Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux
‘Maybe something like a tank top.’
‘Too revealing,’ he said.
He bought me a loose long-sleeved shirt and a baseball hat, a short leather jacket and a sweat-suit. Then, still parked, he took me into the trailer, sat me down and pulled the window shades.
‘What now?’
He towered over me, holding a pair of scissors, and going snick-snick with them.
‘I’m going to make you nice and cool,’ he said. Snick-snick.
But I trusted him. He put his hot face near my head and cut my hair very short. When he was through he said he would leave me alone so that I could change into my new clothes. I put on the blue jeans, the polo shirt, the sneakers. Wearing them, I felt shapeless and younger. I yearned for the sequinned dress and the cape and the lipstick I had worn when I had been his assistant, Annette – ‘It’s dangerous, working without a net!’ But he had bought these clothes for me with his money and it seemed ungrateful to refuse to wear these hosepipe pants and the kid’s shirt.
We crossed the bridge and followed the signs to Buzzards Bay, where he pulled over at a roadside telephone. He talked for a while and listened intently, squinting into the mouthpiece of the phone.
‘That was a trailer park.’
I did not know what to say – the Cape was full of trailer parks. Dada lived in a trailer in Mashpee.
‘It’s run by a preacher. The Reverend Baby Huber. Ever meet him?’
‘Never even heard of him.’
‘That’s good. He has a fat voice.’
Now I understood that Millroy knew what a person was like from the way he or she looked – ‘fat voice,’ Smoker’s Face, all that.
Pilgrim Pines Trailer Park was located on the canal side of Buzzards Bay, near the railway bridge. A sign said, Hook-ups Available – All Facilities. Millroy swung his Airstream into the lot where a fat little man in a baseball hat was waiting with a clipboard.
‘How long you planning to stay?’
‘Days or weeks, I’m not sure,’ Millroy said. ‘We’re on vacation, aren’t we, son?’
Son?
Was he talking to me?
8
After we got hooked up and were inside the trailer I wanted to say to Millroy, ‘I didn’t appreciate that.’
When a truthful person tells you a lie he turns into someone else, and if you don’t say anything about it, so do you. Then you have to think hard about everything else he has ever said to you. I had trusted Millroy for his being true – it had encouraged me to go with him. I believed I would be safe. Now with this Aren’t we, son? business I was not so sure.
But that was what he had said to the Reverend Baby Huber, manager of the Pilgrim Pines Trailer Park in Buzzards Bay, and I became seriously worried – more worried than when he had whispered to me, I need you, pudding.
‘Where are you going, sugar?’
‘Restroom.’ It was his usual word.
Millroy said, ‘Just take your time.’
It was not what he thought. It was my period, not my first one but the strangest one, because this was my first day as a boy, and I was not feeling boyish. I was cramped and weak and leaky. I attended to my bleeding, and then looked at my reflection in the mirror.
My face was small, I had freckles, my nose was sunburned and peeling, my eyelashes and eyebrows were sunbleached like my hair – though most of that had been chopped off in the crewcut Millroy had given me. Because of my short hair my ears stuck out. I wore a baggy shirt and loose jeans, the rolled-up kind that Little Leaguers liked. Now I knew why Reverend Huber had not blinked.
Never mind how I felt, I had passed for Millroy’s son. I could see that I was more convincing-looking as Millroy’s son than Millroy’s anything else. And in the way that I had seen a resemblance between Millroy and Dada, I also saw one between Millroy and me – the same resemblance.
Yet I began to think that Millroy was sorry about the lie, because it was one of those lies that you had to keep telling, the same lie the next day and the next, because I had to go on being his son and wearing these clothes as long as we stayed at Pilgrim Pines.
‘You’re regular,’ he said when I came out of the restroom. ‘See, they knew something about high-residue diet, too.’
I said nothing. He knew nothing about my period. He thought that I was brooding about his lie. I could tell he wanted to be forgiven.
