The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  “My son sells gum,” Lottie explained to the cops.

  Then she put her arms on the bar and put her face down on her arms. She moved her shoulders a little. I don’t think she was crying. I didn’t hear crying-sounds.

  Owner picked up the money, rang it up and brought down the bottle and filled the glasses. Fielder lifted his glass with his left hand.

  “Say a prayer for the guy,” he toasted Haircut Man.

  Lottie looked up then. She’d been crying alright.

  “Wenceslaus,” she told Fielder, “how God is going to punish!”

  The one beside the juke had gone.

  ODE TO AN ABSCONDING BOOKIE

  Where have you gone Sam the Jackal?

  How can it be that through miles and miles

  Of wires and wires

  No message can reach us on a day this blue?

  For the ducks that swim the infield quacked us no warning quack

  Foretelling MODEST MAIDEN, in good form,

  Well-bred and well thought of by her neighbors

  Well-regarded by her muckers and respected by her groom,

  Well-behaved while being shod and well-placed in the gate—

  Distance suits—

  And off at nine to five—

  On a track announced as Fast yet that looked no more than

  Good Would break with maiden-modesty

  To find her stride too late.

  Too late Sam the Jackal?

  How could this be so when no skywritten prophecy gave us

  The post-time tip

  That GALLANT RALLY wearing one-eyed blinkers and racing evenly

  Would rally gallantly at the top of the lane?

  Yet lack the necessary speed?

  Necessary speed? What can be the meaning of this Sam the Jackal?

  We would like to understand how GAME COMMAND

  Nine times out and never out of money

  Responding to brisk pressure would battle gamely for command

  To quit cold at the eight-pole.

  Quit cold Sam the Jackal? After battling for command?

  Is there something you weren’t telling us you’d like to tell us now?

  For all you said was RECKLESS LOVE was one sad dog

  Held together by scotch tape and Absorbene That no bookie had to fear.

  I hate to take your money boys

  You added when we put up ten apiece on RECKLESS at 44-1 And pocketing our fifty.

  Now nobody is blaming anybody Sam the Jackal

  We would only like to know

  How it could happen that NEVER BETTER—

  Only needs good ride—

  Got the ride that he’d been needing while never feeling better Easily outgaming horses who never had felt worse Leaving GAME COMMAND and MODEST MAIDEN tied fast to the rail.

  To just miss.

  JUST MISS Sam the Jackal? What the hell is going on here?

  Whom has been kidding whom?

  We didn’t need to see the rerun: we were standing at the scale

  When RECKLESS LOVE came past the stands

  Striped by a daily-double sun

  And sheer astonishment.

  Steadily improving

  At forty-four to one.

  Bulled way between rivals. Won driving.

  We were waiting where we always wait

  Beside the fifty-buck partition

  Exchanging self-congratulations

  While doing some addition

  And disdaining well-backed entries who find their strides too late.

  When it came to one and all of us

  That you were a little late yourself.

  Too late too late too late Sam the Jackal?

  On a night when the moon has a disbarred rider’s eyes

  And tip-sheets are borne upon a wind

  Blowing from Just Missed into nowhere

  And cats freeze to death on fire-escapes

  You shall come to us again

  Returning forgotten hoofbeats to the backstretch of our dreams.

  O skywrite something for us Sam the Jackal

  Before post-time tomorrow

  Leave us grasp your manly hand

  Leave us see your sunlit smile

  Give us a sign: some omen

  For trustful hearts now desolate who once knew you best—

  Like Wither Thou Goest I Shall Go

  Will Pay Sixty Cents on the Dollar

  Or at least a forwarding address.

  BULLRING OF THE SUMMER NIGHT

  LOCKED into the darkness of an endless starting gate, the rider saw field lamps burning in a mist; bordering a straightaway rains had left so shining that every lamp looked tethered.

