The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  “Don’t try to sit up yet, Little Baby”—and when he said that I saw him clear. I saw my own Little Daddy’s face. My onliest Little Daddy. His face so old so young. So sort of pulled with care. He dried my nose and mouth and patted me with a warm damp rag. Then he dried me ever so gentle. Nobody can gentle me like my Little Daddy.

  “You’re the best connection a working girl ever had,” I told him then.

  “Don’t try to talk yet, Little Baby,” he told me. “We’ll have good times again—This is the old Christy talking now.”

  He didn’t look like the old Christy. Not by far. I remembered the old Christy.

  Yet I’ve tried to live without him and it’s like living without a heart at all.

  How old was I when he came past looking so young yet so old? Seventeen? I was needing someone to lean on.

  “I want to get up, Christian,” I told him again. He brought me my slip and turned his head while I dressed. When I looked in the bathroom mirror I gave a bit of a jump to see how thin my face had got. Still, it had a bit of color now. I added a little more.

  “I’m ready to go to work,” I told him when I came out.

  “Sit down, Beth-Mary,” he told me, “I don’t know whether you’re ready or not.”

  I thought he meant I wasn’t strong enough yet. But that wasn’t it at all.

  “We won’t make a bankroll tricking bums,” he let me know.

  I felt his drift. Yet I wasn’t sure.

  “Is there some other kind of trick?”

  He got up and walked around. Daddy had something on his mind.

  “It’s time to go the kayo route, Baby,” he told me.

  “You didn’t want that route in L.A.,” I reminded him. “How come you want to go it now?”

  “Different circumstances,” he told me.

  “What different circumstances?” I wanted to know.

  “Look around you, Beth-Mary. Just look around you.”

  I looked around. I looked at the bed still damp with sweat and the walls the brick was showing through; the wash-basin like something stole off a junk-wagon and four inches of alley-window that gave down the last of day.

  “I see what you mean, Little Daddy,” I told him. “Where you going to get the prescription?”

  “A place called the Southsea. A bartender name of Ram.”

  “You’ve been covering a lot of ground, Christian,” I praised him. “If we score do I get back my Longine?”

  I remember a time he would have clobbered me for checking him like that. Now he grinned weak-like.

  “Get your handbag,” he told me. “I want you to meet some classy people.”

  “What about my Longine, Daddy?” I made bold to press him harder.

  Then he pulled his wallet and flashed me the pawn ticket.

  “You keep checking me out,” he warned me, “next time I’ll hock you.”

  “I just wanted to know whether you’d sold it or hocked it,” I let him know.

  And out we went, down the stairs and onto the street.

  Just two fools leaning on each other.

  3. O Shining City Seen of John

  O Shining City Seen of John I thought, if that country fool of mine has but the country sense to phone Enright, that he can keep the chubby if he’ll go our bond and forget who threw the shot-glass, at least one of us can make the street and it had best be me.

  If she don’t we’re both going to get too sick to call for help on anyone but God, and God can’t help you from behind a solid door. The solid door is where they lock you when you deny being a user but they know you’re one all the same. It’s part of the treatment, I’ve had it before.

  That’s why I was keeping an eye on that string of light between the floor and the door. Because that time we were busted in L.A. and they wouldn’t let Beth see me, she rolled a cigarette under my door to let me know she was making the street. For a country fool to get city-smart takes but five days in Los Angeles.

  Poor piece of trade who needed someone strong to lean on—Who’ll you lean on now if your Little Daddy gets time? What’ll you do when the dolaphine gives out? Ride Trailways to Shawneetown?

  Who do you think’ll be at the station to meet you? The Shawneetown Parent Teachers Association? I doubt you’ll be able to score for your midnight fix at the Shawneetown General Store, Beth-Mary.

  Face up to it, Little Baby: you were bom unfit to be anybody’s mother and you’re unfit yet.

  Where Can I Get A Good Piece of Tale, some fool had scratched in yellow chalk, on the wall just over my head. I couldn’t think of an answer.

