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 Niño," 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 Niño 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 fo' my narrow ass gets blowed back to Clarksville."

"It's not that bad," said Theo. "I think it'll blow over."

Winter denial — Theo did it, most Californians did it — they assumed that because the weather was nice most of the time, it would be nice all of the time, and so, in the midst of a rainstorm, you'd find people outdoors without an umbrella, or when nights dipped into the thirties, you'd still see someone dip-pumping his gas in surfer shorts and a tank top. So even as the National Weather Service was telling the Central Coast to batten down the hatches, as they were about to get the storm of the decade, and even though winds were gusting to fifty knots a full day before the storm made landfall, the people of Pine Cove carried on with their holiday routine like nothing out of the ordinary could happen to them.

Winter denial: therein lay the key to California Schadenfreude — the secret joy that the rest of the country feels at the misfortune of California. The country said: "Look at them, with their fitness and their tans, their beaches and their movie stars, their Silicon Valley and silicone breasts, their orange bridge and their palm trees. God, I hate those smug, sunshiny bastards!" Because if you're up to your navel in a snowdrift in Ohio, nothing warms your heart like the sight of California on fire. If you're shoveling silt out of your basement in the Fargo flood zone, nothing brightens your day like watching a Malibu mansion tumbling down a cliff into the sea. And if a tornado just peppered the land around your Oklahoma town with random trailer trash and redneck nuggets, then you can find a quantum of solace in the fact that the earth actually opened up in the San Fernando Valley and swallowed a whole caravan of commuting SUVs.

Mavis Sand even indulged in a little California Schadenfreude, and she was a Californian born and raised. Secretly, she wished for and enjoyed the forest fires every year. Not so much because she liked watching the state burn down, but because for Mavis's money, there was nothing better than watching a burly man in rubber handling a hefty hose, and during the fires, there were plenty of those on the news.

"Fruitcake?" Mavis said, offering a suspicious slice on a dessert plate to Gabe Fenton, who was drunkenly trying to convince Theo Crowe that he had a genetic predisposition toward the blues, using some impressively large words that no one but he understood, and periodically asking if he could get an «amen» and "five up high," which, as it turned out, he could not.

What he could get was fruitcake.

"Mercy, mercy, my momma done made a fruitcake look just like that," Gabe howled. "Lawd rest her soul."

Gabe reached for the plate, but Theo intercepted it and held it out of the biologist's reach.

"First," Theo said, "your mother was an anthro professor and never baked a thing in her life, and second, she is not dead, and third, you are an atheist."

"Can I get an amen?!" Gabe countered.

Theo raised an eyebrow of accusation toward Mavis.

"I thought we talked about no fruitcake this year."

The prior Christmas, Mavis's fruitcake had put two people into detox. She'd sworn that it would be the last year.

Mavis shrugged. "This cake's nearly a virgin. There's only a quart of rum and barely a handful of Vicodin."

"Let's not," Theo said, handing the plate back.

"Fine," Mavis said. "But get your buddy off his blues jag. He's embarrassing me. And I once blew a burro in a nightclub and wasn't embarrassed, so that's saying something."

"Jeez, Mavis," Theo said, trying to shake the picture from his mind.

"What? I didn't have my glasses on. I thought he was a hirsute insurance salesman with talent."

"I'd better get him home," Theo said, nudging Gabe, who had turned his attention to a young woman on his right who was wearing a low-cut red sweater and had been moving from stool to stool all night long, waiting for someone to talk to her.

"Hi," Gabe said to the woman's cleavage. "I'm not involved in the human experience and I have no redeeming qualities as a man."

"Me either," said Tucker Case, from the stool on the other side of the red-sweater woman. "Do people keep telling you that you're a psychopath, too? I hate that."

Tucker Case, under several layers of glibness and guile, was actually quite broken up over his breakup with Lena Marquez. It wasn't so much that she had become a part of his life in the two days he had known her, but that she had begun to represent hope. And as the Buddha said: "Hope is merely another face of desire. And desire is a motherfucker." He'd gone out seeking human company to help dilute the disappointment. In another time, he'd have picked up the first woman he encountered, but his man-slut days had left him lonelier than ever, and he would not tread that lubricious path again.

"So," Tuck said to Gabe, "did you just get dumped?"

"She led me on," Gabe said. "She tore my guts out. Evil, thy name is woman!"

"Don't talk to him," Theo said, taking Gabe by the shoulder and unsuccessfully trying to pull him off his bar stool. "This guy's no good."

The young woman sitting between Tuck and Gabe looked from one to the other, then to Theo, then at her breasts, then at the men, as if to say, Are you guys blind? I've been sitting here all night, with these, and you're going to ignore me.