‘What would you be doing right now if you were at your Gaga’s house?’ he said.
It was about seven-thirty at night, mosquito time, cricket harmonizing, skunk hour – just getting dark.
‘Probably watching TV.’
Without another word, Millroy hurried into Buzzards Bay and bought a twelve-inch Panasonic TV set. He jammed in the rabbit ears and put it on the prop-up dining table and turned it to face my bunk.
‘All the comforts of home,’ he said.
Millroy’s trailer, a Wally Byam Airstream, was set up like one of his magic boxes, full of secret compartments and panels and sliding doors. He said that everything he owned, all his tricks, all his books, his whole wardrobe, was in that little trailer. The biggest, whitest, warmest room was the restroom, set up like a Vanishing Cabinet, with pull-down facilities and fold-away plumbing and pop-out drawers.
Millroy had a magician’s ability to conceal large objects in a small space and to make other things disappear. He kept his trained birds in a special rack that hung on the rounded rear-end of the trailer. ‘I’m always fighting contamination.’ They clucked and cooed in a series of boxes, like pull-out drawers with holes drilled in them. Inside the trailer there were pull-down tables and fold-out chairs. The sink was a pop-out and so was the stove. My sleeping cubicle had walls that swung aside like shutters, and a fold-away shelf-bed and a door with a triple lock. It was just like the ones in his magic act in which he put an unsuspecting little girl from the audience and locked her in and made her disappear. I was not worried by that – in fact, I was glad my cubicle was designed like a Vanishing Cabinet: it meant there was plenty of room inside where I could hide.
I was in it right now, looking at Julia Child’s Art of French Cooking but not paying much attention to the old woman with the big wooden spoon.
‘I wish you wouldn’t watch that, angel.’
He was very gentle, still trying to please me, still wanting to be forgiven.
‘I’m not watching it,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘Tons of things,’ I said. ‘Like seeing Dada at the Gas and Go, the way you were talking to him. And those clothes you bought me at the Outlet Mall.’
Then in a panic, my eyes hurting, I put it to him. ‘Plus, I was wondering why you called me your son.’
‘Because you’re under-age,’ Millroy said, ‘and people always jump to the wrong conclusions. Particularly someone like the Reverend Baby Huber.’
That was the main thing. But there were other things. I could see Millroy being extra-careful, trying to avoid scaring me. Our going-to-bed ritual had became elaborate and fussy.
‘Now I’ll just step outside while you put on your jams.’
They were boy’s pajamas with flapping sleeves and a drawstring on the big legs. I put them on fast. In those first days, I never felt nakeder than when I was naked in Millroy’s trailer, but I soon ignored the fact that in his act he bugged his eyes out and said, I can see through walls! because he was so kind to me.
He gave me time to change, and then returning to the trailer he always announced what he was doing so as not to spook me. ‘I am locking this door tight,’ he said, when he was inside, ‘I am drawing the curtains, and fastening the walls on my bed-shelf’ – the Vanishing Cabinet across the room that he slept in. Then, two clunks on the floor: ‘They were my shoes, angel.’ I heard him breathing softly – he had a strong man’s way of breathing, in a sort of steady purr of powerful lungs. ‘Now I’m climbing
I imagined him on his bed-shelf, wrapped in his blanket like a parcel, purring through the wool.
In the darkness that first night at Pilgrim Pines, after a summer silence – crickets, the wind in the pines, the mooing of the foghorn at the canal entrance – he cleared his throat, sounding like a drain emptying.
Then he piped up, ‘And because of something else –’
He was resuming the talk we had had earlier in the day. It startled me. I had thought he was asleep, but then his wide-awake voice filled the room.
‘Because I believe I was you in a former life,’ he said.
A former life? That just confused me. I had been listening to boats passing through the canal, trying to make out from their sound or the wash of their wake against the banks whether they were big or small, freighters or sailboats.
Often, figuring what Millroy said was like doing arithmetic.
