Tornado Pratt (2 page)

The easing out process went on for nearly a month and during that time I had a good many sessions with Harvey Maldoon. For some reason—and it’s not the one you’re thinking, Horace—Harvey had taken a shine to me and before long I was quite easy and natural with him, drinking his imported scotch whisky in his quarters and quite at home.

“Do you mind if I ask you something, Major?”

“Harvey’s the name.”

But I couldn’t break through the discipline and conditioning I’d had that quickly.

“Right you are, Major. I’d like to ask you: how come you talk that way?”

“What way, Tornado?”

“I guess like an Englishman, Major, though I never heard another.”

“I am an Englishman, Tornado. At least I was. Now I’m a naturalized American.”

“But, Major, there’s a war going on—over there—”

“You’re suggesting, Tornado, that I’m in the wrong army? I fancy they’ll be able to manufacture enough corpses without my help.”

“How’d it happen, Major, that you wound up over here—in our marines and everything?”

“The wheel, Tornado, has a way of coming full circle. I left England to
avoid
the army. I was a younger son, traditionally destined for it. Or the church. Since I have always been
exceedingly
doubtful as to whether God truly appreciates the exertions of his agents on earth, the church would have been sheer hypocrisy. That left the army—”

“Well?”

“I decided to travel instead—more precisely, I decided to seek fame and fortune in the New World. Needless to say, I found neither. Rather badly down on my luck and in urgent need of a buck to ward off incipient starvation, I finally enlisted. I
rationalized
my decision with the thought that, in the American army, it was exceedingly unlikely that I would ever be required to actually harm anyone—a proceeding for which I have the greatest possible aversion.”

“But hell, Major, that’s what soldiers are for—killing people—”

“It is an ironic thing being a younger son, Tornado, and irony seems to pursue you. You bear a grand, ancient name but, because you’re denied the right to use the title which illuminates it, no one recognizes it and you remain as anonymous as the herd. You have the shadow of glory but none of the substance. You are a half man, an in-between man. You cannot throw yourself into adventure and ambition, trying to carve out a world and an empire for yourself because, in one sense, you’ve already reached the highest goal to which the average man aspires. But at the same time you can’t settle back to pursue dynastic aims and wield hereditary power because, by an accident of birth, it’s not you but your brother that’s in the saddle.”

“That’s all very well, Major, and I can’t say I know a thing about it but how come you joined the army—feeling the way you do?”

“I thought I’d get away with it. When I enlisted, Tornado, about ten years ago, there was a large quantity of peace about. Even Europe seemed tranquil and as for America—well everyone from the President to the hobos I used to chat with on the trail—oh, I was
very
down on my luck!—insisted that America would never, never get involved in European wars. But there you are, Tornado, that wheel, that wheel of irony, keeps turning and the way things are going I wouldn’t be surprised if American
expeditionary
forces weren’t on their way to France before the year is out.”

“And will you go over there, Major, and shoot Germans?”

“I’ll never do that, Tornado. I’d desert first. Now, do you see what I’ve done?”

“What’s that, Major?”

“I’ve put myself in your power. If you were to go and report what I’ve just said to the Colonel—you might get me
court-martialled
.”

“You’ve been real nice to me, Major. I wouldn’t want to harm you none.”

“Nevertheless, I want you to understand, Tornado, that I have quite deliberately given you a hold over me. I’ve done it because I trust you and I want to prove it to you. Now, as I said, if Winston Churchill or Lloyd George or another of our fire-eating politicians succeeds in dragging America into this holocaust and we get our sailing orders in the near future I’ll have no option but to desert. However, I don’t think it’ll come to that.”

“I’m not with you, Major.”

“In exactly three months and seventeen days, my term of
enlistment
will be over. I’ll be a civilian again. What’s more, I’ll be a modestly prosperous one. I’ve lived frugally and I’ve managed to save—a few thousand dollars. Now that’s where you come in, Tornado.”

“Me!”

