The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  The step that had rotted, the rain pipe that had rusted, the hinge that had loosened, the fence wind had bent. He moved among pistons and vises and cylinders, he healed boilers and ministered to valves: hoses had to be coiled with care lest they crack; clocks had to be wound against losing time; wiring had to be insulated against fire. He used electrical tape like a doctor applying a tourniquet: he was a geneticist of lathes and prolonged the lives of brushes stiff with sclerosis of paint. His ear was not so well attuned to human speech as it was to the delicate play of gears: his dreams moved on ball bearings; and within them he sensed that one dream-bearing was more worn than the others.

  Puttying or soldering, welding or binding, my father was a fixer of machinery in basements and garages.

  He could get a piece of machinery to work for him that would work for no one else; but he could not get other men to pay him any mind at all.

  “If you’re so damned smart, why ain’t you a foreman?” I would hear my mother going for him when the bulb that lit the kitchen and the lamp that lit the door were the only lights foretelling the beginning of a winter day—and was still going at him in the bedroom after dark when supper dishes had been put away and the gas lamp burned before the door once more.

  Yet in the hours between she paid her lot no mind, sometimes singing to herself—

  Take me out for a joy-ride

  A girl-ride, a boy-ride

  I’m as reckless as I can be

  I don’t care what becomes of me.

  There were no heroes nor heroines on my father’s side of the family; although he had many brothers and sisters. My mother’s family, on the other hand, consisted of nothing but heroes and heroines—of whom the most heroic was Uncle-Theodore-the Great-Lakes-Sailor.

  Uncle Theodore had had a fistfight with the cook on the deck of the steamer Chicora that the ship’s captain had stopped: which of the brawlers had begun it he didn’t care to hear; but one would have to pack his gear and get off the Chicora. Some captain.

  Uncle Theodore packed his gear and walked ashore at Benton Harbor after shaking hands with everybody but the captain.

  He should have said good-bye to the captain, too. For the Chicora went down with all hands on her next trip.

  Down with all hands to leave not a trace on the unshaken waters. Not an overturned lifeboat nor a sailor boy’s cap. Not a beer cork nor a clay pipe nor a smudge of oil. Cutters scoured the waves for days but found no sign. Then the waves froze over; the wind blew the memory of their names into winter. Spring began as though the Chicora had never been.

  But a son of the Chicora’s fireman built a glass-bottomed boat in his Chicago backyard, determined to find the wreck on the lake’s shifting floor or go down himself. Five days after he had put out, the glass-bottomed craft capsized.

  Down went the brave son of the brave fireman to join the brave crew of the brave ship Chicora below the cowardly waves. Down to the uselessly shifting sands; yet determined all the way down. And left no more sign than his father had.

  My mother spoke of these upsets as though the glass-bottomed disaster were the greater. But my father insisted that the youth who had followed his father had been simply one more glass-bottomed damned fool.

  “Not all the damned fools are at the bottom of the lake,” my mother observed.

  How having a relative, who didn’t happen to go down with the Chicora, made anyone an authority on shipping disasters, my father claimed he failed to see.

  How a man could work six years for the Yellow Cab Company and not get to be foreman was what my mother failed to see.

  How a man could get to be a foreman when he had a woman who never let him rest was another thing my father failed to see.

  If a man didn’t have a woman to inspire him he could never be a millionaire was how things looked to my mother.

  If a man has to be nagged into being a millionaire he’s better off to stay poor was my father’s decision.

  Some men couldn’t even be nagged into being a millionaire my mother implied.

  Then she might as well save her breath, my father concluded; and threw the cat off the davenport.

  “That’s right, blame everything on the poor cat.” My mother encouraged us all to penalize the cat for our poverty.

  “What good is a cat that won’t hunt mice?” my father wanted to know; with the Saturday Evening Blade across his face.

  “He can’t hunt mice because he’s handicapped,” my mother explained.

  “Then let him hunt a handicapped mouse,” my father suggested.

