ON THE SAME day, at the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins, two hundred and forty-six miles to the south, WDOC Inmate Number 24886 shuffled down the hallway in his state-issued Crocs, accompanied on either side by Corrections Officers R. Winner and C. Egleston. They were headed toward the outtake room near the front lobby.
The prisoner kept his head down and did not engage with other convicts who watched him pass by. He’d left the pod behind him, but his route included the open doors of the mail room, the law library, and the computer room. His ears were still ringing with the hoots, catcalls, and curses that had blasted out in E pod when Winner announced his name that morning after breakfast.
“Gather up your shit and report to the front desk,” Winner had said.
Everybody knew what that meant.
Two newbies saw him coming and reacted by backing up against the hallway walls and not making eye contact. Even though they had just arrived, the newbies knew to avoid prisoners wearing orange who came from E pod. Orange was the color of hardened criminals, and E pod was where they were housed.
“Step aside,” Winner said to the newbies with mock gravity. “Here comes Dallas Cates.” Then: “Yeah, it’s him. The one, the only. Don’t worry, he don’t bite.”
“Except when he does,” Egleston said. CO Connie Egleston was new to the facility and had obviously been assigned to shadow Winner to learn the ropes. She was one of only three female COs.
“You don’t bite, do you, bro?” Winner asked Cates with mock affection.
Cates didn’t respond.
“That was kind of fascinating back there in E pod, wasn’t it?” Winner asked. “When I called out your name, you know? It was like a sociological experiment come to life. All their true feelings about you just came pouring out. They didn’t even try to hide them anymore. How does that make you feel, bro?”
Again, Cates didn’t react. He couldn’t afford to. Not on his last day in prison. Not when anything he did or said could be used against him as a reason to keep him there a little longer.
Winner said, “The Brothers in Arms and La Familia, they hate your fucking white-boy guts, don’t they? But I didn’t see all that much reaction from the Warrior Chiefs. Is it true you WOODS are allies with them now?”
The Brothers were Black, La Familia was Mexican, and the Warrior Chiefs were Native American. WOODS stood for “Whites Only One Day Soon.” Dallas Cates was their undisputed leader.
“When the cowboys and the Indians get together on the same side against the Blacks and the browns, that’s interesting, don’t you think?” Winner asked rhetorically. “Kind of like cats and dogs joining up, right? I guess this is the new Wild West, eh, bro?”
This was why they’d sent Winner, Cates was sure. To goad him, to try and get him to act out. To give the COs a reason to beat him and drag him back to a cell, claiming he’d assaulted them.
Winner was a rare CO, Cates knew. Unlike ninety percent of the other COs and five percent of the do-gooder social worker types, Winner seemed to enjoy the worst parts of his job, especially confrontations with inmates. There was nothing the man would rather do. He was the first to break up a fight, and the first to sucker punch anyone he thought disrespected his authority. He was known to leave a door unlocked when a convict “deserved” a beating from enforcers within the gen pop or the gangs. They had history, those two. Dallas Cates hated Winner, and Winner hated Dallas Cates.
Egleston was dark haired and stout, and her movements were hesitant. Cates thought she was trying too hard to fit in. It was clear she looked up to Winner.
“Give it up, Winner,” Cates said as Egleston swiped her card on the mechanism that opened the outtake room. “You can take all the shots you want. All you’ll get out of me today is warm feelings and happy talk. Do your best, but I’m loving life right now.”
Winner laughed.
*
INSIDE THE OUTTAKE room, Cates stripped off his orange jumpsuit and let it pool on the floor around his ankles. He now wore only dingy prison briefs. He stood there and let Winner and Egleston take him in. The room was spartan and consisted of slick tile walls and a steel table bolted to the floor.
When his clothes dropped away, Egleston said, “Shit. Look at this guy.” Her neck flushed red.
Cates had changed his body over his years in prison. He’d once had the wiry build of a world champion rodeo contestant, an athlete from Saddlestring who’d won both the bull-riding and saddle bronc events at the National Finals Rodeo in consecutive years after taking gold buckles at the Pendleton Round-Up, the Calgary Stampede, and Cheyenne Frontier Days. Since then, he’d added forty pounds of solid muscle on his frame. His thighs were as thick as trunks, his neck fanned out to the tops of his shoulders, his biceps like hams, and his chest a hard cask.
Ink covered his body. He’d only used the best prison tattoo artists, from the serpents that crawled up his thighs, to the bucking bulls across his six-pack, to the all-capitalized WOODS done in German Gothic font across his pecs, to the portrait of his mother, Brenda, on his shoulder. The undersides of both forearms and the back of his left hand were covered in newly minted red tattoos that Cates hid by keeping his hands down at his sides and turned inward.
