The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  “How’d you pick that thing?” Red asked me.

  “Arcaro gave him to me,” I admitted.

  “They’ll bring you your money.”

  I looked at my last card. Joker. Straight flush. Deadpan checked his hand. He had a nose; had Deadpan Jack.

  I risked a check because there were four bettors behind me. The second bet two dollars. That dropped the two behind him. Deadpan started to raise the pot ten dollars. Then, looking as though he were afraid he’d lose me, bet five instead. And began a slow revolution of his skull.

  “Raises you three,” Red announced.

  I raised him five. His skull gained momentum as he raised me back five. I was as afraid of losing him as he was of losing me. I raised back five.

  His skull came to a coasting pause, then went slowly into reverse. And as it began gathering momentum, fear following astonishment across his features; pursued by hope that was routed by despair; to be replaced by suspicion chased by undisguised delight: then bloomed with an infinite patience. Out of which canniness shone like a light.

  If only he’d get bored, I thought, we could all get some rest.

  He pushed all of his chips into the pot. Before Red had finished the count, Chiqueno came up and gave me forty-eight dollars and seventy-five cents. He waited until he realized he wasn’t going to make seventy-five cents for himself.

  “He raised you fifty-four dollars,” Red told me. I shoved forty-eight into the pot.

  “All in,” Red told Deadpan Jack, and returned six dollars to him. Everyone waited for me to turn over my hand.

  “I called him,” I reminded Red.

  Deadpan’s hands couldn’t handle his cards. Red turned them over for him.

  Eight, Nine. Ten. Jack. Queen. All diamonds.

  “How many did he draw?” I asked Red.

  “Two,” Joan answered for him.

  “I think you were right about that solution,” I told Joan as I rose to leave, “there is something else in it.”

  I didn’t feel bitter. After all, I hadn’t lost anything except the money I’d won on Quadrangle. And I’d saved six bits of that.

  Butte, Montana, isn’t merely a town where the cops don’t have uniforms. It is also a place where The Company is too big to beat. Where the house cut is always too steep. And where victory, below ground or above it, consists in snatching a draw out of the jaws of certain defeat.

  Butte is also a place where winds blow all day beneath the earth; where narrow rails cut through volcanic rock, bearing drivers, begoggled and gaunt, whose only light is borne by a battery attached to a helmet of steel.

  Five thousand feet beneath the Butte Country Club, blood-colored streams stagnate between automatic ramps. A spatter of copper sulphate, in the ominous overhang, winks in the gloom like a handful of mischievous stars.

  This gigantic fun-house has been tunnelled, picked, gouged, blasted, blown up, flooded, hammered and blasted for a hundred years in order to bring up two and a half million ounces of gold, three and a half million dollars worth of copper and six hundred and thirty-three million ounces of silver.

  Which hasn’t proved quite enough to buy benches for Main Street; a town mail carrier; nor uniforms for the police.

  In the times when gold came easy, in the days when flesh sold cheap, Butte’s Chinatown ran two blocks wide and four blocks deep. Fifteen hundred whores were working three shifts in The District. And the odor of arsenic, off roasting ores, pervaded the dance halls. Where blue-green gas-flares, intermittently twisting, cast a pallor across the faces of fugitives, fire-ships and fly-by-nighties; all alike.

  And a wind blew down off the tippled hills which withered blade, bush and tree for miles around. Birds fled Butte’s side of The Continental Divide. Butte had the world’s highest smokestack and fanciest whorehouse, deepest mine-shaft and longest ore-train, boldest thieves and crookedest judges, the most lynch-minded editors and bloody-minded mine-owners: and Stanley Ketchel fighting all corners at the Casino Theatre when he wasn’t bulldogging drunks at the Copper Queen. But birds liked it better on the other side.

  The city named itself The Richest Rock on Earth. And thousands thronged that golden gaslit town. Earth’s finest players, sweetest singers, roughest fighters and chanciest gamblers made Butte their capitol. Butte had the loudest bands, the suddenest homicides, and the strongest miners’ union ever organized.

