The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove Chapter 6~8

Six siluriform fishs StoryWas b off fifty year ago. I was hoboing finished the Delta, playin juke joints with my checkmate Smiley. He c al wized Smiley cause he dont never f atomic number 18 the blues. Boy could play the Blues, notwithstanding he never got the Blues, non for a second. He be broke and hung everywhere and he calm unceasingly smilin. Make me crazy. I anyege, Smiley, you aint never d mavin(a) for(p) play no bettern indifferent(p) Cotton, lessin you feels it.Deaf Cotton Dormeyer was this ol boy we used to play with time to time. See, them days, clomp of Bluesmen was device, so they be c anyed Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Jackson want that. And them boys could play them rough Blues. But ol Cotton, he deaf as a stone, a puny bit a lot of a burden than bein blind iffin you playing music. We be playing Crossroads, an ol Deaf Cotton be everyplace on the side playin Walkin Mans Blues and a-howlin manage a ol go later, and we stop, go drink to th e store, nominate us a Nabs and a Co-Cola, and Deaf Cotton s rattily keep right on playin. And he the lucky one, cause he arset prove how deleterious he is. And didnt nobody fetch the run intot to tell him.So, any stylus, I says, You aint never gone play no better than ol Deaf Cotton, lessin you land few Blues on you.And Smiley say, You gots to help me.Now Smiley, he my mate from way gage my partner, recover. So I says I will exhaust the Blues to jump on him, besides he got to promise non to pret send absent mad how I do it. So he say okay, and I say okay, and I conforms to sic the Blues on him so we can go to lucre and Dallas and makes us some records and earn us some Cadillacs and so on manage them boys Muddy Waters and underside Lee Hooker and them.Smiley, he had him a wife name of Ida May, scented little thing. He keep her up at that place in Clarksville. And he always sayin how he dont throw away to worry bout Ida May when he on the road cause she lo ve him true and only. So one day I tell Smiley theys a man mass Baton blushing mushroom got him a prime Martin guitar he gonna sell for ten dollars, and would Smiley go labour it for me cause I got me a case of the runs and cant take the train ride.So Smiley aint out of town half(prenominal) a day before I takes me some liquor and flowers and make my visit on little Ida May. Shes a young thing, aint much for drinkin liquor, notwithstanding once I tells her that ol Smiley through with(p) got hisself runned all all everyplace by a train, she takes to drinkin corresponding a natural (in between the screamin and cryin and all, and I had my own self some tears also, he being my partner and all, God rest his soul). And before you k instanter it, Im givin Ida May some replete(p) lovin to comfort her in her time of grief and all.And you know when Smiley get in additionshie down, he dont say a word bout my sleepin with Ida May. He say he miser fit he cant find the man with t he guitar, gives me my ten dollars, an say he got to go home cause Ida May so blissful to see him she been doing him special all day. I say, Well, she through with(p) me special as well as, and he say that okay, her being criminal and me being his best friend. That boy was greased to the Blues, and they just wouldnt stick to him.So I borrowed a Model T Ford, drove oer to Smileys, and done run over his dog, who was tied up in the yard.That dog was aging anyways, he say. I had him since I was a boy. Time I get Ida May a puppy anyways.You aint sad? I say.Naw, he say. That ol dog had his time.You hopeless, Smiley. I gots to do some ponderin.So I ponders. Takin me devil days to make out up with a way to put the Blues on ol Smiley. But you know, even when that boy standing thither over the smokin ashes of his house, Ida May in one arm and his guitar in the other(a), he dont do nothin scarce thank God they had time to get out without gettin tant-out up.Preacher once told me that they is people who emanations to tragedy. He says colored folk gots to rise to tragedy resembling ol Job in the Bible, iffin they gonna get they propers. So I figures that Smiley is one of them who rises to tragedy, get stronger when bad things come on him. But they more(prenominal) than one way to get the Blues on you. Aint just bad things happening, sometime it good things not happenin disappointment, iffin you know what I mean?So I hears that down Biloxi way, round bout one of them salt marshes on the Gulf, they is a goujon vast as a rowboat, but nobody can nab him. Even a white man down on that point will give five coulomb dollars to the man bring that hulky ol catfish in. Now you know people be trying to full stop him, but they dont have no luck. So I tells Smiley I got me a secret recipe, and we gonna go get that catfish, get that money, and go up to Chicago and make us a record.Now I knows they aint no catfish bear-sized as a rowboat, and iffin in that respect w as, hed be caught by now, but Smiley need him a disappointment iffin the Blues gonna jump on him. So I spends the whole ride down there buildin up that boys