“Let’s see your valuable treasure,” Winner said as he opened the pillowcase Cates had used to gather his belongings from his cell. The CO dumped the contents on the surface of the steel table.
Cates’s property consisted of several packs of ramen noodles, the stub of a pencil, three well-thumbed paperback books, and a two-inch-thick roll of cash.
“Jesus Christ on a biscuit,” Winner said. “How did you accumulate all this fucking money?” It was obvious from his sneer that he was personally offended.
“I saved it,” Cates said. “I’m frugal.”
There was no way he’d tell the CO that the cash came as a monthly tribute from WOODS members under his protection, or that other individuals and gangs paid Cates for leaving them alone or settling disputes. The roll amounted to over eighteen hundred dollars. The outside bills were fives and ones, and the larger denominations were in the middle of the roll.
“Don’t touch it,” Cates said, quickly retrieving the roll. He knew the CO would have taken it if he’d had any idea it existed before that moment.
Winner fanned through each book to make sure there was no contraband pressed inside. As he did, he said, “The Art of War. Interesting. And then we have the Holy Bible and Wilderness Evasion: A Guide to Hiding Out and Eluding Pursuit in Remote Areas.
“Naw,” he said, “you won’t be needing any of this shit.”
With that, Winner swept the items into a trash can near his feet.
Cates bristled at that. A minute before, Cates would have messed up anyone who touched his property. Now he looked at it for what it was: trash. He glared at Winner.
“Those WOODS-peckers of yours are gonna get the shit kicked out of ’em now,” Winner said.
“They can handle themselves,” Cates said. “But I don’t worry about that anymore. It’s all water under the bridge. I just want everyone to get along.”
“We talk about you,” Winner said. “My buddies and I take bets on how long it’ll be before we see you in here again. It’s your second visit, right?”
Cates said, “And my last.”
Winner snorted a laugh.
“I won’t be back. Bet on that.”
“Go get his street clothes,” Winner said to Egleston, who left the room.
*
AFTER SEVERAL QUIET minutes in which neither Cates nor Winner said a word, Egleston pushed through the door with a clear plastic square filled with the clothes Cates had worn when he arrived in Rawlins five years before. There was also a small box with a cowboy hat crammed inside. The CO placed the parcels on the steel table and stepped back.
“You know what to do,” Winner said to Cates.
He did. He unzipped the square and removed his Western shirt with the snap buttons, the size 28 Wranglers, the scuffed round-toe Tony Lama boots, and civilian undershorts and socks. All of the items had a plastic odor.
Only the socks and boots still fit. The shirt wouldn’t button and the jeans wouldn’t zip up. His custom-made pure beaver hat was jammed into the box and completely misshapen. Cates didn’t even try to put it on.
Cates piled the clothes back on the table.
“Damn,” Winner said, feigning concern. “You can’t walk out of here like that.”
Egleston chuckled.
“You don’t mess up a man’s hat,” Cates said. “And where’s my belt and buckle?” He felt his neck get hot. The tooled belt was a gift from his mother. DALLAS was stenciled across the back. The huge gold buckle was from his second win at the NFR.
“What belt and buckle?” Winner asked.
“You sure as hell know what I’m talking about,” Cates said.
Winner and Egleston looked at each other with practiced wide-eyed incomprehension.
Cates suddenly relaxed his shoulders and grinned at them. “Okay, I know what you’re doing. I’m not going to take the bait. Now, where’s my buckle? And that belt, it means something to me.”
“It means something to him because his mother had it made,” Winner said. “I think he has a thing about his mother. You can see her face on his skin right there.”
“Kind of unhealthy, I’d say,” Egleston responded.
Cates wanted to kill them both with his bare hands. When a senior member of La Familia had commented on the tattoo of Brenda’s image, Cates waited for his chance and had pushed the man’s face onto a hot stove and held him down until the victim’s right eyeball liquefied and acrid smoke filled the kitchen. No one had ever gone there again.
Now Cates closed his eyes and breathed in and out. He discovered he was knotting his fingers into fists and he consciously relaxed them.
“I want my buckle back,” he said softly.
“And I’m just sorry about that,” Winner said. “I truly am. Things get lost in the storage room, and that’s a fact. You probably don’t remember signing the property release when you came back here. The release you signed says we have no liability for lost or stolen items while you’re incarcerated. Do you want me to go get the release you signed?”
“I want to talk to the warden.”
Winner shrugged. “Unfortunately, the brass is away at a conference in Montana right now. Do you want to wait a few days to speak to them?”
