Rattlesnake & Son

by Jonathan Miller

  She said nothing. Was her heart beating faster with doubt? I might as well be asking her if I could take her son with me to prison to share a cell.

  “He’ll be with me all day,” I said. “What could possibly go wrong?”

  “I can think of a lot of things.”

  Chapter 10

  Skin-Walking

  Monday, Luna called at dawn, just to make sure that Marley survived the next six hours in my care. I hurried to his room to check on him, and he was sound asleep. Luna made me wake him and then put him on the phone to verify proof of life.

  “Mom, it’s great, Dad is going to play lawyer with me today!”

  I got back on with Luna, “Everything is going to work out.”

  • • •

  Marley got ready for court in the moldy bathroom.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, knocking on the door after he took a full five minutes. “Did the mold get you?”

  “Not yet,” he said, opening the door. “But I heard a mouse squeal.”

  “He’s paying rent here.”

  “When are your bathrooms going to be finished?”

  “Well, I got an estimate for the mold remediation. It should be next month, after I bill for these cases and get paid for the private one.”

  “Hopefully, I’ll get to use your bathroom after it’s clean.”

  “I hope so, too.”

  “What should I wear?”

  “It’s court, do you want to look like a lawyer or a criminal?”

  “A lawyer. Denise packed a suit for me.”

  He wore khakis and a blue blazer. Denise had better taste in clothes than his mother. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tie his tie, either by hand or with his mind, so I tied it for him in front of the mirror. Many kids on his end of the autism spectrum had poor hand-eye coordination. I didn’t know if that also applied to kids who were part psychic.

  “It’s too loose,” he said.

  “I didn’t want to make it too tight.”

  I then tied my own tie. I went with orange with the gray suit. My dad had gone to Syracuse and he had loved orange ties. I also liked orange ties because they matched the orange jump suits of my clients.

  We went out to the living room. Sitting in the same stylish chair, he attempted to tie his shoes, but failed at that, too. The laces seemed to magically untie themselves after a moment.

  “How do I keep them tied?” he asked.

  “There’s a new trend sweeping the nation,” I said. “All the cool kids are doing it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Double knots! Tie the ends together.”

  “My last dad used to yell at me when I couldn’t tie my shoes. I’ve got a complex.”

  “My dad used to yell at me about that, too. I promise I will never yell at you . . . for not tying your shoelaces.”

  He laughed. We hurried out to the Lincoln, and headed down Tramway Road, which descended from my high desert neighborhood all the way to the interstate. On the south side of the two-lane road, the final subdivisions of Albuquerque sprouted out of the desert. On the north side, the Sandia Reservation kept a semblance of wilderness, open grassland, and that big blue New Mexico sky.

  Marley swiveled his head in both directions, as if trying to choose between civilization and wilderness. I did the same.

  We saw a single hot air balloon fly over the freeway. Sponsored by a dairy, the balloon was shaped like a giant cow jumping over a small crescent moon.

  “That’s the famous Creamland Dairy float,” I said. “The cow jumping over the moon.”

  “Awesome.”

  “Hopefully you can come here for Balloon Fiesta in October,” I said. “They get eight hundred balloons up every morning.”

  “Wow, I’ve never been up in a balloon.”

  “Well, put that on your bucket list.”

  We watched the balloon land on the Sandia Casino Golf Course. Marley wanted to see it up close and personal, but we had to get to court. “You’ll see lots of balloons when you come in October,” I said. “You’ll even get bored with them, there will be so many. Today, I’ve got to concentrate on my case.”

  “What’s this case about?” He attempted to take off the rubber band from the manila file, but the rubber band shot off and hit me in the glasses. Had the glasses not been there, it could have taken my eye out. I still swerved into oncoming traffic and barely swerved back in time before hitting a Ford F150 pick-up.

  “Watch out, you can kill someone if you’re not careful,” I said.

  He said nothing until we passed the massive Sandia Casino and entered Interstate 25 southbound into the city.

  After we made it a mile down and I felt safe from future rubber band accidents, I figured I better brief him on the case du jour. “It’s a PV-DV, a private case now. One of my former clients, Anna Maria Villalobos . . . well, I represented her baby-daddy. Now their kid is in trouble.”

  Still driving, I produced an old headline on my phone and showed it to him. jesus villalobos found not guilty of cop’s murder!

  “What happened to Jee-sus Vill-a-lobos?”

  I slammed on the brakes and pulled off the interstate. This boy was half Hispanic and couldn’t pronounce the name Jesus correctly? Then I remembered I had done the same thing when I first moved here.

  “It’s pronounced Hay-zeus,” I said, recalling my initial difficulties with the Spanish pronunciation of the name. Like father like son, unfortunately. “He died in prison, hung himself, after he was convicted on another crime. I thought I had saved him, but I was wrong.”

  “That’s too bad. How did he have a kid while he was in prison?”

  “Conjugal visits,” I said. I needed to change the subject as I didn’t want to explain birds and bees having conjugal visits. “Well, their son Chuy got charged with a kidnapping last year. The victim didn’t show for trial, but they said they could still go forward, as they had video of him taking her out of a casino in a drunken state and putting her in his car when she clearly didn’t give consent. It could have gone either way. To avoid risk of eighteen years in prison, I got him to take a plea to probation with a suspended sentence.”

