The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  “What is it, Doggy?” I asked. He was too preoccupied with what was going on inside that crate to reply. He drew back without taking his eyes off that hole.

  “Did you catch something, Doggy?” I asked. Doggy nodded as much as to say he’d caught something but wasn’t too pleased about it.

  “What did you catch, Doggy?” I asked after another minute. “What’s in there?”

  “What’s in there? What’s in there?” he mocked me. “The Thing That Fights Snakes, fool! Now, stand back while I rile it up a little.” I backed off.

  He drew on a pair of canvas gloves, lowered his cap to protect his eyes and bent to the box once more. He appeared puzzled about something. “Damned little bugger just et ’n now he’s hongry again,” he reported, shaking his head reflectively.

  “It is a pure wonder to me, though,” he reflected, turning back to his captive, “that it’d want another rattler so soon. Barely had time to digest that one. Where am I to find another’n?” he asked himself, then answered, “I just plain don’t know.” He stood up, appearing relieved. “Sleeping,” he confided to me in a whisper. I bent down over the crate with utmost caution.

  The top sprang open and a silver-streaking fury, all fur and fangs, flew at my face. I stumbled backward, wigwagging frantically to protect my eyes; then recovered myself and peered down through my fingers. An eviscerated squirrel, its fur painted silver, lay coiled at my feet. A spring had been wired to its tail and a set of old dentures joined to its jaws.

  Doggy began leaping about the yard, his laughter breaking like crockery cracking on stone, holding his stomach for sheer joy of his prank. One can’t expect too much of a semiliterate booze-fighter, I thought, walking to the house and registering contempt with every step.

  Jessie was in her rocker on the porch with a copy of the Valley Morning Star on her lap. I took the rocker beside her. A column of coal smoke kept rising from a Southern Pacific switch engine directly across the rutted road into a cloudless and windless sky. Voices, from the Iglesia Metodista just down the road, rose in praise of that same sky.

  “En la cruz, en la cruz

  Yo primera vi la luz

  Y las manchas de mi alma yo lavé

  Fue allî por fe yo vi a Jesús

  Y siempre felîz con él seré.

  “The papers keep puttin’ every killing in Texas on Clyde and Bonnie,” Jessie complained, “I know for a fact that Bonnie was in jail at Kaufman when them gas stations at Lufkin was robbed. ’N it wasn’t them that shot down the grocerman at Sherman. That was Hollis Hale ’n Frank Hardy. Clyde ’n Bonnie was up in Kansas gettin’ married by razzle-dazzle. ’ ’

  “By what?” I asked politely.

  “By razzle-dazzle. Flat-ride. Carousel.”

  ‘ ‘Merry-go-round?’ ’

  “No. A merry-go-round is the gambling wheel you’re working with

  Doggy. Could a couple fixing to get married ride that?” As a victim of one practical joke that day, and the day still short of noon, I thought it best not to pursue the matter.

  “Just one of Mother’s pipe dreams,” Hannah advised me from the door. She was wearing some kind of hand-me-down burlesque gown, ripped under one arm, to which a few silver sequins still clung. The sun glinted on them so sharply that she canted one arm to shield her eyes; exposing a dark tangle of hair in the pit of the arm. Again I caught that faint scent of lavender or clove; touched now by perspiration.

  “If you think me and your pa got married in church,” Jessie reminded her sharply, “you’d do well to check with Bill Venable’s steam razzle-dazzle in Joplin—’cause it was on that your pa and me got bound in wedlock, holy or no. ’N don’t you go forgettin’ it.”

  And here came Doggy shuffling along with his cap pulled too low over his eyes. Well, let the poor geek tell his sorry joke, I thought; I’ll go along with the laugh.

  Yet the old man spoke not a word. Simply braced his back against the sun-striped wall with his cap low over his eyes. But when he glanced up, blinking toward the light, I saw his eyes looking inward and his cheeks pale as ash. Jessie gave me a flicker; as if to say she understood something I did not.

  “I wasn’t disputing you, Mother,” the girl explained, “I just purely doubt that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow married that way. After all, they’re not camies.”

  “They wouldn’t be the first outlaws rode the flat-ride because they couldn’t risk walkin’ through a JP’s door,” Jessie suspected.

  “I’m not an outlaw, Mother,” the girl caught Jessie up.

