Snake Eyes

by Joyce Carol Oates

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  Snake Eyes

  Joyce Carol Oates writing as Rosamond Smith

  for Dutch Leonard—

  il miglior fabbro

  IT HAS BEEN SAID UNTO YOU, AN EYE FOR AN EYE, AND A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH: BUT I SAY UNTO YOU, THAT YOU RESIST NOT EVIL.

  MATTHEW 5.38–39

  ALL JOURNEYS HAVE SECRET DESTINATIONS OF WHICH THE TRAVELER IS UNAWARE.

  MARTIN BUBER

  I

  1

  Lee Roy Sears had only a single tattoo, on his sinewy left forearm, but it was a masterpiece. He’d designed it himself and had it executed by a Filipino tattoo-artist, in Manila, where he’d been sent on leave near the end of his Vietnam tour of duty, as it was then called. This was late 1971.

  The tattoo challenged all conformist standards of “ugliness” and “beauty.” It was so ugly it turned beautiful before your eyes.

  In fact, the tattoo was hardly a mere “tattoo”—a trick of dyes stippled into living human flesh—but an actual presence, alive in itself. You had only to contemplate it for a few minutes, with no distractions, to understand that.

  Lee Roy Sears, who had been visited by “dream visions” since earliest boyhood, had transcribed it out of a fever-dream in a Vietnam jungle: a tensely coiled snake, oily black, gold-spangled, with a bony humanoid head. Its small forked red tongue protruded between tusklike fangs that dripped venomous saliva, and its strangely gleaming gold eyes were pricked with tiny black pupils like pulsing ink spots. Even before Lee Roy Sears did the trick with his forearm muscles, giving the impression that the snake was twitching to life, about to spring and strike, about to sink those fangs into warm flesh, your instinctive reaction was to shrink away.

  Uncoiled, the tattooed snake would have measured only about eight inches. But you’d remember it as much larger—life-sized.

  You might not even remember it as a tattoo, exactly.

  Lee Roy Sears was not ashamed of “Snake Eyes” (which was his pet name for the tattoo)—Lee Roy Sears was not ashamed of anything to do with Lee Roy Sears save infrequent lapses of strength and will—but, of course, being no fool, he knew to cover it for what could be called formal occasions. When conformity to bourgeois society’s customs might be strategic. Like the hearing before the five-member State Board of Pardons at the Connecticut State Prison at Hunsford, on the morning of May 11, 1983, thirty-six hours before Lee Roy Sears was scheduled to die in the electric chair in an adjacent wing of the facility, on a charge of first-degree murder.

  There, subdued, watchful, erect, the condemned man sat, listening as strangers debated his fate, his “case,” before him. In his spotless prison khakis. Sharp-creased trousers, long-sleeved shirt discreetly buttoned to the wrist.

  2

  “It is sad, I suppose. He has such haunted eyes.”

  It was the eve of May 11, 1983. In their white colonial house on Glenway Circle, Mount Orion, New Jersey, Gina O’Meara was speaking to her husband, Michael, scheduled, the next morning, to attend the hearing at Hunsford and to speak on behalf of the convicted killer Lee Roy Sears—who, of course, so far as Gina could gather, Michael did not necessarily think was a killer. She was peering at a small, smudged photograph of Sears stapled to one of the numerous photocopied documents in Sears’s file. Such a strange, intense, brooding face! Like one of those ugly-exotic masks from Polynesia, hanging on the walls in that sinister-dark wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—mere holes for eyes, but were they mere holes, and not, somehow, eyes capable of seeing?

  Michael O’Meara rarely told Gina about his pro bono legal work for The Coalition because Gina had a habit of challenging him, in her coquettish yet sharp-witted way, like a rival lawyer. Her wifely attitude was that so hard-working and so dedicated a person as Michael O’Meara should always be paid for his labor, though she did not like to say so since this sounded—didn’t it?—as if she wanted to be paid. So she struck a more ideological note, an objectively philosophical note, as she did now, frowning. “I know I probably don’t understand, the law is a game you can’t really play without knowing the rules, but, Michael dear, isn’t the crucial thing whether this man is a murderer or not? Not whether he received a fair trial, or there were inflammatory things said, or this—what is it—‘prosecutorial’—”

  “—‘discretion.’”

