Snake Eyes Page 5

  For there they came, running. His sons.

  His heart flooded with love of them: Joel and Kenny.

  Kenny and Joel: the O’Meara twins.

  “Daddy, here’s something—”

  “—something for you—”

  Michael, who had been working for several hours shoveling sediment out of the pond behind his house and hacking away at overgrown cattails and rushes, wading in rubber hip-boots he’d borrowed from a friend, waved at the boys, and started for shore. He tried never to disappoint his sensitive sons by failing to fall in with their moods: Joel and Kenny were still of an age when so much was exciting, even crucial, especially if it allowed for a legitimate intersection of their lives with their parents’ lives. To be the bearer of important news makes children experience themselves as important: Michael O’Meara could recall claiming, or trying to claim, his own distracted father’s attention, years ago.

  “Daddy—!”

  “Daddy—!”

  Michael had been about ten yards from shore, in muddy-churned water up to his thighs. It was difficult walking purposefully, trying to keep his balance, in the damned clumsy boots, which seemed to be leaking. Soft black muck sucked lewdly at his feet; he sank, in treacherous spots, up to his ankles. It was a prematurely warm April day and his face smarted with sunburn. His gloved hands were throbbing with pain of which he was just now conscious and there came a sharp warning twinge between his shoulder blades. Was he so badly out of condition, for a man of only forty?—who prided himself, however modestly, on his general fitness? He had certainly underestimated the task of dredging out some of the accumulated sediment from the pond and clearing away the excessive cattails and rushes that were choking it at one end. Seemingly small, self-contained, and shallow, seen from the house above, the O’Mearas’ pond was in reality more than one hundred yards in circumference and, though shallow near shore, deceptively deep, over a man’s head, at the center. Overhung by full-grown willow trees, bordered by wild azaleas, water iris, and cattails, the pond was exquisitely beautiful, if a bit neglected, and for years Michael had intended to clean it up. Despite his best efforts, however, and his stubbornness, the work was really too much for an inexperienced man; as Gina had several times suggested, he should have called in a professional. Even Joel and Kenny, who had been helping him earlier, delighted at the rare opportunity to be in their father’s company out-of-doors, had grown restless and bored with the repetitive work, and had drifted, without exactly announcing their departure, back up to the house. To read, or to write (the boys were composing a comic-strip epic jointly, which neither Michael nor Gina had yet been allowed to see), or to watch television: they had no friends their own age in this semi-rural suburban neighborhood, miles from the village center of Mount Orion, where spacious houses were built on three-acre wooded lots, and there were no sidewalks, and Glenway Circle was not a through street but a graveled, idyllically winding cul-de-sac.

  Michael tossed the spade he’d been using down on the bank and heaved himself up, grunting, hip-boots streaming water. “Okay, guys, what are you bringing me?” he called. The boys were racing downhill more recklessly than he liked to see, showing off for Daddy, Joel waving an envelope importantly—or was it Kenny?—the twins so closely resembled each other that, at such times, when they were animated and breathless, it was virtually impossible to tell them apart.

  It was a letter for Michael O’Meara, and it had come special delivery, and Gina, up at the house, had signed for it. A thick packet, an official-looking letter with a return address of the Connecticut State Parole Board in Hartford, Connecticut.

  Michael stood frozen, staring at the envelope for a long moment before moving to open it. Even then, his numbed fingers moved stiffly.

  “Daddy, what’s wrong?” Joel asked anxiously.

  And Kenny, at once, “—what’s wrong?”

  Michael said, smiling, “Why, nothing.” He opened the envelope, and scanned the letter addressed to him, and merely glanced at the photocopied material, and, smiling, more emphatically now, said, “It’s good news, boys. You’ve brought me good news. So, guys, thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  Michael O’Meara’s tone with the twins was nearly always hearty, happy, upbeat, brisk.

  Wasn’t that the way to do it?

  Always, he would remember that moment: that hour: that day: Saturday, April 13, the day following his sons’ seventh birthday.

  Not that there was any connection between the two dates, the two events. Not even coincidence.

  He would long remember, too, with a pang of both guilt and defiance, Gina’s reaction.

