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  “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, acc
ording 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.

  “Thanks 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.

  “Tattoo 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.

  “Just dropped her at her CPA class,” he explains.

  “CPA?” Jessica says.

  “The tattoo business isn’t what it was. Not for us. Young people want to get tattoos from young people.”

  “You’re not old,” Jessica lies.

  “We’re old enough to not be cool, and that’s ancient,” says Newt. “Plus, when you’re over fifty you got to start saving. Shelly figures her face tattoos might scare off clients so she’s going to work online or over the phone. Anyway, she has a plan. She’s the brains around here.”

  Newt and Jessica eat and after dinner Newt snaps a chicken bone and lets Skittles lick its marrow from his fingers. Behind him sits a side table heavy with framed photographs. They are mostly of people in black leather who might have been Newt and Miss Shelly’s peers twenty or thirty years ago.

  “Do you have any children?” Jessica asks.

  “Nah, we never got around to having kids. But then we also never got around to getting legally married. I suppose we’re common law by now, or would be if they had it out here. Back in the day you would have called us anarchists. Mainly we partied. I did anyway. But time caught up with us. You never think it’s going to happen when you’re young. Then one day the mirror starts scaring the crap out of you.”

  After they clear the dishes Newt spreads a newspaper over the plank table and drops onto it a gnarled clump of green-brown vegetation. “Mind if I clean this?” Then he extracts a sizable joint from his t-shirt pocket and puts it between his lips. “Old school,” he says.

  In communion Jessica takes out the pack of cigarettes she bought at the corner store. She taps one up. “You mind?” she asks in turn.

  “I almost do,” Newt says. “Those things’ll kill you. They spray ’em with pesticide. But this”—and he shows Jessica the doobie—“is one hundred percent guaranteed organic.”

  Newt lights up and offers Jessica his flame. As they creak back in their chairs with their separate drugs, a thought strikes her. “Don’t you have to pick up Miss Shelly?”

  He smiles. “Oh, I’m never too stoned to drive. Anyway, a classmate is dropping her.”

  By the time Newt has deseeded the cannabis, Jessica is almost high from the aroma. Newt wraps the waste into the newspaper. That’s when they both notice the lost-in-the-desert article Shelly had shown her that morning. Carefully Newt tears it free. “For my scrapbook. To remember you by after you’ve gone on your way.”

  “Can I have it?” she asks.

  The next day
Jessica returns to the corner store to buy an envelope and stamp. She mails the clipping to Florida. Only the clipping. It will be enough to let Don know that she is alive, that she is as well as can be expected, that she is thinking of him. But she dare not tell him where she is, which is off the grid—unless there happen to be transistors in her fillings.

  She’s not paranoid crazy enough yet to imagine she might be wired with transistors. But, after all, her business had been surveillance; she knows there are watchers watching out there and that the watchers can do bad things since she has done the worst of those things. Killed innocent people. If she wrote again of that event to Don, his watchers would learn of it and hers would not be happy. They might send people to make sure she keeps quiet. They might have done so already. She dares not risk including a return address.

  CHAPTER 13

  Florida

  My Dearest Jessica,

  Getting an envelope addressed in your hand sped my heart. But finding no letter inside almost stopped it. The prison authorities claim there was only the newspaper clipping. But why should I trust them after they took all your other letters? Now I must guess how you are doing from a scrap of newsprint and this is torture. For it seems I have brought upon you my own bad luck. Know that I would cut off my toes to get you back your Air Force job. For you not to be burned and laid up in a hospital. But what can I do?

  Do you know a man called Voigt? An Air Force colonel. He wrote to say he would return your letters to me after they were redacted. I looked up the word and it means censored. Maybe I should tell him that I can recite from memory what you wrote and will keep quiet about it only if he rehires you. A man like me in a cage has his fantasies.

  Anyway. I can only pray that your situation will improve. Except for losing your letters mine has. I got a new cellmate. An honest to God professor named Ramirez. He is a funny man who calls me Senor Aldridge no matter how many times I tell him first names are fine. His is Ector and Ector does not have the hygiene problems of my old cellmate. Like all born Cubans Ector wears pressed clothes and washes behind the ears. He plays a sweet guitar too. Nylon string. Kind of soothing to hear him strum. I am listening right now because the professor gets to practice in our cell. This is part of the warden’s music program just like allowing CD players. I have one of those thanks to your cigarette money. But it seems your generosity is a one way road. For what can I give back? Only my best hopes. So here they are.