Rattlesnake & Son

by Jonathan Miller

  Even worse, a couple on jet skis sped right at him, their eyes on each other rather than the water. Marley waved his arms at them. I couldn’t tell if he was standing up or just floating. How deep was the water?

  They didn’t see him. He kept waving his arms. The jet skis kept coming.

  I jumped off our jet ski and let it plunge forward and circle in a death spiral. I swam fast and grabbed Marley. The guy on the jet ski on the left was racing his girlfriend on the right. They were wake violators, but no judge would stop them in time before they struck us. If they were driving cars this recklessly and hit us, it would be vehicular homicide. I didn’t know if that applied to boats.

  No time to check Westlaw in the water. This wake violation would be fatal.

  “Take a deep breath,” I said to Marley. I dragged him under the water, all the way to the bottom, maybe six feet down. We had an anxious moment as the jet skis rumbled toward us, increasing in speed. Marley looked at me, his eyes wide with terror.

  Thankfully, the skiers passed right over us. Once the wake subsided, I then took eighty-eight pounds of Marley up in my arms.

  I didn’t have to do mouth to mouth. He could breathe on his own. The jet skis were already a hundred yards away, oblivious.

  “You saved my life!” he said, treading water.

  “How did you fall off?”

  “I didn’t fall. I jumped. My fanny pack fell off and I had to get it.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  It took me a moment to spot the fanny pack a few waves over, but moments later another jet ski ran over it. It disappeared.

  “It’s gone,” I said.

  I felt an electric current pass through me. Was Marley going to use some psychic powers on the couple, and on the third jet ski? Out of nowhere, a rogue wave lifted the jet ski a few feet in the air and roughly put them down.

  Marley started crying, then stopped as if embarrassed. We looked all over, but the pink Laser Geisha fanny pack had vanished beyond the waves. He wiped away a tear and then “bucked up.”

  Our jet ski finally stopped traveling in circles, and I helped Marley get on the back seat. I then climbed on in front.

  “Don’t let go,” I said.

  “I’m never letting go,” he said. “Even when we make it to dry land.”

  • • •

  When we arrived back at the dock some time later, I put my hand firmly on his shoulder. “Your mom doesn’t need to know about this.”

  “I’ve got a feeling that there’s a lot we won’t be telling her.”

  When we returned the jet ski to the dock, Denise was waiting for us with a rented U-Haul. The dock workers helped us load the jet ski into the back. They weren’t playing Morrissey, thank God.

  As Marley got in the MKZ with me, I thought about my son’s possible psychic abilities, and the fact that Denise said he might not even know about them. Was this kid a telekinetic like the title character in Stephen King’s Carrie? What would have happened if Carrie had gone to trial after almost killing everyone in school?

  Chapter 6

  Jornada del Muerto, Southbound

  I parked on the side of Luna’s road, since construction pick-up trucks blocked the driveway. Marley tripped over a shovel as I walked him through the yard work to the front door.

  “Careful,” I said, before tripping over a wheel barrow and suffering the laughter of the workmen. Like father, like son.

  Luna opened the door dressed in black spandex shorts and a jogging bra. She was sweating as if she had just come back from a run along the Rio. She had almost made the Olympics in the triathlon in her youth and could still do a mean 10K even in this heat. I couldn’t keep up with her on land, sea or on a bike.

  “It’s too hot to run, I probably should have gone to the water with you guys,” she said.

  Marley and I looked at each other but didn’t say anything. No, she didn’t need to know about our brush with a watery death. He was a little sunburnt, had muddy sneakers, and lost his fanny pack, but otherwise wasn’t worse for wear. I had brought my son back in one piece.

  She gave Marley a sweaty hug, made him take off his wet sneakers, and ushered him back into the living room without letting me inside. I heard Marley’s bedroom door slam behind him. Still guarding the front door, Luna looked down at a text and texted back.

  What I was supposed to do while she kept texting? My shoes were just as muddy as my son’s, so I didn’t want to risk going inside. Would I ever see them again?

  “I should probably go back, check my mail to see about any court on Monday on the breakdown docket,” I said. “Unless. . . .”

  She didn’t respond.

  I started down the driveway, careful to dodge shovels and wheelbarrows, but suddenly Luna cursed again. “My damn phone is dead. How can I shoot a satellite into orbit if my phone doesn’t work?”

  “I’ve got a charger in the car,” I said.

  Luna looked up from her phone, smiled. “I’ve been so rude. I might as well be the one in orbit right now.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’ve got a lot on your mind.”

  She could see Marley’s window and he was staring out at us. Marley nodded at Luna.

  “Why don’t you stay the night?” she asked. “We’ve got a guest room. Do you have anything going on back home on Sunday, Mr. Rattlesnake Lawyer?”

  “No rattlesnake litigation this weekend,” I said. “I could do some rattling in truth, or some rattling in consequences right now and drive back tomorrow afternoon.”

  She waved me in and plugged in her phone. We sat in two plush chairs in the living room.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I’m tied up at the spaceport tomorrow, doing rocket science and stuff. Could you take our son to his freshman orientation tomorrow, Sunday morning? He probably should see the school before he starts there next Friday.”