  “What does suspended sentence mean?”

  “Basically, if Chuy finished his five years of probation, he wouldn’t have to go to jail. But if he picked up a new charge, he would do the whole eighteen years in the penitentiary.”

  “Let me guess, so Chuy picked up a new charge?”

  “Yep. Chuy got in yet another argument with his girlfriend and she pressed charges, although I’m sure he’ll claim she started it. In any event, that’s domestic violence charge, a DV, which is a misdemeanor in Metropolitan court.”

  “Do you think he did it?”

  “Not my job to judge, there’s someone called a judge does that. I’m here to make sure his rights are defended.”

  Marley nodded. “I wish someone would fight for my rights instead of jumping to conclusions. But what happens if the girlfriend, the victim—”

  “Alleged victim,” I said. “Get used to saying that.”

  “Okay, so what happens if the alleged victim doesn’t show for the domestic violence hearing in Metropolitan court or if she admits that she started it and he acted in self-defense?”

  “The DV gets dropped. Unfortunately, it’s still a PV, a probation violation in district court, if someone picks up a new charge even if the new charge gets dropped.”

  “It’s a PV even if he’s innocent of the new crime, the DV?”

  “Yep. Picking up a new charge is a ‘technical violation’ in district court, even if the charge is dismissed in the lower court. And remember, no one is ever innocent. They’re always not guilty.”

  “What happens in the district court case with a suspended sentence because of the technical violation? Do they un-suspend it?”r />
  “We’re about to find out.”

  “And you get paid for this?”

  How did I get this case again? The case would be private now, right? I couldn’t do it for free. I checked my text messages and sighed with relief when I recognized Anna Maria’s old number with an Aguilar, New Mexico prefix.

  we will pay you 5k after court, deal?

  I texted back, the word deal.

  Well, at least now I would be able to remediate the bathroom and have some left over to remediate my relationship with my former family.

  “Anna Maria said they would pay me five-thousand bucks this morning at the courthouse. She’s a famous singer who was on American Idol or The Voice, one of those.”

  “I’ve heard of Anna Maria. She was famous,” he said. “Her daughter Jaylah is now more famous than she was.”

  “That’s right,” I smiled at him. “Assuming Anna Maria pays, I will spend some of the money on you. Is there anything you want?”

  He mentioned the latest virtual reality game console, and that there was a first-person shooter VR game called Cratercross World.

  I wasn’t sure exactly what a first-person shooter VR game was, or how much they cost. I didn’t care. I should still have money after the bathroom rehab. “If we win the case, and if the client pays up, I’ll pay for the console and the game.”

  “Deal,” he said. “I have another idea. If you win this case, I quit Caldera and you homeschool me for a few months, then I transfer to Albuquerque Academy.”

  “Deal,” I said. But was I making a deal I couldn’t deliver?

  Right past the Big I interchange, I took the Lomas Boulevard exit toward downtown. At the post office I checked my mailbox, reaching all the way back to the end. NFM. Good.

  I found a free parking space in an alley on Fourth Street, three blocks from the courthouses. Fourth Street had been the Camino Real, going directly from Juarez to Taos during the conquistador days. It had also been Route 66 during one alignment before the war. If there could be a low point of the route, it was this alley. It was near Healthcare for the Homeless and several church missions.

  Marley shivered despite the heat as we walked down Fourth, nervous from encountering all the homeless transients on their way to find healthcare. He had lived in the suburbs of New York, not the actual city.

  I was confident in my stride, and Marley stayed close to me. I knew the homeless shoe shine guy and he gave me a wave. He would probably still be here a hundred years from now. So much for Albuquerque being “just right.” Albuquerque was not Disneyland, unless the seven dwarfs had face tattoos, stolen bicycles, and meth paraphernalia in their back pockets. This was the home of Breaking Bad, after all.

  A Native American woman sitting in a wheelchair cackled wildly at us. Terrified, Marley closed his eyes as if to create an invisible protective field, an ultrastructure so to speak. It worked, I guess. The transients and skin-walkers steered clear of us, but the Native American woman perked up and smiled, as if she sensed the psychic energy.

  “Ya ta hey!” she yelled at us.

  “Ya ta hey,” I yelled back. “Ha goneh!”

  “You know her language?” he asked, as amazed as if I knew Klingon.

  “Three words in Navajo—hello, good bye and thanks. There’s something about that crazy old Navajo woman. It’s like she knows the secrets to the universe and someday she’ll tell them to me, when the time is right.”

  “I know you!” the Navajo woman said to Marley. “Yee naaldlooshii!”

  “What does that mean?” Marley asked. I had no idea.

  “Skin-walker!” The woman said. Was she calling Marley a good witch or a bad witch?

  She cackled as I hustled him down the sidewalk, and thankfully she didn’t wheel after us. She shouted “Yee naaldlooshii!” at the next person, though. Either that meant there was a coven of skin-walkers marching on Fourth Street, or she was just drunk and crazy. Perhaps both.

