The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  As I walked out on the night-streets of Montana, as I walked out in old Butte one foul night, I saw more dread-the-dawn dingbats looking for a doorway than I’d ever seen searching for a door around New York’s Port Authority. More quivering, quaking, transfixed and trembling, catatonic, stoned and zonkified drunks looking for a park bench than I’d ever seen on Chicago’s North Clark Street. I saw more pensionless and emphysemized voyeurs kibitzing the lightless corners than I’d ever seen on West Division Street.

  Rain was sweeping the streets beyond the windows of the M&M at 4 A.M. Chiqueno, the houseman, had replaced Red in the dealer’s slot. Of all the afternoon players only Joan-of-Arc, still trying to get even, sat on.

  “Come in if you love money,” Chiqueno greeted me. I sat beside a man whose face was still young under a thatch of snow-white hair.

  “I’m Keith Kellar,” he announced when I sat down, “everyone remembers me.”

  “I’m from out of town,” I explained.

  “You remember me,” he assured Joan.

  “I’ve heard of you,” Joan told him noncommittally.

  “There isn’t a miner in Butte today who isn’t better off because of me,” he informed me. A minute later Joan caught him bluffing cold.

  “Get everybody a drink,” he announced as though his bluff had worked like a charm. Yet Joan was the only one who accepted a drink from him.

  When the TV has long been darkened and the last North American drunk leans against the last abandoned bar, Butte doesn’t feel like the richest rock on earth. It feels more like the loneliest hill in the U.S.A.

  The bartender had tilted a chair against the wall and was on the nod; but had left his transistor murmuring among the bottles. The drunk, with one hand folded around an empty shot-glass, kept lifting it toward the murmuring in hope of another drink. Sometimes he slept; then woke to demand another drink; then slept once again.

  In that long cavernous sanctuary the only light was the green-shaded lamp suspended eye-level above our hands. As its glow kept the cold and darkness out, so the cards, going around and around, kept everyone’s loneliness at bay.

  “If I’d drawn the joker I would have had a flush,” Keith Kellar recalled his lost bluff.

  “If that rabbit had had a pistol he would have shot the ass off the hound,” Joan philosophized.

  Then, out of the rain and into the light—here’s Velma carrying Heavensent. I was really glad to see her hard old phizz. She sat at the empty table beside us and began drying the poodle with a towel.

  “Does that dog talk, Velma?” Chiqueno asked her.

  “He talks,” Velma assured the dealer—“but he’s promised not to tell.”

  “I thought you were leaving town,” Joan challenged Velma.

  “I am,” Velma answered without taking notice of the hostility in Joan’s voice.

  “You’ve been saying you were leaving for fifteen years,” Joan reminded her.

  “This time it’s for real,” Velma assured her lightly, “I’m taking a position in Chicago.”

  “I’ve heard girls get fifty dollars a trick there,” Keith Kellar put in.

  “Good Gawd!” Chiqueno exclaimed in mock horror. “It would cost me a hundred and fifty dollars a day to live there!”

  I’d never played poker with an experienced man, like Keith Kellar, who played poker so badly. He got caught bluffing so often it began to seem deliberate. Caught cold in one last attempt, he pushed his remaining chips to Chiqueno as a tip and left.

  “Was he just bragging about being a big man for the miners?” I asked after he’d gone.

  “He was,” Chiqueno remembered, “then he got mixed up. Didn’t know whose side he was on.”

  Having dried Heavensent and retied his baby-blue bow, Velma walked the pooch around the room as though it were a thoroughbred being led out of the paddock onto the track. Then, taking it into her arms, marched out into the rain.

  As she passed through the door someone else came through it. I saw the green-wool cap, already slowly revolving, out of the corner of my eye.

  I kept my eyes straight ahead.

  Why did it always have to be the seat next to mine that was empty when he came in? I counted my chips: I was holding even. If I could beat Deadpan Jack out of one good hand, I’d leave this town with a sense of real achievement.

