The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  Having deployed those dangerous loudmouths, Sullivan and Attell, out of range of subpoenas, Fallon hurried Rothstein to Chicago to establish his client’s innocence.

  Rothstein was manhandled by the press; as Fallon had hoped he would be. By the time Rothstein rose to testify, his status was that of a visiting dignitary who’d been maltreated.

  Having become aware of certain rumors, the visiting dignitary explained to the court—rumors as false as they had been persistent—he had decided that he owed American jurisprudence a clean and unequivocal statement of the facts behind the rumors.

  “I’ve come here to vindicate myself,” he assured the court, “the whole thing started when Attell and some other cheap gamblers decided to frame the series and I turned it down flat. Attell used my name to put it over. But I wasn’t in on it, and didn’t bet a cent on the series after I found out what was under way. I’m here to clear myself and I expect to get out of here with a clean bill of health.”

  And he did. Rothstein left the stand adjudged, by both the public and the court, to be guiltless. Hardly had he gotten back to New York when Attell materialized, bursting with threats.

  He was going to Chicago to attest that Rothstein had dispatched Nate Brown to Chicago as his broker. That he (Rothstein) had hooked George M. Cohan and Harry F. Sinclair; among others. And that he (Rothstein) had perjured himself before the Chicago Grand Jury. Rothstein bought him off for fifty grand.

  Nobody bought off Sleepy Bill Burns. And his testimony was sufficiently deft to switch the guilt to the players. The fix, he lied as he testified, had been conceived and planned by the players; that it had been the players who’d sought out the gamblers; not the gamblers the players. By the time he was through he’d not only cleared himself, Rothstein, Attell, and Sullivan, but an entire bestiary of bush vipers, buzzards, jackals, and nocturnal predators from the jungles of St. Louis.

  The gamblers had made the money. The players were left holding an empty bag.

  A bag that looked emptier than ever by the time Cicotte, Jackson and Williams got through coming in on themselves.

  Jackson finally phoned one Judge MacDonald. “I’m an honest man,” he told the judge.

  “I know you are not,” MacDonald assured him, and hung up.

  “I’ll be right over,” Jackson phoned back; and explained himself in chambers:

  “Faber and Collins and Kerr and Schalk weren’t in. I got to be careful now.”

  “You’ve been fairly careless to date,” the judge pointed out—“why the sudden caution?”

  It took Jackson a minute of thought to answer that:

  “The Swede is a hard guy.”

  So he’d said it at last and was already wishing that he hadn’t.

  “We did our best to kick the third game,” he testified, “but Kerr won it off by himself just on pitching. Only the gamblers thought we’d double-crossed them so they double-crossed us. They promised us twenty thousand but all I got was five in a dirty envelope.

  “Now Risberg is threatening to bump me off if I talk. That’s why I had a bailiff with me when I left the Grand Jury room. The Swede is a hard guy.”

  He kept saying that. As if he thought nobody was believing him: “The Swede is a hard guy. Some guys are hard but they know when to stop. The Swede don’t know when to stop. If I was a bear ’n the Swede got a grudge against me, I’d be careful not to walk around nights without a couple other bears with me.”

  Risberg didn’t try to save himself. All he wanted to do was take the halo off the college graduate’s head. Detroit had thrown three games, he testified, to give the White Sox the 1917 pennant. Gandil had gotten up a thousand dollars from the White Sox players to pay off four Detroit pitchers. Bill James, of Detroit, had accepted the bribe. Yes, Collins had contributed forty-five dollars along with the others. The others, that is, except Weaver. Weaver hadn’t put up a nickel.

  But the Grand Jury wasn’t interested in the 1917 fix. It was the 1919 fix it was trying to solve.

  An assistant bailiff, who’d lost a twenty-seven-year-old moustache on the series, called out to Cicotte, when they were smuggling the pitcher from the Grand Jury Room to the sixth floor—“Did you get a bath, Eddie?”

  Meaning an immunity bath.

