Tornado Pratt

by Paul Ableman

  So there came a day, in a town with a clock, when we had to tell Austin. Tell him what? Why, that Betty and I had decided to light out together. She left me to do the telling and—yeah, that’s how the clock fitted in. We had two rooms in a frame hotel because, in Arkansas in those days, they wouldn’t let any members of the opposite sex share a room unless they could prove they were married. We had some money because we’d all been working in a warehouse. After packing in great secrecy, in Betty’s room, I went to our room to see Austin. Now the hotel was across the street from the depot and the depot had a big white clock on it. Betty and I had secretly bought tickets for Chicago and I noted on the clock that our train was due to leave in just over half an hour and that was a comfort because it enabled me to tell myself: no matter how badly he takes it, it can’t last longer than half an hour. So I came straight out with:

  “Betty and I are thinking of heading for Chicago.”

  I sensed that he got the full implication of this because his big, hooked needle—he was sewing leather—stopped dead in the air and he glanced up at me. But the tactic he adopted was to feign incomprehension and so, almost immediately, he resumed sewing and just asked casually:

  “You reckon we’ll find work there?”

  “Austin, I’m just talking about Betty and me.”

  “How’d you mean?”

  “Just Betty and me. We want to be together. Just the two of us.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  I could see Austin visibly paling. I sensed he was on the edge of tears. I felt sick and wished to hell I hadn’t started it. He said thinly:

  “Yeah, but—I don’t get it. We’re friends—”

  “Sure, we are—”

  “I mean—all three of us? I mean—hell—I know Betty feels more of a pull towards you, Tornado. I understand that. I haven’t pestered her for a long time. I won’t pester her no more. You two can have the big sleeping-bag every night. That’s fine by me.”

  “It’s more than that, Austin.”

  “How’d you mean?”

  “We want to be together—like a couple—maybe even get married some time—”

  “Okay, that’s great. You’re a great couple. You know I wouldn’t do anything to bitch it up for you.”

  “You see—”

  “You wouldn’t just leave me, would you?”

  “It’s not like that, Austin.”

  “How the hell isn’t it like that? You go off—yeah, I see you’re looking at the depot clock! You take off on the flyer to Chicago and I’m just nothing. I’m just left here in this room, less than a cockroach running along the boards. I’d sooner be that cockroach. I’d sooner be dead.”

  His misery rotted my resolution and I heard myself whooping in simulated astonishment:

  “You don’t get it, you dope! We’re going to send for you. We just want to go on ahead—there’s a couple of things I want to show Betty—and then when we’re fixed up—we’re going to send for you.”

  He found some spirit.

  “In a pig’s asshole! Don’t lie to me, Tornado. You never have yet. Okay, if you want to go, go. But make out like I’m a cockroach—like the cockroach I was when you found me—and just stamp on me first.”

  “Now snap out of it, Austin.”

  “Two days before I met you, I tried to drown myself in a stream but I didn’t have the guts. The last few months—they’ve been the only life I’ve ever had. I’ve really been happy and—heck!—I thought it would go on forever. I didn’t think I was ever going to be lonely again. Honest, Tornado, I don’t have to screw Betty—I’d be happy to respect her—I do respect her—just so long as I can be around—with you two and—”

  And—yeah!—his shoulders started heaving. I felt like a cur then, Horace, and I determined that I wouldn’t do it. I decided I’d go back to Betty and tell her that we just couldn’t K-O Austin that way. The big moon of the clock above the depot showed it was just twenty minutes until the flyer was due.

  I said:

  “Okay, forget it.”

  Austin immediately looked up with hope on his face. It took him a little while to master the sobbing but slowly it abated. He sniffed hard, flicked a tear from the corner of his eye and said:

  “You mean it?”

  I sighed and assured him:

  “Yeah, sure I mean it, Austin. We’ll stick together.”

  He was just like a kid, just as unselfconscious as a five-year-old.

