House of Blues

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