Eric Puchner - Model Home

Major Meltdown scowled. “I thought we agreed to take collective responsibility.”

“Excuse me. Are we forgetting.” Captain Lobo glanced back at them, smiling his planktony grin. His mouth was a museum of gunk. Jonas liked him because he spoke like one of Lyle’s T-shirts, behaving as though he made perfect sense. Don’t feed the spectators, he’d say, or It’s the logicians versus the magicians. He was fond of this last saying and had already repeated it twice while they were driving. “Anyway, we’ve got the changeling. Commercially untapped.”

Griselda stopped her chair in midswivel, patting her knee and snapping her fingers as though she were calling a dog.

“A brilliant idea!” Captain Lobo said.

Before long they turned down a side street and parked in front of a quiet house with plastic animals grazing in the yard. Jonas had no idea where he was. He didn’t mind not knowing and in fact preferred being lost. Amazingly, neither Captain Lobo nor Major Meltdown had asked him anything about his family. He’d woken up in their bed, a possible criminal, and they’d anointed him with a piece of gum.

None of them had called him “weird” even once or blamed him for their problems. If they had problems, they did not seem to care what they were.

Captain Lobo got out of the RV, grabbing an old leash from the back, and the three of them walked with him around the corner and stopped behind a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that said IF THESE ARE MY GOLDEN YEARS I AM SOOOO FUCKED. Jonas noticed that Captain Lobo was no longer wearing his werewolf paw. He squinted at an old woman at the end of the block. She was sitting in a lawn chair, smoking a cigarette while a tractor sprinkler battered her window, its wheels stuck in the grass. Captain Lobo squatted to Jonas’s height and asked if he’d like to partake in a theatrical improvisation.

“You’ve lost a puppy,” he explained, “so your principal function is to look sad.”

Jonas squinched up his eyes and did his best to look miserable. While Griselda and Major Meltdown waited behind the pickup, Captain Lobo grabbed Jonas’s hand and walked him down the block to the old woman smoking in a lawn chair. She was wearing a red bathing suit with a little skirt attached. Her naked arms, sag ging in folds, made Jonas think of scrambled eggs. Captain Lobo greeted her kindly and explained that their puppy had run away. “A little black Lab,” he said, lifting the leash. “Randy here says he saw it run into your backyard.”

“I’ve been lying here like a dog myself. Getting my daily vitamins.” She took off her sunglasses and peered at Jonas strangely, eyeing the gum in his hair. He was aware of the purple flowers embroidering his jeans. “Does your son need to use the bathroom?”

“No, no. He’s just upset.” Captain Lobo glanced at the screen door of the house. “Your husband? Might he have seen him?”

“Stanley passed last June. Pancreatic cancer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’ll be a year this Sunday.”

The woman screwed her cigarette into the arm of the chair and began to cough, losing herself to a fit of hacking. By the time she’d recovered, her face was red as the bathing suit. Captain Lobo asked if anyone else lived at home and she shook her head like a lament. She leaned toward Jonas.

“What’s your puppy’s name, sweetheart?”

“Stanley,” Jonas said.

The woman recoiled. “Same as my husband’s?”

He nodded. Captain Lobo led them around the side of the house and into the backyard, a small tidy lawn bordered by a wall of hydrangea shrubs. Jonas wished he hadn’t said “Stanley,” but he couldn’t think of anything else and it was the first name that had come to mind. Draping the leash around his neck, Captain Lobo waded into the shrubs at the back of the lawn, yelling the dog’s name as though he enjoyed the ambiguity. Jonas had no choice but to help out. The woman failed to join in the search and stood there on the lawn, her face growing more and more distressed. Jonas waited for the game to be over, wanting to leave the old woman alone, but Captain Lobo tramped farther into the bushes.

“Must have run off,” the woman said, glancing at her watch. “Your Labrador.”

“Poodle, you mean,” Captain Lobo said.

She looked at Jonas for a second. “You called it a Labrador before. I’m certain of it. I remember because of Blackie, our old Lab in Port Townsend.”

“Perhaps you’re right then,” Captain Lobo said. “To be honest, we’re none too impressed by Stanley’s pedigree. Among other things, he licks his own balls.”

The woman stepped back. “I don’t know who you are, but I’ve had just about enough of this. You’re trampling my hydrangeas.”

“Where are you going?”

“If you’re not gone in two minutes I’m phoning the police.”

She started up the stairs to the deck. Captain Lobo came out of the bushes and jogged over and grabbed the woman by the elbow, yanking her off the steps. It was like someone picking something from their soup. The woman leaned over and began to hack, dangling by one arm. She coughed so hard her teeth shot out of her mouth. Captain Lobo let go and she sat down on the lawn next to them, her legs splayed like a marionette’s.

“I wish it wasn’t like this,” he explained to her, brushing the hair out of her face, “but increasingly it is.”

He told Jonas to make sure she didn’t move and then disappeared into the back door of the house. The old woman began to cry. Jonas did not know what to do. A yellow jacket landed on her head, its tiny butt twitching, but she did not move and only whimpered to herself like a prayer. “Stan,” she seemed to be saying, though he couldn’t be sure. Jonas picked the woman’s dentures off the lawn, thinking he might put them back into her mouth, but she did not seem to care one way or another.

When Captain Lobo came back to retrieve him, he was carrying a piggy bank under one arm like a football. Griselda and Major Meltdown were already in the RV, sweaty and excited, the backpack sitting beside them on the couch. It was stuffed so full the zipper wouldn’t close. They screeched out of the neighborhood and back onto a bigger street, driving some time before pulling behind a deserted-looking church with a sign in changeable letters that said THE ONLY VITAMIN FOR CHRISTIANZ IS B1. Griselda unzipped the backpack and dumped out a pile of stuff, necklaces and earrings and a big book that looked like a photo album filled with strange silver coins.

“Fuckin’ A,” Captain Lobo said. “Stanley the manly.”

“Please watch your language,” Major Meltdown said, pointing at the sign. “We’re at a house of God.”

“For an avenger of the poor, he’s sure got a lot of houses.” Captain Lobo glanced at Jonas. “You’re not experiencing some remorse for the logicians, are you? Just remember we’re dead.”

Jonas didn’t know what he was experiencing. He kept thinking of the woman’s teeth on the lawn, her mouth sucked in and punched-looking. He squeezed his eyes tight and curled up into a ball on the sofa, wishing he really were dead.

“Meltdown,” Captain Lobo said.

“At your service.”

“No, I think the boy’s having one.”

Griselda wrapped him in a dusty blanket and enclosed him in her arms. She smelled like a cave: dank and pleasant and gleaming with secret drips. Captain Lobo and Major Meltdown leaned down, too, and the three of them hugged him, smooshing him into the couch. Jonas felt squished and valuable. They hugged him for a long time. Griselda leaned back and signed something with her hands, wiggling a downturned finger as if she were trying to pet a fly in midair.

“She’s saying we need you,” Captain Lobo said, kissing his forehead. “The trolls can’t have you back.”