The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  Mother’s voice is gone from the kitchen.

  She’s teaching the angels to sing—

  “Try to sleep it off, Doggy, dear,” Hannah pleaded with him, spoonfeeding hot black coffee into him.

  “I’ll do anything you fellows can force me to do,” he finally conceded. “I’ll take anything you can give me so long as I don’t have to like it.” He took a few spoonfuls of coffee from the girl, then looked "at her drowsily. “If you don’t behave yourself,” he warned her, “I’ll stop taking your money.” And with that threat he fell back, rolled onto his face and sank into a snoring sleep.

  Later I wandered down the road paralleling the S.P. tracks, up to the Iglesia Metodista. The doors were open, though no service was being held. Candles burned in the church’s dusty gloom. I sat on the steps and waited for a train to pass in either direction. There was no train nor a rumor of one down the bright rails.

  I wandered back to the house and around to the stable, wondering vaguely whether there might be anything left in the bottle Doggy had abandoned. There were half a dozen drops, no more. I drank them and pitched the bottle into a corner. Then saw, in the shadow, the crate that held The Thing That Fights Snakes. The Thing still lay coiled inside. I fooled around with its spring until I got it to leap. Then I put the cage in full view of the kitchen window.

  “How was the tip Saturday night, Sport?” Hannah put her head out the window to ask.

  My back toward her, I contemplated the cage and made no reply.

  “Did you have a good tip Saturday night, Sport?” she repeated a bit louder. I held my silence and my pose. Her bare feet came padding up behind me. “Something happening?” I heard her ask softly.

  “Shhh,” I shushed her, “it’s not finished eating.”

  “What’s not eating what?” She came up right beside the box. Doggy’s contraption was new to her. “What’s not finished eating what?”

  “Shhh, I might have to rile it up a bit.”

  “Rile what up, for God’s sake? What have you got in there?”

  She reached for the box, but I held her back with my hand and shouted, “The Thing That Fights Snakes, fool! Back! Stand back!”

  That girl wouldn’t back for tigers. Hannah put her eye to the opening. I sprang the catch. The Thing flew, claws, fur and silvered teeth, into her face. She fell back, waving her hands before her eyes, yet made no outcry. For a moment she stood looking down; until the crazed look in her eyes subsided.

  She turned The Thing over with her bare foot. As she turned it onto its back once more, a smile too sly formed on her lips.

  Then she came right at me.

  Around and around the stable I fled her rage. I had to keep running until she ran out of rage or breath, or stepped on a nail; or all three. Her fingers closed on my shirt, but I ripped away, feinted as if to double back and leaped again, gaining enough yardage to make me halfway around the stable once more. Then I stopped short and wheeled about. She barreled head down right into me, spinning me backward into the stable, crashing me against the domino table as she bore her whole weight down on me. The table collapsed above us in a cascade of dominoes. I clapped my hands about her buttocks, arching myself against her. She broke my hold by straddling me and we both lay a long minute then, struggling for breath. She recovered hers first, because I had her weight on my chest. I tried to push her off with my hands against her shoulders, but she pinned both my arms and slipped her tongue deep into my mouth. That kiss drained my remaining strength.

  “Your buckle is hurting me,” she complained, and released my arms to unbuckle it. Instead, I got my hands around her buttocks again. They were round and firm as new melons. I hauled her panties down nearly to her knees. She slipped half on her side to kick them off; when they caught on her ankles, she gave a wild kick and sent them flying toward the stable wall. That gave me my chance to roll out from under. I got halfway out and pressed her back with all the strength I had.

  She was nearly pinned before she gathered her own strength and I felt myself being forced back inch by inch. In a flash it came to me why she was evading those heavy brothers. This girl wasn’t going to be pinned under anybody : she could not bear it. Either she did the pinning or nothing was going to happen. She entwined her thighs about mine. I thrust upward at the same moment that she thrust down. She gasped with the pain that turns so quickly to pleasure. There was a fast flash of light behind her shoulders and I knew the stable door was standing wide. Then I heard a hoarse cry from far away. I blacked out.