  Yet he heard no horses restive in their gates nor starters’ warning cries. No gate had ever been this dark nor any crowd this still. The field lamps began casting moving shadows all down the straightaway. His horse came asweat as the flag went up, at the restless shadows the high lamps cast: he shared his horse’s fear. Scratch the whole field he tried to cry out as every gate clanged open but his own.

  Lamed riders afoot, all in black silks, broke in a jostling pack, whip and spur to be first to the rail. All limped and several fell. Some fell and could not rise. His horse hooked itself across the still-locked steel, its forelegs racing air.

  He stood in the irons to double the reins and felt his right rein ripping. He reached for the mane but there was no mane—rot in the reins he thought, falling from a great height slowly—rot in the reins all along.

  And wakened feeling disappointed in everything.

  Somebody’s big hand was lying lightly across his forehead. He pulled away from the hand.

  Kate was standing above him. The tumult of her hair, uncombed and reddish-orange, looked to be aflame because of the yellow bug-repellent bulb burning behind her. She was offering him coffee in a tin cup.

  Tin cups were for water not for coffee.

  “For God’s sake,” he sat up to refuse the cup, “you have to shove a person across a room to wake him up?”

  He looks so young yet so old, she thought, Floweree looks so grey in the dark before day.

  “You were tossing, I thought you were fevery.” She placed the cup with care in reach of his hand.

  “Fevery?” he mocked her, “What in God’s name is fevery?”

  “I only have a country vocabulary,” she explained; and let it go at that. It was going to be another mean day for them both; that was plain. With nothing the way it had been before the Mexican had begun nipping him at the wire. He’ll be pecking at me now for my Ozark talk, she knew with resignation; or for being a head taller and half again his size. Or for looking years younger while being years older. Or for being bom in the mountains or raised on a river. Or for not minding when people call me Catfish. Or for wearing a GI cap. Or for wearing horse pins around the bam—What does he think I should use for bandaging?—Glue? Then he’ll get on me for owning a horse that does a mile and seventy without coming asweat by morning yet starts washing in the paddock that same night. A pure wonder he hasn’t yet faulted me for his falls at Waterford. Maybe he does in his jealous mind.

  For all of his pecking (she’d taken note) took care to avoid its true salty cause; for it was her trailer, her table and her bed. Hollis Floweree was scarcely the man to take chances with a good thing. Unless he had money in his pocket.

  “If you’re going to blow out Red,” she reminded him, “you better get moving.”

  “Blow him out yourself,” he advised her.

  Might not have things worked out better, had she not made it too easy for him at the beginning, Kate wondered now. All she’d done, of course, had been to take off his boots when he’d had too much whiskey in him; to let him sleep it off on her bed.

  Yet they’d lifted a few together before, at other parks, when he’d been riding better; and nothing had even begun to happen between them before. That he’d still been using a cane and had had his saddle in hock when he’d come here from Waterfo
rd hadn’t had anything to do with her taking off his boots. She hoped for her own sake now as well as for his.

  Or had the falls—three in two months—had something to do with it? Yet the Mexican had not yet taken either a drink or a fall. And his boots had come off just as easily.

  How can he hold that against me, she asked herself. Don’t he know that was before?

  There was the salty cause Floweree wouldn’t risk pecking.

  Unrequited love wasn’t what was souring him so, she felt sure. It had to be because the rider who outraced him so often was the same who’d nipped him at the wire in bed. A touchy group, these riders; whose need of proving themselves could be felt in their mounting of women as well as of horses.

  Excepting, of course, that Mexican thief. Whose mastery of all mounts came to him so naturally that he felt no need of proving himself to any. Horses sensed it as quickly as women.

  “What time is it?” Floweree asked.

  “Nigh to day.”

  “Night to day—What kind of time is that, for God’s sake, night to day? Didn’t they even learn you to tell time in them hills?”

  “Them weren’t hills,” Kate corrected him, “them were mountains. Though I do have to admit we lived pretty far back.”

  Stripped to his waist, Floweree stood with his disproportionately big hands clasping his cup the way a child holds a gift he fears may be snatched away.

