Eric Puchner - Model Home

“Something weird’s going on with Dad,” he said, glancing at Lyle, who was wearing a T-shirt that said MURDER IS A FAUX PAS. She hadn’t bothered to wash her hair, which hung over her eyes in greasy red strings. “He’s always, like, hanging out in the garage.”

“Maybe he misses the Chrysler,” she said.

“No. I mean, he just sits there with this stupid expression, like he wants to hug me or something.”

“Mom’s the same way,” Lyle said. “Especially when she looks at endangered sea otters.”

“I’m being serious.”

Lyle nodded. “Actually, I saw him last night. Doing the laundry.”

“What?”

“Uh-huh. A big load of whites. It was three in the morning.”

“Are you sure it was him?”

“Well, he was wearing boat shoes.”

“I can’t imagine him doing the wash at all,” Dustin said.

“Exactly! A pod person!” Lyle peered into the backseat. “Jonas, you’re the genius. What do you think’s wrong with Dad?”

Jonas shrugged. “He’s addicted to heroin and his veins have collapsed?”

“Where does he get these ideas?” Dustin said happily.

“Gee, I don’t know. I’m sure Mom’s videos have nothing to do with it.”

Lyle pretended to shoot a needle into her neck, tongue lolling from her mouth. Dustin laughed. They had fun at home, giving their mom a hard time or pretending their dad had gone deaf, talking to him sotto voce, but he and his sister never hung out together for real. It amazed Dustin to think how close they’d been as kids in Wisconsin, playing Pounce for hours on the bed or making tape recordings of made-up poems or selling Country Time lemonade to their neighbors in Nashotah, palming it off as homemade and making a killing. One summer they spent hours at a time inside the pink, echoey, breezeless cave of a flipped-over raft in the lake: it was like being behind an eyelid, or in the same luminous, too-loud brain. It was there, hidden under the raft, that they’d started playing Cats vs. Dogs. It was World War III and they had to decide what things to let into their bomb shelter; for every thing they saved there was something else they had to leave out, dooming it to extinction. Frogs were safe but not toads. Milkshakes but not banana splits. The Beatles but not the Rolling Stones. Lyle loved the game and insisted on playing it every chance they got. Dustin couldn’t imagine playing anything like it with her now. She hated everything; there’d be nothing, no one worth saving.

At the library, Lyle got out of the car without saying good-bye and strode off in her baggy T-shirt, eager to get to her books. His friends called her the She-Yeti. What bugged him more than the nickname was that they used it in front of him, as though his sister was so white and abominable he wouldn’t possibly object. Dustin had stuck up for her more than once, surprised by his own anger. Though he’d never tell her this, Dustin sort of admired her: she dressed the way she pleased and didn’t worry about being tan or popular.

At Rat Beach, Dustin parked the car in the shade of a eucalyptus and walked down the dirt trail with Jonas, who hadn’t brought a bathing suit with him or for that matter even shorts. As usual, the beach itself was nearly deserted. He loved everything about it. He loved parading down to his favorite spot, skirting the breakwater where the sand wouldn’t fry his feet to a crisp, the sexy-looking moms glancing up from their kids to watch him laze by. He loved the soreness in his face from the salt. He loved the lifeguard stand boarded up and gone to rot. He loved, when he walked, the way the sand fleas rose in front of his feet before he stepped, psychically attuned to his stride, as if there were an invisible person walking in front of him. He loved the seagulls, the mellow swells, the sun top-browning the water into three feet of delicious warmth.

He found Kira’s radio and towel and then saw Kira herself, walking back from the Snack Shack with a frozen Snickers bar, its wrapper torn down like a banana peel. Her long brown hair was frizzled from the ocean. She smiled at him and Jonas, a rabbity two-teethed grin that drove Dustin crazy and often haunted his dreams. They’d been seeing each other for close to a year.

“Who are you supposed to be?” she asked Jonas, staring at his clothes. Jonas had laid his towel in the sand and was standing beside it, like a butler awaiting a command.

“A human being,” he said.

“Right. Stupid me. Do you always go to the beach in corduroys?”

Jonas thought about this — or seemed to. It was hard to know. “No,” he said. “Sometimes I go to the mall.”

Kira looked at Dustin, who raised his eyebrows to indicate they’d entered the Jonas Zone and all present dispatches were useless. She really seemed to like his weirdo brother, a first in terms of his romantic history. “Do you think we’ll have freaky kids?” she asked, leaning into Dustin’s ear.

“Like deformed ones?”

“Ha ha.” She kissed his cheek. “I just pray they get my brains.”

“Good thinking,” Dustin said. “If they were too smart, we wouldn’t be able to sell them to the circus.”

She punched his shoulder but couldn’t help laughing. Just for kicks, Dustin imagined what their marriage might be like, how he’d be a lauded figure in the history of L.A. punk and they’d live in a bungalow in the Hollywood Hills, where he’d write his critically acclaimed songs in the bathtub. And being married meant they could screw whenever they wanted. That was one thing, to be honest, he could really get into. Right now their sex life was a little bit unfulfilled. Actually, it was an exercise in major suffering. They’d be going hot and heavy in the backseat of the Dart or on the Shackneys’ living room couch or on the dewy black tarp of their trampoline, dry-humping until Dustin’s dick was chafed, until his pain and pleasure zones were thoroughly confused, but when it came to the magic moment — the unfastening of Kira’s jeans — there was always the Grip, the hand that came down to stop him with a gentle, proprietary squeeze. That would be that, end of story, go back to Dustinville. Other girls had aimed the Grip at him before, and he’d protested with a fierceness that surprised even him. But Kira was different. She was the real thing, maybe the love of his life, and he was willing to wait until she was ready.

Now, perhaps to torture him, Kira stripped down to her bikini bottoms, bending over to pull her gym shorts leisurely down her knees, a sight that should be in The Guinness Book of World Records for most incredible boyfriend perk. She squirted some sunscreen on her arm and started to rub it into her skin.

“You look like a corpse,” she said to Jonas, who was lying fully clothed on his towel with his eyes shut.

“Thank you,” he said. Kira glanced at Dustin. “Actually, corpses don’t think.”

“If you’re not a corpse, what are you thinking?”

“Don’t start,” Dustin said.

Jonas opened his eyes. “Do you really want to know,” he said suspiciously, “or are you just making small talk?”

“I really want to know.”

“I was thinking about whether it was worse to be eaten by sharks or to get picked apart by vultures, I mean if you’re too weak to move and not fully dead.”

Kira frowned, snapping the lotion shut. “Jonas, you’re eleven years old. You should be worrying about, like, if gerbils go to heaven.”

Jonas chose to ignore this. Nearby, beyond a raft of seagulls, Dustin could see two kids about Jonas’s age playing in the sand. One was buried up to his head like a mummy while the other constructed a towering penis at his crotch, running down to the water and bringing back cups of wet sand to gigantify its length. “Holy crud!” the buried kid was shouting. “She’s gonna collapse!” Dustin loved Jonas as he was but wished sometimes he’d build sand penises and say things like “holy crud” instead of worrying about being eaten to death. Lately he’d begun knocking on Dustin’s door at odd times of the day, asking if he would help him practice a fencing move or decorate some pointless card to Mandy Rogers. It made Dustin sad, that Jonas seemed so alone, but he didn’t have time to be the kid’s parent.