Tornado Pratt

by Paul Ableman

  I was walking along this poky street in a dust and clapboard town and I thought: I am going to have a beer! Not boozing. No sir! I am thirsty. I have got a half a dollar and I am going to have a thirst-quenching beer and while I am slurping it luxuriously down I am going to debate with myself whether to can this cock-eyed project. So I was approaching this sign—not a neon sign but just blue paint on a shit-brown board saying BEER—when I heard this growling and yapping and there’s Austin backing away from a porch with this lousy mongrel cur crouched snarling at him. And I could tell Austin was jelly with fear. So I called:

  “Take it easy.”

  And I slipped the latch, went through the lath gate and spoke to the animal until I had that mutt wagging his tail and friendly. Then I grinned at Austin and said:

  “Don’t let them see you’re scared!”

  “But, Christ! I am scared. Anyway—thanks.”

  Now we were on the sidewalk again. I asked:

  “Why’d you go in there anyway?”

  “Looking for work—or a handout.”

  “Broke?”

  “You said it.”

  “Could you use a beer?”

  He said “yeah” but I could tell he wasn’t enthusiastic. I caught on.

  “Are you hungry?”

  He nodded. So I took him into the joint and I had a beer and Austin ate some kind of corn pudding and hog meat and we hit it off. No doubt about it.

  So then for the next few months we were buddies. We worked on farms and in lousy factories. We walked and hitch-hiked. We slept in flea-jumping rooms in one-horse towns and we slept rough out in the open and we talked about women and books, because he’d read a surprising amount for someone whose father had been a drunken truck driver who ended up crushed to whisky-scented gore in his cab. But the theme we always came back to was cowardice. Because I could not shake Austin’s conviction that he was a coward.

  “Then how come,” he’d ask, bewildered, “I’m so scared?”

  “Because you’re not a muscle-mad phoney, like most of them.”

  “Like you.”

  I had to admit that I didn’t share his shrinking from physical encounters. But it made me feel like a hypocrite, like I was pretending that qualities I had were negligible in order to comfort him. And, although I came to respect that guy as much as almost anyone I ever met, I treated him badly in the end and perhaps I did despise him—just a little.

  “Practically the first thing I can remember,” Austin explained, “is kids trying to pick fights with me. It’s funny how quick they caught on that I was mush inside.”

  “Did your pa used to beat you?”

  “No. He’d lash out sometimes but he was mostly too drunk to connect. I wasn’t scared of Pa—that wasn’t what started it. I’m just different.”

  “You never had a fight?”

  “Oh, sure—how you going to dodge them? But I never willingly had a fight and I always went to fantastic lengths to try and avoid them. And I never won a fight.”

  “How come?”

  “I dunno. Because I’m a coward, I guess.”

  “Hell, you’re always saying that. Just what the hell do you understand by a coward?”

  “Well, you saw me with that dog—that’s how I am about everything—everything threatening—every danger—makes me practically crap myself—”

  But, you see, Horace, I’d already been ambling with Austin for a couple of weeks and I hadn’t been propping up a quaking jelly. He was just as bold as I was in our daily life and he’d do one or two things that made me hesitate. For instance, he shined up to the top of a pine to try and pick out a landmark we needed. I can climb too but I reckoned I’d have been a bit queasy way up on that flaky bole. Then he didn’t show any fear of machines. We worked for a spell in a real primitive little machine shop which was a kind of huge cat’s cradle of whizzing belts. I picked my way about with care but Austin skipped around.

  So I said firmly: “Okay, let’s get this straight—let’s just break its back once and for all. Describe exactly—in detail—how you feel when some bozo muscles up on you.”

  “It’s not—”

  “Now come on—try!”

  He sighed but then he went ahead and tried.