  I came to hearing my own cry dying hoarsely in my throat. A moment later, utterly spent, eyes closed, I felt her weight leaving me at last. When I opened my eyes I saw Hannah, silhouetted against the light, scuffling through the straw of the stable floor.

  “Lose something?” I asked her.

  “My underpants.”

  “What color were they?”

  She glanced over at me. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Because if they were pink, it must be somebody else’s white pair hangin’ over that paint can over your head.”

  I’d caught the sun’s glint on the panties’ white fringe, draped across the can out of which a brush was still sticking. It stood on a shelf behind and above her head. She snatched the panties down. Then, half rueful and half laughing, she held them up for me to see.

  “Now, look what that Doggy Hooper done!”

  The panties were dripping with silver hoof paint. It seemed that Doggy had half roused himself from sleep and had come down to do some redecorating. He was gone now; but he had daubed everything within reach. This brought a heavy worry to my mind.

  “Give me a couple minutes to get to the house,” I asked her. “I don’t want to spoil your marriage plans.”

  “Those boys wouldn’t hurt you even if they did find out,” she assured me. I wasn’t that sure. I took a long swing around the house, so that I could approach from the front.

  Jessie and Lon were taking their ease in the front-porch rockers. The rocker holding Lon looked ready to crumble beneath all that brawn. He was shirtless. That bear’s head, tattooed on his right biceps, began studying me with its two small red eyes.

  “I suppose Doggy went and told you of the practical joke he pulled on me,” I asked as soon as I reached the step, my plan being to start asking questions before anyone started asking me anything.

  “He jumped a dead squirrel out of a box on me once,” Lon recalled. “I hit him with the box. He ain’t tried it again.”

  But where was Vinnie? Had he been watching the acrobatics in the stable from his upstairs room? Had he come down the back stairs softly to see what was going on? Had he then conferred with Lon? Had they already set up a plan to catch me that night on the camy grounds? Had they taken Jessie and Bryan in on it? If they consulted Denver Dixon, would he speak a word in my defense?

  “Clyde Barrow ’n Bonnie Parker kidnapped an officer of the law,”

  Jessie said, “drove him around New Mexico all day before letting him go.

  I couldn’t have cared less that the law had been outwitted again. “I reckon I’ll ride out tonight with Mr. Dixon,” I said, forestalling Lon’s usual offer.

  “Suit yourself, Sport,” he said cheerfully.

  “There won’t be much of a tip tonight,” Jessie guessed, “the sand is starting to blow.”

  I went up the footworn stairs to the little room beneath the eaves. Heat was piling up between the walls. A small clock was making a muted ticking; like news of some lost time too dear for losing.

  Fifty-odd years from the bourn of his mother, $22 in debt to Dixon, face down on the cot where he always fell, one palm outflung as if to say ‘‘Spent it all!” Doggy Hooper was sleeping it off fully clothed.

  I stretched out on my cot, hearing voices mingling on the porch below. I fell asleep thinking I’d heard Lon speaking my name to Vinnie. Or was it Vinnie to Lon?

  In sleep I felt something near and endangering. I struggled to waken. And quite clearly,
though framed by a bluish mist, two massive dogs, sitting their haunches, waited for me to waken.

  When I woke at last, Doggy was gone. Sand was tapping the eaves. I listened for something else but heard nothing. The small clock had stopped ticking and the wind was blowing up.

  The carny folks were gathered about Dixon’s board; but I passed the door as if I had somewhere else to go. I went out onto the porch and watched the wind swirling sand between the S.P. ties.

  Dixon and Little British drove up, British at the wheel. 1 climbed into the rear seat.

  “I think Doggy’s off to town to get the hair of the dog,” I explained Doggy’s absence.

  “No,” Dixon corrected me, “Hawks picked him up to sober him up so he can work tonight.”

  “He’ll never get him sober enough to make that midway run,” I was certain.