  “Yes, that. Well?”

  “But, in our criminal justice system, as it is today, the prosecutor can misuse his power,” Michael said earnestly. “He dictates the terms of the case from the start, first to the grand jury, then at the trial. It’s his prerogative to offer plea bargains, to coerce frightened and sometimes even mentally incompetent men and women into entering pleas of ‘guilty’ when, if they were tried, the charges against them might not be proved. Then again, if they dig in, and insist upon a trial to clear their names, like Sears, they can be punished.”

  “But—is Lee Roy Sears a murderer, or not? Doesn’t anyone know?”

  Michael sighed. He had told Gina only the rudiments of the complicated case, glossing over Sears’s earlier brushes with the law and certain unsubstantiated charges, later dropped, of kidnapping and rape. He believed he could hear, in his wife’s ingenuous voice, an underswell of numberless voices, incredulous, demanding, claiming a wish for knowledge without the good faith to receive it. Yet, one must try. “Sears insists he didn’t fire a shot; two ‘witnesses’ say he did. There were others on the premises who had guns. The State so argued its case, five years ago, and the defense so bungled its case, the verdict went against the defendant. That’s all we—I mean we outsiders—really know.”

  Gina said, lightly chiding, “You make it sound as if the trial was a lottery.”

  “It was. Trials are. Especially for the indigent in America.”

  “But some of these accused people are guilty, aren’t they? Even if the public defender bungles the case?”

  Michael tried to smile and squeezed Gina’s fine-boned hands, with their carefully polished nails, in his. He was a man of only moderate height, five feet nine when he stood very straight, but his frame was affably stocky, his shoulders wide, hands and feet big. A bearish sort of man, at least as bears are commonly perceived: there was something both boyish and anxious about him, a characteristic look of appeal, a squinting sort of grin, that endeared him to both men and women; especially to women, at least initially. He was not handsome, neither was he ugly. His eyes were without luster, rather a drab muddy brown, but warm, direct, candid. His fair, curly, red-burnished hair had begun to recede sharply while he was still in his twenties, but its crest remained springy, like a rooster’s comb. His handshake was brisk, even fierce; his touch unfailingly gentle, as if, conscious of his strength, he feared giving hurt inadvertently. By contrast, Gina was slender, even thin; fashionably thin; very feminine, with high, delicate cheekbones in a classically oval face, and large seagreen eyes like gems, and ashy blond hair always stylishly cut—at present, swinging level with the graceful line of her jaw, so that her lovely neck appeared to advantage. Where Michael O’Meara was outspoken, curiously without subterfuge for one trained in the law, his emotions showing raw and unmediated on his face, like a child’s, Gina was all ambiguity, subtlety, calculation. There was something Oriental in her mannerisms, though in her values as in the stamp of her femaleness, she was t
horoughly American: if you were a man you were enthralled by her, yet very possibly annoyed, irritated, for was the woman flirting?—or was she slyly making a fool of you? Now twenty-nine years old, three years Michael’s junior, she’d been, not quite a decade ago, a popular Philadelphia debutante; in Michael’s admiring eyes she looked scarcely older, or more mature, than she’d looked upon the romantic occasion of their first meeting, when, in a Delancey Street brownstone, a private home with an elevator, the elevator door had opened and he’d found himself staring at a girl of dazzling beauty in a black shimmering-silk cocktail dress. There. Oh God.

