He set the legs on the table in front of Dr. Sprague. He wasn’t sure of anything other than the cleverness of the joints, of which he was proud; he felt a rush of regret that he hadn’t articulated the toes, or thought about how the top of the legs might fit into a torso.
“Extraordinary,” said Dr. Sprague. He took them into his lap. They looked smaller there, but all right, plausibly half the length of Truitt.
“What you wanted?”
Dr. Sprague shook his head. He palpated the knees one at a time. He bent the left leg so he could hold its foot. “Mr. Wear. Bowling pins?”
“Yessir.”
“Then there is glory in bowling pins.”
“They like her?”
“Not at all,” said Dr. Sprague. “Arms next.”
“How’s the head?”
“It’ll have to be better now.”
“What’re you making that out of?”
“I’m still in the experimental stage,” said Dr. Sprague. “I am not the artist you are.”
Joe Wear found the elbows dull at first. Who is sentimental about an elbow? Who would recognize a beloved’s elbow among a dozen unknown elbows? One can’t even really know one’s own elbow, not by direct sight, not investigate it with both hands. He spent so much time contemplating the meaning of elbows he came right round to them. He was an elbow himself: useful, unseen, in service to others. Still he might rub up against something meaningful.
Now he felt bolder around Dr. Sprague. The man had asked a favor and Joe had complied. Glory: that was the word he’d used. Joe might ask him things, too. He began to bring little brown sugared and cinnamoned doughnuts in the morning, set the paper bag on a table. Mostly Joe ate them, but every now and then Dr. Sprague would accept one.
“How is it?”
“Quite remarkable, actually,” Dr. Sprague would say, his mustache flocked with sugar. Sometimes Joe thought all the man ate was what Joe brought him.
“What’ll you do with this place?”
“Just this.”
“Why not sell it?”
“It was my wife’s,” Dr. Sprague said. “Not mine to sell.”
“It was Truitt’s. It’s yours now.”
Silence.
“Yours now,” said Joe. “Unless: she leave a will?”
Dr. Sprague shook his head.
“So then what.”
“Let it go to hell,” said Dr. Sprague.
“You could sell it,” said Joe. He didn’t have enough money to buy it, but maybe someday. “Why don’t you go home?”
“Too far away, in time and miles and all the ways. They’ll sell it after my death. I hope you’ll stay on till then, Mr. Wear. Or—”
“—or what—”
He hesitated. Then he said, “As long as they don’t find family.”
“What family?”
“Bertha’s family. Descendants.”
“Minna?”
“No, not Minna. No, never Minna. This place—no.”
Dr. Sprague had heard of wills that prevented children from marrying certain people, or required it, going into certain lines of work, or devoting themselves to charitable works. He could write it into his will. He could leave the bowling alley to whom he liked. This place was quicksand, it would swallow up any good person who stepped onto it. He saw that now, it was what had killed Bertha, not the steamer but the errand, off to attend to the alley’s needs. He was being swallowed up himself. Minna must never own it, not even to sell. Still, he imagined that Bertha would want it to be Truitt’s down the ages. She had loved Minna more than the bowling alley, but she had looked to the bowling alley for her immortality.
He said, “Not Spragues. Never Spragues. Truitts.”
“Are there other Truitts?”
“The lawyers will look.”
“What if they don’t find anyone?”
“Then it will be for sale.”
“Highest bidder?”
“Mr. Wear,” said Leviticus Sprague, “you are meant for better things than this.”
“Owning a bowling alley is a better thing.”
“Owning a bowling alley is something I wish on no man,” said Dr. Sprague. “I base this on my personal experience.”
The head itself did look like Bertha, when Joe Wear saw it, though Dr. Sprague would not show it direct. A pale head, jowly like its inspiration, pink lipped, and full of sorrow. Later Joe would wonder what it had been made of, plaster, clay, papier-mâché, tin, silk, tallow, white chocolate, glass, wood, porcelain, felt, cotton, wool; he found his memory could not tell him whether it reflected light or transmitted it. He watched Dr. Sprague set it on one of the little tables by the lane, then cover it with a cloth.
“It was a terrible thing to make her head,” said Dr. Sprague. He put his hand upon the cloth. His hand was enormous; Joe Wear had never noticed that before. A candlepin ball would disappear inside it, a tumor would. “She believed in phrenology.”
