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she had been a teacher in the decaying and increasingly dangerousLos AngelesUnifiedSchool District, teaching eighth graders the difference between acrylics and oils, a brush and a pallet knife, Dali and Degas, and using her job and her marriage as a justification for never producing any art herself.
    She had married right out of art school: Joe Boyet, a promising young businessman, the only man she had ever loved and only the third she had ever slept with. When Joe had died eight years ago, she had nearly lost her mind. She tried to throw herself into her teaching, hoping that by inspiring the children she might find some reason to go on herself. In the face of the escalating violence in her school, she resigned herself to wearing a bulletproof vest under her artist smocks and even brought in some paintball guns to try to gain the pupils' interest but the latter only backfired into several incidents of drive-by abstract expressionism, and soon she received death threats for not allowing students to fashion crack pipes in ceramics class. Her students – children living in a hyperadult world where playground disputes were
    settled with 9mms – eventually drove her out of teaching. Estelle lost her last reason to go on. The school psychologist referred her to a psychiatrist, who put her on antidepressants and recommended immediate retirement and relocation.
    Estelle moved to Pine Cove, where she began to paint and where she fell under the wing of Dr.
    Valerie Riordan. No wonder then that Estelle's painting had taken a dark turn over the last few weeks.
    She painted the ocean.Every day.Waves and spray, rocks and serpentine strands of kelp on the beach, otters and seals and pelicans and gulls. Her canvases sold in the local galleries as fast as she could paint them. But lately the inner light at the heart of her waves, titanium white and aquamarine, had taken on a dark shadow. Every beach scene spoke of desolation and dead fish. She dreamed of leviathan shadows stalking her under the waves and she woke shivering and afraid. It was getting more difficult to get her paints and easel to the shore each day. The open ocean and the blank canvas were just too frightening.
    Joe is gone, she thought. I have no career and no friends and I produce nothing but kitschy seascapes as flat and soulless asa velvet Elvis. I'm afraid of everything.
    Val Riordan had called her, insisting that she come to a group therapy session for widows, but Estelle had said no. Instead, one evening, after finishing a tormented painting of a beached dolphin, she left her brushes to harden with acrylic and headed downtown – anywhere where she didn't have to look at this shit she'd been calling art. She ended up at the Head of the Slug Saloon – the first bar she'd set foot in since college.
    The Slug was full of Blues and smoke and people chasing shots and running from sadness. If they'd been dogs, they would have all been in the yard eating grass and trying to yakup whatever was making them feel so lousy. Not a bone gnawed, not a ball chased – all tails went unwagged. Oh, life is a fast cat, a short leash, a flea in that place where you just can't scratch. It was dog sad in there, and Catfish Jefferson was the designated howler. The moon was in his eye and he was singing up the sum of human suffering in A-minor, while he worked that bottleneck slide on the National guitar until it sounded like a slow wind through heartstrings. He was grinning.
    Of the hundred or so people in the Slug, half were experiencing some sort of withdrawal from their medications. There wasa self -pity contingent at the bar, staring into their drinks and rocking back and forth to the Delta rhythms. At the tables, the more social of the depressed were whining and slurring their problems into each other's ears and occasionally trading hugs or curses. Over by the pool table stood the agitated and the aggressive, the people looking for someone to blame. These were mostly men, and