Rattlesnake & Son

by Jonathan Miller

  Just to make sure it was okay, I looked at Luna who nodded. “That sounds like a good idea but clean your glasses first.”

  Denise brought Marley some lens cleaners, along with a cloth. He washed the lenses himself.

  “I can see! Oh, my God, I have a father again!”

  “I have a son.”

  Marley took me down to his room. It had a view out to Turtleback Mountain to the southeast. The other window, to the west, looked out at a big boulder that crowded his view. His room was slightly claustrophobic, as he had it stuffed with artifacts from all fourteen years of his life.

  “By the way, now that your mother is gone—attorney-client privileged, well father-son privileged—was that you sending me that SOS?”

  He shrugged, as if he’d been caught passing gas. Clearly uncomfortable. I didn’t want to pry, so I looked for clues elsewhere on my son’s abilities. He had computer graphic art hanging on his wall. It showed a castle on top of a turtle that was on top of an elephant, a full moon with eyes watching over it.

  “That’s amazing. Is that a castle from Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter?”

  “No, it’s my own thing. We’re in the Turtleback subdivision near Elephant Butte. My mom is Luna, so she’s the moon of course. If you look in the corner, you can see a rattlesnake. That’s you.”

  “The rattlesnake is pretty small and barely in the frame.”

  “I don’t really know you yet. I want to create fantasy game art for a living if I grow up.” He pointed to his collection of computer games on a shelf. “My mom says it’s a stupid idea, that game creators never know where their next paycheck is coming from.”

  “I wanted to write novels,” I said. “I guess writing a novel is like creating a game. And you don’t make any money at that either.”

  “What did you want to write?”

  “I always wanted to write a fantasy legal thriller,” I said. “The Rattlesnake Lawyer wakes up on a mysterious planet and has to do a jury trial. Or maybe a science fiction novel set in the year 2112, like the album from the band called Rush.”

  “It’s been done,” he said, “the science fiction book, anyway, by some guy out of Albuquerque. It’s called A Million Dead Lawyers.” He didn’t elaborate further. I felt one of those vague pingings in my head, as if he was trying to reach me psychically, but of course I couldn’t connect. My shine was dull today. He frowned.

  He pointed to a little sculpture of a coiled rattlesnake that served as a bookend on his big book case. “I made that. It’s you.”

  I recognized the sculpture from my dream the night before, but I didn’t want to bring that up. I now saw a tiny “scales of justice” had been artfully placed in the snake’s mouth. “It’s me?”

  “You’re the rattlesnake lawyer.”

  “I’m flattered,” I said. “But I’m just the regular lawyer now. Does it rattle?”

  “Not yet, but I’m working on it. It needs to connect with your energy.”

  I didn’t want to ask if he was doing the Uri Geller thing, or just using magnets.

  I picked up the snake. It had made in china stamped on the body and made in korea stamped on the tail. The snake sculpture was an amalgamation of several toys that might have been melted together.

  “Did you shoplift the parts when you were at Walmart?”

  His face betrayed him. “I kinda act up when my mom ignores me. Is that wrong?”

  “Ah, yeah. It’s called larceny. So, what’s the sculpture for?”

  “It’s kinda like a talisman so when I think of you maybe we can, umm . . . connect.”

  “Like a voodoo doll?”

  “No, it’s all good.”

  I put the snake down quickly, uneasy about voodoo. Time to change the subject. He had an opened diary with scribbled handwriting. He closed the book before I could read it. The cover had a Star Wars theme of two battle cruisers duking it out with the lasers. Both battle cruisers were hitting each other with laser beams—mutually assured destruction. I once had an identical diary when I was a kid. Marley kept his hand on the cover as if I would pry it away.

  “I don’t need to read your diary,” I said.

  “Maybe someday,” he said. “When I’m ready.”

  “What’s this?” I pointed to a strange coupling of wood, metal, and plastic parts that vaguely resembled a crossbow in a post-apocalyptic road warrior fantasy. It, too, might have come from a shoplifting jaunt from Walmart. My son apparently was a mixed media artist who included stolen items in the mix. He was an artist, not an artisan, as the pieces didn’t quite fit together. There was disorder in his order.

  “It's a cratercross. Or it’s supposed to be. I had one on my t-shirt. Don’t you watch Laser Geishas? It’s what the bad guys use.”

  “I haven’t watched in a long time,” I lied. “Be careful with that thing. You could kill someone with it.”

  “I know,” he said. “I want to build a real one someday. One that will fire for real. This thing can fire three darts at the same time, in three different directions.”

  I felt a chill go down my spine. Was my son in the target demographic for school shooter? Maybe.

  “Don’t you know when I’m kidding?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “It’s got a safety, here.” He touched the “safety” on the cratercross, a wooden block resting on the strings. Unfortunately, the whole thing fell apart, the three fake arrows falling onto the floor. “I’m not very coordinated. I can’t really build things at all.”

  A working cratercross could be fatal for someone, possibly fatal for three people. “Well, let’s get going.” I said.

  “Give me a minute. I got to get my fanny pack.”

