Snake Eyes Page 9

  As Sears showed Michael his “new work”—pages of smudged charcoal sketches, some small, clumsily executed humanoid figures in clay—Michael observed him out of the corner of his eye. Lee Roy Sears!—was this the man whose life he’d helped save?—the man with whom, off and on, he’d corresponded? In his imagination, Michael had been envisioning Sears as a sort of brother—well, not a brother exactly, that was a bit far-fetched, but a sort of—disadvantaged cousin; a distant relative of his approximate age who’d had bad luck even as he, Michael, had had good luck. (It was in the nature of “luck,” the very principle of luck, that it is undeserved. This, Michael O’Meara fervently believed, even as he believed yet more fervently in our ability to remake ourselves; in the principle of free will.) Yet, though Lee Roy Sears was thirty-nine years old, only a year younger than Michael, he looked much younger; with his sallow, slightly blemished skin, his dark damp shining eyes, his narrow shoulders and hips and keyed-up mannerisms, he might have been a precocious teenager, a street kid, battered, but hopeful.

  No doubt about it, Sears was ugly. The waxy-pale bony planes of his forehead, with its suggestion of something reptilian; his long thin nose with its oversized nostrils; the teeth oversized too, as if there were too many for his narrow jaws, with a perceptible bituminous stain—ugly, yet in a way curiously appealing, even attractive. Perhaps it was his energy—his wiry, tensed-up body, seemingly small-boned, yet with hard tight compact little muscles. Even his slight limp—Sears favored his left knee, injured in the war—gave him a rakish off-balance charm.

  To meet the O’Mearas, Lee Roy had dressed up a bit, and combed his lank lusterless black hair with a pungent-smelling oil; he’d shaved with an uncertain hand, scraping the underside of his jaw in a half-dozen places. He wore a white shirt that needed laundering, and a pumpkin-and-brown plaid Dacron jacket; a necktie of some greasy green material, inexpertly knotted at his throat; nondescript brown-gray trousers that hung baggy at buttocks, knees, ankles. His brown shoes had not been polished in years and were cracked and waterstained, yet sported tassels. His fingernails were ridged with dirt and clay, yet he wore a signet ring on his left hand, onyx, or plastic resembling onyx. Michael winced, thinking of Gina. She had a habit of cruelly, and irrevocably, dismissing people on sight, if they were not the right sort of people.

  “This one, he’s gonna be real important, I got a strong feeling, but he isn’t exactly born, yet,” Lee Roy Sears was saying earnestly, holding out for Michael’s appreciation one of the misshapen humanoid figures, meant perhaps to depict a man, a wounded soldier?—contorted in agony. “If he’s born too soon he won’t last.”

  Michael stared at the clay figure, smiling, admiring, not certain what was expected of him. As with his sons, who frequently showed Daddy their drawings, schoolwork, ingenious little inventions, Michael expressed unqualified enthusiasm; but, with Sears, he had no questions to ask. He was thinking of the evening ahead.

  Sears laughed harshly, baring his teeth, and said, in a tone that sounded almost warning, “Yah. Like, if he’s born too soon he won’t last. None of ’em do, Mr. O’Meara.”

  Again he paused, and again there came that sudden high-pitched giggle, “—I mean t’say, ‘Michael.’”

  “Must you bring this ‘Sears’ home, Michael?” Gina had asked, pronouncing the name as if it were a rare disease; and Michael had said, “It’s just this once, Gina, I promise.” And Gina had said, with her usual keen, yet somehow misplaced, logic, “But, why, really?—if it’s ‘just this once,’ what difference can it possibly make to the man?”

  Michael had said, “I want Lee Roy Sears to feel that someone cares for him, that he isn’t completely alone.”

  “He has his parole officer, doesn’t he?”

  “Really, Gina!”

  “—and Clyde, and the staff at the Center?”

  “Clyde won’t have time for him, you know that. He’ll chat with him a few times, and for publicity’s sake he’ll pose with him, but—you know Clyde.”

  “I know that he’s a busy man. And so are we all—busy.” Gina poked Michael playfully, yet a bit roughly, in the soft flesh at his waist. “So are you, especially.”

  “Not so busy I don’t have time for crucial matters.”

  “If you took Lee Roy Sears out to dinner sometime to a nice restaurant in Putnam—not in Mount Orion, he’d feel awkward I think, but Putnam—wouldn’t that do just as well?”