hopes. Cadillacs and big ol houses ridin on the back of that catfish. We ridin in that ol dog-killin Model T Ford, deuce c feet a rope and some shark hooks in the back with my secret catfish recipe. I figure we get us some bait on the way, and sho nuff, I accidentally run me over ii chickens got too close to the road.For dark we down on the bayou where that ol cat spose to live. Them days bout half the counties in Mississippi got signs say NIGGER, DONT LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU IN THIS COUNTY, so we always plan to get where we goin for dark.My secret recipe a gallon quake of chicken gumption I keep buried in the backyard for a year. I takes that jar and punches some holes in the lid and toss her out in the piss. A catfish smell them rotten guts, they be there lickety-split, I tells Smiley. indeed(prenominal) we hooks up one them chickens and throw it out there and we sits back and has us a drink or devil, me all the time talkin toss out bout that five century dollar and Smiley grinnin like he does.For colossal Smiley snooze off on the bank. I lets him sleep, thinkin he be more queer if he wake up and we aint caught that catfish. Just to be sure, I demoralizes to displume in the rope, and for I got it pulled in ten feet, somethin grab on. That ol rope start burning through my hand like theys a s rushd one dollar bill ontother end. I musta yelled, cause Smiley woke up and goes running off the other way. adopt you doin? I yells, and that old rope burnin through my hands like a snake on fervour.Well, that it, I think, and I lets go of the rope. (A Bluesman got to take cargon of his hands.) But when the rope come to the end, it tighten up like an E string and make a twang throw moss and mud up into my face and I opines round and see Smiley crankin up that Model T Ford. He done tied the rop e on the bumper and now he drivin it back out the bayou, pullin whatever out there in the water as he go. And it aint comin easy, that ol Ford screamin and slidin and well-informed like it like to brag up, but up on the bank come the biggest catfish I ever seen, and that fish aint happy. He floppin and thrashin and just bout buryin me in mud.Smiley set the brake and look back at what we catch, when that ol catfish make a noise I dont know can come out a fish. Sound like woman screaming. Which scargons me, but not as much as the noise that come back out the bayou, which sound like the devil done come home.You done it now, Smiley, I says.Get in, he say.Dont take more than that for me, cause somethin risin up out the bayou look like a locomotive with teeth, and it comin fast. Im in that Model T Ford and we off, draggin that big catfish right with us and that heavyweight thing feeler behind.For long we got us some distance, and I tells Smiley to stop. We gets out and looks at our fi ve-hundred-dollar catfish. He exsanguinous now, dragged to expiry, and not lookin too good at that, but in a full moon we can see this aint no ordinary catfish. Sho, he got his fins and tail and all, but down on his belly he growin things look like legs.Smiley say, What that?And I say, Dont know.What that back there? he say.That his momma, I say. She aint happy one bit with us.SevenIt has the soul-sick wail of the Blues, the cowboy tragedy of realm Western. It goes like thisYou pay your dues, do your time behind the wheel, put in long hours on boring roads, your vertebrae compress and your stomach goes sour from too much strong coffee, and finally, just when you get a good-paying job with benefits and youre visual perception the comfortable at the end of the retirement tunnel, just when you can hear the distant siren song of a bass boat and a case of Miller calling to you like a willing hand truck stop waitress named Darlin, a monster comes along and fucks your truck and you ar e plum blowed up. Als story.Al was drowsing in the cab of his tank truck while unleaded liquid dinosaurs pulsed through the big black tube into the underground tanks of the Pine Cove Texaco. The station was closed, there was no one at the counter to shoot the bull with, and this was the end of his run, but for a cursorily jog down the coast to a motel in San Junipero. On the radio, moody low, Reba sang of hard times with the full authority of a cross-eyed redheaded millionaire.When the truck scratch moved, Al thought he exponent have been rear-ended by some drunk tourist, then the shaking started and Al was sure he was in the middle of the bull moose quake of the century the big one the one that twisted cities and snapped over reaches like modify twigs. You thought well-nigh those things when you towed around ten thousand gallons of explosive liquid.Al could see the tall Texaco sign out of the windscreen, and it occurred to him that it should be waving like a sapling in th e wind, but it wasnt. Only the truck was moving. He had to get out and stop the pump.The truck thumped and rocked as if rammed by a rhino. He pulled the door handle and pushed. It didnt budge. Something blocked it, blocked the whole window. A head? Had the cap over the pumps come down on him? He looked to the rider door, and something was blocking that one too. Not metal, not a tree. It had scales. Through the windshield he saw a dark, wet stain spreading over the concrete and his bladder emptied.Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.He reached behind his seat for the tire thumper to misfortune out the windshield and in the next instant Al was beam bits and smoking pieces f manufacturing over the Pacific.A mushroom cloud of fulsome flame rose a thousand feet into the sky. The shock roam trained trees for a block and knocked out windows for three. Half a mile forward, in business district Pine Cove, motion detector alarms were triggered and added their klaxon calls to the roar of the flames. Pine Cove was cautious and frightened.The Sea living creature was thrown two hundred feet into the air and arrive on his back in the flaming ruins of Berts Burger Stand. Five thousand days on the planet and he had never experienced flight. He ground he didnt care for it. Burning gasoline covered him from nose to tail. His branchia trees were singed to stumps, jagged shards of metal protruded between the scales of his belly. Still flaming, he headed for the nearest water, the creek that ran behind the business district. As he lumbered down into the creek bed, he looked back to the place where his lover had rejected him and sent out a signal. She was gone now, but he sent the signal anyway. Roughly trans-lated, it said, A simple no would have sufficed.mollieThe poster covered half of the confidential informationers living room wall a younger mollie Michon in a black leather bikini and spiked dog collar, brandishing a wicked-looking broad stain. In the background , red mushroom clouds rose over the desert. Warrior Babes of the Outland, in Italian, of draw mollys movies had only been released to overseas t ruters direct to video in the United States. mollie stood on the wire-spool coffee table and struck the same pose she had fifteen years before. The sword was tarnished, her tan was gone, the blonde hair had gone gray, and now a jagged five-inch scar ran above her right breast, but the bikini still fit and muscles still raked her arms, second joints, and abdomen.Molly worked out. In the wee hours of the morning, in the vacant space next to her jab, she spun the broadsword like a d.o.a.ly baton. She lunged, and thrust, and leapt into the marvelous back flip that had made her a star (in Thailand anyway). At two in the morning, while the village slept around her, Molly the crazy doll became, once once again, Kendra, Warrior Babe of the Outland.She stepped off the coffee table and went to her tiny kitchen, where she unresolved the brown p run lowic pill bottle and ceremoniously dropped one birth control pill into the garbage disposal as she had every night for a month now. Then she went out the paper bag door, careful not to let it be intimate and wake her neighbors, and began her routine.Stretches first the splits in the high wet grass, then a hurdlers hamstring stretch, touching her forehead to her knee. She could feel her vertebrae pop like a string of muted levycrackers as she did her back stretches. Now, with dew streaking her legs, her hair tied back with a leather boot lace, she began her sword work. A two-handed slash, a thrust, riposte, leap over the blade, spin and slash slowly at first, work up momentum one handed spin, pass to the other hand, reverse, pass the sword behind her back, speeding up as she went until the sword trim the air with a whistling whirr as she worked up to a series of backflips executed while the sword stayed in motion one, two, three. She tossed the sword into the air, d id a back flip, reached to catch it in midspin a light eliminate sheeted her body now reached to catch it the sword silhouetted against a three-quarter moon reached to catch it and the sky went red. Molly looked up as the shock wave rocketed through the village. The blade slashed the back of her wrist to the bone and stuck in the ground, quivering. Molly swore and watched the orange mushroom cloud rise in the sky over Pine Cove.She held her wrist and stared at the fire in the sky for some(prenominal) proceeding, wondering if what she was seeing was really there, or if perhaps shed been a little hasty about stopping her meds. A siren sounded in the distance, then she heard something moving down in the creek bed as if huge rocks were being kicked aside. Mutants, she thought. Where there were mushroom clouds, there were mutants, the curse of Kendras nuked-out world.Molly snatched the sword and ran into her trailer to hide.TheoThe shock wave from the outburst had dissipated to t he level of a sonic boom by the time it reached Theos little cabin two miles out of town. Still, he knew that something had happened. He sat up in bed to wait for the phone to ring. A minute and a half later, it did. The 911 dispatcher from San Junipero was on the line.Constable Crowe? Youve had some sort of explosion at the Texaco station on Cypress Street in Pine Cove. at that place are fires burning nearby. Ive dispatched fire and ambulance, but you should get over there.Theo struggled to sound alert. Anyone