  He looked under his unmade bed.

  “Got it!” he said.

  Still under the bed, I heard him fiddling with something. He suddenly produced a “Laser Geisha Pink” fanny pack. The fanny pack was more appropriate for a girl than a boy, but I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m kinda weird,” he said.

  “I was too when I was your age,” I said. “I used to make maps of an imaginary city.”

  “You grew out of it, right?”

  “Not even. I’m still weird.”

  “I’m glad. I’ll always be weird.”

  Out in the living room, Denise had done her Batman thing of vanishing and materializing to save the day with sandwiches. “What did you make for us?” I asked.

  “Green chile pastrami.” Luna answered for Denise.

  The clash of smells worked like a mixed marriage. Luna must have had the green chile shipped up from nearby Hatch, New Mexico and the pastrami flown in from the lower east side of New York, or the lower east side of Eastern Europe. Denise might be overqualified to be a nanny, but she was damn good at what she did.

  Luna gave me a hug before we went. Her perfume overpowered the pastrami.

  I was reminded of how much I loved Luna. Before I could say anything, Marley noticed my Lincoln MKZ out in the driveway. “Nice car.”

  He ran toward it, as if I was his getaway driver after a heist. I hurried to catch up.

  Luna went back into the room and Denise came to me, before I made it to the door. “You take care of him, okay?” I had to strain to hear her soft voice.

  “I will. Your job is to look out for him, right?”

  “He’s special. He’s got a gift. He doesn’t even know he has it.”

  “You mean he doesn’t know that he’s psychic?”

  “Not even.”

  She turned around and didn’t say anything more.

  Marley was picking his nose inside when I got in the car. His shirt was tangled and his glasses were dirty again.

  “We’re going to the beach!” he said.

  “I don’t know if beach is quite the word
for it,” I said. “You know the old New Mexico joke, we’ve got plenty of beach, we just don’t got no ocean.”

  “I think you might be surprised,” Marley said. “I sure was.”

  Chapter 5

  Rattlesnake Island

  Do you like it here in the desert?” I asked as we drove out of the Luna Landing, north through the dusty collection of mobile homes that constituted the incorporated village of Elephant Butte before descending toward the vast blue reservoir. The lake plainly didn’t belong here in this land of mobile homes and marine repair shops. The few palm trees that had been planted didn’t look right either. I could see why someone would want to have a cratercross to guard against rattlesnakes.

  “What do you think?” he said. “I’m a fish out of water in a place with no water. Well, all the water is all down there at the reservoir.”

  “It must be a big change. I became a public defender in a small town after DC and it was still a big transition for me as an adult. I can only imagine how bad it must be for you at fourteen.”

  “Mom says I should just buck up. I only have less than a week to get bucked.”

  “It’s all right not to be bucked up all the time,” I said. “Just be yourself.”

  I turned on my satellite radio. The kid was lonely and depressed. What kind of music did he like?

  I smiled when the First Wave station on XM, Channel 33, played the Smiths’ song “How Soon is Now?”

  Morrissey, the Smith’s lead singer—aka the “pope of mope”—sang about lost love, loneliness, and depression in almost every one of his songs.

  I am human, and I need to be loved, just like everyone else does, he wailed, begging the entire world for love.

  This skinny anglophile, this depressed and slightly sexually ambiguous kid should relate to the song and the skinny, English, sexually ambiguous singer. Marley needed to be loved, just like everyone else.

  He frowned. “I hate this guy’s voice. All the gangster kids around here listen to him.”

  Twenty-first century gangster kids listened to Morrissey? When did that happen?

  I switched to the classic rock channel. Elton John was warbling about something.

  “If you hate Morrissey, I hate Elton John,” I said. “Who’s this guy Benny and what are these jets he keeps whining about?”

  Marley smiled. “Before my time, but I do like the classics.”

  “Classical music?”

  “When I was in the hospital when I was little, they played the Beatles on the muzak whenever you came to see me.”

  He was right. I flashed back to all those visits and all those Beatles songs. We sang along with Paul on the Beatles channel. We both believed in yesterday.

  After a few more miles of hilly desert, we made it to the shore of Elephant Butte Lake, the largest man-made lake in New Mexico. The country surrounding the lake was indeed the color of an elephant’s hide, but the harshness of the shores felt more like a rhino. Hills like white rhinos? We walked out onto a dirty metal dock that smelled a bit from the muddy water. A tattooed young man helped us prepare the turquoise jet ski. He seemed to know Marley vaguely and was fighting with himself not to be a bully. Marley had trouble getting his life preserver over his little fanny pack.

  “You need a hand with that?” The bully pushed down just a bit too hard, and the life preserver almost fell off the boy’s body. Something stuck out of Marley’s pink fanny pack. He put it back in before I could see. He then pointed at the map on the dock house wall. “There’s a place called Rattlesnake Island! Is it named after you?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “A Rattlesnake Island in an Elephant Butte Lake? How cool is that?” he asked. It sounded pretty cool to me. On the edge of the dock, I saw a desert island off in the distance. I hoped that was it.