  “So, you’ve been making these arrangements for this man, this Sears, this”—her eyes flashed with incredulity—“murderer, behind my back? You’ve helped him get paroled, you’ve helped him get a job, and—he’s coming here? To Mount Orion?”

  Gina was speaking rapidly, more puzzled than angry: she knew that Michael adored her, that he could never behave in any way contrary to her best interests; thus, whatever foolish, generous, charitable thing he did was in her best interests, somehow. But how?

  Michael said, “Gina, no. Darling, I never did anything behind your back, believe me! I just didn’t trouble you, as I don’t trouble you with any number of things that seem unimportant. Since nineteen eighty-three, when his sentence was commuted, Lee Roy Sears has written to me a few times, strange, very short letters—just notes, really; basically thanking me for helping to save his life. He exaggerated my part in it, and I tried to tell him that.”

  “You’ve been corresponding with that man? You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Then, about eighteen months ago, I received a call from the director of the prison rehabilitation program at Hunsford, telling me about the work Sears had been doing. On his own initiative he began an art-therapy program, working with the Vietnam veterans mainly, and it’s been extremely successful. The director sent me slides of Sears’s own art, and while none of it struck me as very talented, some oil paintings, clay figures, I was impressed that he had such sensitivity—after all, remember his background. Here was a man who’d had nothing, no advantages, no education—”

  “And—?”

  “And what?”

  “And what did you do, then? How did you reply?”

  “Then?—at that time, I didn’t reply at all. Except maybe to comment that, yes, Sears did seem to have a mission, and it was fortunate that the prison system allowed him to exercise it.” Michael frowned, running both hands through his hair. “I have to admit, honey, I am surprised that the board paroled him so early. But—”

  “Surprised?” Gina’s voice lifted shrilly. “You knew all along! Here”—she tapped his chest with the letter—“the board is thanking you for your assistance!”

  “Please, Gina. You must understand that naturally I wrote on Sears’s behalf to the board, as positively as I could, while stressing the fact that I wasn’t personally acquainted with him. I was hardly the only person they contacted—there must have been dozens. In any case, I assumed the hearing was pro forma—”

  “Skip the Latin, will you, Michael?—you aren’t in court, trying to impress other lawyers.”

  “—just perfunctory, a matter of form. Because I’d been certain the board would probably reject his application as premature.”

  “Yes, why is he getting out after eight years? He was sentenced to life imprisonment, wasn’t he?”

  “‘Life’ is just the maximum sentence; the parole board determines the actual sentence. If a prisoner behaves, as Sears seems to have done, in exemplary fashion, he’s credited with ten days ‘good’ time for each thirty served. That works out to one-third of the maximum sentence.” Michael spoke quickly, seeing, as he often did when presuming to give Gina information, her eyes begin to glaze over. “And there are other factors involved—the art-therapy program, which greatly impressed the board, and Sears’s participation in religious activities in the prison, and courses in remedial English he’d taken,
and his interviews with prison psychologists, social workers—”

  “But—eight years! Did you and the others in The Coalition expect him to be paroled so soon?”

  “That wasn’t an issue.”

  “Wasn’t an issue?” Gina laughed incredulously. “Aren’t you all lawyers, aren’t you supposed to know the law?”

  Michael winced, wanting to say that he wasn’t a criminal lawyer, as Gina well knew; he could not have endured a career in criminal law. Instead he said, defensively, “We were protesting Sears’s death sentence. We were protesting the barbarism of capital punishment. It was a principle of justice we were pursuing.”

  Gina persisted, eyes shrewdly narrowed as if she’d caught him in a lie. “But you went farther than that, Michael. You seem to have gotten Lee Roy Sears a position at the Dumont Center, right here in Mount Orion—didn’t you? How then can you claim you’re surprised he’s been paroled? There’s a contradiction here.”

