And West Is West by Ron Childress Page B

mountain that resolves into brown weave. Behind her a panting warms her neck.
A wolf?
She turns and her nose bumps a snout. A sandpaper tongue intermittently licks.
    â€œHey,” Jessica groggily tells the dog. After dragging her feet from couch to floor she huddles her arms and coughs into her hands until a catch in her throat clears. She looks around.
What place is this?
    Crepuscular light identifies it as a living room, off which opens a kitchen where she goes to wash her hands in a sink stacked with plates. The dog, a long-haired female shepherd, blonde as a desert coyote, pushes against her thigh. She scratches its ear and follows it to a door cracked open to reveal a bed bowed under a snoring mound. An ogre’s gnarled foot pokes from the bed sheet. Jessica pushes the door wider and its groan alerts the ogre—a slight figure with a tube dangling from her nose. Miss Shelly, the smaller part of the mound, sits up in the bed and stretches.
    â€œSleep well?” Shelly asks her through a yawn.
    â€œVery deeply,” Jessica says, recalling now a ride sideways in the back of a pickup.
    Miss Shelly, whom Jessica had thought was wearing tie-dye, is unabashedly sitting there only in her tattoos.
    SEATED ON NEWT and Shelly’s front stoop Jessica sees, between rooftops, a mountain range. Subtracting this horizon and the parched air, the neighborhood feels to her like South Florida with the concrete homes and chain-link fences.
    She inhales on a scavenged cigarette, the first since her desert hike. But the nicotine only reminds her of being on a drone duty break.
    â€œHey,” Miss Shelly says before opening the screen door behind her. She hands down a mug of coffee to Jessica. In the yard the shepherd, puppyish, prances and yelps.
    â€œSkittles,” barks Miss Shelly. “Don’t get us kicked out of the neighborhood.”
    The coffee’s heat dissolves a knot in Jessica’s forehead. Shelly drops a newspaper section onto the stoop.
    â€œYou kinda weren’t in any shape to get back to your VA hospital last night,” Miss Shelly says. “Don’t imagine those military doctors approve of certain medications anyway. But hell, no one ever overdosed on weed. Prescription pills are a lot more likely to do you in.” With a tattooed foot Shelly nudges the newspaper toward Jessica. “Seen this? You got famous.”
    The newsprint coheres into a headline describing a disoriented hiker.
    â€œMaybe you discharged yourself a little early,” says Shelly.
    â€œNo. I’m better.”
    Miss Shelly looks out at the yard. “Got any family here?”
    Jessica shakes her head and then flicks her cigarette onto the patchy lawn. She feels trashy for doing this, but she has taken Miss Shelly’s question as a hint that they, Shelly and Newt, have their lives and Jessica has hers. She puts down the mug and starts for the gate.
    â€œThanks for letting me crash,” she says.
    Shelly follows and takes her arm. “Hey. I was gonna suggest you use our couch for a week or two. You know, till you figure stuff out. Anyhow, a couple of falling-apart old farts like us wouldn’t mind the company.”
    AFTER NEWT AND Miss Shelly leave for work at Tattoo Heaven, Jessica leashes Skittles and explores the neighborhood. Several nearby homes stare vacantly with foreclosed eyes. Occasional children twirl behind the fences of drought-struck yards. An older boy on an undersized bike pedals toward her and Skittles, his front wheel in the air. He turns at the last instant and Skittles jerks against her collar while Jessica pulls her back.
    â€œTattoo freak daughter,” the kid says.
    At a corner store she scavenges groceries from the inadequately stocked shelves.
    Late in the afternoon, she cleans up the kitchen sink and makes chicken thighs and okra. As the sun settles toward the rooflines Newt arrives. He is without Miss Shelly.
    â€œJust dropped her at her CPA