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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 Not to be published, perhaps, but it was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 despair.
    This nearly made him cry.
    It touched him in a way that his father's death had
not; or had not yet—he knew that would hit him in the end. This was
more accessible, this insult to Reed, this slap in the face.
    But no, he didn't think she had killed her father.
That was the last thing he thought. He told his mother he suspected
some thug had done it—someone who had conned his way into the
house.
    " But why?" said Sugar. "Nothing was
taken."
    Why. He hadn't thought about why; in a way, he was a
numb as Sugar.
    So they could kidnap the others and hold them for
ransom.
    But he didn't say it.
    Wait a minute. Someone drove Reed and Dennis's car
away .
    He said, "They probably meant to strip the
place, but Dad got out of hand. You know how he is. And then they got
scared."
    " I think I can sleep now," Sugar said. "How
he was, you mean."
    They had demolished nearly the whole bottle.
    He left her and went to the House of Blues. He liked
to stand there nursing a beer in a plastic cup, swaying; letting the
music pulse through him. It was a good way to empty his mind, forget
his life and his failure, forget the way he missed Nina; forget his
father's death, his mother's odd quiet.
    Buddy Guy was playing. Grady should have been a
zombie, blitzed on the music and alcohol, but his brain was still
functioning.
    Or maybe you could call it that. He was having
something that might be called a thought, but perhaps it was just a
feeling.
    He never got what he wanted.
    If it was a feeling, it