  “I get gut-scared. I can feel his fist smashing into my eye and maybe crushing the eyeball, leaving me blind. I feel his knee jerking up into my balls, hammering the future out of me in a welter of sickening pain. I can practically see the tender things inside me—the liver, say, or the lungs—getting bruised and bleeding under the hammering. I hear the eerie snap of bones and imagine my brain crashing back and forth against my skull. It just seems—crazy! It seems crazy to me, Tornado, to do that to someone. Hell, our bodies are amazing. They tell us it’s taken millions of years of evolution to build them and then we go and batter away at them as if they were sand-bags. I think we should revere the body and treat it gently.”

  “You mean you think other guys should treat your body gently?”

  “Sure. I also feel the same about theirs.”

  “You wouldn’t want to smash them up—the bullies, the Main Street tyrants—kick the shit out of them, make them bleed?”

  “Christ!”—it was a wail of anguish—“I feel just the same about all bodies. I don’t want anyone’s body to be abused.”

  “You dumb fucking saint. You’re just too—too gentle—too compassionate—for our goddamm brutal world!”

  Horace, there’s one good thing—perhaps there’s only one good thing—about being rich and successful. You get to meet famous people. Now this is valuable not because of any spectacular increase in the quantity of wisdom it places at your disposal but because it reduces, or removes, any tendency towards excessive adulation. You discover that politicians and artists and tycoons and judges and all the other categories of big-cheese homo sapiens are one hundred per cent human, just as human as truck drivers and farmers and whores. Now this may not seem a very startling discovery. You might even think that anyone endowed with enough brain to keep him upright would have been capable of reaching that conclusion from first principles. But, Horace, people don’t. It is astounding.

  Now I’ve got a bag full of homage for the heroic minds that towed us into the quaking arena of the twentieth century. But what I’m trying to convey is that you’re just as likely—or nearly as likely—to meet one of these elect trudging through a corn field as in a palace. To warp this narrative back home, I embarked on it anticipating that you were on the point of emitting a few gasps of bewilderment about my spending a whole year bumming around with a zero like Austin Turner. Anyway, the answer—which you’ve probably swatted on the wing by now—is that my years at the top had made me indifferent as to where I hunted character. There came a time, many years later, after my siege of horror, when I sought out the leaven of thought in our world and deliberately tried to sift salvation from the speech of thinkers. But at the earlier stage I was very content to roam Kentucky with Austin.

  PRATT SHARES BROAD

  It would be inaccurate to say we busted up over Becky—Becky? No, Becky was the girl in—those books by—sure, Mark Twain—Sawyer, Tom Sawyer and Becky Hatcher, Thatcher, was it? Anyhow, ours was—zim—Betty—right, Betty we picked up in Clarksdale, Mississippi. I definitely remember the town because it’s where we spent longest, working in greenhouses. But we only met Betty just about as we were ready to move on. She was a Jewish girl. Now as regards women, we’d planted a few bucks in black whorehouses and once I tried to work up some action with a couple of tourists we picked up in a diner but Austin was sexually diffident. He had a shrinking from being promiscuous and perhaps from the flesh altogether. I don’t know at this distance. As for me—sure, I was supposed to be chaste but I just began to lapse and my thoughts began to fill with pussy and I could not convince myself any more that it ratified my reverence for Nat’s memory to go bugs with frustration. So there began to be a kind of unstated contest between Austin and me. He thought of me as a coarse, undi
scriminating lecher and I had him taped as an effete, blood-less creep. This was just with one small critical area of our brains. In most things we were still buddies and brothers. But the sex thing—beginning to rage furiously inside me—was distorting our relationship. And then Betty arrived.

  She had her skirt up over her head within five minutes of arriving, her legs hooked back and Austin—yep, Austin! ploughing her hairy furrow. I was supposed to be out buying coffee or beans or something. But I’d forgotten to take any money and so returned to get this stunning eyeful. Betty still had her pants on! White pants. And Austin’s rod was sawing away at the crotch!

