The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  There was no lack of bad examples.

  “Look now Floweree”—he indicated the rider sitting with Troy Duryea in the Highway Bar—“he do the whiskey, long time, he do the girl. Now he sleep with a lady because she feel sorry.”

  “Then I got nothing to worry, Indian,” Vaes assured Casaflores cheerfully, “I go broke, lady take me in, too.”

  Casaflores looked disappointed in his friend.

  Vaes caught it. “I only want to be happy, Elisio,” he tried to explain.

  “What has that got to do with it?” Casaflores asked.

  Vaes called Casaflores “Indian” because Casa mounted a horse from its right side, Indian-fashion.

  “He could mount from the left,” the apprentice Duryea confided Houssayen, “that still wouldn’t make him a white man. But imagine—a Mexican calling another Mexican an Indian!”

  “That’s nothing,” Houssayen informed the younger man, smiling faintly, “I’ve heard a Cuban call a Mexican a Mexican!”

  The Spanish riders fought like women. D’Arcia and Josohino had gotten into it because D’Arcia had hooked Josohino’s stirrup coming out of the gate. Josohino threw a rock through the window of D’Arcia’s car. The next day D’Arcia cut up Josohino’s clothes with a letter-opener.

  Mounting from the wrong side was only the first thing Casaflores did wrong. Everything he did after that looked even worse. In the saddle he moved in every direction except off. When he should have been pressing himself flat against a horse’s neck, he sat up and began pumping, waving his whip across the horse’s mane and looking like he was about to leap off and drag the horse across the line by its tail.

  “If my mount ain’t giving me everything he got,” he confided in Kate, “I scare that sonabitch till he give it.”

  Casaflores cared everything for horses and nothing for cabereting. When he had to sit out a race he paced, half-dressed and helmeted, up and down the color-room floor, popping his whip against his boots: that same left-handed whip that flicked chalk-bettors with fear when he began popping it, coming down off the crown of the track on a horse so frightened it looked blind. He’d gotten so many wins by coming down off the crown that bettors had named it “Mexican Alley.”

  Why the Mexican Thief would take a bad mount, rather than no mount at all, caused other riders to wonder. Yet up he’d go into the irons of some crow-hopping fourteen-year-old mare that hadn’t won in seven years, yammer into her ears and keep yammering around the turn for home although the whole field was already passing the toteboard.

  “Money?” he answered when asked whether he liked it, “O yes—I like that.” Yet other riders suspected that he rode for the joy of winning as well as for the love of money. The truth was that, though he needed neither a woman nor whiskey in order to get him through the night, Casaflores had trouble getting through a day without driving a horse toward a finishing line.

  And this flatnosed little man whose eyes were Asian and who wore his hair too long, could drive a horse five furlongs in one minute flat by the clock in his head.

  A clock that had never failed him until he’d come to Kate’s trailer, on her invitation to share a Mexican dinner. “Made with my own hands,” she’d assured him.

  The Mexican dinner had been bought frozen. He’d taken it outside and dumped it in the garbage can. But had come back inside himself.

  In the twenty months since he’d seen his wife, it had been his single transgression.

  When he put down forty cents for a beer, that was forty cents worth of bread he was snatching from the mouths of his four children. Yet he’d been known to spend as much as six dollars in a single evening simply to keep a protective eye on Hector Vaes at the Highway Bar. In return, Vaes read books, newspapers and magazines to Casaflores; in English as well as in Spanish.

  Houssayen found it incomprehensible that a rider who’d brought in sixty-six winners, and the meet only half over, could be illiterate.

  “Read what it tell here,” he was now demanding of Casaflores, handing him the sports section of the Post-Dispatch.

  “How this man goin’ read your paper,” Vaes laughed lightly, “when he cannot read even his own?”

  Immediately, Casaflores put a finger on the previous night’s results.

  “It tell here Lee K. pay fourteen-forty with Casaflor’ up,” he reported thoughtfully, “Here it tell Mickey’s Miki pay twelve dolla straight, Casaflor’ up.” He handed the results to Vaes—“How many Houssayen win last night? Tell me where it say. That boy make money like crazy I hear.”

  “Ah made more money in one month in the port of N’Awlins than you’ve made your whole life,” Houssayen let Casaflores know.

