The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  No body was ever Clyde Barrow’s.

  “They’ll never take Clyde alive,” I prophesied.

  The Sinclair agent had let us have a hundred gallons of gas on credit. As well as a high-posted brass bed whose springs bore rust from damp nights at the Alamo. Our chairs were orange crates. I lugged a five-gallon jug of water, pumped from a Mexican farmer’s well, two miles down the highway every morning.

  When the Sinclair agent had driven up with papers assigning responsibility for payment for the hundred gallons, Luther had claimed illiteracy.

  “Mister, Ah cain’t but barely handwrite mah own name, far less to read what someone else has print-wrote. But this boy has been to college. He’s right bright. Got a sight more knowance than Ah’ll evah, git.”

  The right-bright boy with all the knowance had felt right proud to sign the papers.

  “When we git enough ahead to open a packin’ shed,” Luther assured me after the agent had left, “Ah’m gonna need your services to meet our buyers—Ah’ll just see that the fruit gits packed in the back ’n you set at the desk up front. How do that suit you, son?” That suited Son just fine. And if Luther averted his eyes, I realized it was only to conceal gratitude.

  Once, at midday, the agent caught me in the middle of my bushels, jars and sacks. ‘‘We plan to can them for the winter,” was my explanation.

  “Well, you’ll never get to be a millionaire by askin’ for raises,” he counseled me.

  I already knew that you had to work for nothing or you’d never get rich. Grit counted more than money. All a poor boy had to do to get a foothold on the ladder of success was to climb one rung whenever anyone above him fell off. This made the rise from a filling-station partnership to owning a cattle ranch merely a matter of time and patience. And when the day came that I’d made the top rung, the first thing I’d buy would be a pair of Spanish boots and a John Batterson Stetson hat.

  The reason we’d sold only one gallon of gas in that whole autumn season, it looked to me, was that Mexican farmers preferred to buy from Spanish-speaking merchants. “^Quiere usted un poco de este asado?” I would invite myself aloud to dinner while shelling. And, finding the roast beef tasty, would ask for more: “Dame usted un magro, yo le gusta.” That made a pleasing change from what actually went on in our mush-encrusted pan.

  So I’d painted the sign that invited the Spanish-speaking world to our two pumps: with fifty gallons of gas beneath each pump. I’d gotten as far as “Acérquese usted tengo que decide una cosa” when a Mexican drove up, hauling a trailer. I raced to give the crank forty-five or fifty spins. But the burn didn’t want gas. He wanted tequila. What were we doing out here in the brush if we weren’t selling whiskey? He turned his coat inside out to prove he wasn’t a revenue agent. He couldn’t believe that we were actually trying to sell black-eyed peas. Laughing, he swept his hand toward the chaparral: Black-eyed peas were as common as cactus. We must be kidding him.

  Still convinced that we had tequila cached somewhere, he showed me a coin, with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s head engraved upon it, to prove he could pay. It was smaller than any quarter I’d ever seen. I wouldn’t have taken it even if I’d had whiskey to sell. He wheeled away.

  One night I woke up because someone kept snorting. “Is that you, Luther?” I asked.

  “No,” he grunted, “I thought that was you.”

  The snorting came again. From under the bed. “Who’s under there?” Luther asked, leaning far over. For an answer he got another snort.

  He got up, dressed in a union suit, though the night was steaming. He probed under the bed and looked in all the comers with the help of our kerosene lamp. Finally, we both got up and played the lamp under the station’s floor: A wild pig was rooting under our heads.

  “SOOOO-eeeee, soooo-eeeee! Git out of there, you dern ole hawg!” Luther challenged it. But no amount of sooooeeeeeing could get the brute out. Or stop its snorting.

  The next morning, I piled into the front seat of the Studebaker beside Luther. I wanted to go to Harlingen, too. “Now, if we had an accident on the way,” Luther pointed out, “with both of us settin’ up front, both of us’d be kilt. But if one of us was in the back, he’d likely git off just bein’ crippled but still able to carry on our work.”

  I climbed into the back seat. Luther smiled, smugly yet approvingly, into the rearview mirror. “Done forgot what I to’d you about protectin’ yourself at all times, didn’t you son?”