  In those days gold came easy; before the town settled for silver. Days when your life and your gold were one; before the town settled for copper.

  The old Irishman in the cheap hotel room seemed, like the room’s dull green walls and brown curtains, to be long drained of the colors of life.

  And yet his memory was still brightly lit. His voice was still resonant and kept a touch of the brogue he had brought to Butte at the century’s turn. Con Lowney, who’d survived the bloody mining wars by switching from mining to barbering, was ninety-one years old.

  “I understand the animal,” the old man remembered, ‘‘the unscroopulus industrials niver paused in their wicked gains. We were getting three-fifty a day and were trying for four bits more. Ryan was President of The Company at that time. But we’d elected our own man over The Company’s man. Our man was Duffy. And ivery one of the ten men waiting for Ryan were Irish as well.

  “When Ryan came in he walked up to Duffy as though they two were alone in the room. And took Duffy’s two great hands into his own two small ones. ‘Duffy,’ he said, ‘a man like you could be Governor of Montana’ and I kicked Shannon, the man beside me. ‘Watch this’ I whispered to Shannon.

  “ ‘Duffy,’ Ryan went on, not once letting loose of Duffy’s hand, ‘the laboring people of this city are indeed blessed to have a union that protects their helpless little ones. And the union is double-blessed to have at its head a man of your high intelligence. Is there any telling how far a man like yourself might go? ‘Could’ be governor of Montana did I say? ‘Should’ be is what I ought to have said.’ Duffy niver even tried to pull his hands out of Ryan’s. When he sat down he was shaking.”

  “What happened to your four bits a day?”

  “I knew we weren’t going to get it when I kicked Shannon. Duffy voted with The Company because he wanted to be Governor of Montana”—Con Lowney permitted himself the flicker of a smile—“O, I understand the animal alright.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “To Duffy? Indeed he didn’t get to govern anything; not even himself. Ryan threw him back to us and we threw him out. He married a woman who owned a whorehouse. And he didn’t even make Governor there. She put him to pimping to earn his keep and that was one trade Duffy drove naturally.”

  “Did you know Frank Little?”

  “I knew Frank Little. A clean man and no double-crosser. He was half Indian and had but one good eye. We were on strike for better safety conditions, after the Spectacular Mine fire, when he came to Butte. The Company was waiting for him. He’d led the Free Speech fight in Missoula. They held a meeting on The Floor Next to Heaven—as we then called the sixth floor of the Anaconda offices—to decide what to do about the men organizing the miners. We knew The Company meant business when we found out that Roy Alley had chaired the meeting. I warned Frank to watch out. Doubtless others warned him as well. He spoke at the ball park in the afternoon, wearing a plaster cast on one leg, I don’t know why. After the meeting he went back to his room. That was July 31, 1917.”

  There was a long pause. The old man looked exhausted. I rose to leave. He saw me to the door; yet held me there a minute.

  “I was minding my own business in a restaurant once,” he recalled—and whether he meant the day before or forty years ago wasn’t clear—“and this young company lawyer came up to me and asked me, ‘Lowney, do you believe in God?’

  “ ‘Did you believe in Him the day you sent an innocent man, the father of four small children, to the penitentiary?’ I asked him. He never spoke a word to me again.”

  He held up his right hand with the fing
ers spread and asked me, “Do you beat The Company this way?” and answered himself—“No.” Then closed the hand into a fist that might yet knock a good man down. “You beat The Company like this. An injury to one is an injury to all.” Then he closed the door.

  Like closing a door on times before: when the gold had given out, yet flesh could still be bought. When copper was what the risks were for.

  When fists were still what counted most but money counted more.

  The sun behind the Butte Country Club was hurling bloodletting lavas skyward as it sank, casting a volcanic glow across the small bald cranium of the club’s outgoing president.

  When facing outward on life’s tee—the Prez was declaiming—

  What e’er may be my fate

  God grant this one great boon to me:

  That I may drive them straight!

