And West Is West (7 page)

She smiles at him during the last instant of her approach and Ethan feels her cool cheek pressing his. It is not a kiss. “Hey,” she whispers into his ear as if he is the one needing comfort. And he does. Their faces are touching but all he can feel is the void of their separation. “I shouldn't have yelled at you on the phone,” she says. “What my father did was his doing alone.”

“But . . . maybe I could have done somethi—”

Zoe cuts him off. “No.” She stands back and grasps his arms while looking into his eyes. He can feel her nails through his jacket. “No. You didn't know him. I'm sorry he got you involved.”

Then she turns away, called by an older couple who, in practiced routine, hug her tightly as if they are overaccustomed to attending the funerals of acquaintances. Ethan drifts backward and other mourners fill the space between Zoe and him. He finds it hard to breathe.

“You look peaked, old man,” says Alex approaching Ethan from the side. “Zoe's really handling this nightmare. She must be doing some good meds.”

“What if she is? How else could she get through this?”

“Hey, I'm not criticizing her,” says Alex. “I'm admiring her being chemically responsible. Me, if my old man pulled a trick like this, I'd be getting myself seriously fucked up on anything I could smoke, swallow, sniff, or shoot. By the way,” Alex whispers, jabbing an elbow into Ethan's side, “Don't gramps look pissed off as hell being stuck in that box?”

“Yeah. Wouldn't you?” Ethan says flatly. This is as much humor as he can muster.

Half an hour later the coffins are taken away and Ethan and Alex are in their BMW a few cars behind the hearse. There will be no church service. Because of the crowd Ethan and Alex must stand behind a mound of dirt covered by a blue tarp. Next to the coffins, floating on motorized straps over their respective graves, stands Zoe, head bowed and tearless. One of Leston's former colleagues recites a final, secular sentiment, and then a thunderclap and raindrops send everyone back to their cars.

By the time Ethan and Alex arrive at the Lestons' home for the reception, they have driven through an eastward-moving downpour. The sky is clearing and the air is fresh with electrical charge. Beyond fields over which the farmhouse watches, a rainbow shimmers and mourners pause on the porch before going inside. There is talk by some that the rainbow is a sign that what has happened has been forgiven. Walter could not have planned a better moment.

STANDING NEAR THE
mantel of the Lestons' dark fireplace, Ethan recalls Elizabeth Leston's sad attempt to entertain him the previous July, not quite four months before. Alex's discussion with Zoe, however, is within earshot and it pulls him into the present.

“It's ten by sixteen. The biggest I've attempted so far . . .”

Alex is deliberately talking about things other than the funeral, reminding Zoe about all the tomorrows that remain to the living. It is time, he is saying, to begin to turn away from the dead.

“That's great, Alex,” Zoe says, but seems unreceptive. She holds her arms tightly against herself.

Then the man standing at the other end of the fireplace addresses Ethan. The man offers him his hand. “Hi, Hal Stanhope. And you must be a friend of Zoe's.”

“Ethan Winter,” Ethan says, grasping the man's humid flesh. “Zoe and I used to live together,” he corrects.

“Oh?” Stanhope sounds disappointed. A peer of the Leston's, he had probably come of age in the fifties. But his disapproval of premarital cohabitation seems as much based on snobbishness as antique morality. That Stanhope, like Leston, boasts a luxuriant head of hair gives Ethan another reason to dislike him. Ethan, at least, has an advantage in height. “Perhaps you and Zoe will be getting back together now,” Stanhope says ingenuously.

Why would you say that?
Ethan wants to ask. But Stanhope's dull eyes indicate his annoyance would be wasted.
Witless old turd
, Ethan thinks. And then an older woman with an unnaturally taut face and bouffant hair comes to his side. She's carrying an hors d'oeuvres plate and from it Stanhope picks up a cracker spread with liverwurst. “My wife and waitress,” Stanhope says. “Tracy, Ethan, and vice versa.”

“Then you're a friend of Zoe's,” Mrs. Stanhope says. She offers Ethan her hand, which unlike her husband's is a dry bundle of twigs.

“I was just telling your husband I once lived with Zoe.”

“The Zoe I know is a delicate child,” Hal says.

