Authors: Daniel Bergner
When Lane called the range-crew bosses to say he was coming up for a ride, Brooks shampooed the horse, then applied ShowSheen to his coat to make it gleam. The coat wasn’t really a pure black. It was an extremely dark brown with a white streak over one nostril. Lane liked the stallion kept in its stall as much as possible to preserve the appearance of black, and to minimize the white hairs that grew pronounced with the sun. Brooks sanded Little Man’s hooves to remove the grain, and painted on layer after layer of polish to blacken them. When Lane arrived Brooks presented him with the sleek, gorgeous animal, then outfitted Little Man with Lane’s red saddle that was studded with antique silver coins.
As soon as he got out, Brooks told his bride-to-be, he would go to work for Mr. Gerry. He wasn’t yet sure what the job would betaking care of Lane’s other horses, working in his dealership, it didn’t matter. And he would start at minimum wage if he had to, climb his way up. But he would be working, that was the definite thing, and at the end of every day he would arrive home to play with the kids in
their backyard, to make sure they did well in school, to make sure Belva was always happy. A life of family bliss was just a year or so away, just on the other side of his next pardon-board application.
By January Belva had bought their wedding rings on a layaway plan. She wore hers to the visiting shed, making it double as an engagement ring. Because of prison regulations about the wearing of gold, Brooks would get his on their wedding day. In a kind of ceremony of engagement, she slipped her chiseled band halfway down his pinky finger, where he turned it at the knuckle, digging it into the skin, to leave a mark. They discussed, not for the first time, the preparations they had to make, the procedures they had to go through. Brooks had already asked Rick LeDoux, the Cowboys for Christ minister who came to preach at Camp F, to officiate at the wedding. They had to get a list of possible dates from LeDoux, then set a definite one with the warden’s office. They were aiming for early September, because in that time they could get to know each other better, track down a copy of Brooks’s birth certificate, which they needed for the marriage license, have the required interview with one of Angola’s staff chaplains, and request approval from the warden. Even with Brooks’s favored status, these procedures could take time. Not much happened fast in Angola’s world of lifers, but Brooks and Belva were sure that their wedding would, eventually, happen.
If it did, it would not merely be what some of the ten or so weddings performed each year at Angola clearly were: attempts, on the inmate’s part, to secure a link to the outside world, to needed legal papers, to a lawyer who might be convinced to appeal his case, to a source of money. Partly for this reason, several of the prison chaplains were reluctant to approve or perform the ceremonies. But this marriage would bring together a woman who, however shy, had said, “I’ll kick your ass,” and a man who had said to me, “Ever since I been here I wondered if anything like this could ever happen. She done changed my life. I love her, Mr. Dan. I love her.”
Between visits he counted the days, and once, waiting for the prearranged
time when he would call her collect, I had sat with him on his cot as he counted the minutes and checked his watch every twenty-five seconds. How many of these intervals would there be until September?
He began to picture the ceremony in detail. He wondered who would be there inside the chapel. He hoped his two sisters would come; they were the only family who kept any contact. He wasn’t sure they would make the drive from their coastline town three hours away. They no longer visited. But he knew that his boss’s brother, Mr. Darrell, the assistant warden, would be there for him; he knew how that man felt about all the work Brooks had done for his family. In fact, Brooks planned to ask him to be his driver, to take him in the assistant warden’s long, white Department of Corrections pickup truck, the closest thing around to a limousine, from Camp F to the chapel at Main Prison.
And Brooks knew that on his biggest day, when he held Belva’s hands and spoke his vows, Warden Cain would clear his calendar to be there.
I had to find one last convict I’d met before the rodeo, a rider who’d embedded himself in my mind. I wanted to follow him through the year.
“What made you come here tonight?” I’d asked Donald Cook back in September, standing at the rear of a Pentecostal service in the Main Prison visiting shed, as a hundred inmates sang along with a convict choir.
“The a.c.,” he had answered, leaning toward me across a pinball machine, a spiderweb tattoo on his wrist, other designs devouring both arms.
