Snake Eyes

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The one man in paint-splattered (blood-splattered?) clothes, snake tattoo lurid and throbbing with life on his arm, the other in a lawyer’s gray pinstripe suit, now badly torn, stained.

  Cursing, grunting, half-sobbing.

  How many minutes?—faces contorted, eyes leaking tears. Except for the sounds of their struggle the studio was silent, the warehouse empty, and silent. As if no city, no world, existed beyond these walls.

  Sears grabbed one of the humanoid clay figures off a window sill and slammed it against the side of Michael’s head: it broke into fragments at once, but stunned Michael, who loosened his grip on Sears long enough for Sears to wrench away.

  Sears ran to his worktable, opened a drawer, rummaged in the drawer wild-eyed, desperate, then found what he was looking for: a razor blade taped to a broken-off paintbrush: this he brandished at Michael, waving it wildly. It was a sinister instrument, the blade stained with something red, rust-colored.

  “You want it?—you want it?—you want it? Come and get it!”

  Was it possible?—Michael O’Meara rushed forward.

  Head lowered, face grim, distorted.

  Incredulous, Sears swiped at him with the razor, slashing him on the forehead, but had no time for a backhand blow. Michael tackled him about the waist, knocking the razor from his hand, and again the men careened drunkenly backward.

  Sears was screaming like a madman. “You’re crazy!—let me go!”

  They were struggling against a wall—near a window—near a door to the fire escape. Sears managed to get the door open, shove himself out of Michael’s embrace, and stagger out onto the fire escape, as Michael lunged blindly after.

  What happened next, precisely—Michael O’Meara would not recall.

  For had it happened to him, by way of him, or to another man, and by way of another man?—whose face he could not recognize as his own?

  It was his own, of course. Yet he could not have recognized it, in the exigency of those terrible moments.

  It appeared that Lee Roy Sears wanted to kill Michael O’Meara, and yet, at the same time, he wanted to escape him: for he tried to choke him, and banged his head violently against the iron railing of the fire escape, but, a moment later, when Michael proved too strong or too stubborn or too inured to pain to succumb, he released him and began to climb down the ladder.

  The fire escape leading from the third floor of the old warehouse to an unpaved alley below was old, derelict, rusted.

  As Sears climbed frantically down, Michael O’Meara tried to grab him from above, his hair, his shirt, his arm.

  Their breaths must have steamed about their mouths, for it was bitterly cold that night. This, Michael O’Meara would not remember.

  Nor would he remember whether Sears was still cursing him, or whether, intent now upon escape, he’d gone silent.

  What he would remember—vaguely, teasingly, like something glimpsed through wavy glass, or water—was the rung of the ladder breaking suddenly under Sears’s groping foot; the white-knuckled grip of Sears’s hands on the ladder; the look of, not terror, but baffled outrage on Sears’s sweaty face, as his legs swung free, helpless as dead weights.

  “Help me!”

  Instinctively, Michael grabbed at Sears’s wrists, to keep him from falling: but Sears’s weight was too much for him, and Sears slipped out of his grasp, and fell, with a high-pitched childlike wail, to the ground two storeys below.

  Where he struck earth, but also rubble, and sharp-edged chunks of concrete.

  Where he lay flat and unmoving as a rag doll, obscured by shadows.

  Where, breath faltering, blood streaming out of a wound to his skull, he must have died at once: for by the time the ambulance arrived, approximately eight minutes later, Lee Roy Sears was dead.

  IX

  1

  Janet O’Meara tried to keep the exasperation, still less the alarm, out of her voice. Knowing, from experience, how little good it did.

  “But, Mother, why do you say you want to visit them if you don’t?—why did you fly here, if you can’t bring yourself to come with me fifty more miles, to Mount Orion?”

  “I—I do want to see them. I will.”

  “Yes, Mother, but when? You’ve been here five days now.”

  Mrs. O’Meara’s small, damp, close-set eyes brimmed with sudden tears, as if Janet had struck her. She said, hurt, “Oh!—do you want me to go back home?—is the apartment too small for the two of us? Is that what you’re saying?”

  In such a way trying to deflect Janet from the true subject of their conversation.

  “Mother, I am not saying that, and you know I am not saying that. I am saying—”

  “Oh!—you sound like that interviewer self of yours, on television!”

