Rattlesnake & Son

by Jonathan Miller

  The pinging was loud and steady now—you’re almost here. As I drove slowly down Date Street, I felt for the young Cruiser. Only one boulevard to cruise (but with a McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut and a Sonic) to find a date. This was the last town in America without a Starbucks.

  When I arrived at the small, white stucco courthouse a mile later, the pinging in my head increased in intensity. I parked and hurried into the building, which looked like a medical clinic in a middling Florida suburb. The northernmost palm tree in New Mexico guarded the door. The palms were not thriving up here, but court staff had valiantly fought to keep them alive.

  The SOS pings were now in sync with my heartbeat. This must be the place.

  A hand-written sign on the door warned of upcoming court closures statewide due to computer upgrades. I did not pass through a metal detector inside the courthouse entrance, but an elderly bailiff hurried over to me. Like a greeter at a Walmart, he stared at me, scanning for any contraband hidden on my black suit. “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Can I see Cruz Arnold?” I asked. I wasn’t going to call the boy Cruiser. Too familiar. “He has court in Division One.”

  “There’s only one division.” The bailiff looked at me blankly. “And you can’t meet anyone in custody prior to court. No room.”

  I flashed my bar card. “But I’m his attorney!”

  “Are you sure?” That was the question lawyers asked when they couldn’t think of anything else to say. It sounded strange coming from the bailiff.

  “I don’t know.”

  The loudest SOS of them all rocked my brain. I had to rescue poor Cruiser. “The judge ordered me to be here.” I flashed my bar card in his face as if it was a receipt for allegedly stolen merchandise. I was an intimidating lawyer in a good suit that hid my ancient tie, so the bailiff retreated. He ushered me to an interview room and gestured to the deputies.

  The pinging slowed and softened. Moments later, a Sierra County deputy brought in young Cruiser and sat him down the other side of the glass partition. When he looked at me, he must have recognized me, smiled, and the pinging stopped for good.

  I pointed at my head and smiled at him.

  Young Cruiser Arnold was about fourteen, small, and young for his age. He hadn’t hit puberty yet. I had weighed eighty-eight pounds when I was his age and he was about the same size. His orange jump suit was three sizes too big.

  The kid looked vaguely familiar, but he had a black eye and a busted nose under a shaved head, so I couldn’t be sure. The buttons on his jumpsuit were out of alignment, even his horned-rimmed glasses were crooked.

  I knew him from somewhere, but I needed more context. Had I represented him before? Or one of his parents? Was he an alleged victim in one of my cases that I had viciously cross-examined?

  I pointed to the ancient dial-up phone on the wall to his right. He picked up the phone and attempted to talk to me, but I couldn’t hear anything other than a dial tone. He had difficulty dialing with his handcuffs. Next, I heard a mechanical recording announcing that all calls were monitored, but the line still didn’t connect. The phones must have come from another century. They should be updated as well.

  The phone on my side finally rang. I picked it up.

  Too late! Before Cruiser Arnold could say his first word into the phone, a burly guard lifted all eighty-eight pounds of Arnold into the air and carried him through the back door. Simultaneously, I heard a knock on the door behind me. Visiting moments were over. We would have to go into court cold—without a file—without any knowledge of this defendant at all.

  I shrugged. Why should this day be different from any other day in my career? I had seen it all in my rattles around New Mexico, I could win jury trials without a file. Yet something was different. Cruiser was different. Where did I know him from?

  The bailiff stood by the door, blocking my entrance to the courtroom. “Wait your turn.”

  Frustrated, I stood in the small lobby of the courthouse. Through the big picture window, I saw a young woman with long, jet-black hair emerge from the driver side of a shiny turquoise Subaru. The woman’s black outfit nearly floated off the ground as she walked, like she was Darth Vader’s intern on some desert planet. She sported an overlarge white cow skull on a necklace that looked like she stole it out of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. The only splash of color was a pink streak on her black hair.

  The devil’s intern went to the back and opened the car door. A woman with spiked platinum blond hair exited. If Ms. Cow Skull was a hench-woman, this was her Dark Lady.

