Christopher Moore: The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

She made a note to call Winston back and schedule his appointments.

As September’s promise wound down, a strange unrest came over the people of Pine Cove, due in no small part to the fact that many of them were going into withdrawal from their medications. It didn’t happen all at once—the streets were not full of middle-class junkies rocking and sweating and begging for a fix—but slowly as the autumn days became shorter. And as far as they knew (because Val Riordan had called every one of them), they were experiencing the onset of a mild seasonal syndrome, sort of like spring fever. Call it autumn malaise.

The nature of the medications kept the symptoms spread out over the next few weeks. Prozac and some of the older antidepressants took almost a month to leave the system, so those people slipped into the fray more slowly than those on Zoloft or Paxil or Wellbutrin, which was flushed from the system in only a day or two, leaving the deprived with symptoms resembling a low-grade flu, then a scattered disorientation akin to a temporary case of attention deficit disorder, and, in some, a rebound of depression that dropped on them like a smoky curtain.

One of the first to feel the effects was Estelle Boyet, a local artist, successful and semifamous for her seascapes and idealized paintings of Pine Cove shore life. Her prescription had run out a day before Dr. Val had replaced the supply with sugar pills, so she was already in the midst of withdrawal when she took the first dose of the placebo.

Estelle was sixty, a stout, vital woman who wore brightly colored caftans and let her long gray hair fly around her shoulders as she moved through life with an energy and determination that inspired envy from women half her age. For thirty years she had been a teacher in the decaying and increasingly dangerous Los Angeles Unified School 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 bullet-proof 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 9 mms—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 as a 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 yak up 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 was a 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 Theophilus Crowe was keeping an eye on them from his spot at the bar.

Since the death of Bess Leander, there had been a fight in the Slug almost every night. In addition, there were more pukers, more screamers, more criers, and more unwanted advances stifled with slaps. Theo had been very busy. So had Mavis Sand. Mavis was happy about it.

Estelle came through the doors in her paint-spattered overalls and Shetland sweater, her hair pulled back in a long gray braid. Just inside, she paused as the music and the smoke washed over her. Some Mexican laborers were standing there in a group, drinking Budweisers, and one of them whistled at her.

“I’m an old lady,” Estelle said. “Shame on you.” She pushed her way through the crowd to the bar and ordered a white wine. Mavis served it in a plastic beer cup. (She was serving everything in plastic lately. Evidently, the Blues made people want to break glass—on each other.)

“Busy?” Estelle said, although she had nothing to compare it to.

“The Blues sure packs ‘em in,” Mavis said.

“I don’t much care for the Blues,” said Estelle. “I enjoy Classical music.”

“Three bucks,” said Mavis. She took Estelle’s money and moved to the other end of the bar.

Estelle felt as if she’d been slapped in the face.

“Don’t mind Mavis,” a man’s voice said. “She’s always cranky.”

Estelle looked up, caught a shirt button, then looked up farther to find Theo’s smile. She had never met the constable, but she knew who he was.

“I don’t even know why I came in here. I’m not a drinker.”

“Something going around,” Theo said. “I think maybe we’re going to have a stormy winter or something. People are coming out of the woodwork.”

They exchanged introductions and Theo complimented Estelle on her paintings, which he’d seen in the local galleries. Estelle dismissed the compliment.

“This seems like a strange place to find the constable,” Estelle said.

Theo showed her the cell phone on his belt. “Base of operations,” he said. “Most of the trouble has been starting in here anyway. If I’m here already, I can stop it before it escalates.”