Millroy the Magician Read online

  Millroy the Magician

  PAUL THEROUX

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MILLROY THE MAGICIAN

  Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1941 and published his first novel, Waldo, in 1967. His subsequent novels include The Family Arsenal, Picture Palace, The Mosquito Coast, O-Zone, Millroy the Magician, My Secret History, My Other Life, and, most recently, A Dead Hand. His highly acclaimed travel books include Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, Fresh-Air Fiend, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and The Tao of Travel. He divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian Islands.

  Books by Paul Theroux

  FICTION

  Waldo

  Fong and the Indians

  Girls at Play

  Murder in Mount Holly

  Jungle Lovers

  Sinning with Annie

  Saint Jack

  The Black House

  The Family Arsenal

  The Consul’s File

  A Christmas Card

  Picture Palace

  London Snow

  World’s End

  The Mosquito Coast

  The London Embassy

  Half Moon Street

  Doctor Slaughter

  O-Zone

  The White Man’s Burden

  My Secret History

  Chicago Loop

  Millroy the Magician

  The Greenest Island

  My Other Life

  Kowloon Tong

  Hotel Honolulu

  The Stranger at the

  Palazzo d’Oro

  Blinding Light

  The Elephanta Suite

  A Dead Hand

  CRITICISM

  V. S. Naipaul

  NON-FICITION

  The Great Railway Bazaar

  The Old Patagonian Express

  The Kingdom by the Sea

  Sailing Through China

  Sunrise with Seamonsters

  The Imperial Way

  Riding the Iron Rooster

  To the Ends of the Earth

  The Happy Isles of Oceania

  The Pillars of Hercules

  Sir Vidia’s Shadow

  Fresh-Air Fiend

  Nurse Wolf and Dr Sacks

  Dark Star Safari

  Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

  The Tao of Travel

  For Sheila

  Table of Contents

  Part One COUNTY FAIR

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Two PARADISE PARK

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Three DAY ONE

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Part Four THE BIG ISLAND

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  I am that bread of life.

  – John, 6:48

  And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last:

  I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.

  Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter.

  – Revelation, 1: 17–19

  What he liked best was taking things apart, even books, even the Bible. He said the Bible was like an owner’s guide, a repair manual to an unfinished invention. He also said that the Bible was a wilderness. It was one of Father’s theories that there were parts of the Bible that no one had ever read, just as there were parts of the world where no one had ever set foot.

  – Charlie Fox

  PART ONE

  County Fair

  1

  I was supposed to meet my father at the Barnstable County Fair, and in a way I did, though he was not Dada. And I hated riding that awful bus from Mashpee to the fairground, though I did not have to take it back. How was I to know that it was my own Day One, and that it would end in magic, after that morning had been so wicked?

  I had walked from Gaga’s in Marston’s Mills to Mashpee, where Dada was living with Vera, his Wampanoag woman, and when I got there he was black-out drunk and she was gone. I looked at Dada lying on the floor and made sure he was not dead. He was usually drunk on his day off, but he had promised to be at the fair today. It was nine o’clock on a hot Saturday morning in July. The bus shook and farted on the broken road. I sat on the back seat so nervous I sucked my thumb the whole way.

  Millroy was the magician there, famous for making an elephant disappear in a box on stage. I had seen him once with Dada and not forgotten. He invited a small girl from the audience and turned her into a glass of milk and drank her.

  ‘Jeekers.’

  Dada had snorted and said, ‘It’s just a trick, Jilly.’

  But I was still thinking, Jeekers.

  I walked past the Fun-O-Rama, past the Thunder-Bolt, past The Wonders of the World posters and the Live Freaks banners (Pig with Human Hands and Human Feet, Wolf Boy), past Circus Foskett with Yoyo the Clown and Popcorn the Wonder Dog, past Mister Softee, Sno-Cones, Hot Peanuts, Swine Show, and Elephant Rides and Chubby Checker! – Live Tonight! to the tent with the colored banner of the bald-headed mustached man, ‘Belteshazzar – Master of the Magicians’ – Millroy.

  When I went in, Millroy looked up in the middle of his magic and his eyes rested directly on me, among all those people, and seemed to lighten from brown to green. Afterwards I got to know that look well: his eyes got a grip on you and, as he said, the rest was simple. I sat down and stuck my thumb back into my mouth.

  ‘I do magic in daylight,’ Millroy was saying.

  It was as though he recognized me from the last time with Dada and had heard me, back then, say Jeekers. It made him drop something. He was not fazed.

  ‘This is my first day with my new hand.’

