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“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?”

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.

“Why does he do that?” Hector asked, flinching.

“Weren't you listening?” Dustin said. “Comanches can't enter the spirit world without eyes. Now he has to wander between the winds.”

“Wow. That's pretty harsh.”

Dustin looked to see if Hector was joking. He was not used to this sort of sincerity, especially when it came to John Wayne movies. Lyle would have made some snide remark:
Between
the winds? Isn't it warmer that way anyway?
It was one of the reasons he could stand being around Hector. The other was that he didn't try to sugarcoat Dustin's life; when Dustin described how miserable his arm was, how he just wanted to chop it off, Hector never did anything to suggest he was exaggerating but in fact looked as stricken as if it were his own arm being discussed. Unlike everyone else, he never acted as though Dustin was wrong to feel sorry for himself.