Tornado Pratt

by Paul Ableman

  “You’re saying I’m not Pip’s father?”

  “Yes.”

  And then, as I started to ask some more, she cut me off, a trick she had which always set up discords between us:

  “I don’t know. Maybe you are his father. All I’m saying is: I’m not sure.”

  “Who is Hamish?”

  “A boy.”

  Then I did feel anger. I half rose.

  “Betty! You better—”

  “Okay! The boy that delivered the straw—for the horses. You ordered half a ton of straw—remember?”

  “Do I know this guy?”

  “No, he only came once. You were—I can’t remember—out some place.”

  “He came once. And you—you—”

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly, I recalled the first time I’d ever set eyes on Betty. You remember, Horace? Austin had been slamming away at her. But she insisted that this time it hadn’t been anything like that. This time, she claimed, she’d done it quite deliberately. First off, she’d shown the delivery boy, Hamish, to the stables and then, while he was unloading the straw, the idea had popped into her head: I’m going to have him. So she then seduced him and she explained to me precisely how. She made him a cup of coffee and joined him in having one. They drank their coffees sitting on a bale. Then she asked the boy for a light and looked him straight in the eye while he lit her cigarette. Then she asked him if he had a girl-friend and, when he admitted that he had, she asked him if the girl-friend was nice. From that lead, she got to speculating aloud as to whether he ever kissed his girl-friend and pretty soon the boy just naturally caught on and reached out for her. And about this point in the horny narrative I realized it was all moonshine. Oh, Betty had seduced that boy all right—at least, she’d taken his probe into her belly—but she hadn’t the least idea how it had come about. It was really just as it had been with Austin, some voluptuous flame that had licked out and scorched her. And she was scared of those moments of blinding abandon and now she really believed it was the way she’d told it. She begged my forgiveness and, realizing she had a bigger burden to bear than just everyday temptation, I granted it and comforted her. At that stage, I wasn’t too worried. She’d had a one-off bang with a strange boy. There wasn’t a big chance that Pip was his rather than mine.

  After a while, I went into the next room, which we’d fitted up as a nursery, and played with Pip. But I was troubled, as I had never been before, by the fact that no reflection of the features of Tornado Pratt shone back from the mite in my arms. So then I left the house, got into my British automobile and drove four hundred miles, stopped only for gas. I knew where we’d bought the straw. It was a big dairy and general farm upstate. I thought maybe I’d have some trouble locating this Hamish, because there must have been forty or fifty hands on that farm, but all I had to do was swing into the transport yard. With a jolt like you get from sudden fear, I observed my son bucking about that yard on a tractor.

  Now this Hamish was a brown-haired lad with slight buck teeth—didn’t make him ugly but very distinctive. My infant Pip was him reduced by a factor of five. No court, no observer, could doubt that the former was the biological progenitor of the other. I was so fascinated, Horace, that I kept staring at the boy till he pulled up his tractor and was obviously fixing to accost me. Then I hastily turned away, strode back to my Bentley and took off not for San Fancisco but for Chicago. I had a strong inclination to forget that I’d ever known Betty or the kid.

  Maybe it would have been okay if Hamish had just resembled Pip. Maybe then I could have transcended the shock of finding Pip was not my biological son at all and raised him as if he was, because I had generated much love for that babe by then. But there was another factor. And yet—was I wrong? How much can you tell in a flash? Did I observe it or did I impose it? I admit I only saw Hamish for five minutes in the whole of my life and four minutes and fifty-nine seconds of that were, other than for the fact of his resembling my son, without special significance. But then, after he’d stopped his tractor, he cocked his head slightly on one side to consider me and—it made me sick! It was the gesture of an idiot, of a grinning, malignant hick that would match dogs or cocks, giggling at the gore, that would creep to the barn and screw a calf, that might even kill. And that—thing!—was the father of my “son”!