  “Is he in school here? Is it Truth Tech or Consequences Academy?”

  “Hot Springs High is the local high school for T or C,” Luna said. “He would not fit in there at all. I don’t know if he’d fit in anywhere at all around here. It’s very rural. Most of the engineers at the spaceport live down in Las Cruces and keep their kids down there.”

  She didn’t quite say that Marley was smarter than the other kids, but I could sense that’s what she meant.

  I pictured Hot Springs High School and the children of cowboys, jet ski repairmen, and farm workers. Perhaps there was the occasional child of an artist or coffee shop owner. I certainly couldn’t picture eighty-eight pounds of Marley attending Hot Springs High. He should probably be at Professor X’s school for X-men, if he could get his grades up.

  “So, where’s he going?”

  “He’s going to Caldera Academy in Las Cruces,” she said. “It’s a boarding school.”

  My heart sank. I had heard bad things about the place. There’d been an investigation a few years back when a kid died during hazing. “Did Marley apply anywhere else?” I asked.

  “The school is under new management,” Luna said, acknowledging my unvoiced concerns. “Marley applied everywhere else in the state, even to the Catholic schools. He was waitlisted at all the good private schools, because of his grades and disciplinary record.”

  I grimaced. I used to joke that I was waitlisted for a private school at fourteen. Even after I was accepted, I’ve felt like I've been on waitlist for something for the rest of my life. “So how did you pick this one?”

  “This school in Cruces is the only school in New Mexico, probably the only school in America, that would take him so late in the summer without the New Mexico private school test,” she said. “It’s an elite boarding school that has a state charter.”

  “Is it expensive?”

  “No, it’s going to be free for us because our company is investing mill
ions in the school. You’ve got to check it out. They have a trailer, like a movie.”

  A trailer for a high school? When I was in high school, they only had brochures. Luna magically produced an iPad and walked over and showed me a website. The photo of the adobe campus looked like an old New Mexican village set in the mountains, complete with a mission church. There was an Old West feel to the place, but if they did shootouts they were philosophical rather than with firearms.

  She then pressed an arrow to start the video. I looked at the screen and saw two teenagers in purple Caldera Academy jerseys running up a steep trail. One could be Luna at seventeen, the other could Marley if he had a personal trainer and some growth hormones. The camera followed them from above, much like the opening credits of The Shining.

  Then there was a shot of the Mediterranean style Caldera campus glittering in the sunset. A ray of light fluttered over a fountain. We could now see that the camera was on a drone controlled by a student wearing a Caldera t-shirt and a purple beret.

  “Caldera Academy,” a voice intoned, “we’ll take your child to the highest summit.” The voice was reminiscent of the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World.

  Then Flamenco music played before revealing two young guitarists in tuxedos trading riffs in front of a cheering crowd of parents. The next scene showed attentive students staring intently at their teachers in modern classrooms that looked like astronaut camp. The student who looked like a mature Marley answered a difficult question. A teacher who reminded me of Socrates in tweed, nodded. The other students clapped.

  After, students in purple blazers argued in the New Mexico Supreme Court building in Santa Fe, presumably for mock trial, as the voice said, “With our internship programs, students are exposed to challenging careers in everything from law to literature.”

  The video then cut to the same students, now in crisp purple Caldera High t-shirts sitting under a shady tree in the grass by a brook, having a spirited intellectual discussion. This time the voice said, “At our makerspace, students make their dreams into reality.”

  The shade tree then became industrial space. A young student and an attractive brunette instructor in a peasant dress programmed a 3D printer to “print” a plastic Star Wars Millennium Falcon, seemingly from thin air.

  “It’s the high school I wish I had gone to,” Luna said.

  I had a crush on the makerspace instructor by the time the printer had finished the wings of the Falcon. She looked like an artsier version of Luna.

  Finally, a real-live conquistador on a majestic white horse, looking a bit like Don Quixote, rode into a massive stadium in the desert hills filled with football players. The players smashed through a purple Caldera Academy banner, and behind them the entire student body ran through the banner high fiving each other. The conquistador then high fived the two runners from the opening scene as they entered the stadium for a victory lap to raucous cheers.

  “Caldera is more than a campus. It’s a community!” said the voice over.

  It was a community I wanted my son to join. I reached out to the conquistador and touched the screen just as the entire stadium gave the first syllable of the school cheer. “Be . . .”

  Unfortunately, I didn’t hear the rest of the cheer. My touch to the screen transferred me to the admissions page, which read, interested in caldera?

  “Good call, Luna,” I said. “What’s the rest of the cheer—Be strong? Be brave? Be creative?”

  “I have no idea, I haven’t been to the campus.” Luna said. “Hopefully it’s for Marley to become the best version of himself. When I told the dean over the phone about my position at the spaceport he said that they would give him individualized attention. They might even be able to set up an independent study up here one day a week.”

  “That sounds incredible,” I said.

  Luna could bond with Marley one day a week while the rest of the time be in a safe, structured environment. It was the best of both worlds.

