Tornado Pratt (20 page)

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 afterwards 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.