  “He can’t hunt because he can’t smell,” my mother insisted, “when you cut off a kitten’s whiskers he’ll never smell anything.”

  “Has he tried using his nose?” my father inquired softly.

  I’d snipped the brute’s whiskers off with my sister’s nail scissors; but to this very day I cannot help but feel that the real reason that cat never caught mice was, purely and simply, that it didn’t want to take unnecessary chances. It was accident-prone and knew it. Especially when I was near.

  When it limped home trying to lick red paint off its fur, however, that was none of my doing. I simply hadn’t thought of it. The stuff stuck pretty good; especially onto the softer fur around its paws. Both my mother and father agreed that nobody could have done anything as idiotic as ducking a cat into a can of red paint except Johnny Sheeley; but they were both wrong.

  The kid who had done it, the kid to watch out for, the real neighborhood nut wasn’t really Johnny Sheeley. It was Baldy Costello.

  Baldy raised hell with us littler kids. He was really mean and really bald, too. And really accident-prone. The 71st Street trolley, that had never run anyone down in its life, chomped off two of Baldy’s toes. The shock, it was said, was what had caused his hair to fall out; but I think that was only a handy excuse. That kid never really wanted to have hair.

  The backs of both his hands were tattooed with decalcomania papers we called “cockomanies”; and sometimes his forearms, too. He shoved me off my handmade pushmobile, raced it down to 71st Street and left it lying in the middle of the tracks. My sister recovered it before it got smashed; but I never cared for that pushmobile anymore.

  Baldy was a thief who always got caught. Whether anyone had actually seen him take the money out of a purse or not was not important; because he always spent it immediately on cockomanies. When money was missing in the neighborhood, Baldy was sure to show up half an hour later covered from forehead to forearms with red, green and purple designs.

  A few years later he became one of the first men to sit in Cook County’s electric chair upon conviction of murder and rape.

  Didn’t I tell you he was accident-prone?

  * * *

  There was no way of prying my mother off an idea nor an idea off my mother. One afternoon as our winter life was running toward spring, I was busy addressing valentines to put into a box on the teacher’s desk the following day. She would then call out the names of everybody’s valentine in what was a kind of runoff election to determine who was the most popular girl and boy in the class.

  There were 48 kids in the class and I had 46 greetings.

  “Are you sending one to Mildred Ford?” my mother asked.

  Mildred Ford was the only Negro kid in the Park Manor school at that time. How she got there never was told. It was just my luck that she should show up for Valentine’s Day.

  I had no answer; so I made none.

  Mildred Ford, by tacit agreement, had been ruled off the turf.

  No answer didn’t work. When I’d finished the 46th heart-shaped greeting, my mother scooped up the bundle.

  “You can’t send valentines to anybody unless you send one to everybody,” she told me.

  “Nobody sends a valentine to a nigger, Ma.”

  “You heard what I said.”

  The situation was bewildering. Here but a moment ago the world had consisted of 47 of us to one of them; and now I was being told to switch sides. For what?
Just to make it 46 to 2?

  The situation, as Governor Faubus expressed it on a later occasion, was untenable.

  “Nobody sent her any last year, Ma.” I fell back on tradition.

  “Then this is the year to begin,” she decided.

  It wasn’t, you understand, that I had anything against that child personally. It was just that I felt it would be better for her if we proceeded more gradually; in another school on a different holiday. I was afraid that a promotion to second-class citizenship, if it came too suddenly, might leave the girl unbalanced the rest of her life. My friends still tell me I ought to stop putting the interests of others above my own; but I can’t help myself.

  The valentine that Miss Ford received from me possessed as much wit as could be bought for a penny at that time: It showed a tearful puppy pleading, “Don’t Treat Me Like a Dog, Be My Valentine”—about as far as you could go and still stay segregated in 1918.

  All I could see of her, from where I sat, was a pair of nappy pigtails, each tied with a blue ribbon-bow; bent above the one card she had received.

