by Paul Theroux
‘Don’t look up.’ Millroy spoke in a muffled mumbling voice, like a ventriloquist. He knew when someone was staring at him, even when his back was turned, from the pressure of the person’s eyes.
From under the low brim of my hat I saw, near a sign saying Wall of Death, Floyd Fewox, the yellow-faced man with spiky planted hair and tattoos, who clicked his teeth as we passed.
‘Doc and his young friend – hey, I’m talking to you. Get over here and jam with Fearless Floyd,’ he said. He was wearing his dirty Harvard tee-shirt.
Something about the way these fairground men stared made me feel even smaller than I was, and Floyd Fewox had Millroy’s own habit of looking as though he wanted to take a bite out of me, but his missing teeth made it a frightening thought.
Floyd Fewox – I could see his greasy boots – was walking alongside the enclosure lettered Live Freaks and the painted banners Cow with Six Legs, Sheep with Five Legs, Duck with Four Wings, Goat Born without Ears, Midget Horse, Zonkey, Wolf Boy, and Pig with Human Hands and Human Feet.
‘How do they know it’s not a human being with a pig’s head and body?’ Millroy said, in his ventriloquist’s voice.
‘Over here,’ Floyd Fewox said.
‘Just keep walking,’ Millroy said. And I was glad for the way he loomed above me, hiding me.
Nearer the tent entrance Millroy took longer strides, and then he threw open the flap and hauled me in, seeming very agitated.
‘Until today I had not realized how much I disliked this fairground,’ Millroy said. ‘I have been working magic here for Foskett’s for almost three years but it was not until I saw it with your eyes that it dawned on me how dangerous and disturbing a place it is.’
In his dressing-room he unstrapped his valise and took out his cape and his baton and some oatmeal fingers which he had made that morning from his own recipe.
‘And how I have no business here.’
He walked entirely around the Indian basket without touching it.
‘Which is another reason I am grateful to you.’
And kept walking – through the door, backstage, ignoring the smiling stagehands, to peek through the curtain at the audience.
‘You inspired in me the feeling that I am a messenger,’ he said. ‘That I was cut out for better things.’
Looming over me he turned again, casting his shadow.
‘And if I didn’t think that you were, I would have left you in your twenty-five-cent seat that day, wouldn’t I?’
The stagehand with the baseball hat and the mouthful of gum disentangled a hanging rope and took a step towards us. He looked like shapeless Floyd Fewox at the Wall of Death – the same hair, the skinned knuckles, the black fingernails, the missing teeth, the loose lips, the tattoos.
‘No, Doc.’
He smiled, he was grateful, he looked relieved. But I was glad to have that name for him. He had a gift for names. At various times I heard him call himself Felix, Archie, Chester, Galen, Prospero, and Max. He was so powerful that the one name Millroy was perfect, yet I was happiest calling him Doc or nothing at all.
Sitting me down, he gave me instructions about how to walk, to use my hands, showing me the gestures, and then he was on, saying I do magic in daylight.
Round and round, juggling above his head, went the chainsaw, the bowling ball, the propane torch – the saw rat-tatting, and a blue flame shooting from the torch.
‘I’m doing all this without a net!’
Millroy was still juggling in a way that made the people in the front rows wince.
‘So come out here, Annette, and give me a hand!’
They laughed at the joke but that was my new name. He had shown me how to walk on stage as though I knew where I was going, and I did, feeling like a different person, in my high heels and with a new face. I was always to stand at the side, perfectly still and pointing to Millroy except when I was handing him something.
‘Annette will now bring me a bottle of the best French wine, an excellent Beaujolais, which I shall turn into the purest spring water. Annette, my flagon if you please.’
I handed Millroy the bottle he needed – ‘always use your fingertips, make it a gesture’ – and I cleared the tables, but mainly I watched, standing in Millroy’s shadow and applauding – ‘stand straight, head back, on your pretty toes’ – applauding while holding my hands up, as he had said, so that the audience would imitate me.
And when you get them applauding, point to me with both hands – a kind of presentation, he had said.
