Rattlesnake & Son

by Jonathan Miller

  “Your honor, as I stated previously, we are not opposed to you reinstating the defendant to probation,” Douglas said.

  “Anything further, counsel?” the judge asked me.

  Chuy punched me on the shoulder. “It’s all lies! The DA made her sign all that.”

  “Your honor, my client says, ‘it’s all lies! It’s umm . . . bull!”

  “Thank you for your input,” the judge replied. He reviewed a computer screen. “I see that he received a suspended sentence of eighteen years. He has five days of pre-sentence confinement. I will sentence him to the remainder of his time, the entire eighteen years less five days, to be served as a serious violent offender at eighty-five percent.”

  Eighteen years at eighty-five percent was a little over fifteen years of hard time. Chuy was barely over eighteen, with his whole life ahead of him. He would be middle-aged when he got out. This tough but skinny kid was going to die in prison, just like his father.

  “But you said . . .” he yelled.

  I had once decided that “but,” “you,” and “said” were the three worst words a defense attorney could hear from a client. It meant the attorney had made a prediction that turned out to be dead wrong. I had been dead wrong, all right.

  The guards took Chuy away. He was crying. Anna Maria and Jaylah began wailing as well, and since they were both trained singers there was something operatic in their range of wailing. Team Chuy sat stunned, their team vanquished. Even the baby was crying as his dad was led away.

  I was about to approach them, but Anna Maria and Jaylah screamed at me in unison. “But you said . . .”

  “Look, you don’t have to pay me,” I said.

  “Pay you? We’re going to disbar your sorry gringo ass,” Anna Maria said. Her voice was no longer musical. “We trusted you, and now my only son is going to die in prison just like his father!”

  She turned her back and walked out, and the grandmother followed with the infant. I had failed a second generation of her family. Had I already failed Anna Maria’s third generation and it wasn’t even lunchtime?

  I let the courtroom clear until it was just Marley and myself. He came over to me. I wanted to push him away, but he put his hand on my shoulder. For one moment, I was the son and he was the father. He might have healing powers in his psychic bag of tricks, as somehow, I felt better because of that touch.

  I took a deep breath. Before I could exhale, Penny the Puta, the alleged victim appeared from nowhere and came over. “So, is my Chuy getting out now? He needs to be with our son.”

  “What?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “You want him to get out? You just sent him to prison!”

  “He’s going to get out in about fifteen years, thanks to you,” Marley piped in. “Will you wait for him?”

  She turned her back on us and stormed out. “Mr. Prosecutor, my Chuy’s getting prison time, like a life sentence. But you said . . .”

  The door shut behind us. The bailiff came by and said we had to go or we’d be locked up for the rest of the docket.

  “What should I have done?” I was asking the air.

  Marley figured the question was directed at him. “Oh, that’s easy. You should have come back in two weeks and had a hearing where you could have questioned Penny to see if she was lying, and to do it on the record. She would have been all over the place. Then your client would be out. Oh, and get paid up front. Then I’d have a game console.”

  He was right. This kid would be a helluva lawyer someday. “Do you still want me to home school you?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Now more than ever! What’s your next case?”

  Luna called before I could answer him. Somehow, she already knew I had lost the hearing. Was she psychic too?

  “I’m a little worried,” she said. “It sounds like the last hearing was a disaster. I don’t know.”

  Don’t know what? That I was a bad lawyer? That I was a bad father?

  “Do you want me to take him home?” I asked. “He just got here.”

  She thought for a long minute. “Let’s see how you do tomorrow. You can bring him back after right after court.”

  Chapter 12

  Volcano Verdict

  How do I keep my son for the rest of the week? It wasn’t even lunchtime, and I was already afraid I was going to lose him.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “We might as well go to my office.” I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I called days like this “Make-a-plan Mondays,” as I would try to figure out my schedule for the rest of the week.

  I showed Marley my rattlesnake law office, a converted four-bedroom adobe house in a residential neighborhood north of downtown Albuquerque. My landlord was a disbarred lawyer who gave me a discount on rent because I took over his case through the breakdown docket. Hardly a snake pit, I had a nice view of downtown out one window, and a view of the Sandia Mountains out the other.

  Even better, I didn’t have mold, but then again, I didn’t always have air conditioning.

  I had moved in with some young lawyers who were supposed to exchange referrals. I now joked that this was where young lawyers sent their practices to die. There usually was a rotating cast of barristers, but the other offices were empty right now.

  I thought again about the breakdown docket. The practice of law, like the practice of life, was designed to break everyone down in the end. One officemate had done personal injury cases brought to him by his paralegal—until his paralegal was busted for bringing drugs into the jail. That lawyer was now prosecuting misdemeanors in Lordsburg, New Mexico now, arguably the worse place in the state. Another lawyer just handled traffic tickets, but missed a court hearing for a truck driver and ended up in jail with his client. Then there was the bankruptcy lawyer who himself went bankrupt, the medical malpractice lawyer who was sued for malpractice, and the immigration lawyer who was deported. For some reason, one storage closet had yellow crime scene tape.