  “—am saying that it’s very strange, that’s all. And how can I explain, to Michael?—how can he explain, to Gina?”

  Mrs. O’Meara searched for her purse, which was never quite where she left it.

  “Tell them—oh, please tell them—explain, dear—that I’m not feeling well. I’m—I am—feeling so weak, in the chest. My migraine—”

  “They will think you’re avoiding them, you know. I’m not a very good liar.”

  “Would Gina really see me, if I did go?—we’ve never been very close. Would the poor woman let me see her?”

  The frail question hung suspended, as if unanswerable.

  Janet said, drily practical, “There’s Michael, Mother. There are your grandsons.”

  “I—I do want to see them. I’ve said.”

  “Yes, but when? Saturday?”

  This was a Wednesday: March 27. A day of high-scudding clouds. A glowering-pale sky beyond the windows of Janet O’Meara’s thirtieth-floor apartment on East 86th Street, New York City.

  “Maybe. Yes. Saturday.”

  “Good! I’ll call Michael and tell him, then. We’ll be out Saturday.”

  Mrs. O’Meara was tugging a handkerchief out of her purse. Her eyes shone dangerously bright with tears that, if allowed to spill over, would damage the carefully powdered façade of her face.

  Murmuring, almost inaudibly, in her babyish, petulant voice, “Oh, but don’t promise.”

  This was the visit, this, the mysterious and frustrating interlude, when Janet O’Meara’s mother fussed so much with one or another of her monogrammed handkerchiefs.

  No disposable paper tissues, for Constance O’Meara: these were genuine Portuguese linen handkerchiefs, dazzlingly white, edged with lace, and embroidered with the initials CJO.

  Fortunately, Mrs. O’Meara laundered and ironed the handkerchiefs herself, as she personally laundered and ironed all her delicate things.

  When Mrs. O’Meara so dabbed at her eyes, which were pink-lidded and curiously lashless, it was with an extravagant gesture, as if the handkerchief were a magician’s and might be useful for making things disappear.

  So Janet O’Meara was led to think, watching her mother—her mother watching her around the borders of the Portuguese linen handkerchief.

  She wishes I’d disappear. Or, at least, stop asking her questions she doesn’t want to answer.

  Such as: why was she behaving so oddly; so excessively oddly, even for her?—at sixty-seven, a woman of eccentric, willful habits.

  Why, having made the effort (and for Mrs. O’Meara it was indeed a considerable effort) of leaving her comfortable Palm Beach condominium, and flying to the wintry North, with the intention of visiting her son, Michael, and her daughter-in-law, Gina, in Mount Orion, New Jersey—why now make every excuse not to see them?

  At first, it had seemed quite plausible: Mrs. O’Meara had been “exhausted” from travel.

  Then, a day or so later, she’d pleaded “shortness of breath.”

  The next day, a “queasy stomach.”

  And always there was the old reliable “migraine.”

  (In Mrs. O’Meara’s self-absorbed cosmology, it was “my migraine”—a special gem in her collection.)

  Janet s
aid, sighing, “I don’t understand you, Mother. I never have, and I guess I never will.”

  How wounded, how stubborn in her innocence Mrs. O’Meara looked at such times!—turning her pale-powdered, softly creased, moon-shaped face up to her daughter, who superficially resembled her.

  Turning up her face, widening her eyes, as if, though wounded, perhaps even insulted, she would not rise to such bait: she was a lady.

  Quietly she said, with the air of one imparting venerable maternal wisdom, “It isn’t the very worst thing, always, to not understand another person. One day, dear, you’ll see.”

  And what, Janet O’Meara thought, does that mean?

  On Saturday morning, Mrs. O’Meara complained of shortness of breath, queasy stomach, and “my” migraine. So, driving into New Jersey with Janet was out of the question.

  So Janet set off alone, in her Volvo. It was true, though she could hardly so much as hint at the fact to her mother, that the two-bedroom apartment was seeming rather cramped, with the two of them there together so much.

  Janet enjoyed driving, when she could drive out of the city, on interstate highways that allowed her a modicum of speed, thus the illusion, and comfort, of significant forward motion. In her professional career, as, sad to say, in her personal life, such significance was frequently lacking.

