House of Blues

just
assaulted a police officer. I could take you to jail if I want to. Do
you understand what you did?"
    The jagged sobs started again. ''Oh, goddamrnit. Oh,
goddammit. I need Darryl. Oh, please, goddammit; take me to Darryl.
Please, please, Skippy."
    Darryl Boucree was Tricia's best friend, the
bartender at the place where they both worked. Skip knew him well.
    " What's his address? He's Uptown, isn't he? Jim,
I'll take her."
    "He's moved." Tricia gave them an address
on Mandeville, in the Faubourg Marigny.
    Jim didn't say a word, just started driving.
    The house was an unusual one for the neighborhood, a
raised cottage with a front porch, larger than most. Skip saw it was
a double. She rang the bell on the left, and in a moment Darryl
answered. He was a light-skinned black man, handsome, but that wasn't
the main thing—he had a whippety kind of energy, a fast, easy charm
that Skip found close to irresistible. She could see a glow in the
living room, probably from candlelight. He must have a date.
    "Skip. This isn't a good time."
    "I've got Tricia. It's a long story, but she's
way under the weather. I almost had to arrest her."
    He looked as if she'd slapped him.
    "Sorry to ruin your evening." She hoped she
didn't sound sarcastic, but she was so unnerved she wasn't sure.
    Darryl was someone important to her. He was not only
a bartender, he was also an English teacher, a musician, and a member
of a family she knew and liked a lot. Once, they had made tentative
moves toward dating, when she wasn't sure where her relationship with
Steve was going. Jimmy Dee adored him and so did Kenny. Sheila was
frankly in love with him.
    Skip couldn't bear to have him think ill of her.
    He said, "But what are you doing here?"
    "She wouldn't go home. She—" She stopped,
unsure what to say next.
    He must have seen how upset she was. "Let's go
get her."
    When Skip let Tricia out of the car and took the
cuffs off, she began the hysterical sobbing again, but this time on
Darryl's shoulder.
    He looked at Skip over Tricia's wracked body and his
face was inexpressibly sad. She had seen him look that way before,
and it always had the same effect—it made her want to press him to
her breast.
    A woman stood on the porch, a young black woman, also
light-skinned, with long, brownish, curly hair. She was in
silhouette, but Skip had the impression she looked like a movie star.
She got back in the car.
    "Are you okay?" asked Jim.
    " There's nothing wrong with me a little crystal
wouldn't fix."
    "I'll take you to Charity."
    He took her to Steve.
 
 
    10
    Grady had gone home for a few hours to write and to
get more clothes, and since his mother had company, to be away from
her for a while. He was pleased with the children's story he'd
written—not that it was anything he would ever be able to sell (or
would even want to), but it was fiction and it wasn't about vampires,
and it was a start. Toward what, he wasn't sure; maybe just away from
the damned Undead. He was realizing more and more how sick he was of
their everlasting blood lust.
    With his father dead on the dining room floor and
most of the rest of his family missing, vampires seemed a trifle
superfluous, a sort of playing at gruesomeness. It came to him
suddenly that he was truly done with them—that there was no going
back—and that surprised him. All he had written was the tiny
exercise about the planet where spaghetti grew on trees, and he had
no plans for anything else. Yet he knew in that moment—when he said
good-bye to the vampires—that there would be something else. He
just didn't know what.
    That was frightening. Writing was safe because it
wasn't life. If he didn't know what to write, he cou1dn't write now,
and if he couldn't write, how could he keep reality at bay?
    There's the House of Blues, of course. And
alcohol.
    But if I stay out late and drink, then I won't
feel like working tomorrow.
    The thing was, he wanted to get on with it, he wanted
to do it, whatever it was.
    The only thing to do is gut it out.
    He turned on his computer and sat in front of it, a
quote he had once heard flitting through his head. It was a recipe
for successful writing: "Sit staring at paper until drops of
blood form on forehead."
    If that's what it takes, I'll do it.
    But his mother came over.
    Nonplussed, he let her in. "Are you all right?"
    "I just wanted to see if you're all right."
    " Why wouldn't I be?" She never came to Race
Street.
    "I don't know. You know how I'm kind of