  “Gina, honey, I want Lee Roy Sears to meet you and the boys—my family.” Michael paused. He was reluctant to tell her, for fear of seeming absurdly vain, or sentimental, that he wanted Sears to have the experience of seeing a normal, happy American family; he wanted Sears to realize that such normalcy and happiness were well within his own reach.

  As if reading her husband’s mind, and, as on the tennis court, leaping slyly ahead, Gina said, “Next, you’ll be wanting to introduce Lee Roy Sears to a ‘nice girl.’ You’ll be wanting me to arrange it.”

  Seeing the expression on Michael’s face, Gina laughed, and sighed, a charming sign of surrender in her, saying, as if this had been the issue all along, “Well, I won’t have time to cook on Wednesday, I have a luncheon meeting, then a tennis lesson. If you and your guest won’t mind, I’ll just pick something up at—” naming Mount Orion’s premier gourmet food store, where, in any case, Gina shopped at least once a week.

  Michael thanked her and kissed her. He’d known she would come around: she always did.

  The first odd thing: as Michael O’Meara and Lee Roy Sears left the basement area, ascending to a door at the top of a flight of stairs, Sears stopped dead in his tracks, and waited for Michael to open the door; belatedly, Michael realized that Sears had forgotten he was no longer in prison, and had to wait for Michael, his guard, to unlock the door!

  A painful moment, but Sears didn’t seem to notice.

  The foyer of the Dumont Center was airy and spacious, with tall amber strips of glass, and portable white walls upon which were hung photographs by a local photographer; a half-dozen people stood about looking at the exhibit. As Sears crossed the foyer with Michael, his limp became more pronounced and he seemed to be shrinking in upon himself, head bowed, shoulders hunched, a hand raised in front of his face as if to shield it from the curious glances of strangers—who, were it not for Sears’s peculiar behavior, would never have taken note of him.

  Two or three of the visitors were acquaintances of the O’Mearas, and Michael exchanged cheerful greetings with them, while not slackening his pace, indeed making an effort not to embarrass Sears by stopping to talk. He sensed how desperately the parolee wanted to get away.

  Yet, outside, in the warm, waning light, Sears flinched; blinked rapidly; his hooded eyes darting about, like those of a nocturnal animal thrust into the light. He fumbled at a pocket and withdrew a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses which he fitted nervously into place. In the parking lot, he started as a car gunned its motor nearby; in Michael’s gleaming white Mazda, as Michael turned the key in the ignition, he was frightened by the sudden mechanical action of the shoulder belt as it swung up and onto him—“Jesus! What the hell!”

  Michael said quickly, “It’s all right, Lee Roy. Just the safety belt—federal regulations.”

  Sears adjusted his sunglasses, which had been knocked askew by the belt. He joked, lamely, his face coloring, “Huh!—thought it was a snake.”

  Several times during the brief drive to Glenway Circle, Lee Roy Sears flinched and froze in his seat, though Michael, always a careful driver, was exceedingly careful tonight, and there was no question of an accident. His reactions reminded Michael of the “startle reflexes” normal in an infant, and he tried not to be annoyed. He understood Sears’s condition, which was as much neurological as psychological: after so many years in a limited and controlled environment, Sears’s brain was struggling to monitor the barrage of stimuli of the ordinary world. Pearce Pharmaceuticals manufactured drugs to block excessive stimuli, thus to diminish the anxiety such st
imuli evoked, but it was far better to confront them naturally, as Sears was presumably doing.

  As they turned onto Glenway Circle, and Michael slowed his speed even more, driving now at no more than twenty miles an hour, Sears made an effort to relax, and murmured, embarrassed, “Guess I haven’t been in a car in a long time.”

  Michael said, with an ebullience that surprised him, “You’ll get used to it—you’ll get used to everything. In a few months, maybe you’ll be driving again, yourself.”

  Sears only grunted, a vague doubtful assent.

  Then it was Michael O’Meara’s neighborhood that intimidated Lee Roy Sears: this splendid semi-rural suburban landscape of custom-designed homes, each on a large, wooden, sloping lot, partly hidden from the graveled road and worth, even in the deflated market of spring 1991, above five hundred thousand dollars. So long had Michael lived on Glenway Circle, so typically preoccupied were his thoughts as he drove this familiar route, he’d long since ceased to see his neighborhood at all, let alone to gaze at it with eyes of admiration, astonishment: why, he lived here! he, Michael O’Meara, a man of no exceptional intelligence or talent, in his own severe estimation at least, a man who surely did not deserve such a reward—he lived here! The O’Mearas’ handsome white colonial was at the end of the gracefully curving cul-de-sac, set atop a hill and surrounded by a virtual forest of evergreens and tall newly budded deciduous trees; the sky beyond was a rich pellucid blue, as in a Renaissance painting. How beautiful! How was it possible! As Lee Roy Sears stared as if struck dumb, hunching his head down between his shoulders like a turtle trying to retract into its shell, Michael O’Meara seemed to be seeing his property through the other’s awed eyes. He felt a thrill of intense emotion: joy, triumph, guilt.