  “I never make one damned dime in that port,” the Mexican conceded. Then, seeing Floweree, confided aloud to Vaes, “Watch out now—here that man pop people in the nose. He gonna pop you too!”

  Floweree nodded to Houssayen and turned toward the back room; Houssayen followed.

  “Big Red tied the track record out there this morning, Dad,” he told the Cajun the moment they were seated. Houssayen, in his mid-thirties, didn’t appreciate being called “Dad” by a rider himself old enough to be killing the grass.

  “What has running in the morning got to do with running under lights?”

  “That’s just what it got to do with, old buddy—the light at the clubhouse turn. That’s the shadow Red been jumpin’. Can I but get him to the rail before he hits the turn, the Mexican Thief will look like he’s standing still—and Red is going to be the price horse in the field. Old buddy.”

  “Tell the Racing Commission. Maybe they’ll turn off the power when you get a mount that’s scared of electricity.”

  Floweree placed his helmet carefully on the table before him.

  “Catfish just clocked the horse in one-forty-one,” he explained, “but she didn’t allow for his shadow-jump: I figure him one-thirty-nine tomorrow night.”

  “Why not just use a one-eyed blinker and a shadow-roll?” Houssayen suggested.

  “The horse won’t run with equipment. Besides, I couldn’t put extra gear on him without that woman wising up. If she sniffs something up, the word’ll be out.”

  For the first time Houssayen regarded him seriously. Then shook his head, No.

  “Caint afford to get into no more of your jock-room brawls, Flower. I’m on track parole.”

  An apparition, gaunt, lean and unshaven, held out a handful of programs to them.

  Houssayen paid The Apparition a quarter, the standard price, for one of the programs. Yet the Apparition waited.

  “It’s how much I pay for them myself,” he explained, looking sorrowfully down at the coin in his palm, “certain folks give me a nickel extry for bringing them in early.”

  “Let’s go to my place,” Houssayen suggested, adding a dime to The Apparition’s palm.

  Floweree rose to go. Yet now it was Houssayen who stood waiting.

  “You want change?" The Apparition asked at last.

  When he’d found a nickel, Houssayen accepted it and they left.

  The morning workouts were done now. All that was running the track, as they walked past the soybean field behind the toteboard, were tiny tornadoes made of chaff, dust and rumor: that wheeled in pursuit where horse and rider had lately run. That scattered sparrows under the rail then began making up ground. That circled the winner’s circle triumphantly as if mocking that nightly ritual. And at last blew across last night’s crushed lily cups, dead tickets and such.

  Into the vasty hollows beneath the stands.

  A green haze of heat, so heavy it looked like a wall, kept building higher and higher above the bluffs. Then a flash of heat-lightning cracked it and the whole green wall came tumbling down.

  Yet there was no thunder.

  Down the shadowed shed-rows the horses hung their great sad heads. The water in the big orange buckets was already turning brackish. Above the piled hay-bales a small chaff blew.

  Houssayen sniffed the air:
“Somebody’s using cane,” he sensed, picking the scent of sugar out of the scent of hay.

  Between the bales, in small stone rooms crowded with tack, exercise boy and mucker, rider and groom, all slept. Only the faint insistent tapping, of a hammer against a hoof, and a transistor murmuring near at hand, broke the stilly heat.

  “Get out your mud-silks, old buddy,” Floweree warned Houssayen, “when them clouds bust, she’ll pour for days.”

  “Pretty-day colors will do for tonight,” Houssayen judged.

  His room was an army cot surrounded by coffee-stained plastic cups, empty Coke bottles, riding boots, socks drying on a line, a calendar whose pages fluttered when he switched on his small floor-fan; and flies that buzzed contentedly. Never having known any other home.

  “Ah can git you a hundred across the board in N’Awlins,” Houssayen came directly to the point, “if your information works—But only Gawd can git you to the rail.”

  “If you’re in the One Gate I won’t need God,” Floweree assured Houssayen.

  “Ah won’t be posted on the rail. If the Mexican Thief don’t git it, Josohino or D’Arcia will—‘n that comes to the same thing.”

  “Or Vaes,” Floweree suggested.