“We've known her since she was three,” Tracy adds.

Ethan's brain engages. “That must have been when the Lestons moved here.”

“Weren't they from Hartford?” Stanhope asks his wife.

“No. It was Danbury. Or Waterbury. Or was that just where Walter practiced surgery? Anyway they lived or he worked in some ‘bury' out west.”

“Don't you mean
east
, in Connecticut?” Hal says.

The Stanhopes impress Ethan as fonts of misinformation. Despite this, he keeps steering the discussion toward Zoe's past. “Why do you say Zoe's delicate?” The Zoe Ethan knows is independent and unsentimental, at least about him.

“Zoe had emotional troubles as a kid,” Stanhope says. “They got her straightened out though.”

“Valium. Lithium,” Tracy Stanhope lists before reconsidering. Her indiscretion flusters her. “Elizabeth and I used to talk.”

“Our kids never went on the stuff,” Stanhope says.

“Children weren't prescribed those drugs so much when ours were growing up,” Tracy says. “Plus we were lucky. We had boys. It's all in the cards.”

“And your astrological sign,” adds Stanhope.

“Oh please,
Hal
,” says Tracy, though she seems happy for the opening. “Don't start making fun of my hobby again.” Tracy looks at Ethan. “Still, Zoe
is
a Libra and it really shows. She puts on a good front but really keeps her cards close.”

“Guess Ethan's sign,” Stanhope tells his wife. “No, let me.”

“Hal is actually quite good at this,” Tracy says. “But he doesn't take his ability seriously. Imagine, he even refuses to use the stars for stock tips.”

“After the past few years I may start,” says Stanhope. “I can't do any worse.” Then, eyeing Ethan, he bursts out, “I'll bet a hundred dollars you're a Virgo.” Ethan finds this judgment vaguely insulting. “Wouldn't you say Ethan's a Virgo, dear?” he asks his wife.

“He
is
rather quiet,” says Tracy.

Ethan sips down his vodka and licks his lips, which are going numb. “Pisces,” he says, although he is a Virgo.

“I
knew
it,” says Tracy. “I was thinking Pisces.”

Ethan fixates on his empty glass. “Refill time,” he tells the Stanhopes and lurches away.

TRACY STANHOPE, WASHING
the few dirty plates the caterers missed, talks about Salvador Dalí with a solicitous Alex, who is unloading the Leston's dishwasher from its last run. Ethan has been rearranging the salvaged party food to fit the refrigerator. Zoe has been attending to the departing mourners as if each needs the brand of her personal farewell. Perhaps this is justified. Many of these aged people, her grandparents' friends, she will likely never see again.

Finally, the rest of the house goes quiet. Ethan goes to find Zoe, and through the living room windows he sees movement on the porch and glimpses her from behind, her back long and slender. She is standing beside a swaying glider, on which Hal Stanhope sits. Both are facing the descending sun. A white puff blooms around Zoe and Ethan is astonished to see that she is smoking a cigarette. They have been apart for only four months, yet she is utterly strange to him.

Has he never before paid her such close attention? Had he only seen in her what he expected to see? Sometimes her kisses tasted metallic; he thought it was her diet but now determines that this might have been the aftereffects of secret cigarettes. Or a mood stabilizer.
Lithium?
How much had she kept from him? Or was it that he had never allowed her the space to open up?

“Hey,” she says, turning as he squeaks through the porch's screen door. “Thanks for cleaning up.” Smoke exits her nostrils in plumes. Her eyes seem heavily made up. Then he realizes they are shadowed from weariness.

“That a new habit?” Ethan inquires of the cigarette, unable to stop himself.

She flicks the butt into the driveway and sparks skitter. Dusk is arriving. “You heading back to the city soon?” she asks, and Ethan is duly reprimanded. She is shooing him home like the rest of the mourners.

“Will you be all right? Alone up here.”

“We're next door,” says Stanhope. “If Zoe needs anything she just has to cross the yard.”

“That's good,” Ethan says, annoyed by the squeaking of the glider chain.

“Thank you both,” Zoe says. “I'll be fine. I won't have time to brood on things if that's your worry. I've plenty to do. Cleaning up. Putting the house on the market. Financial stuff. My father left neat piles in his study. His lawyer is coming tomorrow to go through them with me.

