Out of the Blues by Trudy Nan Boyce Read Free Book Online

empty except for a worn wine-colored Oriental rug and the books. The cassette tapes were in a battered, brownish pasteboard suitcase the size that a man might have carried on an overnight business trip in the ’60s. Salt slid the case from the shelf, sat down beside it on the carpet, and pried the tarnished latches open, releasing a faint muddy odor as she lifted the top.
    There were a hundred or more tapes in hard plastic cases. Some had factory labels on the spines and others were hand-labeled, her father’s long, loopy writing sliding off the edges. “I can’t read my own writing,” he’d say. “Blind Will” read the label on one tape. Other tapes were blank on the spines, and Salt slid them out in order to see what was written on the tape face. Like the rest of the library, thetapes seemed to be in no particular order, unless, like the library, it was a system peculiar to her father.
    The red cedar shelves were full of books belonging to multiple generations of her father’s family, though most were her dad’s. They were in the order he had read them, with the books about depression on the far wall opposite of where Salt now sat. There was a ledger of his reading on one of the shelves beside the pocket doors.
    She let her fingers rove at random through the tapes and by feel slid a tape from the collection. On the shelf beside the case was a tape recorder of the type that used to be used in offices for recording work to be transcribed. The police department had only within the last few years quit using them to record statements of witnesses and victims.
    Salt plugged the recorder in an outlet, inserted the tape labeled “Pretty Pearl at the Blue Room,” and pushed play. As she adjusted the volume knob on the side of the recorder, a woman’s voice, accompanied by a lone piano, broke soulfully through the scratches and drags of both the tape and machine.
    Spread your wings and fly
    Lil gal, you gonna spread
    your wings and fly.
    Salt leaned back into the corner. Her father’d had lots of good days. With the grass prickly on her legs and the ground smelling of green onions, he’d be bent over something in the black-dirt yard, weeding, planting seedlings, or sometimes just touching leaves, petals, and stems. Stretching his back as he stood, he’d call her “Angel.” She’d run and jump into his arms, his shirtsleeves warm from the sun. He’d lift her to his knees, holding her out, stiff-legged, arms spread wide and facing the world. “Flying angel, spread your wings.”
    She began to remove each tape and stack them according to genre. About half the tapes were blues and the other half jazz and gospel. One tape, its case less worn and scratched, plastic hinges intact, was labeled “Mike Anderson and the Old Smoke Band.”
    I dreamed I heard the Marion whistle blow,
    And it blew just like my baby gettin’ on board.
    I’m goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.
    The familiar sadness settled like a heavy, old quilt. She worked, ran, worked out in the dojo, took care of the sheep with Wonder. But it would settle nevertheless, as she tried to hold together the pieces of her ten-year-old self. “The blues, eh, Pops?” The spines of the books across from her told part of his story:
Depression and Other Major Psychological Disorders
,
Dealing with Depression
,
Living with Mental Illness
.
    Salt pressed the stop button.

ROSIE’S MAGIC
    O n a rusted iron panel of the railroad trestle that ran alongside the mammoth brick Sears, Roebuck building, a graffiti portrait of Blind Willie McTell stared out at the city. The police department leased parts of the old building to temporarily house some of its units, which were now, unit by unit, being moved into the new headquarters building downtown. Homicide was scheduled to be one of the last to leave, so the massive structure was almost empty. At over two million square feet, the