  In airplanes, Horace, with the Pacific shining beneath me, I have sat with eagles on my shoulders and sadly reviewed that moment. In lonely hotel rooms, when the lumbering remnants of Pratt lay on the boring bed sucking a cigar and waiting for the bourbon I cursed my youthful pride and contempt. For I never really gave up Pip in my heart. But the nausea inspired by his pa lasted for weeks and by then the wedges of time had been hammered home. I never saw the kid again. He was raised by his grandparents, who turned out to be quaint and likeable people. I had some financial dealings with them. Pip became a stockbrocker but was very sickly. He had everything from meningitis to—I dunno—but he survived. He’s still going—I guess—haven’t heard about him for a decade or so.

  As for Betty, I contacted her again after a couple of months. I tried to look after her. But she started spending time in sanatoria. I bought a place on Long Island, figuring it was prudent for her to be near her folks. And gradually her mother spent more and more time there and I less and less. Betty began to turn weird. The first really weird thing: she claimed a tree in the garden tried to rape her and we had to cut that tree down. Then she got the idea she was the queen of the plants and she talked to flowers and even tried to live in a big vase. But she had periods of sanity too.

  And then—

  I couldn’t stand the guilt any more. So when Harvey told me he’d managed to lose most of our money somehow, I just took off on the road again. Is there something I’m forgetting? Oh! Christ, yeah, that fish! The last time I saw Betty, she was in a sanatorium, a private room, with masses of roses everywhere. She was curled up on the bed in a transparent nightgown and after a while she grinned at me, opened her arms and I saw she was cuddling a big, dead fish.

  PRATT PROWLING

  Then came my self-destructive phase but not my time of horror. That came later and I guess we’ll come to it later. For the time being, Horace, I just want to give you certain impressions of what the depression was like.

  I saw a lot of blood flow. Once I saw a lush, reaching dopily for a bottle, get his hand cut off by a slow freight train. The lush grunted and rolled down the embankment into a stream and the stream turned red. Two guys fished him out but he bled to death.

  I’ve seen affable police lieutenants suddenly snarl and shoot people. I’ve seen bull-like cops tend sick bums. I had one sober spell and that’s when I met Wheatear. The fact is, Horace—I intend to go on calling you Horace, son, because I’ve forgotten your real name—the fact is, if I hadn’t been sober, I doubt if I ever would have met Wheatear or at least have hit it off with him. I was a pathetic and disgusting spectacle when high on red-eye.

  Now the reason I happened to be sober was because I’d had a terrible experience. I can’t remember where it happened, North or South, but I was laying on my back in the open and it was warm so probably it was South. My eyes were closed because I’d been drinking hard. Suddenly, I heard hoarse whispering. I opened my eyes a crack and saw a couple of putrid old winos bent over a third about three feet from me. I didn’t recognize any of them. The two intruders rummaged around in the sleeping drunk’s possessions until they found what they were looking for: his bottle of red-eye. One of the two gave a satisfied grunt and grabbed the bottle but just then the sleeping man stirred. The second thief snarled: smash him! Obediently, the one with the bottle started to pound the prostrate drunk’s head but a moment later I heard a cry of: “You lousy ape! You’ve busted it!” And I could see red-eye flooding across the face of the unconscious man. There was some more snarling and grumbling and then the two assailants crept away. I waited until they’d cleared and then I crawled over to what I discovered was a corpse with a caved-in sku
ll. I just gazed at that red mess and panted in terror, Horace. Squalour and pain were in good supply on Skid Row, and I was pretty insulated by booze from reality, but the degenerate horror of that scene pierced through. I knew I had to escape from this murderous rabble and I took off alone that night. Two days later, sober, drinking water from a stream, I encountered Wheatear. He was carrying a bundle and was caked in road dust but something about him prompted me to exclaim:

  “Hell, you don’t look like a wino.”

  He grinned:

  “The last drink I had was a dry martini before dinner—four years ago.”

  I lapped up some more water from the stream and Wheatear remarked:

  “You seem to have a big thirst.”

  “Yeah, I’m dry.”