“In what now?”
“She never spoke of it? The study of heads. Nobody believes in it any longer. She did. There has never been the least bit of evidence. Always a danger when you look for a scientific explanation for your beliefs, rather than form your beliefs based on scientific evidence, though I suppose it is the same sensation. But I discovered that when you try to mold somebody’s head it does feel as though you are mapping her soul. This is my ninth attempt, as bad as the others. It’s an unspeakable thing to believe you can judge a person’s character by the shape of her head.”
“Why?” said Joe Wear. “People judge your character by the shape of your body all the time.” He stretched out one stiff leg. “I know. Lame, fat, spindly. You, too,” he said.
“Judged or judging?”
“Both.”
“You may be right, Mr. Wear.” Dr. Sprague toyed with the cloth over the head, but he did not lift it. Then he picked up one of the arms and held it like a baby in his own arms. He looked like he was wondering what to do with it: swallow it like a sword, put the wooden hand to his cheek.
They’d become alike, Wear and Sprague, two men drowning in privacy. They weren’t uncivilized—even gone-to-seed, there was an irritating civility to Dr. Sprague; Joe Wear followed certain rules, so as not to go wild altogether—but they were untended. Either could disappear and nobody would notice; each believed this was true only of himself.
“Where will you put her?” asked Joe.
“Oh, nowhere.”
“Thought you meant her for a monument.”
Dr. Sprague turned and looked at Joe Wear. The sorrow was of course and always his. “Maybe eventually,” he said. “I’ll leave that to the lawyers.”
That was the last Joe saw of the effigy for a long time. What was that dummy’s purpose? He thought it might be supernatural. Calling down the spirits, the old gods, to take those wooden elbows and make them bend. Old Levi must have stored her away somewhere clever, because no matter how Joe Wear hunted he couldn’t find her.
As for Dr. Sprague: once they’d finished the work he could as usual only see how he failed. “I’m sorry, Bertie,” he said to the wood, which was not Bertie, he knew she was not Bertie, but perhaps she could pass along the message, perhaps that was what he believed: every portrait is a kind of telephone to its subject.
Conflagrate
At first the neighborhood gossips believed Joe Wear had set the fire. Then the police did. It had sparked in the corner of the alley, where Leviticus Sprague had sat for all these months—where he was sitting, in fact, when the fire broke out, though it was after hours and Truitt’s Alleys was closed. Nobody knew how Sprague lived, exactly: whether he bathed himself in the shallow men’s room basin, slept upright in a chair at that round table. Had Joe Wear wanted to kill Leviticus Sprague he could have done it any number of ways, thought the neighborhood gossips: poison, suffocation. Even patience would have done the job.
You didn’t have to burn a man to death.
No, of course: the man had set himself on fi
re. Smoking, maybe. His shirtfront had been wet with whiskey or tears or tears suffused with whiskey, and that was that. So much for his so-called intelligence. His wife had been dead nearly two years. Maybe he’d done it on purpose.
That morning, Joe Wear had opened the door to the alleys and was knocked back by an appalling smell. The smell had been in his nose already, he realized: distant sugar through the floorboards but obscene close up. Sweet with Hell and flesh beneath. All horrifying odors are nearly pleasant in tiny doses. Now he thought he might faint from it.
In the corner, the darkened mystery.
Incinerated chair. Melted table, the metal stem drooping like a dying thing.
No sign of a man except the object on the ground.
The fire had burnt so fast, so hot, it put itself out. The chair was gone, the tabletop was gone, the wood paneling was gone, all of Leviticus Sprague was gone save the leg, which was there whole, untouched, on the ground. It was a shock to see it. A shock to see anything so human, so dead, and so forsaken.
A leg still half-dressed in tweed. Old Levi’s leg. Had it been a fake and Joe unaware? A bit of brown ankle showed. Skin made to match the original person. Was it the wooden Bertha’s, swollen up with smoke? Must be. But how on earth? He reached down automatically to feel it.
Lord God. Lord God.
Thereafter everybody said: Joe Wear won’t say word one but you should hear the guy shriek.
