Model Home (14 page)

Through the carport, jutting beyond the corner of the house, was
the open end of a truck. The mud flaps of the truck said
FLEGEL'S HOME FURNISHINGS
. Warren looked back at Dustin, who was still drenching his own leg with the hose.

“Dad, what happened to your head?”

“You let men into the house?”

“They said they're here for the furniture. I opened the garage for them.” Dustin shrugged. “Did Mom buy some new stuff?”

Warren went inside the house, ducking through the front door. The foyer smelled like cigarettes. Near the living room he found two men in baseball caps, corseted in weight belts, carrying the leather sofa toward the garage. The man facing Warren started. He studied Warren carefully and then lowered his end of the couch, as though trying not to disturb a predator.

“That's my sofa,” Warren said.

This seemed to boost the man's confidence. He reached into his back pocket and flourished a folded piece of paper, a medical bracelet sliding up one wrist. A tattoo on his biceps said
DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR
. “Warren Ziller? We have authorization here to retrieve five items of furniture. One Stewart sofa in Bookle Mushroom, one Boone recliner in Leisure Mocha, two Ezra chairs in Whispy Bronze, and one Noguchi cocktail table.”

“Get out of my house,” Warren said quietly.

“This isn't bouclé,” the other guy said, looking at the sofa. Warren could see his belly button, tumescent as a pregnant woman's, peeking above his weight belt.

“What?”

“It's black leather.”

“Says here Stewart in Bookle Mushroom.”

“Must be a mistake. Only Pattersons come in bouclé.”

“Excuse me. Boo-
clay
.” The guy with the bracelet snorted.

“It's French.”

“Forgivez-moi, Monsieur Sofa Expert.”

Warren stepped forward, raising his voice. “I said, get out of my house.”

“We'll be out of your life forever, Mr. Ziller. Soon as we clear this up.”

The man with the bracelet glanced around the hallway before going into the living room and picking up the phone that was sitting on the floor. Warren did not remember leasing the phone table. He stared at the man's tattoo as he dialed. It seemed pro
foundly inaccurate. He sidestepped the couch and headed for the garage. The door was open, the Flegel's truck backed up to the line of shade crossing the driveway. Feeling ill, Warren squeezed past the Deadbeats' drum set and a forgotten pogo stick and edged into the cluttered reaches of the garage. Cobwebs tickled his face. He stopped at the metal cabinet fastened with a rusty padlock in the corner. He had to try the combination twice; his hands were shaking too much to find the numbers.

His father's guns were leaning in a pile. Carefully, Warren took one out, laid it on the ground, and unzipped the leather case. A Browning. It smelled of mildew and something worse, like urine. The barrel was corroded with rust, but he recognized the 12-gauge from when he was a kid. He used to watch his father clean it after hunting trips, hunched prayerfully over the parts, polishing each bolt and O-ring with a rag. Kneeling, Warren took the shotgun out of the case and hefted it in his arms. Some pellets fell out of the barrel and littered the ground. Mouse turds. How resourceful, to live in a gun. It made a kind of sense. Warren opened the breech of the Browning and looked inside. It wasn't loaded, of course, but the men in his house wouldn't know that.

He remembered something from law school, the Castle Doctrine: if a stranger broke into your home, you could lawfully respond with deadly force.

Warren closed the action of the Browning and then stood up. His head felt clear, empty with purpose. He looked up and saw Jonas watching him from the middle of the garage, his eyes shifting between the gun and Warren's haircut.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

Warren lowered the shotgun, blinking at his son. Jonas was not dressed in orange but was wearing his Izod inside out, the crime-scene outline of an alligator on his chest. Warren had the sudden, abysmal feeling that he'd left nothing of value in the world. From the living room, he could hear the man with the tattoo talking on the phone.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just looking at your grandfather's guns.”

Jonas regarded him skeptically. “There are some guys in the house.”

“Yes. There are.”

“What are they doing?”

“Taking the furniture back.”

“What's wrong with it?”

Warren frowned. “They believe it belongs to them.”

Jonas seemed to accept this. Warren had an image of his own father sitting on the roof, gun cleaved to his lap, casing the sky for Santa Claus's sleigh. He took his finger from the Browning's trigger.

“Are you going to kill them?” Jonas asked.