  I didn’t feel good, I didn’t feel bad. Just a little low in mind for knowing I was never going to play the clarinet after all.

  “But Daddy”—the fool complained after I told her I’d seen the clarinet, marked down to twenty bucks, in the hockshop window —“Daddy, how do you know that you can play that thing right off?”

  “How’m I going to learn to play the licorice-stick if I don’t have a licorice-stick, Beth-Mary?” I tried cold reason on her. Then I forgot about the licorice-stick because she started putting on her chubby.

  “Hang that right back up,” I told her. In no uncertain term.

  Right off she has a story—she needs it to keep the wind off her.

  “You’ll do better to worry about the law than the wind, Little Baby,” is what I told her then.

  There’s no wind blows that that broad fears. All she had in mind was showing the chubby off in front of Enright’s other hookers, especially that one calls herself Zaza. Had Beth-Mary had so much as a pearly-grain of sense she’d know that I was only leading the poor broad on.

  “No!” I told Beth-Mary—“No, Little Baby, you don’t need a fur-piece to walk half a city block. Now hang it back up like I told you.”

  “But it’s so cold, Little Daddy, the way the wind cuts right at you I might catch my death!”

  “You have a greater chance of catching your death setting at a bar with that thing wrapped around you, whisking in and out of the cold,” I was forced to point out to her.

  “I wouldn’t wear it in the bar, Little Daddy—I’d take it off till it was time to leave.”

  Allowances have to be made for persons unsettled in the head. Though just when you think Beth-Mary has surely lost one of her marbles, she’ll pull something that makes you think she’s got one extra.

  “Little Baby,” I asked her, getting her down on the bed beside me and one arm around her chubby, “you remember how we agreed your Little Daddy would take care of you in the big things if you took care of Little Daddy in the little ones?”

  I worked the chubby off one shoulder.

  “I never agreed,” she told me; hunching her other shoulder.

  “I agreed for you,” I had to remind her.

  “But Daddy”—she began trying to pull away from me—“all I want is to wear my own very own mink chubby to work. Why can’t that be one of the little things?”

  “Because if you get busted on that mink in Enright’s, Enright is in trouble too. And that makes it one of the big things.”

  “But Daddy, Enright don’t even know it’s a credit-card chubby.”

  “And how do you know the next trick sits down beside you in Enright’s isn’t from the pawnshop detail, looking for that very coat you’ve just thrown across the bar?”

  “I’d put on the coat so’s he couldn’t see the label.”

  “For God’s sake, Beth-Mary, this cop isn’t some two-hundred-pound flatfoot wearin’ a badge and revolver. He’s a long-hair cat wearing glasses, with a book under his arm.’’

  “I’d know he was law all the same, Daddy,”

  “How would you know?”

  “I’d just know, Daddy, that’s all. I’d just know.”

  “You’d just know, would you? And what if you weren’t even there but he came in with your description to Enright and was waiting for you with a warrant?”

  “Enright wouldn’t snitch, Daddy.”

>   “Beth-Mary, why take risks when everything is about to be perfect? As soon as I’ve mastered the clarinet we’ll both get off stuff and send for the baby.”

  She pitched herself face-down across the bed with her shoulders shaking.

  I kicked the mink onto the floor. I never should have mentioned the baby.

  I let her sob for a while then pulled her up beside me and dabbed her eyes with Kleenex from her handbag. It wasn’t too clean because she’d been carrying her needle in it. She dry-sobbed, then got control.

  “What good are things, Daddy?” she asked me then.

  “What good are what things, Beth-Mary?”

  “Having a chubby I don’t get to wear even. What good is that? Hassling every freaky old man on West Madison. What good is that? Just to stay out of jail? What good is staying out of jail? What good is anything, Daddy?”

  It was getting close to her fix-time that was clear.

  “Daddy,” she told me after a while, “I need rest,” and put her head on my shoulder.

