A
Matter of Custody
by
H. J. Utsler
Danny Hennington sat in the front passenger seat and
worried, alternately, about whether the insistent
rattling of the old Ford
station wagon, all they could afford on his mother’s
single income, meant that
the vehicle was about to fall apart in an
eighty-mile-per-hour shower of
rusting bolts and balding tires (and one pinch-lipped
mother and one anxious
little boy), and what it was going to be like to
finally meet his father,
assuming the wagon somehow arrived at Yellowstone
National Park intact. He knew
this was all his fault.
Danny’s
mother,
Myra Hennington -- Miss, not Mrs. -- was thirty-two
years old. Danny was newly
ten. Danny’s father’s age was unknown to him, along
with every other detail he
longed to know about the man, including his name.
Danny didn’t broach the
subject often. His mother never responded favorably to
any line of questioning
that led, even indirectly, to his father.
He had questions, burning ones, but he didn’t dare ask
them now as Myra floored it past a Fed-Ex truck
hauling double trailers up the
narrow, mountain highway. The trailers swayed
alarmingly in the Wyoming wind.
The wagon was midway through a blind curve on the
wrong side of the road, and
Danny knew they were going to die.
“Relax, Danny, I saw the road was clear from the top
of the last hill,” Myra said, swinging the big car
back into the right lane just
in time to avoid a head-on collision with a
bright-green Winnebago. “We need to
make some time. I’ve got to be back at work on
Monday.”
“I know,” he said, catching his breath. “And it’s a
school day.”
She took her eyes from the road and held his gaze for
an uncomfortable moment. “So
it is.”
Danny spent the drive north considering how things had
gone wrong. Getting caught eating match heads had
probably been the last straw,
as far as his mother was concerned, although he knew
his habit of half-drowning
himself in the bathtub was also a negative factor.
Danny loved nothing more than taking a bath. He loved
splashing and playing with his toy boats and green
army men amid fragrant
bubbles. Myra Hennington had no trouble keeping her
son squeaky clean. But, at
some point, after the initial splashing, washing and
playing, he knew “The
Idea” would come to him. “The Idea” was irresistible.
He would lean all the way
back in the ceramic tub and allow his head to slip
underwater, holding his
breath and looking up until the soapy waves stilled
above him. “The Idea” was that this was the
place for him. A quiet,
peaceful place where he could rest and think and… just
maybe, even breathe,
although that last part was a secret he kept even from
himself, and he had
never tried it. His mind would drift under the warm
water, and he’d smile to
himself, and lose all track of time.
Eventually, Myra would realize that the splashing
noises had stopped. Her face would appear above him,
hazy and distorted through
layers of warm water and steam, and his dreamy smile
would disappear, and his
eyes would widen in surprise (He was always surprised,
no matter how many times
this happened.) at her red cheeks and half-scared,
half-angry, expression. Her
hands would dive into the tub and lift him up, whether
he wanted up or not. “Oh
God, Danny! You’re turning blue!” She’d bundle
him out of the bath and
into his towel and hold him so tightly that he could
hardly catch his breath,
and sometimes she would cry. He always tried his best
in the days and weeks
that followed to ignore “The Idea,” to be a good boy,
and not to scare his mom.
It so happened that Danny had once more followed “The
Idea” to the bottom of the tub just two days before
Myra caught him eating the
match heads.
***
Myra was on edge and kept a closer-than-usual eye on
her son the night of his tenth birthday party -- the
night before their
impromptu road trip. She saw Danny through the small
crowd of Hennington
cousins, aunts and uncles, and even one aged
Hennington grandparent, filching
matchsticks from a cast-iron holder near the
fireplace. She watched him break
off one tiny red-and-white tip after another and cup
them in his hand. When
there were enough match heads to cover his palm, he
casually popped them into
his mouth, like a handful of candy corn, and let them
sit on his tongue as
though to let the sugar melt there. But it's not
sugar, she thought, it’s
sulfur and chemicals and… and whatever else matches
are made of. He reached
for yet another match and broke off the tip with his
thumb. It wouldn’t be long
before someone else at the party noticed what he was
doing. Noticed and God
forbid said something. A deep frown crossed her brow
as Danny began to chew.