  Luna had gone to a rural public school in western New Mexico and never fit in. I had gone to prep school back east and never fit in either. Caldera looked like a campus, a community, a perfect fit for Marley.

  • • •

  That night, I took a shower in the guest bathroom. I couldn’t tell if the pipes tapped into the hot springs mineral water, but it sure felt that way on my aching muscles. Denise had perfectly stocked a leather toiletries bag. She even supplied pink Benadryl pills for allergies. The real ones, not generics. I fell right asleep in the bedroom that mixed Luna’s love of Native American art with a whimsical anime poster of the three Laser Geishas aiming matching cratercrosses. Had Marley picked it out, or Luna? Did it matter?

  I had some weird dreams in the nice bedroom. I somehow felt like I’d been here before, that I’d always been with this family. I pictured each day of Marley’s life that I had missed. While he was more at home in Westchester in his family’s big home, he was utterly alone there as well. I saw my son watching old movies and listening to the music of my era. How did he know what I liked?

  I also heard the voice of Sir Nathaniel Arnold and his annoying cockney accent. “I’m worried about the boy. He’s got no friends. He’s just not right.”

  About five in the morning, I heard crying in the bathroom. I thought it was female, Denise perhaps, but when I opened the door, I found Marley.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked.

  He wiped his eyes. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m just worried about that school.”

  “We’ll check it out tomorrow, and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to go on Friday.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  Did I? It was up to Luna. “We’ll see,” I said.

  • • •

  When I woke up and opened the door, I saw that Denise had left me a fresh pair of khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt with price tags still on them, listing an El Paso address. Had Denise secretly measured me in my sleep and then driven down to the Ralph Lauren outlet in El Paso an hour and a half away? The clothes fit perfectly.

  When I went into the dining room at six in the morning, Denise in crimson Harvard Law School sweats, was cooking breakfast for the family. Without a word, she pointed to the price tags that I had forgotten to take off.

  There was so much I didn’t know about Denise, even though she had practically lived with us and Dew when she was in high school. I could see someone writing a book about this mysterious young woman someday.

  I noticed that Luna favored a brand of orange juice with calcium now. She claimed to me that she hated the taste of calcium, and made me take the juice back to the corner market if I made that fatal mistake. She must have changed over now that she had a growing boy.

  I thanked Denise for the meal, but she said nothing. It would take a while for her to warm up to me. From the sounds of it, she didn’t really warm up to anyone, except Marley.

  Luna and Marley joined us moments later. Marley squirmed in his seat, uncomfortable in his clothes. Luna had picked an outfit that assumed that Caldera was an east coast prep school—seersucker blazer, khakis, and a light blue shirt with his monogram on it. To top it off, a red bow tie. Everything was one size too big. If she had thought he would grow into it, he still had some growing left to do.

  He might as well be wearing a red bow tie with a target on it.

  Luna wore a power outfit, dressed in black and turquoise for a work day at the spaceport. She could pick out clothes for herself, but not for her son. Denise had clearly been overruled on picking the outfit.

  “Is that what they wear at your school?” I asked him. He shrugged.

  “I don’t know about this school,” Marley said. “Suppose I hate it?”

  “You’ve got to give it a try,” Luna said. “You need to have faith in yourself. You’re a surviv
or. It’s only boarding school, it’s not going to kill you.”

  Marley grimaced. He wasn’t sure. Caldera Academy had to be better than anything here.

  Luna gave her son a hug. “I have faith in you Marley. You’re a survivor. You handled a bone marrow transplant, you’ll handle boarding school.”

  When Luna hugged someone, they stayed hugged. It was like Luna had passed her optimism over to her son. He stood taller after she released her embrace.

  “Thanks, Mom,” he said. “I’ll try.”

  She did love her son. When he didn’t drink any of his orange juice, with calcium, Luna reminded him that it got very hot in Cruces, and to drink plenty of water. She then handed him a twenty-four-pack of Sheep Springs bottled water, a brand popular in the western part of the state. Marley could barely hold it all. He also put a six pack of coke on top of the water. I helped him carry it.

  • • •

  Denise drove us down from Turtleback via the interstate. She drove well over eighty, ninety at times on the downhills, and must have used her psychic powers as a radar detector, always slowing right before a cop appeared over the next bend in the road.

  Marley handed me a bottle of the water and chugged down one of his own, all while he sipped from a coke in his other hand.

  When he saw a historic marker to the side of the road he asked, “What does that marker say?”

  “Jornada del Muerto,” I said, remembering my own drive-by tourism. “The journey of death. This was where Coronado and the ancient conquistadores came up from Mexico or something like that.”

  “Journey of death, not what I wanted to hear,” Marley said.

  “We’re going in the opposite direction,” I said when we got back on the road. “South. That makes it the journey of life.”

  It grew hotter with every mile, and we cracked one hundred by eight in the morning. Ten miles down, when we passed the muddiness of Caballo Lake State Park—Elephant Butte’s low rent downstream sibling, we could see the water evaporating in the heat.

  “Maybe I can pour some of this bottled water in to fill up Caballo Lake,” Marley said.