  The blond looked totally out of place for court in the boonies. Perhaps she’d gone to a cocktail party on the dark side of the moon with her gravity-defying heels that could have come right off a live barracuda that had stalked the lake. Her only concessions to rural New Mexico were turquoise earrings and accents on her jet-black dress.

  The assistant handed her lady a matching barracuda briefcase. Then the lady took a deep breath as her assistant brushed the lint off her clothes. She had to be the all-powerful Ms. Arnold, of the spaceport, descending from earth orbit for her son. Who else could she be?

  Before I could get a better look at the barracuda, the bailiff called me into the courtroom. “They’re ready for you now,” he said. The judge banged the gavel and another boy in orange was dragged back into detention. Cruiser Arnold’s case was called, and I headed to the podium. It was a tight squeeze in such a cramped space in front of the courtroom. Poor Cruiser nearly tripped over himself when he was ushered in through a back door by the guards. Obviously, he had never walked in leg shackles before.

  Judge Brady was already on the bench of Sierra County Courthouse, Division One and looked exactly like New England Patriots legend, Tom Brady. I had heard of this judge; he had been one of the first judges to come out in this remote and Republican part of the state. Several of my gay friends had told me that while he was straight-laced here in town, he often headed to Santa Fe or even San Francisco for the weekend to play with lawyers and criminals alike.

  The prosecutor, Jane Dark, entered her appearance for the great State of New Mexico by speaking directly into the microphone. She was from another district down in Cruces, and they must have run out of prosecutors up here. God, she had done a mock trial competition with her Native American teammates against my former step-daughter, Dew, when Dew was in high school. And now Jane Dark was a bad-ass-prosecutor in a red power suit, even her braided Navajo hairstyle, the tsai, was a power tsai.

  Poor Cruiser kept fidgeting around as if his body was fighting his medication. I didn’t feel the pinging now, it was like he was clamping it down in front of company.

  Another person joined us at the podium. He wore a blue polyester blazer and red clip-on tie. If the bailiff was a greeter at Walmart, this kid was an assistant manager of the electronics department. He introduced himself as Joe Smith. He could have been me when I was a public defender just starting out. Joe seemed nervous, as if this simple detention hearing was a big deal.

  In a county with no private lawyers, public defenders routinely stood in for arraignments as a matter of course. Joe clearly hadn’t read the indictment or whatever they called the charging document here in juvenile court. While I could improvise my tail off as the rattlesnake lawyer, this young lawyer was a garden snake at best.

  “I’m ordered to be the boy’s lawyer, here,” I said, asserting my territory. “Check your file.”

  Joe opened the file and mumbled that, yes indeed, he was the attorney for the juvenile named Cruiser Arnold. That was odd. If the boy had a lawyer, why was I here? He mumbled the boy’s first name. I didn’t understand what he said.

  Still, it took me a moment to put it together when the barracuda blond came up to the podium. There was absolute silence, as if her black-hole dress had sucked up all the oxygen and all the gravity in the courtroom. God, she was beautiful. How long had it been since I had
been with a woman? Any woman? None since my ex-wife.

  I hoped I wouldn’t embarrass myself by becoming visibly attracted to this goddess.

  “And you are . . .” the judge asked the barracuda.

  She was as tongue-tied when she saw me as I was when I saw her. Why would such a powerful woman grow nervous around the lowly rattlesnake?

  “My name is Luna Cruz Arnold, I mean Luna Cruz Shepard, I mean just plain Luna Cruz. I’m the mother of Marley Cruz, aka Cruiser Arnold.”

  The judge now looked at me. “So that makes you the infamous Mr. Shepard, the rattlesnake lawyer. We’ve made you a party to the petition, which means you are part of this case from here on in. Can you state your name and your relationship to the parties?”

  “I’m Dan Shepard,” I said, nearly fainting. “That makes me this boy’s father.”

