The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  Then Strong Boy lurched to his knees, sending Melvin spinning, got to his feet and went loping counterclockwise to Grizzly, holding his fists aloft in victory. They passed each other twice making the same claim. Then both climbed out of the ring, followed by Melvin. Roughie paused to announce the results, “Draw! Draw! Two falls out of three for the world’s free-style championship! Final fall in one hour!” Then he climbed out, too.

  “That were the worst fake fight I ever seen my whole born days.” A voice behind me drawled its disappointment.

  “The holler ’n uproar was pretty fair,” a woman observed. Fake fight or real, the holler ’n uproar had been fair enough to fill the tent with marks; some of whom had now brought women.

  “And now, if the ladies will allow, I’ll talk to the gentlemen privately,” the dark woman said; then waited. The half-dozen women in the crowd retreated, huddled and sheepish, as their fine bold fellows inched forward. “And I know you are gentlemen,” she resumed, using a more intimate tone. “Do you see this little bell I hold in my hand?” raising a small tin bell and holding it high until every gentleman had seen it. “Now, I know what you men are here to see. I was young once myself—ha-ha-ha—and although you’re gentlemen, you’re still hot-blooded Americans.” Her eyes scanned their ashen and chinless faces in which most of the teeth were missing. “But there’s a city ord’nance against presenting young women in the ex-treem nood within forty feet of the midway—but back there, gentlemen, back there our young women are only waitin’ for me to tinkle this bell so’s they can start goin’ the whole hawg!”

  One tinkle and we’d be off! The men craned their necks like trackmen; but she lowered the bell as if having second thoughts. Then suddenly threw up her hands as if pleading. “For God’s sake, men, don’t go tellin’ total strangers what you’re about to see! You’ll spoil it for your friends!” She waited to assure herself nobody was going to tell. Several more marks joined us from the midway while she still held the bell aloft.

  “Gentlemen! If there’s anyone here who can’t control his passions when we get back there, I’ll have to ask him to step forward and have his money refunded at the box office! No money refunded once the performance has begun! Nobody stepped forward. She tinkled the bell at last.

  “Awful sex acts goin’ on right this way, gentlemen,” the Roughie-referee directed us. “Step this way, gentlemen, for awful sex acts!” He was holding a sombrero into which we each dropped a dime as we passed into the partitioned rear of the tent.

  “You handle quite a few jobs around here,” I observed as I paid him.

  “Why not?” he remarked cheerfully. “It’s my tent.”

  A crude wooden cubicle, octagonal, with shutters at the height of a man’s eyes, waited in the flickering gloom. We stood around it while crickets began choiring to a generator’s beat. The Roughie came in, wearing a coin bag around his neck. “Get your nickels here, boys,” he advised us, “two for a dime and five for a quarter, see the little ladies shiver and shake. You pay for the ridin’ but the rockin’ is free!” I had to wait in line to get change for a dime. A gramophone began playing inside the cubicle:

  Ain’t she sweet?

  See her coming down the street!

  I put in a nickel, the shutter lifted and Hannah-the-Half-Girl-Mystery’s long, indolent eyes looked straight into mine. She was wearing a red veil tied in a great bow about her hips and a green veil about her breasts. She moved her hips and breasts gently as the the gramophone droned on:

  Now I ask you very confidentially

  Ain’t she sweet?

  The shutter closed. I put in my other nickel hurriedly. This time she had closed her eyes and was smiling faintly. The gramophone began another inquiry:

  How come you do me like you do?...

  I ain’t done nuth-in’ to you.

  And click. Another nickel shot.

  “Mighty short nickel’s worth,” I complained to the ex-referee.

  “Ain’t nothin’ to what’s cornin’ next son,” he assured me, “and no charge whatsoever for this next show—just keep your voice and your head down, right this way.” I stooped to keep from bumping my head as he raised the next flap and then stepped into the ultimate mystery of a wide and stilly night. A full moon was just starting to rise. I stumbled across tent stakes until I’d regained the midway.