  The master office had belonged to the attorney/author who drove six thousand miles a month, had a heart attack, and ended up quitting the practice to write novels. I heard he had stolen a few of my war stories about Luna’s old firm, Luna Law, and won the Hillerman award for best fiction in New Mexico. Whatever happened to that guy? I heard his wife made him quit writing and make real money.

  In my own corner office, I kept my head down, worked my ass off, and had enough contracts with the state to avoid the breakdown.

  All in all, this office on Slate street was a good quiet place to practice, or malpractice as the case may be, and certainly quiet. I was between assistants. I had been between assistants for over a year now. I had taken over one space for the occasional temp, and kept an old computer there. My office wall had a poster of the show, Better Call Saul, on the back wall, and blown-up photographs of my travels around the state. Behind my desk, there were a few framed newspaper issues of my big courtroom wins. There hadn’t been a new framed copy in a while.

  While I had an Ivy league diploma from Brown University, I kept it on the ground, face turned toward the wall, as most of my clients had never heard of the school.

  “What’s the color of shit?” I sometimes asked myself, reciting an old taunt from rival schools. “Brown! Brown! Brown!”

  I let Marley use that temp’s office space while I pondered how to appeal the PV-DV. The only possible grounds would be to admit ineffective assistance on my part. I sure as hell wasn’t going to do that. While I stared at my screen, Marley was a natural on the computer next door. He had it converted into a primitive game console.

  I started going through my files in alphabetical order. My ancient “Steelcase” brand four drawer file cabinet always seemed to be bulging with manila case files. The cases were bending the steel. In the bottom drawer, I had never finished Ybarra and Zamora, and got through them in minutes. One required a written request
for witness interviews, the other an email to the prosecutor about a plea to time served. In the top drawer, the Aguilar file could have been closed months ago. Thankfully, I wouldn’t have to open a file for Arnold after all. I organized the Baca files and matched the photographs of stolen property to the right case numbers. His cases involved stolen property and high-speed getaway chases. He had a stunning resemblance to actor Vin Diesel, but he wasn’t the fast and the furious. His random thefts of possible meth ingredients coupled with his reckless driving would make his story, The Crashed and the Curious.

  Next, I drafted a few quixotic motions for a client named Cervantes, and emptied some duplicates from a file for someone with the unfortunate last name of Dump. I shouldn’t be joking, each of these clients faced thirty years.

  Marley watched me from across the hall and peppered me with questions. “What’s the difference between Ag Bat and Ag Burg?”

  “If you are busted for trafficking, can you just get a trafficking ticket?”

  “You do possession cases, do any of them involve demonic possession? If you are possessed by a demon, could that be a defense to possession of a firearm by a felon?”

  I answered the questions that I could and prepped for my other cases, all the way through letter “E,” Enriquez. I had a big brown accordion file looming in the F section, but I didn’t want to face it.

  Marley inevitably grew bored when I couldn’t keep up with snappy answers to his questions. So much for take your son to work day. My family had a word for it, “oodgey,” which I think came from a diminutive of agitated, or perhaps from some unknown ancient language. A child was oodgey when he felt ignored and acted out. After a few Mountain Dews from the fridge, Marley was now beyond oodgey, bopping around the crime scene office playing a first-person shooter game with his finger.

  “I should probably go through this final case,” I said staring at a brown file in F.

  Suddenly, my computer screen went blank. Even my phone stopped working. I’m sure it was just a coincidence, but the oodgeyness was contagious, perhaps even electronic. I could always play lawyer some other time.

  I needed to go to the bathroom first. I handed Marley my phone just in case. “Can you handle the phone for a minute? Chances are it’s going to be some mom asking ‘what’s going to happen to her kid.’ Just look in the file.”

  He nodded. When I returned, Marley was on the phone yammering away, one of my messy Joey Aguilar files in his hand. “Mr. Shepard was handling this case, but your son, Joey, has another case in Santa Fe. His Albuquerque case was already dismissed, but it looks like that Santa Fe case is heating up.”

  I didn’t know Aguilar had a case in Santa Fe. Marley held the phone up, like Hamlet examining “Alas poor Yorick’s skull.” He closed his eyes as if getting a message. “I’m sorry ma’am. I think your son is going to be convicted of that DWI up in Santa Fe, and he’s probably going to have a fatal car accident on I-25 on the way up to his sentencing in December.”

  There was silence on the other line.

  “How did you know all that?” I asked him, grabbing the phone and the file from him and making sure the call was disconnected.

  Marley shrugged. “I just know things sometimes if I can get a feel for them.”

  “You just got that from touching the messy file over there?”

  “I guess so. Are you mad at me?”

  “It’s all good, but I don’t know if honesty is always the best policy in criminal law.

  “I can help you with the rest of your files. I see you have some X-files.”

  “I do?”

  I did have a file in the letter X, Jervon Xavier Wayne, but it was supposed to be in the Ws. How did I miss that? His enthusiasm was palpable while mine was fading. “I think we needed to stop working for the day.”

  I didn’t want to open an X-file on my own son, that was for sure. I didn’t want to know. I looked outside my window at the blue New Mexico sky, and then at Marley. How many times had I wished I could honestly answer my clients after they asked me “What’s going to happen?”