  Michael said, keeping his voice level, “I was asked if I knew of any community service centers where Sears, with his interest in art therapy, might work at least part-time, so naturally I gave them Clyde’s name. Yes, of course, I spoke with Clyde first.” Michael paused. Clyde Somerset was a friend of the O’Mearas, a locally prominent citizen active in community affairs, and director of the Dumont Center; he and his attractive wife, Susanne, were an older couple, central to Mount Orion’s élite, whose good opinion meant much to Gina. Michael understood, though he was far too tactful to suggest it, that Gina’s exaggerated concern about Lee Roy Sears was primarily social—yet, for that, no less crucial to her. He must take her doubts seriously, and he must, with a lover’s solicitude, and a husband’s sense of propriety, protect her from knowledge of her own less than noble motives. He said, meaning to placate, as Gina continued to stare at him doubtfully, “I didn’t get Sears the job at the Dumont Center, he got it himself on the strength of his credentials. You know Clyde—Clyde isn’t sentimental, and he isn’t a fool. In any case Sears has another job, in a parking garage in Putnam, that will provide most of his income. And he’ll be living in Putnam, in a halfway house for parolees. He’ll be reporting to his probation officer weekly. He won’t be living in Mount Orion.”

  Putnam was a working-class town, a suburb of Newark, a half-hour’s drive along the traffic-clogged New Jersey Turnpike from leafy Mount Orion. But Gina said, “He’ll be your responsibility in Mount Orion, Michael—people will see it that way. And that means my responsibility too.”

  Gina spoke so harshly, so in disgust of him, Michael’s sunburnt face stung. He’d had a glimpse of himself in a mirror and had winced at his clownish reddened nose. Every year, a premature dose of the sun, every year virtually the same thing!—Gina would laugh at him, and kiss him, and rub Noxema into his flamey skin. Except, today, with this unexpected news between them, she had no kiss for him, nor even a few fond words of commiseration. Indeed, she gazed at him as if, in his solid stocky ex-athlete’s body with its comfortable ring of flesh around the waist, graying-red hair disheveled and streaks of mud on his clothes, he were a stranger, an uncouth intruder, in their attractively furnished bedroom.

  Yet, for all her bristling animosity, how beautiful Gina was!

  They were to go out (to Michael’s disappointment: he’d forgotten) that evening, and Gina had shampooed her blond shining hair; she wore a brilliant green silk kimono dressing gown, bought for her by Michael on a recent business trip to Tokyo, the wide sash tied tight, as if to emphasize her elegant thinness. Her cameolike beauty was a rebuke to him, and to the clumsy erotic yearning he felt at such times.

  Michael spoke forcibly, but gently. He hoped to entice from this woman, so stiff in opposition to him, a small smile.

  He said, reaching for her hand, “Gina, don’t you feel sorry for Lee Roy Sears? Just a little? Here is a thirty-nine-year-old man, no wife, no family, not much education, his youth wasted first in Vietnam, in a filthy, pointless war, then in prison—not eight years, as you’ve been saying, but thirteen, since he’d been in prison five years before his sentence was commuted. Think of it, Gina—five years on death row! When he gets out of Hunsford on Monday morning he’ll have less than one hundred dollars in his pocket, probably, and nowhere to go except to”—Michael hesitated, about to blunder into saying “to us”—“except to Putnam, New Jersey, to a halfway house. And you, Gina, who’ve never known an hour’s want or deprivation—would you deny the man so very little?”

  Gina laughed unexpectedly. That bright brittle laughter as of icicles breaking that so roused Michael O’Meara’s desire.

  “Yes! Oh for Christ’s sake no! Oh leave me alone, will you!”

  Michael winced at Gina’s harsh voice. He worried that, though they were upstairs in their bedroom, the door shut, and Joel and Kenny were far away downstairs in the family room watching television, the derisive sound might carry. As Gina was in most ways closer to the boys than Michael was, so too she was conspicuously less careful in shielding them from matters that might upset them; she did not consider them nearly so sensitive as Michael did. Yet, from time to time, mysteriously, and to Michael disturbingly, the boys seemed aware of things not told them directly by either of their parents.

  What Michael O’Meara most wanted to protect his sons from was premature knowledge: growing up too soon.

  Gina was angry, and Gina was on the verge of tears, and Michael simply went to her, risking a slap, or her small hard fists pummeling him, and put his arms around her. He said, “You don’t mean it. You’re much too nice to mean it.”