  He plucked the hand out of his sleeve, squinted at it, then jammed it back on and began juggling with it – three different objects. He juggled a bowling ball, a lighted propane torch, and a rat-tatting chainsaw, all at once. He filled his mouth with five ping-pong balls and threw his head back and blew them around, and then swallowed them, still juggling, still staring.

  ‘I’m doing all this without a net!’

  No one had ever stared at me like that before. He was leaning,
too.

  ‘Are you Annette?’ he said to me.

  The people laughed. I was fourteen but even so, small for my age, just under five foot tall, size two dress – not that I ever wore a dress, most of my clothes being off the kids’ rack usually, junior jeans and little tee-shirts and size four-and-a-half sneakers. No bust, and hips like a boy, and short hair. Why would anyone stare at her?

  I was so transfixed by him at first I did not hear anything that he was saying. Then I saw him pulling a paper bag from his trouser cuff.

  ‘Would you say I have bags in my pants?’

  His eyes were still on me. He was tall and slender, balder than the picture of him out front but with a bushier mustache, gentle in his movements, and he gave the impression of strength without bulk, lots of will-power, mind over matter, a real magician. Watching him, I wondered what had happened to that girl he had turned into milk and drunk.

  He wore a tight black suit and riding boots. When he held something like a playing-card or even a bowling ball he did so with the tips of his long fingers. He had a hooked nose, too, and the way he stared and showed his teeth he looked like he wanted to take a bite out of me. I had seen that his eyes had changed color, but they changed again, went paler, and became like a bird’s blinkless eyes and pierced me.

  Millroy was stuffing a big flapping chicken into the paper bag, but I was so intent on him I did not hear what he was saying. The bird was fat with feathers but did not look twitchy and stupid the way chickens do – this one seemed slow and agreeable, like an old friend. Millroy twisted the top and punched the bag on its bulge, flattening the thing, and leaving him holding shreds of paper.

  ‘That was Boobie, and that gives a whole new meaning to the expression, “chicken out,” ’ he said, looking in my direction. ‘Now let’s brighten this place up.’

  A bunch of flowers popped from his sleeve, and he tweaked another nosegay from his breast pocket. One more bunch exploded from underneath the lapels of his coat. He arranged this bouquet and while we clapped he wiggled a ribbon of silk from between his fingers, then yanked it – one silk scarf knotted to another in an endless chain – and while he went on yanking he rolled up his sleeves. Where was this thing coming from? By the time the question popped into my mind the scarves lay in a tall pile on the table.

  ‘What was that?’ he said. ‘That sound?’

  These questions were all directed at me, and I almost spoke up, because just then I heard a clucking sound.

  ‘Get out of there, Boobie, you Chinese chicken!’

  He moved his hands over the head of a small girl in the front row and pulled an egg out of her ear and another from her mouth.

  ‘Got that bird worried,’ Millroy said.

  We all laughed, but he was looking straight into me. I kept my thumb in my mouth and locked my finger onto my nose. Millroy was so close I could see his face and the skin on his bald head were pebbly with sweat, and he was trembling and a bit breathless, as though this performance was taking most of his strength.

  The clucking came again like the monotonous words in a foreign language.

  Millroy said, ‘That’s funny. Come up here, sugar.’

  Gently pinching her small hand with two long magician’s fingers he lifted the small girl to her feet and guided her to the stage. She was about nine, with skinny white legs and falling-down socks and braids.

  ‘What’s your name, honey?’

  ‘Who, me?’

  ‘Yep. You standing there with your teeth in your mouth.’

  ‘Lynette Trumpka.’

  ‘That’s a real pretty name, Lynette. But, say, you got a chicken anywhere on you?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Smile – or if you can’t smile, make a funny face,’ Millroy said, still seeming to be talking to me.

  ‘I’m psyched,’ the girl said, and everyone laughed.

  Millroy walked Lynette Trumpka around the stage so that we could all see she was wearing stiff little pedal-pushers and a ketchup-stained tee-shirt that had come untucked.

  ‘Hey, what’s this?’ Millroy said, and pulled two more eggs out of her ears. ‘You sure you haven’t got a chicken somewhere?’

  The little girl shook her head – nope, she didn’t.

  ‘Okay, Lynette, you’ve been a good sport, so take a bow.’

  As she bent over, Millroy pulled a struggling chicken out from one leg of her pedal-pushers and Lynette went rigid. It was the chicken he had called Boobie and it flapped and squawked until Millroy gripped its yellow legs, and then it relaxed and looked as plump as a feather duster.

  ‘Fatso,’ Millroy said.

  With his fingers sinking into its feathers he weighed Boobie the chicken in his hand.