  It was getting dark and she hadn’t turned a trick for twenty hours. The telephone wires across the window took on light from the arc-lamp and swung a little in the wind. I let her nod off against me for five minutes by her Longine. “Beth-Mary,” I told her too low for her to hear, “I’m sorry I made a whore out of you.” Then I tied her green Babushka under her chin and got her to her feet. She wasn’t yet full awake, fumbling at the bow I’d just made in the babushka and smiling a little just to herself.

  Then she was out the door with the chubby under the arm simply clickety-clacking down the hall and me right behind her—but I had to swing back to turn the key in the lock so she had a headstart. But I could take two steps to her one because of her heels and gained almost a flight on her before she hit the second-floor landing. Had it been five flights down, instead of only four, I would have caught her and dragged her back upstairs by those same heels; but she hit the lobby clickety-clacking so fast the desk-clerk glanced up. I had to slow down to a stroll.

  Did you ever, all your bom days, hear of a simple-minded whore so purely determined, at whatever risk to herself and others, to have her own way?

  She was waiting for me, under the marquee, with the chubby tight about her.

  “You are the most pig-headed country fool ever to walk in shoeleather,” I filled her in right off, walking on the outside to cover the coat the best I could—“you are the slyest country-sneak ever to thrash about the cheapest bar in town”—I kept giving it to her all down Madison, meanwhile keeping on the hawks for the two-man squad that keeps an eye on Enright’s—“I’ve tried reasoning with your childish brain. I’ve whupped your pitiful hide till my arms ached—and you’re still the most calf-brained smalltown idjit a man ever got himself chained to.”

  “Is that why you like me so much, Little Daddy?”—she got in just as she swung ahead of me into Enright’s—“because my mind is even weaker than your own?”

  The lights in the holly-wreaths hanging across Enright’s bar mirror had been switched off for a week. He hadn’t gotten around to washing off the HAPPY NEW YEAR FOLKS chalked across the mirror.

  Beth began taking off the stupid coat, taking her time to make certain that every woman in the joint had a chance to see she wasn’t wearing cat-fur, that it was the real thing. I just stood there studying her reflection.

  “Just who do you think you’re showing off for, Baby?” I asked her. After all, the only other woman to see her, at the moment, was Lucille, a teen-age lush who never leaves the joint, that Enright uses as a B-broad because the chick drinks hard stuff along with the marks—and that’s all she gets out of sitting there, too.

  The used-to-be hooker, Zaza, that Enright keeps in the dark at the back bar, still comes on like a hooker. But all she is now is a deadpicker and Enright gets half of what she steals.

  “Little Daddy,” Beth-Mary told me kind of low, when she finally got the chubby off, “you didn’t make a whore out of me. I made a pimp out of you.”

  Then she tossed the coat across the bar and turned her back on me like I didn’t exist.

  You can always treat a woman too good. But you can never treat one too bad. My mistake had been in giving the broad her leadership. Now she was out of hand.

  “Just because you got another beef going with your old lady,” Zaza tells me the second I sit down, “don’t mean you have to make up to me.”

  It’s hard for a hustler to work a joint where she’s not on speaking terms with anyone but the bartender. I took note Zaza was glad to have my company even though she wasn’t about to admit it.

  Zaza must have been goodlooking before she worked lumber camps. Now she was just burned-down timber.

  Yet not so burned down but she might not help a trusted friend to get a certain clarinet out of hock. The broad needed someone to talk to so bad I figured she might just come up with twenty. Might just.

  “I’m the one to blame for everything,” I took full responsibility for my idiot, “she’s a wonderful, wonderfull child—and that’s just where the trouble comes in. Because it’s just what she is—a mere child. Life can’t be just all a matter of getting kicks. Life has its serious side.”

  Zaza looked me down then up from my Keds to my high hairline, then down again.

  “Say something serious,” she finally asked me.

  “Buy me a drink. I’m serious.”

