House of Blues (28 page)

I don't know why she didn't run, though. She could
have. I saw that scene played out a lot, other times, in greater or
lesser degrees, but she never did run.

I think I would have, I really do. I've wondered a
lot why she didn't.

Mama reached five and she started walking toward her.

Slowly.

Drawing out the torture.

By the time she got there, Evie was standing still,
braced against the onslaught.

When Mama got to her, she raised her hand and kept it
poised in the air, level with her face, the back of it facing Evie.

Then she swatted her.

Backhanded her as hard as she could.

I heard her hand hit Evie's face, and then Evie fell
on the ground, sobbing like a little bitty kid who'd lost its mother
somewhere in the jungle.

"Get in that house," Mama said, and her
voice was napalm. Evie didn't move, so Mama hit her again. "You
get in there. I'm going to turn you over to your daddy."

Evie started crawling; sort of walking like a crab,
except low to the ground, trying to get out of Mama's way, but Mama
was chasing her, hitting her all the way in the house.

My cousin Andrew started laughing. "She looked
just like Pooty when she did that, didn't she?" Pooty was their
dog. He started whining like Pooty, and barking a little, and some of
the other kids joined in, howling and yipping, maybe to drown out the
sound of whatever else was happening to Evie, I don't know. I went
for a walk.

I walked around the block, and then I did it again.
Then I finally walked to the Plum Street Sno-ball stand and got a
strawberry Sno-ball, and then I walked back.

We were pretty young when that happened, and I think
I forgot it until recently. At any rate, I don't ever remember
thinking about it. It slithered back into my consciousness after Reed
and Dennis disappeared.

Maybe it was triggered by that woman in the House of
Blues who looked like Evie. Maybe there was something scared in her
face that reminded me that Evie could be that way, because mostly
what I remember about my sister is that she wasn't scared.

She was just bad.

When she'd do something bad, which was often, they'd
yell at her—both of them. They yelled at me sometimes, and now and
then at Reed, though really not often, but they yelled at Evie a lot.

And she'd do something neither Reed nor I would ever
have thought of doing. She'd yell back.

She'd yell back.

Was she crazy?

Dad would say, "Evie, go upstairs and do your
homework."

And she'd say, in some whiny teenage nasal voice, "I
don't have to."

And he'd say, "What did you say, young lady?"

"I don't have to do my homework."

"What did I hear you say?"

Now, how smart did you have to be to know where that
was going to lead? But nobody said Evie was dumb; she was just bad.
So I guess I thought that's why she did it—not to make Dad and Mama
mad, nothing so well thought out—just because it was her nature.

Our parents were pretty volatile when we were growing
up, but of course we all knew that was Evie's fault.

Because she tried their patience.

Because she never thought about anybody but herself.
Because she just liked to cause trouble.

Those were the things they said.

Mama hated her, so I had to stay as far away from her
as possible. I don't think it ever occurred to me to become her
friend or ally, to think of her any way at all except as an outcast;
an outcast within the family. She simply wasn't important.

Wasn't, in a way.

Was nobody.

Maybe I wasn't the world's most sensitive child, but
I suspect this business of Mama hating her did more to form my
opinion of her than anything else. The plain fact was, if I got close
to Evie, she'd hate me too.

Hate me more, that is.

Mama wasn't all that fond of her baby boy either.

Let me rephrase that. I think she probably adored her
baby boy. It was just that, the older I got, the less she liked me.
She didn't like the way I used to chase the dog around the house;
chase Reed around the house, for that matter.

She said I drank too much orange juice and too much
milk. I ate too much.

I ate standing up.

I was always dirty.

My pet duck pooped all over the flagstones.

I was noisy.

I got sticky fingerprints everywhere.

Do all mothers complain about such things? I'm sure
they do, but somehow, perhaps in the way she complained, Mama gave me
to understand that the trouble with me was that I was a boy.

She didn't like boys. She made that perfectly clear.
So she didn't like me. The older I got, the bigger my feet got and
the more they stank, the more milk and orange juice I drank, the
more, in short, I grew to resemble a man. And the less she liked me.

I think all that was true, pretty much, throughout
our childhood and adolescence, but all bets were off when The Thing
happened.

Everyone was so miserable then, hardly anyone raised
his voice for a long, long time. This was disconcerting, because we
were a family that yelled.

The Thing was possibly the seminal event of my
childhood; the single most important event in it. The reason,
perhaps, that I am a poor scribe instead of a rich lawyer or banker.
It is always in the back of my mind, or just under my skin, or
crawling around in my belly. It is always there, whatever else I am
doing.

The Thing is there when I go out to get my morning
paper and wave to my neighbor.

It is there as I sip my coffee.

It is there as I make phone calls, trying to scare up
a freelance gig, something to pay the rent for yet another month. It
is there if I have lunch with an old friend.

It is there if I have two drinks before dinner and
two after.

It is there when I make love.

It is with me when I walk into the House of Blues,
though often, while I listen to the music, I can forget it
completely.

It is with me when I walk out.

Increasingly, it is there when I write.

I cannot lose it, I cannot forget it. It wants to
come out.

It is trying to worm its way onto the paper.

It is a beast inside me struggling to get out.

And I will let it out.

