Authors: Daniel Bergner
This tempting of fate, along with plenty of anger, ran through much that he did: spraying bullets around Cleve’s Lounge; brutally robbing an elderly neighbor a few weeks before the murder; sleeping with his brother’s wife because he suspected his brother had slept with his; smashing the skull of the man on the levee, a man he’d had sex with at least twice before; vowing to torture and kill his wife and everyone else who had given evidence against him; phoning from the parish jail after his arrest, promising them that he would escape—from the jail before he was sent to Angola, or from Angola if he had
to-just to get at them. His calls, as he knew full well, were recorded: “I will be out there…. There’s many a ways…. It might take me thirty or forty years, but I’m coming…. Arson….”
And now he was curled sweetly, dark blue eyes opening slowly, short black hair rumpled, on the Toy Shop couch. He said he’d been part of the club for several weeks, that an inmate he knew from Alexandria had invited him in. He claimed he had decided to change, that at twenty-nine he felt worn down. “I know twenty-nine don’t seem old, but it’s old to me.” He spoke of his mother, who was sixty-three and sick with arthritis. He needed to give her some hope, some thought that in return for good behavior he would someday be released. “I’m going to die here,” he said. “I know that. But I don’t tell her. I’m the baby of the family. She’s living for me.”
One of his brothers was in prison. Another had been. He showed me a picture of his mother in her cluttered trailer home: white, flowered housedress; cigarette; sunken mouth; the blue eyes. He said she’d run fairly wild in her day, spent as much time in bars as he later did. Now she tried to “garden,” though a picture of her yard showed more debris than greenery. “I’m living for her,” he added, and mentioned the certificate he’d received for participation in the Toy Shop—he’d sent it to her; she kept it on her refrigerator door.
From his reluctant, inward speech, he seemed thoroughly honest. He said he’d gotten the certificate for nothing, that he’d hardly worked on any of the toys the club had given away. He had painted a few cars, that was all. Most he had done in simple patterns, according to other inmates’ instructions. But one racing car, as yet unfinished, he had begun to decorate with an underwater-looking design. He brought the car down from a private spot, on top of a high cabinet, for me to see. One side was painted a dark purple, almost black, and adorned with slender tentacles like seaweed that were only a few shades lighter than the background. They were nearly invisible, but the twisting, waving strands were beautiful. It was as though he was painting his version of the bottom of the ocean. It was as though in
the slow painting he was purging a former self: one that sped wildly, as if in a racing car, through an ocean’s darkness.
The car was, at any rate, an accomplishment, a hint of talent, but I saw even more hope in his mere presence in the workshop, in his sleeping on that ratty couch. He left his dorm every morning before sunrise, and napped or lay awake here. He remained in the workshop through most of the day. Much of that time was spent lying on the couch. A new job on the kitchen paint crew had him working odd hours, often in the evenings; between the job and the waking up at three
A.M.
, he was in the dorm only a few hours each night. Which was how he wanted it. He needed to escape the men who knew him. His closest partner had started whispering “model prisoner,” but Cook could hardly be called a showcase for rehabilitation. So far, hibernation was about as far as it went. The workshop was a refuge. Like a dog on a familiar piece of rug, or a child who likes to nap in the living room, he rested amid the comforting tumult of life, was reassured by the accumulation of sawdust.
If Donald Cook makes some sort of personal progress this year, I thought, Warden Cain will have worked a minor miracle. The credit would belong, as well, to the inmate who’d brought Cook into the Toy Shop, and to the assistant warden who supervised the organization and helped it grow. But finally, I reasoned, if Cain hadn’t put his energy and encouragement behind it, Cook—and surely others like him, in other stages of transformation—would have had no sanctuary. From his position as ruler over 5,000 inmates and 1,800 employees, Cain’s benevolence was filtering down to the bottom.
The warden would have been less pleased by another development in Cook’s life. Cook told me he’d fallen in love with an inmate he’d met while doing his year in the punishment cellblocks. Alberto was
one of the handful of Hispanics at the prison. Cook said Alberto’s accent turned him on.
