The Dragon Documentaries

by J. D. Camacho

  After this, he leaves you. You return to your hotel room, pull up Elmo’s recordings. You start listening.

  PART FOUR

  STORMS

  Twelve

  It was mid-morning, and what did I need? Right now, I needed food. Here I was at The Lake, sitting on a rough, fallen tree several yards from The Lake’s still reflection of still trees and still mountains and still sky. The reflection distorted the images, reversed them and blurred them and faded them out, as if a filter between the real thing and me. I needed to go around The Lake to reach The Mount, a journey that would take a few days more.

  I had stayed here for a while to stock up on food. I made twenty or so deadfall traps around my campsite alongside The Lake. The traps were to bait small animals, but had I built enough? I had no lunch, and lunchtime approached. I wanted to smack myself.

  My traps were made the right way. I had placed two forearm-length sticks – a flattop trigger stick and a sharpened lever stick – in a standing triangle at every trap. Each trap had a flat rock propped against the trigger stick about four times the weight of my target animals. The animals were supposed to smell the sweet cashews and walnuts between the rock and the trigger stick, jostle the trigger stick, bump the lever stick, and find themselves splattered by my trap. They were perfect. The traps surrounded my campsite, and I thought twenty would suffice. But even when a trap captured an animal, often only scraps remained for me. I suspected another animal had picked the trapped creature clean before I could check. I pictured a wolverine pursuing me, following my trapline, gutting my prey, eating my food, taking my hard-earned prize.

  I had learned how to make deadfall traps as a Boy Scout before I became an Eagle Scout, the highest rank. Yes, I was proud of getting to Eagle Scout. It was the only high school achievement that was worth a damn on a résumé. In the adult world, résumés shouldn’t list a school presidency or a sports captaincy. But Eagle Scout? Eagle Scout mattered to many, mattered to me. I felt that way, even with the dorky uniform and the serious scandals associated with scouting.

  And I did it alone; the only other like-aged kid in my troop who reached Eagle Scout had a father for a scoutmaster. His dad supervised every camping trip, ran every scout meeting. His dad was there for him, helped him, made everything easier. The kid got pushed along while I pushed myself along. I knew that being an Eagle Scout made me no better than anyone else, but it was an accomplishment that I had strived get, actually got, and had done so largely by myself. I was as proud of that as anything I’d ever done.

  That Eagle Scout certificate couldn’t feed me, though. I felt hunger over and over. Hunger crested and receded, rose and repeated. It caused salivations and imaginations within me. I thought of the foods from my youth, of the flour flatbreads, of their soft and flaky texture, their sweet and milky flavor, their off-white and spotted brown color. And I remembered how easy they were to prepare, how a ten-year-old could make them. I ate my bait nuts to keep from going nuts.

  I wanted to check the traps again, but they needed more time.

  Hours passed, and a storm brewed. It gathered clouds, disrupted the stillness on The Lake and in the sky. The storm attacked the lakeside serenity as a predator might, sneaking and stalking until the time came to rumble.

  But I saw another image at the edge of my eye. There was a behemoth; there was a dragon.

  This dragon was different than the one from the waterfall on The Trail. This one approached from the storm and shrieked like a great sperm whale in the sky. He soared, showing his carrot-colored underbelly beneath rough, deep-brown wings. His long, thin tail swung above me, like a crane on a high-rise.

  He flapped overhead, the pulse of his wings like rips of thunder across the sky. The dragon stayed aloft over The Lake. He never gazed down, never in my direction. The dragon looked determined, his opal eyes fixated on the horizon. He looked fixated on The Mount.

  I went to meet him.

  Thirteen

  It was just about midday, and what did I want? I wanted to approach the storm dragon. I needed to see him more closely. So I walked toward the very edge of The Lake, felt the chill of the rain, heard the crack of the storm.

  I became very damp very quickly. My hood kept the top of my head dry but protected little else as the storm washed over me from head to toe. I sloshed forward to the now-muddy shore. My feet squished around in my soggy boots and soggy socks. I felt the weight of my sagging pants, wiped the splashes from my soaking brow, winced from my returning headache.

  I looked up at the dragon again.

  He was the biggest one I had ever seen, at least twice the size of the waterfall dragon and airborne to boot. The storm dragon stretched his orange wings out in the violent, swirling grey clouds just as a sorcerer floated his hands over a crystal ball. He held this thoughtful, mystical pose for only an instant at a time, flapping his wings down then bringing them back to remain aloft. The dragon stayed there amid the bangs and flashes in the sky. He stared at The Mount.

  I wanted to meet him, wanted to face him. The dragon descended onto The Lake’s surface, his colossal, brown, and bumpy tail slapping against the rippling water. But he kept his back turned to me. At that moment, I wanted to grab his tail, hold it tight, let him take me with him into the air where he appeared so in control, so comfortable. I wanted to know his world. Yet I watched the dragon’s tail shift The Lake’s surface again and lash about and a towering wave rose and crashed into me and knocked me down onto my side and into the mud, mud that caked my left elbow and left hip before receding into The Lake. I lay now on my left side, my hood pushed back and my view open to the darkening sky and the full, gigantic scale of the dragon in front of me.