  “Can I see Dan Shepard’s Albuquerque? I want to reconnect with my roots.”

  He wanted to see Dan Shepard’s Albuquerque? He wanted to be part of my life even after my debacle at district court?

  God damn, I loved my son!

  • • •

  I gave Marley a tour of Dan Shepard’s Albuquerque—starting with the El Cheapo Motel on Central where I’d spent my first night here before heading out to my first job as a public defender in the New Mexico outback. I headed down the Old Route 66 to the Parq Central hotel where my son’s namesake, Sam Marlow, had been killed by an angry client. We didn’t go inside, after Marley seemed to grow visibly nauseous. Was he getting a bad vibe from the building? We left before I could find out.

  I bypassed the convention center, the last place I had seen his mother, the night of the Dragon Moon Shareholders Meeting. I did show him the Japanese garden of the Bio Park, which had played a pivotal and ultimately happy scene in another story of my life. I ended our tour a few miles west, literally on a high note, in the Metropolitan Detention Center parking lot. It was there that I had proposed to Luna.

  “I held up a sign for her, LUNA WILL YOU MARRY ME, and handed her a ring made by the late Heidi Hawk.”

  “Would you do it all over again?” he asked. “Even though she broke your heart?”

  I looked at the Metropolitan Detention Center. New inmates were coming off a bus and entering the building in the back, while others in plain clothes were coming out the front to freedom. Ahh . . . the circle of life.

  “You’re my son because of me meeting your mother,” I said. “That’s worth a broken heart.”

  He looked away at some tough inmates who were eyeing him. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. “Let’s get out of here. Jail scares me.” As we walked out to the car, his shoes became untied yet again.

  “What should we do now? It’s such a nice day,” he said. “Time is running out. My last dad never took me hiking. He said I was too much of a wanker.”

  I didn’t want to know exactly what a wanker was, I didn’t like being the next dad after the last dad. I was the original dad and always would be, right? “I had a lot of adventures with your mom before you were born. On our first trip together, we went to Valles Caldera and then down to the Jemez ruins.”

  “Those ruins are supposed to be haunted,” he said. “I’m sorry I missed that. I love exploring and now that my health is back, I can go anywhere.”

  “Hopefully, we’ll get another chance. The four of us this time, with Denise.”

  “Let’s hike,” Marley said. “Where to? Someplace where there aren’t criminals.”

  He was going to Caldera Academy, I might as well show him a real caldera.

  “Petroglyph National Monument. We’re going to hike the volcanoes.” I pointed to the three dormant volcanoes that lined Albuquerque’s west side. The hills looked more like rocky knobs than volcanoes.

  “Aren’t you afraid they’re going to blow?”

  “They’ve been dormant for twenty-thousand years, but I’m game if you are.”

  “I’m game,” he said. “Let’s go hike a volcano.”

  • • •

  Denise had packed hiking boots for him back at the house. It took less than half an hour to get to the abrupt end of urban Albuquerque and the start of the high desert. We drove west on I-40 to the last exit in Albuquerque, on top of Nine Mile Hill, and then drove a few miles north on Paseo del Volcan. We parked at the entrance of the Petroglyphs National Monument.

  It was another twenty-five-minute hike through the desert to the caldera of the tallest dormant volcano. Some caldera, we were barely a hundred feet above the mesa. The only clue that these had been once active were the black rocks the size of washing machines that littered the hillsides.

>   I checked, Marley’s hiking boots hadn’t unraveled. It was a small victory; there was hope for him yet. Perhaps we could hike to the top of the Sandia Crest sometime this Fall.

  We sat there on the summit and watched the lights go on over the city as the sun set behind us. Neither of us said anything. I wished this moment could go on forever.

  “It’s starting to get dark,” he said. “Are there coyotes up here?”

  “I don’t know about coyotes, but there are all kinds of rattlesnakes, and not just rattlesnake lawyers,” I said.

  “You’ll protect me, right?”

  “The rattlesnakes won’t come after us,” I said. “Old joke, professional courtesy.”

  He pretended to laugh. We hiked down the steep lava rocks of the hill over the last revenant of the dying sunlight. He tripped, and then grimaced in pain.

  I ended up carrying him the last part of the steep, rocky descent. Once we were back on the flat path, he swore he could walk the last stretch of the trail to the parking lot. Despite an initial limp, he grew stronger with every stride.

  That evening we had an artisanal pizza that involved something called Applewood bacon, brought in from Farina’s and Marley ate like a growing boy.

  So did I. He wasn’t going to starve on my watch. I did remember to go to the grocery store on the way back, not a Walmart of course, and bought all the necessities for a week.

  Luna called me after Marley went to bed. “So, has he survived twenty-five hours in your custody?”

  “He has. Let’s see what tomorrow brings. Another day in court.”

  “Hopefully things will go better for you tomorrow.” She hesitated. “I hope you know that I am rooting for you to be more responsible than you were in your past. He needs you in his life. Well at least for the next twenty-four hours or so.”

  I cringed when she reminded me of the time constraint. I was becoming a better father. Now, I just had to become a better lawyer.

  Chapter 13

  Tucson to Tucumcari