  Jocosely, if with an air of wistfulness, Janet O’Meara had lately cultivated the custom of introducing herself as a “bachelor girl”: in this way she placed herself bravely and accurately in a demographic category, yet, by dint of her attitude, defined herself against it, in opposition to such categories. For, after all, was she not herself? Janet Elizabeth O’Meara, smart, upbeat, industrious, ambitious? At the age, now, of thirty-six, still youthful, and devoted to her career?

  (“My” career, Janet thought, wryly. A bit like “my” migraine.)

  However, she did value her work in television highly, less for what it was at the present time than for what it might be, one day, when she was offered a position commensurate with her ability and intelligence; as a producer of her own program, for instance. A coordinating director of a series of programs.

  What dreams, what girlish hopes she still harbored!

  Yet, such offers failed to materialize. Janet O’Meara worked, she worked harder than virtually any of her colleagues, and, yet—!

  It’s the competition, Gina had said, sagely. A thousand times worse than in life.

  If Janet did receive offers, or those tentative proposals that, if pursued, might lead to offers, they came from sources in outlying regions of the country where she did not much wish to move … such cities, unknown to her, as Omaha, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Portland, even Anchorage, Alaska. Where Janet O’Meara knew no one, of course, and where, surely, she would be doubly isolated and lonely; made to feel distinctly unmarried.

  As for love, romance, “relations” with men—even before the ugly episode with Lee Roy Sears, Janet had known herself strangely and unfairly deprived.

  Lee Roy Sears!—“Janet, please. Not that.”

  She had spoken aloud, reprovingly.

  For why spoil her drive to Mount Orion, the most spectacular leg of which was her crossing, on the wind-buffeted upper level, of the George Washington Bridge?—where at this moment she sped along in her dark blue Volvo, sunglasses shielding her eyes?

  Had she lied, well she had not lied—in her heart.

  Insisting to Michael that she and Lee Roy Sears had not been lovers.

  In the technical, most clinical sense of the word.

  Yet it was almost true, for Sears had been so quick, so crude, so selfish, so physically threatening in his lovemaking (but you would not call it lovemaking), and Janet O’Meara so terrified, the incident, which had occurred in August in an anonymous motel room in a Quality Inn outside Mount Orion, quickly seemed, in retrospect, not to have happened to her.

  He had never so much as kissed her. Nor held her hand.

  He had said nothing of an affectionate, even a placating nature.

  He had pulled and tugged at her clothes and would have ripped them if Janet had not quickly taken them off.

  Thinking, her heart pounding against her ribs, My God: what am I doing?—and why?

  On a sticky-humid August night, near-drunk, or was she in fact drunk, alone in a motel room with a man she knew not at all; a man she’d naively imagined to be shy, boyish, self-conscious, thus easily maneuvered.

  A man she’d naively imagined to be not a murderer, but a victim.

  Oh yes: Janet O’Meara had imagined Lee Roy Sears to be sweet.

  Wasn’t that the word, the insipid self-deceiving word, Gina had so frequently used in speaking of him?—sweet?

  Janet had been fascinated by Lee Roy Sears. The man himself, and his background. For no one she knew was like him in the least. She wanted to write an article about him, but fundamentally she wanted to know him; as if knowing him would allow her possession of a kind.

  A wild creature, he’d seemed. Like—what was that German folklegend?—the tragic tale of Kasper Hauser of Nürnberg?—the lost, untamed boy, the orphan without speech, uncivilized, and uncorrupted?

  Very likely, this was what had drawn her brother, Michael, to Lee Roy Sears, too. Michael O’Meara and others in The Coalition. Liberals, good and decent people, well-intentioned people, devoting themselves to the salvation of others. Seeing, in others, mirror-images of themselves, in need of salvation.

  Janet had said, warmly, “Let me tell the world your story, Lee Roy: trust me!”

  And, “No one else can understand you as I do: you’ll see!”

  Shivering, when he’d touched her.

  The weakness beginning in the pit of her belly and spreading rapidly to all the parts of her body, leaving her faint, breathless.

  He’d removed his shirt, grinning, thrusting his forearm in her face—“Here’s Snake Eyes, sweetheart.”

  The dreamy smile faded from Janet O’Meara’s face. She took a step backward.

