by Paul Theroux
There he was, lying stiffly on a bed-shelf at the far end of the trailer in the hot shadows. His face was pale, with blue bristles of beard, and he wore a tee-shirt and jeans, his white twisted toes sticking up. He slept motionlessly, with his mouth open, stinking and sighing and gulping like a frog.
Vera was smiling at me without showing her teeth.
‘Guess ya still suckun ya thumb, Jilly.’
In my nervousness here I had slipped it into my mouth. I pulled it out quickly and did not tell her how it calmed me, or how – when I locked one finger over the end of my nose – it helped me to think clearly.
Millroy was nodding at Dada and jingling the loose change in his pocket.
‘His heart’s bad. He sweats.’ Millroy sniffed and made a face. ‘There’s corruption in his lungs. I am not condemning him. I am merely remarking on his physical condition.’
A hiss like a slow leak came from Vera who had picked up a small aerosol can and was spraying out air.
‘Sometimes he’s usun this for breathun.’
‘And he has some difficulty walking.’
‘Walkun. Talkun. Runnun. You name it.’
Millroy had turned to look up at the shelves, but he took everything in at a glance – the boxes of breakfast cereal, all their names, and the cans – all their labels – and the bags of chips.
‘If you’da told me you were gunna come over I woulda made brownies or somethun,’ Vera said. ‘And cleaned this place up.’
Now she was seeing everything with Millroy’s eyes – the trailer, and Dada, and the big TV with the pilgrim doll from Plymouth on top. The ashtray full of butts. The sticky telephone.
Millroy touched her shoulders with his fingertips and kept them there until the woman smiled.
‘Mind if I use your restroom?’
I had been dreading that.
‘Have to step outside,’ Vera said.
It was a privy in a shed – I had not known how to warn him. Never mind, he ducked out and went inside. He was back in the trailer in seconds.
‘I see.’
It meant everything the way he said it.
‘Jilly, you gunna have a drink of anythun?’
I shook my head no.
‘Matter of factly, I got some tonic in the cooler. I got some of them slices of baloney. I could make you a peanut butter sandwich. Or what about some marshmullahs?’
She had begun squeezing and crinkling the bag of marshmallows. The bag swelled and spoke in her fingers.
Just her mention of these forbidden things made me fearful and breathless, and I could sense Millroy stiffen as she named them. I was sad, too, that she did not know what was in them and that she ate them with such innocence.
Millroy turned to Dada. ‘That man is not well.’
‘He always goes, “I can look after myself.” ’
‘He ever talk about his daughter?’
‘Not too much.’ She had dropped the marshmallows. She twisted her dress in her fingers. She was sorry, but it was the truth.
What did I care? I felt strong. I had Millroy. Don’t talk to strangers, Gaga had said. But this stranger protected me from her. I had never felt safer. And when the need arose, Millroy had magic.
Millroy said, ‘Take care of that body of yours, Vera. Don’t punish it. Be good to it.’
‘I don’t do much drinkun.’
‘Try to eat right, I mean.’
‘Do my best.’
All this time, the blue parakeet had been silent. Now it twittered again from the chair-back where it had perched. Millroy extended his finger and the bird hopped on, and then Millroy wrapped him in his hand and the bird went silent as Millroy squeezed. When he opened his fingers again there was money in his palm, and a glint of gold.
‘My,’ Vera said as Millroy dumped it into the pocket of her dress, and it jerked her dress down with its weight.
‘That’s for fresh fruit.’
‘I love an apple.’
Millroy was leaving and motioning me out.
‘I will call you. You will remember my voice and do as I say. But you won’t remember me. You won’t remember Jilly was here. And you will never smoke again. Smoke rhymes with choke, Vera. The taste of a cigarette will make you gag.’
She just stared at his head. Behind the clothes-rack, on the shelf, Dada gulped and shifted his arms, hugging his dirty shirt.
Then Dada sat up straight.