The next morning, Myra packed up their suitcases and
told Danny that she loved him, but it was time they
went to Yellowstone. “It’s
a matter of custody,” she said. Danny’s puzzled
expression made it clear that
she had used a word he didn’t yet know, and so she
added, “We’re going to see
your father.”
***
It was late afternoon when they arrived at the west
portal of the park. Danny’s mom handed a
grizzled-looking park ranger twenty
dollars cash in exchange for one entrance receipt and
an informational packet.
“Which way to the Lizard Pools?” asked Myra.
“Which ones are those?” asked the park ranger, “Are
they on the map I just gave you? It’s a fine map.”
“Never mind,” said Myra, “I think I’m looking for that
place where the lakeshore makes a perfect half-circle.
You know, a volcano
thing.”
“The whole place is a volcano thing. That’s why they
made it a park,”
“Never mind,” said Myra, again.
“Got some pretty springs up around Mammoth -- a herd
of elk bed down there in the evenings. You got Old
Faithful, of course, and
some other geysers out that way too, that’s just past
West Thumb. Got pools at
West Thumb, now that I think of it. Don’t
know
about lizards, but if memory serves, there’s one or
two called
dragon-something. That’s back in the burn area. It’s
all there on the map.”
“Thanks,” she said and pulled into the park.
They
drove south, and when
the road turned beneath them, they drove west. Twice
they stopped for buffalo
on the road. The huge, shaggy beasts walked sedately
past the station wagon,
and Myra made Danny roll up his window.
“We
don’t even have a camera,”
he said. Cars lined both sides of the road, and the
tourists who drove them all
had cameras, sometimes two or even three, hanging from
straps draped around
their necks. Some of the cameras were so big, and the
zoom lenses so long and
heavy, that they had to be permanently mounted on
tripods, which made them look
like rare, metal-legged birds. A herd of elk munched
golden grass along the
bank of a winding, valley stream. An osprey circled
over low, pine-covered
mountains. The road took up beside a wide river --
maybe the Snake, maybe the
Yellowstone, they hadn’t even looked at the map – and
Myra spotted a large
animal standing in the water. She pulled the wagon
over in a hurry, as though
catching animal fever from nearby drivers, and jostled
for space on the
shoulder.
“Moose,”
she said.
“Oh,
wow!” said Danny. The
moose raised its head into the air, chewing, and
surveyed the line of parked
cars. Aquatic plants drooped from its
wide antlers.
“This
is ridiculous,” Myra
muttered and edged back onto the road, “we’ve got
things to do.”
They
pulled into an empty
spot in the West Thumb parking lot at dusk and looked
out at the lake below.
“This
is it,” she said, “I
think. Let’s walk down the boardwalk and see what we
see.”
An
old, wooden walkway,
faded from the sun and polished by endless foot
traffic, headed off in two
directions. Steam drifted from random depressions in
the grassy meadow
surrounding the walkway. Great billows of steam rose
from points farther away.
The boardwalk creaked and groaned as tourists moved in
and out of the hanging
mist, their voices a mixed babble of words, some
English-sounding and some not,
with no one conversation distinguishable. Danny saw
that the crowded path was a
circle, going down to the lake in one direction, and
coming back in another.
Spooky trees surrounded the meadow. Many were dead
where they stood --
lifeless, bone-white poles with charred-black edges
and no branches whatsoever.
The dead trees were being overrun by a dense blanket
of bright-green, baby
pines, each of which was barely four feet tall. A sign
read: Reseeded by nature
-- 1988.
“What
happened?” Danny asked
his mother.
“Fire.
The year before you
were born,” she said, “The year you were conceived.”
“What’s
conceived?”
“Well.
That’s one of the
things that happened when I met your father.”
“Oh.”
Danny screwed up his
courage and asked, “Is my father a forest ranger?”
Myra
looked out over the
burn area that began here at the lake and swept up the
sides of a nearby
mountain. “Yesss, he… does take care of the forest.
And animal, um, husbandry.”
“What’s
husbandry?”