  “So far back the owls screwed the chickens,” he decided; “that’s my opinion.”

  “The farther back you live,” she returned the usual answer to the usual taunt, “the tougher you get. And we lived in the last house in town.”

  She handed him his boots with one hand and the Racing Form with the other.

  “You’re in the funny papers, rider.”

  Under “Official Rulings,” he read, with lips moving:

  OZARK DOWNS

  “Jockey Hollis Floweree has been suspended for one day and fined fifty dollars for entering a frivolous claim against jockey Elisio Casaflores following the eighth race of Thursday night, July third.”

  “That’s Ishop, not Casa,” Floweree felt, “I don’t blame the Mexican because his boss pushes the stewards around.”

  “Well?” she wanted to know, “you got fifty dollars for the front office?”

  “You take care of your end, I’ll take care of mine,” he told her.

  Kate didn’t bother pointing out that she’d been keeping up both ends.

  “Front office don’t get fifty by noon, you don’t ride Red tomorrow night,” she reminded him, “and I don’t want your Cajun buddy on him.”

  “What’s the matter with my Cajun buddy?” Floweree asked innocently. “He’s got all the class there is to be had around this bullring.”

  “That depends on what you mean by class,” Kate decided.

  “When you get so good you can get on top of a $10,000 horse and lose to a $3,500 horse without the stewards seeing anything wrong, that’s class.”

  “And when you’re paying a rider to ride for you, and he’s riding for people in New Orleans instead, where’s the class in that?”

  Holding one soiled sock in one fist, Floweree kept peering into the depths of various boots; in hope of finding one equally soiled.

  “That don’t make him a bad guy, does it?” he asked one of the boots. Then looked up at Kate: “That man can whup his own horse ’n flick the nose of the horse behind, all in one motion,” Floweree defended the Cajun, “as good as even Don Meade could. ’N that don’t make him a bad guy, neither.”

  “Oh, toss those stinking things away,” Kate ordered him; and tossed him a ball of fresh white socks.

  “Just because he done a little time—” Floweree began.

  “I know, I know,” Kate interrupted him, “I know that don’t make him a bad guy. But he got a big mouth and he got bigmouth people behind him. In my book that makes him a bad guy.”

  “A person don’t have to come from Louisiana to have a big mouth,” Floweree observed quietly.

  “The Cajun ain’t riding Red,” Kate ended the argument.

  “How about that apprentice kid—Duryea?” Floweree sounded her out.

  “Duryea rides with his shoulders instead of his hands,” Kate pointed out, “he thinks he’s supposed to outstrong his mount. He rides every horse the same. Red takes a long rein. Duryea snugs up.”

  “Can’t you get one of the Mexicans?” he asked her softly.

  “No,” she took him up quickly, “all the good riders are contracted out around here.”

  He finished pulling on his socks before he answered. She could tell he was hot.

  “Believe me when I tell you,” he told her, standing up to his full height of five-foot-one, “I can get a contract with any stable in the country. Believe me when I tell you.”

  “Sure I believe you when you tell me,” she agreed easily, “tell me a rooster can plow ’n I’ll hitch him up.”

  She drew a rubber-banded roll from the pocket of her jeans and laid five ten-dollar bills beside his cup.

  “I don’t want you borrowing off the Cajun, neither,” she explained.

  “It’s your horse,” he disclaimed his involvement, “you take in the fine.”

  “The horse belongs to me,” she agreed again, “but the phony claim is all yours.”

  “Them people up there look at me like I smell of the shed,” he complained.

  “You don’t always smell sweet around me neither,” she filled him in, “what do you care what you smell like to them?”

  He eyed her steadily across the rim of the cup. “The reason that horse of yours don’t win”—he put his cup down carefully—“is he’s ashamed to have his picture took with you in them clothes.”

  “Rider,” she responded quickly, “your job is to get me into the winner’s circle. How I’m dressed for the occasion is my own affair.”

