Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux
‘– because I have an exemplary set of bowels,’ Millroy said.
Then Millroy laughed very hard and I did not know whether he was joking or serious. I hoped he was joking. I had no idea what he was talking about. I had never heard anyone talk so much about the inside of their body. Millroy often described his kidneys – how he flushed them out. His lungs – the way he hyperventilated them. His heart – how he got it pumping, sluicing its gates and chambers. He could activate his intestines while you watched, his stomach rolling like a snake squirming inside a bag. ‘Peristalsis,’ he said. ‘That’s control.’
‘So they come in sets,’ I said. ‘I don’t think many people know that.’
That made him happy. He looked at me closely. He said nothing, but it was his I want to eat you face.
Reverend Baby Huber’s son Todd often came over to the trailer in the morning and asked me to go out and play. ‘How about a game of horseshoes?’ ‘Want to shoot layups?’ ‘I know a neat place to swim.’
Millroy said we were occupied with his project. The TV was playing in the background – Paradise Park.
‘I hate that guy,’ Todd said, looking through the trailer door. ‘Plus, he thinks he’s English.’
‘We’re busy,’ Millroy said.
‘Wicked busy,’ I said.
‘My dad’s been on TV. Festival of Faith. He led the offerings. We got the video.’
Millroy showed his teeth. He rolled up his sleeve and showed Todd an enormous blue and red tattoo of a dagger on his forearm, then made it vanish.
Todd was not impressed.
‘So what about it? I’ve got the horseshoes.’
‘Let go, sonny,’ Millroy said, and shut the door. Then he said, ‘Kids that age have an animal intuition. Or did you tell him something?’
‘I don’t talk to him, being as I don’t even have a name,’ I said.
Millroy said nothing just then, but that night at the pajama hour he said, ‘Time for bed, Alex.’
We were so near the Cape Cod Canal we could hear not only the ships passing through, but also their chains clanking, the men on them, their voices, sounding small and sometimes cross. Just behind our trailer men on the embankment cast long lines for bluefish and ate sandwiches. These late August days were hot and humid, hottest when the skies were gray, but there was often a breeze after lunch, springing up from Falmouth and the islands, blowing through Woods Hole.
The trailer park was surrounded by a grove of tall restless oaks and pitch pines and all around us a deep layer of old leaves and reddish pine needles covered the ground. At night in the dark there was a strong piney smell, but if the tide was down there was a syrupy stink of mud flats, of clams and kelp and old rope and seasalt from Buzzards Bay, and there were always more birds at low tide. After ten days or so, being with Millroy was like my way of life, and I never asked nor dared to wonder what was coming next.
One night around this time, the air thick with low tide, and the rat-tat-tat of boats motoring up to Sandwich through the canal, I was lying in my bunk on my shelf in the cabinet, all my shutters locked tight. Millroy’s voice started in the darkness. It was his wide-awake voice. He had not been sleeping.
‘But what about this Gaga of yours?’ he said, and paused to hum. ‘Won’t she be wondering about you?’
‘Not really.’
‘You’re sucking your thumb, angel.’
I slipped my thumb out of my mouth.
‘She thinks I’m with Dada.’
Millroy hummed a little more – the sound of him thinking.
‘Does she ever worry about you?’
‘There’s nothing for her to worry about.’
After a shorter hum, just a phrase of it, Millroy said, ‘Not even when you’re out and about, all alone?’
‘I never go out and about all alone.’
‘You were alone at the fairground, sugar,’ he said.
‘Because Dada was dead black-out drunk and couldn’t take me.’
‘You were still alone, though.’
‘And Vera was probably fishing.’
Millroy considered this, I could hear him, and now I was wide awake too in the darkness, with all these questions. I was dreading more. I did not have to wait long.
‘Doesn’t your Gaga worry about you and boys?’
‘Which boys?’
‘Any,’ Millroy said, and cleared his throat.
‘Boys are just trouble.’
‘That’s what I mean, pudding.’
‘I don’t pay any attention.’
‘But your Gaga might worry about them bothering you.’
‘She knows I don’t stand for any fooling.’
‘And yet,’ he said, smoothly, ‘she thrashed you.’
‘That was for other stuff,’ I said.
Millroy was silent.
‘Sulking,’ I said.
‘Why were you sulking?’
‘I wasn’t. I was just sad, missing Mumma and feeling bad abou Dada.’
‘Some day death and illness will be rare occurrences, but even so.’
I could tell he was trying to think of another question.
‘What did your Gaga say when you came home late?’
‘Who says I came home late?’ I sat up straight in the darkness. My thumb had gotten cold from being wet. ‘I never came home late.’
‘Bunny, do you want me to believe “never”?’
‘Please don’t call me Bunny,’ I said. ‘Hey, I never went out with boys in the first place.’
‘What about dating?’
‘I hate that word, plus I’m, like, “What does it really mean?” ’
Millroy hummed again, thinking hard.
‘Wasn’t there someone special in your life?’
