Tornado Pratt

by Paul Ableman

  Don’t get me wrong, Horace. I’m not saying I wanted to raise a tower of skulls. I hadn’t got a policy to set against the official one. I was just dazed by the ease of transition, by the way a Jap could change overnight from a ruthless killer into a bowing charmer. For me, the images kept merging. One morning, I awoke to find a Japanese porter bending over me to wake me, which I’d requested the night before, and the next instant we were rolling around on the floor with my hands squeezing his throat. Another time, in a restaurant, I heard staccato explosions from a misbehaving vehicle. Before I could reassure myself, I found myself running, doubled up, for the door, feeling for the automatic I no longer carried. Finally, I went to an army shrink and he said the syndrome was common, although I hadn’t detected it in anyone else, and that I should relax some.

  So I got into sex again. I went to shacks on the outskirts where, for just loose change, expressionless girls would milk you any way you liked. I found my way to sex temples, with sunken baths and tiny, exquisite gardens where, for a few bucks or cartons of Luckies, imperious oriental ladies would bathe you and feast you on their perfumed bodies. I sat in miniature theatres watching displays of gymnastic copulation that would have daunted acrobats. And I was soon drinking upwards of a bottle of bourbon a day. But I still couldn’t elude the darting images of death. Sometimes, on my back on a silk sheet while a courtesan’s haunches dipped purposefully over my loins, while perhaps three more strumpets crouched nearby, legs splayed outwards so that I could feast visually on their cunts, a panic wave would pulse through me. Rather than voluptuous ministration didn’t I deserve death at their hands? Maybe I’d killed their brothers, their fathers? Maybe that grizzled Jap officer I’d hacked to ribbons with his own sword had been someone dear to one of these ladies? And I’d jerk upwards and twist round to see if another girl was stealing up with a dagger.

  PRATT’S TIME OF HORROR

  No, it’s too early to talk about that yet. There’s a whole heap of things to be talked about before that.

  *

  LIKE WHAT?

  Like what happened when—hoo—

  WHEN YOU GOT BACK TO THE STATES?

  Yeah, when I got back to the States. Where had I been, Horace?

  I’M NOT HORACE

  You’re not Horace? Pinch me, I must be dreaming. I must be dreaming the dream of life which, like Einstein’s universe, is finite but unbounded. Suppose, Horace, I slept for a thousand billion years and then awoke. It would just be a night’s sleep. Time is created by clocks and only known to clock-makers. Horace, I have been here before, and everywhere before, and am before and am after and am everywhere for nothing is but where I am and I whirl like a pin-wheel in the world.

  PRATT RETURNED TO THE GOOD OLD US OF A

  When I was sixteen, I raped a young married woman called Mandy Piers. At least, it seemed to me at the time I raped her. I was in a state of sexual torment. For a couple of years I had been wandering around in a daze of desire. At school, my stomach would contract whenever a coed passed close by. I used to listen to the guys boasting about what they did with one or two bright-eyed girls who tossed their hair and giggled and always had a cluster of fellows around them. I can assure you that some, at least, of what they said was true because once, in Mount’s barn, I came upon a fellow with Ellen Parsons. I was poking around in the straw for horseshoes and I heard a sound from the loft. I climbed the pole ladder carefully, stopping now and then to listen. But I didn’t hear any more. When my eyes reached floor level I saw there wasn’t any hay in the loft but there were some big packing cases back against the sloping eaves. So I got on to the floor and started towards those cases. Right away, Ellen Parsons and this fellow jumped up, looking dishevelled, and confronted me. The fellow was rattled. He licked his lips and his shoulders twitched but he tried to bluff me. He put his hands belligerently on his hips and snarled:

  “Why are you snooping around, Pratt?”