  He murmured apologetically, driving up the lane, “It is a bit large, for a family of only four.”

  Lee Roy Sears simply stared.

  And then there was Gina.

  “Why, hello!”—as if, smiling her dazzling white smile, lovely eyes widened in welcome, she were genuinely surprised to be meeting him: a hostess’s flattering attitude, so finely bred in Gina as in most of the women of her social circle as to constitute not hypocrisy but instinct.

  Michael introduced Lee Roy Sears to Gina, very much relieved that Gina had decided to be nice; and tactfully ignored, in the flurry of first exchanges, Sears’s gaping stare—at Gina, at the beautifully furnished living room, at the view from the glass wall at the rear, at Gina.

  It was a gaping stare, both comical and touching: Sears’s lower jaw had dropped.

  But Gina handled the situation masterfully, drawing Lee Roy Sears forward, asking would he like to have a seat (on the curving oystershell sofa facing the rear, with its view of trees, shrubs, the pond below), would he like a drink?—wine, perhaps?

  Sears blinked at Gina for several seconds, as if trying to interpret her words. He removed his wire-rimmed sunglasses and fumbled slipping them in a pocket. “Thank you, Mrs. O’Meara, but I”—and here his voice dropped in shame—“I can’t drink. I mean, I’m not allowed.” He paused, stretching his lips in a woebegone smile. “I mean—as long as I’m on parole.”

  “Really!” Gina exclaimed, as if she’d never heard of such a thing, and shared Lee Roy Sears’s discomfort. “They can dictate to you whether you’re allowed to drink or not?—in the privacy of a home?”

  Sears nodded glumly. He shifted his narrow shoulders inside the gaudy pumpkin-and-brown plaid jacket. “Sure can, ma’am. That’s one of the conditions of my parole.”

  Gina looked at Michael, incensed. “Is that the law, Michael?”

  Michael said, “I suppose it is, if the”—he paused, delicately—“parolee has a history of alcohol abuse, substance abuse, that sort of thing. Lee Roy, can I get you something else? Ginger ale, club soda?”

  Lee Roy Sears mumbled, “Yah, that’s fine. Anything’s fine. Thank you.”

  Sears limped to the sofa and swung himself around, sitting with excessive care. His skin was mottled as with hives. How the O’Mearas navigated the first phase of this excruciatingly awkward visit neither would be able to recall afterward: it seemed to have been Gina’s valiant effort primarily, which then inspired Michael, as, on the stage, when something has gone wrong, one supremely capable actor or actress can inspire the rest, and the scene is saved.

  So, Gina chattered; and Michael joined in. Lee Roy Sears replied to their friendly questions in monosyllables, now and then interrupting himself to cast a floundering look about, and to mumble, “—real nice of you, real nice—”

  And, “—never set foot in a house like this—”

  And, “—real grateful for your kindness, Mrs. O’Meara, Mr. O’Meara—uh! I mean ‘Michael’!”

  At which Gina smiled another of her dazzling smiles, insisting, “Yes, Lee Roy, but, you know, you must call me Gina. ‘Mrs. O’Meara’ is my mother-in-law, who lives in Palm Beach.”

  This graceful remark, poor Lee Roy Sears did not grasp at all.

  Gina went off to fetch the twins, bringing them back with a flourish: she rarely looked more radiant than when introducing her beautiful little boys to company. “Lee Roy, here’s Joel—is it Joel, mmm?—Joel, say hi! to Lee Roy Sears. And this is Kenny—come on, honey, say hi! to Lee Roy Sears.” The boys stumbled reluctantly forward, big-eyed, unsmiling. Gina chided gently, “Joel, Kenny, this is Daddy’s friend Lee Roy Sears, please can’t you say hello?”

  But Lee Roy Sears stared as silently at the boys as they at him. Where with Gina he’d seemed overwhelmed by her beauty, with Joel and Kenny he seemed genuinely alarmed, frightened. His hand holding the glass of ginger ale visibly trembled.