“Oh,
herd management,
population control, that sort of thing. Listen, you’re
not afraid to meet him,
are you? I mean, he’s one of the good guys.”
“I
guess not.” he said,
stepping onto the boardwalk and into the crowd.
They
soon came to the dragon
pools. Dragon’s Mouth was a deep pond filled with
rusty water so hot it boiled.
Danny’s face was wet with warm mist and the smell was
heaven. Men and women
wrinkled their noses as the wind shifted a column of
steam across the path. It
smelled just like match heads to Danny. A sign warned
against touching the
water. Too hot, it said. A nearby picture
board showed how the magma
layer, which it described as molten lava, like from a
volcano, only
underground, was less than ten miles down. The idea of
lava beneath the ground
made Danny queasy, and he half expected the boardwalk
to sink and bob like a
boat.
A
puff of wind cleared the
steam from Dragon’s Mouth, revealing startlingly clear
water. A jagged cave
opened at the very bottom, disappearing into depths
unknown. Bubbles rose out
of the cave’s mouth and gurgled to the surface in
noisy groups.
Dragon’s Teeth
was next. Stalactites hung from
a low roof like hungry fangs. Filmy water, thick and
white with minerals,
drooled from the teeth and trickled into a cloudy
basin. Steam billowed between
the stalactites like exhaled smoke. Next were the Mud
Puddles, pockets of
boiling-hot, sticky mud. Huge bubbles surfaced in the
thick goop, eventually
breaking tension to fling bits of scalding clay
through the air. Danny laughed
to himself, thinking they should have named this one
“Dragon’s Ass” because the
bubbles sounded, and smelled, like great farts. He
didn’t mention this to his
mom. They walked on, signs prohibited litter and
pointed out interesting
thermal features along the way.
They
had covered about half
of the distance to the lake when they arrived at the
Lizard Pools, a series of
color-coded basins. They encountered Red Lizard Pool,
where the depths were
tinged red, then Blue Lizard Pool, where the depths
were tinged blue. Next came
Orange Lizard, Yellow Lizard and Black Lizard. The
pools were all roughly the
same size, no more than fifteen feet across, but they
were deep, and they all
had underwater caves leading down into further
darkness that made Danny think
of the gaping throats of sea monsters. Except for
Black Lizard Pool, where the
water was inky and thick, and you couldn’t see into it
at all. Danny thought The
Creature from the Black Lagoon must live in that
one. Actually, it was all
too easy to think of creatures living in all
of the pools. To imagine
them crawling silently up out of the tinted water,
perhaps dragging long,
snake-like tails.
His
thoughts were just
beginning to make him uneasy when his mom announced,
“I’m going to the lady’s
room. I want you to wait right here -- right by this
sign -- until I get back.”
The sign in question was a clear warning to stay on
the boardwalk. It showed a young boy about Danny’s age
by the look of him. The
boy was stepping from the safety of the boardwalk onto
the patently unsafe
ground below. The illustration showed the moment when
the boy realized, to his
obviously rendered dismay, that the land surrounding
the boardwalk wasn’t a
solid thing -- that what looked like solid ground was,
in truth, merely the
lightest crust of ground -- and learning the
hard way by falling through
it into literal hot water. In the drawing, a woman who
could only be the boy’s
mother looked on in horror. Danny blanched at the sign
and its gruesome
message. She couldn’t be serious, could she?
“Mom,
it’s getting dark.
Maybe we should go find our hotel.”
“In
a little while, Danny.
This is where I met your father. It’s a special
place.” She added over her
shoulder, “Don’t move a muscle.”
Danny
waited. He wandered a
little way down the boardwalk, keeping the horrible
sign in sight. He inhaled
the eggy smell of sulfur and luxuriated in the steam
drifting from the pools
and fumaroles. Tourists were slowly clearing out with
the last of the day’s light,
headed back to their cars and campers, discussing
supper and tomorrow’s plans
as they passed him.
His
mom was taking forever.