“Speaking of which,” Zoe says to Ethan, “those documents my father brought you, did you bring them up?”

Ethan thinks. He could give Zoe the folder without discussing its contents. After which he can go back to his financial modeling, his relationship with Yahvi. He will have abandoned Zoe decisively and perhaps this will kill his longing for the life he might have had with her.

“I forgot them,” Ethan says.

Zoe nods. Does she think this is his ploy to see her again?

“Why don't I just send them to you?” he says.

CHAPTER 11

Nevada

DISORIENTED HIKER FOUND NEAR HIGHWAY

Pahrump, Nev., Nov. 2, 2012—A truck driver taking a rest stop on Route 373 rescued a hiker who had been wandering the Amargosa Desert for two days. Jessica Aldridge, a 24-year-old former Air Force technical sergeant, stated that she became disoriented after running out of water in the Funeral Mountains. Aldridge, found partially disrobed, was initially thought to be the victim of an assault. Investigators now speculate Aldridge removed some of her clothing after suffering heat stroke. She is recovering from dehydration and sunburn at the Pettis Memorial VA Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.

CHAPTER 12

California

The man working the counter has a braided beard and baggy eyes. When Jessica comes into his shop he is leaning over a newspaper spread on a display case of piercing jewelry—tongue rings, studs, ear gauges. After a friendly glance he returns to his perusing and Jessica heads to the wall to examine samples of roses and butterflies and dragons and tribal marks, none of which interest her. But there are also photographs—of elaborately scarified arms, of a man's back imprinted with action cartoon panels, of a bald woman inked from head to toe in jungle flora. Through a beaded curtain at the back comes a mechanical buzz mingled with mumbles that sound like a dental patient attempting speech.

“Oh, keep quiet,” a woman's voice orders from the other side of the beads. The man's mumbling declines to a whimper.

“Ain't usually that bad,” the man at the counter says. “She's doing a mouth.” He pushes up from the newspaper and rises to his full, sad-eyed height, which is over six feet. He is wearing jeans and an armless leather vest—the better to advertise his tattoos, many of which resemble oversized Asian calligraphy. He settles onto a walker and shuffles out from behind the counter. “Considering a tat?”

“Maybe,” says Jessica.

“You over eighteen?”

She is wearing camouflage pants, a tank top, and no shoes—basically what she snatched from her hospital room's closet before she got on the bus that dropped her in San Bernardino. She glances into the shopkeeper's eyes and gets that she must look to him like an underage runaway. “I have ID,” she says.

“Yeah, well. Might need to see some alternate verification, too. We got in trouble once for putting angel wings on a sixteen-year-old.”

Jessica then notices that she is still wearing her hospital bracelet. In the back pocket of her pants she feels the wad stuffed in there and takes it out. “How about my Air Force discharge papers?”

He lifts an eyebrow. “Those'll do.”

Jessica turns to show him her right shoulder blade. “I want this covered up.”

“May I?” he asks and with a delicate touch stretches her skin. “Good inks,” he says. “Miss Shelly could make something pretty out of this. Guess you want to start with the initials, seeing as you're no longer USAF property.”

“Right.”

“And the bird?”

“I don't feel gung ho enough to wear an eagle.”

“See anything on the wall you like?”

“Not really.”

He looks down at her, perhaps at her hospital bracelet, and pulls at one of his chin braids. “There's a doctor I know who lasers tats. Might take quite a few sessions to blast it out though.”

“I'm leaving town tomorrow.”

“All right.”

“But I can't have this on my back anymore.”

“Well, let's wait and see if Miss Shelly can help.”

WHEN MISS SHELLY
emerges through the beaded curtain Jessica recognizes her. She is the shaved, tattooed woman in the wall photo, which must be fifteen years old. Miss Shelly is tinier than Jessica imagined she would be from her picture and she has grown her hair, which stands in sparse gray punky spikes. All her fingers to the first joint display bands of rings. Her smile reveals a gold incisor and causes her face to crinkle deeply. Jessica sees then that what she first took for wrinkles is a tattoo of a spider's web and a black widow, identifiable by its red mark, which is centered on Shelly's forehead. Only after Jessica takes all this in does she notice that Miss Shelly wears a tube clipped into her nostrils and is wheeling behind her a tank of oxygen.