  “Even worse,” Houssayen warned Floweree, “the sonofabitch caint ride a lick any more—but he’ll bump you over the rail to let his buddy git it.”

  “Why, that’s where you come in, old buddy”—Floweree brightened—“it don’t matter whether it’s Casa or D’Arcia or Vaes or Josohino—you thwack the first cat out of that gate—thwack!—like that”—Floweree smacked his right fist into his left palm—“all I got to do is to get inside before we hit the clubhouse light. When I let him out—we’ll leave that field tied to the rail.”

  “What the hell you think ah am, Flower?” Houssayen demanded, “the Confederate cavalry? How many them damn horses you think ah can cut out for God’s sake? Ah don’t even know what the Mexican Thief is riding.”

  “Moon River.”

  “Ain’t nobody can hook Moon River,” Houssayen now feigned inexhaustible patience—“ah know, buddy—ah’ve rode that horse. He runs from behind or he don’t run at all. Now how you goin’ to hook a horse that won’t try until he got the pack in front of him? Wait for him? You hook a horse between horses, when he try to git out front early. By the time the Mexican let Moon River make his run, whole field be strung out.”

  But Floweree began scratching an overnight sheet with a pencil stub. Flies buzzed against the screen. The floor fan rattled as if ready to quit. The light was hot yet the shadows were chill. The scent of instant coffee dried in old cups mixed with the choking odor of manure. Floweree handed his sketch to Houssayen.

  Houssayen saw starting gates numbered 4 and 6, with a diagonal line from 6 to the rail; and a crude representation of a clubhouse light purporting to be an eighth of a mile away.

  ‘‘That simplifies your work,” Floweree decided, “if Casa breaks slow all you have to do is drive at Vaes.”

  “Have to?” Houssayen glanced up quickly from the sketch, “Have to? All ah have to do is drive at Vaes? If ah jist grabbed his tail ‘n waved to you to come on ahead would that be alright with you?’’

  “All I meant was that if you drove at him, he’d give ground,” Floweree apologized, “you know all Vaes wants to do is stay on top of a horse until it slows down enough to let him get off.”

  “That’s only how he’s riding this meet,” Houssayen recalled, “he didn’t use to ride like that. If Vaes wants to ride, he’ll leave you thinking you’re tied to the rail. What’s his mount?”

  “Fleur Rouge.”

  “What’s the class of the race?”

  “Port-O-Pogo. ”

  Houssayen shook his head.

  “No. Fleur Rouge.”

  Then he tore Floweree’s sketch in two and the halves raced, in the floor-fan’s windstream, head-and-head to the open door and out into the haze of day.

  Houssayen went to the door, bolted it, and drew a riding crop and two batteries from a drawer. Sitting opposite Floweree, he unscrewed the top of the whip, exposing a hollowed center. He inserted the batteries. Then, turning the cap of the whip to Floweree, revealed a small coil. He drew a half a dozen small pins from his pocket, inserted them in the handle of the ship, screwed the top back on; then touched Floweree’s forearm lightly. Floweree drew back as if he’d touched an exposed light bulb.

  “Ah paid six hundred bucks for this small goading device, Flower,” he assured Floweree, “if ah wasn’t on track parole ah’d use it m’self. Ah caint take the risk.”

  The penalty for using a buzzer, as Floweree was well aware, was to be ruled off Canadian as well as American tracks for five years. And though other riders had used buzzers here, only one (a Chicago rider) had been caught and ruled off.

  Floweree began laughing, he didn’t know why. Houssayen’s small pillified face looked out at him from under his helmet, like the face of a dog in a kennel’s dark. Then he began making the kind of dry clicking, deep in his throat; that passed, with Clarence Houssayen, for rollicking merriment.

  “Now you’re putting me on, Dad,” Floweree decided—“every steward in the tower would spot a move like that.”

  Houssayen rose and stood in the middle of the room, studying Floweree. “You don’t buzz him on the track, Flower,” he explained, “work it in the areaway under the stands. You wave it in front of the horse. Then you get a strong double-grip in the reins. Then you give him a touch—just a touch. You’ll have to hold him hard—because that sonofabitch is going to stand up on his hind legs and holler. Can you hold Big Red?”