  “The sheriff don’t like that act,” Dixon filled me in. “He spoke to Hawks about it. What he wants Doggy for tonight is just to ride the ferris-wheel. When people see nobody riding the wheel, they don’t want to be the first to get on.”

  “He better strap Doggy in real tight,” I suggested.

  As Little British straightened the car out toward the state highway I glanced back and saw, briefly yet clearly, a pair of silver-colored panties hanging above the stable-door like a challenge.

  Challenge? A challenge to Jessie and Bryan maybe; but a downright threat to me. That child was going to bring on a family row deliberately.

  To get out of marrying either of the brothers? Or to get out of her role as the Half-Girl? It had to be one or both. Because Hannah wasn’t so thoughtless as to hang her silver-colored panties up to dry on a chicken wire in full view of the kitchen. There simply was no way of explaining away that garment, shining with silver hoof paint. She was going to blow up the family circle. And whether I got my neck broken in the ensuing row was, it was plain enough, a matter of no concern at all to Hannah.

  My heart didn’t spin with the wheel that night. Everything, it seemed, had stopped with Doggy Hooper’s clock. Something had ended; yet nothing new had begun. And, in that interval, I had to be more alert than usual; because I was working with Dixon instead of Doggy. In Doggy’s absence, Dixon had wired the gaff to his own shoe; while I fronted the marks for him one by one.

  “Don’t let your luck get away, mister,” I encouraged a Mexican old enough to know better. “All you have to do is hit the red to get the thirty-dollar jackpot!”

  It cost that one two dollars to try for the $30 jackpot, while signals went flying between Dixon and British. When they had eight dollars of the man’s money, British wanted to get rid of him; but Dixon felt he’d stand more gaffing. They built the fool up to a $100 jackpot, and I helped by confusing and encouraging him at the same time; until the man had gone for $30 out of his own pocket. Then he turned back to the midway with his collar awry, sweat on his forehead and a dazed look in his eye.

  As Jessie had foreseen, the tip was thin that evening. Some of the tent flaps were already down; though it was still two hours until closing. Only the flat-ride seemed to be doing normal business, I judged, by its calliope crying La Paloma without ceasing. When I told Dixon I wanted to walk down to a grabstand because I’d missed supper he gave me the nod to leave.

  I made the rounds of the joints chewing a taco. The sand was whirling, in mounting spirals, around the base of the ferris-wheel; but the wheel was still turning. Some fool must still be riding, I figured. Either that or Hawks has walked off, on some business or other, and left his generator running.

  I’d known, as soon as I’d seen that girl’s panties above the stable door, that this was my last night at the Jim Hogg County Fair. But my mind was so dull from the heat and the heavy day, I couldn’t think clearly about a means of getting away.

  When I went back to Dixon’s wheel, there was an old woman in a black-lace mantilla waving her arms at Dixon and British. That is, her tears and Spanish cries made her seem old; but when I went up I saw she was hardly thirty. I hung back, trying to understand a few words of her Spanish rage.

  All I caught was ’’thieves” and “husband.” That cleared matters up. She was, most likely, the wife of the Mexican we’d just sheared.

  By rights, as one of the hands in the shearing, I ought to be right up there taking some of the Ere. On the other hand, what was I doing flapping the jays, anyhow? I didn’t belong on any midway.

  She was pointing a finger directly at Little British, feeling that he was the villain of the plot. Then Dixon put one hand on her shoulder and I saw him reaching for his wallet with the other. He wasn’t going to risk having the sheriff shut his wheel down. And possibly the whole fair.

  I took two steps backward, turned slowly away and began walking through the dust storm like a man walking through rising waters. I put a bandanna to my mouth and nose, as if to keep out sand. But it was also, I felt, a disguise. I held it there while moving against the crowd of marks coming in, despite the dust, under the papier-mache arch with its legend: JIM HOGG COUNTY FAIR.

  Then I ran for it.