  I gazed at him for a moment, then just shook my head and retreated back down the ladder. But although I must have seemed impassive to them, in truth my guts were a great twist of hunger for what they must have been doing behind the packing cases. So why, you may ask, Horace, didn’t I go walking with Ellen Parsons or Midge Beckenhurst or one of the others? I was well set up and I often had girls make up to me with looks and smiles. The reason is: I was scared of God’s wrath. And the reason I was scared of God’s wrath is because my pa kept hammering the theme of purity. I know now he did this because of guilt that he himself felt. I know it from childhood observations interpreted in maturity. My pa was an old lecher himself. He’d go out howling and boozing and sometimes he’d find a girl that was attracted to his black moustache and bull strength. But it made him rotten with guilt because he was a fundamentalist who believed in the literal truth of the Bible and who was convinced that he was dooming himself to roast in hell for eternity.

  He had a Bible which had been handed down from his grandfather or maybe great-grandfather and which only he was allowed to touch. It was a huge book that must have weighed ten pounds and he normally kept it locked up in the chest under his bed. When he wanted to use it, which was four or five times a year, he’d fetch it down and seat himself at the table in the living-room and then he’d go on a Bible-reading jag which usually lasted all night and which might last two or three days. He had, as I now see, a mystical apprehension of that Bible. It wasn’t just a book. It was an altar, and neither Ma nor I were allowed to profane it.

  Once, when I was no more than six or seven, my pa was called out by the hired man while he was poring over his Bible. It was some kind of emergency and, for once, he went charging out without locking up the book. He was gone a long time and I started spinning a top on the table. The top spun near the Bible and, to keep it going, I moved the Bible a little. Then I jumped with horror because the big volume, which must have been precariously balanced, suddenly crashed off the table-top. It lay all crumpled up. I contemplated it nervously, scared to lay even ministering hands on the awful tome. I heard a sound from the door, turned and saw Pa gazing at the crumpled book with a stunned expression. I began to edge away slowly, anticipating the licking of my life but my pa just shuffled over to the Bible crouched and smoothed the pages like he was stroking a fevered brow. I heard a deep gulping sound and realized he was sobbing. I whirled and darted out of the kitchen and I never heard another thing about it.

  But it wasn’t only my pa that offered me a vengeful God. It was the teachers at school and at Sunday-school. It was the parson. It was the general tenor of the whole community which proclaimed that sex was the most diabolical activity a human could engage in. I believed this but not the way I believed that a week of rain would ruin the corn or, later, that the three sides of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. It wasn’t a fact. It was just a miserable, divinely-ordained condition of human existence. There is a part of us, Horace, which is always ready to think that we’re worms and deserve nothing but punishment. It is because of this element that men put up so meekly with terrible conditions, and even accept slavery as their natural lot.

  Then one day, when I was sixteen, my ma gave me a box of provisions to take round to the Piers’ place. Mr Piers was a man of about forty from Detroit who’d put all his savings into a farm which was a loser. It was on a hillside, swept by cruel winds and the fields were thick with rocks. People felt sorry for him and tried to help out, especially when his old mother was taken sick. So I sometimes went round with an offering of dairy stuff.

  This time, when I got there, I found that the old lady had been taken to the hospital and only Mandy was at home. She was twenty years younger than her husband and seemed to me amazingly beautiful. She thanked me for the stuff and asked me if I’d like a glass of wine. I wasn’t allowed to drink even home-made wine but I accepted a glass of buttermilk. She had to pour it from a big urn and spilled some down her dress. She exclaimed:

  “Oh dear. I’ll have to change.”

  And then she took off her d
ress. She had on, under it, a silk, city slip and I went numb. It never occurred to me that she was being provocative. In spite of the frisky girls at school the fellows bragged about and some childhood games I myself had engaged in with willing little girls, I still had the idea that women hated sex and only tolerated it because they were kind-hearted and knew how much men craved it. So I figured she changed in front of me because she thought of me just as a kid who wouldn’t pay any attention. But I paid attention, Horace. True, I was embarrassed. I blushed and looked away but I also kept stealing looks at her as she deftly slipped into a clean garment. And suddenly the two years of fermenting need that I’d had blew out the cork of my self-discipline and I went berserk with lust. I leaped out of my chair, rushed over to her, as she was buttoning up the clean dress, scooped her up and carried her into the bedroom. I was already nearly six foot tall and strong as a team-horse. She cried:

  “Tornado, what are you doing?”