  “I can hold him,” Floweree felt certain.

  “Then, after you’ve made the turn for home—ah said after—you let him see it again and he won’t run for that wire—he’ll fly under it.”

  Houssayen waited for Floweree to ask him something. But Floweree merely studied the device.

  “Well,” Houssayen asked the question himself—“how are you going to get rid of it?”

  Floweree hadn’t thought of that.

  “You toss it to Drumgo. Drumgo’ll know what to do with it. You know Drumgo?”

  Drumgo was Houssayen’s Negro groom.

  “I know Drumgo.”

  “Then be sure nobody but Drumgo gets it. Damned sure.”

  A flash of heat lightning turned the room pale green for a split second. In that green moment, two small gaunt men, one helmeted and one unhelmeted, leaned rigidly toward one another.

  Floweree closed his eyes at that flash and kept them shut when the flash was done. In the darkness that followed he heard Houssayen’s voice.

  “You’re a mean little bastard, aren’t you?”

  The rider opened his eyes.

  “I have my reasons,” he replied.

  Red’s Big Red swung his great sad head across the stall’s webbing, forth and back, forth and back, lifting his left foreleg an inch then the right; in a slow immemorial dance. A small floor-fan, at the rear of the stall, whispered a changeless rhythm; that ruffled the feathers of the rust-colored rooster that was Big Red’s best friend.

  Were it not for her horse’s attachment to this mangy old bird, Kate would have wrung its neck and fried it. The stupid rooster was forever underfoot. But when you’re the owner of a one-horse stable, your horse is an only child that always has its own way.

  ‘‘Hold still, you long-striding sonofabitch,” Kate scolded Red when he shied, pretending to be frightened by the brush against his flanks; yet he didn’t shy too much. Red’s Big Red was a nervous stud who wasn’t against cow-kicking her if he’d dared. But whenever that impulse entered his mind she’d show him the broad white flat of her palm; and he’d decide against cow-kicking. Because with a single smack of the flat of that palm against his belly she’d bring him whinnying to his knees.

  This afternoon he was sassier than usual because he knew she never knocked the wind out of him on a day he was going to the paddock. Red always sensed wh
en she was getting him ready to run.

  Kate Mulconnery might have spent her days teaching disturbed children. Her own need was to minister to beings less endowed than herself in flesh, spirit and wit. But as her own education had never gone beyond the barnyard, she ministered instead to the spiritual and emotional needs of a great inbred four-legged neurotic; slightly retarded and perpetually disturbed.

  Warming, cooling, calming, currying, combing, feeding, coaxing, cleaning, Mercurochroming, bandaging, iodining and soothing this creature lent Kate the feeling that she was of some small use in the world.

  ‘‘Hold still I said,” she commanded Big Red now, “if you want to be a horse act like a horse.”

  Why all her horses had been losers and all her lovers had just missed being dwarfs, Kate needed no shrink to explain. When you’re a single woman cutting toward forty you don’t need to have a witch-doctor to advise you to take what’s at hand. Nor that, if you’re a woman weighing 189 pounds who likes men, your chances of getting cow-kicked by a jockey are greater than those of getting cow-kicked by a horse.

  A hint of rain in the air, however distant, had always had a calming effect on Red’s Big Red. Now he permitted her to pick his hooves with no more than an occasional twitch of his hide. He was feeling well despite the heat. Kate could tell.

  “Looking for rain, Red?’’ she asked him, tying small red and green ribbons into his mane. “You want mud again, Stud? Like the time we won in Ohio?”

  Red’s Big Red nodded: nothing he’d like better than rain bringing mud enough to send him splashing past all those horses that had been running away from him on these nights of fast tracks and dry going. Red snorted.

  She patted his neck. “Get all the money, Red,” she blessed him. Then kicked his rooster.

  “Frivolous claim” kept going through her mind all the way back to her trailer with the U-Haul behind it. Her life, recollected, seemed a sequence of frivolous claims: all put in by riders whose saddles she’d gotten out of hock. Now she’d paid out her last fifty dollars to reinstate a man she wished to trust; yet could not because he didn’t trust himself. That’s about as frivolous as a woman can get, Kate Mulconnery reflected, and began humming to herself.