  Chapter 2

  Luna Landing

  The hearing in Sierra County Courthouse, Division One itself was a five-minute detention hearing that turned into a six-minute plea and seven-minute sentencing. Even a rookie like Joe Smith could handle it without effort. Apparently, his client, the Cruiser, had taken some cheap plastic Star Wars action figures from the local Walmart. Smith easily handled the case—no-contest plea, credit for one-day time served and seventeen dollars of restitution.

  I even told my usual joke, that the young man would be happy to write a letter of apology to the late Sam Walton and the rest of the Walton family.

  As usual, no one laughed.

  Cruiser would be released in a few hours. The guard took him into a back room to get him processed.

  I looked at Luna Cruz Whatever after the judge banged his gavel and left the bench. We were now alone in the courtroom. The spiked blond hair just didn’t look right against her tan skin. She was Eva Peron in her prime, or maybe Madonna on a sold-out comeback tour.

  I recognized her five-dollar turquoise earrings from our trip to Taos Pueblo in another lifetime.

  “Nice earrings,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said. “When I wear them, I think of our trip to Taos when you thought they cost five hundred bucks. When you found out it was only five dollars, you scraped through the car to find the change to buy them, bought them for me with the change from the car. That was pretty romantic.”

  “I’m flattered you still remember.”

  “Why haven’t you called us?”

  “Called you? You took an international restraining order against me, like ten years ago. That’s what the lawyer, excuse me, the solicitor, told me.”

  “Not even,” she said. “Oh, my God. I am so sorry. I had no idea.”

  “I’m confused. You married the lawyer?”

  “No. I married Nathaniel Arnold of Shiva Corporation. His solicitor’s name was Sharma, not Shiva. The solicitor and my ex-husband must have threatened to file something against you. I had nothing to do with it. They didn’t tell me about it. They probably thought you could make a claim on the company shares back when we were married.”

  “So you don’t hate me?”

  “I never hated you.” She said. “Not even.”

  I loved the way she said those words with the last remnants of a New Mexico lilt. She then talked rapidly, reflecting her last years on the East Coast. “In fact, I need you now more than ever as our only son goes off to school next week. And that restraining order would have expired years ago.”

  She gave me a hug. God, I had missed her. Luna once paraphrased Mike Tyson’s quote that everyone had a plan against him until they got hit. With Luna, everyone had a plan until they got hugged.

  We broke off the hug when the other woman, the driver/assistant/intern/nanny came over to us at the podium. She didn’t say anything. She was another familiar face that I couldn’t place.

  Luna laughed. “You remember Denise, of course.”

  I had not recognized her after all these years, but it all came back when Denise grimaced at the sound of her name. Denise was indeed “de” niece of Luna. Luna had suggested the name to her half-sister Jen as a joke, and Jen had gone with it. The fact that Denise was now de driver and presumably de nanny, must be demoralizing for de both of them.

  I hadn’t seen Denise since she had won the mock trial tournament with Luna’s daughter, Dew. Shouldn’t Denise be a lawyer by now, fighting against the Jane Darks of the world?

  Denise didn’t say a word. She rarely did.

  The three of us left the courtroom and walked out to the courthouse parking lot. Outside, the heat was stifling, well over a hundred degrees of dry New Mexico heat. I was broiling, the palm wilting.

  Denise looked at Luna. Even Luna now had a bead of sweat on her forehead. It was way too hot to continue the conversation outside. Time to get in the air-conditioned car. Denise opened the door for Luna.

  Time for me to make my motion to review conditions. “I’d like to catch up with you, Ms. Cruz,” I said, pleading my case. “To catch up with Marley Cruz Whatever-his-name is. You said he’s going off to school in a few days, I might not have another chance.”

  Luna Cruz Whatever esquire had been a judge on Albuquerque’s Metropolitan court. Before that, she'd been the District Attorney of Crater County New Mexico. She looked at me from inside her car, evaluating my case. She would now rule on whether our conversation should continue and whether I would get to see my son once he was free. We had left the Division One courtroom, but court was still in session here in the parking lot.