  And if my best be not enough

  Then give me courage high

  To jump right out there in the rough

  And play them where they lie!

  And when upon life’s putting green

  Others make the cup

  If I do not may I come clean

  And always be well up!

  And when the greens of life are played

  And my clubs are left aside

  No matter what the score I’ve made:

  May I have qualified!

  “You have qualified, old buddy!” someone cried out. And every man rose, in a standing ovation, to applaud as one. The Prez’s eyes misted in receiving their tribute.

  Introduced to him at the bar, I congratulated The Prez upon the sincerity of the poem he’d read. Not his own, he assured me modestly—just something he’d clipped out of a newspaper by an anonymous author.

  “We’ve had some unfortunate experiences here,” he added.

  “I know,” I advised him, “I read about the Spectacular Mine fire.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” The Prez explained, “I meant writers giving a poor picture of the city.”

  “O,” I caught on at last, “you mean unpaved streets, silicosis, the police force not having uniforms, all of that. ”

  “Not exactly,” he told me, “I mean showing respectable people in an unflattering light.”

  “I don’t have anything against respectable people,” I assured The Prez, “but is it your opinion that emphysema is not an industrial disease?”

  The question was indiscreet. Anaconda’s doctors had just succeeded in pushing through legislation defining emphysema as a nonindustrial affliction, contracted by personal negligence; as one might contract gonorrhea. Thus releasing the company from financing medical assistance.

  The Prez studied his scotch a long moment. Then he looked up.

  “You really want to know my opinion?” he asked me directly.

  I nodded.

  “Turn the lock and throw away the key—that’s my opinion—” and he walked away leaving a full scotch on the bar.

  I drank it.

  Locking them out and throwing away the key, like the poem he had declaimed, was something someone else had devised long before The Prez’s time.

  Like the banner headline the Butte Daily Bulletin ran, in an extra edition of April, 1920: SHOOT THE SONS OF BITCHES.

  Since company guards had already wounded fourteen and killed one striker, the extra edition would appear to have been gratuitous.

  All exits had been blocked, by concrete bulkheads, with no openings in them, when fire broke out on the 2400-foot level of the Spectacular Mine. One hundred sixty-four miners died of smoke suffocation.

  Miners refused to return to work, after this disaster, until safety devices were installed. William Andrews Clark, an enraptured Puritan, refused to negotiate. He saw that the issue was not one of safety devices but of the right of miners to negotiate with management. He announced that he would flood the mines before he would negotiate.

  As he had already proven himself indifferent to fire there was no reason to believe he would be troubled by water.

  “I don’t believe in lynching or violence,” Clark had responded to the miners’ protests, ‘‘unless it is absolutely necessary. Terrorism in this community must and shall cease.”

  On the morning of August 1, 1917, five cars, each containing four men and a driver, drove to Frank Little’s boarding house. They dragged him out of bed in his underwear, looped a noose around his neck, tied him to a car and dragged him to a Milwaukee Railroad trestle; now known as Centennial Bridge. He must have been dead before they hanged him. They hanged him all the same.

  FIRST AND LAST WARNING!

  the note pinned on his ripped underwear read:

  3-7-77

  D-D-C-S-S-W

  The initials were those of other union organizers then active in Butte. The figures specified the exact dimensions of their prospective graves. All made the depot.

  None of the assassins were prosecuted. Most of them were rewarded with promotion to mine foremen and were later retired with pensions.

  Six men drove up to his house at midnight

  And woke the poor woman who kept it

  And asked her, “Where is the man who spoke Against war and insulted the army? . . .

  I call you all to the bar of the dawn to give witness

  If this is not what they do in America.*

  Butte, Montana, has two sets of heroes. One is honored above ground, one below. One is memorialized by a plaque expressing his community’s lasting gratitude:

  William Andrews Clark

  Pioneer, Prospector, Miner

  Merchant, Banker, Railroad Builder

  Benefactor of children

  and

  Philanthropist.

