Read Online Leavin' Trunk Blues by Ace Atkins - Free Book Online Page B

bigger. The city was gray concrete, red brick, and silver-mirrored windows. A meeting of the decades in a mishmash of architecture that loomed over the avenues like walls of a canyon. Heat rose from sidewalk vents. White Christmas lights burned from bare trees and red bows wrapped green iron streetlamps. The smell of garbage drifted from back alleys.
    The city noises bleated in Nick’s ears after he parked just off the Magnificent Mile and fed the meter. He adjusted his watch cap over his ears and searched for Doyle Brennan’s place among the monoliths looming overhead. If there were some old King Snake folks about town, Doyle would know where to find them.
    Besides having probably the largest jazz and blues music store in the country, Doyle had his own indie label and was a tracker of sorts. He knew more about the golden age of blues than most professors Nick knew combined. Doyle was an old buddy of his instructor at Ole Miss and one of the first white guys to frequent black clubs in the late fifties and early sixties. A frustrated musician, like Nick, who turned to another profession so he could stay around the music.
    Nick followed a back alley toward the river as a speckle of snow drifted across the asphalt.
    The record store sat on the bottom level of a glass and concrete building and smelled of incense and plastic. Old blues promo posters lined the walls: hot pinks, sky blues, and electric greens spelling out such incredible shows as Little Walter Live or a Muddy Waters doubleheader with Sonny Boy Williamson. Days when the blues pounded the soul and shaped the identity of Chicago. The posters were curled at the edges, a few water- stained.
    A teenage kid in a black Stones T-shirt with a diamond nose ring smoked an herbal cigarette behind the cash register. Nick asked if Doyle was around and the kid nodded to a back door where the man had kept his office for the past fifteen years. Nick turned the knob and walked into chaos.
    Among the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and file cabinets, papers were tacked on cabinets, taped on doors, and strewn across his desk. Styrofoam cups, several overturned coffee mugs, and piles of blues and jazz magazines lay on the floor.
    Doyle sat with his head down, a cigarette burning in a black ashtray on his desk, and a fluorescent banker’s lamp warming a book. A Memphis Slim record spun on a turntable behind him.
    Doyle was a thick-bodied man with shoulder-length gray hair, a bushy beard, and the fleshy reddened cheeks of an Irish farmer. Nick knew he’d once possessed a heated desire to change the world. He’d walked with Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago, helped register voters in Mississippi, and for years tried to help bluesmen recover their royalties.
    Nick coughed. Doyle looked up and smiled. He awkwardly raised from his desk and offered his thick hand. He turned behind him and took the needle from the Memphis Slim record.
    “Mr. Travers,” he said, coughing into his hand. “A little late for the blues festival.”
    Doyle slumped back into his seat and kicked a wobbling office chair over to Nick. He pulled the chair back and took a seat. Shards of sunlight cut through the books, magazines, and records behind Doyle.
    “Let me guess.” Doyle studied his face. “You want something.”
    Nick lit a Marlboro and smiled. “I want to hang out with you. Maybe go to the zoo. Buy a hotdog on the street. Skip through Lincoln Park.”
    “You smoking dope again?”
    “I wish,” Nick said. “No. Actually, I need to pick your nose. I mean brain.”
    Doyle opened a small refrigerator next to his desk and grabbed a couple of Harps. He popped the tops and slid one over to Nick.
    “You got it,” Doyle said, putting the beer to his mouth like it was a bottle. “Man, last time I saw you was in Holly Springs at Kimbrough’s. Remember that woman who was all heated-up and drunk.”
    “My date?”
    “Yeah, that woman you picked up. Ain’t never seen a woman get all sexy with a door. She was