The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  Floweree waggled his whip at a couple of exercise boys but didn’t stop to exchange stories. When the vasty light of morning struck, tilting the straightaway into day while leaving the backstretch in darkness, the odds for the coming night would start forming. Rumors of evening would shape the rest.

  That, and turns so sharp that a rider on a $1,500 horse, who knew the turns, could outrun a $3,500 mount; there wasn’t enough of a stretch for the better horse to prove his class. His rider had either to take his mount around the leading horse or bull his way through at risk of being smashed against the rail. For the sake of a $50 purse, only apprentices and younger riders took such a risk.

  It was also a track where exercise boys competed with professional riders to make two dollars in breakfast money at 6 A.M. And where you saw horses with such string tails you had to look twice to be sure it wasn’t a pony.

  Spring harness-racing had left the track surface so hard that owners of thoroughbreds risked laming their horses here. The track’s hard spots had soft spots that threw a horse off stride. Owners didn’t risk running a horse worth more than a few thousand dollars at Ozark Downs.

  One morning the apprentice Duryea had worked Red’s Big Red out for five furlongs in fifty-seven seconds. The track record was fifty-eight. That same night, while a groom was giving Duryea a foot up in the paddock, the horse had stretched about and chomped the groom’s elbow, sending Duryea skittering down its flank. By the time Duryea had gotten him into the gate the horse was awash with a sweat of anxiety. He’d broken badly and finished dead last.

  Catfish had waited for her rider outside the jock’s room.

  “What happened?” she’d wanted to know.

  “Nothing happened,” the apprentice assured her, “the horse can’t run, that’s all.”

  “He ran this morning.”

  “If a horse can’t run between horses, he can’t run.”

  “And a rider who can’t ride between horses can’t ride,” Kate had judged the apprentice immediately. And hadn’t put him on the horse since. Floweree was the only rider whom both Kate and Big Red trusted.

  “Move over, you,” the groom now ordered the animal as Floweree stood by.

  “Don’t call him you, Mike,” Floweree suggested. “This horse was brought up by a fool who hollered Hey you! at him so much he wouldn’t run. He’s tore chunks out of people for Hey-youing him.”

  Floweree stroked the big brute’s neck and singsonged softly into his ear, “If you move over, baby, your little daddy’ll have more room.”

  The horse shifted its rump to give people more room; then rolled his neck toward Floweree as if to ask, “Is there room enough back there now, little daddy?”

  “He’s been kicking at his tail, too,” the groom reported sullenly.

  “Then take the knot out of it,” Floweree advised him.

  “If he talked like that to women,” Kate observed to nobody in particular, “he wouldn’t have to risk breaking his back riding around a soybean field.”

  “No, I could get it broken for me at home,” Floweree informed the horse, “and never have to leave the house.”

  Cantering onto the track, Floweree held Big Red back until Kate reached the scale at the finishing line; stopwatch in hand. He wheeled the animal into the gate with only his toes in the irons.

  Then, leaning far forward, shouted into the horse’s ear—“Get all the money!”

  Kate saw the perfect start, yet lost horse and rider in the shadows. But where the backstretch broke into day she saw a darkness driving across the sun, rider and horse a single creature, neck astretch and tail slowly blowing. At the turn for home its mane caught the sun and she glimpsed light beneath all four hooves at once: then it loomed like an oncoming express and she shielded her eyes against a showering dust.

  And heard the dying thunder of its hooves.

  When she looked up she saw Floweree easing the horse down the far side of the track. Why don’t you run like that at night you sonofabitch? Kate asked Red’s Big Red and God.

  Floweree wheeled about and gave her a confirming nod as he passed her on the trot.

  Had she seen the horse try to bolt? Floweree wondered. That flash of silvered light, across its hooves, was what had caused it. The clubhouse light, at the first turn—that was it. Now he knew what was frightening the horse at night.

  He knew something nobody else knew. If Kate hadn’t caught it.

  She came up with a scatter of dust across her forehead and the stop-watch still in her hand.

  “How’d he make it?” Floweree tried her out.

  “One forty-one flat.”

