CHAPTER ONE
WELCOME TO REDROCK
My mom was not happy that she had to pick me up when I got suspended from Redrock Retreat, after my friend and I got caught during a random pat-down on the return to the tour bus during a field trip and one counselor found our shrooms on me.
The school called her where she lived with my stepfather on his cattle ranch in Flagstaff. She wasn’t home, and so the maid forwarded the message to where she had been vacationing on the Seine, eating chocolate and sampling the local shopping and theater until her screwup son put the kibosh on that and she had to fly home.
I spotted her ivory-white Range Rover churning up graded sand in its tires on the horizon, as she passed by the rusted windmill that separated the rehab clinic/boarding school from the surrounding barb-wired homesteads. Administrator Stevens stood with me in the shadow of the hacienda’s colonnaded walkway, a clipboard in his left hand and his right hand balled into a fist.
I watched that right hand reflexively close and open, covered with black hair up to the knuckles, the gemstone on his class ring catching light from the hot sun.
“You use this month,” he said to me, “to improve yourself.” He gritted his teeth until I worried he might lose a bit of the ionized white on them. He couldn’t afford to do that, since his eyes were already flinty and his skin sapped of life by the sun, and if he broke the teeth grinding them down he’d look more like a warden than a game-show host.
“Yes sir,” I said, and stood there with my black duffel bag.
A thin reddish dust the Range Rover’s tires had kicked up covered the car, the clouds the same color as the adobe bricks on the buildings of the campus. The car stopped next to the flagstone fountain in the courtyard, and the principal and I went out to meet my mom.
The fob on the Rover chirped, and the trunk opened. I tossed my crap inside, next to some plastic-wrapped antiquing acquisitions Deborah had picked up on her trip down here.
“Careful,” she said, turning to me from the front seat. Oversized Dolce & Gabbana glasses with smoked rose frames covered her eyes. “That’s real French Provincial.”
I settled my bag next to the nearest wooden chair. “I guess you picked this up over in France then, and not down here?”
“They forgot to mail it the last time I was at the Pied-à-terre, even though I left specific instructions to have it forwarded.”
“Well, you’ve got it now,” I said, “and all’s right with the world.”
She pouted as much as the collagen allowed and frowned to the extent the Botox permitted. Debby pulled a smile for Stevens and signed the release form with a quick flourish. “We’re terribly sorry about this.”
He smiled back at her. “He’s a bright kid, with great ability. He’s the star pupil in his English and history classes.” Stevens’ eyes closed, in a gesture that was half-wink, half-wince, meant to show his forbearance developed over the course of a long career dealing with kids as difficult as me, and sometimes worse. “We’ll try again in a month.”
The smiles dropped from both their faces as they parted and let me make my way through their ranks to the car. I settled into the ribbed leather of the backseat and prepared myself for the long drive.
I figured one of two things would happen when Debbie shut her own door and we drove off. Either she would hit me with both barrels, or we’d do the stony silence routine.
The sigh would be the opening salvo, and ready me for whatever came next. The door slammed shut, and she put the car in gear.
The Streisand on the ten-disc changer was loud enough that I couldn’t tell if Debby was fuming. The sizzle of a match coming to life didn’t make it any easier to tell how pissed she was.
She drank smoke from a Gauloises Blond and puckered her lips to blow it out. Then she cracked her window and waved the stream of blue smoke out into the desert. She opened the sunroof just to make sure the crosscurrent was strong enough to hide the smoke from Jim, should he drive her car instead of his silver Porsche Boxster.
“Jim was thinking about letting you manage one of his Subways part-time when you turned eighteen.”
“Can’t work around food, mom.” I slapped my gut beneath the raglan of my Polo shirt. It jiggled a lot less than last time she’d seen me.
“You look fitter.” She flicked her cigarette out of the window into some sagebrush that resembled snow whenever the sun was this bright and there was nothing to keep it from bleaching the scrubland.
The Paiute name for this place actually translated into something like “The Land the Lord Forgot.” The Mormons who’d passed through here maybe a couple hundred years ago seemed to concur, for after a short stay they’d pulled up stakes and hitched wagons, leaving behind the blockhouses to stand empty for ages. Some decades later the widow of some captain of industry opened up a school dedicated to Christianizing any local redskin heathens not already killed or herded onto reservations.
How that eventually morphed into a boarding school / rehab facility for the screwed up kids of the wealthy is something you will have to ask someone better educated in Redrock lore.
“You want to tell me why you did this to me?” she asked.
The tires went from rock to asphalt, and now aside from Streisand’s pleading to her wayward father there was only the growing silence between me and my mother.
“Debbie, I think I’m the one who ingested those mushrooms. I didn’t do it to you. I did it to me. Or for me.”
“Okay, Michael.” She put some sneer on that. She didn’t like it when I called her by her name instead of “Mom,” and especially not when I shortened “Deborah” to “Debbie.” That reminded her too much of our white trash roots, how she’d been a keno runner who had lassoed herself a high-roller by playing her cards right, saddling up to the well-heeled rancher when he was on a winning streak and tipsy from the comped whiskey sours.
Hell, she’d played her hand better than right. Perfect, in fact. They didn’t even have a prenup.
“Why did you do something this stupid?” She asked. “You had a problem with hard drugs. I could understand a relapse, but this…” She shook her head. I hung mine. She had a point. The anger was subsiding, and the pain was coming, the realization that she was human and I was hurting her, that even if she was a gold digger, I didn’t blame her for that. It was a cold world, and she was just trying to survive, and a lot of the pain she’d absorbed had been to shield me.