God of the Rodeo (38 page)

Then Terry Hawkins went out to grab that Guts & Glory chip. During the month, he had used both of his strategies: He had taunted the bull and run away along a tight curve; he had stood and taken the direct hit. The bull had run over him, hoof cutting his cheek and grazing his throat. It had sent him into an airborne cartwheel. And now Terry found himself too close to the fence. He
knew
he was too close, that if he didn’t flee he would be isolated and trapped, with nothing to distract the animal once it came for him. He stayed. He held the fence with one hand, thinking maybe he could force himself between the steel cords, escape that way. With his other hand he reached out toward the bull. It charged.

Swinging low with its horns, the huge animal struck Terry behind the thighs, upending him and flinging him into the air. His body spun on every axis. He gyrated and wound up falling with his belly facing the ground. It was almost the equal of last year’s flight, but it didn’t last as long. The bull didn’t launch him over and over. Terry came down on a horn.

And of course, at times, I had thought that this was exactly what he wanted: to offer himself up to Mr. Denver Tarter, the slaughterhouse owner he had murdered. I had thought that this explained his devotion to an event no one else approached so recklessly. No matter. He discovered himself indestructible. The point of the horn met with the center of his chest, but he bounced off, the wind knocked out of him, and was left, after a week’s healing, with only a bruise to the bone and a ragged, silver-dollar-size scab.

What would I have glimpsed had the horn somehow exposed the workings of his heart? What vision?

Unseeing, unknowing, I had, instead, only a list of reasons why he kept doing this to himself, a list I struggled to arrange in order, as though by weighing the importance of his motives, by assigning a rough percentage to each, I could understand him at his core.

Two hundred dollars.

The range crew.

Self-punishment and purging.

And then, too, another kind of cleansing, a momentary washing away of everything about his existence, in a thrill of fear and adrenaline.

How could I know what drove him most? And how, in the end, could it matter?

For one thing was clear, that in these desires he wanted what anyone, anywhere, did: money, a better life, a clear conscience, and oblivion.

And like anyone who climbs to some high, public precipice, ready to jump, like anyone who takes a handful of sleeping pills and leaves the bottle by the bedside, knowing that someone will come home, like anyone who has ever so much as imagined the wording of his own suicide note, Terry, beckoning the horns in front of five thousand people, wanted to be saved, whether he deserved it or not.

This was his way of asking.

“T
HE
DEVIL’S
GOING
TO
GET
HIM,”
W
ARDEN
C
AIN
set forth my destiny for Louisiana’s state senate judiciary committee.

The
Harper’s
magazine article—about the rodeo—that had first brought me to Angola had just been published in the February 1998 issue. But the article, in its final form, included more than the rodeo. It included Warden Cain. It included Amherst. And the chairman of the judiciary committee had called hearings, wanting to know more about my allegations, and wanting to find out exactly what was going on up at the prison.

So the warden and I sat side by side below the senators, answering their questions. When a microphone broke, we were forced to lean toward the same mike, our shoulders all but touching. The scene was intimate and, with the state’s TV news teams in full attendance, very public.

Cain testified, at first, that he’d never demanded payment from me, only asked my opinion about what sort of advance he might expect were he to write an autobiography. Then he allowed that he had requested money, but only because he’d believed my book was to be a personal portrait of him and his family, unrelated to his position at Angola. He elaborated that in pursuing his biography I had
met with his wife and family, and that, early on, I had spent time at his home. How easy it had been, he told the committee, for him to misunderstand the focus of my book. And how surely the devil would seize me for my lies.

And yet more important than the contradictions and comedy of Warden Cain’s alibis (I have never met his wife, never been to his home) was his success at silencing any testimony that might corroborate my own about his approach to the inmates and his standing with the staff at the prison. The committee chairman, having heard through his own sources that my portrayal in the article was accurate, had tried to line up supporting witnesses. No employee would testify against Cain. Nor would any of the inmates whose long records of good conduct lent them credibility. They all believed their statements would be futile, that the hearings would amount to nothing, that their lives would remain, as ever, his.

They were almost certainly right.

As it was, the cameras rolled and the hearings led the evening news and made the front pages of the Louisiana papers, and eight months later Cain retains all his power and looks forward to more. A recent federal law, the Prison Litigation Reform Act, driven through Congress to ensure that incarceration not be too costly to the taxpayers or too joyful for the convicts, will likely free Angola from federal oversight within the coming months. Judge Polozola and his court-appointed investigators will be removed as the only check on Warden Cain’s rule.