  Under the new moon’s coppery light, the fair seemed strangely changed. The dust that rose down its long midway, catching that light, looked like metallic flecks restlessly drifting. A glow, like beaten bronze, burnished the sides of tents that by day had been mottled gray. And the faces of the men and women behind the wheels and the stands and the galleries looked out more ominously than before.

  The dark woman’s plea of “¡Avanza! ¡Avanza!” sounded more pleading and the calliope cried La Paloma more urgently now. An air of haste stirred the dark pennons as if to hurry the tempo of pleasure along. Everyone began moving a little faster as though time were running out: All lights might darken at the same moment and never come on again.

  “Spin ’er, mister!” Someone was challenging the wheel in a wheel-of-fortune tent. “Doublin’ up! Let ’er spin! This is my night! Cash on the barrel!” A clinking of silver dollars followed and I hurried over to watch.

  If the aging man in the paint-stained cap was having a winning night, he looked to me it must be the first winning night of his life. “Takin’ the six!” he announced like an auctioneer. “And the nine!”

  “Only one number to a player,” said the wheelman, refusing the Cap’s double bet. He looked worried.

  “Afeerd I’ll beat you both numbers, mister?” the Cap taunted the wheelman; yet the wheelman still refused him. I felt the Cap slipping a silver dollar into my hand as he whispered, “Put this on the nine for me, son.” I liked his plan of putting something over on the wheelman. Immediately.

  The wheel clicked fast, slowed at 5-6-7-8, then nudged onto 9 and stopped. All the poor wheelman could do was shake his head ruefully and complain, “This is the worst streak of bad luck I’ve ever run into,” while he paid me twelve silver dollars. When I slipped them to my backer, he returned one as a token of his appreciation, whispering, “Play this for yourself, son.”

  I was careful to wait until the wheelman stepped back from the wheel before I put it down. Nobody was working monkey business on me.

  I put the dollar on 7. The wheel almost stopped on 6, then nudged over onto 7!

  “We’re killing him!” the Cap cried joyously.

  The wheelman stacked the $12 I’d won just out of my reach. Then stacked twenty of his own beside them and asked me casually, “Try for the jackpot, son?”

  “Take him up,” the Cap urged me in the same hoarse whisper.

  “I don’t know how it works,” I confessed in a whisper almost as hoarse.

  “You get the chance at the twenty-dollar jackpot because you won twice in a row, son. You don’t have to bet on a number, you can bet on color ’n that gives you a fifty-fifty instead of just a thirteen-one chance, ’n if you bet on both color and number ’n you hit both, you get paid double on top of thirteen-one, making twenty-six-one ’n a chance at the twenty-dollar gold piece—”

  “Red!” I shouted. But the wheelman just stood waiting.

  “It costs a dollar to bet on the color, because the fifty-fifty pay-off gives you too big an edge over the house—that’s the rules of the game, son.” I put a dollar of my own down and the wheel, sure enough, stopped on the red 5.

  “Hit again! I never seen anything like it!” the Cap exulted and I wished he weren’t so loud about it. He was attracting the attention of people on the midway. “Whoo-eee! This kid is a gambler! Pay the kid off, mister!” he threatened the wheelman loudly enough for the whole fair to hear. I didn’t see any need for threats; because the man was already stacking my winnings in three neat piles.

  I decided not to press my luck. “I’ll just take my thirty-two,” I told him.

  “Play,” the Cap hissed in m
y ear, “you can’t quit now.” Only this time he wasn’t advising. Now he was telling. I felt someone standing right behind me; but I didn’t turn to see if it was anyone I knew. I just gave the Cap a fixed smile and then turned it on the wheelman so he wouldn’t think I liked the Cap more than I liked him.

  “Try for sixty, sport?” he asked.

  “Sure thing,” Sport agreed, “make it or break it on the black.”

  “It costs five dollars to try for sixty,” the Cap informed me. “Rules of the game.” Could he be making those rules up as he went along?

  “I don’t have five, I have only two,” I lied; because I didn’t want to go into my right shoe.

  “Let him try for two,” a voice behind me commanded. The wheelman spun for two. If I won again, I’d have to make a run for it—but it stopped on red zero. The house had recovered its losses; plus three dollars of my own. I turned to go. Nobody was standing behind me.