Slowly I lay down on my bunk again. I did not answer. I thought, Why didn’t I pretend I was asleep when he started these questions? The last one was the toughest one because it made me think again of Mumma, and I felt small and lonely, back to my old life, and I looked behind me and saw myself at Gaga’s in Marston’s Mills as a silent solitary person with no friends, someone people picked on because she was small and the rest of the world did not know or care about her. Most days I did not believe that I really existed, and I felt like a harmless ghost haunting the world from behind a big window, because no one spoke to me or saw me or paid any attention. Was that why I had gone with Millroy so easily?
‘Wasn’t there someone you opened your heart to?’ Millroy asked. ‘Someone you trusted?’
I was still silent, thinking, I trusted you, Doc.
‘Someone you would offer anything to, and wouldn’t draw the line anywhere?’
Now the air surged with heat and pine scent, and I saw in a stifling way what he meant by his questions.
‘No,’ I said in a croaky voice.
Millroy went very quiet. I could hear the purring of his breath through his blanket, and I knew he was rigid in his own cabinet, thinking of what I had just said. My boy’s pajamas were stuck to my skin and my hair was plastered to my head and my hands damp. The thumb I sucked when I was alone felt small, like a whittled-down stick.
In that same croaky voice, half sorrowful and half defiant, I said, ‘Nobody ever touched me.’
There was something like a gasp from Millroy’s corner of the trailer, as though he had been holding his breath.
‘Good girl,’ he said.
‘And if anyone ever tried anything funny like that with me I’d get wicked angry and try to kill them.’
Thinking about it, I started to cry, then I stuck my thumb back into my mouth and felt better.
Millroy said nothing else. After a while I was asleep, and in the morning, as usual, he was watching Prayer Line and Paradise Park with Mister Phyllis, doing yoga upside-down. Even so, I could tell that he was glad to see me and I felt safe again.
‘Morning, s
I was looking at Mister Phyllis.
‘What is it about that guy?’
‘He’s twisted,’ Millroy said, ‘but this show could be licked into shape.’
He watched nothing except Paradise Park for a week after that, ignoring even the Bible shows.
That was the week after Labor Day, and the summer was over. No matter how hot it was during the day it was cold at night – cold enough so that I needed a sweater and had to start wearing socks, and the more clothes I wore the more I felt like a boy – Alex, as far as anyone else was concerned. For the first time for as long as I could remember I would not be heading back to school. It made me so happy to think I would not have to deal with all that, but the thought of explaining it to Gaga and Dada worried me. Most of all, I was afraid that the school would get to them before I did.
‘I’ll take care of them,’ Millroy said, reading my thoughts. I was so grateful to him for caring about me and liking me and surprising me with his magic.
A few days later I smelled cold leafmeal from beneath the trees, and my nose was pinched by drier air, and it was quieter at night – fewer cars on the roads, fewer boats on the canal, ducks in the sky looking distant and frantic. I knew the summer was over and that we had to face them after all this time. But at least I was not alone anymore.
9
The trees of the Upper Cape were bright with September streaks – yellow patches, here and there a few bunches of orangey leaves, splashes in the maples, fluttery rust-red leaves in the stuck-out boughs of the pepperidge trees, and every back road crowded and overhung with buttery branches that the school bus always banged into. We saw one do it just off Cotuit Road.
‘Miss school, muffin?’
‘I stunk at it.’
‘Smart kid like you?’
‘They said I had a learning disorder. ADD. Attention Deficit Disorder. I used to stare at stuff for a wicked long time. I never heard them when they talked to me at school.’
And the longer I had stayed away from Gaga’s the less I wanted to go back.
‘I like it when you stare.’
Millroy called Gaga from the public phone at Pilgrim Pines (‘This is Dicktronix Telemarketing,’ was all I heard him say) and he could tell by the sound of her voice that she abused her body ‘violently.’
‘She has a fat voice, a congested heart, and labored breathing from the tar on her lungs,’ Millroy said. ‘I don’t even want to think about her muscle tonus.’
Never mind her health – that was no excuse. My supposed reason for being away from her was a lie – and growing bigger and stranger – and now that I had been away so long, almost six weeks, the lie was such a monster that I was afraid to uncover it.
Maybe Gaga and Dada knew I had run away, and maybe they were mad. Maybe they had already called the police. I did not want to face that crazy old woman and that drunken man. But Millroy said we had to, or else.
‘I want the best for you, even if it means losing you. Your future is what matters most.’
‘They’ll go coo-coo.’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Gaga will scream wicked loud and Dada will hit me.’
‘Let me handle them,’ he said.
That word made me remember that I had once seen him juggle a bowling ball (big), a chainsaw (going) and a blow-torch (lit). He had made an elephant disappear. But I also remembered his saying that he was good with kids but did not have much luck with adults.
‘I have to be careful. They’ll get the police after me,’ Millroy said. ‘Ever notice? The police are very poor listeners.’
