Catfish looked at the guitar and sang, “Got a mean old woman, Lawd, stay angry all the time.”

“There’s nothing noble in using your art to escape life. You should have helped them.”

“Got a mean old woman, Lawd, Lawd, Lawd. She just stay angry all the time.”

“Don’t you ignore me, Catfish Jefferson. I’m talking to you. People in this town have been good to you. You should help them.”

Catfish threw back his head and sang to the ceiling, “She gots no idea, Lawd, what’s hers and what’s mine.”

Estelle snagged a skillet out of the dish rack, crossed the room, and raised it for a rocketing forehand shot to Catfish’s head. “Go ahead, sing another verse about your ‘mean old woman,’ Catfish. I’m curious, what rhymes with ‘clobbered’?”

Catfish put the guitar aside and slipped on his sunglasses. “You know, they say a woman was the one poisoned Robert Johnson?”

“Do you know what she used?” Estelle wasn’t smiling. “I’m making my shopping list.”

“Dang, woman, why you talk like that? I ain’t been nothin but good to you.”

“And me to you. That’s why you keep singing that mean old woman song, right?”

“Don’t sound right singin ‘sweet old woman.’”

Estelle lowered the pan. Tears welled up in her eyes.

“You can help them and when it’s over you can stay here. you can play your music, I can paint. People in Pine Cove love your music.”

“People here sayin hello to me on the street, puttin too much money in the tip jar, buying me drinks—I ain’t got the Blues on me no more.”

“So you have to go wreck your car, or pick cotton, or shoot a man in Memphis, or whatever it is that you have to do to put the Blues on you? For what?”

“It’s what I do. I don’t know nothin else.”

“You’ve never tried anything else. I’m here, I’m real.

Is it so bad to know that you have a warm bed to sleep in with someone who loves you? There’s nothing out there, Catfish.“

“That dragon out there. He always be out there.”

“So face it. You got away from it before.”

“Why you care?”

“Because it took a lot for me to open my heart to you after what I’ve been through, and I don’t have much tolerance for cowards anymore.”

“Call it like you sees it, Mama.”

Estelle turned and went back to the kitchen. “Then maybe you better go.”

“I’ll get my hat,” Catfish said. He snapped the National back into its case, grabbed his hat from the table, and in a moment he was gone.

Estelle turned and stared at the door. When she heard his station wagon start, she fell to the floor and felt a once warm future bleed a black stain around her.

The cave lay under a hillside, less than a mile from the ranch road at Theo’s cabin. The narrow mouth looked down over a wide, grassy marine terrace to the Pacific, and the interior, which opened into a huge cathedral chamber, echoed with the sound of crashing waves. Fossilized starfish and trilobites peppered the walls and the rocky floor was covered with a patina of bat guano and crystallized sea salt. The last time Steve had visited the cave it had been underwater, and he had spent a pleasant autumn there feeding on the gray whales that migrated down the coast to Baja to bear their young. He didn’t remember the cave consciously, of course, but when he sensed that Molly was searching for a hiding place, the map in his mind that had long ago gone to instinct led them there.

Since they’d arrived at the cave, a dark mood had fallen on Steve and, in turn, over Molly. She’d used the weed-whacker on the Sea Beast several times to try to cheer him up, but now the sex machine was out of gas and Molly was developing a heat rash on the inside of her thighs from repeated tongue lashings. It had been two days since she had eaten, and even Steve refused to touch his cows (Black Angus steers, now that Molly knew he couldn’t tolerate dairy).

Since the coming of the Sea Beast, Molly had been in a state of controlled euphoria. Worries about her sanity had melted away and she had joined him in the Zen moment that is the life of an animal, but since the dream and the horrible self-consciousness that had descended on Steve, the notion of their incompatibility had begun to rise in Molly’s mind like a trout to a fly.

“Steve,” she said, leaning on her broadsword and staring him squarely in one of his basketball eyes, “your breath could knock a buzzard off a shit wagon.”

The Sea Beast, rather than go on the defensive (which was fortunate for Molly, because the only defense he could think of was to bite her legs off), let out a pathetic whimper and tried to tuck his huge head under a forelimb. Molly immediately regretted her comment and tried to patch the damage.

“Oh, I know, it’s not your fault. Maybe someone sells Tic Tacs the size of easy chairs. We’ll get through it.” But she didn’t mean it, and Steve could sense her insincerity. “Maybe we need to get out more,” she added.

Dawn had broken outside and a beam of sunlight was streaming into the cathedral like a cop’s flashlight in a smoky bar. “Maybe a swim,” Molly said. “Your gills seem to be healing.” How she knew the treelike growths on his neck were gills, she wasn’t sure—perhaps more of the unspoken communication that passes between lovers.

Steve lifted his head and Molly thought that she might have gotten his attention, but then she noticed that a shadow had come over the entrance to the cave. She looked up to see half a dozen people in choir robes standing at the opening of the cathedral.

“We’ve come to offer sacrifice,” one woman managed to say.

“And not a breath mint among you, I’ll bet,” Molly said.

H.P.‘s Cafe was crowded with early morning old guys drinking coffee. Theo downed three cups of coffee quickly, which only served to make him anxious. Val and Gabe had ordered a cinnamon roll to share, and now Val was feeding a piece of it to Gabe as if the man had somehow managed to reach middle age and earn two Ph.D.s without ever having learned to feed himself. Theo just wanted to blow the bitter chunks of indignation.

Val said, “I certainly hope that the presence of this creature isn’t responsible for how I feel right now.” She licked icing from her fingers.

Right, Theo thought, the fact that you’ve fucked up all the previously fucked-up people in town and committed a string of felonies in the process shouldn’t be the rain on your little love parade. However, Theo did sub-scribe to the “honest mistake” school of law enforcement, and he honestly believed that she was trying to right a wrong by taking her patients off their medication. So although Val was currently irritating him like a porcu-pine suppository, he was honest enough to realize that he was merely jealous of what she had found with Gabe. That realized, Gabe started to irritate him as well.

“What do we do, Gabe? Tranquilize this thing? Shoot it? What?”

“Assuming it exists.”

“Assume it,” Theo spat. “I’m afraid if you wait for enough evidence to be sure, we’ll have to find you an ass donor, because this creature will have bitten yours off.”

“No need to be snotty, Theo. I’m just being sensibly skeptical, as any researcher would.”

“Theo,” Val said, “I can write you a scrip for some Valium. Might take the edge off your withdrawal symptoms.”

Theo scoffed. He didn’t scoff often, so he wasn’t good at it, and it appeared to Gabe and Val that he might be gacking up a hair ball.

“You all right?” Gabe asked.

“I’m fine. I was scoffing.”

“At what?”

“At Dr. Feelgood here wanting to give me a prescription for Valium so Winston Krauss can fill it with M&Ms.”

“I’d forgotten about that,” Val said. “Sorry.”

“It would appear that we have multifarious problems with which to deal, and I don’t have a clue where to start,” Theo said.