  I picked up a week-old San Antonio paper in town. Four youths had driven up to a dance hall in Atoka, Oklahoma, arguing among themselves. Two officers had come up to pacify them and both had been shot down. Other youths had grabbed the officers’ guns and given chase. The outlaws had abandoned their car when it had lost a wheel, had kidnapped a farmer in his car, had set him free at Clayton, had stolen another car at Seminole and then had disappeared themselves. One of the officers had survived.

  “That got to be Ray Hamilton and Clyde Barrow,” I decided.

  “And Bonnie Parker,” Luther was just as certain.

  In the window of the jitney jungle in Harlingen, Luther pointed out a Mason jar of black-eyed peas I’d packed for the industry myself. I could hardly have been more proud. “You’re practically the black-eyed-pea king of the whole dern Rio Grande Valley awready,” Luther congratulated me. I felt the responsibility.

  Sheltered from the sun in the station’s window, my fingers forgot their cunning in a dream of a Hoover-colored future; wherein I supervised a super Sinclair station wearing a J.B. Stetson hat. Never a yellow kelly.

  “I never been North”—Luther came up with more curious news —“but my family been struck by the Lincoln disease all the same.”

  “What disease is that, Luther?”

  “The one that stretches your bones. My Auntie Laveme growed to over six feet before she was fifteen, same as Abe Lincoln. Her shoe was fifteen and five eights inches, it were that long. Same as Lincoln’s. It caused her nipples to grow inward. Which made her ashamed. Later she went blind but recovered her sight ’n spent the rest of her days blessing the light God had sent her personally.”

  The next night I wakened to hear a motor running that wasn’t Luther’s Studebaker. Yet I could make out his long lank figure in the dark, bent above the gas tank. I thought he was drunk and trying to vomit, because he had both hands to his mouth. There was someone at the roadster’s wheel whose face I couldn’t make out. “Llévame a casa” had been chalked on one side of its windshield and “Take me home” on the other.

  “Feeling badly, Luther?” I called. He made a long, sucking sound for reply. Then he climbed into the roadster and off he wheeled with the mysterious stranger.

  He’d siphoned the last drop of gas out of tank number one. I wasn’t going to be the black-eyed-pea king of the Rio Grande Valley after all.

  So I filled the Studebaker from the other tank. Then I dumped a bushel of peas into that tank, added five cans of Carnation milk, two plates of dried mush and a can of bacon grease. Then went back to bed content. Toward morning I heard the roadster return. I hoped I hadn’t flavored the tank too richly. I didn’t want Luther to choke on anything. After he’d emptied it he wheeled away once more.

  In the forenoon I went bowling along in the Studebaker at fifteen miles per hour. On a day so blue, so clear, it took my breath away to breathe it.

  The Llévama a casa—Take-Me-Home roadster was parked out on a shoulder of the road on the last curve into Harlingen. Luther came out of it wigwagging. I pushed my speed to eighteen miles per hour and he had to jump for it. In the rearview mirror I saw him standing with his hands hanging at his sides like a disappointed undertaker’s.

  Now he’d walk into town to save a nickel phone call. And report to the agent that I’d absconded with a hundred gallons of Sinclair gas in a stolen Studebaker. Would the agent telephone Dallas to alert the Rangers? Would I have to run a roadblock at Texarkana? Would my picture be posted in every P.O. in Texas: wanted dead or alive?

/>   Clyde, Bonnie, Ray Hamilton and I were at large. I’d never felt so elated in my life.

  I sold the heap to a garage in McAllen for $ 11 without being recognized. I treated myself to tortillas and chili in a Mexican woman’s lunch counter that leaned toward the Southern Pacific tracks. She didn’t recognize me either.

  I took cover behind a water tower until a northbound freight came clanking. I climbed into a boxcar, slid the big door shut and fell asleep in a corner. I slept for a long time; waking only to hum contentedly:

  Dead or alive, boys, dead or alive

  How do I look, boys, dead or alive?

  Until in sleep I heard a music, like children calling; between the beating of the wheels. Little lights were pursuing one another under the boxcar door. A calliope’s high cry came clearly. I slid the big door open just an inch. Great silver-circling lights were mounting like steps into a Ferris-wheeling sky. A city of pennoned tents was stretching under those mounting lights. Then a tumult of merry-go-rounding children came on a wind that blew the pennons all one way.

  I hit the dirt on a run, leaped a ditch, jumped a fence, fell into a bush, crept under a billboard, straddled a low brick wall and followed a throng of Mexicans under a papier-mâché arch into the Jim Hogg County Fair. And the name of that carnival town was Hebbronville.