  I hummed the Gilligan’s Island theme, hoping to drown out the moping of Morrissey.

  “That was a song from a show, right?” Marley asked. “Was it on radio in the forties?”

  “Gilligan’s Island. It was on TV. Color TV.” I now sang the words to the Gilligan’s Island theme but substituted “Rattlesnake Island” for the chorus.

  Marley joined me for the final chorus. “Here on Rattlesnake Isle!”

  • • •

  Once we got the jet ski in the water and were on our way, Marley held on tight even though we barely hit five miles an hour.

  “No wake,” he said, and pointed to a sign that said wake violations will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. “If I die before I wake,” he added.

  A cold shudder passed through my body. “Don’t joke about that.”

  I gunned the jet ski’s motor, once we could legally violate the lake, or was it violate the wake? Marley was exhilarated by the rush of air. I felt his heart beat faster.

  There was surface tension on every inch of the lake. With a surrounding water level this low, people were territorial about every drop of water here in the desert.

  “Let’s go to Rattlesnake Island,” I said.

  I pointed the jet ski directly at the barren island. With every wave, the island looked like the tip of a dirty ice berg although it was probably the size of a basketball court with a small hillock about fifteen feet high in the center.

  “Do people live on the island?” he asked, pointing to the mound of dirt.

  “Do you see any signs of intelligent life? If someone got stranded there they would have to be rescued.”

  “I don’t see any living people,” he said.

  On shore, there were a few old bones, but they looked like someone had eaten ribs and hadn’t disposed of them. Still, they were big ribs. Perhaps they were a dog’s or even a human. Thankfully, I didn’t see or hear any rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes couldn’t swim, could they?

  We docked on the island, as much as you could dock on a rocky beach. Marley ran to the top of the little hillock and raised his hands as if he had conquered Mount Everest. I started to follow, but my muscles were tight from controlling the watercraft.

  “I’ll stay here on the beach.”

  Marley scanned the lake in every direction, searching for Johnny Depp or any other lost pirates of the Caribbean. I practiced martial arts exercises called katas. Once he saw what I was doing, he hurried down the little slope. “What’s that?”

  “Martial arts. I used to be pretty good back in the day. I made it to green belt. This is called ‘long form one.’”

  Right inward block, left outward block, cat stance, right punch and a parry—or something like that. Turn to three o’clock and then repeat, sort of.

  “How many martial arts forms are there?” he asked.

  “Infinite, I suppose.”

  “Could you do it again?”

  I moved slowly as he tried to mirror every kick and block, but he had even less coordination than I did. Still, he did have a perfect memory and he repeated the moves with flourish. He seemed to visualize his opponents, as if they were there on the beach with us.

  Encouraged, I showed him long form two and short form three. He couldn’t kick and punch and the same time, but then again, neither could I.

  After we ate our delicious lunches, I took a brief nap and felt relaxed for the first time in months. When I awoke, Marley was sparring with imaginary enemies with his feet in the water. He used a stick as a cratercross to repel the horde. I joined him on the beach and did my katas. He gave me a high five as I took out an imaginary bad guy when I did a move called Kimono Grab.

  A few of the jet skis approached the island but backed off as they saw us defend it. After five full minutes of cratercrosses and kimono grabs, we had won the war.

  “We beat them off Rattlesnake Island,” he said. “Gilligan would be proud of us!”

  “We’re a good team. And if they made it on shore I would sue them for trespassing. I am the rattlesn
ake lawyer, and this is my island after all.”

  “What does that mean exactly, a rattlesnake lawyer? Mom didn’t think it was a good thing. Low class.”

  “It means a lawyer who adapts to a rough Western environment and says, ‘Don’t tread on me!’”

  “I don’t want to be tread on,” he said. “But I got tread marks all over my face.”

  I told him some rattlesnake lawyer stories. “When I first started twenty years ago, I actually did a hearing in T or C in the very same courthouse.”

  “Did you win?”

  “I thought so at the time.”

  I told him a few more rattlesnake lawyer stories. I’d had an interesting career, even if I hadn’t quite become the greatest lawyer in the world.

  “You know what?” he asked.

  “You want to be a lawyer just like me?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “Maybe someday.”

  Here on Rattlesnake Island, we sang together.

  “Maybe we can build a castle here,” he said.

  “I’ll help you build it,” I said.

  “I got to go to the bathroom first,” he said.

  “Go on the other side of the hill, then we’ll get started.”

  It took him longer than I expected. I checked on him and he was putting something in the pink fanny pack after he put in a roll of toilet paper. I couldn’t see what it was, but he was chanting a prayer over the item, as if blessing it.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  We built a nice little castle from the rocky dirt, and then settled back onto the jet ski and sped away from the island. The water in our faces felt warm in the afternoon sun. Had the lake level gone down a foot or two over lunch? I could now see sand and rocks below.

  Suddenly, I felt Marley loosen his grasp of my ribs. The jet ski lurched up now that it had an empty seat. Before I knew it, he was gone.

  The jet ski bobbed up and down, and I nearly lost my balance when I looked behind me. Marley was overboard, about twenty yards away.