He had unhooked the Ford from the Airstream and I got into the front seat with two sandwiches of alfalfa sprouts and a jug of grape juice, a pomegranate and a cantaloupe to eat with a spoon. We drove on back roads towards Marston’s Mills, the Ford slanting and curving under those trees that had just begun to turn.
It was a Sunday in that slow uncertain time of year, the last hesitating days of late summer. On the Cape in these weeks it was as though the weather had feelings – mostly regrets, but also plenty of pride. Except for the first hot days of May, I liked it better than any other time. It was a month of clear skies and cold lawns and browny corn stalks and too many tomatoes, or squashes and pumpkins, and empty roads. People started to wear socks again. The bushes and the trees were thick with green leaves and those occasional blobs of color. Soon all the leaves would be brown – dead and torn off and plastered against the house. After that, fall and winter were a time for holding your breath.
The weather and the trees at home were familiar to me, but home was so strange – nothing like Buzzards Bay, which was not even far. I was last on the road the week of the Barnstable County Fair. Then I had run away with Millroy the Magician. Now, he was heading back, and I wondered whether the road had always been so narrow, the houses so small, squatting against the grass, the wood shingles so weatherbeaten, the spaces between the trees so dark. I felt younger and more helpless here, and yet I knew something important – the way out.
‘I feel different,’ I said. ‘It all looks different.’
‘It’s the way you’re seeing it. And you are different,’ Millroy said. ‘Stands to reason.’
We were passing the grassy runway of Marston’s Mills airport – just a wooden shed and an airstrip – and it lay like a perfectly flat meadow beside the straight road.
‘You’re regular,’ Millroy said. ‘You think it doesn’t affect your eyesight?’
‘This is the airport.’
‘All I see is grass.’ Millroy was driving and glancing. ‘Regularity is so very important.’
‘It’s a meadow. A field, anyway. But planes still land on it.’
‘Ah, yes. There’s a windsock.’
‘Dada used to work out of here.’
‘Flying planes?’
I nodded.
‘Licensed pilot? Lots of hours on his log?’
I nodded again.
‘Charter flights?’
‘No. Dada used to be a tuna-spotter. You fly out over the ocean and look for tuna fish.’
‘The tuna is specifically forbidden as food in Leviticus eleven,’ Millroy said. ‘Moses probably wrote that book, by the way. “Hath not scales,” “an abomination,” et cetera – all the standbys of the school cafeteria. Never mind, it’s one of the more misleading prophetic books. Most of those proscribed animals were worshiped by so-called pagans, Egyptians, desert crazies, what-have-you. Take the pig – worshiped. Take the snake and the eagle – worshiped. Lizards – they were on their knees to them. “Pay no attention” was what Moses was trying to get across.’
We were in the woods again, but when the road straightened out Millroy turned to me.
‘Your Seventh-day Adventist is a sort of tuna-spotter, too.’
‘After Dada got his license revoked on account of his drinking he couldn’t go tuna-spotting. He ended up on the pump at the Gas and Go.’
‘Some people would call that despair,’ Millroy said. He was twisting his head to look up at the sky. ‘But not me.’
Some black ducks flying in formation among wisps of cloud. That was another thing about this time of year, always ducks overhead, flying toward Rhode Island.
‘Your Dada just lowered his sights. Got a job that allowed him to go on drinking.’
‘You want to know anything about Gaga?’
‘I already know she’s not vertical. And I’ve monitored her emissions on the telephone. That’s enough for now,’ Millroy said. ‘Just point me in her direction.’
Gaga’s house was a gray-framed saltbox with a chicken run behind it, set just off the road in the cold shade of two towering oaks. It needed paint so bad it looked like driftwood, the same splintery dry-bone color. Never mind the flat weedy yard and stone walls. Never mind the sandy soi
The house looked somewhat different but I did not mind its differences – Millroy had accustomed me to differences. It was the way the house looked unchanged that scared me. The way it was dark inside: it had always looked that way. I imagined myself walking in and disappearing, in the way any house swallows you up and never lets you go peacefully but sometimes spits you out.
‘You’re afraid,’ Millroy said.
He could tell.
But I said, ‘Not much.’
He was silent. He knew I was lying.
‘It’s just that I’m not ready for this.’
‘You’re regular,’ he said. ‘You’re ready.’
He was steering the Ford into the driveway, which was two wheeltracks in the weedy yard.
‘I believe in you – do you believe in me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you believe in yourself, muffin. Let me do the talking. In the meantime, stay in the car.’
The fat cat, Yowie, stared and did not hiss at Millroy as he went to the door and knocked. Pretty soon I heard the old yakkety-yak of Gaga’s complaining voice. Then the whisper of Millroy’s. Then silence.
In a very short time he was back at the car. He knew from my eyes that I wanted to know how she was.
‘She’s big and angry and crammed with pork, and she looks like Babe Ruth, and where are her teeth?’
He glanced back at the house.
‘You think she’s sober, but no. She’s a dry drunk.’
Millroy was still peering at the house and I thought I could make out Gaga’s shape, standing perfectly still, her big body in the kitchen.
‘Yet she’s open to suggestions.’