In the deep trench off California, near a submerged volcano where the waters ran to seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit and black smokers spewed clouds of mineral soup, a creature was roused from a long slumber. Eyes the size of dinner platters winked out the sediment and sleep of years. It was instinct, sense, and memory: the Sea Beast’s brain. It remembered eating the remains of a sunken Russian nuclear submarine: beefy little sailors tenderized by the pressure of the depths and spiced with piquant radioactive marinade. Memory woke the beast, and like a child lured from under the covers on a snowy morning by the smell of bacon frying, it flicked its great tail, broke free from the ocean floor, and began a slow ascent into the current of tasty treats. A current that ran along the shore of Pine Cove.
Mavis tossed back a shot of Bushmills to take the edge off her frustration at not being able to whack anyone with her baseball bat. She wasn’t really angry that Molly had bitten a customer. After all, he was a tourist and rated above the mice in the walls only because he carried cash. Maybe the fact that something had actually happened in the Slug would bring in a little business. People would come in to hear the story, and Mavis could stretch, speculate, and dramatize most stories into at least three drinks a tell.
Business had been slowing over the last couple of years. People didn’t seem to want to bring their problems into a bar. Time was, on any given afternoon, you’d have three or four guys at the bar, pouring down beers as they poured out their hearts, so filled with self-loathing that they’d snap a vertebra to avoid catching their own reflection in the big mirror behind the bar. On a given evening, the stools would be full of people who whined and growled and bitched all night long, pausing only long enough to stagger to the bathroom or to sacrifice a quarter to the jukebox’s extensive self-pity selection. Sadness sold a lot of alcohol, and it had been in short supply these last few years. Mavis blamed the booming economy, Val Riordan, and vegetables in the diet for the sadness shortage, and she fought the insidious invaders by running two-for-one happy hours with fatty meat snacks (The whole point of happy hour was to purge happiness, wasn’t it?), but all her efforts only served to cut her profits in half. If Pine Cove could no longer produce sadness, she would import some, so she advertised for a Blues singer.
The old Black man wore sunglasses, a leather fedora, a tattered black wool suit that was too heavy for the weather, red suspenders over a Hawaiian shirt that sported topless hula girls, and creaky black-on-white wing tips. He set his guitar case on the bar and climbed onto a stool.
Mavis eyed him suspiciously and lit a Tarryton 100. She’d been taught as a girl not to trust Black people.
“Name your poison,” she said.
He took off his fedora, revealing a gleaming brown baldness that shone like polished walnut. “You gots some wine?”
“Cheap-shit red or cheap-shit white?” Mavis cocked a hip, gears and machinery clicked.
“Them cheap-shit boys done expanded. Used to be jus’ one flavor.”
“Red or white?”
“Whatever sweetest, sweetness.”
Mavis slammed a tumbler onto the bar and filled it with yellow liquid from an icy jug in the well. “That’ll be three bucks.”
The Black man reached out—thick sharp nails skating the bar surface, long fingers waving like tentacles, searching, the hand like a sea creature caught in a tidal wash—and missed the glass by four inches.
Mavis pushed the glass into his hand. “You blind?”
“No, it be dark in here.”
“Take off your sunglasses, idjit.”
“I can’t do that, ma’am. Shades go with the trade.”
“What trade? Don’t you try to sell pencils in here. I don’t tolerate beggars.”
“I’m a Bluesman, ma’am. I hear ya’ll lookin for one.”
Mavis looked at the guitar case on the bar, at the Black man in shades, at the long fingernails of his right hand, the short nails and knobby gray calluses on the fingertips of his left, and she said, “I should have guessed. Do you have any experience?”
He laughed, a laugh that started deep down and shook his shoulders on the way up and chugged out of his throat like a steam engine leaving a tunnel. “Sweetness, I got me more experience than a busload o‘ hos. Ain’t no dust settled a day on Catfish Jefferson since God done first dropped him on this big ol’ ball o‘ dust. That’s me, call me Catfish.”
He shook hands like a sissy, Mavis thought, just let her have the tips of his fingers. She used to do that before she had her arthritic finger joints replaced. She didn’t want any arthritic old Blues singer. “I’m going to need someone through Christmas. Can you stay that long or would your dust settle?”
“I ‘spose I could slow down a bit. Too cold to go back East.” He looked around the bar, trying to take in the dinge and smoke through his dark glasses, then turned back to her. “Yeah, I might be able to clear my schedule if”—and here he grinned and Mavis could see a gold tooth there with a musical note cut in it—“if the money is right,” he said.
“You’ll get room and board and a percentage of the bar. You bring ‘em in, you’ll make money.”
He considered, scratched his cheek where white stubble sounded like a toothbrush against sandpaper, and said, “No, sweetness, you bring ‘em in. Once they hear Catfish play, they come back. Now what percentage did you have in mind?“
Mavis stroked her chin hair, pulled it straight to its full three inches. “I’ll need to hear you play.”
Catfish nodded. “I can play.” He flipped the latches on his guitar case and pulled out a gleaming National steel body guitar. From his pocket he pulled a cutoff bottleneck and with a twist it fell onto the little finger of his left hand. He played a chord to test tune, pulled the bottleneck from the fifth to the ninth and danced it there, high and wailing.
Mavis could smell something like mildew, moss maybe, a change in humidity. She sniffed and looked around. She hadn’t been able to smell anything for fifteen years.
Catfish grinned. “The Delta,” he said.
He launched into a twelve-bar Blues, playing the bass line with his thumb, squealing the high notes with the slide, rocking back and forth on the bar stool, the light of the neon Coors sign behind the bar playing colors in the reflection of sunglasses and his bald head.
The daytime regulars looked up from their drinks, stopped lying for a second, and Slick McCall missed a straight-in eight-ball shot on the quarter table, which he almost never did.
And Catfish sang, starting high and haunting, going low and gritty.