House of Blues

to give her time to obey. When he knocked on the door, she
said, "Come in," and this time she was tucked in. She still
had her makeup on, but he wasn't going to quibble.
    "Good, Mama. You need to get some rest." He
hadn't called her "Mama" since he was twelve.
    The television hummed in the background, and he was
suddenly afraid she would see the news and that his father's death
would be on it. "Let's turn this off, shall we?"
    He poured her a drink and handed it to her. He poured
himself one and sat on the stool that went with the dresser. He had
no idea what to say to her. She was the one who talked—talked and
talked and talked, much to the discomfort of everyone around her. His
relationship with her consisted of fending her off.
    Finally, she said, "Do you think she killed
him?"
    "Who?"
    " Reed."
    "Reed?" He would have been as shocked if
she'd said Hillary Clinton. "Why Reed?"
    "What he did wasn't right. All that child ever
wanted in her life was to run that restaurant—that and please her
daddy. And he took everything away from her."
    Grady felt a tingle. Oh, God,
another lovely evening in the House of Blues.
    The House of Blues was a club, one of several in
various cities, but still the biggest thing to hit New Orleans since
the casino was voted in. It was artfully funky and low-down, full of
Louisiana native art. Its sound system had probably cost millions.
Its acts were top of the line. It perfectly captured the city's idea
of itself, every college student's fantasies, every baby boomer's
memories, and managed somehow to be the exact club Grady would have
built—any music lover would have—if he just had unlimited funds.
Grady went there a good three times a week, every time he got to
feeling depressed.
    But he had first been attracted by the name. He'd
always been disappointed that there wasn't really a House of the
Rising Sun. When he was about twelve, maybe thirteen, he'd spent a
lot of time thinking about the song's second line: "It's been
the ruin of many a poor boy and, Lord, I know I'm one."
    He found the song unspeakably romantic and somehow
true; true in a way he couldn't put his finger on. He never thought
of it as a bordello, just as a house in New Orleans, like the first
line said.
    The name House of Blues, the melancholy the phrase
evoked, hit him the same way, made him think of the old song. But
there was something more, something like the twist of a knife, and it
excited him. it inspired him, gave him ideas he'd never had before.
    He had written a lot of nonfiction, pieces for Gambit and New Orleans Magazine ,
and now he'd begun to write short stories . about vampires. If Anne
Rice could, why not Grady Hebert? The metaphor—the love that
devours and kills, the sucking of blood, the sucking, sucking,
sucking till there is no juice left—had spoken to him as a
teenager. At least that was the way he grandly put it now, as if it
were a metaphor.
    The Undead seemed appropriate to the city, he
thought, and so he had tried his hand.
    But he wasn't sure about these vampire stories of
his. He had sold a couple, his first published fiction, to horror
magazines, and that was a thrill—not only for its own sake, but it
had delighted him to tell his parents, to watch their confused
reactions. His father, of course, had belittled them, as he did
everything; Sugar had tried to be nice, but in the end she couldn't
conceal her distaste. Grady thought perhaps he felt a bit of the same
thing.
    He wanted to write something more real.
    He had found himself thinking of his own childhood
home, Sugar and Arthur's home, as the House of Blues, of the Hebert
dynasty as having its own name, a name like House of Atreus, House of
Tudor, House of Hanover.
    And he had known that he
would write about The Thing. Not to be published, perhaps, but it was
something he would do. When he had done it, he would be like Clea in
The Alexandria Quartet, the artist who painted well only after she
lost her hand. He too would have an artistic breakthrough. Why this
was so he didn't know, any more than he understood why Clea had. He
knew that he had to do it, he was excited by the idea, thrilled in a
macabre way, but he also knew he could not. And so he went night
after night to the House of Blues and let the music flow through his
body, cleansing him.
    * * *
    Sugar told him the story, told him what Arthur had
done to Reed, how he had taken back the restaurant from her. Reed's
world, Reed's life, her worldview, had always made Grady