Eric Puchner - Model Home

Jonas skated back to the kitchen. Since his parents had stopped talking to each other, it was not unusual for them to communicate in this way. Jonas was happy enough to help — it made him feel needed — but recently the messages had become angrier and more difficult to remember. He relayed his dad’s question as best he could, leaving out the part about Dustin’s penis. His mother’s face, still peering into the refrigerator, reddened. “If he’s asking would I willingly turn myself into an alcoholic, on top of the rest of my problems, then the answer is no.” She closed the fridge. “No milk even! Are you supposed to put beer in your granola?”

“The answer is no,” Jonas reported to his father.

“No what?”

“She’s not an alcoholic.”

“What the hell is she talking about?”

“She’s also wondering if you’re giving me beer for breakfast.”

“Yes! It’s our major staple! Breakfast, lunch, and dinner!” He grabbed an open can of Budweiser off the bedside table and handed it to Jonas. “Do me a favor,” his dad said. “Go in there and take a big swig in front of your mother. Chug the thing and lick your lips. Will you do that?”

Jonas skated back to the kitchen, some beer sloshing on his hand as he teetered off the runner. He had never drunk beer before and did not particularly want to try it, but felt he could not disappoint his father. He waited for his mom to look up and then lifted the Budweiser to his lips, closing his eyes in order to mask the flavor. It tasted so bad — tinny and bitter — that he almost gagged.

“Did your father put you up to that?” his mother said. She looked furious.

Jonas nodded. His mother began to say something but then stopped in midsentence, her eyes snagging on Jonas’s roller skates. Her face softened suddenly, emerging from its frown. It was like seeing someone unzip from a costume. Silently, she took the can of beer from his hand and poured it down the drain, bent over the sink as though she didn’t want to show Jonas her face.

He left the kitchen and skated past his father’s room — his dad stood eagerly in the doorway, awaiting his mother’s message — and headed out through the garage. The image of his dad’s grimly hopeful face made Jonas’s stomach hurt. He knew that he was the cause of his parents’ unhappiness. To distract himself, he unbuckled his roller skates and left them by his Schwinn Traveler in the driveway. The silver bell on the handlebar sparkled in the sun, too blinding to look at. It was a strange thing to have a bike in a place with only one block, because you could only ever ride it back and forth. The bell, too, was a bit of a conundrum. There were no pedestrians, the block was utterly, echoingly empty, so the bell’s being there at all seemed like a philosophical question.

Sometimes Jonas would ring it anyway, feeling a forlorn tringling in his heart.

Gingerly, he climbed onto the scalding bike, tugging his shorts down to protect his thighs. The seat burned him even through his shorts. He stood up on the pedals, ringing the bell as he rode down the block. It echoed off the empty homes. He sometimes imagined that if he rang the bell loud enough, the front doors would fling open and the street would fill with children, an avenue of toys, Wiffle bats and skateboards and Big Wheels with rainbow-colored seaweed sprouting from the handles. But they didn’t appear, and he felt more than ever like a ghost. Once he’d ridden up and down the block a hundred times, just for the hell of it, but there was no one to witness his accomplishment and he began to wonder if he’d really done it.

Jonas ditched his bike at the edge of the block and wandered back into the desert. He missed fencing practice. He missed watching videos with his family and throwing popcorn at the screen. He missed eating breakfast together in their old kitchen, missed playing Monopoly and Battleship and Connect Four, missed the way Lyle and Dustin laughed when he talked about the fast foods he was going to invent, like the Jelly Doughnut Dog. Mostly he missed his mother, who sometimes didn’t get home until after his bedtime. There were days he didn’t see her at all. But it was his fault she had to drive so far to work — his fault all these things were gone — so he deserved to wander the desert like an animal.

A hawk circled far above him, looking for food. Jonas was jealous that its wanderings had a purpose. He decided to pray to Mandy Rogers. He did not know when he’d started praying to her: last year sometime, after they’d found her cut up in pieces and planted in someone’s garden. It was a creepy habit, but Jonas couldn’t help it. Sometimes he imagined a garden of body parts sprouting from the earth, little toes and fists opening to the sun.

He wanted his family to stop hating him, so he prayed for something that would help them forgive him. Exactly what this would be, or where he might find it, Jonas could not imagine.

He roamed farther into the desert, treading softly so as not to scare anything off. Many strange things presented themselves — a lizard puffed up like a balloon, a heap of tiny ant wings — but nothing that seemed to answer his prayer.

For several days, returning home only for meals, Jonas searched. He had nothing else to do and remembered that Jesus had roamed the desert for forty nights. In a backpack, he carried water, Slim Jims, and a Swiss Army knife in case he got bitten by a snake. His lips chapped so badly they started to scab. He began to have trouble distinguishing between his thoughts and the hot breeze sipping at his ear. It wasn’t like the loneliness he felt at home: it was large and breathable and seemed almost like companionship, since everything else was breathing it as well.

On the third day, he discovered a pile of trash out near the freeway. Jonas had come across these piles before, heaps of abandoned things: old TVs and car batteries and once a plastic Jacuzzi tub, sitting there as if dropped from a plane. This pile was different, however. There was something unsavory about it. There was a fish tank with some sizzled-looking plants inside, a tricycle with the price tag still attached to it, a dollhouse with a hunting knife sticking out of its roof. It looked like maybe whoever had dumped these things was not the true owner. Jonas found an acoustic guitar under the tricycle, its neck broken cleanly in two. The neck dangled by one string, like a trout. On the body of the guitar was a bumper sticker that said FINISH YOUR BEER: THERE’S SOBER KIDS IN INDIA.

Jonas rescued the broken guitar from the pile, wondering if Mandy Rogers had answered his prayer. He’d had something a bit more biblical in mind. Still, Dustin had sold his guitar; if Jonas could fix this one up, return it to good-enough shape, his brother might start playing again. He’d stop watching TV all the time, he’d join a band again, Jonas’s family would rejoice. Anything was possible.

On his way home, passing the dump, Jonas peered through the fence and saw a coyote crouched on the embankment of the toxic pond, licking its own reflection. The coyote’s ass was missing all its fur. It looked like a French poodle. It stopped drinking and gazed at Jonas for a minute, eyes crazed and bloodshot. Jonas held up the guitar, and the coyote seemed to approve. Then it ran at the fence and scaled it almost in a single leap, scrambling over the top and racing off into the desert.

Ethan shot the dead Comanche’s eyes out, which really put a scorpion up the reverend’s ass. Everyone in The Searchers had a scorpion up their ass, which was why Dustin admired it. He rewound the tape and watched Ethan shoot the Comanche’s eyes out again, impressed by the placidity of John Wayne’s face.