  I won two small pots; then a heavier one. But Deadpan hadn’t been involved in them. Outside the all-night rain had stopped, and a hazy smear of light against the door showed Butte would be here for one more day. I dragged the chips I’d just won into my bank without bothering to count them.

  On the next hand I drew a pair of jacks, and discarded three cards. The first one I picked up was my third jack. A deuce of hearts was next. I squeezed the fifth card. It was the deuce of clubs.

  Full house with jacks high.

  Deadpan opened the pot for two dollars and I paid. All the other bettors dropped out except Joan. She raised the pot a dollar. The other bettors dropped. Deadpan rereaised her five dollars.

  “Costs you six dollars,” Chiqueno counted for me.

  “Make it ten,” I decided. Joan dropped. Deadpan raised the pot twenty. His one card draw had filled him up. And as he began that wavering motion, out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash: he was holding a full house with three tens.

  I had him.

  I began pushing my chips in. Then saw a card, pulled in from the last hand, among my chips:

  Six cards! Dead hand.

  There was no use trying to get rid of it: Chiqueno had spotted it. It was just a question of whether he called it or I called it on myself. I threw in my hand. Chiqueno understood.

  “It was in the chips,” he assured the other players, and turned up the five cards he’d dealt me.

  “It would have been your pot,” Joan told me as though I didn’t know, “it was a misdeal.”

  “No misdeal in poker,” I told her before Chiqueno could say it.

  Deadpan’s VFW cap was spinning by its own momentum while he stacked his chips.

  Deadpan Jack murdered me and Deadpan Jack will murder you.

  And Butte, Montana, is a town where everyone finds his own Deadpan Jack.

  Since the times when gold came easy. And flesh was still not dear. When fists were the thing that mattered most.

  Yet money mattered more.

  *From When The Cock Crows, by Arturo Giovanetti.

  BRAVE BULLS OF SIDI YAHYA

  WHENEVER bread came within Simone de Beauvoir’s reach, she crushed it to death between her palms. She’d crushed a hundred loaves between Marrakesh and Tunis, talking the whole while. She hadn’t shut up since Casablanca and I hadn’t had an unmangled slice since Fez. Why she had to turn fresh loaves into crumbs simply to turn Marx, Hegel and Freud into dry crusts, I understand no more today than I did in June of 1949. A Bedouin toiling between the shafts of a donkey cart, she assured me, was doing so because he could not afford to feed a donkey. For correcting my first impression that the man was Darryl Zanuck, I thanked her.

  “When you see a woman forced to sell herself,” she revealed after passing a whore in a doorway, “you know you are in a country suffering repression.”

  My defense, against Madame’s sententiousness, thereafter was to load my camera every time we approached a woman waiting in a doorway. This simple action provoked such resentment in Madame that an intense passion for photography was awakened in me: a passion so pure that I would aim and click my camera even when it held no film. Women in doorways didn’t care for this move either.

  “For your being a citizen of a nation of exploiters you are not to be held altogether to blame,” Madame allowed, “but to walk about deliberately pointing a machine at the very objects of that exploitation is more than merely adding insult to injury. It is collaboration with the makers of the camera.”

  “The people doing the exploiting around here are citizens of France,” I had to remind her. “When we get to Guatemala, you take the camera.”
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br />   Now we were sitting in the dining room of the Hotel Tunisia Palace. Bottles along the bar were still shadowed by the night just done. Bored beggars waited beyond the door. Overhead a ceiling fan kept rising a decibel in hope; then descending in a clattering fall as though disappointed in everything.

  We had to go to Matmata because troglodytes lived there. Had no one ever heard of a troglodyte anywhere near Matmata, there would have been no excuse for anyone’s ever going there. Since an entire colony had been surviving there, beneath the surface of the earth for immemorial African ages, that seemed all the more reason for staying away.

  A portly young Arab wearing a GI fatigue cap sat at the bar; but he wasn’t drinking. He was either sizing us up or thinking of turning in his cap for a fez.

  “The absurdity of demanding fidelity in a relationship reducible to a physiochemical reaction has now become clear,” Madame shifted from colonialism to sex without interrupting herself, “therefore, complete fidelity can be experienced only by those who impose it upon themselves as a mutilation. Women who are faithful can only compensate themselves by sublimation or by drink.”