  “Sport!” the wheelman called me back and handed me two quarters, “get yourself something to eat at the grabstand and come back if you want to go to work.”

  I went wandering down the thronging midway, clicking my two consolation coins. One was smaller than the other. Why was it somebody was always trying to slip me phony money? I turned it over and saw it had Roosevelt’s head upon it. I gave it to a woman selling tacos just to try it out. She gave me 15 cents change. Well I be dawg. That Mexican had been on the up-and-up, after all. With the ten-dollar bill in my shoe and 40 cents in my hand, I had enough to go courting! I worked my way through the throng toward Hannah-the Half-Girl’s tent.

  The ex-referee was sitting on the bally stand chewing a blade of grass; looking as if he’d been put together with wire; then sprayed with sand. A sinewy, freckled, sandy-haired, pointy-nosed little terrier of a fellow of any age between thirty and fifty.

  “Stick around for the girlie show, son,” he hustled me the moment he saw me, “you never seen anything like it.”

  “I’ve already seen the show, sir,” I let him know. “May I ask you something?”

  “Ask away.”

  “Is that wheel down the midway on the up-and-up?”

  “Every show on the grounds is honest, son,” he assured me; looking me straight in the eye.

  “Reason I ask is that I lost three dollars playing it and that gave rise to some doubt,” I explained.

  “Nobody wins all the time, son.”

  “I feel better about it now.”

  The dark woman came up, walking as though she were wearied out. Behind her the Half-Girl put her head and torso out of the tent. I hoped that that really wasn’t all there was to her. Then the rest of her emerged on two sturdy legs and began moving toward us. I kept my eyes on the man and the woman. When she came up I caught a faint scent of clove and lavender.

  “Oh, they’re nice enough,” I hastened to assure the tent people, “one of them loaned me half a dollar and told me to come back if I wanted to go to work. It’s the wheel with the Navaho blanket nailed up in back.”

  “That’s Denver Dixon’s,” the man informed me. “You’re in good hands, son.” He added, to the girl, “Dixon has offered this young man a position.” All three then looked me up and down; as though one thought were in all their minds.

  “I can see how he’d prove useful,” the woman decided for them all.

  “We take care of Dixon’s boarding-house,” the girl put in. “It’s where you’ll stay if you work for him. If you come back here at closing, we’ll drive you out.”

  “I appreciate your hospitality, miss,” I assured her.

  The man put out his hand. “Name of Bryan Tolliver,” he told me. “My wife Jessie. My daughter Hannah.”

  “That’s spelled T-a-l-i-a-f-e-r-r-o,” the girl explained. Now, how had a sandy little man held together by wire, and a woman as weary and heavy as that, gotten themselves a girl so lovely?

  * * *

  WELCOME TO

  DIXON’S SHOWFOLKS BOARDING HOME

  SPANISH COUSINE A SPECIALTY

  Everything was settled, yet nothing was settled. Hard times had taken the people apart and hard times had put them back together: some with parts missing; some with parts belonging to others; some with parts askew; yet others with extra parts they hadn’t learned to handle. The times themselves had come apart and been put together askew.

  Doggy Hooper, the shill in the paint-stained cup, had been a railroad clerk on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe for twenty years. Now he showed me how he’d made Denver Dixon’s wheel stop at 9 by a wire attached to his shoe; how he’d stopped it at 7; and then how he’d stopped on red zero when I’d bet on the black 11. Doggy replayed such small triumphs with the air of a man who’d made a killing on Wall Street.

  “’N that’s the way we flap the jays!” he grinned up at me; but a bit to the side because his right eye was slightly turned out. “It’s how we move the minches ’n give the rubes dry shaves”—and he did a bit of a jig.

  We moved the minches and flapped the jays every night. Doggy was the reach-over man; Dixon was the cool-off man and I was the stick. Anyone we hooked between us was a mark. When we got two or three more Dixon pulled the sticks.