Every other afternoon, around five o’clock, Cook hurried to a fence at one end of the Main Yard. On the other side of the barbed wire and chain link was the Walk, then another fence, then the area where the cellblock inmates were let out for exercise. Cook’s lover was still serving time in the cells, so they arranged to meet at their opposite fences, about fifteen feet apart. There were always ten or twenty men meeting in the same way—to catch up on news, or to run business of one kind or another, or just to sit and pluck at the lawn and let the time pass. Cook ignored the men around him. And though everyone had to call across such distance, all the conversations did seem intimate, even private, as though the convicts had honed some inflection of voice that mingled in a special way with the Angola air, muffling and channeling their words so that they barely carried outside a direct line.
One warm afternoon in the last days of December, Cook asked his lover, whose buttery, unmuscled chest showed beneath a work shirt open to the belly, “You heard from your mom yet?”
“No, Donald.”
“She’s doing all right. You’d feel it if she wasn’t.”
“She’s bad sick.”
“You’d feel it, though. If she got any worse you’d feel it. Like my mama with that pancreas. Soon as she got it, I started getting them cramps. Started cramping up. We’re like twins. You’re the same way with yours. You’ll know. Trust me.”
“Mine’s farther away.”
“It don’t matter.”
“She’s bad.”
“Don’t start being all depressed now.”
“I know.”
“You better be strong.”
“I know.”
“You know, you lose your head they got places they’re going to put you. Places worse than them blocks.”
“I received your brother’s card.”
“He wrote you?”
“You know.”
“Yeah. I told him to.”
“It was a nice Christmas card.”
“Yeah.”
“He say how special I am to you, sweetheart.”
“Yeah. That’s true.
“It was a very caring card.”
“I told him about your mom and all.”
As Alberto’s hour wound down, Cook said, “Turn around and show me your ass.”
Alberto pressed his jeans against the chain-link, rubbed for a second against the metal. Cook did not reciprocate. Nor was he asked to. Whenever his lover made it back into the main population, their sex would follow the code: “There’s always a man and always a punk.” “He’ll take care of his own self,” Cook explained. “He better never disrespect me.”
Within those parameters, Cook had found love at Angola.
H
E ORDERED ME TO HIS OFFICE
. I
HUNG UP THE
phone in the range-crew headquarters. It was late January. In muddy boots, pants, shirt after a ride with Johnny Brooks, I drove right away to the administration building. I tried to brush the caked dirt from my clothes as I steered. I did not wish to keep the warden waiting.
“Mr. Bugner,” he began, never quite having learned to pronounce my name, “I want to know what you’re up to.” His white hair was luxuriant. His voice was affable. His stomach, as he pushed away from his desk, made him look still more relaxed. “ ’Cause you might be hearing too much.”
We exchanged smiles.
“That depends what I’m not supposed to hear.” It was easy to keep my tone light. I hadn’t heard much that reflected badly on him. And I wasn’t hoping to.
He chuckled, then let his smile fade. “I’ve given you the run of this prison. I haven’t put an officer with you. You’re out there driving from outcamp to outcamp. But why do you need so much privacy, anyhow? How much are you going to put homosexuality in that book? Or drugs? I’m starting to wonder. And what are you going to do if these inmates say bad stuff about me? You’re coming down here
from New York. I don’t know who you are. How much are you going to believe what they say?”
“Warden Cain—”
He cut me off, politely. He radioed for two assistant wardens. He said he wanted their input, wanted them to hear my answer. This did not seem a good sign. Maybe I could reassure him during a long-winded, personal chat about religion, regeneration. But with a pair of Angola veterans to keep the talk on practical terms, I thought the meeting might end with me led permanently off the grounds.
As we waited amid the dustless, gleaming surfaces, Cain turned his attention to signing documents. And I thought of the coverage he was used to in the national media. ABC, PBS, the Discovery Channel—in the past year they had each run programs featuring him as a warden unlike any other: balanced, sensitive, deeply thoughtful, a hero to anyone who still believed in the basic humanity of violent criminals. And it was no secret that he loved the publicity, adored the way he came out on camera. He’d urged the teams from ABC and the Discovery Channel to return for more stories. My book, he’d been certain, would bring him even more serious attention. He would be recognized as the leader of a “moral revolution” in criminal justice.
