Tornado Pratt (32 page)

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

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 consumes 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.

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.

So I asked her:

“Where do you get all that energy from, Ma?”

“Why just from the sun, I guess, Tornado. I just love living in the sun like this. Then there’s so many exciting things to do.
Yesterday
I collected a song from way back before the Declaration of Independence. And I just can’t get enough of your fine social life. You know so many interesting people and, don’t forget, son, I never had much of you before so it’s exciting for me to have you all the time. And this is such a beautiful place, Tornado, with the creek and the sea and there’s a lot of shells which are not just beautiful but valuable as well and I was thinking we could maybe make little collections of them and advertize them up East and maybe make a nice little business out of it. I haven’t got so many years to live but I never felt better in my life and—”

I figured that my pa had sat on her for sixty years and now, with the pressure released, she was just spouting out like a fountain.

It wasn’t on the same day or even maybe the same week but it was sure as hell within the compass of a month that I met the three people who dominated my last phase, Horace. Oh, sure, you were the most important, gazing thoughtfully at the house in the dusk when I drove up with a sackful of fish. I called:

“You want something, son?”

“I’m looking for Mr Tornado Pratt.”

I didn’t say anything, Horace, because I couldn’t locate the source of the enchantment. It was like golden leaves flowering in the forests of time. Grace rippled in the air and I glanced across the darkening sea, wondering if I’d see flakes of rapture drifting down. That was the first moment of my old age, Horace, when youth flowered on the coast. I asked:

“Who?”

Just to draw closer, and when you got near enough I saw you
had her cheeks and eyes but a stronger chin. And when you spoke again:

“I’m sorry—isn’t this the house?”

My impulse was to spring from the car and bundle you in my arms, crooning at the failure of the deeps to hold you. What I heard was the clear, English reed I’d last heard from Nat’s lips. You weren’t falsetto, boy, and I would never impugn your
masculinity
but you still had a boyish treble nestling in your throat that pierced the crusts of time and restored to me the frail-wavering ghost of my love.

I asked:

“Who are you, son?”

Your smile slipped into perfect congruence with the one stored in my brain. But I was gruff as you recounted your adventures in locating me and how a chance reference by a cousin in England had initiated a little whirl of interest which slowly, over a month or two, dilated into a vortex of curiosity about the semi-mythical Yankee lord of the aunt who’d died before you were born and finally propelled you across the Atlantic to meet him. I was gruff because it was part of my inchoate strategy, which I must have initiated almost at the moment your first words hit me, to keep you near me forever.

So I continued gruff but laced it with hospitality. I asked you in and fed you. I gave grumbling assent to Ma’s eager suggestion that you stay for a week, slipped you a hundred bucks for the road when you left after that week, intimated that if you’d care to circle back, after inspecting the North and West, I’d be willing to put you up again for a spell. I knew you’d accept, Horace. You were her kin and the same strange tug of longing that had united us acted again between you and me. You confirm that, don’t you, son? Sure you do. Proof is: you came back, right on schedule and you’ve been with me ever since and I just wish I could establish for sure that you’re here now. Say, Horace, could you just take my hand? Yeah—phim—right, I sure felt that, son. You’re here by the bed. So now I’ll continue, Horace, and remember, son, I don’t pay you for idling so make sure you get everything down so you can write a fine book, not like that last one.

I can’t recall who came next, Helen Jameson or—oh sure I do. Leastways, I can figure it out. It must have been the Gabellis because I found Helen when I was nosing about the coast looking for a site for Paradise. So I had to have met the Gabellis before that: Adam and Eve—and after what we put them through for
publicity, Horace, it’s amazing that they’ve still got cordial feelings for yours truly, the Serpent. But they come by for cocktails
sometimes
. When I see them I still find it hard to hear what they’re saying through the remembered ballyhoo. I discern, rippling behind Adam’s—hell, can’t even shake the Madison Avenue tag—real name was George which is the anglicization of Giorgio, I guess, not Giuseppe which was his true name but, having to rap out a name fast for some bullying punk on Ellis Island, he’d picked George and stuck with it as his pizza empire had spread round the Milwaukee area. Yeah, the point I was trying to make was, because I most often saw George and Maria, for the first year, smiling into camera or backed by media freaks, I never could fix them as plain folks even after they’d been just obscure occupants of Paradise One for five years. They were good, kind but boring people, Horace, and I had them taped that way within minutes of our first encounter in Palm Island Bay.

It was a fierce day with a tremulous sun sulking behind veils of cloud and a sense that, just below the horizon, a stupendous tempest lurked. The sea shared the uneasy calm and lapped the shingle with small, irritable sighs. The submarine cliffs along the north side of Palm Island Bay are good for rock lobsters and I was aiming to claw out a mess for dinner that night. But by the time I’d stripped, put on my trunks and flippers, the approaching storm had revealed its battle standards: towering purple cumulus on the skyline, cleaved repeatedly by streaks of fire. It would have been imprudent to have been caught in the storm a half mile from land and so I reluctantly abandoned diving for the day. I dressed and walked along the beach to watch the storm approach. Its black wings spread like a magician’s cloak and distant thunder began to boom like an artillery barrage. I was so fascinated by the grandeur that when the first scattered handfuls of rain rattled on the dry grass, I found I had no chance of reaching my car without a drenching. I’d walked the best part of a mile and I was wearing a lightweight suit that would probably be wrecked, so I glanced about for shelter and saw a kind of woodman’s cabin a hundred yards back up the slope. I went scrambling towards it and reached it before the first great swathe of rain came swooping in off the sea.

I was prepared to bust a window to get in but the door had a handle and naturally I tried it. To my surprise the place wasn’t locked and so I piled in. I immediately discovered the reason why entrance had been easy. A middle-aged couple was seated on a pile of logs beside an open hearth. The minute they saw me, they
stiffened slightly and the man reached quickly into his pocket. I said courteously:

“Hope I’m not intruding?”

They glanced at each other and I could tell they wished they had the right to say: you are, mister. But they were obviously taking shelter the same as I was. The man looked back at me and shook his head, keeping his hand in his pocket. I reckoned he was clutching a gun and I was sorry for his sake he was so nervous and I tried to set him at ease.