  Then Doggy and I would be free to take a turn of the midway, past the stand that sold what I called cotton candy but Doggy called sweetened air. Past the flavored drinks that I called pop but Doggy called flukem. Past what I called a ferris-wheel but Doggy called the chump-heister. Past what I called the merry-go-round; but Doggy called the razzle-dazzle.

  “Son,” Doggy asked me seriously, “do you have so much as a flash notion of how much people will pay for the chance of losing their shirts?”

  I didn’t have a flash notion. He showed me a pair of dice; which I had only to weigh in my palm to tell were loaded.

  “I wouldn’t play against you with these,” I told him.

  “Even if I told you beforehand they were loaded, that what I had in mind was to cheat you?”

  “Surely not.”

  He stuck a finger at my chest. “You wouldn’t now. But you will, son. You will.” And he walked away.

  Doggy was right.

  Born on the hooks and looking for prey they were all fly-by-nighters and hustling rogues, hip to the lay and the holdout box: accomplices in putting the bends or playing the humps. They’d caught early-on to the Gypsy switch. Yet when hit with the swag when the hooks were out, they could take a drop without hollering cop. They were no whit less honest for all of that.

  Though the ducks in the shooting galleries had lead in their tails and the blackjack decks had a missing six; though the wheels were wired and the dice were rolled, the men and women who cast the dice and spun the wheels were no whit less honest. For all of that.

  And though they pitched their tents on the very same lots where, but a year before, they’d sheared the rubes and flapped the jays, flimflammed them at the jam auctions and suckered them at three-card monte, yet their tents were hardly pitched before the rubes were jostling each other to try again: crawling under the flaps for the chance of being sheared, suckered, conned, hooked, fleeced and flimflammed one more time.

  The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe had made a good move in getting Doggy away from their rolling stock, I concluded. He’d sprung a coupling and been left on a spur.

  Doggy Hooper’s parts didn’t match. But then, nothing else around that old strange house matched. Upstairs or down. There were hens in the yard; but when you looked for a rooster here came a capon.

  Denver Dixon himself belonged somewhere else. Six-feet-one and slim in the hips, wearing a dark suit sharply pressed, walking so lightly in his Spanish boots with the yellow string of his Bull Durham pouch dangling from his lapel pocket, keeping his face half-shadowed by his Stetson and his drawl pitched to the Pecos, nothing he wore or said would indicate that he’d been born and brought up in Port Halibut, Massachusetts.

  Had his big red-white-and-blue boardinghouse sign stood near the state highway, instead of being smeared across the
side of a dilapidated stable, that would have seemed less fanciful. Chicken wire, nailed across the stable to prevent horses from leaping its half door, would have made sense had there been a horse inside. But all the stable held was a domino table teetering on a scatter of straw. Where harness and saddles should have been, fishing tackle hung. Kewpies of another day, that once had smiled on crowds tossing colored confetti, smiled on; though their smiles were now cracked and all the confetti had long been thrown. Along shelves were ducks of wood and cats of tin remembering, among paint cans in which the paint had dried, their shooting-gallery days. An umbrella hung above the Kewpies—what was that doing here? A burlap sack marked FEED held nothing but dusty joint-togs discarded by belly dancers; whose bellies by now had turned to dust.

  The deep-sea tackle belonged to Doggy; who’d never come closer to a creature of the deep than to a crawfish in a backwater creek. Yet nobody considered the man strange because he practiced casting, with rod and reel, in ranching country. Once, showing me how to reel in bass, he hooked his line into a bristlecone pine. Then stood purely dumbfounded that anything like that could happen to a man in a country of cactus and bristlecone pine. If a blue whale could have been hooked in alfalfa, Doggy Hopper was the man with the bait, sinker and line to haul the awful brute in.

  Doggy liked beating marks. He liked beating me. He beat me at dominoes and he beat me pitching horseshoes—and every time he beat me, he called me Sport. But he never beat me for money again.

  One forenoon I found him crouching before an orange crate half-covered with tar paper. Chicken bones, recently gnawed, littered the crate’s uncovered side. A hole, sufficiently large for a small animal to enter, had been cut into the top of the covered section. I thought I heard a faint scurrying in there.