  “And not much of a camy neither,” Jessie put her down quite as fast.

  “All the more reason for me to be married in church instead of on a merry-go-round.”

  “We don’t call it a merry-go-round,” I put in authoritatively, “we call it a flat-ride or razzle-dazzle. Merry-go-round is a gambling wheel. Or a lay-down.”

  “Now,” Jessie exulted at Hannah’s expense, “you hear that? Here’s an eye-tinerant college boy turned camy bare a week ’n he talks better camy than you who was born ’n bred to tent-life.”

  “I didn’t attend college,” Hannah explained, taking the rocker beside her mother’s. “I want a church marriage. By a preacher. I’m just not goin’ to set on top of some dumb wood brewery horse with a calliope blowing ’n call that a marriage.”

  “Your pa and me rode wood horses driven by steam ’n we called it marriage,” Jessie said reproachfully, “ ’N the flat-ride we rode we could have set atop a zebra or a lion if we’d wanted—that razzle-dazzle had a whole jungle on it. If we find you a steam-driven ride with a zebra, will you like that better, honey?”

  “Mother, try to be serious.”

  I had the impression that this fanciful debate had been fought, uphill and down, numerous times before. Always about whether it would be a camy or a church wedding; and never a reference to a groom.

  It had, of course, to be one of the half brothers who alternated nightly in the roles of the Strong Boy and the Grizzly. Lon Bethea, at 233 pounds, outweighed Vinnie by less than four pounds. Yet their combined 462 pounds of sinew, with the sheen of youth and the shine of health and the poise of power upon it, could hardly have left Hannah Taliaferro less impressed.

  When they took her into their Model A in a kind of protective custody each evening, she sat in the back seat flipping the pages of a magazine; while they sat up front matching her indifference with their own.

  “It’s up to Vinnie and Hannah,” Lon would say, resigning himself too easily to losing Hannah.

  “If Hannah ’n Lon make the ride, I’ll be their best man.” Vinnie was equally gallant, “I’m not a-going to stand in my own brother’s way.”

  “It’s awright with me if you marry ’em both, Sis,” Melvin came to his own decision—for which he caught a fast clap on his ear from her.

  The Bethea boys hurled themselves into battle night after night, applying airplane spins and turnover scissors, hammer-locking each other, then butting like bulls; stomping each other’s feet, barking each other’s shins, then choking each other purple with Gilligan guzzlers; yet they breathed nothing but good will toward men by day.

  The S.P. engine shunted a boxcar onto a siding, then raced backward, tootling all the way. “What’s that fool got to toot about?” Jessie feigned indignation at the engineer, “because he’s driving a yard pig?”

  “Goin’ backwards is when folks blows their whistles loudest,” Doggy decided, “or when they got no mail whatsoever to pick up. Don’t I do a lot of tootlin’ myself?” he asked. “And what have I got to tootle about? Ain’t I been tootlin’ backwards ever since I was born?” he asked in a voice prepared to grieve the whole bright day away.

  “I cheated on my folks by playin’ hooky,” Doggy mourned on, unheeding. “I cheated on my wife with other women. I cheated on my kids by hittin’ the bottle. I even cheated countin’ boxcar numbers for the Atchison, Topeka ’n Santa Fe.” He paused for dramatic effect. “What else could I do? I were only a child.
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  “Giving the Atchison, Topeka ’n Santa Fe a wrong count on boxcar numbers wasn’t cheating,” he explained to clear that point up, “it was a subconscious matter I haven’t to this day been able to understand myself.” He waited to see if we were interested in this mystery. Nobody was.

  “I couldn’t report a three if I was counting inside,” he recalled. “I had to go outside to do it. 1 could not form that number within walls. Inside, my fingers simply would not do it. Had to write another number or go out in the rain.”

  The little engine raced all the way back toward us, as if the engineer had been listening to our conversation and wanted to put in a word himself. Surely our voices, in that clear bright air, carried far down the tracks. Then he raced back down the roundhouse and out of sight. Jessie turned toward Hannah.

  “And if you’re making plans to sew that seam under your arm before it’s ripped to your belly button, young woman, I’ll loan you a proper needle.”