“No.”

He seemed disappointed. “You'll have to dispose of the bodies. There's an old incinerator behind the Hathaways' barn, but I don't think it works.”

“I'm not a murderer, Jonas.”

“Are they going to take Mom's car, too?”

Warren stared at his son. The boy knew much more than he pretended. Warren wondered if it was lonely to be so strange. He felt strange and lonely himself. Not for the first time, he wondered why he was so much more wrapped up in Dustin than in this macabre and friendless child. Maybe it was the charge that Dustin gave off, a crackle of power; watching him in the garage, basking in the cockiness of his music, Warren couldn't help feeling that everything would be okay. Or perhaps this was a rationalization: he'd been smitten with Dustin from the day he was born. The truth was Jonas had never evoked the same woozy wonderment. Warren wanted to hug the child in front of him, to say something that would make everything all right, but couldn't imagine what on earth that would be.

He told Jonas to go outside and then locked the guns in the cabinet. All around him were bikes and boogie boards and barely scuffed skis. The waste of money appalled him. Inside again, Warren walked to the living room, where the two movers were cinching their belts. The guy with the belly button was grinning about something. They paid no attention to Warren. Through the panel window beside the front door he could see Dustin goofing around with the hose, cracking bullwhips of water in his girlfriend's direction.

“It's the Stewart in Bison Leather,” the guy with the bracelet said sulkily. “Frank here was right.”

“Listen,” Warren said, taking out his wallet. “The boy out there. The handsome one with curly hair. Will you tell him some better stuff's coming? Furniture? It just got delayed for a couple
weeks?” He took a ten-dollar bill from his wallet. “Make it sound that way? Like we're trading it in?”

The man stared at the ten-dollar bill, his lips thinned into a line. He glanced at his partner. Warren couldn't look them in the eye.

“Sure,” the guy said, taking the money. “No problem.”

Warren went to his room and shut the door. He lay in bed, staring at the hideous Pac-Man yawning at him from the wall. Noises echoed down the hall, a din of scrapes and thuds and voices: the sound of his house hemorrhaging around him. He felt cold and helpless but also somehow relieved, as if the worst were finally beginning.

Dustin drove down the street with Kira, headed to her house for dinner. He wished he could swing by Starhead's place and buy a gram of weed, just to get him through the night. He was happy to be ten dollars richer but still wondering why the hell the furniture guy had given him the money. “Your dad needs help,” the man had said, handing him the folded-up bill. It was strange, but then again a lot of strange things had been happening lately. The best strategy, Dustin had decided, was not to think about them too much. Case in point: he'd spent all day at the beach with Kira, knowing they were having dinner at the Shackneys', but was only now admitting to himself that Taz might not confine herself to her room.

“Is your sister going to be there?” he asked now. He was careful to avoid saying her name, not wanting to appear overly familiar. Why Kira insisted on inviting him to these family dinners he didn't fully understand, though he suspected it had something to do with impressing her parents. She'd had some bad boyfriends in the past and this was her chance to show Dustin off, like a report card. Normally, he was happy to indulge her.

“Who cares. The little bitch keeps leaving her retainer in the bathroom. In the same cup as my toothbrush.”

“She has a retainer?”

“She does it on purpose. She knows how disgusting it is.”

Dustin stared at the road. “When did she get her braces off?”

Kira frowned, uninterested in her sister's dental history. “My mom thinks she's ‘emotionally disturbed.' Sure. As long as they think she's nuts, she can do whatever she wants.”

He nodded, though he believed that “emotionally disturbed”
was probably an understatement. What kind of fifteen-year-old swallows glass to impress people? Of course, he couldn't tell Kira about the glass incident. Certainly he couldn't tell her that Taz's face had begun to disrupt his dreams, smirking at him while she squirted PAM up her nose or yanked his car apart piece by piece, smirking at him even as she kicked off her saddle shoes and began to unbuckle his eight-armed belt, engaging him in an act of statutory proportions. This particular vision had appeared to him last night. She had touched him expertly with two hands. He'd hoped, of course, never to see her outside of his dreams again—but that was clearly a fantasy.

“Anyway,” Kira said, “I think she's been sneaking out. She's always sleeping till two in the afternoon.”