‘Heard every word,’ he said, in his crumbly Smoker’s Voice, smacking his lips. ‘You can watch a thief but you can never watch a liar.’
At the sound of Dada’s voice, the dog Muttrix began yapping.
Millroy simply pointed and both Dada and the dog rolled over and sighed.
Driving down Route 28, Millroy slowed the Ford at the first pay phone he saw. I gave him Gaga’s number, then Dada’s, and I watched him enter the phone booth, where he made the calls, two of them, very brief ones, but during each one, as he spoke, he motioned with his arm, moving his fingers in a steady command.
‘Think of the responsibility,’ he said, when we were on the road again. ‘The power of having someone totally in your control. You need great restraint.’ He was driving but he took his eyes off the road and set his gaze on me. ‘You can get them to do anything.’
Back at the trailer he told me to wait a minute, and then he said, ‘It’s okay to go in now.’
My room was changed. It was now my room from Gaga’s, with all the old paraphernalia that I loved and she hated – my music box, my two stuffed bears, my bedside lamp with the frilly shades, my Michael Jackson poster, my Tall Ships poster, the stuffed squirrel I won last year at Squirt Gun Fun, my Mashpee Intermediate pennant, my framed dollar bill from my first paycheck at Shockley’s, my Cape Cod Melody Tent program for the Olivia Newton-John concert, a quahog shell with a face of pebbles glued on, a gold tassel I found at the Annual Mashpee Pow-wow two Julys ago, my own pink pillow, and a small box with a locket inside containing – did Millroy know this? – a picture of Mumma in her wedding dress.
Even so, that night I woke up worried.
‘Promise you won’t ever do that to me,’ I said into the darkness.
Millroy knew what I had just remembered, and I did not even hesitate to wonder why he was still awake.
‘I promise, angel.’
After a while, from the other end of the trailer he spoke again through the darkness that separated us.
‘And I know how you must feel.’
I wanted him to tell me, because I hardly knew.
‘I left home myself. I had spent years telling them things they needed to know. Then I realized that no one was listening to me. So I went.’
That was not it.
‘You’re sad,’ he said.
‘Not only,’ I said. ‘But I also wish they were like other people’s folks.’
Millroy’s voice was like sparks in the shadows of that dark trailer.
‘They are exactly like other people’s folks,’ he said. ‘They’re burgers.’
‘Rachel Wolfson’s father’s a dentist, she was at Camp Farley with me, and they live in a big house in Osterville, and he’s not like that.’
‘Dentists are the worst burgers of all,’ Millroy said. ‘They are all like that. Only their shapes are different, and their shapes can be truly monstrous.’
He sounded so sure of this his voice was rumbling like someone on the radio, and I could tell he was now sitting upright. His voice lit up the trailer.
‘Every last one of them is the same. Walter and Lorraine Millroy, of El Jobean, Florida, for example. And is your Gaga different from old Grammy Gert Millroy? No, she is not. If you stayed with them you’d end up living like them and dying like them –’
There was a sound like small birds that told me his hands were flapping, and his voice went on rising and falling.
‘You think your
own folks are uniquely horrible, but I tell you, no, they are average. Give or take a few pounds of pork they are the brother and sister of most burgers in America. That’s why you’re afraid of them.’
It was true. Fear was that suffocation I had felt, a sensation of thirst and nausea.
‘Afraid they’ll drag you down.’
Or just keep me indoors.
‘Which is why you should pray for them.’
I tried to pray. I shaped the words Please God with my mouth, and let God read the rest of what was scrambled in my mind.
‘Because people like that, people in general, will eat you alive if you give them half a chance.’
He was angrier than I had ever heard him, and although I had been afraid of Gaga and Dada I had never felt that angry with them. Millroy was still talking and I was by now too upset to pray anymore.
‘They can’t get their teeth into you now, angel. You’re free.’
But all I saw was their teeth glinting in the darkness.
‘Get some sleep, princess. Big week ahead.’
