Snake Eyes Read online

  For several minutes Michael spoke to Lee Roy, quietly, placatingly, as if addressing one of his sons, or a demoralized junior lawyer at Pearce, Inc. He assured Lee Roy that he would not be forcibly ejected from his studio; nor would he be dismissed from his position. (Was Clyde Somerset listening, at the door? Michael hoped so.) He was standing behind Lee Roy, at a respectful distance of two or three feet. Cautioning himself, Don’t startle the man, don’t upset him further. If this were a prison situation, he could erupt under pressure. Michael seemed to know that Lee Roy was under a powerful psychoactive drug—which should help.

  Was it possibly Chlonopramane, Pearce, Inc.’s highly profitable “wonder drug” for the control of mania, obsessive thoughts, and violent behavior?—of course, Michael would never have been so tactless as to ask his friend.

  So pressed for time had he been in recent weeks, Michael had not visited the studio since the fall term had begun, and he was surprised at its disorder, and the pungent odors of paint, clay, turpentine, human sweat and effort. The large space was also the art-therapy classroom: various works by Lee Roy and his students were on display, in a jumble of colorful images, like psychedelic cave drawings. Crude cartoonlike sketches in charcoal and crayon; swaths of acrylic color on sheets of construction paper taped to the walls. How primitive, how exposed!—art’s rawest impulses, without the strategies of art.

  From where, Michael wondered, struck by pity, did this impulse spring?—and why?

  At last, sullen, mumbling, Lee Roy responded to Michael’s questions, though still without looking up at him. Squatting on his heels in front of the clay figures, arms tightly folded, head bowed, Lee Roy put Michael in mind of a snake—queerly upright, yet coiled. He said, “—ain’t got no right, calling me names. Saying things about me like I’m an—animal.” Michael said quickly, “Lee Roy, no one thinks of you that way. There has been a little misunderstanding, that’s all. If we could—” Michael stepped cautiously closer, looking down on the top of Lee Roy’s head; seeing, for the first time, that Lee Roy’s thick, shaggy black hair was in fact slightly thin at the crown; a bald spot the size of a silver dollar was defining itself, like a sly, secret thought unfolding in darkness. Lee Roy drew the edge of his hand roughly beneath his nose, saying, “—no ‘misunderstanding,’ Mr. O’Meara! Nah!” He glanced up at Michael, his eyes damp, dark, shiny, and his forehead creased. His ordinarily boyish, expectant look was replaced by an expression of scarcely controlled fury; his lips were drawn back from his teeth. As Michael blinked down at him he mumbled something further that sounded like “Fuck it!”

  Michael switched on the overhead light, and, seeing the objects at Lee Roy’s feet, stared in silence, appalled.

  Even through the mellow haze of Liloprane, Michael O’Meara was shocked.

  The most prominent were humanoid figures, like Lee Roy’s earlier work, but these were female, and more grotesquely mutilated. They were naked, lying on their backs or sides, heads flung back in agony, with gashes for mouths and lurid gouged-out spaces between their legs. One figure’s legs were twisted out from her body almost perpendicularly. Another’s legs, spread, were broken at the knees. There were eyeless sockets, noses mere holes. Breasts were attached to bodies by flaps of skin, or torn off altogether. One figure’s abdomen had been opened, and a fetus removed, entwined in spaghetti-like coils meant to represent intestines. The smaller objects on the newspaper did not bear close examination—they were eyes, fingers, genitals, interior organs.

  Of the six figures that were complete, four were Asian; the other two, Caucasian. All were young, mere girls.

  Michael thought, My God!

  Michael thought, They are obscene.

  There was a long, painful silence, broken only by Lee Roy’s harsh breathing and, from outside, a sound of traffic, voices—jarringly ordinary. Michael felt faint, yet, at the same time, determined to take this in stride. He whistled thinly through his teeth and said, “Well.” A pause. “Well.”

  Hunched over, his face masklike with tension, Lee Roy squinted up at him.

  There was nothing to do but plunge forward: so, in lawyerly fashion, his face burning, Michael explained to the silent Lee Roy Sears that, though he understood, and sympathized with, the autonomy of the artist, there remained the fact that the community has rights too, and has customarily exerted pressures enforceable by law. When, in particular, a sexual taboo is broken, and when the community in question is financially supporting the artist—

  Lee Roy made a derisive grunting noise, shifting his weight on his haunches. He was still squinting up at Michael, in that strained, quivering, reptilian pose. His bony forehead was prominent. The smell lifting from him more pronounced.