“What's wrong with her ears?” Dustin asked casually. “I noticed these scabs all over them. At the beach.”

“That's one of her issues.”

“Issues?”

“She picks at them until she bleeds. Her therapist says she's got a parasuicidal condition.” They slowed for a stop sign and Kira turned to him, squeezing his thigh. Her front tooth was smudged with lipstick. “Let's not talk about her. I've been so happy lately. Thinking about our anniversary.”

Only a madman, a drunken pervert, would tarnish the purity of Kira Shackney's love by fantasizing about her little sister. Her underage sister. Who wore, he was just beginning to fathom, a
retainer.
Those things that kids wear. Those things that collect disgusting bits of food and which you occasionally see little boys licking after lunch. The party, the beer, the Butthole Surfers—all of it had conspired to make him temporarily insane. How else could he explain it?

At the sign for Hacienda de Shackney, they drove through the Old West–style gate and pulled up the long shaded driveway to the extravagant portico of the Shackneys' house. Mr. Shackney met them at the door, wiping his hands on his slacks. He had a Band-Aid on one cheek. Dustin looked at the floor so he wouldn't stare. It was one of the things he'd noticed about California, these Band-Aids on people's faces: he did not remember seeing them in Wisconsin.

“Man of the hour,” Mr. Shackney said, clapping Dustin on the back.

He led them into the kitchen, which was as large as a restaurant, and pulled out two St. Pauli Girls from the chrome Sub-Zero fridge. He handed one to Dustin, winking at him as though they were involved in some kind of shady investment. Dustin knew what was coming: the Trial by Sports. Somehow, purely by accident, he'd led Mr. Shackney to believe he was an avid sports fan. Dustin knew almost nothing about sports, but somehow this misunderstanding had persisted and it was too late to correct it. The key, he'd discovered, was to slip in the word “powerhouse.”

“What'd you think of the game last night?”

“I couldn't watch all of it.” Dustin waited, perilously, for some hint of what sport Mr. Shackney was talking about.

“When Denver missed it. Jesus. I thought that they were goners.”

“Me too.”

“Know what they need?” Mr. Shackney lowered his voice. “Someone like Noll. An X's and O's coach.”

“Yeah. You're right.”

“Miami, though. They're starting to make some noise.”

“I don't know,” Dustin said. “Denver's a powerhouse.”

Mr. Shackney slapped him on the back again, beaming. “You said it, kid. You. Said. It.”

While they waited for dinner, Dustin and Mr. Shackney sat in the living room sipping their beers, staring out at the crisply mown backyard that sloped to a tennis court at the bottom of the hill. Mr. Shackney wanted to know how his father's real estate venture was doing; Dustin tried to concentrate, but his attention kept drifting to the hallway that led unstoppably to Taz's room. It was a dark hallway, with lights that went on automatically as you made your way to the bathroom. It reminded Dustin of the reptile house at the zoo. Unless you were stoned, the effect was merely irritating. As Dustin tried to make small talk, the back door opened and Kira's little brother came clattering in with his skateboard, wearing one of those surf-wax T-shirts that said
THE BEST FOR YOUR STICK
. Unlike Jonas, he would never lack for friends or have to worry about being pantsed.

He greeted Dustin with a nod. “Why does your father have such a crappy car?”

“Brent Alexander!” Mrs. Shackney said, poking her head into
the living room. She had bionic hearing, which seemed to turn on magically like the lights. “That's completely out of line.”

“His real one got stolen,” Dustin explained.

“Sucky,” Brent said.

Mr. Shackney seemed relieved. “I'm betting that's why your dad seems a bit . . . on edge.”

Dustin felt a vague tremor of alarm, as though his dad's car loss was suckier than he'd realized, but he was too worried about Taz to investigate it. He was still clinging to some small shred of hope that she wouldn't surface. His heart sank when they sat down to eat in the dining room and he noticed six place settings at the table. Plunging his heart further was Taz herself, who emerged from the kitchen in a hooded sweatshirt and black jeans shredded at both knees, yawning as though she'd just woken up from a nap. The rips in her jeans opened and closed, like little mouths, when she walked. She flopped into her chair at the table and smirked when her eyes reached Dustin's. The witch's forelock was still there, dangling between her eyes; Dustin was hoping it would have miraculously disappeared.