  “Gee, Tornado, you won’t regret it. We’re gonna have a great time. I’m going to take care of you. Listen, man, I’m not specially physical anyway. Friendship’s much more important to me. When we get down to Mexico, I’ll kind of be your servant. I’m good at that. Worked in a hotel for a while in Detroit. You’re going to be very spoiled—both of you and—”

  He went on and on and my mood began to change. A little while before, I’d felt compassion for Austin. Now that he was babbling on in gratitude, resentment was building up. What right had he got to be happy when he’d bitched things up for us? Part of me protested: but that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You didn’t like seeing Austin so miserable and now you’ve made him happy and you should be pleased. Nevertheless, I could feel myself contracting into surliness. I tried to fight it and Austin’s grateful torrent became a murmur in the background. Then suddenly something he said chimed through and I asked:

  “What?”

  “You’ve got to admit it makes sense, Tornado.”

  “Say it again, Austin. I missed some of it.”

  “I just said that the three of us have a better chance of making out.”

  “Making out how, Austin?”

  “Everyhow. I mean, what if the depression doesn’t end? There ain’t going to be much work anywhere in this country. But so long as one of us three is in work we’re not going to starve anyway.”

  I repulsed a little surge of fury and asked quietly:

  “Aren’t you forgetting something, Austin?”

  “What’s that, Tornado?”

  “What I told you? Aren’t you forgetting what I told you?”

  He looked away then, Horace. He was embarrassed. I pressed him.

  “Well, Austin?”

  You see, Horace, I had told Austin some time before—and before we ever teamed up with Betty—the truth about myself. He knew—or at least he’d been informed—that I was a millionaire.

  At the time I’d told him, I’d been surprised at how calmly he’d taken it. He’d asked one or two questions, which I’d answered candidly, and then he’d dropped the matter and never referred to it again. When we met Betty I made him promise not to mention it to her and he readily agreed. And now the reason for his tepid concern with the somewhat staggering fact of my true status became apparent. He’d never believed a word of it!

  “Austin, do you remember what I told you?”

  “Yeah, sure, Tornado.”

  “What was it?”

  “I know what it was. I remember.”

  “Just to please me—tell me.”

  “Okay, you said that—that you were a millionaire.”

  “And do you believe that, Austin? Do you think I am a millionaire?”

  He looked very evasive, very miserable but, coldly, I insisted:

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know, Tornado—”

  An then something—some restraining membrane of decency—snapped in my brain. In a final attempt to master myself, I strode to the window. But even as I reached it, and my eyes noted that the big hands on the porcelain-white face of the clock showed ten minutes before departure time, the biting words began to spill from my mouth:

  “So you didn’t believe it, Austin? You thought it was bullshit. That means—all this time—you’ve been thinking I’m insane?”

  “No—”

  “What do you mean, no? It’s either that or you had me down for a puffed-up, shit-spieling liar. Which?”

  “I never—”

  “What’s the alternative, Austin?
Consider: I tell you—as an act of friendship—and it meant something to me to spill a secret I’d pledged myself I’d keep—so I tell you the truth about myself and you grin and come back: gee, how interesting, Tornado. And we walk together for a year and the whole time you’re really thinking: pretty good guy for a loony! Or: we hand him some laxative to flush the lies out of him and he’d be quite a cute fellow! Is that what you’ve been thinking, Austin?”

  “You know goddamm well—”

  “But I don’t, Austin. Okay, just answer a simple question: what do you think I am?”

  Austin looked uneasy.

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know fucking well what I mean! Am I a millionaire or a crackpot bullshit artist?”

  “There doesn’t have to be—”

  “Don’t be fucking evasive. Am I a millionaire?”

  “Sure. Sure, you’re a millionaire.”

  But his assent further rasped on my nerves, Horace, because I could tell he was just humouring me. If I’d asked: do you believe I’m the king of England, he’d have said “yes”. I snarled:

  “Don’t give me that shit, you goose-gutted prick! You don’t really believe it, do you?”

  Poor Austin turned very red. He threw his half-finished moccasin down.

  “For Christ’s sake, it doesn’t make any difference to me. You’re my buddy—that’s what matters.”