  This memorial erected by

  The Society of Montana and Other Friends

  As a tribute to his great achievements

  And to perpetuate his memory.

  The other is remembered only by a faded photograph in the Miners Union Hall:

  Fellow Worker Frank Little

  Murdered August 1, 1917

  By the Copper Trust

  We never forget.

  Times when gold came easy and yet men’s flesh went cheap.

  When fists were the thing that counted most.

  But money counted more.

  No light shines, either upstairs or down, from the old frame house on Wyoming Street. Within the iron fence before its door, uncut grasses make the house appear abandoned.

  At the door one hears neither sound nor rumor of sound. Not until one presses the little white buzzer does it seem that people might be alive inside. Then a curtain parts, the door swings wide and laughter falls carelessly within a wealth of light.

  This is the last of the golden brothels; where a great cut-glass chandelier still fragments the lights as it did in the days before gold became tainted by copper.

  Velma, the gaunt and henna-haired madam, with a half-century of being a sporting-man’s woman behind her, swings into the parlor to greet her guests—“What’s the chicken doing for a living, boys?” Then calls down the hall—“Jo-Ann! LaVerne! Melanie! Parlor choice, girls! Parlor choice!”

  Now cow-country whores, sorrowful as clowns, the girls who grew up in Meaderville, Seldom Seen, Flathead Lake, Big Arm or Logan Pass, come slouching in their party togs; to lean, weary with boredom, upon each others’ arms. While the cow-country miners appraise them sheepishly. The embarrassment is all with the men. While the big juke booms—

  I want to die for the Engine I love.

  One hundred and forty-three.

  * * *

  One is a stout, housewifely bison in a dirndl. All she needs is a pink ribbon to look like a once-great mind had snapped. Beside her is a round and pouting creature, weakly abashed. The other two are tough blondes in black slips who appear to be sisters. One of the miners nods to The Bison and she shambles off down a hall of many doors. A couple boys dressed as cowboys, but who looked more like folksingers, follow the tough sisters. The pouting creature is left sniffing
into a piece of colored kleenex until a shaggy old boy, his belly over his belt, gives her the nod. I wandered down a hall of many doors to see what was going on in the kitchen.

  Velma was punching beer-cans there for the boys who’d already had it. The air smelled of beer mixed with disinfectant and perfume. Velma punched me a beer.

  A poodle dyed pink raced in, yapping as though it were trying to herd the men into the bedrooms. Velma picked it up and told the brute, “Quiet, Heavensent.” Then explained—“We call him Heavensent because Heaven sent him.” She fussed with the baby-blue ribbon around the poodle’s throat.

  The only girl in the kitchen had a face too pale, like that of a child recovering from an illness, uninterested in anything except a menu from Hotel Finlen. By the smudges on it it looked as though many a soup du jour had grown cold since the carte had been abandoned here.

  “Jo-Ann likes to pick out,” Velma informed me. Like a child to whom a grownup has drawn attention, the girl put the menu aside.

  “Are you from around here?” I asked her.

  “I’m not from anywhere,” she decided.

  “Everybody’s from somewhere.”

  “I’m from nowhere,” she insisted.

  “She’s from Meaderville,” Velma cut in.

  The girl turned sharply on Velma. “How can I be from somewhere ain’t even there?”

  “Meaderville is gone,” Velma explained, “wasn’t but a few folks left there. The Company bought them out and bulldozed it.”

  “Even the high school I went to,” Jo-Ann remembered, and picked up the menu to resume her “picking out.”

  Meaderville; Walkerville; Alder Gulch; Seldom Seen: all the old lost boom towns that died the first time when the gold gave out; then boomed once more when silver was found; and died again when silver thinned; and that then were bulldozed to get at the copper. Jo-Ann now feels as though, when the bulldozers came, they bulldozed her childhood along with her home.

  “It ain’t I don’t know right from wrong,” she tried to explain later, “but, ever since they bulldozed Meaderville, I don’t seem to be able to get foot on the ground either way.”