"Christopher Moore - The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Christopher)

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 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