  But that wasn’t the real truth. It wasn’t just that I was thirsty. In fact, I’d been drinking water neurotically for the last couple of days. I kept tasting red-eye and, although I could recognize the metallic, laboratory flavour, it also tasted like blood to me. The consequence was I kept drinking to swill that taste away. But naturally since it was a phantom taste it couldn’t be swilled away with material water.

  Now I’ll tell you something, Horace, that was the only time I ever lied to Wheatear, lied even to the extent of just giving him the partial truth. And as I spoke these two disingenuous words: I’m dry, why I suddenly saw that yellow-toothed, stubbly, caved-in face holding puddles of booze and blood and I gagged. I could feel myself go faint and my stomach heaved but only a bit of slime dribbled from my lips. I breathed deep and said:

  “Pieaou—”

  And then Wheatear had a firm arm ringing my shoulder and was lowering me to the grass. I shook my head to convey I wasn’t really bad and he nodded:

  “Sure. Don’t worry. Just rest a while. I have a little medical knowledge and if necessary I can fetch a doctor. But I’m sure you’re not badly sick—physically sick, that is.”

  I don’t know how he suspected what that last remark implied, but in a couple of minutes, after he’d made some tea—Wheatear always carried tea, not coffee—I asked humbly:

  “Can I tell you something? I need to get it off my chest.”

  “Go ahead. Talk it out.”

  So I told him about what I’d seen and the horror of it. When I’d finished, he didn’t say much and I guess I felt somewhat indignant about that. I came at him with:

  “You hear that kind of tale every day?”

  “No way.” Then he pointed to his left ear, which was ragged, and asked: “You see that?”

  “Sure. How’d it happen?”

  Whereupon Wheatear told me his tale of human savagery. It had happened when he’d been new to the road. A railway cop had caught him sleeping in a freight car. The cop ordered him off and Wheatear, instead of going meekly, put up some verbal resistance, pointing out that it was raining and that he wasn’t doing any harm in the car. The strange thing is, Wheatear explained, that for some time the cop seemed to be listening sympathetically. It was late in the evening, almost dark, with just a faint green light from signals illuminating their faces. Wheatear even thought he saw a kindly grin on the cop’s kisser. He was therefore amazed when the husky officer yelled:

  “Goddamm it, I get too much shit from you bums!”

  Whereupon he grabbed Wheatear’s head, tugged it towards him and gripped his ear in his teeth. Then he chewed the ear for a while before giving Wheatear a hefty shove that sent him staggering through the car door to drop five or six feet to the ground. Wheatear picked himself up and, hand clamped to his shredded ear, just bolted. He said he couldn’t have stopped if he’d wanted. His legs just went pounding on, like pistons, trying to put as much distance as they could between him and the maniac. Luckily he didn’t hit a ditch or barbed-wire fence, but in the end he ploughed into some scrub and ripped up his legs some before finally sinking down shuddering on the prairie. At that time Wheatear had only been on the road for a month, after living a bourgeois life on Long Island. He told me it took him about a week to shake off the elemental horror which that incident had inspired in him. By the end of the week, he was calling himself a sissy and a creep but he couldn’t help still shivering and gulping whenever he thought of it. Then Wheatear said:

  “So, friend, you’re right to reproach me. Having experienced that kind of thing myself, I should be more sympathetic.”

  From that moment, I liked him, Horace, and I never again lied to Wheatear. I realized he was the kind of guy you could trust with any revelation because he no longer had any self-interest. You felt that he lived at about the same distance from every fact and that he had no vested interest in any point of view. I guess that’s because he was a true philosopher. Later in life I met a peculiar professor at Oxford University in England who claimed to be a philosopher—and had a big reputation for one—but all he was interested in was fiddling around with sentences. Wheatear was the only man I ever met whose mind perpetually roved through the universe and caressed his race, the race of man. For example, a day or two later, I asked him if he thought what I’d told him was the worst thing he’d ever heard of: that is, killing a man for a bottle of red-eye and worse regretting the breakage of the man’s skull less than that of the bottle. Wheatear said: no, he’d heard of something much worse. I asked: what was that? He replied:

  “There was a guy crossing a stream in Brazil and for no reason at all, hundreds of little fish called piranha fish ripped into this guy and picked him to a skeleton in a couple of minutes. Now I reckon that’s worse. Your two bums didn’t resort to cannibalism.”