  I never spoke to Mildred Ford, she never spoke to me. She didn’t thank me for the valentine. But, as she passed me when class let out, she gave me a glance that plainly spoke—“You’re on the other side.”

  I had not known until that moment that there was another side.

  * * *

  Out of odd lore and remnants of old rains, memory ties rainbows of forgetfulness about old lost years.

  Out of old rains new rainbows.

  An image of Jesus hung above the piano in Ethel’s home; but above our piano nobody but Uncle Harry looked down. Yet there was a resemblance: both had died young of a wound in the heart. But Uncle Harry’s was hidden under the buttons of his Spanish-American uniform.

  That uniform still hung in our closet with a threat about it, because my mother planned to cut it down to fit me, to wear to school on the anniversary of the sinking of the battleship Maine. That would be just about what might be expected of a kid who had asked a black girl to be his sweetheart.

  Ethel’s faith in Gawd encouraged me to wait at the window every evening to see His colors rage the sunset sky. Yet I did not feel I had as much to do with Him, nor He with me, as with the lamplighter who came later.

  Came riding a dark bike softly: softly as the snow came riding. God’s colors would begin to die on tree and walk and street, when the lamplighter propped his ladder against the night to defend us. Touched a torch to a filament that came up green. Then turned to blue against the drifted snow.

  I followed him with my eyes to see a line of light come on like tethered fireflies. God’s colors passed but the night flares burned steadily on.

  For we are very lucky

  With a lamp before the door—

  And Leerie stops to light it—

  * * *

  I read in a book my sister had gotten for me at a library—

  As he lights so many more.

  My memory of that Chicago winter is made of blue-green gas flares across a shining sheet of ice so black and snow so white it was a marvel to me to recall that under that ice-sheet tomatoes had lately flowered.

  St. Columbanus kids stood around the ice pond’s rim with skates under their arms; for an inch of water was already spreading to the pond’s edges. When they tested the ice it squeaked the first squeak of spring.

  In March came the true thaw, running waters in running weather, when we raced the sky to school and raced it home once more. The St. Columbanus kids began lingering on the steps of their church—then the light, that had closed each night like a door behind their cross, began to linger, too. As if to see what they would be up to next.

  Then the fly-a-kite spring came on and I fled through the ruins of Victory Gardens pulling a great orange grin of a kite higher than the cross of St. Columbanus; with Ethel screaming behind me.

  When it soared so high it no longer grinned, I anchored it and Ethel sent a message up: I LOVE MY SAVIOR. I don’t know what had frightened that kid so.

  Ethel’s father had died without last rites and her mother had paid a priest $100 to keep her late husband from spending eternity in Purgatory. The priest, Ethel now told us between sobs, had returned to tell the family that all the $100 had done was to get the old man to his knees. It would take another $100 to get him out. But Ethel’s mother had answered, “If the old man is on his knees, let him jump the rest of the way;” and had sent the priest on his way. The blasphemy had provoked Ethel’s decision to run away from home.

  Ethel’s mother opened the kitchen door, tossed in an armful of the girl’s clothing onto the floor—“And don’t come home!” she announced; and slammed the door on her pious daughter.

  The cast-out girl stood silently. Then her features began working.

  “He’ll never see the face of Gawd!” she howled her grief and love. “He’ll never see His face!”

  “Then let him look at His ass,” my father made a swift decision.

  * * *

  On weekdays I got a penny to spend and blew my nose into a rag. But on Sundays I got 10 cents and a clean handkerchief. Weekdays gave only the meanest kind of choice: that between two yellow jaw-breakers or licorice whips or a piece of chewing wax shaped like a wine bottle with a few drops of sugar water inside. But Sundays offered a choice between a chocolate or vanilla or strawberry sundae.