At some point in the measureless darkness I went to sleep, and I woke to the sound of Paradise Park with Mister Phyllis playing on the TV in the room beyond my own folding walls.
‘He’s a twisted old fruit,’ Millroy said, ‘but this program has potential.’
Then I remembered where I was and how I had gotten there. I knew I was free, I had no doubts now, but I trembled at the memory of having been trapped. Millroy had rescued me, but it had been a close call.
PART TWO
Paradise Park
11
Millroy had a powerful sense of smell – not only for food, his favorite subject, but also for what he called ‘the unphysical world.’
‘And it was not always this way with me,’ he said, squinting as though into his past, but not mentioning anything that he saw.
He could smell bad luck, he could smell disorder and corruption, he could smell the future. (‘Much of our future has the tang of fresh bread.’) A person’s lie created a strong odor that reached him. Premonition was another odor. He could smell trouble, he could smell truth, he could smell colors in the dark. The physical world was simpler. ‘That’s why I could happily walk around with a blindfold on,’ he said. ‘My nostrils are like a keen pair of eyes.’
Children a certain age also had an unusual sense of smell, was his theory, especially where adults or the opposite sex were involved. ‘And most intuition is in your nose, angel.’ He said that was why Todd Huber was still lurking, though there was something dumb in his patience – he did not know why he wanted me to rough-house with him, though Millroy and I were well aware of it. Todd would lose this gift fairly soon, Millroy said, ‘because if you’re not conscious of it, your capacity atrophies.’
‘You have all these gifts when you’re young, and one by one you lose them unless you work on them and fine-tune them,’ Millroy said. ‘And I can smell error, I can smell complex fractions, I can smell the past.’
Millroy’s nose was larger than normal, he could wrap his whole hand around it – he often did that when he was thinking – but even though it was big it was soft, it was not fearsome, it made him seem friendly. He had started out the same as everyone else, his nerves had been no different. It was just that he had gained mastery over his body.
‘As I say, it was not always this way.’
He did not elaborate until one night just before bedtime he said suddenly, ‘I was a lost soul once. I’ll tell you all about it sometime. How I ate the flesh of innocent animals. I was full of dead meat – meat rotting inside me. That was all I could smell – my own self. Can you imagine how that cuts a person off from the spiritual world?’
He was at the door of the trailer looking out at the rest of Pilgrim Pines – music playing, other people’s TV sets, a grumbling dog, the sound of frying, the Silverinos, F.X. McEachern, Franny Grasso, Bea Rezabeck, the Glenn Branums, all the others.
‘Excuse me, muffin, but I was farting pure methane,’ he said. ‘I was like most people, a walking fire hazard. I had flame-thrower breath. I was combustible.’
This little settlement of pets and laundry lines and people murmuring in tin trailers and recreational vehicles reminded me of the gypsy camp employees’ quarters at the Barnstable County Fair. I was too tired to tell him that, and I was even a bit sorry that he had raised this interesting topic so late at night. But that was a habit with him, even speaking up in the darkness to say something frightening, as though he had just woken from a bad dream.
‘I was once like those people,’ he said, looking at the other trailers. ‘I don’t deny it, because it is important to consider how I transformed myself.’
He was now staring past the Blevinses and the Lingells, at the Reverend Baby Huber’s mobile home. The smell of cooking, the sound of sizzling fat, came from that trailer. It was Huber preparing his speciality which he wanted to put on the market under the name ‘Huber’s Real Good Fries,’ in a non-profit company, and use all the money for what he called ‘prayer fairs.’
‘Magic isn’t an accident,’ Millroy said. ‘It’s good health. It’s aligning your body and mind. I made myself into what I am with God’s help, by eating right. Hey, I got creative.’
‘Some people say there is no God.’
‘God is just another way to spell “good.” ’
‘I believe in God,’ I said.
‘That’s kind of premature – a mistake, angel, and anyway so does Reverend Huber, but never mind,’ Millroy said.
‘What’s wrong with believing in God?’