  I dumped her on the bed and then I tore down my pants, never thinking I was engaged in anything but piratical rape even though Mandy just lay there docilely. When I’d got rid of my jeans but was still in my underpants, I just dived on to Mandy, pulled up her long dress and slip, tore down her frilly drawers, scrambled over her and started thrusting wildly. I had an idea that sexual union happened automatically but of course it didn’t and in about twenty seconds I squirted without ever having penetrated her. Then I slowly started to gulp and sob and, as the distress mounted, just rolled over on to my back, wailing. Mandy cried:

  “Tornado? What is it?”

  I was so confused it didn’t seem at all unnatural that the victim of my brutal assault should be questioning me solicitously. I explained:

  “I’ve ruined you! I’ve ruined everything! You’ll fetch the police and they’ll take me away to the penitentiary and my ma and my pa will die—they’ll just die from the disgrace. And I should never have been born—I’m so wicked. Mrs Piers, I’d be mighty happy to die. Does your husband keep a gun in the house?”

  “Now, you silly boy—”

  I rolled off the bed, my underpants trailing around my ankles, and went staggering about the room, vaguely searching for a revolver.

  “Mrs Piers, if you’d let me off that easy—I won’t do it here—I’ll do it out in the pasture where you won’t have to see. Please tell me: where does your husband keep his revolver?”

  The next instant she was hugging me and shaking me.

  “Tornado! Tornado! Don’t you dare talk like that! I’m not mad. Do you hear me? I don’t blame you.”

  I gulped:

  “I’ve ruined you. I’m worse than a drunk nigger. I deserve to be lynched.”

  “Tornado, sit down. Do you hear me? Sit down here!”

  She finally got me down on a chair, still with my underpants flopping at my feet. I recall looking down at them and thinking I ought to pull them up and just being too miserable to attempt it. Mandy said sternly:

  “You’re a fine boy and you’re good-hearted. You helped me paint the house last year.”

  “But what I’ve done—”

  “Well, maybe it wasn’t all your fault—”

  That pierced through to me, Horace. Not all my fault? How could that be? There hadn’t been anyone helping or egging me on.

  “I don’t understand, Mrs Piers?”

  “Oh, you’re so innocent. Don’t you see—Tornado, my husband is a good man—”

  I echoed this piously:

  “He’s a fine man, Mrs Piers.”

  “He’s not a fine man. Oh, you’re really being dumb now.”

  Well, maybe I was being dumb, Horace. But I wasn’t hog-dumb. I began to register the contrast between her manner after my vile deed and now when my worst offence was praising her husband. There was a mystery here and one, I began to sense, that might turn this catastrophe into—well, something instructive anyhow. I’d recovered some of my self-possession and, as discreetly as I could, I pulled up my underpants and then fetched my trousers and put them on. I suggested:

  “Perhaps you’d favour me with an explanation, ma’am.”

  Then we talked for about an hour and I learned all kinds of amazing things. I learned that Mr Piers was mostly “too tired to do anything”. I guessed what she was referring to but made no comment on the implied revelation that a lady might regret such an incapacity. I learned furthermore that even when her husband brought sufficient vigour back from his stony pastures to “do anything”, somehow it never really “satisfied” her. At the word, my heart gave a thump. It implied hunger, desire, the very same things that I, and all the fellows I knew, felt. But the most astonishing thing of all, Horace, was that finally, shyly, Mandy Piers confessed that she’d been “taken with me” for quite some time and that, when she changed her dress in front of me, she hadn’t been unaware of the effect it might have on my young susceptibilities. I cried:

  “You did it on purpose? You wanted me to jump you?”

  She hastened to set me straight. She certainly hadn’t intended to provoke any such explosive reaction but, having initiated it, she couldn’t very well get up on her high horse about it. She was a very sweet-natured, sex-starved woman, Horace, and she never tried to repudiate her responsibility. So I asked her:

  “Well—gee!—Mrs Piers—”

  “Mandy! You’ve seen my figure—you can use my name.”

  “Heck, I mean, what were you trying to do?”

  “I didn’t have any big plan, Tornado. I guess I was just flirting with you.”

  After that, Horace, it didn’t take long before we were naked in each other’s arms. Only this time I was, initially anyway, tranquil and studious. And then, ultimately, we were both loud and ecstatic. I made love to Mandy Piers three times that afternoon. Her husband had gone into Parkertown with the buggy and there was no danger of his surprising us. Then, after a short sleep, I drifted home in the late afternoon sunshine. And everything that met my eyes, Horace, was tender and golden. A jack-rabbit went leaping with delight over the glowing grass. The creek gurgled with sympathetic rapture and the wind crooned love songs through the trees. Grasshoppers creaked serenades and all the land was mild. I was even glad to be leaving the darling girl who had raised delight in my young body so that I could cradle the memory of the afternoon and yearn for our next meeting.

  And that—so what was it, Horace? Why did I recall my first true love just then? Was there some point I wished to illustrate? I can’t think of one. I guess it could have been the—krerr—change of perspective, how things seem to be one thing and then just flip over into their opposite. There are two aspects here: first, I thought women didn’t dig sex and after that afternoon I knew this was not true and I embarked on my career of making love to many women. Mandy and I had a long affair and although I felt kind of nervous about her husband, and a bit sheepish when I met him some place and he was friendly, I never felt one atom of guilt. But finally the Piers gave up their crummy farm and went back East. The totally unrealistic hope of maybe bumping into Mandy again helped reconcile me to leaving home myself a few months later. Oh yeah, now I recollect the second aspect: it was God. Mandy’s gasps of pleasure that afternoon just puffed him out of the universe as far as I was concerned. All my pa’s thunder was drowned out by her first moan of bliss and I could never again accept a deity who said that people were wrong to do that marvellous thing together. So, you see, Horace,

  RIGHT

  Yeah, right—I mean—it was yesterday—everything that happened to me. It was yesterday I shot my first squirrel, yesterday I lay on top of Mandy Piers, gazing proudly down on her sweet, love-flushed face. It was yesterday I hit Chicago and dollars and dames flew to me like scrap to a magnet. It was yesterday, I stood over that old Jap, who’d fired and missed, and hacked him to bits. All those moments. Are they the life of Tornado Pratt? Am I a cloud of moments, Horace, and if so in what are they suspended? In God? Mandy blew him out when I was sixteen but he got switched on again when I was about fifty, and n
ow—crazy. God is crazy but no-God is just as crazy.

  RIGHT

  Right, right, right! Quit saying right. Maybe it is right at first when the gift of life to a kid in a truckle bed seems infinite in duration and potential. But they roll it up behind you, boy, until a lifetime is just one rug in a palace the size of a galaxy. And don’t say “right” again.

  RIGHT

  Thanks, pal. And I agree—I support what you’re saying one hundred per cent! God is juvenile stuff, to comfort the kiddies, the grown-up kiddies in the infancy of mind. Hell, you don’t believe, Horace, that Jesus was God’s son and that he came down to earth to be crucified and redeem you of sins. You don’t believe that crap because it’s full of absurdities and inconsistencies. Why would God have a son? What is He, some kind of family freak? Right. It’s crap. It’s a kind of weird allegory. It’s for the kiddies. Trouble is—

  So is the scientific universe. Are you aware, Horace, as I became aware when, returning from the Pacific Theatre of Operations, I delved into science and philosophy, that the model of the sidereal universe the scientists have built is simply a shimmer? That’s a fact. The basic equations which describe the observable behaviour of matter are wave-function equations. You know what we really are, without God, Horace? I’ll try and put it in a metaphor your intellect can handle: what we are is a kind of buzz in a clamour, a ripple on an agitated surface, a wisp in a cloud.