  “What’s wrong, sweetheart? Don’tcha like Snake Eyes, sweetheart? Huh?”

  Several steps backward. Staring at the thing on this man’s forearm, the snake, a living snake, an oily black sheen spangled with gold, and gold-glaring eyes, eyes fixed on her—as she backed away, suddenly very frightened.

  Lee Roy Sears’s voice rose, in mock anger, derision. “What’s the matter, sweetheart, don’tcha like him?—think you’re too good for him? White bitch, huh? White cunt? Huh?”

  In nakedness Janet had imagined herself, at first, in control; imagining that Lee Roy Sears, poor Lee Roy Sears, would be overwhelmed with her female beauty, her specialness, the gift that was her. How smug and superior she’d felt, how thrilled with her own bounty!—without quite realizing it.

  Until now.

  When it was too late.

  Seeing not admiration not awe not love not affection not even a warm and companionable regard in Lee Roy Sears’s hard glassy eyes, seeing only mockery there, and contempt.

  Thinking, He’s going to hurt me.

  Thinking, Is this why I am here?—to be hurt?

  “Think you’re too good for Snake Eyes?—nah, nobody’s too good for Snake Eyes!”

  Lee Roy Sears grabbed Janet by the arm as she’d never been grabbed in her life, pushed her down onto the bed, atop the bedspread, thrust his hard knee between her knees as if prying her open as a shell is pried open, its feeble resistance overcome, its spine broken with a snap—and jabbed, and jammed, and sank his erect penis into her, with no more sentiment than if he’d shoved her aside going through a doorway.

  “Oh!—oh!”

  The pain of it, the dry thrusting pain!—she bit her lip to keep from screaming.

  His muscular forearm across her throat, with the threat of increasing its pressure.

  His quick staccato thrusts, like an animal’s, pragmatic, wholly without romance—or what might be called “mind.”

  His face contorted in orgasm, chunky discolored teeth bared in a grimac
e terrible to see.

  “Oh!—oh!—oh!”

  Janet O’Meara had not resisted, Janet O’Meara had been mesmerized, as if with the prospect of her own dying.

  She had not screamed. Not once. Not wanting to anger her lover. Not wanting to call attention to herself.

  His penis, engorged with blood, an instrument of pain!—and the weight of him, his pale sweaty body, knots of muscles, suffocating her!—and what if quite deliberately he did strangle her, and left her in this anonymous room, spreadeagled, lifeless, on the stained bedspread! Janet O’Meara’s soft fleshy womanly body she’d always wanted to believe was a beautiful body, breasts, belly, hips, thighs—simply left behind, discarded, as one discards a bone from which the flesh has been gnawed.

  But it had not happened that way, he’d spared her.

  In his indifference, he’d spared her.

  Swiftly and efficiently fucking her (you would not call it love-making), and rolling off her, and falling into a drunken-snoring doze; and Janet, terrified of her life, eased off the bed by cautious degrees, threw on her clothes in a corner of the room, and fled.

  No wonder, then, she had not wanted to confess to her brother, Michael, that, yes, in the strictest most clinical sense of the term Lee Roy Sears had been her lover: that they’d had a “love affair” of a kind.

  “I’d die of shame—I couldn’t bear it.”

  So she had lied, but very awkwardly. And he’d known. (Hadn’t he?) Regarding her with his quizzical, searching eyes, brown eyes like her own, sensitive to the most subtle modulations of her voice.

  For they were sister and brother, after all: Janet O’Meara and Michael O’Meara. Apart from their mother, who did not seem to be, quite, a mother, they were all that remained of their family.

  Yet how odd it was, how profoundly disturbing, that Michael had insisted he’d seen her with Lee Roy Sears weeks later, at a time when Janet had assuredly not been with Sears.

  She had wanted to complete the article on him, that’s true. Even after the humiliating episode in the Quality Inn, she’d been determined, if not fanatic. Like a good reporter she’d accumulated many notes, documents, taped interviews with Sears and others who had known him. The article kept shifting its focus, however. At one time it was to have been “Lee Roy Sears: From Death Row to Mount Orion, New Jersey.” Later, it was to have been “Lee Roy Sears: From Death Row to SoHo”—when it had looked as if Sears was indeed an artist with a future.