  In a sense, their courtship still continued, perhaps in part because Gina had yet to become pregnant. Thus she remained virginal in a sense, not completely won. From the first Michael had felt a subtle yet powerful erotic tug between them in which he, the man, thus manly, must conquer her, the surpassingly feminine woman, who is after all not so easily conquered. “Gina, darling,” he said, stroking her hands, which were cool, dry, a bit restless in his, “that isn’t the point. There are always degrees of guilt, as there are degrees of intention. For crime to be crime, traditionally speaking, there must be mens rea—literally ‘evil mind,’ or criminal intent, as opposed to ‘accident.’ Also, you certainly know that our criminal justice system favors the well-to-do. Look at a bastard like—” naming a Manhattan socialite tried for, and acquitted of, attempted murder of his heiress wife, for years in a comatose state. “Defendants who can afford private attorneys invariably receive a kind of justice poor defendants don’t. Lee Roy Sears was a poor man. I know only the outline of his background, but—”

  “He’s Indian, is he? Is that what you said?”

  “He claims he’s one-eighth Seneca, from upstate New York. He—”

  “But, wait—he could be guilty, even if he has been discriminated against. Isn’t that so?”

  “Look, Gina. Of the appalling number of murders committed each year in the United States—forty-eight thousand, I read the other day—how many are solved by police?—how many perpetrators are arrested, indicted, brought to trial, found guilty, let alone sentenced to death?—how many of them, like Lee Roy Sears, wind up spending years of their lives on death row?”

  “What are you saying? I wish you wouldn’t raise your voice.”

  “I’m not saying, honey, I’m asking.”

  “But,” Gina persisted, “maybe they should be!”

  Michael laughed sharply. “Should be—what? Sentenced to death?”

  Gina hesitated. Her lips, coral pink, curled in a small smile, then pursed, soberly. “Found guilty.”

  “Yes, and then?”

  “And then what?”

  “And then—what should be their punishment?”

  “I don’t know, for heaven’s sake! Let’s go to bed,” Gina said, laughing. “You’re the lawyer in the family.”

  “I’m only trying to suggest, Gina, how relative the concept of punishment is, in any society. There’s the old, primitive lex talionis—‘an eye for an eye.’ There’s the new, revolutionary concept, developed by the Quakers, of rehabilitation. It’s the outrageous inequity of Lee Roy Sears’s sentence we’ve been protesting, not the issue of his actual guilt.”

  “So you, Michael O’Meara, don’t know, any more than anyone else does, if the man is a murderer or not. If, even, he committed other murders and was never caught before.”

  “Gina, what a thing to say!”

  Michael was genuinely shocked, which made Gina laugh—he was an endearing man, and at such moments, at least when they were alone together in their comfortably furnished house, and there were no distractions—no other more striking, more romantic-minded men—she did love him, very much.

  Impulsively, seeing the hurt and disapproval in his eyes, Gina kissed the knuckles of one of Michael’s hands; big, hairy-backed knuckles; and detached her own from it. She ripped the photograph of Lee Roy Sears from the document to which it was stapled and brought it to the lamplight, frowning thoughtfully, biting her lower lip with her perfect white teeth. Finally she said, as if this were all that might be said, to put an end to the discussion, “Your man doesn’t look very Indian, does he?”

  Michael O’Meara’s secret, the engine, as he thought of it, that drove him, and that probably accounted for his professional success, was his sense of guilt.

  An obscure guilt, a seemingly sourceless guilt.

  More than that, a sense of having done wrong in some specific way; and of being unable to remember what the wrong had been, or upon whom it had been perpetrated, or when—years ago perhaps, when he was a child?

  Guilt lay like a shallow pool of dark, rancid water at the base of his skull. So long as he kept himself occupied he scarcely knew it was there, but of course, yes, it was there. It hadn’t been possible for Michael to make such inquiries of his father, but he’d tried several times to ask his mother—had anything happened in his childhood, had he done something for which he’d been severely punished, or, perhaps, insufficiently punished?—had anything upsetting or mysterious happened back then that had never been explained?

  Michael’s mother was a sociable woman, with many friends; a shrewd bridge-player; but easily wounded, and quick to take offense if it seemed to her that she was being criticized even in the most oblique of ways. She’d laughed nervously, and, Michael thought, a bit angrily, at his earnest questions, denying any bad memories of the past—“Up until your father’s death we were all so happy.” Michael’s father had been a very successful retail furrier who had died of stomach cancer when Michael was a sophomore at Williams College. “So happy,” she said again, conclusively.

