Tornado Pratt

by Paul Ableman

  I can’t remember just what the circumstances were but there was a police search for an escaped looney who’d chopped up about a dozen coeds. Returning to camp, I saw a guy through the trees and I thought: suppose that guy’s the killer? So I closed in very easy, circling and crouching, until I could see: it was Wheatear! I was about to guffaw and holler when I noticed something. He had his cock in his hand. I was a bit dampened by this observation and I didn’t move or shout. While I watched he jerked off. He did it in a leisurely kind of way, sprinting for a second or two and then resting. Then I noticed something else. He was peering around a tree trunk, as if concealing himself and, when I craned a little, I could see, beyond him, the tip of a canvas tent. The tent must have been in a small gully or hollow because only about the upper foot was showing but I realized that Wheatear, on higher ground than me, would be able to see the whole tent and the ground in front of it. Some couple screwing, I thought, and I felt a vivid yen to have a peek myself. But I couldn’t have got near without Wheatear spotting me and I didn’t want to humiliate him. So I slowly pulled away and then loped back to our patch.

  Wish to hell I’d kidded him about it—the minute he ambled back to our camp. Or maybe later that evening, or the next day—or any time before it got too awkward, before the long gap spoke of doubts and turmoil. What the hell did it matter? A self-induced spasm of pleasure! Hadn’t I ever had one? Hadn’t I ever had ten thousand! Hadn’t every man done it? Didn’t the books say that ninety per cent of all men masturbate and the other ten per cent lie about it? So what the hell was this—this shrinking, revulsion—why shouldn’t Wheatear have a pull like the rest of us? I kept going over it, trying to get at the roots of my distaste. For one thing, it was a sly act—okay, I understand, but however essentially natural it is, in our culture it’s a sly act. In the nine months we’d been on the trail together neither of us had done it openly—although I’d certainly done it! So catching him at it clashed with my—image I guess is the word—of Wheatear, the image of a man of transparent candour. But there was something else—perhaps several things more. One of them anyhow was this: I wanted him to be above it, the flesh, orgasms, mundane, animal things. I wanted him to be—yeah, now I see—a priest, a celibate priest. I didn’t want him to be enslaved by the same gross tides that moved me and the mass of men but to dwell on a higher spiritual plane, to be near to—not God—I never really thought there was a God even then—but some super-human—sure—

  Then there was another aspect: I kept asking myself: what was he peeking at when I’d seen him? Naturally, I’d assumed at the time it was a couple screwing but maybe it hadn’t been. Maybe it had been something else. What? Well, something sexy presumably but that was just it—what was sexy for Wheatear? I’d thought of him as a man who had been ordinary, normal, middle-of-the-road in the world but who had then turned his back on society in order to achieve spiritual growth. I had assumed that such renunciation also implied renunciation of the flesh—a nutty concept, if you think about it, Horace. I mean, I never assumed he’d renounced eating or drinking, so why should I have thought his other instincts had evaporated? Still, I’d caught him jerking off and peering at—what? It would be too strong to say I became obsessed with this question but it certainly kept recurring to me. A number of times I was on the edge of asking him straight out—and I wish to hell I had done. But something always stopped me. I know what it was. I honoured that guy. I couldn’t bear to say anything that sounded like reproach or criticism. I couldn’t set up as his critic or judge—so I kept quiet. And I guess it had a bad effect on our relationship in the long run.

  We didn’t take to—oh, just one thing I’ve forgotten. I decided I’d try and catch him out. I figured if I could surprise him jerking off why then we’d be forced to discuss it and everything would get defused. But I never caught him out. As far as I could swear from personal observation Wheatear had just one sexual orgasm in his whole life.

  Our friendship didn’t collapse or anything. We didn’t take to having fights. In fact, thinking back, maybe it was just a natural wearing out and I’m giving too much weight to the jerking off factor. But what chiefly happened is: I began to drink again. It built up gradually, over a couple of months, until I was back on two or three bottles of red-eye a day. And then Wheatear guarded me like a mother and never reproached me until I moved into delirium and lost him. Then I just recall screaming as I fled through labyrinths of my own mind until I woke up fifty pounds lighter and found Harvey tending me. And I never saw Wheatear again except in my mind where I often viewed him and can still see him here, Horace, only he’d really be old like me.