  “Alright,” he gave in, “I’ll take the fine in—only don’t get the idea you’re doin’ me a big favor. I got friends all over the country ready to back me.”

  “Sure you have,” she yet agreed, “you got friends from coast to coast. Tell me a duck is carrying a gun ’n I’ll stay out of his range of fire.” She whipped her GI fatigue cap down over his ears, tugged it tight and hurried through the door. By the time he got it off she was down the shed-row.

  Floweree spun the cap against the wall without so much as a glance at the money she’d left. He drew on his boots and stomped his feet to make them tighter. He put on his helmet and let the straps dangle. He flicked his little whip. Then he stomped in his boots once again. And once again flicked his little whip. He put on his riding-goggles. Then he picked up the money and left.

  And kept trying to figure out, as he followed Kate’s steps between the shed-rows, why, when it had been the Cajun who’d done the provoking, that the Mexican had come at him.

  “Hey! Casa!” the Cajun had started it—“You make fifty dolla! You have good time at your mama’s house now, Casa?”

  Not until the Mexican had been sitting on the floor, cupping his nose with a touch of blood on the white of his silks, had Floweree realized it had been himself who’d knocked the boy down. “You don’t get the best of it all the time, Mex,” he’d heard himself saying.

  The Mexican Thief got his nerve, I got to give him that, Floweree now had to admit to himself. For, in the next race, he’d driven his mount between Floweree’s and Houssayen’s and beaten both under the wire. His nose hadn’t started to bleed again until he’d climbed down out of the irons.

  That still didn’t make The Cajun a bad guy.

  * * *

  A heat haze was already banking above the ridge. Between the sheds grooms were sponging down horses with names like Flying Indian, Billy V., Flash McBride and Popcorn Bummy.

  Two grooms were hauling a horse up a ramp into a coast-to-coast horse van, while another shoved the brute from behind. Six horses, already installed, stretched their necks out of the windows like so many shop ste
wards, to see how the work was going. The driver leaned idly against the van, holding a bill of lading in his hand and spitting tobacco juice now and then to show he didn’t have to lift a finger.

  The hay, heaped and baled between the bams, lent a yellowish scent to the air. Floor fans, whirring all night and into the breaking day, carried music cool or hot from rooms where hot-walkers drank or dozed.

  Owners saved a pretty penny here by permitting hot-walkers to do the work of grooms: A green youth could pick up a lifetime craft here. He could learn how to tape a horse without having galloped one. The trick in bandaging was to keep the tape level, so that cotton tufts showed at either end of the bandage. And if the thermometer he shoved into the animal’s rectum read a degree and a half off, and the horse was backing off its feed, he knew that that horse should be scratched.

  Yet, as like as not, the horse was led to post all the same. And the rider who refused a mount unfit to race might have a rough go getting another.

  The riders, as well as the grooms, knew that things that mattered at other tracks didn’t matter all that much here. That’s what made it a bull-ring. It was all block-and-tackle around the soybean field; where a rider could make more money by running interference for the horse he’d put his backers on than by winning on his own mount.

  The rail was too high and the purses too low. There weren’t half a dozen rectal thermometers in the whole stable area. Nobody had heard of a film patrol. Hustlers wearing shades walked in and out of the bams without having to identify themselves. That’s what made it a bullring, too.

  But there were also, around the same bams, men whose respect for horses was merely part of their respect for men. This old-fashioned kind of Western man wouldn’t run a horse that wasn’t ready; any more than would the fight-manager who won’t throw a fighter into a ring at risk of a bad beating. There were owners of horses here who still considered the chief point of racing horses to be finding out whose animal could run the fastest.

  This kind of owner insisted that his grooms, when taping a horse, keep the tape level all up and down the leg. And who, when the rectal thermometer was a degree and a half off, scratched the horse.

  A stakes-winning rider earned only $50; and the rider behind him but $30. Third money earned $17 and fourth received $12. Out of which each rider paid a dollar to the Jockey’s Club and two dollars to his valet.