‘If you were me in a former life, huh, who was I?’
‘Good question,’ he said. There was a dark buzzing little pause, interrupted by the foghorn. ‘The answer is, you were me. We were each other.’
‘Sounds okay,’ I said, because I did not understand it.
But what did it matter, either way? It did not change anything. It was perhaps more magic, trying to make something so by saying it was so. What he did with his hands, his magic manipulation, he often did with words. So, what he said – the words, the meanings – was often like something out of nothing: colorful, shocking, unexpected, funny and bright, even reassuring. He could talk magic. He had talked me into being a boy.
‘That’s why I could never hurt you.’
‘Sounds good.’
I was happy enough being a boy. When I was supposed to be Annette in my sequinned costume and cape, Millroy had seemed – not dangerous but a little steamed, giving off simmering vibrations and a hesitant surge of heat, like a toaster just before it pops up. I had felt it as we walked down the Fun-O-Rama midway with Floyd Fewox and the others looking. I could even feel it on stage from people in the audience. It made me feel small and white. But as a boy I did not feel this surge. No one looked at me, not Reverend Huber nor his son Todd, nor any of the other trailer people at Pilgrim Pines – the Silverinos, F.X. McEachern, Franny Grasso, Bea Rezabeck, the Glenn Branums, the Lucas Huffmans, the Blevinses, Thressa and Ross Lingell, Tike Overmore, Lee and Chuck Reddish, and their daughter Misty, who Millroy said I could not play with. And Millroy relaxed. When we walked along we did so like father and son, and that suited me. Now I had an inkling of how my being a boy affected him – no surge, no steam, and no one was suspicious of him.
As a girl I had the sense that he was strongly male – a man. But as a boy, his so-called son, I began to regard him as my father, not Dada, but a safe one, generous and protective, big and friendly. He would take care of me. With Dada I had always felt I was in danger.
He was happier too, and less guilty about having made me vanish in the Indian basket and then driving off with me.
And it was fun being someone else. The past was rubbed out. I was starting all over again new, and I was not alone, even though sometimes I felt like it.
It was Millroy’s TV-watching. He had bought the set for me, but he became interested in it – at first in an offhand way, sort of turning his head to look, and then in an unstoppable way, with his face flat against the screen. He began watching The Hour of Power, Festival of Faith, Faith for Life, Reasons to Believe, and Healing Hands, with Pastor Walter Murray Clemens.
He smiled, stroking his big mustache as though it was his pet. He was fascinated, not happy but disgusted.
‘They’re awful, they’re subversive, they’re all about money.’
It was true – all the programs asked for donations to keep the program on the air, they said, to spread the word.
‘I had no idea they were so rapacious.’
Millroy said that since joining Foskett’s Circus Promotions he had not paid any attention to television.
This was better than any midway show. It reached more people, it was technically better, it was simpler, more direct, more entertaining and conveyed more information.
‘But you said they were awful.’
‘I’m describing their potential, sugar.’
The Bible programs were only half of it. The other half were children’s shows. Mostly he watched early in the morning – cartoons, puppet shows, Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones, Balloony and Muttrix, Quackerbox, The Chippies, Voyage to Candy Mountain. I sometimes heard him watching even before I woke up, when it was still dark.
– Where are you going with that hamster, Muttrix?
– Hamsterdam, of course, you bean-brain!
Now and then I heard Millroy’s unmistakable chuckle, pumping little bursts of air through his nose. He watched Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo, many of them re-runs of programs I had seen when I was five.
‘That man used to be Clarabelle the Clown,’ he said. ‘Bob Keeshan. Kind of low-key and lovable.’
Millroy was looking at the man, Captain Kangaroo, a big man in a blue uniform with a mustache similar to his own.
‘But a dietary disaster.’
Millroy was smiling in pity, and then he turned to me.
‘Howdy Doody? Mister Bluster? Buffalo Bob?’