  Sundays were for sundaes; the very same day that Ethel was my girl and I was the one with the dime. Ethel owned weekdays because she was closer to Gawd. But Sundays belonged to me because I was the one who knew the way to the country where maraschino cherries lived atop vanilla ice-cream cones. Where strawberries loved whipped cream and pineapple syrup ran down both sides of banana splits. It was all butter-cream frosting there; where caramels lived in candy pans and Green River fizzed beside root beer. It was always root-beer and ginger-ale time; it was always time for lemonade there. Where walnuts lived in butter-cream fudge and pecans lived in chocolate. It was the one place where vanilla, chocolate and strawberry embraced. Ethel’s church was St. Columbanus but mine was John the Greek’s: The Store Where Ice Cream Came True.

  Yet even there Ethel couldn’t forget Gawd. She was really dotty on Jesus. The minute John the Greek brought us two glasses of water, that kid would start sprinkling me. I didn’t mind the wetting as the day was warm. But as she had already used holy water on me without any result, I didn’t see how a couple glasses of soda-fountain water would do any good.

  And as though that weren’t enough superstition for one Sunday, she would dare me to step on a crack in the walk all the way home. If I did, Gawd would strike me dead, she decided.

  I didn’t believe a word of it. I put both feet down flat, deliberately, on each crack of the walk, all the way home.

  Nothing happened.

  “You wait and see,” she warned me.

  Another Sunday, though the weather was still cool, Ethel and her mother and my mother and myself took a basket lunch and swimming suits and went to the Jackson Park beach.

  A replica of Columbus’ flagship, the Santa Maria, had been standing around the Jackson Park lagoon since the World’s Fair of 1893. We took our lunch on the grass in view of its rotting hulk. Ethel and her mother went to the women’s bathhouse and I went to the men’s to change into swimming suits.

  My mother wasn’t going swimming herself and she felt the weather was too cool for swimming. If I wanted to go in the water, I would have to put the suit on over my winter underwear.

  When I came out of the bathhouse Ethel’s mother took one look and started to laugh. Then my mother laughed. It must have been a pitiful sight. When Ethel began to laugh, however, I felt really brought down.

  In pauses in our play, after that Sunday, Ethel would survey me gravely—then give me a smile of thinnest mockery as she saw me once more in a swimming suit drawn on over a suit of long underwear. Ground lost by such experience is not easily regained.

  As the roll-a-hoop spring came o
n blue as peace. By the light that now lingered, the light that now held, I stood bowed against the gas lamp crying warning—“eight-nine-ten-redlight!” As the roll-a-hoop spring raced to a summer of redlight pursuit.

  A terrier got hit in the street by a car that kept going. We heard its yelp and watched it drag itself to the curb. Ethel gave it last rites.

  The next morning she got me out of bed to give it a Catholic burial. I hadn’t even known the brute was a Christian.

  We took turns digging with a toy shovel. When it was deep enough Ethel began crossing herself and I stepped back until she should tell me to throw in the deceased.

  Johnny Sheeley came up, put his six quarts of milk down, and took the shovel from me. The grave wasn’t deep enough, it seemed.

  At his first stroke, the shovel bent and Johnny looked humiliated.

  “Wait for me,” he asked us. We stood around until he came back bearing a man-sized shovel.

  Johnny dug until we grew tired of watching him and wandered off to hunt four-leaf clovers. When we came back he had dug himself to his waist.

  The dead terrier lay beside the milk. Ethel threw in an extra prayer for the dog and I practiced crossing myself until it was time for lunch.

  From our front window, I watched Johnny on the warm noon, digging for his life. He had, it was plain, forgotten both dog and milk, dirty home and dirty mother. In the early afternoon Ethel came down to fetch me and we went out to watch Johnny for lack of anything else to do.

  “You’re going to catch it if you don’t get home,” Ethel shouted down into the hole from which we could still see Johnny’s sweat-tousled head. Her answer was a shovelful of dirt from which we both jumped back.

  Johnny dug until we saw his mother coming—somebody had snitched! She was a formidable harridan who supported half a dozen sons and daughters with her backyard dairy; doing more herself than her whole retarded brood combined. Johnny tried to scramble out, but couldn’t get a hold. His mother had to get two of his retarded brothers out of bed to pull him up.