  “Did she say I was Luke Skywalker?” Marley asked. “The chosen one with the force and all that?”

  “No. Skin-walker. It’s a Navajo thing.”

  “Does that mean I’m some kind of a zombie?” he asked.

  “No, she just says that to everyone who passes by.”

  “What’s a skin-walker anyway?”

  I had some vague knowledge from reading the Tony Hillerman novel of the same name. “A skin-walker is anybody with magical power, good or evil, who can walk in the skin of an animal, or vice versa. That’s all I know.”

  “I can barely walk in my own skin. I can’t walk in anyone else’s.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder and forced his attention forward. He was entranced by the big building in front of us and a brass sculpture of the scales of justice twenty feet high. If Lady Justice was the size of the Statue of Liberty she’d be holding scales like this.

  “Do those scales move?”

  “I don’t think they can.”

  “I wonder if I got in them if the scale would go down?”

  I pointed at Metropolitan courthouse. “If the scale went down it would be criminal damage to property and you’d be facing a misdemeanor charge in this very courthouse. Unless of course, the damage was over a thousand dollars. Then it would be a felony and you’d be in district court across the street.”

  “Metro court is much nicer,” he said. “It looks like a palace.”

  Some palace. Metro court might be nine stories of marble, but it handled more criminal cases in one day then the rest of the state put together. Some courtrooms on the fifth floor handled more cases per day than some counties had in a year.

  His excitement faded once we got inside the courthouse. Marley grew agitated as he waited to get through the metal detector to get into the lobby. He shouldn’t have to go to the bathroom already, right? No, this was impatience. He didn’t like people in authority telling him what to do.

  When he finally got to the metal detector, he kept beeping with every pass, even though he had no metal on him at all. Perhaps he had too much ectoplasm or whatever.

  The guard frisked him and found nothing, but wanted to send him back one more time just to be sure. Suddenly, the alarm on the metal detector sounded on the person in the next line over, an ancient man who looked like he had just escaped from Alcatraz, as he wore an ancient “Property of Alcatraz” black and white striped t-shirt. The guard waved Marley through, so he could help deal with the old man.

  Marley smiled. Had he used his powers to set off the alarm? I would never know.

  Chapter 11

  PV-DV

  The first hearing of the PV-DV, the domestic violence or DV, was in Judge Manning’s courtroom on the fifth floor, all the way down the hall. More cases were resolved on this hallway than anywhere in New Mexico. Things rarely went to trial and that was a good thing. I smiled and fed on Marley’s energy and enthusiasm. Really, I felt stronger with every stride. People got out of our way. Don’t tread on me, indeed.

  “You walk through here like you own the place,” Marley said.

  “I used to,” I said. “It’s good to be back.”

  The lawyers in Metro were all so young now, as it was the place that baby lawyers began their careers. I was probably the oldest lawyer on the whole fifth floor, maybe in the whole building. I’d been a lawyer longer than some of these newbies had been alive.

  Maybe that’s why I felt so confident today.

  I met Anna Maria Villalobos just outside the courtroom. I had known Anna Maria when she was seventeen and now she was in her late thirties, a mother of her own. She had been anorexic at seventeen, but now was pleasantly plump. She looked like an opera singer in black, with scarves and Native jewelry. She liked jade where Luna liked turquoise. She had also beaten her addiction issues, what her cell mates had called “the Jenny Crank diet.”

  Her once tall black hai
r was now tied back in a bun, and like Luna she had bleached her hair a bright blond. Unfortunately, her dark roots were coming back quickly.

  “Dan, I’m glad you’re here. Hopefully, you can get my Chuy out.” She had a New Mexico lilt and her voice sounded like she was singing, even when she was just saying her son’s name.

  “I will do my best.”

  An older woman held a baby in her arms. I recognized the late Jesus Villalobos’s mother, but she didn’t recognize me.

  “That’s Chuy’s baby,” Anna Maria said. “That’s why he needs to be out.”

  “I’ll try Anna Maria. I’ll try.”

  Since her husband died, Anna Maria was batting five hundred with her kids—her son was a criminal, but her daughter was a star-to-be. I knew Anna Maria was now managing her daughter Jaylah’s tween singing career. Jaylah stood behind her mother and had somehow smuggled her phone inside the courthouse.

  Jaylah was the name of a character in a Star Trek film, and this Jaylah dressed in a metallic miniskirt that wouldn’t look out of place if the USS Enterprise had a disco.

  Jaylah was probably the same age as Marley, but in her heels, she towered over him. I had thought my son might be gay, but he clearly had an infatuation for this young pop tart.

  “My name is Marley,” he said. He offered his hand for a nervous handshake. “I’m a big fan. I follow you on Instagram.”

  Jaylah said nothing, just rolled her eyes at him. The force of the eye roll affected the earth’s gravity, and I almost lost my balance. I don’t know if Marley had the power of invisibility, but he looked like he wanted to disappear.

  “Is this your son?” Anna Maria asked, trying to salvage her daughter’s disdain. “He’s adorable. He looks just like you, but like half-Spanish.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a compliment,” Marley replied to her. “So your son, Chewy, is a criminal again?”