  “It felt even faster,” he risked suggesting.

  “The watch don’t lie.”

  It don’t tell the truth all the time neither, the rider reflected.

  When she led the horse off, to cool it, Floweree pushed his helmet back on his head and lifted his goggles to his forehead. The workout had presented him with a gift package that he didn’t want to unwrap quite yet.

  The gift was information. And information used too soon could kick back in your teeth; used too late, it lost its value. Used at the right moment, it could bring him the stake he needed to get away from Kate.

  He never could admit to himself that it wasn’t losing photofinishes to Casaflores that was rankling in him. Not even to himself could he admit that, sleeping with Kate, he was second again to the Mexican.

  “He gets the best of it every time,” Floweree thought—thinking only of photofinishes.

  He and Kate would be better friends, he assured himself benignly now, if he had his own digs.

  Information, however, had to be worked before it could be used. He lowered his goggles against the sun and cracked his little whip just once. Then set off for the Riders’ Cafe.

  He was going to need help.

  The clipclop clattering of horses at a walk or a canter, cries of rider to rider and the swift swing of cars off the highway to the bams, carried a clamor of preparation across the hurrying air. In which the faintly bitter scent of leaves parching on the bluffs mixed with the odor of horses awash with sweat. The heat was already building.

  In the Riders’ Cafe the horse-and-woodleaf scent was lost in the greasified pall of hamfat frying, bacon sizzling and beef stewing while toast was crisping in the ovens and eggs were burning in the pans.

  Great floor fans blew the ovens’ heat across the Negro muckers and walkers lounging in the cafe’s back room. For the boys who earned a dollar for walking a horse half an hour, the big rainbow-colored juke played Caterina Valente singing—

  * * *

  Chinatown my Chinatown

  Where the lights are low

  Dreamy dreamy Chinatown

  Hearts seem light and life seems bright

  In dreamy Chinatown—

  while they ate fried chicken and gnawed on the bones. They accommodated themselves to the heat and the noise more easily, it appeared, than did the white owners and riders who ate, with their wives and kids, in the front room.

  There helmeted farmboys from Kentucky took off their helmets while jiving teen-age girls off Canadian farms. And high school dropouts from New York, New York, kept their helmets on, while jiving the same girls, so their straps could dangle. Why the girls had left their farms, only in order to muck out stables, nobody understood; least of all the girls.

  But they preferred listening to Kentucky farm boys, and New York City dropouts, to listening to some ancient railroad pensioner recalling what it had been like as a brakeman on the Nickel Plate. There were too many drifters of no trade here, parolee-breakers, hiders-by-day and flyers-by-night; smalltime bookmakers gone on the arfy-darfy; too many I-Wonder-Who-Shot-Johns; who knew who’d shot John.

  Off in a comer, the always-by-himself loner—ex-salesman, exinsurance agent, ex-teacher, ex-lawyer, ex-husband, ex-father, ex-barber, ex-clergyman, ex-whatever—was making his last stand for survival with the Racing Form.

  The loner didn’t drink any mor
e. He didn’t date women. He never went to a movie. He read nothing but yesterday’s charts and today’s overnight sheet. He spoke of nothing but last night’s results and today’s entries. He lived as close to the mutuel windows as he could find a bed.

  The sure-losing-loner rose early to watch the horses work out. Then sat about the Riders’ Cafe figuring, figuring; until the toteboard lit up.

  When all he had was daily-double money, he couldn’t risk it on food. Because that two dollars was going to pay him, come evening, $51.50. Thus enabling him to put twenty and twenty on something that was going to pay $11.20 and $6.80; giving him a bankroll of a hundred and eighty-four dollars. Enough to sit at a clubhouse table with fifty dollars going for him on the nose of an 11-1 shot. Which would bring him $596.80; thus permitting him to put a hundred across on a sure thing off at 9-2. Then he’d move into a hotel until the meet closed. Whereupon he’d fly to Hialeah and win the grandstand. Then he’d return triumphantly, in a new car, to his wife.

  All this between the peeling of the paper off a chocolate bar and the final bite; that would have to last him until night. It never occurred to him that his wife wouldn’t have him back.

