by Paul Theroux
Whatever that meant.
‘Come on, angel.’
I followed, but I was still afraid – that she would yell at me and maybe hit me and call me a tramp. But when she saw me entering the house she just smiled and wiped her hands on her dress the way she did when they were wet or she had sticky jam on her fingers. She seemed unsteady, as though she was on the verge of tipping over.
‘Hi, Jilly,’ she said.
That made me want to duck. I looked for Millroy but did not see him.
‘I like your friend a whole lot,’ Gaga said.
‘Anyway, where is he?’ I began to panic.
But Gaga was smiling. ‘Carrying out his inspection. He’s servicing the house, and that.’
Was she drunk? She wore a silly grin and her head was cocked to one side, her eyes were half closed and looked cruel and slitty. The woman terrified me. I thought her grin was a trick. At any moment she was going to attack me – grab my head and begin bashing me. She could be violent and, in spite of her large size, energetic – huffing and puffing and harmful. But today she looked big and soft, with crazy crinkled hair and those squinting nutso eyes. Was this what Millroy meant by her Babe Ruth face, plump cheeks with fur on them, like a baby monster?
‘The man said he can repair all my appliances.’ Gaga was trembling quietly, as though her motor was idling. ‘He says he has to carry out a property inspection first.’
I kept her out of reach. I said, ‘He can fix anything.’
Gaga tottered at me again.
‘He’s wicked strong, too,’ I said, to make her hesitate.
Just then Millroy appeared, so confident you would have thought he was in his own doorway.
‘It would be a very great privilege to see your restroom.’
Only I knew what this really meant, and why. And then Millroy sort of held his nose as he waded in.
He was not gone long. His expression was pained and disgusted, his mouth turned down, an obvious tingling in his fingers.
‘Quite a lot of work to be done in there,’ he said. ‘Full of distractions. Drips and stains. Hopper’s the wrong height. The seat is a beast. Frankly, I’d gut the whole business. And the other one?’
Gaga stared at him, her goony face wavering.
‘You mean you have only the one restroom, ma’am?’
Millroy’s eyes were fixed on hers.
‘A restroom ought to be clean and comfortable enough to read the scriptures in,’ Millroy said. ‘Something I often do.’
Now I realized that Gaga seemed a little sad, as it sank in – you could see it in her eyes – that Millroy was flunking her.
‘I’d love to see what you’ve done with your kitchen,’ he said.
I could not imagine what Gaga would say to this. Would she hit him? No – she smiled instead, she shuffled her dirty slippers and showed him the way.
To me, she said, ‘As you know, I have great respect for the medical profession.’
A lie, but she seemed to believe it. And it was then that I noticed she was breathing normally – not wheezing. She was relaxed, she was tired perhaps. It was her after-dinner mood, when she was full of food, having finished a huge meal of take-away fried clams and onion rings from Winky’s Clam Shack or a Centerville pizza, when she heaved herself into a chair to watch the news, when she might even burp and say, ‘That’s funny, Jilly. I’m not hungry anymore.’ I could see she was not going to hit me. She turned her moo-cow eyes from me to Millroy.
He was opening the refrigerator door, and as the sticky rubber seal sucked apart, a small whimper of pain escaped Millroy’s lips as the smeared shelves were lit up – whole-fat milk in a half-gallon jug, ‘Tropical Cocktail’ in a rusty can, pork sausages, hard cracked cheese, dead YooHoos, left-over meat loaf getting gray, last week’s Jell-O, a gnawed hambone, two opened cans of catfood for Yowie, a yellow fried chicken thigh, half a loaf of white bread, a carrot that looked like a screwdriver, black seaweedy lettuce, a jar of Miracle Whip, a bitten-off piece of Mars Bar with teethmarks in the chocolate, bottles of pink wine, plastic bottles of Diet Cola.
Millroy was thinking: Death and damnation.
‘You eat these puppies?’ he said, and pinched a mouse out of a plate of burned pork sausages.
The pink and black mouse squealed under Gaga’s nose and she looked at it sadly as Millroy tucked it back onto the plate, where it curled up, imitating a sausage link.
