The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  The Inimitable Vivi-V. Who’d refused to sing like Sarah Vaughan; nor even like Her Nibs Miss Georgia Gibbs. Who’d let Miss Patti Page go her own way while she went her own, proudly belting lyrics out in night-blue dives till dawn. And belting each so inimitably that once a barfly had lifted his head and told a bartender, “I never heard anything like it”; and had put his head back on his hands.

  Half-memories mixed with flash notions in her mind; remembering the same old soiled lyrics and the same old soiled bars. Little lacey fancies came, like kerchiefs on a line; turned and moved and wandered through her wandering mind. Small and silken fancies about singing for a living far beneath the traffic’s cries.

  Downward forever downward had been the route she’d gone; singing Good Morning Heartache to a thousand heartbroken dawns.

  Until at last she’d cried out, to someone, toward morning, “I don’t know what I’d do if I thought there wasn’t any bottom”—and there had been no bottom. Only a falling without end.

  She hadn’t hit bottom yet.

  Sometimes she would rise and begin gathering up soiled clothes, from the front room to the back—sheets, shirts, underclothes, towels, curtains, socks, stockings, drapes, aprons, skirts, brassieres, handkerchiefs—all would go into the old-fashioned bathtub. In a soapified mist Vivi-V would wash, scrub, dry, and hang clothes from the front of the old flat to the back.

  “She’s on her laundry kick again,” Beulah would report to Dingdong, “you got any shoelaces you want ironed?”

  Even when a clothesline went up over his easy chair in the front room, and underwear began to hang against the windows, Dingdong never interfered with Vivi-V’s compulsion to launder everything in sight.

  For one thing, it kept her out of searching the flat for a hidden cache. For another, it got his laundry done.

  “She’s going to look for the cache in the gas-meter,” Beulah would fink to the old man while the water was running in the tub. And would wonder, even as she finked, whether the cache actually was in the meter.

  Once Beulah had warned him that Vivi-V was planning on breaking into the back of his cuckoo-clock, hanging above his easy chair. He’d never used the clock for a cache. But after he’d discovered that Vivi-V had opened it, and found nothing, he’d kept a cache there for a month. Then he’d tipped off Beulah to the clock; and had taken the heroin to another hiding place.

  Sure enough, the clock was broken into that same night.

  That was why, as much as the old man and Vivi-V distrusted one another, both distrusted Beulah: Double-Fink, Counter-Counter Agent, Friendly Investigator, Perfidious Confidante, the most of all.

  And why Beulah was so aware that, while she was keeping one eye on the old man for Vivi-V, and keeping the other on Vivi-V for him, and both were keeping an eye on each other, that each was keeping one eye on her.

  “No one in my family was ever in politics, Emil,” the cop, at the wheel of the car parked in the alley, assured his partner. “I had to break the ice entirely myself.”

  “Around five o’clock I begin to get tired,” Emil recalled; for both were dead-weary of cruising.

  “Leave the parking lights on, Stan,” Emil suggested. “It looks better that way. Like we’re just laying low for a culprit.”

  Stan wondered vaguely whether a culprit was a suspect who’d done time. He’d have to look it up.

  “Sometimes I sleep overtime,” he informed Emil; implying it might be best if one of them stayed awake.

  “I got caught six times at Navy Pier,” Emil boasted; just to let Stan know he hadn’t yet been decorated for vigilance.

  “I had a partner once who never wanted to sleep,” Stan recalled dreamily.

  “The fink,” Emil sympathized.

  His sympathy was lost. Stan was already snoring lightly. A moment later Emil was on the nod, too.

  On the nod in a dead-end alley’s depths; with a cardboard box over the flash. Law and Order was working quietly.

  Four stories above them, Dingdong-Daddyland lay like a great refrigerator in which the light had gone out. The three outcasts slept among the broken-handled cups of hopes that had never come true. Their dreams, long dried, yet somehow still cherished, lay among crusts that had once been loaves.

  The old con slept. Beulah slept. Only Vivi-V remained awake; waiting until Beulah’s sleep grew deeper.