I shook my head.
‘You’re so young, angel.’
‘I used to watch Captain Kangaroo,’ I said. ‘I liked The Flintstones better, though.’
‘I can go with the immediacy, but I’m uncomfortable with the unreality of cartoons. This fellow’s very talented.’
He meant Captain Kangaroo, who was talking to the simple skinny man, Mister Greenjeans.
– I’m just going to put my bales of hay in my wagon, Mister Greenjeans said. And then we can eat some of that cherry pie –
‘All over America, children are yelling, “Ma, I want a piece of cherry paahhhhhh!” ’
I laughed at the way he imitated a small stuttering child, but then he became very serious.
‘The power these people have,’ he said. ‘A county fair magic act is nothing to this. I needed to be reminded of that.’
He went on watching Bible programs and the children’s shows, and soon it was all children’s shows, the early-morning ones, the late-afternoon ones, some of them new to me, many of them re-runs – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Mickey Mouse Club, Big Brother Bert, Robby the Parrot, Whiskery Pete in the Yukon, The Jingle Family and their Dog Fred, Yogi Bear. He never missed Paradise Park with Mister Phyllis, a Boston show that was on every morning between eight and nine.
‘Why do you like that show?’ I asked him, one morning when he was sitting in front of Paradise Park.
‘Who said I liked it?’ he said, keeping his eyes on the screen.
I felt lonely and excluded when Millroy watched these shows. He often watched them while doing yoga exercises, sitting in total silence, wrapped tightly, or with one leg flung around his neck, or stretched out with his arms twisted backwards like a human pretzel. He could hold his breath for an hour or more – for an entire edition of Paradise Park. He said, ‘I have total lung control. I’ve been buried alive in a sealed box. I hold an underwater record.’ His elbows and knees were double-jointed. He could put himself in a trance, sitting or standing. He could shut off his nerve endings, he said, so that he felt no pain at all. He could eat glass. He could stick pins into his body and still watch TV.
That made me feel lonely, too, but I never felt lonelier than the night he yelled in a dream into the darkness of the trailer, I ain’t ready!
He did not explain it. The next morning he was tying himself in knots and saying to me, ‘Punch me in the stomach! Go ahead! Hard as you can!’
– This Reggie Bear is precious, Mr Phyllis said. Look at his lifelike eyes, just warmly glowing. Isn’t he super?
&n
– Chickens, do you have a bear that you take to bed? Mister Phyllis asked, peering out of the TV screen at Millroy.
‘Because I know health,’ Millroy said. ‘Simple as that. It has allowed me to gain control of nine of my bodily functions.’
I had seen him stand on his head in front of the television set, and watch an entire program that way. He could hoist himself twenty-two times doing one-arm push-ups. He stuck lighted matches under his fingers. You could punch him in the stomach as hard as you wanted, and he just laughed.
– I know a song about warm furry bears, Mister Phyllis said.
‘I can make any of these organs obey me.’
I was thinking, Organs? Which organs?
‘Not everyone can say that.’
This sort of talk made me wonder what I was doing in a trailer park in Buzzards Bay on a Saturday morning dressed as a boy with a big middle-aged magician who was standing upside-down on his bald head and watching a children’s show on TV.
I would have asked Millroy that very question if I could have thought of a way of putting the words together. With each passing day it became harder for me to ask, and – though I could not explain why – less urgent. I accepted this man, as he had accepted me.
Meanwhile, Millroy spent most mornings in front of the TV set, in a yoga posture, arms and legs looped together, clenching and throbbing.
‘I am not afraid of anything mortal,’ he said. I did not mention his dream, when he had yelled. ‘It is wonderful that we are together, that we have each other, that we have everything ahead of us.’
– Some bears are frightful snobs when it comes to elevenses, and they want fresh jam and clotted cream with their hot scones – don’t they, Titch?
‘Two hundred years,’ Millroy said.
– sits there on his little bottikins –