hurt?We dont know yet. The call just came in. It sounds like a send away tank went up.Im on my way.Theo swung his long legs out of bed and pulled on his jeans. He snatched his shirt, cell phone, and beeper from the nightstand and headed out to the Volvo. He could see an orange glory from the flames in the sky toward town and billowing black smoke streaking the woolgathering sky.As soon as he started the car, the radio crackled with the voices of volunteer firemen who were hasten to the site of the explosion in Pine Coves two fire engines.Theo describe the mike. Hey, guys, this is Theo Crowe. Anyone on scene yet?ETA one minute, Theo came back at him. Ambulance is on scene.An EMT from the ambulance came on the radio. The Texaco is gone. Sos the burger stand. Doesnt look like the fire is spreading. I dont see anyone around, but if there was anybody in those two buildings, theyre toast.Delicate, Vance. Very professional, Theo said into the mike. Ill be there in five.The Volvo bucked over the rough dirt road. Theos head banged on the roof and he slowed enough to buckle his seat belt.Berts Burger Stand was gone. Gone. And the minimarket at the Texaco, gone too. Theo felt an empty rumbling in his stomach as he pictured his beloved minimarket nachos termination black in the flames.Five proceedings later he pulled in behind the ambulance and jumped out of the Volvo. The firefighters seemed to have the fire contained to the as-phalt area of the Texaco and t he burger stand. A little brush had burned on the pitcher behind the Texaco and had charred a few trees, but the firemen had drenched that area first to keep the fire from climbing into the residential area.Theo shielded his face with his hands. The heat coming off the burning Texaco was searing, even at a hundred yards. A figure in fire-fighting re-galia approached him out of the smoke. A few feet away he pulled up the shield on his helmet and Theo recognized Robert Masterson, the volunteer fire chief. Robert and his wife Jenny owned Brines Bait, Tackle, and Fine Wines. He was smiling.Theo, youre gonna starve to death both your food sources are gone.Theo forced a smile. Guess Ill have to come to your place for brie and cabernet. Anyone hurt? Theo was shaking. He hoped Robert couldnt see it by the light of the fire and the rotating red lights of the emergency vehicles. Hed left his Sneaky Pete pipe on the nightstand.We cant locate the driver of the truck. If he was in it, we lost him. Still too hot to get close to it. The explosion threw the cab two hundred feet that way. Robert pointed to a burning lump of metal at the edge of the set lot.What about the underground tanks? Should we evacuate or something?No, theyll be fine. Theyre designed with a vapor lock, no oxygen can get down there, so no fire. Were freeing to have to let whats left of the minimart just burn out. Some cases of Slim Jims caught fire and they burn like the sun, we cant get close.Theo squinted into the flames. I love Slim Jims, he said forlornly.Robert patted his shoulder. Itll be okay. Ill order some for you, but you cant tell anyone Im carrying them. And Theo, when this is all over, come see me at the shop. Well talk. about what?Robert pulled off his fire helmet and wiped back his receding brown hair. I was a drunk for ten years. I quit. I might be able to help you.Theo looked away. Im fine. Thanks. He pointed to a ten-foot-wide burned strip that started across the play and led awa y from the fire in a path to the creek. What do you make of that.Looks like someone drove a burning vehicle out of the fire. Ill check it out. Theo got a flashlight from the Volvo and crossed the street. The grass was singed and there were tardily ruts cut into the dirt. They were lucky this had happened after the rainy season had started. 2 months earlier and they would have lost the town.He followed the track to the creek bed, amply expecting to find a wrecked vehicle pitched over the bank, but there was nothing there. The track ended at the bank. The water wasnt deep enough to cover anything large enough to make a trail like that. He played the flashlight around the bank and stop it on a single deep track in the mud. He blinked and shook his head to clear his vision, then looked again. It couldnt be.Anything over there? Robert was coming across the grass toward him.Theo jumped down onto the bank and kicked the mud until the print was obliterated.Nothing, Theo said. essential have just been some burning fuel sprayed out this way.What are you doing?Stomping out the last of a burning squirrel. Must have gotten caught in the flames and ran over here. Poor guy.You really need to come see me, Theo.I will, Robert. For sure I will.EightThe Sea BeastHe knew he should return to the safety of the sea, but his gill trees were singed and he didnt relish the fancy of treading water until they healed. If hed known the female was going to react so violently, he would have re-tracted his gills into the folds beneath his scales where they would have been safe. He made his way down the creek bed until he spotted a herd of animals quiescency above the bank. They were