Can you imagine how I felt, Horace? There I was, chewing the fat with this weird officer who’d sort of befriended me while I was waiting to get my discharge papers, and suddenly with no warning he says a thing like that? Why at that time I just thought of myself still as a barefoot hillbilly. The idea that a major in the US marines and who was some kind of big-shot Englishman as well could include me in his plans just bowled me over. There’ve been moments in my life, Horace, moments of triumph and power which few men have ever experienced, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a thrill of achievement as I did just then when the Major said: “that’s where you come in, Tornado.”

“Just—just what have you got on your mind, Major?”

Well, he explained it to me. It seemed crazy—crazy on his part. I was just one under-aged boot in a camp of three thousand marines—and he’d picked me! Of course, what he said, Horace, and now naturally I recognize that he was right, was that he could judge men.

“That’s the one thing my kind of background fits you for, Tornado, judging character.”

He said I was to take his money—all of it!—and just go off and travel about the States and find something good to do with it. Naturally, he said I wasn’t to live wild or fat but just spend what I had to and find something profitable to do with that money. And if I pulled it off, why then he and me would be partners.

“But, Major!” I cried, “I can read and write well enough or they wouldn’t have let me tote one of their rifles but I don’t
know nothing about business or—or investment—or things like that—”

“You can hit a bull with four shots out of five, Tornado. You’ve got an eye. That’s what I want—a fresh eye. Naturally, you’re to do nothing without consulting me first. I’ll make the final
decisions
. You’ll just be a roving agent—looking for opportunities.”

“And suppose I take off with your money and you never hear from me again?”

“In that case, Tornado, I’ll know that you’ve been robbed and murdered and dumped in a ditch.”

When he said that, Horace, I started to love Harvey Maldoon. I wanted to prove myself—prove that he’d been right—prove that I was worthy of his trust. He was shrewd, was Harvey, and he’d judged me right. More than that, he spied what no one else had spied to that time, that I had brains as well as guts and, given a start, could go anywhere. And, in his ironic, British way, he loved me too. And perhaps I better just clear up one point here and now, Horace. There was never anything of a sexual nature between me and Harvey. I know that he’d had several boy-friends at school in England and there was something between him and a house-boy we had in Chicago but I don’t know how far it went. But Harvey was very abstemious in his sexual habits and moreover he wasn’t just one sided. He liked women too as I discovered much later.

I started off with meat, Horace, and I’ll tell you my reasoning. I’d been a marine. I knew how much chow a man doing military training could get through. Harvey said that America was going into the war. That meant there were going to be thousands,
perhaps
millions, of men to be fuelled. Then, over there, where the big armies were grinding each other to dust, the land was being neglected or ruined. Europe was going to be short of food. Any way you looked at it, Horace, I figured you couldn’t go wrong with meat, and in particular canned meat. And, of course, I’d been raised on a farm. I knew what a prime steer should look like.

So I made my way to Chicago.

It makes me shudder, Horace, to recollect it. I was so green I—the first week a con-man took me for five hundred bucks! The next week I—you swallowing this, Horace? Then you haven’t sized me up right at all! I’ll tell you how it really was:

I spent three weeks in Chicago mooching around the stockyards,
talking to anyone I could buttonhole, reading the trade
newspapers
and anything else that seemed useful. Then I went back South and had a long talk with Harvey. Then I went back to Chicago and bought a half-interest in a small meat-canning plant.

And three years after that, we had the second biggest
meat-canning
operation in Chicago.

Don’t ask me how I did it, Horace, because I can’t tell you. All I know is I never put a foot wrong. I did it naturally as a bird flies or a bomb explodes. I never had any hesitation. It was as if there was a voice inside me telling me what step to take next—what move to make.

You see, Horace, I soon found that the pace of other men compared to mine was that of a sluggish crab to a dolphin. I skimmed round them spewing out golden bubbles while they crawled a painful step sideways. I could do a day’s work in an hour, a week’s work in a day. Why, I even got so infuriated with the labour of getting letters done—dictating to a slow-witted secretary, checking for errors, getting them retyped and so on—that I taught myself to type and whipped out my correspondence myself in a flash.