  Doggy poked his ferrety face out from under his cap. “Aren’t no proper thread.” Then he pulled his head back under his cap and began singing challengingly:

  If he’s good enough for Lindy

  He’s good enough for me

  Herbert Hoover is the only man

  To keep our country free!

  “Good enough for Lindbergh ain’t good enough for me,” Jessie derided the President, the pilot, Doggy and the song. “Franklin D. Roosevelt is the man to set this country free.”

  “I’ll tell you about Roosevelt,” Doggy offered: “He’s like the bottom part of a double boiler—gets all worked up but don’t know what’s cookin.’ ’N I’ll tell you something, Sport.” He turned to me. “Any time you get into a town where the cops don’t have uniforms, you can be sure the chow is going to be lousy.”

  Doggy seemed to be coming out of his mood nicely.

  “Is Mr. Dixon up yet, Mother?” Hannah asked.

  “Gone to town bright ’n early to pick up the Jew fella,” Jessie reported. “Took them two fool wrasslers along.” The “Jew fella” was Dixon’s wheelman, Little British.

  Although Hannah Taliaferro was a sturdy girl, she gave an impression of fragility. She was quick in mind and movement; but, even more, the impression came from that strange personal scent that seemed to mingle clove and lavender with perspiration. Men who fixed their eyes on a distant point, when she stood directly before them, looked perfect fools to me. I avoided looking the fool simply by shutting my eyes until her mother called her away.

  The true mystery about Hannah the Half-Girl Mystery was not how her lower body disappeared at tent time, then reappeared as she swept floors, made beds and turned hot cakes the next morning. It was how, whether bending, walking, turning, resting, stretching itself or just standing still, it became more voluptuous at every reincarnation.

  Her carelessness toward her own charms was not the least of her charm. She went about barefoot, wearing nothing but that handme-down burlesque gown, once red, now faded to brown. Her nipples, always pointing as if forever taut, stretched the dress’s thin fabric. When she bent down over the table to serve a dish, I saw a skin so tawny that the circles about the nipples were only a hue darker than the breasts themselves.

  After that I’d go upstairs to rest.

  Doggy got so drunk, between the stable and the town, that he lay all day Sunday on his garret cot, paralyzed by exhaustion. By Monday noon, however, he’d recuperated sufficiently to go about consumed with remorse: “No, you don’t get a cigarette,” I heard him pronouncing various penances upon himself—“you had yours Saturday. No, you don’t get any lunch today. You had yours Saturday.” All day Monday he denied himself; and part of Tuesday, too. Thursday evening he began letting up a bit on himself. By Saturday he’d be ready for an all-night bender once again.

  A camie named Hawks owned the ferris-wheel and the wild-man concession as well. Neither concession was drawing. He came to Dixon’s Showfolks Boarding Home, one Sunday forenoon, seeking Dixon’s advice.

  Hawks was having touble with Leroy, his wild man. Leroy was a country boy who’d joined the show in Texarkana. Hawks gave him his meals, a bed, and a couple of dollars every Sunday morning. All Leroy had to do was to sit in a cage, wearing flannel underwear dyed black, a ffightwig, a mouthpiece that lent him the appearance of being fanged; with a dog-collar and chain around his neck. Sometimes Hawk tossed chicken-bones onto the straw at Leroy’s feet. If the tip was good Leroy would gnaw them.

  It wasn’t hard work. The boy didn’t even have to howl unless he felt like it.

  The yokels paid a dime to stare at FANG THE SAVAGE SOLOMON-ISLANDER. But Leroy was bored. He bought a small radio to pass the hours while the yokels paused, looked, and passed on. The sight of a wild man from the Solomons listening to square-dances disappointed many. Leroy was turning Hawks’ show into a farce. So he’d forbidden the boy to take the radio into his cage.

  Leroy sulked. Then he wrote a note to the sheriff, saying he was being held against his will in a cage at the Hogg County Fair. The sheriff dispatched a constable to investigate.

  Hawks was so annoyed with the boy, for bringing law onto the grounds, that he fired him on the spot. But the constable wouldn’t permit Hawks to fire Leroy. Not in Texas.

  “If you’re going to fire him you have to fire him in the state you hired him,” the constable decided, “you can’t fire this fool in my state.”

  Hawks had had to drive Leroy the entire length of Texas in order to fire him in Texarkana.