“Hey. Be with you in a minute,” Miss Shelly says to Jessica in an accent that is not West Coast. And then she turns her attention to the clicking curtain. “
Harvey
, get your hairy butt on out here.”

A hulk parts the curtain. He is covering his mouth.

“I swear, you big ones are the wussiest. Now show us what you got.”

The man lowers the covering hand and Jessica is surprised to see that his mouth, chin, and cheeks display no art. Then Harvey pulls his lower lip inside out and a tattooed
ROSALYNN
appears right side up. His upper lip is grinning.

“Harvey, know what you ought to have did before you came to me?” Miss Shelly asks. “Shacked up with a girl named Sue.”

LEANING FORWARD IN
a masseur's chair, Jessica cannot see Miss Shelly at work.

“Skin fresh peeled from a sunburn makes a good canvas,” Shelly comments. “The ink goes deep. But it don't tickle.”

They are behind the beaded curtain, in a back room more the size of a closet. Jessica's top is down and a rotating table fan intermittently chills her. Miss Shelly's vibrating needle pricks over the bone of her shoulder blade and she clenches a fist.

“There's not much meat on you so it's gonna hurt extra,” Miss Shelly says. “I'd pour you a tequila if I could, but we ain't allowed to serve drinks or drunks. Let me know when you want a break.”

“I'm good,” Jessica says. “As long as we can finish today.”

“This'll take a couple few hours. Never done one of these. A lot of phoenixes. Never a sphinx.”

Jessica has picked the image from a book on Greek urns in Miss Shelly's limited but odd library—which includes volumes on Disney cartoons, Maori sculpture, Balinese ceremonial masks, fractal geometry, Chinese astrological symbols, scarification in Ghana, ancient Egyptian writing, whatever might inspire a customer. The sphinx will incorporate her eagle's wings and turn the claw-clutched USAF banner into hieroglyphs. “Ever heard of a palimpsest?” Miss Shelly asks her. “That's writing on top of writing. We fix a lot of tats that way. Keeps a part of your history while changing it.”

“Fine,” Jessica says and drifts.

Jessica had always charted out her long-term future like a psychic predicting happiness: a disciplined twenty years that would culminate in a military pension and return her to her beachside hometown in Florida. There she would invest her savings in a small apartment building, which she would paint pink and manage alone. Sure, she would meet a few men . . . yet she would not marry—her marriage to the Air Force having been sufficient. This life to come had appeared as solid as a monument cast in bronze.

Attuned to the vibrating needle, Jessica comprehends that her new philosophy is to be adrift. She will keep on the move for the same reason she is undoing her tattoo, and for the same reason she had slipped away from the hospital: to be no longer what she was. In order to start again, she must now not do
anything
with military deliberation. She must drift and even in this drifting she must let herself drift.

Under the music of Miss Shelly's needle, time passes. Is it moving forward or jumping backward? Through the curtain seeps a smell that Jessica recognizes. She had avoided proximity to this odor after her enlistment.

Miss Shelly quiets the needle. “How about that break?”

“Okay,” Jessica says and, rising stiffly, rolls her shoulders. A mirror displays Shelly's work in progress. Jessica's USAF has been transformed into hieroglyphs representing a woman, a serpent, a hill, a lamp wick—because those ancient symbols have shapes similar to the letters Miss Shelly is burying. Above them, Jessica's American eagle is but half metamorphosed into the stony female sphinx it will become and Jessica does 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.

“Cannabis 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.

“Yep,” 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.

“It may look like I shoot up, but this is from dialysis. Ain't half as much fun.”

“I didn't . . .”

“Oh 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.

“Finito,”
Miss Shelly says and aims a mirror so that Jessica can view her work.

“S'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?

“Whoa!” 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.

“Stuff'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.

“Newt,”
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 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.

“Hey,” 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.

“Sleep well?” Shelly asks her through a yawn.

“Very 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.

“Hey,” 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.

“Skittles,” 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.

“You 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.

“Maybe you discharged yourself a little early,” says Shelly.

“No. 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.