Then, at the rodeo in October, determined though all the other men were, Cook had seemed even more so. One Sunday, in the Wild
Horse Race, he hauled himself partway up onto the animal’s back and rode the bucking horse with his body pitched sideways, virtually parallel to the ground. He was simply unwilling to let himself fall. As he crossed the finish line he
did
fall from that fully vulnerable position-for the rest of the day he couldn’t move his left arm at all. Yet he walked out into the ring for the Guts & Glory, stalking the chip with his useless arm held straight to his side. “I want to take that chip off
him,”
he had told me, pausing before that pronoun, seeming perhaps to capitalize it, as if he felt himself in a battle with his maker.
Cook’s dorm guard told me I could find him in the Toy Shop. I went along the Walk to track him down. After building and giving away 2,500 toys just before Christmas, the members were catching their breath. Over the past year, the club had grown from a temporary, November-December group that constructed a few hundred toys in a hallway outside the prison gym to a year-round organization with its own workshop. Its collection of tools had expanded from the makeshift-a hammer made by welding a piece of compressor motor to a stray metal cylinder; a meat saw found in the kitchen’s Dumpster and rigged for cutting wood—to the traditional. Now there were table saws and a full tool closet. Local businesses had donated some of the equipment; Toy Shop fund-raisers (a cheeseburger, potato salad, and a PG video shown to any inmate with three dollars to pay) had bought much of the rest.
The club was still hardly sophisticated or well supplied. Material consisted of scrap lumber, of scavenged mop handles that would be turned into stick ponies. But those ponies were beautiful! Their spotted wooden heads were like something you might hunt for in expensive boutiques. And the cars and trucks and dragsters and military tanks—all their wooden wheels were impeccably balanced and had been made, one at a time, by inmate and saw. All their gleaming surfaces, their racing stripes and camouflage spots, had been painted by hand.
The workshop was almost deserted when I looked in. Two inmates geared up for next December, aiming past 2,500. A saw shrieked. A hammer pounded. Donald Cook lay curled on an old vinyl couch, amid the sawdust and noise.
I was surprised Cook had been accepted into the organization. It was a selective club. You had to show good discipline to be approved by the members and the security sponsor. And just four months ago, he had finished a year in the punishment cells for dealing marijuana.
Six years earlier, in the small Louisiana city of Alexandria, Cook had lured a man from a bar with the promise of sex. A friend of Cook’s drove them to the Red River levee. Cook was married, had one child and another coming, and for several years had been letting men suck him off, partly for money, partly for pleasure. Burglary supplied the rest of his income. He had been charged with at least thirty separate thefts. Once, a group of tavern owners had arranged to have him beat up, they were so tired of his daytime break-ins. He spent his nights in those same rough bars. And once, at a place called Cleve’s Lounge, when a man stroked the belly of Cook’s pregnant wife, Cook had taken the gun from his belt, shot between the man’s feet, and then shot out the ceiling above the bar mirror.
On the levee above the Red River, Cook wound up beating his trick to death with a tree branch after trying to rob him. He dragged the body down the embankment into the water. He hurled large rocks to make it sink. The corpse was found three days later. Meanwhile, Cook changed out of his blood-soaked clothes, hid at friends’ houses around Alexandria, discovered from the TV news that he was the prime suspect, and fled to Texas. He returned with the hope—grown quickly stronger than the wish to avoid arrest—of killing his wife and two friends who, he figured rightly, had told everything to the police. He was in what he called his “don’t-care mood.” He planned to torture them first, give them plenty of time to think about what they’d done to him, while he put them through pain. He found his wife at another friend’s house. She answered the
door when he rang. He said, “Come to Texas with me.” She, sensing he wanted to get her alone to kill her, slipped off to call 911. The cops stormed the house before he could do any harm.
From his time at Angola, as well as many stays in parish jails, his short, wiry body was covered with tattoos. The spiderweb was among the smallest. An animal half lion and half monster, with a mane of fire, occupied most of his back. A Viking dominated his chest, a helmeted woman his shoulder. From hip to hip across the bottom of his back, in fancy calligraphy, a tattoo read:
LOUISIANA CRACKER
.
