Double Jeopardy

By Paul Reidinger

Paul Reidinger's second novel, first published in 1989, concerns a mysterious family murder and the efforts of an idealistic young lawyer to figure out what really happened even as his professional relationship with the murderer, a surly teenage boy, turns his own world upside-down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Reidinger
• Release date: Nov 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452454535

Paul Reidinger

Paul Reidinger is the author of several novels, including The Best Man, Good Boys, The City Kid, and The Bad American. His other books include a memoir, Lions in the Garden, a collection of essays and criticism Patchwork, and The Federalist Regained, an essay on the Constitution. He grew up in Wisconsin, was educated at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and lives in San Francisco.

Book preview

Double Jeopardy

a novel by Paul Reidinger

Copyright © 1989, 2011 by Paul Reidinger

Pubilshed by Paul Reidinger at Smashwords

Cover art, oil on canvas, copyright © 2003 by Dennis Hare. Used by permission.

Foreword

This novel was first published by Donald I. Fine, Inc. in April 1989 under the title Intimate Evil. I hated that title, but because I was given to understand that Mr. Fine himself had thought it up and presumably was proud of it, and because I couldn’t propose a remotely plausible alternative, that was it. The jacket design, which seemed to dwell on the novel’s more garish aspects, deepened my sense of distress. We’re not supposed to judge books by their covers or their titles, but everyone does, even authors. Titles, in their conspicuousness, are massively important, and not only for purposes of selling. A good title, for the writer, is the key in which a literary work is written. A good title is part of the work and helps define that work, whether it’s present at the creation or occurs to the writer later. A good title permeates and pervades; it isn’t just slapped on the finished article, like a piece of decorative ribbon wrapped around a present. But it took me years to see this truth and to cultivate some knack for titles.

Meanwhile, I was a young author, and to be a young author – I had just turned thirty when the book appeared – who hated both the title and jacket design of his book was to be in a pretty bad place. But there I was. In my heart I wrote this novel off as a complex and misbegotten catastrophe and tried to move on as best I could. I tried to reassure myself that experiments often end in disaster and that people learn best from their failures, not their successes. If that was the case, than this book would amount to a sweeping education for me. That did not mean I had any desire to revisit it.

But the advent of digital publishing has, among other things, opened archival possibilities that did not exist even five years ago. In recent years it became possible for me to reissue the novel as an e-book – but did I want to, should I? Writers do sometimes abandon titles they judge to have gone wrong, leaving them to molder in unhallowed graves. The title Double Jeopardy had come to me at least a decade ago, in a moment of musing about what I might do with the book in the unlikely event that a chance to reissue it ever presented itself. The new title struck me as good but not great, which I didn’t see as a huge problem, since the book itself certainly wasn’t great and might not even be good. It was a two-dimensional title, but at least that was better than a one-dimensional, and mawkish, title. At least I didn’t hate the prospective new title, and at least I’d thought it up myself rather than having it imposed from above, by a money-minded publisher thousands of miles away.

The issue at last became uncomfortably clear: If I were to make an informed decision about what to do or not do with this text, I would have to re-read it. In contemplating this doubtful enterprise, I was mindful of Gore Vidal’s comment about some of his early novels, that he couldn’t rewrite them because they were so bad he couldn’t re-read them.

With that thought and with feelings varying between apprehension and outright dread, I dove in. I was surprised to find the early pages gliding by smoothly. The young writer did often indulge a tendency to express himself in sentence fragments, which sometimes flew about the page like poorly aimed shrapnel, and I wondered what he had thought to achieve in writing like this. More often than not, I left these fragments, in all their annoyingness, stand, but on several occasions they did pass the threshold of unbearability, and I did smooth them into proper sentences. The revisor faces a delicate task, or at least this revisor felt he did, in trying to balance a wish to disturb the text as little as possible – to honor it in all its flaws and shortcomings as an authentic artifact of a certain time and sensibility -- while correcting or removing its more egregious passages, so that it reads more or less as it might have read if some long-ago editor had done his job. Revising, in this sense, might be akin to translating; each is an attempt to locate a text’s authentic meanings and flavors and bring them, as little tampered-with as possible, as near to what the author intended as possible (insofar as that can be determined), into a new medium without being seen to do so. It has long been part of my awareness that the important people in publishing, the deciders – the publishers and agents and acquisition editors – seldom stoop to reading books. They talk about them instead, and they have lunch. When a text actually has to be read – to ready it for the printers, let’s say -- freelance copyeditors are hired to do that dirty work.

In the end I removed only a handful of passages, several clumps of perhaps a dozen paragraphs each that seemed largely to be concerned with graphic sex. Writing them – and writing them miserably – turned out to be an important lesson for me in the perils of sex writing, and deleting them does no harm to the narrative, in my opinion. In fact, the deletions, leaving behind as they do a set of shadows and implications, strengthen it. It is, for me, a basic rule of imaginative writing that what gets left out or taken out is usually as important as what is left in. I learned this the hard way.

