ONE OF the inmates said to me discreetly as the warden walked away after giving his blessing. I cannot write which inmate. Despite Judge Polozola’s sympathy and the possibility of appealing to him about any reprisal, I can, in fact, offer the convict little protection. The same man soon explained that I was just starting to see what the inmates had learned ahead of me, that Cain loved both glowing publicity and making money exactly as much as he didn’t care about the inmates, exactly as much as he wasn’t the warden they’d longed for when he first arrived. “Dumb to say,” the man went on, “but what we’re always wanting with a warden is sort of like a caring god.” I denied my sadness to the inmate, denied it until the very last day of my year, when we said goodbye outside the rodeo stadium. Then, as he said, crying, that he wished he was leaving with me, I allowed that he’d been right about my emotions. But for the meantime I shrugged, telling him my feelings were irrelevant.