For six years, I worked like a dynamo and at twenty-three I was the youngest self-made millionaire in the United States.

But naturally I didn’t do it alone. There was Harvey. And, in the first years anyway, I wouldn’t have got anywhere without him. I had the power and the instinct but he had the experience and the judgement. We were, I guess, the ideal team. And I worshipped him.

When he got his discharge, we set up together in a modest apartment out by the lake.

Evenings I’d work or else take off into town and explore the evil places of Chicago. Harvey didn’t go out much. He mainly stayed at home and read books. Now here’s a crazy thing, Horace, it wasn’t for about three months that I really noticed Harvey reading. I guess the explanation is: I knew about books. I had to read some at school and I’d even read a couple of Westerns and things on my own. But I’d always just assumed that books belonged to people like Harvey—the kind of people who become officers and senators and lawyers. Books didn’t have a big part in the world of folk like me, except, of course, for the Bible. So when I’d come in—maybe a little boisterous and liquored—and Harvey would be plumped in a leather chair with a book in his hand, it just seemed the natural order of things.

I remember very distinctly the evening I suddenly became aware of Harvey reading. I was dressing to go out and I came into the living-room—we had a bedroom each and a big
living-room
which Harvey kept tidy—and I was about to ask Harvey something and suddenly the question flashed into my mind: why’s he always reading?

For a while I just stood and watched him. He didn’t sprawl in his chair. He sat pretty near upright and he held the book neatly in his right hand with his fingers supporting the spine and his thumb holding the pages apart. When he’d read to the bottom of a page, he’d raise his left hand, pull his thumb out of the middle, turn over the page and then replace his thumb to keep the pages spread out. And suddenly I had a great desire to do the same. I asked him:

“Is that a good book, Harvey?”

“It is—by reputation. But I suspect its beauties are too subtle for me.”

“Could you recommend a good book for me, Harvey? I reckon I’ll stay in this evening and read.”

“Well, that’s a very commendable resolution, Tornado. I think I know just the thing.”

Harvey went to one of his bookcases and came back with a thin little volume which he handed to me.

“This is a splendid book. I’m sure you’ll like it.”

Well, I took that book and I parked myself in the other
armchair
and I started to read it. It took me about twenty minutes to read the first page. I didn’t understand more than about half of the words and I couldn’t make anything at all of their
arrangement
. The sentences were so long that by the time I’d got to the end of one I’d forgotten the beginning and I had to go back and start again. Moreover, my mind kept wandering so that I’d find my eyes were moving along the lines of print and I might even be saying the words under my breath but I’d be thinking of something different.

Suddenly Harvey asked:

“What do you think of it, Tornado?”

“Why—it’s a mighty interesting book, Harvey.”

“You don’t feel, as some critics do, that an element of
renaissance
frivolity tends to undermine it?”

“Come again?”

“You don’t feel—”

But then something surprising happened. Harvey broke off and
made a sort of gurgling noise. The next moment he stood up and staggered about the room spluttering with laughter. I couldn’t see what was amusing him so and it made me uncomfortable. After a while, I asked:

“What are you laughing about, Harvey?”

He managed to say:

“Tornado, forgive me! I’m laughing at you.”

I frowned and began to feel kind of tense.

“What’s so funny about me, Harvey?”

“I did it—I set it up—and it was an unkind thing to do. But—Tornado—the expression!—the expression on your face!”

And he was off again, doubled up, clutching his belly, and heaving with laughter. I didn’t say anything but I felt my fist clench.

“What is this book, Harvey?” I asked.

“It is selections from Erasmus, in translation. It’s a very difficult book, Tornado, even for someone who’s had a full classical education.”

“Then why did you give it to me, Harvey?”

“I have to admit, Tornado, it was pure mischief. I was curious to see what you’d make of it.”

“You never expected me to understand it?”