As I read through the text, I noted several general impressions and revelations. The prose is for the most part flat and adequate; there is fluency but little music or poetry in the language. The story itself unfolds with a smooth intensity, and the use of multiple points of view seems to me to enhance the strength and flow of the narrative and not distract from it, as I had feared; the narrative method is not a gimmick. The story rang faint but unmistakable bells, for me, of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), books that, each in its own way, powerfully blended themes of homoeroticism and law and made enormous impressions on me when I read them in my youth. I was relieved to see that my tale had worthy antecedents, even if it was not itself nearly as worthy. The legal dimensions of the novel, in particular seemed both to link it to those earlier books and to prefigure themes that would appear, more extensively realized, in later work of my own.

All writers write juvenilia, and this retitled and slightly reshuffled book is an example of mine. It has the rude energy of youthful work, it is morally and philosophically ambitious – perhaps beyond its young writer’s abilities, but then it is natural and not necessarily bad for young writers to bite off more than they can chew – and, perhaps most important, it reflects the delusion then regnant in my life that I would publish a novel every few years and this would be my career. My peers would work regular hours in offices or cubicle farms, they would become brokers or bond traders, partners in law firms or public-relations agencies, whileI would turn out a work of fiction every few years, and somehow these efforts would be published and make money. Others had blazed this trail before me, Evelyn Waugh and John Updike, to name two figures I particularly admired. The trail appeared to be there, right before my optimistic eyes. They had done it; I would do it.

But reality was already intervening. I see it clearly now, in retrospect, and I believe I felt it even then. There were, to start, the vagaries of the publishing industry, which became impossible not to notice. Fiinding a publisher for one’s work, or even an agent to represent it, turned out to be not automatic, and being paid money wasn’t the same thing as being paid enough money to live on. And beyond those vagaries lay philosophical issues. If you felt you must write fiction not in response to some inner summons but because you needed cash or to fulfill a contract or burnish your reputation, you might find that you were pressing. You might find that you were casting about for material instead of letting the material come to you. You might find that you were working with material you hadn’t fully digested or understood. These are common enough issues for young writers and indeed all writers, but they are massively complicated when ideas like career and money step through the unlocked door into the room.

I do feel the pinch of these matters in these pages. When this novel was first published, it was only beginning to occur to me that the idea of being a productive writer, one who churned out imaginative work as if it were a product being manufactured on an assembly line, was an idea peculiar to an industrial culture. In factories, productivity and consistency are indeed virtues, and time is always of the essence: make them all the same,make a lot of them, make them quickly, like fast-food cheeseburgers. But imaginative work isn’t factory or fast-food work. Imaginative work begins in inspiration – with lightning bolts of illumination or revelation that can be hoped for, invited and awaited but not conjured – and reaches its highest forms through sorting, discarding, reworking, concentrating, intensifying. First drafts are indispensable and inevitable, but the real work of literature is revision, and revision takes time. It’s a little like making balsamic vinegar, with the precious liquor being poured into ever-smaller casks over a period of years, and any activity that appears to result in less of something is a problematic undertaking in a land like America, which values size, speed and consistency and is, by no coincidence, a nation of fast-food chains strung coast to coast like cheap Christmas lights and of McMansions, many now in foreclosure. In American letters as in American life generally, the wisdom of Burger King obtains, as given in a catchy advertising jingle from the 1960s: the bigger the burger, the better the burger, the burgers are bigger at Burger King.

Because the vast majority of the changes I’ve made here have been deletions, my revising is not likely to have deepened or enriched this work. It wasn’t intended to, and I’m not sure I could have managed such an enrichment even if I’d been inclined to try, since hindsight too has its limitations, practical and moral. This is just as well. Shortcomings and missteps are an important part of the record; if all creative work is an attempt to achieve a perfection we know in advance can’t be achieved, then the ways a particular work falls short of achieving the perfection that was contemplated are important measures of what was achieved. In any event, I don’t envision further changes to this text.

-- Paul Reidinger, San Francisco, November 2011

Part I

Trials

1.

Dawn. Night sky leaking salmon. Down the bars, the sweating concrete blocks, onto the face. Puffy, overstuffed clouds. Rain on the way. The dusty shafts of morning light play funny games. The nose seems longer; so do the lashes. The whiskers darker and heavier. He hasn’t shaved in several days.

Cocks crowing in barnyards some miles distant. The scents of hay and corn, pigs and summer. Farmers milking the cows and firing up the combines. Rumblings of thunder. Out there. Not here.