‘If you eat right, your head clears, you get power, you get an odor of sanctity,’ he said. ‘You don’t need faith. Listen, if you live the truth – and I am talking about food here – you don’t have to take anyone’s word for the Almighty.’
He swallowed hard, he hesitated, and then he turned on me.
‘Eat right and get regular and you will see the face of God.’
I was smiling at the thought of someone with a full stomach of pottage and honey and wheaten loaves looking up and seeing God, in a white robe like a full spinnaker, with a huge beard and blazing hair.
‘No,’ he said, because he knew what I was smiling at. ‘It’s not as though God is someone else. You will be looking at your own face.’
I was thinking how Millroy did not even go to church.
‘Church isn’t the answer,’ Millroy said, again reading my thoughts. ‘A church is just an empty building. The trouble with most religions is that they make you feel so miserable on earth you know you’re going to feel equally miserable after you’re dead. Think about it. The Catholics? The Jews? The Mormons? The Baptists? Reverend Baby Huber’s Pentacostalists? Who wants to spend eternity in their particular kind of heaven?’
He was looking out of the door of the trailer, but not at Pilgrim Pines or at any particular mobile home or RV. Millroy’s eyes were raised above those roofs, as though he was looking at the world.
‘Did you go to church?’ he asked, without turning his head to me.
‘Most Sundays,’ I said. ‘With Gaga.’
‘Which church?’
‘The one with the gold rooster on the weathervane in West Barnstable. And when I was staying at Dada’s Vera took me to Mashpee Baptist.’
‘It should be real easy to choose a religion,’ Millroy said. ‘You walk in the church building and you ask yourself, “Do I want to look like these people – I mean, physically resemble them? Do I want to live for all eternity in a heaven populated by burgers like these?” ’
‘I never really thought about it that way.’
‘It’s even simpler than that. You don’t need church if you’ve got the Book,’ Millroy said. ‘A man like Huber thinks the church comes before the Book.’
I reminded myself that he meant the Bible.
He said, ‘A true religion would tell you how to read
it, to harmonize your body and mind. Most of them think they’re bigger than the Book. Preach about themselves instead. And that’s another reason I can’t join.’
All this talk about God, religion and the Bible should have made Millroy seem a severe and scolding preacher himself, but he was the opposite, chuckling as he talked, inhaling the cool night air of Buzzards Bay, and occasionally chewing a fig. He wore black boots and a shirt with roses embroidered on the back – buds and blossoms, green leaves and thorny stems, a beautiful piece of needlework. He looked priestlike without seeming religious. No matter where he was, even here in Pilgrim Pines, he looked like a magician, with his great mustache and his shining head and a small gold earring in one earlobe. Handsome.
‘You’re probably thinking, “But I could learn all about that in school!” ’
I was not thinking that at all.
‘ “What about food technology and science?” You’re cogitating hard on that.’
Whatever cogitating was I was not doing it, because I was not doing anything except looking at Millroy.
‘Listen, muffin. Technology eventually catches up with scriptural principles, and vindicates them.’
My dim smile was a one-word question that went Meaning?
He knew it. He said, ‘See this fig?’
The wrinkled fruit was in his hand. He popped it into his mouth and chewed.
‘That’s what I mean,’ he said. ‘The Book is full of figs. Make you healthy. Keep you right. It seems simple but, muffin, this could be the secret of life.’
He was still munching the fig.
‘I’m talking longevity here. The Book’s specific about years.’
‘Like how long?’
‘Four hundred isn’t unusual. Shem lived six hundred.’ Chewing the fig was his way of thinking. ‘I want to be looking at two hundred plus, why shouldn’t you?’
That night he woke up and interrupted the darkness, saying, ‘I am so grateful to you, princess. If it weren’t for you I’d be talking to myself and thinking I was crazy.’
‘Letter for Doctor Millroy,’ the Reverend Baby Huber said one morning soon after this. He delivered the mail. ‘A doctor’s always handy in the trailer park. Now I know where to come.’