This means something. When something is this
persistent, this strong inside oneself, it means a creative leap. I
know that.

I don't know how I know it, but I do. If I can write
about this, my writing will take a turn, I am sure of it. I've been
nibbling at the edges of it for a long time, standing on a
metaphorical precipice, and this stunning new fact may push me over.
This grotesquely amazing thing.

The fact that Evie, my sister, has killed our father.
Is that possible?

It has occurred.

Now I have written it. If only I could assimilate it,
could make myself believe it.

Events, thoughts, are turbid within me; old memories
take on new meanings.

A funny thing, though. That softball thing, the thing
where Evie flailed and jumped up and down, I think that was on
Easter. The Thing certainly was.

We were all dressed up, I remember it well; we had
been to church.

The girls and I fought in the car. Reed had a hat and
I think I jerked it off her head and threatened to throw it out the
window. She cried, and Mama slapped me.

It was a beautiful day, a
perfect day, the reason pagans celebrate the spring, and I guess the
reason Christians do too. We had been to church . . .

* * *

Grady stopped, realizing he had already written that.
He exed it out and wrote, "Reed had a hat . . . before he
stopped again. His skin felt prickly and the back of his neck was
damp. His stomach crawled with venomous snakes. He felt a furrow in
his forehead as deep as a ditch. His jaw locked so hard his teeth
hurt. '

Wait. Breathe deep.

He brushed sopping hair from his face.

It'll be okay.

Nausea roiled in his groin and began to travel to his
solar plexus.

Get up and walk around.

As he got up, he began to flail the air, recognizing
in the gesture something of what he'd written about his sister. He
walked and flailed, stretched a few times, and then threw himself on
his bed, still breathing deeply, until the terror and hatred had
passed. Can you be phobic about a day in your life?

Maybe.

But I don't think I am. This isn't a phobia, it's a
parasite chewing on me. It had to go, The Thing had to go.

And for the first time, he thought he could get it
out, pull the worm from beneath his skin, all twelve miles of it, or
three thousand miles of it, whatever was in there.

He thought it would come out soon.

But not now.

As soon as he was breathing normally again, he would
shower off the sweat and go to the House of Blues.
 

19

Skip woke up to the sound of a yipping puppy. But the
outside noise was nothing compared to what was going on in her head.
This Dennis development had her reeling.

She had hoped that when she found Dennis, she'd find
Reed, Sally, and all the answers. Instead it seemed she'd only opened
a can of worms wriggling at something approaching the speed of light.

One of those wriggling worms was called Tricia, but
she figured that was something she'd have to deal with later. Right
now, life was throwing things at her like one of those machines that
serves tennis balls.

Dennis, Dennis, Dennis, do I believe you?

She had no choice.

That was the practical consideration, but there was
also another. Deep in her gut, she felt he was telling the truth.

The more time she spent as a police officer, the more
she was coming to trust her intuition. It seemed a contradiction in
terms that intuition should come with experience, but even the most
grizzled cops talked about it. Guys without a metaphysical cell in
their bodies. Who wouldn't be caught dead in a church, say, unless
someone had died.

Her brain did a kind of mental "oof," and a
black curtain dropped somewhere in her psyche as she remembered that
someone had.

And yet, the curtain swung down and swung back in a
few moments, more or less of its own accord. The loss of jim was
going to be a raw wound for a long time, perhaps would never
completely heal. But it was starting to scab over.

She pulled on a pair of loose-fitting linen pants and
an olive silk T-shirt, kissed Steve good-bye, and left in a
coffeeless daze, thinking to get caffeined-up at work.

As she sipped, she considered her situation.

Oh, hell, she suddenly thought, and looked in the
phone book for an Evie Hebert.

There wasn't one.

And of course, Evie could be calling herself Skip
Langdon for all she knew. Nothing to do but start at the beginning,
and that was Hebert's.

To her distress, Sugar was there; Skip had hoped to
find Nina alone.

"Officer Langdon," said Sugar, "could
you please tell me what's going on? Last night, Grady called me at my
house and said Dennis was back and needed his house, could I please
go home? Can you imagine? Not even offering to put me up. Not even
thinking about my things, over at Dennis and Reed's.

"
Now Dennis won't answer the phone, and I can't
find anything out. What happened? What's going on?"

"Grady didn't tell you?" She thought Dennis
had probably filled him in.

"
Nobody tells me anything."

Skip considered. ''Let's sit down," she said.
"You have a right to know. But I'd appreciate it if you'd keep
it to yourself."

When they were seated, she said, "First, let me
tell you that we still don't know where Reed and Sally are."

With her right hand Sugar batted away the
irrelevancy. "Grady told me that."

"Okay, here's what Dennis said. I'm afraid
there's some very bad news—your daughter Evie is involved."

Sugars mouth pulled tight at the corners and a
furious look blazed in her eyes. Skip found the expression unnerving,
wildly inappropriate for a person who was being told her oldest child
had murdered her husband. It was so full of anger and hurt that they
spilled over and filled the room.

"
I'm sorry," Skip said when she had
finished her story.

Sugar said nothing.

Skip made her voice businesslike. "I need to
know anything you can tell me about how to find Evie."

"
I don't know how to find Evie."

"This is important, Mrs. Hebert. Think back to
the last time you saw her."