  But he’d already signed a waiver of immunity without knowing what he was signing. He cried on the stand and couldn’t say whether it had been Attell or Gandil who’d gotten the remaining seventy-five grand.

  “I’ve lived a thousand years in the last twelve months,” was all he had to say when asked who he thought had put ten thousand dollars under his pillow. Then he climbed off the stand and nobody saw him for six weeks.

  He showed up at his home at last; and perhaps he was still a kind of hero to the wife and kids. He went to work for Ford’s Bennett and never talked baseball again.

  Five years behind bars and two thousand dollars, each, in fines was what the eight faced if found guilty. And by the time that Cicotte, Jack-son and Williams got through testifying against themselves—having been duped into waiving immunity by the States Attorney—Comiskey’s man Austrian had to conspire with Rothstein’s man Fallon to keep the eight from doing time behind bars. That was when the confessions—of Cicotte, Jackson and Williams—disappeared themselves.

  That cost Rothstein a pretty penny. As paying the defendants’ legal expenses, without the defendants knowing about it, cost The Grand Old Man an equally pretty penny.

  Court and press, prosecution and defense, cooperated. The Grand Jury acquitted all eight men of the charge of conspiracy.

  “If any of my players are not honest I’ll shut the gates of the park I’ve spent a lifetime to build,” the old man boasted for the public’s benefit. When he posted a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for evidence against any one of his players, his sincerity could hardly be doubted. When he reduced the reward, a month after, to ten thousand dollars, nobody wondered. When the reward disappeared altogether nobody remarked that the offer had been nothing more than a PR gimmick.

  “Write to Commy, write to Commy,” the press pleaded, “tell him you know he’s okay.”

  Lardner was one Hoosier who wasn’t cheering. “Why were all the bonuses except Jackson’s held up in the spring that followed the series?” he kept asking.

  The old man never answered. He was too busy playing hero for newspapermen and saving his purse.

  The players assumed that acquittal meant reinstatement.

  They went out to celebrate in the same Italian restaurant in which the jurors were celebrating. Before the evening was over they’d pushed the tables together and everybody loved everybody. The celebrants had hardly gotten to bed before the new High Commissioner of baseball issued the final word on their careers:

  Regardless of the verdict of the juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes or promises to throw a game, no player who sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a ball game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will never play professional baseball again. Weaver was present during the testimony of a witness, [Landis went on to justify his inclusion of Weaver in the ban by recalling the testimony of Bill Burns] who most specifically stated that Weaver was present at the conference, and yet the case went to the jury without any denial from Weaver on the witness stand...

  The fact that Weaver had been denied his right to take the stand was a fact the judge found inconvenient; so he dismissed it. That Weaver had been denied his right to a separate trial was equally unworthy, the judge decided, of his consideration.

  A petition, reminding the judge that not only had Weaver accepted no money, but had played errorless ball and hit.327 in the series, was signed by 14,000 fans in a single day. The judge remained unimpressed.

  Weaver fought for years to get back into baseball. When his playing days were done, he fought on just to clear his name.

  He died indicted.

  Say they made a great
ball club

  Say it was the greatest

  Say The Swede was a hard guy

  Say he was the hardest

  Say it all again fifty seasons after—

  Then let it go at that.

  Let it go at that:

  Say the gamblers double-crossed them

  Say Jackson was too ignorant and Felsch too dumb

  Weaver too careful and Risberg too careless

  Gandil too slick and Williams too silent

  Say the press needed a villain so it could have a hero

  Say because he’d been the best the longest

  It had to be Cicotte.

  Say it must have been because he didn’t understand

  How a man could be a hero in America one day

  And a bad guy the next

  That he cried on the stand.

  Then let it go at that.

  Yet a left-hander’s wind keeps blowing this way then that

  Around an abandoned ball park

  Always blowing away from home.

  And if a single typewriter keeps clacking derisively

  High in the press-box

  It’s only the ghost of a high-collared Hoosier:

  There’s nobody in the press-box tonight.