  Then she unwound herself like a shadow from the sheets and moved, like a ghost of a ghost, into the bathroom. She locked herself in and raised the lid of the water-closet, peering in at the water-bulb. On its surface she could see no sign of any mark where the rubber might have been split; so she tried it with her eyes shut, letting her fingers explore the surface of the rubber: the fingers came to a slight indentation and held there. She adjusted her specs with one hand, keeping a finger in the indentation. Then, peering more closely, she saw, sure enough, that a small slit had been made in the rubber and vulcanized. Her fingers found the edge of the patch and pried it off. In her anxiety she tore the slit wide—and there it was: a paper, a full ounce of something.

  She sniffed it. It wasn’t heroin. No matter. She melted a few grains in a spoon over the gas flame, took her sixteen-gauge needle out of her pocket, placed the spoon carefully beside a chair, sat down and crossed her ankles. Then she hit herself in an ankle vein with whatever it was.

  She sat that way a long minute. Then she began scratching her upper lip; then her stomach, then her ankles. When she had finished scratching, she rose.

  Wellsprings of energy began flooding her: she had never felt so well since she’d been born.

  Beulah was used to waking to find Vivi-V missing; and then, by listening, to follow her movement about the flat by small creakings and creaks and murmurings beneath the creeper’s feet.

  The sounds that wakened her now were not furtive: there was a clanging of pans and kettles and pots from the kitchen, and a high falsetto singing:

  Blue Moon

  You saw me standing alone

  Beulah rose and saw every light in the house ablaze, and Vivi-V wearing not a stitch but a baby-blue apron tied behind her in a flowing bow matching her pink ribbon-bow. That bow looked now like the rainbowed halo of her junkified glow.

  Vivi-V, racing near-naked between stove, pantry, and sink, then into the bathroom and back to the stove, forced Beulah to stand back against the kitchen wall to keep from getting knocked down.

  “Is there something going on, dear?” Beulah asked.

  “Oh, have consideration, do have consideration,” Vivi-V scolded her on the run, “we’re late with the chicken. Late with the roast! Not a clean tablecloth in the house! Somebody stole the best silver!”

  “Why?” Beulah asked weakly. “Are we expecting somebody?”

  “Oh for Heaven’s sake, you know very well we’re having guests—and there you stand not even offering to lend a hand!”

  “I only thought it was early in the day to be making soup,” Beulah explained.

  “This isn’t soup as you well know—it’s hot water for the sheets and pillow-cases—oh, have consideration.”

  “If you’re going to launder tonight, honey,” Beulah asked calmly, “why heat water on the stove? Why not just turn on the faucets in the tub?”

  Vivi-V stopped and thought that over: “Why, of course, how silly of me. Will you turn on the water in the tub for me, there’s a good girl? I have to watch the soup.”

  When Beulah had the hot water drawn, she stood by to keep the mad laundress from plunging into the scalding tub herself. For she was piling tablecloths, sheets, pillow-cases, window shades, shoes, spoons, napkins, saltshakers, shirts, and a potted geranium—pot and all—into the tub. Then began stirring it wildly with the old man’s umbrella.

  “Can I help in any way?” Beulah asked again. Vivi-V couldn’t hear her because of the roaring of the water. Because of the steam, Beulah could hardly see her.

  “Needle and thread on the dresser, dear,” Vivi-V instructed Beulah, “if you really want t
o help”—and one of Dingdong’s socks came flying and dripping as it flew. Beulah caught it. And began a confused retreat.

  Dingdong was sitting before the TV, that was still whirling blindly with sound turned down. Beulah entered quietly. She would say she was looking for needle and thread.

  But the old man’s head was sunk on his chest. He was snoring lightly. She watched him with her hand on the brass knob of the old-fashioned bedpost. And heard Vivi-V caroling—

  Red sails in the sunset

  All day I’ve been blue —

  * * *

  Emil sat up.

  “What’s the matter?” Stan asked.

  “I heard someone walkin’.”

  “We better start cruising. It might be Task Force Tuf.”

  Emil ducked into the rain, took the box off the car’s flash, and in its blood-colored beam he saw a woman seated on the sill, washing a window in a 3 A.M. rain.