  “I wouldn’t have made an issue of the radio,” he assured Dixon and Doggy now, “if the kid had had any talent. But he wasn’t paying his way even without a radio.”

  “Don’t blame him,” Doggy reproved Hawks, “it’s your show. You can’t expect people to pay just to see somebody sitting in his underwear in a cage. You have to give them a story.”

  Doggy and Hawks retired to the front porch for a story conference. I wasn’t surprised when Dixon replaced Doggy at our wheel that night. Dixon didn’t trust me to work the gaff by myself.

  Doggy was sitting in a cage across the midway, wearing flannel underwear dyed black; a frightwig; with a dog-collar and chain around his neck. He claimed he didn’t need fangs.

  Toward ten o’clock, the hour when the tip begins milling from bally to bally, trying to see everything before midnight, I heard a scream, high-pitched as a tom-cat’s in heat, across the midway. The tip began milling wildly, hoping somebody was getting killed.

  In that cat-scream I’d heard Melvin’s voice.

  And here he comes staggering side to side, bespattered with what surely looked to be blood—and the wild man in wild pursuit.

  “The wild man has broken loose!”—I heard Jessie shouting.

  Women fled. Men backed away. Children stood quietly observing. Every time Melvin screamed, the wild man roared and lunged for him.

  Every time he barely missed. Once the boy fell prone and the wild man nearly had him—but the boy staggered to his feet and shook off the wild man’s grip on his shirt. A woman began shouting “Help him! Help him!” Yet not a man dared get near the wild man.

  They made a complete lap of the midway before Melvin collapsed—conveniently—in front of his own tent. There the Bethea boys grabbed the wild man and dragged him, struggling wildly, back into his cage. Jessie and Bryan came rushing to minister to the wounded youth.

  The crowd gathered around Melvin. Lon and Vinnie carried him into the tent and the crowd tried following.

  Jessie barred the way.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” she commanded them, “your kind attention please! The management has asked me to express its deep regret—and that of everyone in this show—for the tragedy you have just witnessed. But we can assure you that the young man who has been mauled by FANG THE SAVAGE SOLOMON-ISLANDER will get the best attention medical science can offer! At the moment his condition is critical! Nobody will be allowed to enter the tent! Unless he or she is associated with the medical profession!”


  “I’m a practical nurse!” a big redheaded woman announced, and began pushing her way through the crowd; followed by a redheaded man and two redheaded teen-age girls. Bryan, standing at the entrance, let the practical nurse and her family in; but another woman tried to follow—“My husband is a doctor,” was her claim; but it didn’t work.

  “Those related to members of the medical profession cannot enter unless accompanied by their relatives in the profession,” Bryan announced firmly—“or by payment of a small contribution to our medical aid fund!”

  When the contribution was understood to be only a dime, the whole crowd surged forward, holding dimes. Jessie moved inside the tent to keep the crowd moving past Melvin, bandaged and prone.

  The ketchup on his chest already beginning to dry.

  * * *

  On September 1, 1932, the moon moved across the face of the sun and I heard an owl hoot in Dixon’s stable just before noon. It was lighter than night yet darker than day. I’d never seen an owl.

  So I went searching the stable’s shadows, with a flashlight, in hope of seeing that curious bird. All I saw was Doggy Hooper huddled in a corner, his eyes staring at me so fixedly I wondered whether it might have been himself who’d hooted. “You playing owl on us, Doggy?” I asked, playing the flashlight on his face.

  “Gonna be a shakedown an’ a shakeup!” he cried without blinking right into the flashlight’s beam. “Union’s gonna throw old Doggy out! Roman black snakes after old Doggy!”

  An uncorked pint lay on its side, seeping darkly onto the straw. “You’re losing good whiskey, Doggy,” I told him. His head wobbled, trying to focus on the figure behind the flashlight.

  “Awright, Dixon,” he muttered, “you come to collect”—he struggled to his feet, holding the wall of the stall for support—“this is the showdown! Showdown, Showwp. Shakedown! Shakenp!” I had to support him into the yard. Hannah came out to help. Between us, we got him up the narrow stairs to the room above the stable.

  A Navaho blanket, tom and stained by tobacco juice and whiskey, covered Doggy’s cot. A cheap alarm clock ticked on the floor. But Doggy wouldn’t lie down. He sat stubbornly on the cot’s edge and began croaking lonesomely—