  I stopped dead in the doorway. They were going so hard they never heard me. And a flash seared me at the wonder and power of it. And then when Austin gave a cry like a wild bird and made a final lunge and Betty’s legs rose up past his ears like a semaphore, I lost all civilized restraint. I lunged forwards, grabbed Austin’s shoulders and tugged him off the girl. He was too weak to resist but he moaned a protest while she just blinked at me. And then I took his place and rode her swiftly to glory, shouting:

  “Christ! Oh, Christ! Christ! Christ! Christ!”

  About half an hour later, after we’d all had coffee, I beckoned Austin outside and asked him:

  “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know. Her name’s Betty.”

  “Yeah, but I mean—where did she come from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, but—now don’t provoke me, Austin. I step out to buy a can of beans, find I haven’t got any dough step back into the shack and you’re shafting away like an engine.”

  “It was bad—sinful—”

  “I’m not taking your confession, goddamm it. I just want to know how it happened?”

  “I was just sitting there thinking when there’s a tap at the door. I looked up and there she was.”

  “Go on.”

  “That’s all!”

  “Goddamm it! It can’t be all! I want to know how you got into her in about six minutes flat, which must at least equal the world and Olympic records!”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know. You shouldn’t have taken advantage.”

  “The state I was in I’d have taken advantage if I’d found you pleasuring a skunk. But will you please tell me, in finnicky detail, exactly what happened?”

  “Well, she knocked at the door—”

  “Yeah? Yeah?”

  “Well, naturally, I looked up and I saw her standing there—”

  “Right. So then what did you say? Or do?”

  “I didn’t say anything. Oh yes, I did. I said: hi.”

  “Austin, how would you like to taste my wrath?”

  “Now, look, Tornado—”

  “I want to know what happened!”

  “I don’t know! That’s the goddamm truth. I looked up and saw her standing at the door and the next thing I’m shooting my load into her and you’re tugging at me. That’s the God’s honour truth, Tornado.”

  And it probably was too. I could never get any more than that out of Austin concerning his first encounter with Betty. Later, when we’d taken off together, I asked Betty how it had happened. I suggested:

  “You laid it on the line for him—is that it?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t mean crudely. I mean, you were dying for it—”

  “No. I’ve never been dying for it. I’ve never even wanted it—ever—though I’ve never minded it either.”

  “But how did it happen—with Austin? I’d only been away five minutes. I come back and you’re going like a couple of jack-rabbits. How’d it happen?”

  “I thought he looked a little like Jake—my brother Jake—”

  “You mean you make it with Jake?”

  She smiled as if maybe she did but also shook her head. She shrugged.

  “There was just some pull between us, I guess.”

  And I never could get either of them to elaborate any further. So what was Betty doing in that hick town? Oh yeah, it was an amazing story.

  She’d been travelling south with an uncle called Moses who had a chain of stores in the South. This uncle was an old man but just outside Clarksdale he stopped the car and tried to kiss Betty. She was so disgusted she just got out of the car and walked away across the fields. He tried to follow her but, because he was so old and feeble, she had no trouble out-distancing him. Then she just kept walking and the first house she came to was the shack where Austin and I were staying. The amazing part of the story was that this uncle was very religious—in the way of Jewish kosher religion—and was always denouncing the evil ways of modern youth and Betty told us—yeah, a hell of a lot! But was there a word of truth in it? I never doubted it until this very minute, Horace, when I’m recounting it for you to put in your book, and that’s very strange because I soon discovered that Betty was not scrupulous about the truth and you’d think that I would have re-examined her story before now and questioned it suspiciously. Maybe I didn’t because I haven’t thought much about Betty and didn’t want to think much about her for years now. Hell, at the time it seemed a simple and convincing explanation for her presence in Clarksdale. I accepted Uncle Moses as a senile lecher and I’ve once or twice brooded on that alleged scene when the glamour of the beautiful niece seared away the pious restraint of a lifetime. But it seems to me now it was all bullshit. She invented that story as she invented other things later. Hell, I can’t prove it but I’d bet on it—if there was any point.