  But then the dragon rose out of The Lake, lifted himself higher, pushed me back farther. His tail rose with him, his orange underbelly becoming more distant with each flap of his wings. The storm dragon started off away from me, in the direction of The Mount. That was still where I wanted to go.

  Eleven

  It was evening, and what did I have? I had wet clothes, a burbling stomach, and no storm dragon. And I had no storm here, either, because the storm had passed rather quickly. I decided to change into drier clothes, wanted to go around to check my traps right after the storm. Hopefully, I had made the triggers secure enough to survive the rainfall and not collapse on their own. I needed to be patient, though; I needed to let the traps sit for now. But what did I need next?

  I stood on a rock near the edge of The Lake and tried to shine a flashlight out across it. The light didn’t go far, but I saw the water giving off an eerie teal glow, as if an enormous lantern fish swam within. The glow definitely didn’t come from the starry ceiling, seeing as the stars only glowed a twinkling white against the dimming night sky. The sky spanned out above me, made me feel small. I knew that everybody felt small sometimes. But I also knew that most people didn’t have both the sky and a dragon to thank for it.

  I wondered whether stargazers felt tiny all the time. These observational astronomers looked at celestial objects everyday, and the amateur ones did it for fun. The more exact reasons they did it eluded me. I suspected that, most of the time, hobbies just happened; we all found what we liked.

  Of course, I read a lot, but I tried several sports, too. I loved the narrative of sports. I didn’t call it “narrative” when I was younger, but I knew that there was something special in sports that led millions to invest time and money into simple, communal moments. When I played soccer as a kid, I noticed a shared experience that I hadn’t had before. My parents rarely showed up for games, but I went with other kids whose parents did, and playing together felt very nice indeed.

  I didn’t much care for individual-driven sports, but I had to give boxing a shot. It was the last individual sport I tried. I wanted my father involved in my hobbies, and he wasn’t exactly the reading type. He valued loyalty above all else, so I thought I’d show loyalty by picking his sport. I was young – less than ten years old – but I wasn’t
the youngest in there, not by a long shot. But it wasn’t long until my father pulled me out of the gym. He didn’t let me come back. I recalled feeling deflated, cheated, deserted. Here I was, trying to do what my father loved, trying to show him the loyalty he approved of, and then I had my efforts smacked back across my face. Maybe I didn’t understand it at the time, but I remembered the feeling. I always remembered the feeling.

  When I thought of myself, that feeling of desertion was the strongest one I had. I wrestled with it, clawed with it. I only had two feelings inside me that strong: there was this one about my father – and there was this other one about my mother.

  PART FIVE

  STORY OF YOUR LIFE

  Fourteen

  You’re almost through Elmo’s recordings. You know that Elmo’s mother, Yvette, was the one who gave them to your magazine. You want to know about her, want to know why.

  This morning, you touch down in Kansas, grab your rental car, head over to Yvette’s home. You notice the pale sky above the blond grasslands. The grasslands look flat for long stretches until massive modern buildings rise in the distance in front of you. You see a church, a theater, an office building. But each rises by itself, stranded amid a great grass sea.

  You enter Yvette’s neighborhood and observe the homes. To you, they look straight out of a 1983 real estate catalog. You spy a school alongside the street, shaped like some starfish spaceship facing upward, and you wonder whether that seemed futuristic in the 1980s. You drive up to the house at the given address, get out of your car, wave to the short, brown-skinned, black-haired, and smiling woman who exits the home and approaches you.

  “So good to meet you,” Yvette says, shaking your hand. “It’s a good thing that you’re here a little early. I have a new client meeting this morning, so you can ride with me to the office. It’s not too far.”

  You sit down in Yvette’s sedan. Its engine revs, the sedan rolls, and the scenery starts to pass by you in the window. You recall that, like her daughter, Yvette also practices as an attorney. You try to remember her specialty.

  She smiles again. “So good to meet you!” she repeats as she drives.

  Does she practice family law?

  “Yes, that’s what I mostly practice,” Yvette says. “Divorces, child custody, child support – that sort of thing.”

  You ask her if family law is a rough business.

  She pauses. “A rough business?”

  Can’t those disputes get pretty foul?

  “Yes, they can,” she says. “And those are the hardest clients to work for. Sometimes they just want to destroy the other side. That’s never good.” She looks very comfortable in her velvet sweatshirt and sweatpants.

  You pass the office building again, and then you pass the theater. You discover that this place separates its locations through a grid system, but the lines and boxes are much larger than they are in a city. There is an ease in getting from place to place – a turn here, a turn there – but you also sense the long distance between spots, as if these places want to be available but want their space, too. You ask Yvette how her own divorce compares with what she’s seen over the years.

  “Well, with the divorce, Buddy and I agreed on mostly everything,” Yvette says. “That made it much easier. He understood that a child should be with his mother at that age.”

  Have Yvette’s experiences at her practice changed her perspective on mothers?

  She pauses again. She keeps forward, sighs. “Somewhat.”

  You’ve reached resistance rather quickly. You know your job; you prod further.

  “It’s a complicated thing.”

  Complicated? Does she mean her job or her son?