  “Sweeping the floor might help,” I suggested; but since Madame had never held a broom, the concept remained existential.

  “Many couples conclude more or less the same pact as Sartre and myself, but Sartre and I have been more ambitious,” she continued congratulating herself. “We seek to maintain through all deviations a certain fidelity.

  “Recent experiments in parthenogenesis have disclosed that the egg may be penetrated by an ordinary safety pin and artificially fertilized. The male gamete is not necessary for reproduction.”

  That’ll be the day.

  Where had we gone wrong? The original understanding had been that she could make long speeches if she’d let me find the bars. I’d make the jokes if she’d pick up the tabs. I’d look the other way while she was destroying bread if she’d only let me photograph camels. Arabs wouldn’t interfere so long as you stuck to aiming at camels. But the man atop the camel would let you know that he wasn’t to be photographed.

  This wasn’t a superstitious fear that you were going to catch his soul in a little black box and stick pins in it. It was a religious conviction: “Ye shall make you no idols, neither shall ye rear you up a graven image.” God commanded it and man is made in the image of God. There you have it. And if it sounds like Jehovah and Leviticus to you, it sounds more like Allah and Mohammed to the camel driver.

  I spent one whole morning photographing camels only to discover that the camera had held no film. I was certain I had loaded it and suspected foul play. I immediately began eating all the bread in sight. Madame began paring the skin off her forearms with her fingernails. I gave her back the bread. She had stopped laughing at the jokes but was still picking up the tabs.

  I might have attributed this to the fact that she had no sense of humor. On the other hand the jokes weren’t funny. The real difficulty, it struck me, was that her sense of personal responsibility for the world had overwhelmed her responses to it.

  The fate of the Western world, she assumed, hung upon the decisions of Jean-Paul Sartre. But since Sartre himself made no such assumption, the full responsibility not only for that world but for Sartre as well, had devolved upon herself.

  For Sartre perceived the world as a clown show in which his own pratfalls appeared as absurd as those of everyone else. The more profound his judgments the more lightly he held them.

  It never crossed Madame’s mind that her love life might not be a matter of global concern. Sartre took for granted the world’s indifference to his love life. Judging by some of the women he slept with, he was indifferent to it as well.

  “A hero of the Resistance is thinking of cutting in on us,” I gave Madame warning; but the overhead fan set up such a clatter that she didn’t hear. Although she wouldn’t have heard even had the fan come to a dead stop.

  “Of course,” she pointed out, “it is always possible that one of the new partners, or allies, may prefer a new attachment to the old. But this presents no difficulty as long as neither ally permits the new one to become permanent. ’ ’

  She was trying to tell me something.

  “Or is it your point of view,” she charged in hope of an argument, “that freedom can come through fidelity?”

  “Heaven forbid!” I disclaimed the accusation, “I was only wondering what would happen if only one ally proved unfaithful. Would that mean they’d both have to stay drunk all day?”

  “Every effort to free oneself entails risk,” she warned me, “so let not my words be taken to imply more than they say.”

  It came to me then that she wasn’t going to be able to sever our relationship simply. She would have to excommunicate me.

  I was relieved to see that the Arab was finally making his move. He approached with a grave, deliberate mien, touched his cap to Madame, then turned his back upon her; and handed me a snapshot of a French soldier holding a telephone to his ear.

  “Hassine Ameur Djemail,” he introduced himself in French-accented English, “making long-distance call Paris-Tunis. Hassine Ameur Djemail”—he exchanged photographs—“owner of Citroën. Hassine before garage of fastest automobile in Djerba. Two suits in garage.” He changed photographs once more.

  “Hassine Ameur Djemail before Tour Eiffel”—he paused courteously to give me a chance to top that. Then accepted the chair I offered him.

  Madame drew a big bright map of Tunisia from her purse and became oblivious of everyone.

  “Of what government?” Hassine asked me.

  “American.”

  “Of what government in America?”

  “Of Chicago.”