  A banner, strung between two poles in front of a tent and lit by carbon lights, showed two boxers squaring off. Someone began banging on an iron ring. A big woman, tawny as a gypsy, with a yellow bandana binding her hair, mounted a bally and began barking: “¡Avanza! ¡Avanza! ¡Avanza! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! See the two strongest men on earth battle to the death! See Hannah the Half-Girl Mystery! See the Human Pincushion!”

  A dozen rubes were already gaping. A skinny boy, wearing white boxing trunks and muddy tennis shoes, climbed up the bally beside her. ‘‘Say hello to the folks, Melvin,” the gypsy instructed the boy. The boy grinned stupidly.

  “I never saw anything like it!” a roughneck in farmer’s jeans exclaimed beside me.

  I didn’t see anything that remarkable. The boy looked to be about fifteen, thin as a long-starved hound, with legs that had little more than knobs for knees. His shoulders were so narrow there was just room for his goiterish neck between them. His chin receded so far an ice-cream cone would have had to be inserted beneath his upper lip before he’d be able to lick it. The Human Pincushion looked as if a pin stuck into his egg-shaped skull could cause him no pain; while his hair had the look of bitten-off pink threads.

  Two young huskies, one in a tattered red bathrobe and the other in a faded blue one, trotted from opposite sides of the tent and climbed onto the bally, one beside the boy and the other beside the woman. “The Birmingham Strong Boy!” the woman held up the hand of the red-robed terror, who merely looked sullenly out toward the midway. “The Okefenokee Grizzly!” she held up blue-robe’s arm. Grizzly merely frowned. Both men were high-cheekboned blonds, unshaven; and looking enough alike to be brothers.

  The Mexican sheriff came down the midway, checking the joints.

  “Keep movin’, tin-can cop!” Strong Boy challenged him. “Keep movin’ or I’ll come down there ’n whup you!” Grizzly, the woman and the Pincushion grappled with him to keep him from assaulting the officer. The sheriff kept on walking, smiling faintly. The rubes grinned knowingly.

  “The man is an animal,” the roughie whispered to me confidentially.

  “You must have seen the show before,” I took a guess.

  Grizzly threw off his robe, began pounding his chest with his fists and roaring. Strong Boy immediately threw off his robe, pounded his chest and roared back. They created such an uproar that one Mexican came on the run, leaving his wife and two children standing on the midway. Melvin and the woman got between the two monsters and the roughie jumped up onto the bally to keep them from tearing each other to bloody shreds publicly.

  “The boys are going to settle their differences inside!” the woman announced after the two had been cooled momentarily. “Mountain style! No holds barred!”

  “I don’t want to miss this!” Roughie chortled at the crowd and headed for the tent, with the rubes following him like sheep following a bell ram. Melvin jumped and began taking dimes. His chest, I noticed as I paid him mine, appeared to be mosquito bitten.

  Someone had painted both sides of the tent with figures intended to be those of seductive women; but had succeeded only in creating two lines of whorish dwarfs. The angle at which the tent was pitched amplified the breasts and foreshortened the legs; so that each grotesque leaned forward as if she’d been impaled at her ankles. The artist had used too much red. Some whores.

  Roughie, standing in front of a curtained closet no higher than himself, announced, “Hannah the Half-Girl Mystery!”—and opened the curtain. Swinging gently there on a child’s swing, against a background of velvety black, a girl in a purple-and-cream-colored sweater looked down upon us with long, dark, indolent Indian eyes. Her body apparently ended at her waist.

  “As you see,” she explained in a voice as low and husky as a child’s,

  “I have no visible means of support and still I don’t run around nights. Thank you thank you thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you one and all. Señoras y señores, gracias.” The crowd sighed, as one man, with pity and love.

  “She tires easily,” Roughie explained and drew the curtain.

  “You believe that?” a simple-looking fellow, in need of confirming his own doubt, asked me.

  “Might be she got run over by a train,” I took another guess.

  He looked at me with the indignation a simple mind feels when confronted with a mind even simpler. “You dern fool,” he accused me. “Couldn’t you even tell that girl was a-layin’ on her belly?”

  “Step this way, gentlemen,” Roughie commanded us and nodded to the mosquito-bitten boy. “Melvin the Human Pincushion!”