  PRATT IMPECUNIOUS

  My middle years began, Horace, in loneliness and poverty. I can’t truthfully say I ever suffered from extreme loneliness or poverty. Hell, I was never poor, not poor like an empty belly, a swollen belly, matchstick arms and legs, skull face, tight skin like I’ve seen in India and Africa, poor the way millions have always been. It is horrible to think about, Horace, the great mill of life with its heaving loins pumping out generation after generation. In the old days, the babies—most of them—dropped and withered, like berries in the winter. But now we have a great refinement of torture. We send doctors coursing amongst the poor, jabbing them back from easeful death—where’d I hear that?—into the barren world, so that the poor and starving still multiply like locusts picking the earth bare.

  The poorest I’ve ever been was on the hobo trails of America and that was self-inflicted. If I’d chosen I could have cabled for a thousand bucks at any time. But the hell of it was when I did come to cable for a thousand bucks, Harvey cabled back: that just about breaks the bank. While I’d been roaming, Harvey had got so deep into antiquity—like learning Sanskrit instead of tending to the accounts—he’d let most of our mazuma ooze away. So I hopped a Greyhound back to Chicago and—shit, that’s not right because when I went into delirium out on trail it was Harvey who found me and—so, what the hell, the point which you can check up on is that when I came back to full working capacity in Chicago there was only peanuts in the till. I cursed Harvey some until he said: I am weary of exile.

  That was how I learned he was yearning for the green and villages of England. So then my basic nobility asserted itself and, with most of our remaining funds, I fixed him up with a small annuity and sent him back to England. That was the chief source of my loneliness, being deprived of both Harvey and Wheatear. And I had no steady woman then. Shit, I still knew about ten thousand people but they were all diamond people. They had cutting edges. There was no one I could sink into.

  I became tormented by financial worry. I still lived pretty high and there wasn’t enough dough left to sustain that lifestyle. But for a long while I couldn’t get things together and set up any kind of successful deal.

  PRATT PRAGMATIST

  In my business ventures I kept coming up against dumb impediments. I’d have things clicking into place in, say, hog slaughtering and, just as we were ready to start mixing cement, the state legislature would pass a new series of slaughter-house acts. So we’d shift the operation into the next state and then find rail charges neutralized profits. So I’d concentrate for a while on haulage, because that was the time when long distance trucking was taking over from the railways and I saw the future of it right away. I’d get together a pool of interests and set up a consortium and—kapow!—Straw Czerny kicks the bucket. One minute he’s a vigorous, cigar-smoking, whisky-drinking man of around fifty and then—it seemed like in days—he’s shrunk to an ivory doll. And what I hadn’t made enough allowance for was that Straw was the only guy that could reconcile all the different elements and the consortium falls apart like a plane in heavy turbulence. Dumb things like that. I still wasn’t on the bread-line. But most of what I showed was front. My Cadillac was hocked. I only had one good suit which I kept cleaning over and over. The good restaurant I ate in gave me credit from the old days. And I’d taken to touching my friends.

  PRATT IN PERU<
br />
  The bad luck continued for another year and then I fell in with the Perkins brothers.

  Sam Perkins had been to school in South America with an Inca boy. They’d been great buddies and remained so after they grew up. Sam married that boy’s younger sister, which sealed the friendship. The Inca boy grew up to be a powerful man and even had a seat in the legislature and there weren’t many Indians in that. Sam, meanwhile, became a dealer in grain and vegetables and then one day he and the Inca hatched a scheme for setting up a trading corporation operating out of Lima, the purpose of which, to be candid, was to gyp the Indians out of everything they grew in exchange for shoddy manufactured goods. You wouldn’t believe this, Horace, but when we left the Andes, there were stone huts which housed a vacuum cleaner, a radio and a refrigerator when the nearest source of electricity was a hundred miles away. This was not policy. We preferred to give them things which had some use but some of them knew about household equipment and insisted on having it. It was a source of pride to them. They’d invite friends over and they’d all sit round the vacuum cleaner, staring at it and getting drunk on slimy moonshine.