  The man in deep left field in the uniform muddied at the knees

  With the shadows of fifty seasons behind him

  Isn’t who you think it is.

  For Shoeless Joe is gone long gone

  With a long yellow grassblade between his teeth

  And a lucky hairpin in his hip pocket.

  And what a patch of spiked sand around third looks like

  Fifty years after

  Only a turning wind may remember.

  Only a wind that keeps turning, turning

  Around an abandoned ball park.

  That blows and blows, forever blowing

  Away: always away from home.

  A TICKET ON SKORONSKI

  I don’t know what you have to do to have somebody buy you a drink in this neighborhood. In the old days, when the Logan Squares won, Owner poured a drink for everyone. When Hippo Vaughn pitched, he bought even if Hippo lost. Now it’s all changed. Now the good times are gone. Now Owner stops when he gets to me.

  One night we were getting ready for four-handed poker—Owner, Fielder, Haircut Man and myself. Lottie-Behind-Bar was behind bar. Fielder kept shuffling a red deck.

  “Last night I dreamed—” Fielder began.

  “No dreams,” Owner ordered him, “deal.”

  “I was leaning on the rail, I got a big ticket in my hand,” Fielder told, “only it don’t say what race. Don’t say what track. Don’t say Win. Don’t say Place. Don’t saw Show.”

  “For how much?” I asked.

  “Don’t say for how much. Horses are in gate. Flag goes down.”

  “What distance?” I asked.

  “Don’t say what distance. My horse busts out in front. Cuts to rail. Two lengths out! Three! Pulling away!”

  “How do you know it’s your horse?” Haircut Man wanted to know.

  “In a dream,” Lottie called across the bar, “you don’t have to have all written. When you want horse to pull away horse pulls away.”

  “Deal, deal,” Owner said.

  “Skoronski is riding. Coming into backstretch, Skoronski stands up in the irons.” Fielder stood up and hollered. “Whip him in, boy! Whip him in!”

  He slammed the red deck against the blue.

  “Sit, Wenceslaus,” Lottie told him gently.

  Fielder sat. And just sat—head down, holding the cards without knowing he held them; red against blue.

  “You’re breaking decks,” Haircut Man told him.

  “Then stops,” Fielder said like sorrowing, “Skoronski stops."

  “Stops?” Haircut Man asked nervous like it had been his dream.

  “He couldn’t get away with that,” Lottie decided. “Not even Skoronski.”

  “All stop, Mother,” Fielder insisted, “stop like when on film somebody is cranking, then stops cranking. Film stops, horses stop. Skoronski stops, Mother.”

  “Next time you see somebody cranking, ask for a job before he stops,” Lottie told him.

  “Jocks climb off. Kneel like track stars!” Fielder was getting excited again.

  “Two bits Skoronski wins on foot,” I said, and put my two dimes and four pennies in front of Haircut Man.

  “What’s the distance?” Haircut Man asked before he took my bet.

  “Hundred yards to finish line!” Fielder told us, “I climb rail! Fielder running for Skoronski!”

  Two hundred eighty-five pounds. When he sits, chair screaks. When he walks, floor screaks. I took my twenty-four cents back.

  “Bang!” Fielder shouted. “Bang!”

  “Bang?” I asked, “How did a Bang! get into this?”

  “He got to carry gun so nobody steals his paycheck,” Owner guessed.

  “How I run!” Fielder shouted, “away from all! Like wind! The wind! The wind! Right across finish line!”

  “Where did Skoronski go?” I asked.

  “No!” Fielder cried out. “I am Skoronski!”

  “Play cards, Wenceslaus,” Lottie told him.

  Fielder sat down. How he looked. Pale, so pale.

  The game began as it always began; cards fell as they always fell.

  A wind came up like wind does. Rain began like always. Juke played what it always plays.

  We said the things we always say. Barflies drank what they always drink.

  The blue-and-red beer sign over the door flicked on, flicked off. Dead bulbs and bad wiring make it hard to see who comes in that door.