  But I bored into him like a diamond drill.

  “Am—I—a—millionaire?”

  “Yeah—sure—if that’s what you want to be. Everyone’s what they dream about being.”

  “So it’s just a dream?”

  “It doesn’t have to be—”

  “Do you believe I’ve got a million bucks in the bank?”

  “Hell, Tornado, if you want it straight out: no, I don’t believe that you’ve got a million bucks in the bank.”

  I guess what I really felt, Horace, was outraged class superiority. It seemed intolerable to me that Austin had not perceived, even before I’d told him about my lofty past, that I was a remarkable man. I was profoundly humiliated that he could ever have taken me for just a big-mouth drifter. True, Betty didn’t know the truth either and seemed prepared to accept my humble disguise as reality but I was convinced that when I peeled off my coat of patches and revealed the gold and ermine beneath she’d merely breathe a sigh of relief at the appropriateness of the transformation.

  I started off trying to be reasonable with Austin but some force, some wild fury that I’d never experienced before, or rather that I’d always before mastered, now mastered me.

  “Austin, you ever caught me out shooting the shit? I mean, when I’ve said to you—anything—that I met someone or that I found us a job—or anything—has it been crazy? Okay, just hang on a minute. I mean—what gets me is—I’m disappointed—I figured you had a higher opinion of me than that. Hell, we’ve been cruising together for nearly a year and I thought—you respected me! Shit! That’s a lousy word but—who made the running? I mean, have you been taking care of me or have I been taking care of you? Goddamm it, I could have been in Rome or fucking Siam or anywhere and anywhere I went they’d have clustered round beaming and saluting because—goddamm it, I’m Tornado Pratt! Do you hear me? I’m the self-made fucking eighth wonder of the world and do you think I’d have wasted ten puffs of my immortal breath on a worm like you if I hadn’t thought at least you’d have appreciated it? Okay, kid, so sometimes it’s an accident. Ten guys set out to climb the icy slope and only one of them finds the steps hacked in the glittering wall and makes it to the summit. But it’s not like that with me. I’d have been up there, whistling at the roof of creation, if I’d have had to claw my way up with my finger-nails and I’d have beaten the next guy who had an ice-axe. And how about you, Austin? You’re a nice kid and you have dim aspirations. Well, keep going, sonny, because if you sweat it out for the next fifty years you could just about make mediocrity.”

  By this time Austin was white and trembling and I saw twin moons: his pale, whipped face and the depot clock. And on that clock the clanging semaphore of the hands was calling the flyer in. I glanced along the track and I saw the bullet-nosed serpent curving into town. I bit my lower lip and then, much too late, I tried to disperse the poison-cloud I’d belched out.

  “Hell, kid, I’m sorry. I just—I don’t know.”

  The big engine was nosing into the depot.

  “Austin, I have to go. Betty and I—we have to go. But I didn’t mean all that. You’ve got to believe it. Hell, we’ve been buddies—real buddies and—well, you’ll be hearing from me. Keep your guard up and—so long, kid.”

  I gave him a playful tap on the chin with my fist. But, very understandably, he didn’t respond. He just stared straight ahead and his face was white. As it clanked to a halt the train screamed out for passengers. Two minutes later, Betty and I were galloping across the parched square and two minutes after that we were seated in the big, blue, dust-caked railroad car clicking smoothly out of town.

  I should have gone back. I meant to go back. But the next depot was forty miles down the track and it turned out there wasn’t a train until the next day. The town was just two shacks and a saloon and I felt a strong repulsion towards stopping in it. Truth is, I wasn’t really heading for Chicago as I’d made out to Austin. I vaguely intended to take Betty to Mexico City or—maybe Honolulu—first get me a big packet of dough and then just live it up with her for a couple of months—maybe in Europe—