  Now I came into the picture when I met Ulysses Perkins in Chicago where he was starting to raise capital. He gave me a rundown on the scheme and I realized at once that it would work and that it was putrid. I also realized that Ulysses and Sam were rogues. Sure, Horace, I’d grunted “here’s to ya!” at a rogue or two before and shot pool with bootleggers but the Perkins boys were something else. They gave off a whiff of corruption and you know something, Horace, the truly corrupt are special. There are not many who tread the earth that have no conscience. When I was smiting war-lords in the Pacific I met a demon or two but most of those had inverted consciences so that they’d die for their lunatic cause. They were not rambling turds like the Perkins who wouldn’t drop a nickel in a beggar’s cap unless it was to impress someone. Ulysses and Sam weren’t cruel or sadists. In fact, they were both voluptuaries who wallowed in wine and pussy but for them the world was a toyshop and other people were merely the clerks who had to be outwitted or put down so that they could get at the toys.

  So, you ask, why did I team up with them? Because by that time, I was desperate. I was fifty thousand bucks in the red and I hadn’t planted anything good since before the depression. It began to seem to me that I might wind up in stir. Horace, I was just an echo of what I had been, just a breeze rippling the corn compared to the Tornado devouring the plain. I had a worried look. Boy, in the left-hand pocket of my blue leather case with the tooled gold monogram—not the new blue one I bought in Honolulu but the old blue one—there’s a packet of old photographs with a rubber band round it. One of them shows me by a swimming pool round about that time, say nineteen thirty-five. When you look at that picture, boy, you’re still looking at a man, with shoulders like wings if also with a touch of pot-belly. But you study the face and it will speak to you of worry. There are lines, boy, on the face of Tornado Pratt and his eyes have shrunk back to hide their woe. There are no eyes in that photo, Horace, but only black pits of doubt. I only keep that picture to contrast it with the one of me by the pool in Okinawa, ten years later and once again a Tarzan.

  DEATH BY GUNSHOT OF INDIAN YOUTH

  It was in a town called Guayaquil or was it Quechaquil or—I can’t remember. But it was superb. It was in the Andean foothills and behind it the mountains soared up like white cathedrals. Opposite, the ground planed away, lit by orchards and meadows, down to the distant sea. The houses were dusted pink and blue and green and they had fancy ironwork on the windows. Behind their high walls were courtyards and some folk had fountains in them powered by mountain streams. Llamas stalked through the streets with girls lightly beating their rumps. The girls wore crimson aprons and gold earings and their tawny breasts swayed beneath loose blouses. The old men smoked long clay pipes on the rooves and in the taverns and they were very fit. I’ve seen eighty-years-olds jogging for miles, long white beards floating in the Andean stream. The children, wrapped in rust-and-black blankets, posed in little groups on the street corners, following everything with their liquid, black eyes. I’ll never forget those silent kids of—what was that paradise called, Horace? Oh, and the condors that sailed like winged scarecrows down from the crests of the Andes and wheeled above the town.

  That was where we set up our base, Horace, and, as you might guess, we had one hell of a time finding staff. There was just one girl that could type and she did this at about the speed a faucet drips. But she loved typing. It made her laugh. Because of the steep terracing of the town, the window behind her desk was on the same level as a church steeple. If you entered her room in the early morning she seemed to be wearing a golden spire on her head. Such glories glow still in the waning mind of Tornado Pratt. But, you ask—or do you? Ask away, boy, and I’ll tell you straight.

  You suggest that in view of the subject it would be more suitable if I was to think crooked? That’s a smart gag, Horace, and you were always a—what were you, Horace? Anyhow, I have to think crooked, as you imply, but don’t get the notion, son, that we were the Mafia or something. No way! What we had—in the Andes—hoo—what we had—we had the kid and—guess that’s it, boy, guess I’m trying to wipe that incident from my memory but now I got it again in sharp focus. So I’ll come right out and state: Ulysses Perkins shot him with a forty-five calibre, army-issue automatic pistol. Course, I can’t prove he did! I didn’t actually watch him do it. I wasn’t standing near that gully when the kid went limping past and nor did I hear the spat of the big gun above the chuckle of the stream. I didn’t see the scrawny kid pause and cough and I didn’t observe his guts shoot out through his back. I never beheld him clutch at the rent in his belly, double up, sway forwards over the bluff and finally plop down into the baby rapids where they found him. Limping past? Oh sure—didn’t I mention that? Some guys have all the luck. I mean, that kid, with his other great advantages in life, like being hungry, being an idiot, having no family, why that over-privileged kid was also a cripple. But what would all those blessings have been without his crowning stroke of good fortune? What was that? Give the man a cigar! Yeah, it seems young Luis met Ulysses Perkins on the bluff that day and good old Ulysses had his pistol handy, so—

