Burton rolled down the window and stuck his head out.
“What are you people doing? It’s five in the morning.”
A balding man whose choir robe was three sizes too small looked up with a beatific smile and said, “We’ve been called by the Holy Spirit. We’ve been called.” Then he walked on.
“Yeah, well, you almost got to see him early!” Burton yelled, but no one paid attention. He fell back into the seat and waited as the procession passed. It wasn’t just people in choir robes, but aging hippies in jeans and Birkenstocks, half a dozen Gen X’ers dressed in their Sunday best, and one skinny guy who was wearing the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk.
Burton wrenched his briefcase off the passenger seat and popped it open. False passport, driver’s license, Social Security card, stick-on beard, and a ticket to the Caymans: the platinum parachute kit he kept with him at all times. Maybe it was time to bail.
Well, the Food Guy finally got a female, Skinner thought. Probably because he had the scent of those mashed cows on him. Skinner had been tempted to roll in the goo himself, but was afraid the Food Guy would yell at him. (He hated that.) But this was even better: riding in the different car with the Food Guy and his female and the Tall Guy who always smelled of burning weeds and sometimes gave him hamburgers. He looked out the window and wagged his tail, which repeatedly smacked Theo in the face.
They were stopping. Oh boy, maybe they would leave him in the car. That would be good; the seats were chewy and tasted of cow. But no, they let him out, told him to come along with them to the small house. An Old Guy answered the door and Skinner said hi with a nose to the crotch. The Old Guy scratched his ears. Skinner liked him. He smelled like a dog who’d been howling all night.
Being near him made Skinner want to howl and he did, one time, enjoying the sad sound of his own voice.
The Food Guy told him to shut up.
The Old Guy said, “I guess I know how you feel.”
They all went inside and left Skinner there on the steps. They were all nervous, Skinner could smell it, and they probably wouldn’t be inside long. He had work to do. It was a big yard with a lot of shrubs where other dogs had left him messages. He needed to reply to them all, so each could only get a short spray. Dog e-mail.
He was only half-finished when they came back out.
The Tall Guy said, “Well, Mr. Jefferson, we’re going to find the monster and we’d like your help. You’re the only one who has seen it.”
“Oh, I think you’ll know him when you see him,” said the old guy. “Y’all don’t need my help.”
Everyone smelled sad and afraid and Skinner couldn’t help himself. He let loose a forlorn howl that he held until the Food Guy grabbed his collar and dragged him to the car. Skinner had a bad feeling that they might be going to the place where there was danger.
Danger, Food Guy, he warned. His barking was deafening in the confines of the Mercedes.
Estelle was fuming as she cleared the teacups from the table and threw them into the sink. Two broke and she swore to herself, then turned to Catfish, who was sitting on the bed picking out a soft version of “Walkin‘ Man’s Blues” on the National steel guitar.
“You could have helped them,” Estelle said.
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.