  Michael bravely continued, trying to speak reasonably, as a professional man to a friend, explaining that, since its inception, the Dumont Center had depended solely upon private donations and public funding; with an emphasis upon private donations. In Mount Orion, there were a number of generous, civic-minded people, many of them women—older women—like Julia Sutter. And so—

  “All Clyde Somerset is asking, I think, is that you remove these pieces from the premises. You could take them”—Michael paused, not certain that the word home exactly applied to the rundown halfway house in Putnam where Lee Roy lived—“home with you. Couldn’t you? I’ll help you, I’ll drive you, right now. What do you say?”

  With a curious shrugging gesture of his shoulders, as if his shirt were too tight, Lee Roy grinned up at Michael. His eyes were unnaturally shiny. “You’re on their side, huh, Mr. O’Meara!” It was not a question so much as a statement, an accusation.

  “It isn’t a question of sides, Lee Roy. It’s a question of how best to proceed. If you refuse, your future at the Center may be jeopardized. If you compromise—”

  “—said I was ‘obscene.’ Said I didn’t deserve to be here.”

  “Who said that? I’m sure you misheard.”

  “They did. They did.” Lee Roy jerked his head in the direction of the door.

  Out in the corridor, at a discreet distance, Clyde Somerset and the uniformed guard stood, cautiously watching. With his back to the doorway, Lee Roy Sears could not see them but very likely knew they were there.

  Under his breath he muttered, “Fuckers!”

  Michael had to resist the impulse to touch Lee Roy’s shoulder, to quiet him.

  He would have liked too to squat down beside Lee Roy, as if they were equals: but feared seeming condescending.

  He said, “Lee Roy, you must know that you have created some very extreme images here. When an artist, or anyone, violates a taboo, offends what’s called ‘community standards’—” As he spoke, Michael was uneasily aware of both Lee Roy’s derisive expression and the clay figures at his feet: the mangled, mutilated female bodies, the outspread legs, back-flung heads, severed body parts. The clay was even the color of raw meat; and its texture suggested a damp stickiness. Michael felt dizzy, disoriented. Why am I here, appealing to a madman?—am I mad myself? Yet he dismissed the thought, a thought shared by any number of lawyers, certainly, during the course of their careers; he continued speaking reasonably as before, confident that, in another few minutes, he would win over Lee Roy to his side. (If he left the Dumont Center soon, and drove Lee Roy to Putnam, he could swing around to the Parkway just east of Putnam, and be back at Pearce, Inc., within forty-five minutes.)

  He saw that Lee Roy’s white shirt, his so characteristic white shirt, was encrusted with clay and other stains, and that the sleeves were rolled up partway to his elbows, cuffs flapping loose. And was that a tattoo on his left arm?—Michael had only a glimpse of a corner of something black, spangled with gold. He’d never known that Lee Roy Sears had a tattoo.

  Michael said, suddenly, almost reproachfully, “Lee Roy, you wouldn’t want Gina to see these, would you?”

  Lee Roy ducked his head guiltily. He rocked on his heels. “She don’t need to, then,” he mumbled.

  “But she might, if she
came here, to visit your studio. What then?”

  Lee Roy shrugged.

  “Don’t you think Gina would be shocked, seeing these? Perhaps even hurt?”

  Lee Roy mumbled, “They’re what came out.”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t shape them yourself?—with your own hands? Who did, if you didn’t?” Michael asked skeptically.

  He had surely not intended to get into an argument with Lee Roy, particularly in these volatile circumstances, yet, as it happened, he seemed scarcely aware of what he was saying, still less what he might be precipitating. He would think, afterward, with a kind of baffled shame, That isn’t like me at all. ‘Michael’ is the one who never objects.

  Lee Roy gave a sound of anguish, or was it anger—choked, guttural. His face was an aborigine’s, dark with blood, the eyes shiny, manic. Again he mumbled, “They’re what came out,” the word “out” elongated, a low wail.