  I was in a nice chalk striped suit with a purple tie, driving a shiny Lincoln, the only other car in the lot. I had a modicum of success. I might have plateaued since she left me, but I hadn’t gone down any further. She wiped away the bead of sweat.

  “I really want to re-connect with Marley,” I said in my closing argument. “Hopefully I can give him a scared straight speech, so you don’t have to come here again for court on a probation violation before school starts.”

  “He needs that,” she said. “He sure isn’t listening to me. Maybe you could be a good influence on him before he goes off to school a week from Friday. Why don’t you follow us?”

  She closed the door, and Denise drove out of the lot. The car signaled a right turn, northbound. Denise drove like a bat out of hell, or at least a bat out of the nearby Carlsbad Caverns that didn’t want to die in the daylight. I got in the Lincoln and followed them up Date Street.

  Right before Date Street hit the interstate, Denise swerved the vehicle onto a two-lane road and toward the massive Elephant Butte Dam reservoir. Was she trying to out run me? I kept pace. After a mile of desert, with the blue waters of the reservoir in view, we hit the turn off for a gated subdivision called Turtleback Mountain. Denise sped through.

  The gate stayed open for me, thank God. Beyond the gate in the valley below was an oasis in the desert. The Turtleback houses were nice, modern adobe set on half-acre lots. Each had a view of the rambling golf course. This could be Scottsdale, Arizona rather than a Nowhere, New Mexico suburb. Even better, there was a view of natural greenery—the bosque—the wooded area around the muddy banks of the Rio Grande, so out of place here in the desert.

  Denise turned up the driveway to a house set on a ridge, but this was not a CEO house, more like a mid-level engineer’s. I deemed the place the Luna Landing, because with its various satellite dishes and skylights, it looked like part of a rambling moon colony trying to blend into the desert moonscape.

  I parked in the driveway and followed them inside the opened garage door. After Denise and Luna emerged from the Subaru in the two-car garage, I noticed what could be a large wooden coffin in the far part of the garage.

  Before I could ask, Luna ushered us inside to the spacious living room that featured a picture window with a nice view to the valley below.

  Luna’s white walls still favored the Native American art and artifacts of her western New Mexico youth—drea
mcatchers, sand paintings, and kachinas. On the wall, she had a photograph of her late father, the doctor, taking a seven-year old Luna’s temperature. No one knew then that her father would abandon her, move to Juarez, have three other daughters and then die in an American prison for selling prescription pills without a prescription.

  The Luna Landing was still under construction. The tiles had not been laid, and a pile of them sat in one corner of the floor. Luna had moved in before the house was ready for her.

  Denise had disappeared and then returned with tall glasses of iced tea. Denise had a way of vanishing and returning without notice, like Batman. It was prickly pear ice tea and was beyond refreshing on this hot, dry afternoon. Luna and I had once tried prickly pear ice tea in the spa town of Ojo Caliente, up north. I enjoyed the memory with every sip.

  “So how did a nice girl like you end up in a place like Truth or Consequences?” I asked.

  “Where do I start?”

  “Last time I saw you in the flesh was in Albuquerque. You had just been elected CEO of Dragon Moon corporation. Like twelve years ago.”

  “After I became head of Dragon Moon, Marley relapsed. His body rejected the transplant, so we moved to Bangalore for one more round of treatment.”

  “I knew that. That’s where you stopped keeping in touch.”

  “Well, that’s where I met Sir Nathaniel Asshole who owned the hospital among other things. He was knighted for being rich. And eventually he lost that, but he was still an ass. We got married, he adopted Marley, and we moved back to Westchester County, New York, like ten years ago. You didn’t know any of this?”

  “Not even,” I said. “I told you right after you left I got this international restraining order or whatever and I stipulated to no contact. Sir Nathaniel Asshole? Sounds bad. Why did you marry someone like that?”

  “Remember that line you had about an old girlfriend? She liked people who liked themselves—opposites attract. The same thing happened with Sir Nathaniel and myself. Unlike you or me, he didn’t have a neurotic bone in his body. I thought that was a good thing.”