  Yvette stares at the road and wrinkles her nose. “You have to understand, it’s a complicated thing,” she says. “Elmo was very young at the time. And Buddy didn’t want to see him. Look, I’m sorry, I don’t want you to think I’m a nasty person, but it’s true: he didn’t want him. It was like he wished that we didn’t have him.”

  You tell her that Buddy said something different.

  “It doesn’t matter what he said – look at what he did!” Yvette says. She stops at a red light and starts chopping the air with her right hand as she speaks. “He didn’t want visitation rights. He didn’t want anything to do with him. He made support payments, and that’s it. That’s not a father. He abandoned Elmo.” She glares at you. “Do you understand? That’s how my son ended up the way that he did.”

  Fifteen

  Yvette greets a fleshy lady dressed in what looks like the garb of a dental assistant: hunter-green shirt and navy-blue pants. They both sit across from one another in Yvette’s office; the air of fresh coffee and honeyed baklava waft around you. You glance through the glass entrance and the sunlit, open sidewalk. Your back rests against your creaky but comfy leather chair in the common area, and your eyes watch Yvette’s meeting through the open door. You feign disinterest, yet you listen intently.

  “It sounds like,” Yvette says, “from your email, you don’t want your ex-husband around you and your daughter anymore?”

  The lady nods and starts to explain her situation. She wants to prevent her ex-husband from contacting their daughter. The daughter is fourteen and pregnant.

  Yvette remains expressionless, a trait you’ve seen somewhere before. “Do you have sole custody of your daughter?” Yvette asks.

  The lady nods again and continues. She describes her daughter’s relationship with the boyfriend who’s responsible for the pregnancy. The lady wants her daughter to have an abortion. She tells Yvette how the daughter and the boyfriend had escaped to Oklahoma to wed and how they needed parental consent for the marriage. The lady stirs in her seat. She recounts how the boyfriend contacted his father and how he contacted her ex-husband and how her ex-husband gave consent to their underage daughter’s marriage. The lady notes that her ex-husband had had little contact with their daughter prior to this. She appears to boil now, from her feet to her forehead.

  “So your ex-husband gave consent,” Yvette says, “and now you want him to have no contact at all?”

  The lady almost screams her agreement. She says her ex-husband should lose everything.

  “You want him to have nothing?” Yvette says. “No visitation, no inheritance, no consent rights – nothing at all?”

  The lady raises her voice again and leans forward and backhands the air in Yvette’s direction, as if wondering why Yvette would even ask that question.

  Yvette looks over this lady in the green and blue attire. “Is there any other reason why your ex-husband would be considered an unfit parent?”

  The lady doesn’t say.

  “Physical abuse? Drug abuse? Is he a felon? Is he mentally ill in some way?”

  The lady shakes her head.

  Yvette pauses. “I’m sorry,” she says. “There’s not much I can do.”

  The lady twists her face like a corkscrew. She asks why not.

  “Ma’am, you have to understand: he’s still a parent,” Yvette says. “He’s still the father of your daughter.”

  The lady reminds Yvette of her sole custody rights.

  “Yes, but that doesn’t matter here,” Yvette says. She leans forward herself. “Just because – look, just because you have sole custody doesn’t mean you can cut him out of her life. You haven’t told me anything that would disqualify him as a parent. He’s done nothing that would make him ‘unfit’ in the eyes of a judge.”

  The lady looks unconvinced. She reiterates how he consented to their daughter’s underage marriage in Oklahoma.

  “In Kansas,” Yvette continues, “that’s his right as a parent. He can do that. When judges look to disqualify a parent, that’s not really one of the factors they look at. I’m not trying to be short with you; I’m just telling you how it is. Your ex-husband still has rights.”

  The lady stands now. She shouts and points. The lady says that Yvette must never have married, that she must never have had children of her
own, that she must never have known what it’s like for a child’s life to be over so soon.

  Yvette quiets on this last comment. But she stays expressionless.

  The lady whips up her purse and grumbles out the office door and bangs through the glass entrance and stomps onto the open sidewalk.

  No one looks happy.

  Sixteen

  Not too long after, Yvette stops her sedan in a large parking lot underneath the grey skies and light rain. She tells you that she needs to retrieve some blown-up vacation photographs from this Walmart. You wonder whether there’s anything more Midwestern than a Walmart in Kansas.

  Yvette still looks comfy in her velvet sweat suit. She walks quickly but with a hunch, as if shuttling a load. She jangles the keys in her closed fist.

  After you pass the sliding entrance, you ask her again if all her clients act like the fleshy lady.

  “I told you in the car already: I wouldn’t say they’re all like that,” Yvette repeats. “Is it that hard to believe? And she’s not a client now. She didn’t want my help. I try not to take clients like that anyway.”

  What does she mean “like that”?

  “Clients that just want revenge,” she says. “Clients that won’t listen to me. Why would you pay me if you’re not going to listen to me? And sometimes they don’t pay me even if they do listen to me. This one client paid for thousands of dollars in legal work with baklava. Granted, she did make me a lot of baklava.” Yvette pauses. “But she didn’t pay me what she owed! It’s a frustrating thing.”