  “For God’s sake, Lee Roy—”

  Lee Roy seized one of the clay figures and held it up to Michael, as if offering it to him. (And how grotesque, how ugly the thing was!—a broken female, vagina gouged out, one couldn’t help but imagine Sears’s fingers plunging, scooping.) Seeing the look in Michael’s face of disgust, disdain, Lee Roy said, “You hate me too, huh! You, and them!”

  To Michael’s astonishment, Lee Roy began crying; sobbing; muttering to himself. Quite deliberately he broke the clay figure in two and flung the parts down. He picked up another, and this time broke it fiercely into bits, flinging them down, now out of control, sobbing like a broken-hearted child. A child in the throes of a tantrum.

  “Yah?—this? This? This? Yah this?”

  He snatched up figures, shook them at Michael, and broke them. As Michael stood over him, too surprised to act, or, perhaps, fearful of trying to stop him, Lee Roy crawled on his hands and knees on the outspread newspaper taking up and breaking the figures, smashing them, grinding them to bits with his fingers. Now he was in a paroxysm of destruction, sobbing, laughing, “Uh! uh! uh!”

  “Lee Roy, no—”

  Lee Roy scrambled to his feet, hunched, panting, his eyes wild in his mottled face, and went for the charcoal sketches and paintings taped to the walls, tearing them down, tearing them into strips, he seized canvases resting against a wall and tore and kicked at them, with a violent wave of his arm he sent jars, bottles, cans, paintbrushes, a ceramic bowl flying off the workbench—all before Michael dared try to prevent him, dared even to touch his arm. And when Michael did touch Lee Roy’s arm, Lee Roy shoved him away—like a rabid dog turning against his master he actually bared his teeth at Michael.

  “You hate me too!—you think I’m shit!”

  Then, sobbing, Lee Roy Sears ran out of the studio.

  In the corridor, several staff members had gathered, with Clyde Somerset and the security guard, to watch what was happening in the studio; when Lee Roy rushed out, everyone scrambled aside, to give him passage. Afterward it would be recounted (not by Michael O’Meara: by the others) that Lee Roy Sears had gone berserk—no other word for it but berserk.

  And was he to blame. Who was to blame.

  Who to blame.

  Though greatly upset, needing in fact to swallow down a second pale green pill, even as he was making his way weaving skillfully through traffic on the Parkway, Michael O’Meara managed to return to Pearce, Inc., by 4:30 P.M.; worked until 6:30 P.M.; put all thoughts of Lee Roy Sears and of what must be done (what he must do) out of his head, until he was once again free, and again navigating the Parkway westward for the final time that day.

  That day!—Friday, October 18. How long it had been thus far, and how much longer it would be!

  He was seeing as in a kaleidoscopic jumble the ugly, obscene humanoid figures and organs—for they were obscene: why prevaricate?—and he was seeing Lee Roy Sears’s crouched tremulous form; hearing Lee Roy Sears’s heartrending sobs, and that accusation, which Michael O’Meara believed he would never forget, for the remainder of his life.

  You hate me too. You think I’m shit.

  Yes, and there was Lee Roy’s contorted face, an infant’s face. Glistening eyes. Mania. The sharp sweat-smell of mania. Who to blame? Had Michael only been thinking more coherently, he would have realized that you don’t attempt to reason with, thus end up arguing with, a distraught man, a man recently paroled from a maximum security prison, a man who fought in, and was wounded in, Vietnam, a man who was exposed to the toxic Agent Orange, a man with a history of emotional instability. You don’t.

  What must be done, what he must do.

  If he could not salvage Lee Roy Sears’s residency at the Dumont Center, he could at least prevent the poor man from being returned to prison.

  For prison, for Lee Roy Sears, would be a death sentence.

  Michael’s thoughts leapt ahead in swift lawyerly fashion. He would speak with Clyde Somerset, and he would speak with Julia Sutter, and he would speak with Marian Parrish—whom he did not know, but whom Gina knew slightly. He would argue on Lee Roy Sears’s behalf. But he would not put them on the defensive: he would explain, apologize. Appeal to these good people. For they were good people, generous, and charitable, and kind. They were not vindictive, were they?—far better to forgive.

  He would arrange to see them all tomorrow. Thank God, tomorrow was a Saturday.

  He had work to do for Pearce, Inc., which he’d brought home, but he could do that early, he’d get up early, at dawn. And there was Sunday.

