The stupidest angel: a heartwarming tale of Christmas terror

he was going to be sore the next day because of it. It was a Warrior Babe look, and he realized fully, then, that she was having an episode. She probably really was off her meds. This had to be handled just right.

    He backed away a few steps and tore the paper off the package. Inside was a white box with the silver seal of a very exclusive local glassblower, and inside that, wrapped in blue tissue, was the most beautiful bong he'd ever seen. It was like something out of the Art Nouveau era, only fashioned from modern materials, blue-green dichromatic glass with ornate silver branches running through it that gave it the appearance of walking through a forest as he turned it in his hand. The bowl and handle, which fit his hand perfectly, appeared to be cast of solid silver with the same organic tree-branch design seeming to leap right out of the glass. This had to have been made just for him, with his tastes in mind. He felt himself tearing up and blinked back the tears. "It's beautiful."

    "Uh-huh," Molly said. "So you can see it's not your garden that bothers me. It's just you."

    "Molly, I only want to talk to Lena. Her boyfriend threatened to blackmail me. I was only growing – "

    "Take it and go," Molly said.

    "Honey, you need to call Dr. Val, maybe see if she'll see you – "

    "Get out, goddammit. You don't tell me to see the shrink. Get out!"

    It was no use. Not now, anyway. Her voice had hit the Warrior Babe frenzy pitch – he recognized it from the times he'd taken her to the county hospital before they'd become involved as lovers. When she'd just been the town's crazy lady. She'd lose it if he pressed her any more. "Fine. I'll go. But I'll call you, okay?"

    She just gave him that look.

    "It's Christmas…" One last try maybe.

    The look.

    "Fine. Your present is on the top shelf in the closet. Merry Christmas."

    He dug some underwear and socks out of the drawer, grabbed a few shirts out of the closet, and headed out the front door. She slammed it hard enough behind him to break one of the windows. The glass hitting the sidewalk sounded like a summary of his whole life.
    Chapter 11 – A SLUG TRAIL OF
    GOOD CHEER
    He might have been made of polished mahogany except that when he moved, he moved like liquid. The stage lights reflected green and red off his bald head as he swayed on the stool and teased the strings of a blond Stratocaster with the severed neck of a beer bottle. His name was Catfish Jefferson, and he was seventy, or eighty, or one hundred years old, and not unlike Roberto the fruit bat, he wore sunglasses indoors. Catfish was a bluesman, and on the night before the night before Christmas, he was singing up a forlorn twelve-bar blues fog in the Head of the Slug saloon.
    Caught my baby boning Santa,
    Underneath the mistletoe (Lawd have mercy).
    Caught my baby boning Santa,
    Underneath the mistletoe.
    Used to be my Christmas angel,
    Now she just a Christmas ho.

    "I hear dat!" shouted Gabe Fenton. "Sho-nufF, sho-nuff. True dat, my brutha."

    Theophilus Crowe looked at his friend, just one in a whole line of awkward, heartbroken men at the bar, rocking almost in rhythm to the beat, and shook his head. "Could you possibly be any whiter?" Theo asked.

    "I gots the blues up in me," Gabe said. "She sho-nuff did me wrong."

    Gabe had been drinking. Theo, while not quite sober, had not.

    (He had shared a toothpick-thin spliff of Big Sur polio weed with Catfish Jefferson between sets, the two of them standing in the back parking lot of the Slug, trying to coax fire out of a disposable lighter in a forty-knot wind.)

    "Didn't think you muthafuckas had weather here," Catfish croaked, having sucked the joint so far down that the ember looked like the burning eye of a demon staring out of a cave of dark finger and lip. (The calluses on the tips of his fingers were impervious to the heat.)

    "El Niсo," Theo said, letting loose a blast of smoke.

    "Say what?"

    "It's a warm ocean current in the Pacific. Comes up the coast every ten years or so. Screws up the fishing, brings torrential rains, storms. They think we might be having an El Niсo this year."

    "When will they know?" The bluesman had put on his leather fedora and was holding it fast against the wind.

    "Usually after everything floods, the wine crop is ruined, and a lot of cliffside houses slide into the ocean."

    "And dat because the water too warm?"

    "Right."

    "No wonder the whole country hate your ass," said Catfish. "Let's go inside