  ‘But that reminds me,’ he went on, and leaned towards me. ‘This is the greatest country in the world – hey, I’ve got a personal tribute to the USA coming up at the end of Act One – but, listen, hasn’t there got to be something seriously wrong in a country where the poor people are fat and rich people are skinny?’

  Still plumping Boobie in his hand, as though he was thinking hard, made him more serious rather than more ridiculous, and this seemed a true question to which there was no obvious answer. But what did it have to do with magic?

  ‘What does this have to do with magic, you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘The answer is’ – the chicken interrupted him, clucking a three-syllable word – ‘right, Boobie – ev-ree-thing.’

  He fed the chicken with some corn kernels, and he swallowed as the chicken pecked at them in his palm.

  ‘That sure makes me hungry,’ Millroy said, approaching a man in the front row. ‘I could use a chicken-pot pie around now, and here’s the chicken.’ Smiling at the man he said, ‘You are Kenneth Lesh from Hatchville and I need your carrots and your turnips and your hat.’

  The man was so surprised at hearing his full name uttered by Millroy he stood up flustered and touched his hat, which was an old farmer cap saying Wirthmore Feeds, as Millroy drew a carrot out of one of the man’s ears and a turnip from the other, then lifted off his hat. Before the man could protest, in went the chicken and the vegetables and two of the eggs he had gotten from the little girl Lynette Trumpka, cracking the eggs and chucking the shells along with the goo. Milk squirted in from his fist, and snapping his fingers he produced a sprinkling of flour.

  ‘Bleached flour and refined sugar,’ he said. ‘And let’s not forget a pinch of salt and a stick of butter. It’s an American recipe.’

  Meanwhile the hat was struggling and squawking.

  ‘Now let it cook.’ A match flared from his fingers and he tossed it in.

  We were laughing while the farmer down front, Kenneth Lesh – if that really was his name – was looking grumpy about his ruined hat and his humiliation.

  Millroy passed his fingers across the hat and then turned it over on his table, and when he lifted it up there was a deep crusty chicken-pot pie steaming on the table-top. He broke into the crust with a spoon and brought it out filled with pieces of chicken meat and blobs of fat in the dripping gravy and yellow chicken skin.

  ‘That’s death in a spoon,’ he said and closed his hand over it, and when he flexed and opened his fingers it was gone.

  We laughed hard but did not know why because we did not connect this to anything he had said earlier. As for the hat, it was empty and clean – no damage done, he showed us the inside, and he handed it back to the puzzled farmer. But where had that clucking chicken gone?

  ‘I’m still hungry,’ Millroy said and pulled a sword out of the top of his trousers. ‘Get the point?’

  This was a real sword of glittering sharpness about a yard long silver and gold, with a tassel swinging from its handle. Millroy flourished it and whacked it against the table leg, chunking off a cookie of splintered wood. Then he looked up at me, and I stared back with my thumb in my mouth, my fist in my face.

 
‘This is one way of getting iron into your system.’

  He gargled and threw his head back and shoved the whole blade into his mouth, straight down, until the handle was jammed against his front teeth. His head was still tipped back, his stomach out, and he unbuttoned his black jacket and his shirt and waggled his finger at the point of his sword pressing against his belly just below his breast bone. I half expected the sword point to pop through his skin

  When he slid the sword out of his mouth the cheer from the audience was louder than ever. He put his hand up for silence, and we all went quiet again out of respect.

  ‘Still awful hungry,’ Millroy said and flung a lighted match into a saucer on the table. The spark gasped and flared into torch-like flames.

  Using a pair of tongs he fed himself fiery sponges, and he chomped on them, then made a torch and chewed on those flames. Smoke and fire flew out of his mouth and seemed to singe his mustache. He was sweating, his head gleamed, his eyes were red in the firelight. I had seen that long sword go down. I could see that these were real flames he was eating, and I was near enough to feel the heat.

  Soon there was no more fire – Millroy had eaten it all. He smacked his lips as though he had just had a meal and said, ‘Delicious – and better for you than some stuff I could name. But fire-eating makes you thirsty.’

  He opened his hand and revealed a pitcher brimming with water.

  ‘Remember the wedding feast at Cana – the very first miracle, according to John? Watch closely.’

  Still glancing at me, now a bit suspiciously, as though I might be wearing something of his, he poured a stream of water from the pitcher into a glass, and as it splashed in it turned a winey red.

  ‘But just to show you I’m not a one-trick pony, here’s a variation that John didn’t mention,’ Millroy said. ‘Maybe Jesus didn’t know it, or was still working on his technique.’

  Now he had a pitcher of red wine and some of this he poured into an empty glass and it turned clear and colorless.

  ‘Wine into water – a much better idea in these days of alcohol abuse,’ he said, setting these pitchers and glasses aside.