  Melvin shuffled onto the bally with a sheepish look and began pinning red-white-and-blue campaign buttons into his skin. Some were for William Gibbs McAdoo. When he used a Hoover button I thought he’d surely bleed. He didn’t bleed for either McAdoo or Hoover. He was a bipartisan pincushion.

  Then he jabbed a huge horse blanket pin into his shoulder and Roughie went face forward in a dead faint. Strong Boy and Grizzly, both in their fighting robes, carried him off. I was glad to see they’d made up their differences in this emergency.

  The dark woman handed Melvin a small blackboard and a piece of chalk. He drew a line beside three lines already drawn and held the board up for us all to see. “ ’N that’s the number of people has fainted during my performance just today!” he announced triumphantly and jumped off the bally without waiting for applause. That was a good idea; because there wasn’t any applause.

  “In this cawneh!”—and here came Roughie again, now in white referee’s trousers, into the center of the makeshift ring—“in this cawneh, at two hundred and fifty-two pounds, the champion of the Florida Coast Guard—the Okefenokee Grizzly!” Pause for scattered applause. “ ’N in this cawneh, the champion of the Panama Canal Zone—the Birmin’ham Strong Boy!” Scattered applause by the same hands. “These boys are about to settle a long-standin’ grudge, so any of you men who faint easy, kindly leave now. No money refunded once the battle has begun!”

  “How about yerself?” someone had to remind Roughie; but he paid no heed. “Now, this event is presented at no extra cost and no hat passing, because you men are all lovers of good clean sport, auspices of the Rio Grande Valley Wrestlin’ Association.” He turned to the wrestlers. “Boys, remember you’re professional athletes at the top of your class, representin’ the honor of the Florida Coast Guard and the American fleet in Panama, respectively, and I’m here to enforce the rules. Now, shake hands, return to your corners, come out fighting and may the best man win!”

  Grizzly put out his paw, but Strong Boy, hateful fellow, struck it down. Then he turned on his heel back to his corner, handed his robe to the dark woman and
flexed his thighs while holding the ropes.

  “You’ll pay dearly for that, Strong Boy!” The Human Pincushion threatened him from Grizzly’s corner.

  “Watch your mouth or I’ll whup both of you!” the dark woman answered. Strong Boy, still grasping the ropes, spat across the ring directly at the opposing corner. The yokels loved it.

  Strong Boy and Grizzly began circling each other, both frowning, yet not closing. Somebody booed. Grizzly went to the ropes, scanned the faces looking up through a haze made of tobacco and heat.

  “What do you want for a dime?” he challenged the whole tent. “Blood?”

  “Look out!” Pincushion warned him too late.

  Strong Boy leaped on Grizzly from behind and they went to the canvas, rolling over and under from rope to rope in a roaring fury. The canvas shook, the tent poles trembled and the carbon lamps swung. Strong Boy clamped a headlock on Grizzly that nothing human could break. But Grizzly—being subhuman—broke it, sending Strong Boy staggering, his hands waving before his eyes in the throes of blinding shock. Grizzly backed against the ropes to gain leverage, then propelled himself half across the ring. Strong Boy stepped lightly aside, grabbed Grizzly’s ankles as he flew past and brought him crashing down on his face. Strong Boy had only been pretending to be hurt! Swiftly applying a double scissors, a toe hold, a half-nelson and a Gilligan guzzler with one hand, he began poking his opponent’s eyes out with the other.

  “Give it to him, Strong Boy!” the crowd came on in full cry, uncaring which of the two brutes got it, as long as one of them was punished murderously. “Wreck him, Birmingham!”

  The blood-lusters hadn’t reckoned on the Human Pincushion. Melvin slipped through the ropes carrying a length of hose and now it was the dark woman who cried warning—“Watch out, Strong Boy!”—just as Melvin conked him behind the ear and knocked him flat on his face.

  The referee snatched the hose length from the boy’s hand and began loping about the ring, holding it aloft and crying, “I’m here to enforce the rules! Here to enforce the rules!” as if waving a hose length proved that that was what he was doing; while Strong Boy still lay stretched defenselessly with Melvin kneeling in the small of his back. Grizzly, instead of helping Melvin, merely loped after the referee with his fists clasped in the victory sign. A bear’s head was tattoed on his right biceps: a grizzly with small red eyes.