The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

think you can paint the Blues?"
    "Youever seen Van Gogh?"
    Catfish looked out to sea. A three-quarter moon was pooling like mercury out there. "Van Gogh…
    Van Gogh…fiddle player outtaSt. Louis?"
    "That's him," Estelle said.
    Catfish snatched the pint out of her hand and grinned. "Girl, you drink a man's liquor and lie to him too. I know who Vincent Van Gogh is."
    Estelle couldn't remember the last time she'd been called a girl, but she was pretty sure she hadn't liked hearing it as much as she did now. She said, "Who's lying now?Girl?"
    "You know, under that big sweater and them overalls, they might be a girl. Then again, I could be wrong."
    "You'll never know."
    "I won't? Now that is some sad stuff there." He picked up his guitar, which had been leaning on a rock, and began playing softly, using the surf as a backbeat: He sang about wet shoes, running low on liquor, and a wind that chilled right to the bone. Estelle closed her eyes and swayed to the music. She realized that this was the first time she'd felt good in weeks.
    He stopped abruptly. "I'll be damned. Look at that." Estelle opened her eyes and looked toward the waterline where Catfish was pointing. Some fish had run up on the beach and were flopping around in the sand.
    "You ever see anything like that?"
    Estelle shook her head. More fish were coming out of the surf. Beyond the breakers, the water was boiling with fish jumping and thrashing. A wave rose up as if being pushed from underneath. "There's something moving out there."
    Catfish picked up his shoes."We gots to go."
    Estelle didn't even think of protesting. "Yes.Now." She thought about the huge shadows that kept appearing under the waves in her paintings. She grabbed Catfish's shoes, jumped off the rock, and
    started down the beach to the stairs that led up to a bluff where Catfish's station wagon waited. "Come on."
    "I'm comin!" Catfish spidered down the rock and stepped after her.
    At the car, both of them winded and leaning on the fenders, Catfish was digging in his pocket for the keys when they heard the roar.The roar of a thousand phlegmy lions – equal amounts of wetness, fury, and volume. Estelle felt her ribs vibrate with the noise.
    "Jesus! What was that?"
    "Get in the car, girl."
    Estelle climbed into the station wagon. Catfish was already fumbling the key into the ignition. The car fired up and he threw it into drive, kicking up gravel as he pulled away.
    "Wait, your shoes are on the roof."
    "He can have them," Catfish said. "They better than the ones he ate last time."
    "He?What the hell was that? You know what that was?"
    "I'll tell you soon as I'm done havin this heart attack." five The Sea Beast The great Sea Beast paused in his pursuit of the delicious radioactive aroma and sent a subsonic message out to a gray whale passing several miles ahead of him. Roughly translated, it said, "Hey, baby, how's about you and I eat a few plankton and do the wild thing."
    The gray whale continued her relentless swim south and replied with a subsonic thrum that translated,
    "I know who you are. Stay away from me."
    The Sea Beast swam on. During his journey he had eaten a basking shark, a few dolphins, and several hundred tuna. His focus had changed from food to sex. As he approached theCalifornia coast the radioactive scent began to diminish to almost nothing. The leak at the power plant had been discovered and fixed. He found himself less than a mile offshore with a belly full of shark – and no memory of why he'd left his volcanic nest. But there was a buzz reaching his predator's senses from shore, the listless resolve of prey that has given up: depression. Warm-blooded food, dolphins, and whales sent off the same signal sometimes. A large school of food was just asking to be eaten, right near the edge of the sea.
    He stopped out past the surf line and came to the surface in the middle of a kelp bed, his massive head
    breaking though strands of kelp like a zombie pickup truck breaking sod as it rises from the grave.
    Then he heard it.A hated sound.The sound of an enemy. It had been half a century since the Sea Beast had left the water, and land was not his natural domain, but his instinct to attack overwhelmed his sense of self-preservation. He threw back his head, shaking the great purple gills that stood out on his neck like trees, and blew the water from his vestigial lungs. Breath burned down his cavernous throat for the first time in fifty years and came out in a horrendous roar of