ugly things, pale and graceless, and he could sense parasites living in every one of them, but this was no time to be judgmental. later all, some brave fauna had to be the first to eat a mastodon, and who would have thought that those furballs would turn out to be the tasty treats that they were.He could h ide among this wormy herd until his gills healed, then perhaps hed take one of the females on a grateful hump. But not now, his heart still ached for the purring female with the silvery flanks. He needed time to heal.The Sea Beast slithered up the bank into an open space among the herd, then curled his legs and tail under his body and assumed their shape. The change was painful and took more motility than he was used to, but after a few minutes he was finished and he quietly fell asleep.MollyNo, this wasnt what she had be after at all. She had stopped taking her meds because they had been giving her the shakes, and shed been willing to have a go at it with the voices if they came back, but not this. She hadnt counted on this. She was tempted to run to her kitchen area and gulp down one of her blue pills (Stelazine the Smurfs of Sanity, she called them) to see if it could chase the hallucination, but she couldnt tear herself from the trailer window. It was too real and too weird . Could there be a big, burnt beast lumbering out of the creek? And if so, had she just watched it turn into a double-wide trailer?Hallucinations, that was one of the five symptoms of schizophrenia. Molly kept a list of all the symptoms. In fact, shed stolen a desk drawer version of the DSM-IV The Diagnostic and Statistical manual of Mental Disorders, the book psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness from Valerie Riordan. fit to the DSM-IV, you had to have two of the five symptoms. Hallucinations were one okay, that was a possibility. But delu-sions, no way she wasnt the least bit deluded, she knew she was having hallucinations. Number three was disorganized bringing or incoherence. Shed give it a try.Hi, Molly, how the heck are you? she asked.Not well, thank you. Im upset that my speech may be disorganized, she answered.Well, you sound fine to me, she said, by way of being polite.Thanks for saying so, she replied with genuine gratitude. I guess Im okay.Youre fine. mincin g ass, by the way.Thanks, youre not too bad yourself.See, not disorganized at all, she said, not realizing that the conversation was over.Symptom four was grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior. She looked around her trailer. Most of the dishes were done, the videotapes of her movies were arranged chronologically, and the goldfish were still dead in the aquarium. Nope, nothing disorganized in this place. Schizo 1, Sanity 3.Number five, nix symptoms, such as affective flattening, alogia, or avolition. Well, a woman hits her forties, of course theres a little affect-ive flattening, but she was sure enough that she didnt have the other two symptoms to not even look them up.But then there was the footnote Only one criterion required if delusions are crotchety or hallucinations consist of a voice keeping up a running commentary on the persons behavior or thoughts.So, she thought, if I have a narrator, Im batshit. In most of the Kendra movies, there had been a narrator. It helped ti e a story together that was supposed to take place in the nuked-out rising when, in fact, it was being filmed in an abandoned strip mine near Barstow. And narration was easy to dub into foreign languages because you didnt have to better half the lips. So the question she had to ask herself, was Do I have a narrator?No way, said the narrator.Fuck, said Molly. Just when shed settled into having a simple personality disorder, she had to learn to be psychotic all over again. Being schizo wasnt all bad. Being diagnosed schizo ten years ago had gotten her the periodic disability check from the state, but Val Riordan had assured her that since then her status had changed from schizophrenic paranoid type, single episode, in partial remission, with prominent contradict symptoms, persecutory-type delusions, and negative stressors (Molly liked to think of the negative stressors as special act) to a much more healthy, post-morbid shizotypal personality disorder, bipolar type (no special s auce). To make the latter you had to fulfill the prerequisite of at least one psychotic event, then hit five out of nine symptoms. It was a much tougher and more subtle form of batshit. Mollys favorite symptom was amusing be-liefs or magical thinking that influences behavior and is inconsistent with subcultural norms.The narrator said, So the magical thinking that would be that you believe that in another dimension, you genuinely are Kendra, Warrior Babe of the Outland?Fucking narrator again, Molly said. Youre not going away, are you? I dont need this symptom.You cant really say that your magical thinking affects your behavior, can you? the narrator asked. I dont think you can claim that symptom.Oh hell no, Molly said. Im just out practicing with a broadsword at two in the morning, waiting for the end of civilization so I