  “Am I!”

  Gina stood very still in Michael’s embrace, neither resisting him nor exactly giving in. Their quarrels, which were infrequent, frequently ended in this way. Michael buried his burning face in Gina’s fine coolish hair and caressed her gently, almost shyly, reverently. Her slender curving buttocks that were so tense, her narrow waist, her ribcage, her small high breasts … he held her as he would a rare prize, feeling himself unworthy, yet exulting in possession, as her husband: the father of her children.

  They were silent for some seconds. Overhead a jet passed.

  Gina said, “I know you’re right. Of course you’re right. You make me ashamed of myself, I’m so selfish and stupid. You really should be married to someone else, Michael. Someone worthy of you.”

  Did that mean, I should be married to someone else …?

  Michael protested, unthinking, “But, Gina, I love you!”

  Anxiously Joel asked, as Michael was about to switch off the bedside lamp between the boys’ beds, “Daddy, is somebody coming to live in our house?”

  And Kenny, at once, breathlessly, as if the words had been pent up for many minutes, “Daddy, is it a bad man?”

  Michael, who had noticed that his sons had been unusually subdued as he’d tucked them into bed, chatted with them a bit, kissed them goodnight, was nonetheless taken by surprise, and said, hesitating only a moment, “Why, no. Of course not. Who on earth told you that?”

  He stood tall and protective above them, smiling, he hoped not uneasily, smiling hard, a bit baffled; considering and then rejecting that, for some whimsical reason of her own, Gina had gone ahead and told the twins about Lee Roy Sears. But of course she hadn’t. Somehow, they simply knew.

  Michael looked with loving concern at Joel in his bed, at Kenny in his, screwing up his face like a television daddy to suggest honest perplexity and the silliness of the boys’ fears. He asked again who had told them, but the little boys pursed their lips tight and said nothing, just gazed up at him, each with a tiny convulsive shiver despite the warmth of the room and the bedclothes drawn up to their chins. Joel in “his” bed, on the left; Kenny in “his” bed, on the right. True, the beds were identical, they were “twin” beds, but Joel’s bedspread was navy blue with cartoon nautical symbols, and Kenny’s bedspread was hunter green with cartoon farm animals. Joel’s pajamas were lightweight flannel with blue and white stripes, Kenny’s pajamas were lightweight fl
annel with beige and white stripes. Joel’s new sneakers were aqua and white, Kenny’s red and gray. Joel’s newest good trousers were dark brown, Kenny’s dark blue. Over Joel’s desk, on his side of the room, was a glossy poster of E.T., and over Kenny’s desk, on his side of the room, was a glossy poster of those mutant turtles whose metamorphosis, from television animation to Hollywood “acting,” had so alarmed Michael O’Meara when he’d taken his sons to the movie.

  Looking from one silent boy to the other, Michael said, “There’s no ‘bad man’ coming to visit us, but there is a man, new to us, you might possibly meet next week. He isn’t coming to live in our house, though. He won’t be around here much at all. No more than”—Michael paused, searching for the perfect analogue, which eluded him “—the oil delivery man.”

  But this was lame and unconvincing. Joel and Kenny, big-eyed, hours from sleep, continued to gaze up at their father. What is it about a child’s smooth forehead creased in anxiety that so pierces the heart! Michael tried to smile, more cheerfully. “Remember your birthday—your birthdays—yesterday? Wasn’t that fun?”

  Gina had arranged for eight of the boys’ classmates to come over in the late afternoon, following school; Michael, who customarily stayed at the office until six o’clock, had not come home in time for the party, but he’d been told, by an exhausted Gina, that it had been a great success. And, following Gina’s discreet suggestions to the other mothers, two or three of whom were her friends, there had been no “twin” presents—matching toys, clothes, games, books, videos.

  For while it was obvious that Joel and Kenny were identical twins, thus bearing identical chromosomes, it did not follow—and on this point Michael was particularly adamant—that either child’s personality should be subordinated to the other; or to the fact, essentially accidental, of twinness.