  “Up there! Up there!” he jabbed a finger toward the wall.

  “If you want to go up and find out, I’ll wait here,” Stan told Emil.

  “What are people thinking of anyhow,” Emil marveled, “washing windows in the rain?”

  Then he observed a puff of dark smoke blowing out the window past the woman on the sill. Well, he could just as easily have not seen that.

  That same blood-red swing of light across his window had wakened Dingdong. He brushed his hand across his eyes, shook his great head, and shambled to the window.

  He heard the beat of the rain against the pane, and peered down. A squadrol with a cop at the wheel and another cop coming around the end of the car!

  He raced to the front room where the blue films were stacked, hauling madly at twine he had knotted too taut. Stumbling into the bathroom, trailing the twine behind him, and didn’t pause because the tub was full of steaming laundry. He heaped the film on top of the clothes, and raced back to the front room for more. Then for matches.

  “They’re on the way up! Don’t let them in without a warrant!” he cried warning to Beulah, and hauled her by one arm to the front and shoved her into the bathroom. The film on top of the laundry blazed up.

  Beulah began heaping cardboard cartons onto the fire, and the smell of burning rubber made a perfectly terrible stink.

  While Vivi-V, enraptured by window washing, went endlessly washing and rewashing the rain-soaked pane.

  Dingdong lurched and heaved and coughed and spat and choked and phlegmed from the front room to the back, heaping more cardboard cartons of Dingdong Daddies onto the fire; till smoke darkened the ceiling and made the lights burn like lights in an eclipse of the sun.

  But Stan and Emil were merrily wheeling, already miles away; relieved to be out of the jurisdiction of the Chicago Fire Department.

  Until Vivi-V finally slipped back into the kitchen, caroling as she came—

  I know there’s room for me

  Upon your knee

  Dingdong, looking out the window, saw that the squadrol was gone. He sank into a chair, blue film dangling from his hands. Beulah sank onto a chair on the other side of the room.

  Between them Vivi-V came in; looking done in. She was coming down fast. She looked like she wanted to say something; but the old man waved her off. She turned and went quietly. When Beulah followed her a few minutes after, she found Vivi-V sleeping the sleep of total exhaustion. The old man slept where he sat.

  Toward nine he woke. Coughing and phlegming, in air black and odorous, spitting now and then, he moved through the flat assessing the useless damage.

  Broken boxes, burned film, clothing and ruined sheets that had been both washed and scorched; a smoldering shoe: a pot of stew that had boiled over into the flooded forging-room—from front to back Daddyland looked like a land struck by a tornado, fire, and flood.

  Yet a many-splendored line of Feathered Friends was still festooned above the stove; like a rainbow of hope in the smoldering air.

  Would some neighbors report smoke? A fire inspector at the door would be as catastrophic as a policeman. All morning Vivi-V and Ding-dong shared their common dread: kicking a habit cold turkey for her; dying in a cell for him. And in this common fear their feud was forgotten. There was no longer any point in threatening one another with prison; when prison for both was so near.

  She opened windows, drove out the smoke, and cleaned up the litter. He helped as best he could.

  “Beulah’s sleeping late,” he complained to Vivi-V.

  “Let her sleep,” Vivi-V decided.

  Toward noon Vivi-V went into the bedroom to wake Beulah. She came out looking so bleak that the old man guessed before she’d said a word.

  “Gone?”

  “Gone.”

  Beulah had crept downstairs in the night like a bug in flight.

  Where had she gotten the courage to leave? The old man looked in the bulb of the water-closet. Finding it split and the stuff he’d hidden there gone, he assumed that had been where she’d found the courage. When he checked his bedroom, however, and found she’d missed his big cache, he felt gratified that she’d taken such a minute prize. He never learned that she had gone without taking any drug at all: that she had simply fled in dread of the police. To take her own chances on the street.

  Dingdong seemed to accept Beulah’s flight with resignation. But after Vivi-V had cleaned up the kitchen, flushed the last condom down the drain, and the last bit of evidence against the old man’s enterprise had been destroyed, he rose and fumbled about until he found a piece of chalk. He ran a rag across a section of the wall to serve as a blackboard. Then, with his tongue between his teeth, and Vivi-V sleeping, he went to work.