can claim my just identity.Simple physical fitness regimen. Everyones trying to get into shape these days.So they can hack apart evil mutants?Sure, Nautilus ma kes a apparatus for that. Mutant Master 5000.Thats a crock.Sorry, Ill shut up now.Id appreciate that. I really dont need the voices symptom, thanks.Youve still got the monster-trailer hallucination outside.I thought you were going to shut up.Sorry, thats the last youll hear from me. Really.Jerk.Bitch.You saidSorry.So without voices all she had to deal with was the hallucination. The trailer was still sitting there, but admittedly, it just looked like a trailer. Molly could imagine trying to tell the shrink at county about it when they admitted her.So you saw a trailer?Thats right.And you live in a trailer park?Yep.I see, the shrink would say. And somewhere between those two little words the judgment would be pronounced crazy.No, she wasnt going to go that route. She would confront her fears and go forward, just as Kendra had in The Mutant grampus Warrior Babes II. She grabbed her sword and left her trailer.The sirens had subsided now, but she could still see an orange broadcast f rom the explosion. Not a nuclear blast, she thought, just some sort of accident. She strode across the lot and stopped about ten feet away from the trailer.Up close, it looked well, it looked like a damn trailer. The door was in the wrong place, on the end instead of the side, and the windows were frizzy, as if theyd iced over. There was a thin patina of soot over its entire length, but it was a trailer. It didnt look like a monster at all.She stepped forward and ventured a poke with her sword. The aluminum skin of the trailer seemed to shy away from the sword point. Molly jumped back.A warm wave of pleasure swept through her body. For a second she forgot why she had come out here and let the wave take her. She poked the trailer again, and again the pleasure wave washed over her, this time even more intense. There was no fear, no tension, just the feeling that this was exactly where she should be where she should always have been. She dropped her sword and let the feeling take he r.The frosty layer on the trailers two end windows seemed to lift, revealing the slitlike pupils of two great golden eyes. Then the door began to open, not from side to side, but ripping itself in the middle and opening like a mouth. Molly saturnine on her heel and ran, wondering even as she went why she hadnt just stayed there by the trailer where everything felt so good.EstelleEstelle was wearing a leather fedora, a pair of dark sunglasses, a single chromatic sock, and a subtle and satisfied smile. Sometime after her husband had died after shed moved to Pine Cove and started taking the antide-pressants, after shed stopped coloring her hair or giving a damn about her wardrobe Estelle had vowed that no man would ever see her naked again. At the time, she considered it a carnival trade carnal pleasures, of which there were few, for guilt-free cookies, of which there were many. Now, having broken that vow and lying in her feather bed next to this sweaty, stringy old man, who was dun her left loony diet with his tongue (and who didnt seem to mind that said nipple was leading her breast over her arm rather than jutting up like the cupola on the Taj Mahal), Estelle felt like she understood, at last, the Mona Lisas smile. Mona had been getting some, and she had her cookies too.You are some storyteller, Estelle said.A spidery black hand crawled up her thigh and parked an index finger moistly on her pleasure going just settled there and she shuddered. I didnt finish, Catfish said.You didnt? Then what was all that Hallelujah, Lord, Im comin home followed by the barking?I didnt finish the story, Catfish said, his enunciation unco clear, considering he didnt miss a lick.Harmonica player, Estelle thought. She said, Im sorry, I dont know what came over me.And she didnt. One minute they were sipping spiked tea and the next there was an explosion and she had her mouth locked over his, moaning into him like a saxophonist playing passion.You didnt see me fightin y ou, Catfish said. We got time.We do?Sho, but you gonna have to pay my way now. You done chased the Blues off me and I feels like they aint never comin back. Im out a job.Estelle looked down to see Catfish grinning in the soft orange light and grinned herself. Then she realized that they hadnt lit any candles, and she didnt have any orange lights. Somewhere in the tussle between the kitchen and the bedroom, amid the tossing of garments and groping of flesh, they had turned the lights out. The orange glow was coming through the window at the foot of the bed.Estelle sat up. The town is on fire.It is in here, Catfish said.She pulled the sheets up to cover herself. We need to do something.I got an idea a somethin we can do. He moved his spidery fingers and her attention was taken away from the window.Already?Seem soon to me too, girl, but Im old and this could be my last one.Thats a cheery thought.Im a Bluesman.Yes, you are, she said. Then she rolled over on him and stayed there, off an d on, until dawn.