  Yet the people who really made the show go had no such fantasies. Now and again they’d make a small bet—but not at the price of a night on the town or of going without supper.

  They were the muckers and haulers and walkers and washers; who slept in shacks between the bams. Spongers and brushers and combers and cleaners: starters of the gate and jockey’s valets, saddlers and scrapers of hooves and manes; of hides and great white horse-teeth. They knew how to file a horse’s teeth so its lips wouldn’t tear when it was reined sharply. They were the ones who could calm a horse in the pad-dock; then whip him across the finishing line whether he wanted to run or not.

  Riders, trainers, grooms and traders chunked the ice in their glasses; and talked of their horses more like farmers than bettors. The rider turned agent, the carnie turned hot-walker, the agent turned tout; and the exercise boy who’d gotten his start in life by contracting rickets at the age of three.

  Beside the ex-pro football coach now running a stable for a Chicago outfit, still wearing a whistle around his neck, sat the ravaged owner of three horses (two of them sick and one of them crippled) in hope of getaway money back to New Iberia, Louisiana.

  “Good morning, horsemen!” The PA system exclaimed above the metallic voices and the aluminum trays, “here’s how it looks: Thursday morning, July 10th: first race didn’t fill. Out. Sixth race goes as she stands. Seventh race goes. Third substitute race out. Scratch Terry’s June in the fifth. Scratch Flash McBride in the eighth. Attention! Mr. Jack Coleman the tattoo man is here! Please pay Mr. Coleman five dollars. All horses must be tattooed within the week. Thank you, Mr. Coleman.”

  This was the place where the rider who weighed 104 found out what had happened to the rider who now weighed 133. This was where the rider, whose riding days had been shortened by whiskey, asked the young rider to lend him ten dollars until he got a mount. It was where the rider who had never taken a fall heard out the rider who’d taken one fall too many—and resolved to sleep alone, stay sober, save his money; never take a fall and avoid bad dreams.

  This was the long morning before the night’s swift show and these were the ones who made the show go. The grooms who rubbed the soreness out of the horses’ legs with ice and Absorbine; scraped the hooves and taped the legs; or held the brute still by a nose-twitch to permit the vet to wrench out an abcessed tooth with a pliers.

  These were the ones of whom it could be said: To him who hath shall be given; and him who hath not even that which he hath not shall be taken away. For it was the owner of seventy horses, such as Everett Ishop, who claimed the one sound horse left in the stable of an owner of only four: one crippled, one sick and one bowed. When photofinishes came up it was the bigger owner who got the break; his horses being essential to making up the programs.

  “Attention, Stewards!” the PA system demanded, “nominations for the Western Missouri Juvenile Stakes, five thousand dollars added, two-year-olds Missouri bred, to be run Saturday, August 2nd, will close Monday, July 28th.”

  Clarence Houssayen’s career had been unique. Not because he’d come up fast, from the bullrings to The Big A, and then had gone back down to the bullrings. But because he’d come up a second time.

  Flimflam men and smalltown sports followed him. He was trusted by such birds of prey as those whose prey was other smalltown sports and other flimflam men. Past-posters, coneroos, double-crossers and informers believed in him. Because when he gave his word that a short-price horse would run out of the money, and he was on it, it ran out of the money.

  He never talked face to face with this little group. There were only one or two, among them all, whose faces he’d ever seen. He made his deals by telephone from a house-trailer a few furlongs down the highway.

  Somebody had put concrete blocks under a trailer, hooked it up to electric power sufficient to keep a dozen twenty-watt bug-bulbs flickering weakly around a hand-painted invitation over the trailer’s entrance:

  EXOTIC TOPLESS DANCERS

  Whether the other exotics had left, or had not yet arrived, nobody troubled to ask. There was only Wilma-Mae, a lank and freckled barmaid with teeth so bucked she could eat an apple through a snow fence. And a pair of breasts so lactated Houssayen would shake his head sadly, when Wilma-Mae served him a beer, and reproach her gently.

  “Wilma-Mae, you ought to wear a bra just to protect yourself. Some guy loses control of hisself in here, it’ll be purely your fault.” Then he’d flick a few fingers of beer foam at those piteous dugs.