‘Chicken thigh’s fresh.’ Gaga’s tongue was gray as she spoke.
‘Just the word “thigh,” angel.’ Millroy was shaking his head. ‘You wouldn’t eat this on a bet. And even if you did you’d lose.’
‘I eat everything,’ Gaga said, swaying, ‘that’s put in front of me.’
‘Murder,’ Millroy said.
Gaga seemed sad and was growing sadder, as though Millroy had found her valve and was letting air out of her.
A slope had been hacked into the chopping board which was dull gray with meat grease. Millroy ran a fork across it, making tracks.
‘Botulism,’ he said. ‘Think of all those carcasses. Don’t scrub it, burn it.’
Smiling sadly in her drugged and dreamy way, Gaga seemed to agree with him.
But she could be so tricky. I won’t touch your loose tooth. I just want to look at it. Open up. She would breathe these words into my face just before she stuck her sour fingers into my mouth and clawed my tooth out. And even now she might still explode and snatch my hair and kick me in the legs and tell me I was creepy and cost too much money.
‘This is all very discouraging,’ Millroy said. He lifted a plastic bowl with a quivering mass inside it. ‘Does this have a name?’
‘Salad,’ Gaga said. It was red and white and brown.
‘Ingredients?’
‘Jell-O, can of crushed pineapple chunks, peanuts and Kool-Whip. It’s nice on a hot summer day, ain’t it, Jilly?’
Millroy made wild eyes at me and plucked a pink struggling mouse from the bowl, making Gaga wince.
This house was a dusty trap, containing all my lonely past. I felt sick, I felt small, I wanted to go. I was afraid I might enter my bedroom and be trapped again. All this time I longed to be back in the Airstream in my little cupboard, away from this witch’s cottage.
But I was grateful that Gaga did not attack me. She seemed peaceful the way she went humping back and forth behind Millroy. He reached under tables and chairs, he moved lamps, he lifted rugs. Was he searching for one thing or many? He fished from one room to the other, and then he saw me looking at him and read the question on my face.
‘I’m looking for signs of life.’
After a while he stood still and seemed to size up the rooms he had checked, the bathroom, the kitchen, the hallway, the parlor with its cat-stink and its TV set and a bowl full of goldfish (‘Probably the only edible things in the entire house’).
‘We’ve got a problem,’ he said.
Gaga’s sloping smile tightened with anxiety.
‘I hope you’re not mad,’ she said.
‘Not mad,’ he said. ‘Disappointed.’
‘Is this going to cost me anything?’
That was the old Gaga.
‘Not a cent,’ Millroy said. ‘But there are other consequences.’
Gaga lost all expression and her big blank face with her pale eyes and much-too-big jaw was like the front of her own old car.
‘We’ve got a serious health risk on the premises,’ Millroy said.
Gaga accepted this, nodding.
‘You want this little girl to be healthy,’ Millroy said, ‘eating nutritious whole grains, soups, breads, porridges, honeys, and tree-ripened fruits.’
I could see these words enter Gaga’s brain-pan and rattle around, making her head wobble a little.
‘You are going to leave her with me. You are grateful that this opportunity has arisen,’ Millroy said. ‘Take care
of yourself as best you can, and let me handle Jilly.’
At first I thought that Gaga was twitching and hesitating, but in fact she was nodding her head, not the word-wobble of a moment earlier, but positive movement meaning okay.
‘I understand that Jilly used to work odd weekends, sweeping and cleaning at Shockley’s Cash and Carry, and some baby-sitting,’ Millroy said. ‘And that she contributed to your household expenses.’
She called me lazy, she used a strap on my legs, she demanded half my money in the summer, she said I would never amount to anything, no one would ever want me. I was stupid, I was obstinate, I was deaf, I sucked my thumb, I had made her suffer by wetting the bed for months after the funeral, ADD was just another word for stupid. I had told Millroy all this, but even so, you looked at Gaga and knew it on sight.
‘Here is a little something to ease the passage of time,’ Millroy said.
