Tornado Pratt

by Paul Ableman

  In Cairo, I found that Alex had gone up to the Sudan to interview a tribal leader. She was expected back in a week. But towards the end of that week, her office informed me that she’d been rerouted to Alexandria. So I took a bus to Alexandria. But I had a hangover and got on the wrong goddamm bus and found myself in a crumbling desert village. There wasn’t a bus back to Cairo for a week but in the bazaar I found a camel caravan setting out for Alexandria. So I bought a camel and teamed up with them. But on the way the chief’s wife died and the caravan just stopped dead for ten days of mourning. So I cut loose on my camel but, with just a pocket compass amongst all those dunes, I contrived to miss Alexandria. I phoned Alex and learned she was now in Sicily interviewing an American gangster. You won’t believe this, Horace, but the next unbelievable calamity was: the fishing boat taking me to Crete sank in a goddamm squall and we had to row in a small boat back to Libya. After that it was more camels and then a truck to Tripoli and finally a flight to Sicily in a two-seater. You guessed it. By that time, Alex had moved on to Paris. It wasn’t until I was finally established in a hotel room in Paris, swigging whisky and cleaning myself up, that the absurdity of my pursuit began to hit me. My black mood became pierced with memories of ludicrous incidents—like once when my camel wanted to go south instead of north and I had to practically drag it after me—which made me grin and then laugh aloud until finally I was staggering about the room, doubled up with laughter. Then finally New York phoned and gave me the name of Alex’s hotel. So I got a cab, stopped to buy an armful of flowers, and went fizzing along to the opulent palace they’d named. I had the room number and so, intending to surprise her, I went up in the elevator, padded along the deep carpet and knocked discreetly on the door, like a servant might have done. I was hissing with escaping glee and when Alex opened the door, I dropped the flowers, grabbed her up in my arms and just charged with her into the room and straight towards the bed, shouting: “Baby, wait till I tell you—”

  But I didn’t get much further. I realized Alex was not responding with delight. Instead she was bawling me out and pounding on my arms. Then I saw the bed was behaving strangely. I’d noticed it was unmade and assumed Alex had been having a nap, although she was fully dressed. But the bed began to squirm and out of it popped a disagreeable head. It was something like a monkey’s head—kind of brown and wizened—and my first thought was that Alex must have got herself a pet monkey. It even flashed through my mind that she must have a lot of pull these days because most hotels would be very uptight about guests harbouring monkeys in their rooms. But then I realized that the creature, although simian in appearance, had certain features, like hairlessness, which compelled one to classify it as human. And that realization was like a body blow, Horace, because if it was human it was definitely male and when a naked man is found in a woman’s bed, why—

  I swear, Horace, it took me about ten seconds of concentrated speculation to reach this position and then I gave a low growl. This stimulated Alex to even more vigorous efforts to dislodge me while the monkey-man, with a startled grunt, hopped naked out of bed—revealing a figure like a dumpling with twigs stuck in it for arms and legs—and rummaged through a suitcase for something. I released Alex to be ready and was not surprised when the thing came up with a pistol. I plucked it out of his hand, took him under my arm and flipped him out into the passage. Then I shut and locked the door after him and turned to Alex with, I guess, an expression of pained inquiry. There was a muted frenzy of hissing and scuffling from the other side of the door and Alex screamed:

  “He’s naked! You can’t leave him there!”

  So I took a suitcase that contained male clothes, opened the door, tossed the suitcase out and shut the door again. Then I turned back to Alex. She was in the biggest rage I’d ever seen her. She stamped and her raven hair fell across her face. She yelled:

  “Will you—give me that gun!”

  I started to comply and then I felt a slight pang of fear lest Alex might be so het up she’d use it on me. So I opened the bottom drawer of a cabinet and dumped the Browning in it. Alex stormed to the door and seized the handle. But, before opening it, she turned to me again.

  “When I open this door, Tornado, I want you to go out and Andreas to come in. And if you make one more hostile gesture towards him I will never speak to you again. Is that understood?”

  I nodded.

  She opened the door and called:

  “Andreas! Andreas!”

  She peered up and down the broad corridor but the missing link had vanished. I offered:

  “Must have gone to the john to get dressed.”

  Alex closed the door wearily, murmuring:

  “Oh God.”

  I burst out.

  “But who the hell is he, Alex? I mean—hell—if you wanted a man you could have found something a little more elegant than that—in Paris!”

  All the fight had gone out of her. She glanced at me absently and then went to the dresser and straightened her hair. She said:

  “We’re going to be married.”

  I thought: that’s ridiculous. I thought: that’s typical of Alex—she confers the tremendous honour of her body on a little freak for some kindly reason and then, when I kid her, she claims she’s going to marry it.

  I asked:

  “Where did you find him?”

  She spun towards me then with a slight revival of her anger.

  “I’ve told you about him. He’s my second cousin—from Salonika.”

  But what began to seep numbly into my bones, Horace, was a realization that Alex meant it. That—curiosity—which was doubtless scampering through the hotel at that moment scaring dogs, was really her fiancé. A big knot of resentment began to tie itself in my throat, Horace. I suddenly perceived that the farcical trip I’d just completed had really been a noble pilgrimage, a sanctified quest for the mistress of my heart. And when the knight finally rides battle-stained back through his castle gates he finds his lady getting screwed by a monkey.

  Then I began to get faint chimes from the name. Andreas? Yeah, Alex had talked about some Andreas. She’d said things like: the only really fine man I’ve ever known. Sure, whenever Alex had sought an example of nobility or an antidote to baseness, Andreas had been trotted out. I’d never invited her to enlarge upon this paragon because, I guess, I’d been jealous of the affection in her voice. Even when she’d shown me—Christ! That’s why I’d had trouble relating the monkey to the name! I’d seen his picture or at least a picture. But the image on the black and white positive had been of a sturdy, good-looking Greek with an imposing moustache. I’d only been jealous because he was so fine-looking. If what had been on that picture had been monkey-Andreas I’d just have felt very sympathetic about the unfortunate—guy.

  “How’d he get so shrivelled up?” I asked her a couple of days later.

  There were just the two of us on a terrasse on the Champs Elysées. It had needed two days of abject telephone apologizing to get her to agree to meet me. But half an hour after we met we were back on the old easy footing.

  “The Germans tortured him. He was a resistance fighter.”

  “Alex—why does he have a gun?”

  She shook her head with a little frown.

  “I didn’t know he had until—”

  It was about that moment I perceived that Alex wasn’t in love with Andreas. And that made it easy for me to be cordial to him. On our first civil meeting, that night at dinner in a restaurant, after profuse apologies, I delivered a rip-roaring account of my hunt round the Levant. I made it funny, particularly about my stiff-necked camel. Alex laughed a lot and Andreas grinned and nodded. Okay, I thought, you have no reason to like me. I’ll give it time. But no amount of time endowed Andreas with a sense of humour and his response to jokes—with Alex and me choking—was a nervous smile. The more I tried to see in him the ruined lineaments of a hero the more he blossomed as a creep. And, without it bothering me much, I felt that Alex thought so too. The Andreas
she was really marrying was just a reminiscence—a profound young idealist who’d taken her sailing in gales and ignored the weather to discourse on Heraclitus. She was continually using this memory to screen off the reality of the physical and mental cripple she was engaged to.

  I suggested this one time when we were alone but she flared up and quoted a Greek poem at me which I couldn’t understand even when she translated it. After about a week I headed back to New York.

  About a month later, Alex turned up at my apartment and confessed that I’d been right. Andreas had changed and she’d decided not to marry him. I asked how he’d changed and she said he’d become reactionary.

  “He’s some kind of agent for the Americans. That’s why he has the gun.”

  “Well—”

  “Don’t pretend you liked him.”

  “No—I—straight on the line—thought he was a creep.”

  A faint, rueful snort.

  “When he was young, he wasn’t a creep.”

  We went out for a meal and drank a bucket of wine by candle-light. After we’d talked about life and loneliness and somehow reached an expectant pause, she asked irritably:

  “So—do you want to marry me?”

  But before I could voice the inevitable reply which all our time had ineluctably generated, she quickly forestalled me.

  “No, of course, you don’t. It’s not for us, is it? The funny thing is: I don’t believe in marriage. And I certainly have no conscious desire to be married. But—I suppose it’s the way women have always been trained—I keep remembering the word.”

  And that, Horace, was positively the last time anything like romance interfered with the love between Alexandra Wilks and me, a love which lasted ten more years, as her lungs rotted away, until the moment when she tried to rise and greet me—her nurse pushing her back—and then issued a hoarse scream and died before my eyes. But my love for her didn’t end then, Horace. That’s the thing about love. It continues after the death of the person you love. In fact, it even gets a boost because all the niggling details of the living person are stripped away by death and just the warm central core remains.

  PRATT LICKS THE LIQUIDITY DROUGHT

  About that time I received a letter from my bank manager lamenting the fact that my current account was moribund. This distressed, but did not surprise, me because I knew I’d been munching steadily at a puny bale of hay. I went to my share-dealer to unload a block of stock and found that, for some curious and crummy reason, most of my shares had collapsed. At current market prices, I wasn’t worth much more than about two thousand bucks.

  I felt a great revulsion from making money. All kinds of slickers had been pestering me to wheel and deal with them. But none of the big boys. I just wasn’t respectable. Sure, I was part of the financial history of the twentieth century but they had me down as the last of the cowboys, brilliant but unstable, and so none of the solid corporations would even let me piss in their john, while fixers and operators besieged my door. But I had to do something, so I finally settled for a bean-pole with a shock of white hair who had a scheme for ripping off the Incas. We hustled down to Peru and set up a trading corporation. It worked fine. Two years of toil shovelled a million greenbacks into my account. But then a vile incident with an Indian kid, who was a cripple and—something’s wrong. That wasn’t after the war. Shit, those Perkins swine—yeah, it was definitely before the war I ran into Sam Perkins in Chicago and—yeah, that’s got to be right because we could never have mounted the operation, with the new controls, in the sixties. So—where did I get?—hell, it’s a funny thing but I could swear I remember discussing the moon-shot with Ulysses Perkins and the moon-shot wasn’t until—the fifties, was it? Sixties? Long after the thirties. Comes to me a possible explanation could be that I wasn’t discussing the moon-shot but the possibility of a moon-shot with the Perkins hood. That could figure because I remember reading in Peru some book by Verne or Wells or someone about a primitive moon-shot and I remember Ulysses, the philistine, booming: who cares, Tornado?—moon, shmoon, are there any suckers there? Another possibility is that I was discussing the moon-shot in the sixties with someone whom I’m now confusing with Ulysses Rat Perkins. But then what the hell did I do when the bucks dried up in the sixties?

  Let me think. There was a booster called Jumbo Reilly who had a scheme for closed-circuit—no, that’s a bum lead because Jumbo dived out of a plane before—I got it! Paradise Plots. That was the last Pratt empire and—praise—Horace, I’m homing in on you at last. I’ll get to it, boy, blow the last tendrils of mist from your sweet face but it makes me pant too much now for my heart. I can see already that you’re not Japanese. And—you there, boy? Maybe, I better get this out before the big clout, if it’s coming, stills my tongue. Horace, son, you’ve been the crutch and sunbeam of my old age although that phrase: old age—is a ridiculous phrase for these last lusty years of mine. But they were late years and could have been desolate except that Horace Thorpe moseyed into Catch Creek one day and stuck around for the next ten years nursemaiding, secretarying, bullying and cosseting the old man and in every way substituting for the blood son he never had except for scattered progeny who never cast filial eye on old Pratt with unending kindness except for the one matter of that goddamm book. Goddamm it, boy, I refuse to think about that sordid matter now. But I better proclaim I harbour no resentment about the stinking manuscript, Horace, and the fact is I only wiped my ass on three or four pages. I was aware you had copies, boy—anyhow, assumed it—and so you lost nothing. I’m not about to apologize but I admit very humbly I acted in fury. If I had succeeded in remaining calm for maybe half an hour and maybe taking a swim or a walk in the parrot garden or any damn thing to distribute my anger somewhat I would never have puffed out like a demon frog with tendons thick as knotted vines and heart pounding like a pile driver as I contemplated that lousy book. Okay, I concede that writing it under my roof wasn’t treacherous but it was somewhat treacherous, you have to admit. Right, now I can be balanced and objective. I know now that basically, in spite of the evidence of those sick little shitty sneers you had affection for me. Haven’t you proved it over and over, sticking by me on the dirt track and island boats, by my side in peril—true peril—like when Joel Annerly threatened me with his old Colt—the old dolt!—and you hacked him on the shin before he could fire. That was in Tulsa, was it?—no, in Italy some place—Vicenza!—what were we doing in Vicenza, Horace?—sure, you wanted to show me the big houses—those—gark—villas of Palladio and when, on the gritty road beneath the figs, we strode out so fine and straight I thought: the son I missed, oh praise. So maybe now you could insert your hand, Horace, into this whirl and find mine, son, to find of say so long, Tornado, old padre and

  TRUE BUDDY

  and—maybe feeling just a little better, Doc. Because—hell—I’m only seventy-two and that’s no kind of age these days with medical miracles in every dime store and—

  I was still very active in my sixties when I took over as manager of a chain of hardware stores. I knew what the deal was: I was supposed to expand those stores all over the United States. They had thirty-two stores, mainly concentrated in the New England area and they’d done some digging, after I’d been introduced in the New York Ethical Club—maybe they figured I’d gone ethical? They could have figured: this guy Pratt was once the most dynamic business brain in the States but he wasn’t too ethical. If he’s gone ethical he could shift Nobleware all over the States. This Nobleware was classy stuff, Horace—Horace? Sure, Horace Thorpe. I know who I’m talking to now, and I know you’re interested and you can write these revelations in your book if you want, with my blessing, dear Horace.

  This Nobleware was pots and pans, coffee percolators, every kind of kitchen stuff. The stores also sold nuts and bolts, hammers, standard hardware junk. Now I want to give you some advice, boy. If you don’t make it in literature, steer clear of hardware. Why is it no one ever became a hardware king? Even now when every American consum
es five hundred bucks worth or whatever of hardware each year why is it still small time? The answer is: there is a repugnant aspect to hardware. No one ever felt affection for hardware. It is too inanimate. All hardware dealers acquire a sad and thwarted look. I figured all this after my first month in Nobleware and decided just to pull in my Noblepaycheck and forget the Nobleware.

  After about eighteen months, Les Gorowski—or some such Polack name—denounced me at a board meeting. He sure wrong-footed me. Up till then all the directors had fawned on me and then at this board meeting, when my head was expanding like the universe after a night on the tiles, Gorowski fingers me as a wastrel and a confidence man. I counter-attacked, naturally, intimating that Gorowski couldn’t sell Cadillacs to Arabs but he was able to demonstrate that I’d only started three new Nobleware outlets and, in that time, five of the old ones had withered away. So they kicked me out, Horace, but I stung them for a Noblehandshake, not exactly gold but high-grade silver. With that I bought my house in Florida and, after I’d conquered my lifelong aversion to the sea, became an enthusiastic scuba-diver.

  SPORTING RETIREMENT OF TYCOON

  I was located on the unfashionable west coast of Florida, just north of Tarpon Springs, handy both for the whorehouses of Tampa and the savannah south of Tallahassee. After about a year I began to feel lonely. I could only lure Alex down for a weekend every couple of months and I wanted someone to live with me in that big house. So I sent for my ma. My pa had died of alcohol a couple of years back and my ma was in her eighties. The last time I’d seen her—about five years back—she’d been very subdued, just tending to sit and rock and nod her head slightly. I figured that’s what she’d do in Catch Creek which was the name of my house, deriving from a silver creek that issued just below the bluff on which it stood. But Ma turned out to be a dynamo. She’d had her hair done with a blue rinse but it didn’t give her that grotesque look, like a senile swinger, so many ancient American ladies develop. Her face was smooth and her figure was plump and she looked like a wholesome sixty. She hopped around the countryside searching for old songs. I remembered her singing a lot to me when I was a boy but I didn’t know she’d developed a collector’s mania. She said she was assembling a book of early American songs and she already had about fifty. I had to buy her a small German car to whizz around in and a magnificent tape recorder. But song collecting wasn’t her only activity. Hell no. If we had a dinner party, she was chattering merrily until the last guest left. If I wanted to go to Tampa for some private reason she insisted on coming with me and I’d have a hell of a job parking her somewhere while I slipped off to Lily’s for an hour or two. In addition to songs, she collected wild flowers, sea shells and a couple of antique but enthusiastic boy-friends, one of whom got as far as kissing her in the parrot garden. I’d imported a flock of parrots and made an exotic garden.