Eric Puchner - Model Home

Somehow, though, it hadn’t been enough. Ever since he was a kid, he’d imagined leaving Wisconsin: his father’s illness, the smell of gas that lingered on his mother’s skin, even in the mornings — they seemed to be a part of the landscape itself, as inescapable as the lakes and moraines and snow-flattened cornfields. The westerns he’d watched while his mother worked the swing shift had proffered another world, one filled with sun and dust and violence, a life of monumental dreams. He remembered the day Larry had invited him out to California. It had been the middle of a bitter winter — he’d spent the day before shoveling the driveway in zero-degree wind — and Larry had called him from the car phone in his Alfa to tell him about the “golden egg” he’d found in the desert. Warren had thought he was shouting through a blizzard before realizing the top was down. When Warren landed in L.A., groggy from an in-flight nap, he was amazed to see that the baggage handlers were wearing shorts. He had to shake his head to make sure he was truly awake. He had the same feeling touring Herradura Estates for the first time, seeing all the sprawling ranch-style houses, their corrals and barns and glacier blue pools, the horse trails twining through a canyon of scarlet flowers. For the first time Warren understood the difference between being well-off and being rich. The real estate agent showed him the cheapest house on the market, well beyond what he could afford. Warren didn’t care. He raided stock intended for their retirement, a taste of the pillaging to come. That his family hadn’t dreamed of such a life was further incentive to give it to them.

At home, Dustin and his friend Mark Biesterman were blocking the driveway, hosing off their surfboards. Dustin’s beautiful girlfriend sat on the lawn in shorts and a bikini top. The two of them were so clearly in love that it flooded Warren with nostalgia. They blinked at him as he got out of the car. The hose drooped in Dustin’s hand, a stream of water gushing down one leg.

“Wow, Mr. Ziller,” Kira said.

Mark Biesterman nodded, impressed. “I like your do. I mean, it really interrogates the whole notion of ‘hair.’”

“It was a mistake,” Warren explained.

“No sense regretting it. To thine own self be true.”

Through the carport, jutting beyond the corner of the house, was the open end of a truck. The mud flaps of the truck said FLEGEL’S HOME FURNISHINGS. Warren looked back at Dustin, who was still drenching his own leg with the hose.

“Dad, what happened to your head?”

“You let men into the house?”

“They said they’re here for the furniture. I opened the garage for them.” Dustin shrugged. “Did Mom buy some new stuff?”

Warren went inside the house, ducking through the front door. The foyer smelled like cigarettes. Near the living room he found two men in baseball caps, corseted in weight belts, carrying the leather sofa toward the garage. The man facing Warren started. He studied Warren carefully and then lowered his end of the couch, as though trying not to disturb a predator.

“That’s my sofa,” Warren said.

This seemed to boost the man’s confidence. He reached into his back pocket and flourished a folded piece of paper, a medical bracelet sliding up one wrist. A tattoo on his biceps said DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR. “Warren Ziller? We have authorization here to retrieve five items of furniture. One Stewart sofa in Bookle Mushroom, one Boone recliner in Leisure Mocha, two Ezra chairs in Whispy Bronze, and one Noguchi cocktail table.”

“Get out of my house,” Warren said quietly.

“This isn’t bouclé,” the other guy said, looking at the sofa. Warren could see his belly button, tumescent as a pregnant woman’s, peeking above his weight belt.

“What?”

“It’s black leather.”

“Says here Stewart in Bookle Mushroom.”

“Must be a mistake. Only Pattersons come in bouclé.”

“Excuse me. Boo- clay .” The guy with the bracelet snorted.

“It’s French.”

“Forgivez-moi, Monsieur Sofa Expert.”

Warren stepped forward, raising his voice. “I said, get out of my house.”

“We’ll be out of your life forever, Mr. Ziller. Soon as we clear this up.”

The man with the bracelet glanced around the hallway before going into the living room and picking up the phone that was sitting on the floor. Warren did not remember leasing the phone table. He stared at the man’s tattoo as he dialed. It seemed pro foundly inaccurate. He sidestepped the couch and headed for the garage. The door was open, the Flegel’s truck backed up to the line of shade crossing the driveway. Feeling ill, Warren squeezed past the Deadbeats’ drum set and a forgotten pogo stick and edged into the cluttered reaches of the garage. Cobwebs tickled his face. He stopped at the metal cabinet fastened with a rusty padlock in the corner. He had to try the combination twice; his hands were shaking too much to find the numbers.

His father’s guns were leaning in a pile. Carefully, Warren took one out, laid it on the ground, and unzipped the leather case. A Browning. It smelled of mildew and something worse, like urine. The barrel was corroded with rust, but he recognized the 12-gauge from when he was a kid. He used to watch his father clean it after hunting trips, hunched prayerfully over the parts, polishing each bolt and O-ring with a rag. Kneeling, Warren took the shotgun out of the case and hefted it in his arms. Some pellets fell out of the barrel and littered the ground. Mouse turds. How resourceful, to live in a gun. It made a kind of sense. Warren opened the breech of the Browning and looked inside. It wasn’t loaded, of course, but the men in his house wouldn’t know that.

He remembered something from law school, the Castle Doctrine: if a stranger broke into your home, you could lawfully respond with deadly force.

Warren closed the action of the Browning and then stood up. His head felt clear, empty with purpose. He looked up and saw Jonas watching him from the middle of the garage, his eyes shifting between the gun and Warren’s haircut.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

Warren lowered the shotgun, blinking at his son. Jonas was not dressed in orange but was wearing his Izod inside out, the crime-scene outline of an alligator on his chest. Warren had the sudden, abysmal feeling that he’d left nothing of value in the world. From the living room, he could hear the man with the tattoo talking on the phone.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just looking at your grandfather’s guns.”

Jonas regarded him skeptically. “There are some guys in the house.”

“Yes. There are.”

“What are they doing?”

“Taking the furniture back.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Warren frowned. “They believe it belongs to them.”

Jonas seemed to accept this. Warren had an image of his own father sitting on the roof, gun cleaved to his lap, casing the sky for Santa Claus’s sleigh. He took his finger from the Browning’s trigger.

“Are you going to kill them?” Jonas asked.

“No.”

He seemed disappointed. “You’ll have to dispose of the bodies. There’s an old incinerator behind the Hathaways’ barn, but I don’t think it works.”

“I’m not a murderer, Jonas.”

“Are they going to take Mom’s car, too?”

Warren stared at his son. The boy knew much more than he pretended. Warren wondered if it was lonely to be so strange. He felt strange and lonely himself. Not for the first time, he wondered why he was so much more wrapped up in Dustin than in this macabre and friendless child. Maybe it was the charge that Dustin gave off, a crackle of power; watching him in the garage, basking in the cockiness of his music, Warren couldn’t help feeling that everything would be okay. Or perhaps this was a rationalization: he’d been smitten with Dustin from the day he was born. The truth was Jonas had never evoked the same woozy wonderment. Warren wanted to hug the child in front of him, to say something that would make everything all right, but couldn’t imagine what on earth that would be.