After
a long while, he made
the trek uphill, back the way they had come, to check
on her. At the parking
area, he found two very clean-looking, unisex
outhouses. Both were empty. The
station wagon was gone. He stood looking at the empty
spot where he was sure
they had parked as the last of the big motor homes
switched on its driving
lights and drove out of the lot. The car must have
been towed, he
thought. Expired plates or something. It was
the only explanation that
made sense.
Danny reasoned with himself, if his mom wasn’t here in
the parking lot looking for their missing car, then
she’d probably gone looking
for him. Of course, she had. And the reason they’d
missed each other was
simple: since the boardwalk was a circle, she must
have headed down in one
direction while he was walking up the other way.
She was sure to be angry when he wasn’t where she’d
left him. And she’d go off like a nuclear bomb when
she found out about the
car. He didn’t have much choice, though. He'd find his
mother and tell her what
he knew. He fervently wished he had stayed by the sign
as she had asked. Then
they would already be together. He suddenly wanted his
mother with an urgency
he hadn’t felt since he was maybe five or six years
old. And now he had to walk
back to the Lizard Pools by himself. In the gathering
dark.
Myra
Hennington was not
waiting impatiently for him when he got back.
Indistinct shapes drifted like
ghosts in and out of the steam. The surrounding mist
thickened as the sunset
quickly became a thing of the past and the night air
cooled over the pools.
Alone in the
gloom, Danny had to admit to
himself that the car probably hadn't been towed. The
smallest seed of doubt,
which had been in the back of his mind all during the
trek down the boardwalk,
now arrived at his front
brain for rational
examination. His heart sank. He wondered what to do
next, what you were supposed
to do next, when your mom drove off and left you at an
interesting thermal
feature. That’s when the orange light began to pulse
from deep inside Blue
Lizard Pool.
It
happened so fast that
Danny only had time for two fully formed, consecutive
thoughts, beginning with,
There’s a fire underwater. and ending abruptly
after, Hey, is
that some kind of fish? For some
time thereafter, it was all he could manage to remain
upright and watch as the
thing from the depths, definitely not a fish,
splashed out of the pool
in front of him and began running around, yelling
something vaguely familiar
that Danny, in his present cognitive state, didn’t
have a hope of
understanding.
“No,”
he said, finally.
“What?” said the dripping thing from the pool.
The thing stopped running around and focused on Danny
with two large,
unblinking, black eyes. “Who are you?” it said.
“Lizard,”
Danny said,
“Blue.”
“Yes?
Look, I’m a little
busy just now. Myra! Myra!"
“She’s
not here,” Danny
said. Even to himself, he sounded slow and dimwitted.
“Look,
do I know you?” said
the lizard thing.
“I’m
Danny. And Myra’s my
mom. I... I guess she left me here.”
The
lizard thing studied him
with renewed interest. “And why would she do that?”
“She
said it's a matter of
custody.”
“A
matter of… but. You.
You’re not….”
“I’m
not what?” asked Danny.
“You
don’t look anything like
me! Myra!”
“She
can’t hear you. She left
in the car. I’m supposed to meet my new father
here. I mean he’s new to me.” Danny shook his head. “I
mean I haven’t met him
yet. But I’m feeling kind of sick all the sudden.
Maybe I’d better go lie down
somewhere.”
“I’m
not your father, kid.”
“Oh,”
Danny said, “Good.”
“You
don’t even have my
tail.”
“That’s
true --”
“Or
my webbed feet.”
“Umm...
actually…” Danny
felt increasingly uncomfortable. The thing eyed him
the way a hungry perch eyes
an unfortunate worm wiggling on a hook. He wondered if
any of this was really
happening.
“I’ll
be damned!” the lizard
thing yelled, pointing a claw-like finger at Danny,
which caused him to jump
back a good two feet.
“Look
at that! Look! You’ve
got Taylor toes!”
“Wait,”
Danny held up his
hands in a warding off gesture, but he was curious,
almost in spite of himself.
“I’ve got who’s what's?”
“Taylor
Clan toes! We’ve all
got ‘em. See how your last couple of toes are a little
crooked? See how they
bend in at the first joint and then bend out
again at the
second?”
“You’re
looking at my
hands.”
