings were changed, returned to mopping floors and emptying trash. But before the end of his shift he tried to stop back in, to make sure James didn’t need anything, and to massage his face one last time: chin; cheekbones; eyelids; forehead; temples.

J
OHNNY
B
ROOKS
CHECKED
HIS
WATCH
. I
T
WAS
8:14
in the morning, the chapel quiet except for the scattered words spoken by Brooks and the two convicts in his wedding party. Their special clothes were as carefully planned as any set of tuxedos, as any ensemble of blue blazers and white flannels. The groomsmen wore identical light blue short-sleeved dress shirts to go with their sharply pressed jeans. And the groom, whose jeans matched theirs perfectly for shade and ironing, was distinguished by a simple gray western shirt with faux-pearl snaps, by his white straw cowboy hat adorned with a black band, and by a
1992
“All-Around Cowboy” belt buckle.

They compared watches. 8:14. 8:15. 8:20.

“Eight-twenty? You got eight-twenty?” Brooks looked wide-eyed at the groomsman with the fastest watch.

“Call it eight-sixteen, Johnny,” the other one said.

A few weeks ago, Belva had finally made it for the chaplain’s conference. They’d finally gotten approval. But she and her bridesmaids weren’t here now, and the wedding was set for eight o’clock.

Brooks pried a pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint from his tight jeans pocket. “My heart’s beating a hundred miles an hour waiting for my fiancée to walk in that door.”

“You sure they had a car?”

“They had one.”

The talk died out. Sitting on one of the red-cushioned chairs, Brooks leaned far forward with his elbows on his knees, all but doubled over.

It was 8:30. Or 8:31. Or 8:36.

“You want me to ask the chaplain will he call and see if they’re at the front gate?”

“Yeah. See can he call.”

The chaplain picked up the phone. The three men watched him in his side office, behind the half-open sliding glass door.

No, Belva wasn’t at the front gate.

A cake with flowered icing, made by one of the inmates at Camp F, sat on a table at the back of the sanctuary, next to a yellow-and-maroon water cooler. Brooks, jamming more gum in his mouth and leaning forward again, spoke toward the floor: “I was up all night just staring at the ceiling.”

No one answered.

Eventually one of the groomsmen exclaimed, “I’m going to get to kiss the bride!”

Brooks straightened, gave a playful glance, smacked his fist into his palm. “You giving her away,” he reminded.

“To who? I’m gonna say, ‘I can’t. She loves
me.’ ”

“She’ll say that’s not true.”

The others listened to this literal-minded fear dangling in the air, not diminishing.

“Nah,” the joking one assured. “I’m glad for you. I’m glad you got somebody in your life.”

8:50.

“It’s hot,” the groom declared, sweat beading below his hat, though the sanctuary was air-conditioned, comfortable. “After the ceremony I’ll take off this undershirt I bought—you can take it back to the camp when me and Belva go on to the visiting shed.”

8:55. 8:56. 9:01.

He stood, paced, went outside for a cigarette, stepped back in, cowboy boots clicking on the tile. “Wow!” he announced, laughing, not quite believing she wouldn’t come but nowhere close to believing how sick he felt.

9:08.

The chaplain hung up the phone.

They’d just come through.

September the fifth, 1997. That was Johnny Brooks’s wedding day. In exactly one month, on Sunday, the fifth of October, the rodeo would begin. And this inmate so determined to look special, to look
right
, for anyone from the outside world, whether for his bride or for the entire rodeo crowd, whether with his wedding clothes or with the turquoise and black suede vest he’d sported in the stadium last year—this rider, Johnny Brooks, would be required to wear a shirt of thick, coarse cloth with black-and-white stripes two inches wide. He would be forced to wear this replica of the old-fashioned convict uniform. He would be made to wear what hadn’t been worn at Angola in almost half a century, what had been abolished during the reforms that followed the heel slashings of 1951. He would put on the stripes that had been a symbolic flogging, that had been a reminder to the inmates of their abject powerlessness, and a reminder to the public, whenever it saw photographs of the convicts, that those men were different, were scarcely men at all, were something closer to animals.

At 7:30, the morning of the wedding, Mr. Darrell had stopped by Camp F for Brooks and his groomsmen. He had driven them, in the cab of his pickup, to the front of Main Prison. It was an honor to ride with an assistant warden. Brooks was pleased. He never complained
to me that neither Mr. Darrell nor Mr. Mike attended the wedding. He never complained that Warden Cain didn’t show. Perhaps it didn’t matter at all once Belva arrived. Perhaps I was the only one waiting to see whether the people who insisted that they saw Brooks as a human being first, and a prisoner second, would make the gesture of standing at the back of the sanctuary. Perhaps I was the only one waiting to see whether the man who called himself Daddy would make an appearance to offer congratulations. (Brooks was, presently, Cain’s own car washer at the Ranch House.) In the idiosyncratic world of Angola, such personal gestures on this one day wouldn’t have broken any unbreachable codes. But perhaps Brooks had known all along that they wouldn’t come, even as he’d spoken-all eager expectation-of their presence. Perhaps, at some level, he didn’t want them anywhere near his wedding.

One of Belva’s bridesmaids, wearing a long black lace dress and a choker of pearls, pinned a white boutonniere near the collar of Brooks’s shirt. The second member of her party, also in black, also in pearls, fixed the same white rose to each of the groomsmen. Below a spray of baby’s breath in her short hair, below pearl post earrings and her pearl necklace, Belva wore a white satin suit, its high neck trimmed in brocade. Over the rest of her large, forgiving body, the suit was shimmering yet simple, resplendent but dignified.