He opens his eyes and wonders for a moment – though he has been here, in this very spot, for more than a year – where he is. He starts, remembers. His neck is stiff from having slept with his head against the wall for most of the night. A quiet night. No visits. No departures. No midnight announcement.

A faint smell of shit in the air. Also chlorine.

The cells, including his cell, are about 100 yards away – down to the end of the row, through a heavy set of steel doors, down a corridor dimly lit by bare bulbs, into a small chamber, no more than ten feet square, painted a sickly green, the color of Comet.

One of Jason’s neighbors on the cell block made his brother-in-law eat Comet. Then he shot him twice in the right ear. Brains and blood all over the flowered wallpaper in the kitchen.

It is said to take about two minutes, more or less, to get there. But of course that’s the direct route, not the scenic. It takes about two minutes, more or less, to do it.

Along one wall of the green chamber is a long Plexiglass shield behind which the witnesses sit, four across, three deep. Twelve witnesses in all, as required by state law. Black drapes divide them from the scene: opened briefly, closed. Like a play. The tiled floor slopes discreetly downward to a drain. Just in case.

There is a black telephone on the wall near the door, where the warden stands. Just in case.

Behind the chair itself is another window. The operator stands there, cloaked in black, like the villain from a children’s tale. Dials, buttons, a big toggle switch, the trappings of modernity, the humane advancement of science. First used a century ago.

The chair itself is made of oak, but the straps are leather. Built by the inmates themselves in 1931, from trees grown on prison grounds. Grisly Gretchen, they call her. He has never seen Grisly Gretchen. But he has dreamed about her.

The cells themselves, twenty of them, are lined up like cells in a honeycomb. They are all the same size, all painted the same off-white color, all equipped the same way: bed, toilet, wash basin. There aren’t enough of them, though, so not everyone who has a date with Gretchen is waiting so near her. A group of them are somewhere else in the prison, at a remove. No one has ever seen them.

It’s Tuesday: shower day. The guard comes by at a quarter to seven, rattles the keys in the lock. Another guard stands behind, watching.

Let’s go, kid, the guard says gruffly.

He extends his hands, and the guard puts on the handcuffs. He does this defly, gently. The other guard watches, hand resting on holster. Off they go to the shower, the prisoner loping along in the middle, the two guards to either side and slightly behind. He knows where to go, and the guards talk quietly to each other about baseball. Not much different from walking a dog. A lovely Sunday stroll. Like a family.

The days are not unpleasant, just numbingly the same. His mother was allowed to send him a small black-and-white television – a gift to commemorate the first Christmas he had ever spent away from his family – but he has taken to reading. Odd that a boy who was always lackadaisical about school should end up taking such an interest in reading. Or in chess – but that’s because of Bryan, of course, always the intellectual.

Two weeks from tomorrow is Patrick’s twentieth birthday. Jason dreams about him, too: where he is, what he’s doing, what he thinks about or feels. You know so little for sure in a place like this, where the tiniest bits of information about the outside world, outside people, are like scraps of food thrown to starving people. Your imagination can get carried away.

And, of course, his father.

Little Colleen is already eleven, already a big help to her mother in the kitchen. For a while they mailed him cookies they’d baked, and the guards X-rayed them to make sure the McGuires hadn’t put in a gun or razor blades instead of chocolate chips. But there haven’t been cookies in a long time. He hasn’t seen his mother or heard from her in a long time. Nor from Colleen.

He savors the shower, soaping himself down slowly, thoroughly. Every part of his body receives intense attention, and at length he is so lathered up that he looks like a mummy. He is not at all self-conscious of the guards, the fact that their eyes are on him at all times. There is no privacy, here or anywhere else.

They watch but do not seem to see. Sometimes he plays with himself a little, tries to get a rise out of them, but if they notice they don’t show it. The routine is to stand there puffing cigarettes, maybe humming, checking the watch from time to time. He gets five minutes under the hot water.

He towels himself off, buffing dry his mop of auburn hair. He is very conscious of his hair and keeps it short and neat, the sideburns carefully shaved back to the top of the ear, the neck kept clear of undergrowth. He is conscious of the fact that the hair will be shaved just before they strap him in. He runs his hand through it to give it that final touch, then slips back into his underwear and pale blue prison fatigues. They take him back to his cell.

Breakfast at eight. Orange juice, farina, sausage links, toast with butter, coffee if he wants it, but he’s not keen on the taste.

Exercise later, in the yard.

And his lawyer is coming.

•••

Monroe is a strikingly beautiful city, all trees and parks and unexpected vistas of the three large lakes that attracted the first settlers. Everything here is prototypically efficient: the buses are all new and make no noise; the mayor is young, good-looking, well-spoken and has been on the Today show; people put their trash into the trash barrels instead of throwing it in the gutter. Even the graffiti are literate: