Tornado Pratt (19 page)

“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.

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 skull. 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—”