  “Do you have oil for cooking in Chicago?”

  “We have oil for cooking in Chicago.”

  “Do you have flour in Chicago?”

  “We have flour in Chicago.”

  “Do you have eggs in Chicago?”

  “We have eggs in Chicago.”

  “Then we are rich! You will write to the governor of Chicago that Hassine comes to make brik.” He slapped me heartily on the shoulder. “I will sell this car and use yours to carry the Chicago eggs, the Chicago flour and the Chicago cooking oil to the Chicago cooking pot!”

  I caught a fast flash of myself stirring a caldron of simmering oil in the lobby of the Civic Theater while Hassine passed among opera buffs, during an intermission of Tosca, peddling pastries wrapped in palm leaves.

  “I have no car,” I tried to weasel out of the deal.

  “Are you not American?”

  “I am an American who has no car.”

  “One must have a car to do business.”

  “I am an American who does no business.”

  Now he knew I was putting him on; and changed his tone.

  “Do you have an enemy in Chicago?” he asked slyly.

  “In Chicago everyone has enemies.”

  “I will have him killed in Tunis for five hundred dollars,” he promised, “you are my brother.” He turned to Madame.

  She was drawing a red line down from Tunis to the desert’s edge, encircling the places she intended to see. The red line bypassed Djerba.

  “In Paris,” Hassine tried to get her attention, “Hassine touched ice with his hands.”

  She encircled Carthage, Kairouan, Matmata, Gabés and Médenine.

  “In Paris,” Hassine tried again, “Hassine went to Folies Bergére.”

  No response.

  “Hassine fought bravely for the French,” he played his trump card. “In Paris Hassine was in hospital.”

  He turned to me, unbuttoned his shirt until his right shoulder was exposed. The scar extended from shoulder to elbow. He buttoned the shirt and raised his left trouser leg: A red seam zigzagged from ankle to knee. Shrapnel. He dropped the trouser leg.

  “Although Hassine fought bravely for the French,” he filled me in, “yet now they do not let him fight the Jews.”

  Madame glanced u
p from her map.

  “What do you want to fight Jews for? Did Jews give you your wounds?”

  “My wounds are no matter, Madame,” Hassine explained heroically, “I wish to fight the Jews because they offend God.”

  “How can God’s chosen people offend Him?”

  “If Jews are God’s chosen people,” Hassine wanted to know, “why did He not pick them to conquer all North Africa and Spain instead of the Arabs?”

  “If God chose the Arabs to conquer Spain, why didn’t He let them keep it?”

  “If He did not, why did He let them keep it a thousand years?”

  “Would God now be letting the Jews hold the road to Tel Aviv, against Arab armies, had they offended Him?”

  “A battle lost is not a war lost,” Hassine answered promptly. “Had God meant Jews to win, He would have given them a flag. Now they make their own flag. God does not wish people to make their own flag. He does not wish people to begin. It is God’s will that Arabs have an army because Arabs have always had an army. If Jews begin to have an army, then Bedouins will want one also. Even the people who live in the ground in Matmata will come to live on top of it. If God had wished them to live on top of the earth, He would not have put them to live beneath it. They too will want a flag.”

  “Why shouldn’t they have a flag?” Madame persisted.

  “Because they are only Bedouins who live underground.”

  “We will see Bedouins who live underground for ourselves,” Madame decided, turning the map toward Hassine.

  “It is not necessary to stop here, Madame,” Hassine told her confidently, touching Carthage. “There is nothing here but old rocks. In Djerba is the most beautiful beach for bathing in the world.”

  “We do not wish to bathe. We wish to see old rocks.”

  Hassine smiled patronizingly: “In Djerba, Madame, are the world’s sweetest figs.”

  “We do not wish for figs. Either to see or to eat.”

  Hassine shook his head sadly.

  “In Kairouan, Madame, are nothing but old walls.”

  “We wish to see old walls.”

  “In Gabès,” he kept trying, “are only women who are not serious. But in Djerba one may buy the finest pottery for only a few francs. In Djerba are the world’s finest racing camels.”