What had triggered his nerves? We had discussed, up front, my dealing with all sides of prison life, homosexuality and drugs included. Those issues alone couldn’t have set him off. But the difference between me and a TV crew—maybe that had just dawned on him. No inmate was going to speak critically about him into a camera. With me he had no guarantees.
Or maybe, I thought, he’d been remembering one of the few print journalists, a reporter for the
Boston Globe
, who had displeased him. The man had written about the food can relabeling plant the warden had tried to establish at Angola. He had mentioned, too, private business brought to D.C.I. while Cain was warden there. The
writer’s suggestion of corruption, of kickbacks, had been unstated and without proof. But the suggestion had been unmistakable. For months I had tried to keep that article out of my mind. I recalled it now, as the assistant wardens, forearms thick below the short sleeves of their sportshirts, took chairs close on my right. “We’ve got his name at the front gate,” I’d heard Cain say with easy satisfaction about that reporter. “He won’t ever be back here again.” I didn’t want my name recorded there.
“All you have to do,” the Warden set aside his documents and resumed with me now, “is put me in my comfort zone.” He leaned far back, seeming to speak past his belly, which had grown during the months I’d known him.
“I’d like to.”
“Well, that’s good, that’s good. ’Cause all I need is an editorial agreement. So I can read through your book before you turn it in to your editor, and make sure it’s all accurate, and make any changes I need to make, ’cause I want it to be a good book.”
“I understand your worries,” I said, trying to stay calm as I imagined what his sanitized treatment might look like. Warden Cain no longer entering in his chariot. Terry Hawkins no longer getting that blowjob in the shower, no longer needing to be “inside some warm flesh.” And none of my fear, growing minute by minute as I sat in Cain’s overly air-conditioned office and sensed the extent of his desire to keep something hidden, that the
Globe
reporter had been right and, worse, that the corruption wasn’t a mere human flaw but might be the defining quality of the man. What if all the humanitarian talk was a smoke screen?
“I understand how important it is to represent Angola and your administration correctly,” I went on, keeping my voice steady. “I know that books and movies usually turn prisons into sensationalized places, with all kinds of rapes and killings, and wardens are always sadistic villains. But I haven’t seen any rapes, and what I’m
hearing about you is eighty percent good. Eighty percent’s not bad when you’re dealing with inmates talking about their keeper. So I really do understand, but I think it would be a mistake for both of us if we had any kind of editorial agreement.”
“But it would put me in my comfort zone.”
He sipped from his Dr Pepper, and I entered into a long explanation: Everything positive I wrote would be put into question.
“You don’t have to tell anyone about the agreement,” he offered. “I won’t. All it’ll be is a piece of paper.”
“But everyone will ask. How did he get such access inside a maximum-security prison? How did he convince the warden to let him roam around for a year? And I’m not that good a liar.”
“All right. Well, you’re an honest man. In that case I’m going to have to put an officer with you. But you don’t have to worry. It won’t be a man in blue. It’ll be someone from classification. Because I don’t want to intimidate the inmates. I really don’t. I want them to talk to you. I do. I want this to be a good book. But they’re inmates, let’s remember that. They’re liable to say any old thing. So let’s put someone with you, to make sure they say what’s right.”
“I am skeptical of what they say every second.”
“All you have to do is give me editorial review.”
“That would be another kind of book. ‘Warden Cain as told to.’ No one would take it seriously.”
“Then,” he looked to the stone-faced veterans, “shouldn’t I put someone with him? To make sure they don’t say anything too bad about us? Isn’t that the right thing to do?”
They nodded.
“It would be much better,” I turned back to Cain, trying to keep the plea out of my voice, “if I could write on the acknowledgments page, ‘And many thanks to Warden Burl Cain, for allowing me unlimited access to the prison and unmonitored time with the inmates.’ Then everything that really matters to you, the humanity
of the convicts and the value of your programs, all your accomplishments, will be trusted by the reader.”
“You can write that anyway,” the warden said, finishing his Dr Pepper. “That way we’ll all be comfortable.”