  A kid called Lopez came in with the papers and left the door open behind him. Lopez is either a grade-school dropout or a fifty-four-year-old disbarred jockey. Nobody knows which.

  “Shut the door behind you, Lopez,” Owner said.

  I watched Lopez reaching for the door handle, standing inside so as not to get wet. The light over the door flickered out. Somebody came in.

  Came in without walking around Lopez and stood in the shadow of the juke.

  Lopez closed the door. “Race results?” he asked.

  “No horse players in here,” I told him.

  “Then buy a paper to put on your head,” Lopez said, “it’s raining outside.”

  Nobody else had seen the one who came in. Only me. The blue-and-red light flickered on again.

  “What are you going to do with your money? Be the richest guy in the cemetery?” Lottie asked Haircut Man when he won a hand.

  “Mind the bar and shut the mouth.” Owner told her.

  “Watch how you talk to my mother,” Fielder told Owner.

  “When you can pay for your own drinks,” Owner said, “you tell me how to talk. Don’t worry. I see all that goes on.”

  “So do I,” Fielder said, like under his breath. “All.”

  “You keep mouth shut,” Lottie called across the bar to Fielder.

  “When Haircut Man gives me a job,” Fielder let Owner know, “I won’t spend one dirty nickel here.”

  Haircut Man said nothing. But Fielder’s chance with him had come and gone.

  “Fielder,” Haircut Man told him ten years ago, “come to shop at eight o’clock. I learn you haircut business.”

  Fielder made it to the old man’s shop at two in the afternoon, so drunk he had to sleep it off in one of the chairs with the outfielder’s glove across his face. All he’s done since is sell gum at doubleheaders. Takes his mitt along in case of a foul.

  Who remembers when Fielder played? Who remembers Fielder, a boy like a deer?

  “Where you going, old man?” Owner asked when Haircut Man got up.

  “To wash face,” the old man told him.

  “To put his money in his shoe, he means,” Lottie said, after the old man had shut the washroom door. Haircut Man wears Ground Gripper shoes. If he would put shoe trees in them they wouldn’t turn up at the toes.


  I was dealing when he came back from the washroom. “You look pee-kid, old man,” I told him when he sat down.

  We all had our cards in hand before he picked his up. He picked them up and began squeezing one card at a time. When he got to the fourth, he let one card fall to the table. Then another, then another. The last two fell to the floor. His head went forward on his chest.

  “Wake up, old man!” Fielder reached across the table and began to rub Haircut Man’s wrists. “Old man! Wake up!”

  Owner ran behind Haircut Man’s chair to take him under the shoulders.

  “Telephone doctor!” Fielder shouted, taking up the old man’s feet. “Keep head down!” he told Owner.

  “Feet down!” Owner shouted at Fielder; but they went up, so Owner grabbed the ankles and pushed. Fielder yanked Haircut Man out of Owner’s grip.

  He carried Haircut Man all the way to the pinball machine and stretched him out face down with his heels against the scoreboard. Then—fast like a fish—Haircut Man flip-flopped so his face turned up. He looked better that way.

  The one beside the juke had his cap down over his eyes.

  Owner tried to get a fresh hold of the old man, but Fielder pushed him back.

  “He’s suppose to go the other way, Wenceslaus,” Lottie decided.

  “Why do you always take his side, Mother?” Fielder asked. And began massaging Haircut Man’s chest.

  I didn’t think the old man looked right myself, with his shoes against the GAME COMPLETED sign. But I don’t like to take sides.

  “Massage his feet, You,” Fielder ordered me.

  I began rubbing fast, with both hands, taking care not to pinch the toes. The old man never done me harm.

  “Not the shoes, dummy! The feet, the feet," Fielder hollered right at me. I don’t mind being hollered, but not right at.

  I unlaced one of the Ground Grippers. When I got it off I looked inside.

  Then I took off the sock and held it up. But everybody was so busy watching Fielder massaging, nobody would even look at my work. I took the sock over to Lottie.