“Those
are Taylor toes, all
right. It looks like you are my spawn, tail or no
tail. Doesn’t that just beat
all? Hey, kid, you’re looking a little peaked. Hard to
tell though, you’re pale
as a ghost to begin with.”
“You
can’t be my father.”
“Why’s
that, kid?”
“Because you’re a… a lizard.”
“Damned
fine one, too!” said
the lizard, puffing out his slimy-looking, blue chest.
“You just ask all your
little brothers and sisters when we get home, and
they’ll tell you, Eddie
Taylor is one damned fine fire-breathing blue
lizard.”
“Wait.
I have brothers and
sisters?”
“Oh,
sure. The tadpoles are
all great kids. You’ll see. And if one of them takes a
bite out of you, well,
you just bite her back, twice as hard. Say, can you
breathe underwater?”
“Of
course, I can’t breathe
under --” Danny began, “well... maybe,” he was
thinking about “The Idea.” For
the first time “The Idea” didn’t sound so crazy.
“Maybe?”
“When
I’m in the bath at
home, sometimes I think.... I mean, I can stay under
water for a long time.
Until mom gets scared and pulls me out. She always
says I’m turning --”
“Blue?”
“Blue.
Um, Eddie?”
“Call
me Pop.”
“P...
Pop? I’m pretty
scared.”
“Don’t
be scared, Danny boy.
You can breathe fire at least?”
“No.”
“Well,
you can’t have
everything. Take those gloves off, and let’s see how
you like the pool.”
“Those
are my shoes,” Danny
said and toed them off. He pulled off his socks and
stuffed one inside each
shoe. He reached down and straightened out his long
toes from where they had
been folded up under the balls of his feet for so long
now that they had fallen
asleep. He wiggled the claw tips back and forth to get
the circulation going.
He splayed his toes out, and the webbing pulled tight
between them. He splayed
his hands out too, wishing for the first time that he
had webbed fingers. He
studied the crooked pinky and ring finger on each
hand. His mom didn’t have his
fingers any more than she had webbed feet. “Where do
Taylor fingers -- Taylor
toes -- come from, Pop?”
“Probably
inbreeding.”
“What’s
inbreeding?”
“Ah!
It’s... um... kind of a
joke, Dan. But it’s the kind you don’t want to make
around Granny Taylor when
you meet her, okay?”
“Okay.”
As
it turned out, the water
wasn’t too hot.
They
slipped over the edge
and into the blue depths together, and for the first
time ever, Danny followed
“The Idea” all the way down.
***
Late
the next morning, Myra
parked the old Ford station wagon at West Thumb and
made her way through the
early crowds to Blue Lizard Pool. She didn’t know why
she had waited, wasting
time in the motel room before checking out at the last
minute, but she was glad
for the bustling tourists on the boardwalk. Blue
Lizard Pool steamed in direct
sunlight. People wandered past, commenting on the
bright colors and taking
pictures of one another. They seemed like an alien
species to Myra, dropped in
from some other, more mundane dimension, and
completely unaware of the complex
world beneath their feet.
Myra
stared into the depths
of the pool for a long time. She reached into her
pocket and brought out three
matchsticks. She tossed them in the blue water, where
they bobbed and spun.
“Hey,
lady! Don’t throw
trash in there! Can’t you read?” said a man just
behind her.
“I
guess some people don’t
give a hoot,” said an old woman to her right.
“It’s
people like that who
ruin it for the rest of us,” added the woman’s
companion, who was equally old
and dressed entirely in pink.
“Hey,
are you okay?” asked a
man with a friendly voice.
“Hmm?”
said Myra, wiping
tears from her eyes. No one else seemed to have seen
the small, blue hand break
the surface of the water and gather up the matches. A
moment later, when the
curtain of steam drew back with the breeze coming off
the lake, Myra glimpsed
him again, a little boy-shape clinging to the rocks by
the cave entrance, deep
underwater. He smiled at her, clutching the match
sticks to his chest.
“I
said, are you okay?
You’re crying.”
Steam
once again covered the
surface of Blue Lizard Pool, obscuring her view, but
Myra had seen enough. She
glanced up at the man with the friendly voice.
“Yes,”
she said. “I'm okay.”
END
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