For each of these he had paid a convict artist to burn a plastic canister, usually of Speed Stick, with a paper bag held over the plastic to catch the rising soot. Scraped from the paper, the soot was mixed with toothpaste and water to make the ink. A steel guitar string was threaded through an empty pen shaft. The artist rigged a tiny motor, taken from a cassette player, to jab the steel string thousands and thousands of times into Cook’s skin.
For work, Cook had not progressed off the field lines since coming to Angola, partly because of fights with black inmates. “I won’t let these niggers get racial with me,” he said, reminding me of an element of life here that I rarely saw or heard about. The blacks were so dominant in numbers that the whites never challenged them in any concentrated way. Yet the whites didn’t seem to feel overly stranded—there were enough of them, and enough mostly white clubs, to keep them comfortable. Quiet avoidance marked the relations. But the quiet didn’t mean the anger wasn’t around. Trying to capture the beauty of some property his brother owned in Missouri, fields he showed to me in pictures and spoke of like the Promised Land, Cook emphasized, “There’s no niggers up there.”
Besides the tattoos and the fighting, he had spent his time in prison smoking and selling marijuana. The drug, like the harder narcotics, came in through guards (who might leave it behind one of Angola’s unused buildings, to be picked up by an inmate and buried
in the fields, unearthed by another convict, and brought to the prisoner who’d made the deal with the guard in the first place), or it came in through visitors (who buried it in their rectums). When Cook heard of a new delivery, he put out word that he was willing to handle the sales if the inmate was too nervous to deal for himself. Cook divided the drug into sugar bags—the little packets meant for coffee, emptied of their contents. This was the prison’s standard measure. One sugar bag, scarcely filled, cost ten dollars, about four times what the same amount of marijuana would have brought on the street. It furnished what the inmates called a “mosquito” joint.
The day he’d been caught, Cook had taken some sugar bags out to the fields to distribute. On a break between picking rows, a few men had huddled together to get high. They positioned themselves so the breeze would keep the smell from their guards, who chatted with one another and ignored what they didn’t see. At lunch, relaxed and hungry, Cook decided to risk the mess hall. He knew he might be frisked, but it was Wednesday, chicken day, and he didn’t want to miss his favorite meal. The lieutenant outside the doors stared straight into the face of every inmate. Cook glanced away.
He knew he was finished. He prided himself on handling all pressure. He should never have let his eyes slip.
The lieutenant told him to step out of line. He ran his hands over Cook’s back first, then his underarms, down his sides, his thighs….
“What you got in your pocket?”
“Chap Stick,” Cook said.
More eye contact. This time Cook’s held.
“Let’s see.”
Cook drew it out, showed it, a tube of Chap Stick.
Again eyes, again steady.
The lieutenant ran his hand over the same place. “What’s this?”
“Nothing.”
“Empty it.”
Cook leaned to the side, dug into his jeans pocket. He squeezed
the sugar bags in his hand, swung up with his other forearm. The lean giving him extra momentum, he knocked the lieutenant into a wall. Cook ran up the mess line, through the open gate, across the Walk, and through another gate and onto the Yard, where he tossed the sugar bags under a ledge as he sprinted toward the basketball court, toward the softball diamond, toward the hundreds of yards of open grass, toward nothing but fence, he realized, with three or four guards behind him, as he leapt over a drainage ditch, slipped on some mud, fell and just lay there, waiting to be cuffed.
They couldn’t find the sugar bags. When it came to sentencing in D.B. court, this meant the difference between J and a working cellblock, where he got an hour of communal rec time in the early evenings. The working blocks also had circulating air. Standing against the vent at the back of his cell, and knowing the guard had to walk his tier only once an hour, Cook went on getting high. He did it for the gamesmanship. Much of his life had been ruled by the pleasure of adrenaline. His childhood had been poor and disordered enough (his family’s trailer home, which I visited, stood in a weedy lot across from the railroad tracks, the worst house in a run-down, all-black section of Alexandria, and his schooling had ended in the ninth grade), but his crimes had been driven by more than poverty. He had liked robbing people he knew, sometimes while they were asleep in their houses. And he had liked robbing his tricks, men who could identify him and who he would see again afterward.