  Anyway, seeing this dust-patch where we’d have to wait for nearly a day, I decided it would be quicker and more effective if I cabled Austin from the next depot, telling him we’d be sending him some dough so that he could join us. Only the next depot didn’t have a cable office. What it did have was an amazing hotel built like a schooner with a saloon that actually rocked. There, I expanded into wild behaviour and became my old self again. I did feats of strength and carried a waiter about on my shoulders. The saloon rocked and the sea roared and the wind blew—all from piped sound—and I did a crazy hornpipe to the cheers of a bunch of gangsters that were passing through. No—hell!—they were actors! They were touring about doing plays by Shakespeare and that Frenchman—classical plays. I knew some Shakespeare and I thundered out Mark Anthony’s funeral speech about Caesar: oh, pardon me, thou bleeding lump of dirt—you know that great speech, Horace? When I’d finished, the actors roared with applause and carried me on their shoulders. I glanced down and saw Betty looking up at me with disbelief. She couldn’t believe that this wild extrovert was the same man who had soberly discoursed to her about life and philosophy for some months.

  No, I think I got it wrong, Horace. That schooner-hotel was in California some place—maybe Los Angeles—and we didn’t hit California for months. So—I dunno. I just know I didn’t go back for Austin and I felt lousy about it.

  Later, I put detectives on it but they could only track Austin out of town. Then they lost him. They tracked him on the road, walking. They even had some kid that had watched him plodding out of town. And then—pop! No more Austin. Vanishing act. Now I think he reached somewhere. My detectives were good. They were Pinkerton men. If there’d been a suicide in the district, they’d have heard about it. Anything violent had happened to Austin, those professionals would have nosed it out. But he just melted into mankind. And when I think of Austin, a gentle, incompetent man who hadn’t the axe or the armour for hacking his way to the golden citadel, I think of a boy in jeans and mocassins belting away at a lovely Jewish girl, swarming up a pine, splashing in a water-hole, frying eggs and bacon over a camp-fire and that boy, if he survived, would really be a creaking old bastard nearly as old as I am. And he wove his life-weave all the years that I did somewhere in the darkness beyond my vision. There Austin played and suffered and there too played and suffered all those others who curved in on my track but once and then flashed out into the wastes of time. So could you fix it for me, Horace, so I don’t die? Could you oblige me, son, with eternal
life? Because I want to watch over things, boy, and see the blaze of achievement of my race amongst the stars. Never doubt that we are heading outwards, Horace, towards Sirius and the face of God for our ineluctable mission is to wring the truth—one golden, infinitely-potent drop of truth—from the great sponge of the cosmos.

  PRATT PENITENT

  It was accumulating guilt; that’s what drove me out of affluence. There was a time in the thirties when I had the idea that I was responsible for everything bad that happened around me. If my goddamm chauffeur shot his aunt in the belly I figured there was something I could have done to prevent it. What I mean is: I could not rid myself of the idea I’d done it—that the ultimate responsibility was mine. I had Pony Roach on my conscience. I’d been cruel to Austin. But the main thing, of course, was my terrible cruelty to Nat and her dying.

  Not that I didn’t try not to hurt her. I tried like hell and for about two years—maybe more—I held out. Sometimes I’d sit in my office, in a Chicago spring, with all the musk of the mating world drifting in the window, and try and keep my thoughts off my secretary. I’d check down a column of figures and when I’d reached the bottom I couldn’t remember the total. What I’d have in my mind would be my secretary. I’d gaze at the intervening door so hard I sometimes thought it would begin to smoke and flake away. Just beyond it sat Letty. I swear I gripped the seat of my chair to anchor me, because it seemed I’d risen like a balloon and was floating helplessly towards her.

  If I paused to kid with her on the way in, I’d have to rehearse the patter in my mind because once I’d begun, with a boss’s big grin, I lost control over, and even contact with, my voice. Dimly, I’d hear it punching wise-cracks, and faintly I’d see Letty’s nervous, obliging face because it was hard to focus through the roar of my huge desire. From behind her severe, blue blouse, her pointed breasts called like sirens. The plaid skirt, grooved and hollowed from her sitting posture, mimicked the white flow of her limbs and sometimes I’d ask myself: has it happened? Have I started?—uncertain whether my hands had not already begun to fumble at the buttons of her blouse.