The warden’s kingdom will soon be sealed.

It is a place I think back on with despair, a place I left with no soothing affirmation of God’s presence. But I did see men struggling to rise, men whose efforts made me wonder constantly: What do we owe them?

A thousand times I repeated to myself all the reasons one could answer: Nothing. We owe them nothing. They have destroyed other
lives; what obligates us to help in reconstructing theirs? What is our duty beyond protecting ourselves, our society, by putting them away?

Yet we are their keepers. They may need or deserve to be kept, but it is precisely in making this decision that we take on responsibility. We take control of their lives. And so, unavoidably, we are obligated. We owe them something more than a perverse rodeo as a vehicle for self-improvement and a way to make themselves known. We owe them our help and our attention. We cannot both claim and forget them.

For within them, there is possibility. Look, one last time, at Littell. Imagine stirring your own shit to douse your neighbor as he leaves his house. Imagine your life revolving around that. And measure the distance between that and the life Littell is now making for himself. He is working for a small trucking company, driving a route between Oregon and Georgia. He calls me every so often from truck stops. In his need to “establish” himself, he drives at least the legal limit of ten hours per day. He earns twenty-three cents per mile. He pays his expenses on the road. It is not much of a living, but it
is
a living, and when he calls he says he is doing great, that the job is excellent, that his boss is fair and prizes him for the relentless effort he puts in. And he reports that this country, all the land he passes, is “fucking beautiful.” Try to measure the distance between what Littell was and who he is now. It is impossible. The distance is infinite. Or nonexistent. For both then and now are contained in one person.

And in that, there may be a sign for all of us.

Endless thanks to my agent, Suzanne Gluck, and, for their faith and excellent guidance, to my editors, Steve Ross and Ayesha Pande. Huge gratitude also to Colin Harrison, Lewis Lapham, and
Harper’s
magazine. And to Cynthia Fox, William Hogeland, Roland Kelts, and Laura Marmor, great appreciation for readings and criticism that, at various stages, helped to shape this story.

Beyond the literary part of this project, I owe a debt to more people than I can name. But without the perfect counsel of two lawyers, William D’Armond and Bradley Myers, this book might not exist. Saul B. Shapiro also gave invaluable legal advice in moments of panic. And were it not for the late Alvin B. Rubin, esteemed judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, I would never have come to know Louisiana and the Angola rodeo in the first place.

Brian Belfiglio, Alexia Brue, and Elissa Wald all gave vital support in seeing the book through, and Jane Praeger committed extraordinary effort and intelligence to the publication process. Many, many thanks as well to Joanne Wyckoff for all her work on the paperback.

My coverage of Angola’s history relies heavily on several sources: Ann Butler and C. Murray Henderson’s
Angola: A Half-Century
of Rage and Reform
(Lafayette, Louisiana: The Center for Louisiana Studies, 1990); Mark Carleton’s
Politics and Punishment: The History of the Louisiana State Penal System
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980);
The Wall Is Strong: Corrections in Louisiana
, edited by Burk Foster, Wilbert Rideau, and Douglas Dennis (Lafayette, Louisiana: The Center for Louisiana Studies, 1995);
Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars
, edited by Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wilkberg (New York: Times Books, 1992); the generously shared and prodigious unpublished research of former Angola assistant warden Roger Thomas; and the work of the
Angolite
, whose modern editors have been Michael Glover, Tommy Mason, Wilbert Rideau, Billy Sinclair, and Ron Wilkberg.

But how to thank all the people who put up with my hours and hours, days and days, months and months of questioning? In the cases of many inmates and employees, I cannot thank them; they would rather not be named. Yet I can express my gratitude to Keith Nordyke, civil rights attorney long involved with the prison, for returning my relentless calls and providing indispensable analysis on a wide range of issues. I am indebted as well to former warden C. Murray Henderson, who is, unfairly, scarcely mentioned in the book but whose unflagging belief in rehabilitation is an inspiration. I want to thank Hayes Williams, lead plaintiff in the 1971 lawsuit, for his recollections. And I think it is safe to print my gratitude to two inmates with whom I spent a great deal of time but who were not, finally, part of this narrative, Leotis Webster and Tyrone Jack. To them, to the men who form the core of this book, and to all the others: Your patience and honesty were crucial to me and, I hope in the end, important to everyone’s understanding.

Finally, I want to thank my father: a moral guide.

D
ANIEL
B
ERGNER
is a journalist and author of the novel Moments of Favor. He lives with his wife and two children in New York City.