  He used the bar, in the long afternoons, to take long-distance calls from New Orleans. When the phone rang a man’s voice identified itself:

  ‘‘ Atchafalaya here. ’’

  “Off,” Houssayen would answer. Meaning all bets off; no fix. But if things looked right he’d answer “Suffolk. Five. Six.”

  “Suffolk” meant put your money down. “Five” meant five hundred dollars to win on himself. “Six” meant the sixth race at Ozark Downs. Whether or not he won, his backers stayed behind him. They knew that, once Houssayen gave his word, he’d do all in his power to keep it. Houssayen was trusted by the sure-thing boys.

  In order to remain free to choose his own mounts, he never signed a contract with any stable. He had to stay free to choose his own. There were mounts nobody could win on. And there were mounts that it would be particularly risky, for a man on track parole, to lose on.

  Houssayen was not only trusted by the gamblers who backed him: he was respected.

  The apprentice rider, Troy Duryea, sharing the common disdain of the native-born riders toward the Mexicans, brought a story on Hector Vaes to Houssayen. Houssayen got tight-up.

  “Ah take mens as ah finds mens,” he advised the apprentice coldly, “Ah don’t traffic in second-hand info’mation on a man’s cha’acta.” And had kept a cold distance between himself and the apprentice ever since.

  Now he sat, in the Rider’s Cafe, with his unclean underwear turned about so that its red label looked like a spot of congealed blood in the dark hollow of his throat. The tiny patch of dead-white skin, beneath his right eye, made him look even more leathery. It was a hoofmark from a bad fall he’d taken at Evangeline Park. Clarence Houssayen, under his faded helmet, looked like a cross between a bad-tempered rooster and a worn razor-strop.

  When you were told he’d been up to the Big A twice, you could believe it. As you knew, just as certainly, that he wasn’t going up there again.

  The second time he’d gone down he’d gone down all the way to the Louisiana State Pen for armed robbery. This had solved the problem of keeping his weight down for so long that weight was no longer a problem to him.

  Making his way through the heat and the chatter, to where Vaes and Casaflores were chatting it up, side by side, with Houssayen on the other side of their table, Floweree thought: it looks like
bygones are bygones.

  Hector Vaes was a picture rider. He sat a saddle like a man bom to ride. Yet his ambition, aboard a horse, was limited to staying on top of it all around the course; then to get into his civvies and get to the Highway Bar before they ran out of whiskey.

  Vaes had so many fourths that, when parading a mount assigned to the Number Four gate, some railbird was sure to shout across the rail, “You got your own number today, Hector!”

  “Vaes knows all the moves,” bettors agreed, “but I’d never buy a ticket on the bum.”

  For fifty dollars wasn’t too much to sacrifice, it was Vaes’ thinking, to avoid a broken back. And he conveyed his caution to the animal under him.

  When pressed to the rail with room—-just room—to get through, Vaes would falter and get blocked off. When the apprentice, Duryea, had once charged him coming out of the gate, Vaes had pulled up so hard the horse had swerved, and it had taken him an eighth of a mile to catch the pack. That day he ran fifth.

  He’d ridden at Santa Anita. But his conviction, that it was better to give ground than to run into a crush at the wire, made it increasingly difficult for his California agent to get mounts for him. He wouldn’t ride at Santa Anita again.

  Yet once Vaes and Casaflores had dismounted, all the caution belonged to Casaflores. Vaes went for the girls. He went for the whiskey. He went for the dice. He went for the cards.

  The women and the whiskey and the dice and the cards liked Hector Vaes, too. So did the bartenders and the sharpie crapshooters and the stud-poker mechanics and the blackjack cheaters. If nobody cheated him out of his money he’d find a hooker willing to hold it for him. There wasn’t a horse stabled at Ozark Downs for which Vaes cared anything.

  Although he was six years younger than Vaes, Casaflores nonetheless cast himself in the role of an older brother. All Hector required, it seemed to Casaflores, was edification. He never ceased, therefore, to point out bad examples to his friend.