  Horace, a hundred times I have torn at my own guts, with clawed hands, moaning and choking about that kid because—I could have stopped it. I have to tell you, I knew the Perkins were going to do it.

  Bullshit, Pratt, you may have suspected it but you didn’t know. You couldn’t have done.

  Then why didn’t I say something? I could have said—Christ, anything—like: that’s a chance we’ll have to take, because there’s nothing we can do about it.

  But I didn’t. And when Sam Perkins said:

  “Hell, if he tells anyone—but anyone!—we’ll lose our trading licence.”

  I replied feebly:

  “Yeah, but who’s he going to tell? He’s half-witted.”

  “That makes it worse. We can’t bribe him to be silent. We can never be sure he won’t spill the beans—any time. Hell, why did you have to hire the only kid in town who speaks English? How the hell does he come to speak English anyhow?”

  “Father was American—kid spent first ten years in New Mexico.”

  “Well, we’ll have to make sure he doesn’t talk.”

  “I don’t see how we can.”

  “There are ways, Tornado. There are always ways.”

  And I knew! Goddamm it, I knew what he meant! Don’t tell me I didn’t. What kind of lousy conscience, are you, Horace? Certainly, I knew. I knew like an Arab knows that it’s time for prayers when the muezzin wails from the minaret. I saw the message clear as if it had been flashed on the sky in letters ten miles high. He meant to kill the kid. And I said nothing. Not a word, not a squeak, not even a little tisk of protest. And why? Because the accountant who lives in my brain began murmuring that it was vital to be solvent and that the consequences would be catastrophic if our trading licence
was revoked. You know something, Horace, he made such a long analysis of the fiscal situation that by the time he’d finished Sam Perkins had gone to launch his torpedo-brother and, goddamm it, though I searched for those two hyenas for the next two hours, I couldn’t find them—and then I heard, the next morning, that Luis had been blasted at the bluff!

  So then there was this hassle with me drunk in Lima for a week and then drifting north into Ecuador with three British archaeologists in their truck.

  It was in Quito that Sam Perkins caught up with me. I’d had fantasies of mashing him and, even more so, Ulysses into red pulp but the minute I saw him I just wanted to be sick. And you know why, Horace? Not because I couldn’t bear the proximity of a skunk. But because I knew he was going to lead me back. Sure I’d sent them my resignation. I’d taken off. But there was ambiguity there. I’d put some kind of phrase in that letter like: “for the time being” or “I don’t see how I can continue” or something that just pleaded with them to pursue me. And I’d left a trail. Hell, I could have covered my tracks. I could have been in the Orkney Islands or Honshu. I could have snatched my body away from them forever. Not they nor the law nor the outlaws nor anyone could have sniffed out Tornado Pratt if he’d really used his vast knowledge of earth-ball to hide himself. But all Sam had needed to do was hotel hop and here he was, as I’d secretly anticipated, oozing into my bedroom. He made a speech:

  “I know what you think, Tornado. You think Ulysses blasted that kid. Well, the police let him go. They questioned him five hours and released him. They haven’t found the killer and they won’t. If you think I know who it was, you’re dead right, and if you think we had anything to do with it, you’re right again. And I don’t regret it. My three sons need to eat too. I’m sorry for the kid but he was an idiot and he had no folks. There’s never been a deal that didn’t kill, Tornado. You know that as well as I do. How many lives have you burned up in your plants? How many heart beats have you turned into bucks? Well this time it was direct. First time for Ulysses and me, although we had no direct hand in it. And you had no part in it at all. So head back with me, Tornado. We’ve torn up your resignation because we can’t pull this off without you.”