  “Why should I? Enright don’t want you hanging around your old lady when she’s working, so you come back here thinkin’ I’ll be grateful to have your company; only I ain’t. You’re going to put down the same old story on me, how you’re going to swing with another mink chubby any day now just to see how I look in mink. Only you aren’t. I’d be lucky if you swung with a pair of Goldblatt earrings for me.”

  “Earrings?”—I picked her right up on that—“You want earrings, baby? Just don’t go away.”

  I took a slow stroll toward the front bar past Lucille. She gave me her baby-lush smile but I didn’t even rap to her. Just strolled on by and came up behind Beth-Mary as if I meant to give her a hug. Instead I yanked her earrings off both at once—she yelped and swung about. But I was already strolling back. Now she knew she wasn’t the only one who could make a fast move in our family.

  Lucille didn’t lush-smile me this time by. “I can get me any pimp in town?” She let me know how I stood with her now.

  “Without an ID card?” I asked her and kept on moving. Yet I took care, when I got to the back bar, to put Zaza between me and the front door. Just in event anyone from the front bar should want to see me about something.

  I squirrel-eyed the front bar and, sure enough, I see Beth-Mary coming. But I failed to take note of the shot-glass in her hand.

  “Here, honey,” Zaza told her, holding out the earrings to Beth, “I don’t want them. My ears are pierced.”

  Beth-Mary ignored the offer. She purely hates the idea of any other broad buying me anything. Especially a clarinet. “Daddy,” she asked me, “can I just talk to you?”

  Now I knew I had her hanging. I just let her hang.

  “What do you think,” I asked Zaza, leaning a bit back from the bar to make sure Beth didn’t miss a word I was saying, “of a woman who’ll use her daughter’s education-money for her own midnight-score? What kind of a woman would put her habit ahead of her husband’s musical career?”

  Zaza lay both earrings down, very carefully, on the bar in front of her. She looked at them like she wanted no part of either one.

  “I’m talking about what a drag a woman with a habit can be,” I kept right on, “what a day-to-day burden—”

  Had Enright not walked out from behind the bar just as Beth pitched the shot-glass it would have skulled me instead of him. Zonk!—he spun half-about right into Zaza, nearly knocking her backward off the stool. She grabbed the bar with her left hand and swung her handbag with her right and zonk!—Enright went out cold face-down across the bar with his big behind sticking out.

 
“Call a priest! Call a holy father!” Lucille began hollering and ran out into the street to get one. Enright started to sag. I caught him around the waist and Zaza and Beth-Mary were helping me to get him up straight when two cops stormed in followed by Lucille. Who did she think she was working for?

  “Who hit him?” Cop One wanted to know, taking Enright away from me.

  “That one skulled him with a shot-glass,” Lucille got right in there, pointing out Beth-Mary—” and that one”—pointing out Zaza—“skulled him with her handbag!”

  Enright raised up as though all he’d been doing with his head on the bar was resting it—“I’m not pressing charges!”

  I’d never seen a man come around that fast before.

  “And I don’t blame you,” Cop One went along, taking Enright’s big moon-face between his hands and studying it like a map. There was a black and blue bruise on one side where the shot-glass had grazed it and a lump, just starting to come up, on the other.

  “I fell over a beer bottle,” Enright explained everything.

  I sat at the back bar looking straight ahead because I felt Cop Two’s eyes on me.

  “Get the two broads into the wagon,” Cop One told Cop Two.

  “Which two?” Cop Two wanted to know; not taking his eyes off me.

  “The one who pitched the shot-glass and the one who swung her handbag.”

  “I’m not pressing charges neither!” Lucille suddenly came back into her right mind; and handed Cop One her ID card.

  “Did I ask you to show me that?” he asked her. She put it back in her bag.

  “That’s right,” Cop One congratulated her. “Keep it safe, honey, you’re going to need it at the station.” Then he turned to Cop Two: “Take all three of them.”

  “What about him?” Cop Two asked.

  “Put the broads in the wagon,” Cop One decided, “I’ll take the pimp in the squad so’s they don’t fight over him all the way to the station.”