And West Is West by Ron Childress Page A

not know if she likes it. Carefully she pulls up her tank top, and then Miss Shelly holds the curtain for her to exit the work space. The odor gets stronger, but strangely there is none of the usual smoke.
    â€œCannabis for Newt’s back,” explains Miss Shelly. “It’s legal. Though in the old illegal days it was easier to get. Now you got to go to LA to fill a prescription. Unless you grow your own.” She and Shelly watch as Newt inhales through one end of a long flexible tube—the other end of which he is pressing into some device with a power cord.
    â€œYep,” Newt says. “City council has banned dispensaries here.” He puts the tube down onto the display case. “I’m getting some air.”
    Using his walker Newt clomps out the front door. A fuming truck charges past and diesel mingles with the cannabis odor in the shop. And then Miss Shelly and Jessica are alone. Shelly is scratching at a crust of blood on the inside of her arm, which Jessica notices is badly scarred.
    â€œIt may look like I shoot up, but this is from dialysis. Ain’t half as much fun.”
    â€œI didn’t . . .”
    â€œOh hell, I’m no innocent.” Shelly shuts off the oxygen tank and unclips her breather. “For example, it ain’t exactly legal to share ’scripts and I don’t currently have one myself.” Shelly picks up the tube near the silver device and does what Newt had done. After exhaling she smiles at Jessica. “Likewise it would be real dumb of me to offer a customer a hit off this even if she was sore from my needlework. But that ain’t compassionate. Ever vape? Believe you me, it’s easier on the lungs than toking.”
    THE NEEDLE’S HUM goes quiet, but the tingle in Jessica’s scapula goes on, thanks to Newt’s cannabis.
    â€œFinito,”
Miss Shelly says and aims a mirror so that Jessica can view her work.
    â€œS’good,” Jessica responds. The sphinx, fiercely protecting her flank, looks livelier than it had an hour earlier as a crippled eagle. But, according to Miss Shelly’s book on classical urns, the question it asks is not the usual one a sphinx asks:
What walks from morning to night first on four legs, then two, then three?
—with the answer being
man
.
    No, the riddle Jessica’s sphinx presents is a woman, a serpent, a hill, a wick. But if the riddle is gibberish then won’t the answer be whatever she gives it? And if it’s whatever she says, then doesn’t
she
become the answer?
    â€œWhoa!” Jessica’s thoughts say loudly. Or maybe she has spoken aloud. The next thing she’ll be doing is talking about the atoms in the thumbnail of some cosmic giant who is himself an atom in the thumbnail of a giant. She notices that her cheeks ache from grinning.
    â€œStuff’s pretty potent. Hybrid. Plus the vape,” Miss Shelly says. “You okay?”
    It’s hard, but Jessica manages to form some words. “Sorry. Never really got high. Just a few times in high school. What do I owe?” Jessica yanks a pocket inside out and watches bills flutter into the air like comic, clumsy birds. Trying to catch them she starts to laugh.
    â€œNewt,”
Miss Shelly calls. “I do believe our friend here is having a reaction to your kush.”
    IN THE DESERT, after burying her uniform, Jessica had aimed herself toward the scrub plateau in the direction of her motel—or where she’d thought it was. But in a vise of dehydration that approached delirium she had wandered. And when under a three o’clock sun her boots touched blacktop, she could go no farther. She would have to wait until someone came to her. A trucker finally did.
    The hospital room, the bus ride, the tattoo parlor—maybe they were all a wishful dream. She is still lost in the desert, huddled in a fetal curl against a hot wind. Then her crusted eyelids open to reveal a topless wall of