A thickness of bills, General Grant’s face on the fold: fifties.
‘This will come in awful handy,’ Gaga said, and I had a sense she was glad to sell me.
‘You want me to look after Jilly,’ Millroy said, issuing her an order.
Gaga was not listening. She squeezed the money, trapping it in her fist so tight it looked like a stain in her hand. But even then I thought it was a pretense, that she might spring forward, casting a great stinking shadow on me and pushing me over and crushing me against her fatness, smothering me on the floor under her knees.
She stayed mild, with the same silly eyes and goofy grin, her hairy face turned upon Millroy. It was a doggy obedience I had never seen in her before, yet I wanted with all my heart to get out of this house.
Millroy said as though to an employee, ‘I will be telephoning you with further instructions. You will know what to do when you hear my voice.’
Gaga nodded again at this, looking unsteady on her fat ankles and broken slippers. Her mind was made up. Her face was turned away from mine and fixed on Millroy the Magician.
Then Millroy and I were out of the door, in the car, across the yard, on the road, racing away. My heart was whole.
‘Bet you hardly recognized her,’ Millroy said.
He was looking pleased with himself. I had seen that face just after the elephant vanished, as the razor blades spilled onto the glass table, when he opened the Indian basket for the last time.
‘She was open to suggestions,’ he said.
‘What did you do to her?’
‘Straightened her out – helped her listen.’
He drove down to Route 28 and hung a right nearer Falmouth. We passed Mashpee Intermediate.
‘They’re probably doing geography with Miss Buckwack.’
‘Let them.’
Millroy was very happy.
‘So as things stand,’ he said, ‘I have total control over nine of my bodily functions, and one or two of your grandmother’s.’
Whatever that meant, though I felt I had nothing to fear from her.
‘And I memorized your room,’ he said, still being mysterious. ‘Now where’s our tuna-spotter?’
10
He was not at the Gas and Go – and he should have been. He was not at Ma Glockner’s, nor at the Cheapo-Depot. He was not at Mister Donut, not at the Trading Post, not at the Rod and Gun Club where he often drank. We looked. Dada had to be black-out drunk, though it was not even noon and I was sorry, because I knew what he was like sober, but I never could predict what he would be like drunk.
‘There are so many black children here,’ Millroy said, looking out the window as we crisscrossed Mashpee.
‘I guess so. I never really noticed.’
I just wanted to go away without seeing Dada or even saying goodbye.
Millroy said, ‘He must be home.’
Home seemed the wrong word for the place Dada lived.
He too had a trailer but his was an old rat-trap the shape of a shoe box, on a sandy back road the color of stale corn meal in some pitch pines near Moody Pond, Mashpee. The trailer bottom had burst with rot like an old barrel and slipped off its cinder blocks and fixed itself to the ground. Some weeds reached to its windows. It was made of scratched metal sheets riveted together with aluminum strips that were whitened by decay. The whole thing looked rotten and immovable. All around it were scattered bottles and rubber tires and twisted metal and burned boxes, the back end of a car and a Jeep with no wheels.
‘There’s a dog. You never see him. He just growls behind a hung-up blanket.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Muttrix.’
‘The power of television,’ Millroy said, and smiled. ‘I’m great with dogs.’
At the window, the thing that looked like the most torn part of the torn curtain was the face of Dada’s Wompanoag woman wondering what to do. Her eyes were wide open and her mouth was pressed shut.
‘Vera Turtle,’ I said.
Millroy raised his hand to her in a friendly greeting. His big mustache bristled around his teeth and made them bright. He said nothing. His hand was still upright. He folded his fingers over, then opened his hand and produced a blue parakeet. It perched on his forefinger, swiveling its head, and squeaking.
Looking out the window at the fidgeting bird on his finger and not at Millroy’s face, Vera became calmer and started to smile.
‘He’s sleepun,’ Vera said in a whisper, pushing on the door. She seldom said Dada’s name. ‘Don’t wake um.’
The warped door stuck and then sprang outward with a twang like the cut-open lid on a can of fish. That was the smell, too – fish, coming out of the doorway. And the hum of flies frisking in sour dust. The smell of frying-pan and cigarettes and sweaty dog – Muttrix.