  Nor had Michael’s sister, Janet, five years his junior, been any more helpful. Janet now lived in Manhattan and worked for CBS-TV in a sub-subordinate position, as she called it, and she’d acquired a cheery, brassy, fast-talking manner in which all personal history, including family history, was best served by being translated into rowdy capsule-anecdotes of the kind one might hear on television talk shows. She spoke of Michael in rounded generic terms, saying he’d been the ideal older brother when they were growing up, sweetly protective of her, smart, helpful, even, in his own idiosyncratic way, good-looking, so he’d become a model for the other boys and men in her life—“Unfortunately!—since, set beside Michael, most men today are bastards, or gay, or both.” And Michael’s young sister would throw back her head and laugh with crackling-canny laughter, of a kind he’d never heard before in her.

  Michael’s boyhood in Darien, Connecticut, certainly seemed to him, from an adult perspective, both very American and uneventful. He could recall no memorable traumas, hurts, disappointments; he’d never been snubbed in high school; in fact he’d been a popular guy, a football player of slightly above average ability, an officer in student government, a very good but not exceptional student. His anxiety about being guilty of something obscure and unnameable surfaced from time to time, but was readily banished. And then he went off to Williams, aged eighteen, and entered a new world—not that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Michael O’Meara was radicalized, like many of his contemporaries, by anti-Vietnam War agitation, but, being an idealistic and sympathetic young man as he was, he’d been profoundly moved, spiritually engaged, by the example of an activist clergyman, a “renegade Christian” as the man called himself, who had been publicly censured by his church for his politics. So, after college, Michael intended to become a clergyman too: it scarcely mattered which denomination, in this era of ecumenical feeling.

  The O’Mearas, two brothers, had emigrated from Dublin, Ireland, early—in the 1840s. Apparently, with surprising alacrity, they’d cast off their Roman Catholicism and become assimilated into New England; they and their children married where love, or perhaps business interests, guided them. Michael’s mother’s family was Protestant, but not very decisively—to Michael’s mother, such subjects as God, redemption, “soul” were as embarrassing to speak of as physical intimacies and maladies. Michael’s father
had had no formal religion at all but referred vaguely to himself as Christian, as if to set himself apart from Jews, his fierce rivals in the fur trade.

  Though it wasn’t the Word of God so much as the Spirit of God Michael O’Meara hungered for, he’d enrolled in a distinguished, indeed very famous, seminary in New York City, with the intention of becoming a Protestant minister who was also (about this, Michael was vague) a teacher. Immediately, however, he was overwhelmed by the seminary’s requirements and expectations of its students, in such contrast to the amiable Bachelor of Arts curriculum he’d taken as an undergraduate: ancient Greek? Latin? Hebrew? His introductory courses forced upon the twenty-one-year-old the paralyzing fact that he had no idea what religion meant, let alone what God meant—these were mere words, word-symbols, concepts, political/historical/sociological/geographical phenomena, ever-shifting and evolving—or devolving. (Michael had been certain he’d known who Jesus Christ was, but, exposed to a critique of the New Testament, he quickly came to see that the Jesus Christ of His time was not the Jesus Christ of subsequent times; nor was the Jesus Christ of His time altogether consistent in His teachings or His behavior.) The Bible, subjected to dissection, turned out to be not the Word of God—hardly!—but a ragtag anthology by diverse hands, compiled, not altogether fastidiously, over a period of centuries; in short, a work of fictions, some very weird indeed, containing competing ideologies and even religions. The Lord God Yahweh, so jealous, threatening, and unpredictable, was traced back to humble sources—he’d begun as a volcano god somewhere in the ancient world! Like a mediocre local politician who ascends to extraordinary heights not by merit but virtually by chance, this volcano god somehow ascended to the highest throne of all, and now cannot be dislodged.

  Of course, Michael O’Meara’s teachers at the seminary did not say such things directly, nor even simply. It is not the intention of scholarship to say things directly or simply; for then, and very quickly, the game might be up.