This meant extending my skinny arms and twinkling my fingers at him, to emphasize that he was the star of the show. I did the rest of it, I shut off the chainsaw, turned off the torch, and boxed the bowling ball. I disposed of the paper bags, I took charge of the youngsters from the audience Millroy sent crawling into the basket, and the hoarse heavy-breathing boy he locked in the cabinet he called the Thorn Variation.
He turned wine into water, water into wine, and rammed chopsticks up his nose, then set them on fire and ate them.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked a young girl.
‘Polly,’ she said shyly.
‘And I am polyphagous!’ Millroy cried out.
He swallowed broken glass, more fire, live slugs, and something I had never seen before – he shoved a long sword down his throat and pulled only half of it out, leaving about a foot of it – the pointy end – in his guts. He ate part of an omelette and vomited whole unbroken eggs, which he turned into three large chickens. The chickens were pushed into a pot, the pot became a pie, the pie became a cake with fourteen candles and the monogram AF – and he presented this to a girl in the front row.
‘Tell us your initials and your age,’ Millroy said.
‘A.F. – for Amy Feerick. And I’m fourteen.’ And then she screeched, ‘Awesome!’ and looked scared.
I was not frightened but I was amazed, because Millroy’s magic was more powerful and shocking close-up than from the audience – I could see things transformed, I could smell the burning and hear the sizzle and squawks, I could taste the water and wine.
After Millroy took his bow – I was still pointing and presenting – and the curtain flopped down, Millroy stood in the dust flecks sifting past the bright lights and looked sad.
‘I hate the way they stare at you, angel.’
He crammed the big-brimmed hat on my head and covered me with a cape and wrapped himself up as well, and we walked the long way back to his trailer, past the little zoo where the animals looked badly fed and deeply unhappy, sick, vicious and miserable, Packy chained to his post, the bony lion boxed into its big loose cage where it coughed and roared itself hoarse. We hurried past the Fun-O-Rama and Live Freaks, and the terrifying food and all the people eating it. Don’t look up, he said, but he was slowing down and staring hard and wearing an exhausted smile.
Back at his Airstream trailer, he said, ‘Tell me the truth. What did you think of the show from up close?’
‘It was awesome, like the girl said.’
‘But what did you think?’
‘They were all, like going nuts,’ I said. ‘About a million eyeballs all looking at you.’
‘And you,’ he said. ‘Tell me more.’
‘Magic,’ I said.
Until then the county fair had just been a summer event that appeared out of nowhere and vanished after two weeks, leaving only injured Portugees and worn patches on the ground and trampled grass and garbage and, in the dirt, splotches of spilled engine oil that had dripped from the gears of the rides. It was a strange little temporary town of canvas and RVs and trucks and trailers, odd-shaped laundry on lines and big yapping watchdogs wherever you went.
During the day it was bright and blowsy, but at night the fairground could be wicked: the shadows were sharper, the shows different, and louder, and weirder, and so were the spectators. Instead of the day-time families and children, at n
ight there were crowds of loud boys with their baseball hats on backwards, and big sunburned lobstermen, farm boys and Wompanoags in torn shirts, and clammy-skinned couples hugging, and babies screaming because they were up too late. It was all glary and louder, the sort of marbled light and dark of a stormy sky that seemed to have gaps and cracks wide enough for you to fall through – where you might vanish. The days were hot and disorderly, the nights were black and violent.
Most nights, from under the wide brim of my floppy hat, on those long walks from the trailer to the show tent and back, I saw much more of the county fair than Millroy wanted me to see.
Between the flap of a heavy canvas tent behind the Fun-O-Rama a pale fattish woman walked back and forth in front of silent staring men while loud music played. She was naked and she had a cruel shaking way of walking, and her body wore a teasing expression, as though her whole body were a huge bearded face with popping eyes. She laughed as she passed the men and snatched off their hats and eyeglasses, and she looked like a witch in a roomful of wheezy children.
The yellowish man, Floyd Fewox, with the wild planted hair and the Harvard tee-shirt and greasy jeans, sat on his motorcycle and gunned the engine as we passed by Live Freaks. He made fingersigns to Millroy and me.