  Sometimes on tiptoe and sometimes flatfooted, pausing now and again to spit, scratch himself, or lean back to gain perspective, he completed his letter to the world. Then the chalk dropped from his hand, and he went to his bed; weary to his very bones.

  Later, Vivi-V saw a rude caricature of a woman with a neck like a turkey-hen’s, the belly bloated and the knees badly knocked, the breasts lactated like empty hot-water bottles, the whole figure stippled by disfiguring hair; and flies buzzing about the figure everywhere. Below the old man had scrawled his final conviction:

  WOMIN DRAW FLIES

  “A once great mind has snapped,” Vivi-V commented aloud—and wiped the figure out with two swipes of a damp cloth.

  * * *

  Though the lives of all three had been in the hands of each, the balance of power shifted with one of the three gone.

  With Beulah at hand, Vivi-V had been the most imperiled of the lot; because the old man could open the gates of a terrible sickness upon her any moment he chose.

  Now he had to keep her well. For there was nobody now but her to shop and cook and wash and help him make it from day to day.

  The Mumbling Man never came any longer. Yet every morning Vivi-V found a pinch of heroin beside a spoon on his dresser. Every noon there was another pinch. And at night there was another pinch for her to sleep on.

  She searched that bedroom high and low—even when she knew he was only feigning sleep. She raised his pillow when he raised his head; there was nothing under his pillow.

  When she swept under the bed she examined the bedsprings; nothing was hidden there. She looked behind the mirror; in the light fixture and along the walls. It had to be in his bedroom. He hadn’t been out of it in days. Yet she never found a single pinch.

  Meanwhile she shaved him, washed him, humored him; brought him tea and toast and little candies to suck on. She changed his sheets and listened to his rambling accounts of merry penitentiary times.

  So it was that, in his final hours, the old man drew some small ironic measure of contentment from a woman at last.

  Once, toward evening, he looked up at her as though he had never seen her before.

  “What I said about bedbugs—you know—” he faltered—“was just in fun.”

  “What I told you was in fun, too,” Vivi-V assured him.

  The old man’s face
flopped about: he was trying to smile.

  Vivi-V opened his window every morning; so he could hear the jackhammers breaking stone half a mile away.

  Every morning they came nearer. One morning he asked her to open the window wider so that he could hear them. But, when she opened the window, he could not hear them at all.

  “It’s Sunday,” she explained. But he didn’t seem to understand why he couldn’t hear jackhammers. Suddenly he asked, “How much your little sausages?”—and asked it urgently.

  He died that evening just before the street lamps came on. When she came into his room with tea, he was sitting up; but the glaze was on his eyes. She laid his head back on the pillow: understanding her dream at last.

  “The kick greater than H,” she told herself aloud; taking his wrist-watch and ring.

  In her final search, all she found was a couple of twenties in his wallet and a few dimes on his dresser.

  Yet once, as she looked about the bedroom, her hand rested, where Beulah’s hand had: on the big brass knob of his bed. She had never noticed that the knobs of the bedposts could be unscrewed; nor that the posts were hollow. She never knew that, beneath her hand, was five pounds of pure heroin.

  She left the door open behind her. And walked, in a light November rain, to the Desplaines Street station. She came in there looking like a ghost wearing a pink ribbon-bow.

  “Vivienne Vincent,” she told the officer at the desk, “there’s a couple warrants out on me.”

  Half an hour later Stan and Emil were mounting the stairs. Sure enough, just like that old junkie had said, there was a stiff.

  Some stiff. Wasn’t even wearing a watch.

  “Maybe the Fire Department was here already,” Emil suggested.

  Stan found a pair of pants that fit him, supported by a pair of suspenders with clips that said Police Brace on them. Emil found a woman’s raincoat. A package of dry cereal and a bucket of hardened rubber was all their search for treasure yielded.

  The few sticks of furniture weren’t worth hauling down the stairs. The bed was such an old-fashioned heap it wasn’t worth dragging down four flights.