  He’d vaguely promised Joel and Kenny he would take them to The Islands, but the promise had been vague, and maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t remember?

  The following week, he would probably speak with H. Sigman, Lee Roy’s parole officer. The man was a thorough professional, hardly idealistic, yet not cynical; beyond cynicism, you might say. He wanted simply to do his job, to get it done. How many parolees he had in his charge, in his files, Michael did not know, but he suspected quite a few. When Lee Roy Sears had walked off his job at the parking garage, and the manager had accused him, falsely, with no witnesses, of having threatened him, Michael O’Meara had taken the time to meet with Sigman, in his cramped office, and that had seemed to flatter him, Michael’s very presence had seemed to flatter him, let alone Michael’s sincerity. Here was a successful corporation lawyer from Mount Orion, well-dressed, down-to-earth, making it a point to speak to H. Sigman who was nobody. About an ex-con named Lee Roy Sears who was nobody too.

  Sigman should be persuaded, this time too.

  What a dreary, depressing place!—Michael ascended the creaking stairs quickly, glancing neither to the left nor to the right, trying not to breathe too deeply. He was not by nature an overly sensitive man—Gina frequently chided him for his imprecision in identifying smells—but the odor here, a nightmare admixture of rancid food, grime, dried vomit, urine, Lysol, brought tears to his eyes. He could not imagine how Lee Roy Sears bore it.

  Unless prison had been worse?

  Of course, prison had been worse.

  Michael knocked on the door to 12B, which was Lee Roy’s room: seeing no light beneath the door, and suspecting, in any case, that Lee Roy would not be in. He saw that the door was scraped and battered, as if gnawed upon. The corridor was dimly lit, the walls stained and layered with dirt.

  Michael knocked again, and, for the second time that day, said, cautiously, “Lee Roy?—it’s me, Michael.”

  He had not spoken loudly, but a door opened at once behind him, and a paunchy squinting man in an undershirt appeared, asking something in Spanish that Michael could not comprehend. He believed he heard the name “Sears,” but he might have been mistaken. “Yes, thank you,” he said, stammering, “n-no, thank you,” retreating to the stairs, confused, sick at heart, blinking genuine tears out of his eyes. The man in the undershirt questioned him again, in Spanish, more belligerently. Michael waved vaguely, hurrying down the stairs. “No! No thanks! It’s all right! Never mind!” For one so heavy in the stomach, the man moved with star
tling swiftness, to the stairway railing, and, now shouting in Spanish, leaned over and spat out a great gob of mucus that landed on the right sleeve of Michael O’Meara’s navy blue pinstripe suit.

  Michael was too shocked, and too frightened, to protest. He half-ran out of the building and to his car parked close by. He imagined he heard laughter in his wake. Had others in the rooming house been watching too?—did they recognize him, somehow?

  He might then have fled home, to Mount Orion; to Gina. But he wanted so badly to talk to Lee Roy tonight … to see that Lee Roy was all right, and to give him counsel.

  Yes, he had to talk to Lee Roy. Simply had to.

  He’d failed to protect Lee Roy, as he might have. He knew it, and Lee Roy knew it. This was a knowledge shared by no one else.

  He wouldn’t even try to explain to Gina.

  Yes, he had better try to explain to Gina.

  In any case he had to telephone her, since it was late: after 7:00 P.M.: he didn’t want her to worry about him. By now she had certainly heard of the further trouble at the Dumont Center; in Mount Orion, news travels rapidly, and bad news most rapidly. He’d half expected Gina to call him again at work, but she had not.

  Michael called home, from a pay phone, and, after several long rings, to his surprise, the answering tape switched on. At this hour of the evening?—but where was Gina? Hello! came his own cheery voice, This is the O’Meara residence! I’m afraid neither Gina nor I can come to the phone right now, but if you’d like to leave a message … He was struck by the forlorn fatuousness of his own voice.

  Desperately he said, “Hello? Gina? Marita? Joel? Kenny? Hello, this is—” But he didn’t need to identify himself, surely?

  He waited, hoping that Gina might pick up the receiver. There was someone at the house, of course: Marita was there, tending the boys. Marita refused to answer the phone at the O’Mearas, however, with the excuse that her English was poor.

  “—Hello? Joel, Kenny? Hey! Can you hear me! This is Daddy—”

  In disgust Michael hung up the receiver. Walked away.