Eric Puchner - Model Home

A sweet, murky warmth entered Dustin’s mouth. No one helped him up. He stumbled through the crowd — a sea of wheeling faces — until he found his way out of the party, collapsing on the curb under an arc lamp, his jaw throbbing to his pulse. He spat into the street: a gobbet of blood. The world seemed brighter somehow, more colorful, as though he’d stepped from a cave. He took off his glove and scratched at his hand. He didn’t know how long he sat there; he could hear the band start up again, Biesty’s peppy voice singing, There’s some integrity on my clothes, and I can’t get it off.

“That was quite a performance.”

Dustin looked up to see two girls in front of him. The two girls merged into one, a fuzzy teenager in a Billabong sweatshirt and rubber thongs. Except for the beach clothes, and for the fact that her hair was blond, she looked suspiciously like Taz.

“You’re not who I think,” he said angrily.

“How do you know?”

“What happened to your wuzzit? Witch’s forelock?”

“I dyed it.”

He peered at her again, squinching his eyes to bring her into focus. She seemed nervous, fingering the little mole on her lip and trying not to stare at his face. Same as everyone. He realized with dismay that his sunglasses were gone. Somewhere inside his drunkenness Dustin felt a hopeless poof! In his fantasies, replayed often in his mind, she’d looked him straight in the face and spoke to him like she used to, insulting as ever, unashamed of his ugliness. He asked her what she was doing here.

“Mark called. He said you were coming.”

“Biesty? You’re pals now?”

“He called me out of the blue, pretending to be a youth minister. That’s what he told my mom.”

“You look like a cheerleader or something,” Dustin said.

Taz frowned. “It was supposed to be a surprise. That I was coming. He said you’d told him about us.” She stared at her feet. “He wanted me to see you.”

“Well, here I am. How do I look?”

She shrugged miserably. “Honestly? I didn’t recognize you.”

Dustin frowned. He wanted the truth, and he didn’t want it at the same time. He was hoping Taz would go away, return to the drunkenness she’d stepped out of, but she sat down on the curb beside him. Her new hair made her seem bland and chirpy; she looked like she’d maybe gained some weight. It was all fucked, everything: nothing ever stayed the way you wanted it. He itched so badly he wanted to cry. Then he did start to cry. He couldn’t help it. Taz stared at him finally, her eyes damp and serious. Dustin wanted her pity at the same time that it infuriated him.

“Leave me alone,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Fuck off! Do you need me to write it down?”

Taz stood up. Her rubber thongs slapped down the sidewalk, in time with Biesty’s music. Dustin wanted to call her back, to apologize for his own misery, but couldn’t bear the thought of her watching him cry from one eye.

Jonas could tell that his family hated him. They didn’t mean to hate him, but the truth seeped out anyway. It was there in the mornings when Jonas ate his granola, his father eyeing him too long as he picked out the dates. It was there in the afternoons, leaking through Dustin’s door like the sound of the TV. It was there in Lyle’s never wanting to play Risk or Stratego with him even though she spent most of the time staring zombielike at the ceiling. It was there in the evenings, when Jonas’s mother snapped at him for leaving the microwave open, weary and brittle-voiced and wishing he were a cigarette.

How different this voice was than the one in his head, playing over and over again even in his sleep. Don’t forget to turn off the stove. He could hear them perfectly: his mom’s garbled words, thick with marshmallow. Sometimes he could even see his fingers on the knob, turning it until the flame went out, clear as the image from a movie. He could remember doing this. But he hadn’t, it was a lie, his brother’s face was burned up. Your brain could convince you of anything.

Most days he spent roaming the desert. It was a relief to be free of school, that gloomy place where the teachers wore shorts and his locker was so hot he had to open it with a sock over his hand, where no one spoke to him except the garbled voice in his head and he’d somehow completed his transformation into a ghost. In the desert, at least, there were extraordinary things. There were scorpions eating each other. There were rats hopping around like kangaroos. There were wasps dragging tarantulas around by the leg. There were snake skins dried into paper, bird nests as small as contact lenses, lizard skeletons dangling from creosote bushes, delicate as ice. Once, not far from the house, he saw a roadrunner go after a rattlesnake, its right wing extended like a matador’s cape. When the snake lunged, the roadrunner snapped up its tail and then cracked it like a whip, slamming its head against the ground — over and over — to bash its skull.

Jonas liked to stand as still as he could in the broiling sun, pretending to be a bush. He was a convincing plant. Maybe too convincing: one day a scarlet hummingbird flew right up to his face and fed out of the corner of his eye, its tiny tongue licking his eyeball. It felt pleasant and appalling at the same time. Afterward, Jonas couldn’t shake the sensation that his eyes were flowers, in bloom fifteen hours a day.

“A hummingbird licked my eyeball,” he told his sister later. She was sitting on the couch in the living room, reading a book called The Spy Who Came in from the Cold . Jonas tried to imagine a world in which it was colder outside the house than in. He’d found a rusty pair of roller skates in the desert and was strapping them onto his sneakers, amazed that they fit.

“Is that some kind of code?” Lyle asked.

“No.”

“Does it mean, like, ‘The East Germans have recovered the microfilm’?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Jonas said.

She returned to her book, her face slack with disappointment. It was the same look she always had, as if she were melting of boredom and you were somehow contributing to her liquefaction. Jonas roller-skated into the kitchen, where his mother was cleaning out the refrigerator. Even though it was Saturday, it was startling to see her home in the middle of the day. “A hummingbird licked my eyeball.”

“That’s nice, dear.”

“I think it was after the salt.”

She shook a carton of orange juice. “You’re going to be licking each other’s eyeballs, if your father can’t find the precious time to buy a little food. And look at all this beer! How much beer does he want Dustin to drink?”

“I found some roller skates, too,” Jonas said.

“Jonas, please go ask your father what he expects us to eat for dinner.”

Jonas nodded. He skated down to his father’s room, leaving little train tracks on the runner in the hallway. His father was lying in bed with a pen in his hand, a newspaper spread across his knees. He did his best to smile at Jonas when he stumped into his room. He hated Jonas even more than Dustin did, which was why he was always trying to smile at him.

“Outdoor youth counselor,” his father said, shaking his head. “Three ads in a row. What the hell’s an outdoor youth?”

“Mom wants to know what you expect us to eat for dinner, since all you buy is beer.”

“Oh, is that what she said?”

Jonas nodded. He sometimes exaggerated his mom’s messages: it made his father hang on his words in an appealing way. “A hummingbird licked my eyeball.”

“Please go ask your mother if she’s ever been in a burn unit with forty percent burns, and been in too much pain to hold her own penis, and then come home and wanted some beer at the supermarket, and then was her father — her own flesh and blood — petty enough after what she’d been through to deny her the chance to drink a measly goddamn Budweiser when she wanted to?”