  I got over the same fence I’d scaled a week before and mounted the embankment before I looked back. In those few moments of flight, the whole sky had darkened. A swirling darkness was enwrapping the tents. Yet the calliope went on crying.

  And the merry-go-round kept circling, circling, though its red, yellow, blue and green lights were blind with dust. Finally, the calliope began to subside. The merry-go-round was going around for the last time.

  Then the music stopped and pennons and tents, grabstands and galleries, kewpies and camies and gaff wheels and all, were lost in a rising dust wind.

  Only the ferris-wheel’s empty seats rose and fell above the storm. And as I watched, I saw a small dark figure, its head buried in its hands, rise for a moment at the wheel’s utmost height.

  Then sank, like a sinking hope: forever downward into dust.

  TRICKS OUT OF TIMES LONG GONE

  Again that hour when taxies start deadheading home

  Before the trolley-buses start to run

  And snowdreams in a lace of mist drift down

  When from asylum, barrack, cell and cheap hotel

  All those whose lives were lived by someone else

  Come once again with palms outstretched to claim

  What never rightly was their own.

  Boothbroad, bluemoon cruiser, coneroo

  Drifters of no trade whose voices, unremembered

  Complain continually among the cables overhead

  Hepghosts made of rain still on the hawks

  Tarts out of times long gone who softly try old doors

  Or search for long-lost dimes down broken walks

  Where spears of summer grass once thrust their green ways up

  Through iron and cement.

  All green thrusts fade where rainmade hepghosts go:

  These grasses have turned white; are shaken to their roots

  Between dark cracks in winter’s measured stone.

  Tonight when chimneys race against the cold

  And cats are freezing fast to fire-escapes

  I hear them tapping back-doors of old books

  And think they must be ghosts of hookers who died broke

  Still seeking chances lost and long-missed scores.

  Their shadows rise in paving-flares against old walls

  Then fall

  Then hurry off with some last souvenir to pawn—

  This is the victims’ hour where they go

  Where winos used to drink themselves to death

  Or merely slept away their 29-cent woes.

  For no ghost follows where a square has gone.

  “Chicago pimps just have no class

  “No class at all”—

  You told me in that long-gone dusk.

  Beyond our pane electric forests came magically alight

  El cried to El across the city’s height.

  “Why, when me ’n Little Daddy went into an L.A.
bar

  “Everyone in the cave would holler, ‘Hello cats!’

  “Especially the bartender.

  “Chicago hookers got less class than their daddies—

  “I couldn’t stand myself if I came on like them—

  “You know what one of them fools told me just today?—

  “ ‘I started the babushka fad around here,’ she tells me—

  “Imagine the class of people you have to deal with

  “Who think that wearin’ a babushka gives them class!

  “For God’s sake I think them broads drink

  “Out of their old man’s shaving cup is what I think—

  “’n anyhow I was wearing a babushka two years in L.A.

  “So it was me who started that style around here.

  “Baby, will you put that Earl Bostic on?”

  So I listened to Earl Bostic and yourself

  Going on and on—

  “ ’n that old bartender at the Fireball

  “Telling me my Daddy is no good—

  “Don’t he think I know?

  “Didn’t Little Daddy come to me himself saying

  “ ‘Little Baby, when I made a who-oor out of you

  “ ‘I didn’t mean for you to be a junkie too—’

  “ ’n his face so sort of drawn ’n pulled with care

  “ ‘Daddy,’ I asked him then, ‘Remember how I needed someone strong

  “ ‘To lean on when you come past?

  “ ‘Well, how was either us to know then

  “ ‘It would turn out to be just two fools leanin’ on each other?’

  “People don’t know my Little Daddy.

  “When Little Daddy says he’s going to do a thing

  “He’ll do it if it kills him. He ain’t afraid of anything.

  “If he tells me he’ll go away

  “ ’n I won’t see my Little Daddy anymore

  “He’ll go away. ’N I won’t see him

  “Never anymore.

  “And then he’ll never know what’s in my heart for him.”