‘I wrote you some poems,’ he called out. I noticed he kept his cat in his lap. ‘You don’t believe me!’
Some nights I saw him riding sideways up the Wall of Death, and his crazy laugh was louder than his motorcycle.
The lion with the rotten teeth became hysterical at night, growling and hiccupping, while people stood watching or gargling back at it and tossing peanuts at it and smacking the bars.
You often got a fight when it was very late at the Fun-O-Rama, two drunks pushing or wrestling each other, and kicking, and their girlfriends screaming, and other men egging them on.
Neither my big hat nor any amount of hurrying from Millroy could prevent me from seeing those faces or smelling those smells. Then I knew that it was one thing visiting the county fair for a day, it was a whole other thing to live there. When I saw someone I knew, I hid, because it was like seeing them in a dream in which they were real and I was not, or as though they were dreaming me.
‘That’s true,’ Millroy said when I told him. He gripped my shoulders in his excitement. ‘And what’s dangerous about unreality is that it tends to shorten your life. Who wants that?’
We were passing Sno-Cones, Texas Burger, Chilli Dogs, Fried Dough, Pizza.
‘This is one of the saddest places in the world,’ Millroy said.
Prince Vladimir the acrobat attached lighted sparklers to his buttocks, so that he was bristling, and he stood on his head. He wagged his butt to the music, which was his trick.
‘I taught him that,’ Millroy said. ‘How to gain complete control of one set of muscles.’
One night Vladimir attached too many sparklers and generated so much heat with his shaking buttocks he set off the sprinkler system in the show tent and drenched the crowd.
Millroy’s show was cancelled while they set up pumps and dried the seats.
‘What do you see when you walk through this hideous place?’ Millroy asked me.
‘A whole bunch of stuff,’ I said.
He thought about this for a moment, and then said, ‘I’m sorry you have to see it.’
But I liked hearing I’m working without a net! and Why, here she is – Annette!
One night after Millroy’s show a woman in the audience came up to me quickly as I was leaving the stage and I thought she was going to hit me. She was pot-bellied, her face was hairy, she wore a baseball cap and muddy sneakers.
‘I know you. You’re Jilly Farina from Marston’s Mills. Listen, kiddo, does your granny know you’re here dressed up like that?’
‘Madam,’ Millroy said, ‘you are mistaken. This young woman, my assistant Annette, is a recent immigrant from the Baltic republic of Latvia and does not speak a word of English.’
He fixed the woman by enlarging one of his eyes and leaning forward and back.
She said sorry!
‘That was close,’ Millroy said.
That same night I lay in bed alone in my wooden cabinet listening to Floyd Fewox’s motorcycle sputtering up and down the Wall of Death, and his crazy laugh drowning out the rapping of his engine, and after the applause and the music at the end I still heard the motorcycle as though it were zig-zagging through the fairground. I was not imagining it. The next thing I knew the motorcycle was revving outside the trailer. Millroy turned on the light and went to the door. I opened the flap to my cubicle and looked out.
Floyd Fewox stood on the trailer steps holding a can of beer.
‘Get your shoes on, babe, and let’s wail,’ he said. ‘You’re going for a ride you’ll never forget.’
Millroy turned his back on the man and said, ‘It’s true – this man taught at Harvard. He wrote a book which got respectful reviews. But he was fired for writing threatening letters to his colleagues and for persecuting students. His irrational views were incompatible with those of a great institution. He spent a great deal of time sobbing his heart out at the university infirmary. He was heavily sedated, and he finally was discharged.’
‘Hey, I’m not denying it,’ Floyd Fewox said. ‘I’m wild. You don’t believe me.’
‘He once went into the kitchen for a glass of water for his late wife and he disappeared. He showed up three months later, wearing nothing but a pair of army surplus combat boots, with the laces undone.’
Floyd Fewox laughed, showing the black gaps in his teeth, and he took a slug of his beer, spilling foam over his stubbly chin, and he wiped his mouth with the blue tattoo on his arm, and laughed again, like a dog trying to talk.