  The sudden thought came to Michael O’Meara, as if out of the other man’s very consciousness, He has killed children this age, has he!—in Vietnam.

  An absurd thought, which Michael immediately rejected.

  He urged the boys forward, to shake hands with Mr. Sears, and so they did, shyly, yet sweetly; and the painful moment passed, or seemed to. The boys did their best to smile at Daddy’s strange-looking friend, who was so very different from Daddy’s and Mommy’s other friends, and Lee Roy Sears made an effort too, to overcome his discomfort. He stretched his pale lips in a ghastly smile, hunched forward, saying, “You’re—uh—twins?—that’s fun, I guess?—yah?—like at school, screwing up your teachers, huh?—”

  Joel giggled suddenly. Kenny, whose thumb had crept into the corner of his mouth, giggled too.

  Gina said, chiding, “Boys, don’t be silly.”

  Michael said, “They hardly think of themselves as twins, just as brothers. That’s the main thing.”

  “They were seven years old, just last week,” Gina said proudly. “Weren’t you, fellas?”

  Lee Roy Sears looked from one child to the other. Joel to the left, Kenny to the right. Joel wore a blue shirt, Kenny a green plaid shirt. Joel’s hair whorled clockwise, and Kenny’s counterclockwise—or was it precisely the opposite?

  “I was a twin, I’d have a helluva time!” Lee Roy Sears said crudely. He glanced at Gina, and at Michael, and sensed that he’d made a blunder. Quickly he amended, “I mean—when I was a kid. Not now.”

  As if she’d only now thought of it, Gina exclaimed in a childlike voice, “Oh, I know: let’s all go outside, while it’s still light. Dinner won’t be ready for a few more minutes. I bet Lee Roy would enjoy seeing our pond, wouldn’t you, Lee Roy?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Lee Roy Sears said with undisguised relief.

  Michael unlatched the sliding door to the terrace, and they all went outside, Lee Roy Sears limping, the twins running ahead, the elder O’Mearas hand in hand. Michael had had a quick glass of wine and was feeling rather festive. “It’s strange for me, on a weekday, to be home so early,” he said, and Gina said quickly, as much for Lee Roy Sears to overhear as for Michael to hear, “Yes, it’s a shame—you never get home before seven. So this is an occasion.”

  It was a clear, fresh, fragrant day, smellin
g of last year’s leaves underfoot, a sodden, earthen odor, delicious to the nostrils. Lee Roy Sears limped along energetically, blinking and staring at the tall trees, the many shrubs, the flowerbeds, a pair of white wrought iron chairs set picturesquely above the pond; and at the pond itself, brimming from recent rains, dark, lustrous, its surface relatively clear of leaves and other debris. Sears paused to draw in a deep shuddering breath. He murmured, as if to himself, “—Real nice!”

  The boys were running ahead, a bit wildly, giggling and nudging each other. Michael watched them closely, with a father’s pride, seeing them through the prism of Lee Roy Sears’s eyes: his sons.

  His, and Gina’s.

  And there was Gina, lovely Gina, slender in her aqua print Laura Ashley dress, a rope of amber beads around her neck, her pale hair shining. She wore high-heeled alligator pumps whose narrow heels sank into the soft earth, so she had to lean on Michael’s arm, glancing up at him with a sly inscrutable smile not meant for their guest to see. That afternoon, at the club, Gina had played tennis on an outdoor court for the first time this season, mixed doubles with a friend (had it been Dwight Schatten?—Michael couldn’t recall whom she’d mentioned), and others.

  Sometimes, after a siege of serious tennis, Gina was distracted and irritable; today, she was in high spirits. The games must have gone well.

  Lee Roy Sears drew a deep shuddering breath, and said, “The air here is sure nice.”

  “Is it!” Gina exclaimed.

  Lee Roy Sears cast a wistful sidelong glance at her, which Michael couldn’t help but notice.

  As they descended the hill, the pond opened out before them horizontally, as if mysteriously, considerably larger than it appeared from the house. Underfoot, the earth was increasingly marshy. Red-winged blackbirds broke from cover. Jays cried in the near distance. Joel and Kenny explored the farther side of the pond, peering into the water, grabbing at broken cattails and rushes. There was a curious, not entirely agreeable wildness in the boys, down here, which Michael had noticed in the past: as if the very smell of the pond, that dark, brackish, sweetly sour odor, set them off. “Joel, Kenny—be careful,” Michael called. “Don’t get your feet wet.”