  For a moment, I figured he was kidding and it didn’t seem in too good taste. I said:

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “I don’t see how you can compare the two things?”

  “Sure you can. They were both acts of murder.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  And I began dimly to see that he was being ironical. It was some kind of parable but I couldn’t make out where it was pointing. So I grinned at him to signify that I’d dug his aim and asked:

  “Okay—elaborate.”

  “I think you already perceive, Tornado, that it’s not the act itself which generates the degree of moral culpability. An act that one individual can perform blamelessly is wicked for another. Now, of course, nothing that animals do has any moral stature. Why is this? Because they have no understanding—and that is the crucial determinant. The more the individual perceives the meaning of his act and the nexus of causality which may bring it to dreadful, or glorious, fruition at some other place and time, the more rigourously must we judge. Your two pathetic winos, who could hardly perceive anything in the world but booze, are surely less culpable by any meaningful scale of values than—well, people who do harm in the full knowledge of the consequences. The law doesn’t take this into account—how can it? How can you have an infinitely variable legal system? And yet men have an infinitely variable moral nature. Blake said: one law for the lion and the ox is oppression. It doesn’t take too much insight to see that therefore all law is of its nature oppressive.”

  We had a great year together, Horace, a terriffic year. It seems to me looking back that we moved always in Arcadia. But really, I guess, I’ve put it together—yeah, now I know I have because I recognize that valley. I was just seeing a flower-sprinkled hillside, sweeping up to a sweet cusp of snowy mountains. But I now remember that place was in Switzerland and it was where Nat and I stayed once. So I don’t know for sure where any of them come from, the glimpses of Wheatear and me camped on a carpet of pine needles beside a gurgling stream, Wheatear and me stretched out under peach trees, sucking sweet peaches and talking about lofty things, us swimming in blue lakes, listening to the boom and hiss of big surf under a sub-tropical sun—but even if I have endowed our tramp’s odyssey with some of the glory-moments of my whole life, it was still good. Because—I never hit it off with anyone like that before or since. Harvey? Now he was my father and my teacher and afte
rwards my dependent. With Wheatear it was different. We were independent. He was about my age but he was like a slightly older brother. This was because he was more profound and more learned. I was deferential towards him. Most of the time, I asked questions or made exclamations of understanding. He talked, spinning out his amazing reflections on life and death, mind and matter, man and the cosmos, time and space, thought and potential, origin and destination—every mighty thing a philosopher could contemplate.

  Sometimes we teamed up with one or a number of others but in the main we played it alone. I smell the choking smoke from the camp-fire suddenly gusting across my face and see the bright stars scattered thick in the black bowl of night. Mornings we ate ham and eggs and drank tea. Then, as like as not, we’d play chess. Wheatear had a rule:

  “Never play chess after midday.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it’s addictive. If you get the habit bad, you can lose the world.”

  I knew the moves but, after starting to play Wheatear, I realized I’d never truly played before. First few games he was all over me, his bishop or queen would come zipping out of nowhere and blast one of my pieces. Then, after a few more moves, my helpless old king would be limping around in the open with nothing to protect him from murderous attack. But I persisted and after a year I could give Wheatear a good game. He never would break the rule about playing only in the morning, in spite of the fact that when I had chess-fever I begged him to have a game sometimes when we stopped for supper or in the evening.

  That year I didn’t drink too much. If we were near a town, I might have a couple of beers or even a fifth of bourbon. Maybe once a month, I’d drink myself unsteady so that I’d come roaring home to our camp-fire, lurching like a truck on a timber trail and once I got into a fist fight in a Georgia whorehouse and came back with a cracked jaw. Every time I got into trouble, Wheatear would patch me up and nurse me. He never fussed and never reproached me. But then my drinking began to increase again and once again there was something I could not tell Wheatear. Not because it shamed me but because I was afraid it might shame him.