‘Hi, Jilly. Got a haircut, eh?’
‘I like yours better.’
The way Vera’s hair was stiff and wild and burned blonde at the ends, and her small smooth face, which was browny-gold, made her pretty. Her eyes were greeny-gray and such a pale color they always looked slightly wet, and lovely. Her lips were full and pink, and she was so shy she smiled with her lips pressed together, not showing her teeth.
She hung onto the door with her slender fingers, keeping us out, and was in such a timid shrugging posture her body was lost in her loose cotton dress.
‘This is for you, dear,’ Millroy said, lifting the blue parakeet. The bird nibbled and squeaked at her.
‘Hi, Vera,’ I said. ‘We thought we’d stop over and see you guys.’
But Vera was looking at the bird. She put her fingers to her mouth and she chewed where the pink polish on her nails was chipped.
‘So what am I gunna do?’
‘Just relax, Vera,’ the bird said in a small squawky voice.
‘He was drinkun last night with Al Shockley,’ Vera told the bird. ‘He was down for workun at the G and G this mornun, but then he starts throwun up and everythin gets stinkun. I goes, “Ya late,” because I wanna do some cleanun. He goes, “Except I’m sick,” and starts drinkun again, and I’m, like, “What’s go-un on?” ’
The bird began tweeting back at her.
‘No point botherun with urn, so I bombs over the canal for fishun and caught some blues, about a ton of um.’
That was the smell coming through the door, fish-guts and scales, and flies buzzing in the enclosed heat of the sunny trailer room, crazed by the hot stink of gutted blue fish.
‘He goes, “So what’s up?” ’
She seemed more talkative than usual and I guessed that she was frightened and lonely.
‘Then he starts snorun.’
She glanced around, into the rusty trailer, and now her damp-looking eyes made her seem sad.
‘He’s still sleepun.’
‘Why not say hello to my little friend,’ Millroy suggested, moving the bird on his finger closer to Vera’s face.
Vera said, ‘So where have you been hidun, Jilly?’
/> But her soft nose was near the bird’s glittery blue feathers.
Millroy said, ‘Tell Vera Turtle how glad you are to see her.’
The bird said in its squawky way, ‘I was, like, “Are we really going to see Vera?” ’
Vera’s mouth had dropped open, her eyes seemed wetter, she had let go of the warped metal door of the trailer, and her hands were open, as though to clutch the bird.
The bird said, ‘I’m here to help you relax. I have come all this way to show you how I can sing. I will sing you to sleep. I am too small to do you any harm.’
The lids of Vera’s eyes were drooping and now I could see her tongue swelling behind her teeth as her lips parted. She seemed dazed and happy, and all at once very soft.
‘Can we come in?’ the bird asked in a low gargly tone.
‘But don’t make any noise,’ Vera said. She led the way. ‘I don’t want him go-un and wakun up.’
She moved beneath her dress and then her dress moved, as she went swaying barefoot through the old trailer. It was not a big trailer but the smell of warm fish-guts made it seem smaller.
Millroy said, ‘Please sit down, Vera.’
She did so, putting her wrists on her knees and swinging her legs together.
And then I knew what he had done to Gaga – hypnotized her, made her smile and obey. In his Millroy way he had turned terrible Gaga into someone who was peaceful and agreeable.
This was happening to Vera. It was like a dentist giving her gas. She breathed deeply and listened and became calm. Her voice was steady. She smiled at Millroy and his talking bird. She sat up straight, listening, as the small bird fluttered to the top of a chairback.
‘And you do all your cooking here?’ Millroy asked, pausing near the sink and the stove.
‘Don’t do much cookun.’
‘Food preparation.’
‘Whatever,’ Vera said. ‘Guttun blues and then fryun um up.’
Millroy turned to me and said, ‘When you consider the time we spend eating our ancestors!’
‘Ray ain’t much of an eater.’
Speaking his name made her seem as though she was divulging a secret – something out of her heart. And by saying his name she made Dada exist.