Although his heart whumped in his chest and there was a red tinge to his vision, Cates stepped back and shook his head. He said, “I’d like to get out of here now. Get me a white jumpsuit and I’ll leave in that.”
White was the color for nonviolent offenders. It wouldn’t scare the locals as much as his orange one.
“We’ve done you one better,” Winner said with a wink. “Egleston?”
*
THE OTHER CO left the room and quickly returned with a large plastic Walmart sack. She placed it on the table next to the clothes Cates could no longer wear.
Cates took out each item. He could hear Egleston laugh as he did so.
Bright white skinny jeans two sizes too large, a plastic belt decorated with dinosaurs, and an XXL pink sweatshirt emblazoned with DON’T LET YOUR BABIES GROW UP TO BE COWBOYS.
“We took the liberty of dipping into your commissary funds to get you a new outfit to wear into the outside world,” Winner said with a chuckle. “We hope it all fits.”
*
CATES STARED AT Winner for half a minute. Finally, the CO broke his gaze and looked away. Cates got dressed in the new clothes and stuffed his old ones into the plastic parcel to take with him. He carried his ruined hat by the brim in his free hand.
As Winner stepped to the side to let Cates walk into the public lobby, Cates paused.
“I just added you to the list,” Cates said in a whisper.
“What list?”
“My special list of special people,” Cates said. “You know, like for Christmas cards.”
“Well, that’s darned sweet of you,” Winner said. “Unless you’re making some kind of threat.”
“I’d never do that, Officer. Especially right now.”
Winner narrowed his eyes.
“I’ll send you my address when I get settled,” Cates said. “Then you’ll know where to send me my belt and buckle.”
“You do that.”
“I surely will,” Cates said. “And I surely expect to get my property back.”
*
THE SKY WAS gray and overcast and the wind was blowing as it always was in Rawlins when Dallas Cates pushed his way through the double doors toward the parking lot. He deposited the square cube of his old clothes into a garbage can on the way out.
A tumbleweed propelled by the wind hit his left leg as he walked, and he shimmied around it and avoided another one that flew out of the lot into the sagebrush flat to the north.
Cates squinted against the wind and the grit it contained until he saw the white 2015 Chevy pickup in the lot. It was a four-by-four with a topper over the bed, and there was a bloom of primer on the front passenger door. Just as she’d described it. She’d obtained it from a former boyfriend who’d been arrested and sent away on drug charges.
Bobbi Johnson, twenty-eight years old and dirty blond with a gold front tooth, beamed at him and waved from behind the wheel. He headed in her direction and climbed into the cab.
“You look happy,” she said.
“I am. I am,” he said, gesturing through the front window. “Air, open country, open sky. You have no idea how good this all looks to me. It’s like I’m breathing real air again.”
“What are you wearing, Dallas?” she asked in her high-pitched voice.
“The COs thought it was funny,” he said as he leaned over and grasped her in a bear hug. It was the first time they’d ever touched. The prison’s visiting room maintained a strict no-contact policy.
Johnson was bony, but she had large, soft breasts under her hoodie. Her hair smelled like weed smoke and he felt her hand squeeze the top of his thigh. He was instantly hard and he wanted her now.
She looked older than she was because her face was weathered from too much time in the sun, too much time in the wind, and too much time mixing alcohol and meth. She swore that she was no longer a tweaker and now relied solely on weed, alcohol, and the occasional Oxy for the pain in her lower back. Cates wasn’t sure he believed her.
They’d met online and she’d confessed to him that she’d once been a teenage buckle bunny who liked to hang around rodeos and bed contestants. She’d also confessed that she’d always had her eyes on Dallas Cates, but that he was too big of a star at the time to get close to him.
Johnson had visited him twice in the last two months, and she’d promised to be there to pick him up when he was released.
“After all,” she’d said, “you don’t have no family no more.”
*
CATES SAID, “LET’S get the fuck out of here.”
“Where are we going?” she asked.
He beamed and said, “We’re gonna buy a bottle of whiskey and get a cheap motel room. I’m gonna get drunk and then I’m gonna fuck your brains out. Then I’m gonna get drunk again and fuck your brains out again. How does that sound?”
“It sounds good, babe. I’ve been waiting for this day for years.”
“So have I,” he said.
Johnson swooned and let out a howl and floored it.
“Don’t speed out of here and give ’em a reason to stop us,” he said firmly.
She slowed down and said, “I’m wet and I’m literally shaking.”
“Me too. Hey—did you buy me a couple of those burner phones I asked you to get?”
“There’s three in the glove box,” she said. “You owe me a hundred and fifty bucks.”