  But then what the hell was Betty doing in Clarksdale? She was a thousand miles from home, that’s for sure, and she was much too tempting to have been simply hitch-hiking alone through the lusting South. I’ll never find out now, Horace, and there’s not much left of that girl in my brain except a handful of disconnected images in spite of the fact that I nearly married her. Perhaps the one thing about her that was authentic was her beauty.

  When I was capering about London back in the flapper days, high-class ladies sometimes looked at a girl and remarked: good bones. It took me some time to figure out what they meant since I was not disposed to credit them with X-ray vision. Anyway a guy wasn’t really yearning for a gorgeous skeleton. What the phrase referred to was prominent cheek bones, a kind of gaunt look which was supposed to be aristocratic. I must confess, until I met Betty—no, until I held her by the chin in a meadow and gazed at her wondrous face and felt a kind of gulp of admiration—I never really appreciated “good bones”. But she had them okay—high cheek bones—but she definitely wasn’t gaunt. No, her cheeks were rounded and her skin had a subtle olive sheen. Her eyes were a startling, vivid grey and her mouth and nose were faultless. Clothed, she was a shade skinny, but naked she was perfect: firm breasts, lithe legs and an intoxicating swell of tummy. In the sticks, when we were off the road, she sometimes took off all her clothes and gathered firewood or washed clothes in a stream. Then Austin and I would chew the fat with long pauses while we gazed in reflective appreciation at this nymph that had come to bless us. Yeah, we shared her—every way. Nights, sometimes we’d both screw—that’s a disgusting term, Horace! Hard and contemptuous. Moreover it’s inaccurate. The motion of sex is reciprocating—slow and liquid or fierce and dynamic—not rotatory! I’m sure as hell never going to use that word again. Seems likely I’ll never perform the act again either so—so—what was I—sure, Betty. That girl was totally giving and totally impartial. We both fell in love with her.

  Which was why we never even reached Texas. Our original scheme had been to work our way down through Arkansas and Texas to Mexico but we had bad luck. First we couldn’t find work. Then, after we did, and had saved enough to set off across the desert, Betty broke her wrist trying to crank an automobile for an ungrateful old dentist. And the next thing that happened was: we split up.

  Thinking back—and that’s not as easy as it sounds, Horace, because the past is not a relief map across which you can search until you find the place you’re looking for. Hell, no, the past is more
like a cauldron of days and nights, a screen on which a thousand movies are playing at the same time, an arena in which a man battles with a legion of his former selves. So cleaving back across the huge ache and longing of my inch of time I just perceive that summer evening when Austin opened his eyes and exclaimed: Christ! That caused me and Betty, who were laying on our stomachs, to roll over. In turn, we must have gasped at what approaching night was doing to the distant hills. From a ragged lattice of blazing gold dripped gouts of crimson. But the sunset isn’t the point I want to make, which is really that Austin had been asleep while Betty and I talked.

  I’d been telling her about Naples or backgammon, about raising cattle or making money. Earlier I’d told her that the depression had ruined me.

  But I still keep shadow-boxing with the point, Horace.

  Which is that, before we’d all been together very long, the social grouping began to shake down into a couple and a friend. You guessed it! Betty and I were the couple and Austin was the friend and he must—hell, he must!—have seen signs of what was coming before it broke. I mean, it wasn’t long before Betty began to make excuses to him about sex. She’d say corny things like: “Oh, Austin, do you mind? I’m so tired! We’ve walked so far.”

  Or she might say:

  “Oh, Austin, honey, I can’t—I’ve just come on today.”

  But she moved in the direction of saying:

  “I just don’t feel like it—that’s all! Don’t pester me!”

  And I’d listen grimly, thinking: shit, it’s tough on poor old Austin but what the hell! I can’t force her to—that would be cruel. But really, I guess, I was feeling very complacent about the way things were going.

  I was what—about ten years older than Betty but in terms of experience and—yeah, in spite of the fact that she had a pretty expensive education and I was an autodidact, in terms of knowledge too—I was greatly her senior. I think that’s what edged out Austin. With him, it would have been boys and girls stuff and Betty was looking for a wise father.