‘You know his problem?’ Millroy said. ‘He’s not wild. He’s not an outlaw. He’s just selfish. He’s an intellectual.’
‘This babe’s coming with me,’ Floyd Fewox said.
He made a move towards me and I thought he was going to touch me when Millroy took a step and blocked his way.
‘I’m challenging you to a duel,’ Millroy said. He was very calm. His mustache was smooth. His head was dry. He was taller than Floyd Fewox, and more muscular, and pink with health.
‘Any time, buddy.’
‘A psychic duel,’ Millroy said.
‘I’ll rip your ear off and spit in the hole,’ Floyd Fewox said.
6
Floyd Fewox had been crouching, hunkering down, but the way he stood up with his elbows out told you to make room for him. Then they stood face to face, Floyd Fewox cackling the way he often did when riding the Wall of Death, and Millroy the wizard.
‘Get lost,’ Floyd Fewox said.
He showed the gaps in his teeth and terrible wood-colored fangs, and when he opened wide to laugh at Millroy his mouth was a dark hole with brown teeth and a black tongue. He slouched in front of Millroy, his thumbs sticking out sideways, squeezing his can of beer in one hand and pinching a cigarette in his other. His greasy jeans were tugged down and I could see his deep shadowy navel in his hairy belly.
‘I’m taking this little lady for some Chinese food.’
He swigged his beer and let it dribble from his chin, and then he wiped his hands on his Harvard tee-shirt.
‘Pay no attention to him, angel. He’s a case of serious mind-fry.’
‘I’m okay,’ I said. Millroy was still calm, staring with electric eyes, as though he could see straight through Floyd Fewox and maybe even straight through the walls of the trailer.
‘He’s had too much to drink,’ Millroy said. ‘But that is not the point.’
I wanted to say, Drunks – tell me about them, as if I had not seen Dada’s wet eyes brimming stupidly with Old Grandad enough times. That seemed to be the way it always was with people like that – big messy men who drank and drank, and then just leaked all over, sweating, steaming, nose running, drooling,
whatever.
‘You’re a liar, Millroy.’
Even his saying that was familiar, and typical of Dada saying There’s nothing in my hand when he was holding a bottle, or I haven’t had a drop when he was falling-down drunk and talked with a wobbly hinge on his jaw.
‘The point is that this man is constipated.’
‘Dada gets wicked constipation too,’ I said, and when both Millroy and Floyd Fewox suddenly looked at me I realized that I had mentioned this because I had been following my train of thought about Dada.
‘You think you’re strong, huh?’ Floyd Fewox said. ‘Okay, smart guy, pick up this oyster.’ And he spat a clot of phlegm on the trailer floor.
Millroy smiled a pitying smile.
‘She’s coming with me. To the China Moon!’
‘Not just yet.’
Floyd Fewox staggered and then propped himself up by snatching the towel rail beside the sink counter.
‘Don’t you see that I am challenging you to a duel?’
Floyd Fewox opened his dark hole again and an angry Wall of Death laugh came out like a bark, and then he bumped the sink.
‘But I’d rather you didn’t sit down,’ Millroy said.
Lifting his arms, Fewox eagerly looked for a place to throw his staggering body. He saw a low stool beside the sink and plopped on it and grunted. Millroy’s face was blank, his mouth was shut, but there was great confidence in his eyes.
He said, ‘Go on, Floyd, frazzle me with your power. Make me afraid.’
Floyd Fewox leaned forward and showed his dark teeth at Millroy and said, ‘I’ll kill you.’
Millroy did not flinch. He said, ‘Though he became a thug at Harvard, Floyd is an intellectual from Canada. He’s ninety-nine percent buffoon. Neendy-neen.’
Hearing Millroy mock him with these Canadian words, Floyd Fewox put on his I’ll kill you face again.
‘Say “Good morning,” ’ Millroy said, and then, ‘Gid merning!’
‘I’ll break your neck,’ Floyd said.
‘Want one of these?’
