Eric Puchner - Model Home

“One thing I’ve never figured out,” the man sitting across from Warren said. He was slurping at a miniature box of Frosted Flakes, which he’d filled with milk from one of those school-sized cartons. He’d requested them — both the milk and the cereal — from one of the officers on duty. Drunkenly, the man flashed the box at Warren, Tony the Tiger grinning maniacally over a bowl of corroded-looking flakes. “Why’s he wearing a bandanna around his neck?”

“Who?”

“The tiger. I mean, who the fuck wears a bandanna around their neck?”

“I don’t know,” Warren said, directing his gaze to the steel toilet in the corner. A pubic hair sat on the rim, coiled like a tiny spring. He wanted to enjoy his arrest — the nadir of his life thus far — in peace.

“Fuck me,” the man said. He thrust the box at Warren, as though he were showing him a photo of his wife. “It’s monogrammed! Tell me that isn’t a little T-O-N-Y I’m seeing.”

The man seemed to be waiting for a response, a trickle of milk leaking down his chin. Warren had no choice but to look: sure enough, the tiger’s name was sewn into the bandanna, proof of his aristocratic tastes. Clearly, he was imparting a message to the less privileged of the world. If we all knew our place, we wouldn’t pretend to be rich or break into our neighbors’ homes and steal their belongings. Burglary in the first degree . That’s what the guy taking Warren’s fingerprints had typed into the booking sheet. When Warren asked why it was first degree, he’d looked at him as though he were a dim-witted child and said, “If you’d wanted second, you should have broken into a Radio Shack.”

Warren had had plenty of time to ponder his crime. He’d worried the cops would come last night, scared they’d find Dustin on drugs and arrest him, too — but they hadn’t shown up until this afternoon. Twelve hours of sleepless jitters. Mercifully, there hadn’t been a scene at the house. They’d asked Warren to come down to the station, politely, and led him out to the squad car without making a fuss. On a scale of degrading events, it could certainly have been worse. There could have been tears or guns or handcuffs. Still, degradation was one of those things, like coffins, that didn’t need a lot of extras. Walking down the driveway, slumped and frightened, he’d glanced back at the house in time to see Dustin emerge from the garage, gripping his guitar by the neck, a guitar pick glimmering in his teeth. Behind him were Lyle and Jonas, watching through the living room window like strangers. Warren’s consolation was that the cops didn’t know the full truth: he’d hoped that once he explained the whole story — the absurdity of stealing an answering machine from his son’s girlfriend’s parents — they’d let him off with a warning.

But when he got to the station and saw Mr. Shackney and his son waiting there as well, their faces stern and weary, he realized his mistake. This wasn’t the principal’s office. On the desk in the booking area, sealed in a plastic bag marked EVIDENCE, was Warren’s ancient slipper — the same one Mr. Leonard had once peed on as a puppy. Beside it, a little chart titled CHAIN OF POSSESSION had been meticulously filled out. This, more than anything, had alerted Warren to the seriousness of things. In hindsight, he couldn’t really blame Mr. Shackney for pressing charges. Probably it sounded worse than crazy: What kind of father would break into a man’s house at the behest of his son, a drugged-out boy who couldn’t stand his company?

The man with the cereal box got up to take a piss, forcing Warren to listen to the splash of his urine. Warren tried to imagine how he’d face Camille and tell her the truth. She would be on her way by now, probably seeing about bail at one of the gloomy places across the street. He dreaded the explanation he’d have to give, but it was also something like relief: the verifiable bottom. He could own up for good.

By the time Warren was released — an hour? two? — his cell mate had slipped into a flatulent sleep. Camille was waiting for him in the booking area. Her face looked pale and troubled, eyes rimmed with fatigue. The left corner of her mouth was smeared with lipstick, a faint blur of pink, as though she’d been kissing someone. Under different circumstances, the idea would have made Warren laugh. He could no more imagine her having an affair than he could her taking her clothes off at a party and doing the Hustle. Out of shame, he didn’t offer to hug her.

They climbed into the Volvo, Warren’s few possessions gathered in a paper bag in his lap. He felt oddly like a boy again, those dreary mornings at dawn, after his father’s death, when his mother would drive him to school in an exhausted daze. Somehow the day had turned to night, the streetlights glowing through a bank of fog. The fog thickened as they climbed into the hills of Palos Verdes. The arraignment had taken only a few minutes; Warren’s court date was set for September, a little over a month from now. Camille pulled a cigarette from her purse with one hand and lit it with the car lighter, blowing smoke out the open window, her mouth piped to one side like a seasoned smoker. She was stiff as a rod. She didn’t look at him but stared straight ahead at the spectral cone of the lights.

“We’re broke, Camille. Everything’s gone.”

She glanced at him, less alarmed than perplexed.

“The Chrysler wasn’t stolen. It was repossessed.” He stared out the window, the familiar street signs lost in the fog. “Our savings are gone. Everything. I invested every penny.”

There was a release to it, the words tumbling free. He waited for the reckoning to begin. The anger and blame and cavernous contempt. He glanced back at Camille, but she seemed to be in denial, still watching the road.

“We’re bankrupt,” he explained, more slowly. “We’ll have to move. Sell the house. God knows what else.”

Inconceivably, she laughed, a Tourette’s-like bark. They pulled up to the guardhouse, the gate opening as soon as Bud recognized them through the fog. It was so thick you could barely see the road; the houses, the toy-sprinkled lawns, seemed to have vanished. The soggy mist blew through Camille’s window and tasted like salt. Her cigarette seemed to have gone out. As they rounded a curve of John’s Canyon Road, Camille punching the car lighter in with her thumb, a shape loomed out of the fog in front of them, large as a child. Warren shouted. Camille slammed on the brakes: they bucked against their seat belts, skidding to a stop amid the tarry stench of rubber.

A peacock. It was standing, fully fanned, in the middle of the road. The green eyes of its feathers shone in the headlights, gorgeously amazed. From up close, the crown on its head looked like a tiny grove of trees. The peacock ruffled its feathers, twitching its fan back and forth before collapsing into a more plausible creature and sauntering off, dragging its long train into the fog.

Warren unclenched his hands from the bag in his lap. He’d forgotten how beautiful the birds were; when they’d first moved to California, he and Camille used to watch them breathlessly from the house, crowding the window, as if they were visitors from another planet. Now the birds had become pests, eating his flowers.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Camille. He meant for everything.

She didn’t respond. The car was in the middle of the road, but she seemed uninterested in moving it. The lighter on the dashboard popped, sounding faintly in the dark. “Are we still going camping on Saturday?” she asked.

“What?”

“The desert. Our annual vacation. Are we so broke we can’t afford oatmeal?”

Warren felt something within him lift and scatter, like birds from a tree. He could barely see her face. “I don’t know.”