House of Blues

by Julie Smith

  For whatever reason, she was always different from us.

  She was bad.

  That wasn't news. We knew she was bad because that's what everyone said—it was a given in our family. But until then I didn't know how scared she was.

  She was cringing like some kind of pathetic dog—actually holding onto a tree and hiding behind it—and she said she didn't do it.

  Mama said, "Mike. Did she do it?"

  And Uncle Michael said, "She hit the ball, Sugar, but Elise pitched it, and anyway, I'm the adult here, I was—"

  "She just lied to me—did you hear that? Did you hear her 1ie?"

  All the other grown-ups were gathered in the kitchen by this time—all of them come to see if the person howling was their own dear little child, I guess, but Mama didn't seem to care how big a spectacle she made of herself. They were just kind of watching in various states of shock, mouths open, and Dad had his arm around her waist. He was probably saying, "Now, Sugar, honey," or something like that, but she was all alone in the world for all the attention she paid.

  All alone except for Evie. She said, "You lied to me! You're just a little liar, aren't you? You come here to me. I'll show you what happens to liars."

  By this time even I was getting scared, and so were the other kids, I think. We were just standing around like the grown-ups, sort of frozen in place. I don't know what we thought Mama was going to do to her, but there was something terrifying just in the way she was yelling.

  And of course we knew that it was her fault. Because somehow or other Evie made things go wrong. We knew in our hearts that none of us was capable of making that ball hit Mama, that only Evie did things like that. No one moved; not even Uncle Mike. Mama kept saying, "You come here to me. Do what I say, Evelyne Hebert," and slapping the kitchen counter with the flat of her hand. It made a noise like a gunshot.

  Evie sort of whined, "No, Mama; no, Mama," like some pathetic baby animal, and then Mama said, "Don't make me have to come and get you," in a voice like the blade of a saber. Evie started dancing. Jumping up and down and turning around and around, flinging her arms in the air, flailing them about. She was saying, "No! Noooo! I can't," and her hands looked like they were going to fly off her wrists.

  Mama said, "You've got five to get over here." And she started counting. "One. Two. Three."

  Evie was still dancing, still jumping up and down, but she was scratching the tree now, attacking it with her nails, which were probably bitten to the quick, but I guess she wished she could turn into a cat and climb it.

  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 mor
ning 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."

  "Why are you making me do this?" Sugars face turned ugly and liquid; her voice was harsh.

  "I'm sorry. I know its hard for you. But I think if you mull it over, you'll understand why its important." She couldn't see trying to explain something so obvious. "Is Nina here?"

  "Nina? What do you want Nina for?"

  She stood up. "I'd like to talk to her. Excuse me, will you?"

  She found Nina in her own office. "How come nobody told me about Evie?"

  "Evie?" Nina sounded hurt and puzzled. "What does Evie have to do with anything?"

  I guess thats my answer. "She may. It turns out she may."

  "Oh?" Her face was a mask of curiosity.

  "Do you have any idea where she is?"

  Nina shrugged. "No. I don't think shes been heard from in a couple of years."

  "Think back carefully to the last time you saw her. I need to know anything you can remember—"

  Sugar barged in, interrupting: "I remembered something. She was born again—that must have meant she was a member of a church."
>
  She looked extremely pleased with herself.

  "Ah. Did she happen to say what church?"

  "Why, no. She didn't."

  Nina said, "Something with 'lamb' in it."

  "Good. Mrs. Hebert, does that ring any bells?"

  Sugar looked disconcerted. She spoke to Nina: "She told you that?"

  "You mean the name of the church?" Nina shrugged. "She hardly talked about anything else."

  Sugar said, "I don't believe you."

  Nina didn't speak. She sat impassively waiting for more.

  "If she'd talked to anyone, it would have been me. I mean, I am the girl's mother."

  "Well, if I'm not mistaken, she did tell me." Her tone said: This woman's going to drive me crazy if I don't kill her first.

  Skip said to Nina. "Do you remember anything at all about the church? What denomination, for instance?"

  "Not really. I have the impression it was something kind of off-brand. I don't even know where it was."

  "You mean, whether it was in New Orleans or somewhere else?"

  "Uh-huh. I realize I don't even know."

  And she was the one who knew the most.

  Skip left, thinking it was a hell of a family she'd gotten involved with.

  Oh, well. Mine's no great shakes either.

  Her dad hadn't spoken to her for nearly two years after she told her family she was going on the job; her brother Conrad sold her information in return for fixing his parking tickets (actually she paid them herself); and her mother judged herself, her husband, and every member of her family by what she thought other people thought of them.

  Naturally, since Skip didn't have a high-status job, she was usually found wanting. On the other hand, whenever she got in the paper over some case or other, she enjoyed a brief flurry of maternal popularity.

  But at least we don't murder each other.

  * * *

  She went back to headquarters and looked in the phone book. Dozens, probably hundreds of churches. She started scanning for "lamb" names.