The strangest of all strange things: there was a cat in the alley, a little black and white girlcat, no evidence of how it got in. Was it the soul of Dr. Leviticus Sprague, the way some people said a dove was a soul? A piteous, inexplicable thing: Donizetti looking for his master. But Donizetti was old and male. This cat was half-size, with his same Holstein markings and chittering voice.
The insurance company sent an inspector, and the inspector found no cause for the fire. No accelerants, no source of heat. Just ash and leg.
They arrested Joe Wear anyhow and put him in one of the cells in the basement of City Hall. The cot was familiar, made in whatever great factory had produced the beds for the Dolbeer Home for Destitute Children, an industrial concern that employed prisoners and orphans to make mattresses for prisoners and orphans, stuffed with the thin horsehair dreams of prisoners and orphans. Of course he slept. The fire had exhausted him, burnt up his ability to do anything but lie still and be washed over the cataract of sleep.
He could even hear the sound of the policemen saying, “Lookit. How can he sleep like that?”
“Sleep of the innocent.”
“The innocent don’t sleep in jail.”
“You think he did it?”
“Did what? He did something.”
Three days passed before they let him out. No evidence tied him to the fire, which had killed only a foreign colored man already half-dead. Besides, Joe Wear had an alibi, said the officer as he unlocked the door.
Did he? Joe Wear wondered. In dreams he set the fire. The dream-fire burnt so hot he believed he’d been dreaming of fires for months before the spark. But he also knew he wouldn’t have been able to make a fire so canny and brutal, to incinerate only the human matter and not take down the alley. Take down himself.
“I explained I was with you,” said Jeptha Arrison to Joe Wear at the Salford Police Station. “Let us take you home.”
They rode the trolley back in silence, went to Truitt’s Alleys, walked up the narrow stairs to Joe’s apartment. Jeptha tried to fit through the door at the same time as Joe and nearly got them jammed in the frame. One big room with a bed, a little icebox he never used, a sink, a stove, the bathtub right there in the open so the place didn’t need two sets of hot water pipes. The toilet was in a closet by itself. The place was tidier than Joe had remembered leaving it, his bowl and spoon washed and dried by the sink, the chair pushed in. Meaner, too. It was a mean place.
For a moment he thought someone had flung one of Bertha Truitt’s black-and-white hats in the middle of the bed. No: a cat curled round itself.
“What’s that doing there?”
“Dunno,” said Jeptha. “Been around, is all. Bertha’s.”
Joe sat down on the bed and pulled the animal close, one of those accordion cats that got longer when you picked it up by the middle. It circled itself back up in his lap.
“Thanks, Jep,” said Joe. “Go on home.”
But Jeptha was going through the kitchen, locating food Joe had not put there. Some fruit, a paper sack of peanuts, which he shook. “Are you hungry.”
Joe gave a confessing nod.
“’Course you are. Hungry myself. I will fix us some tuck.” Jeptha hunted around the sink looking for dishes. He peered in the cupboard, the bathtub.
“Only the one spoon,” said Joe.
“Bowls?”
“The one bowl.” Shame, to have Jeptha here to see that, though it had never been shameful before. Joe sat at the table.
“We’ll share so,” said Jeptha.
“You shouldnta lied.”
“Nor did I.”
“Well, you did, Jep. You said I was with you.”
“And so you were.”
“I don’t—”
“I do sometimes,” said Jeptha. “Good thing too.”
An electric chill swept over Joe’s shoulders and down his torso. The cat felt it and jumped to the floor.
“Here I was,” said Jeptha. He conjured up a paper carton from the always empty icebox. “In your place, right here. I am catfooted. You know that, Joe Wear. I do come in sometimes.”
“Here,” said Joe. “Here.”
At that Jeptha looked nervous. He handed Joe the bowl. “Not all the time. Try that. Peach Melba. Well, I call it Peach Melba. It’s good. My turn next.”
Joe set the cold bowl in his lap where the warm cat had been. Peach, vanilla ice cream, raspberries, salted peanuts. He’d never tasted anything like it, so delicious he felt tears in his eyes. Jeptha watched him hungrily.
Rumor was Jeptha had been a jockey who got kicked in the head. That made sense, the smallness of him and the tangle of his brain. His head seemed to change shape depending on the season. In the fall he might pass for handsome till you noticed how oblong he was above the neck; in spring his noggin was a sack of flour; in summer, a boiled pudding slumped in the heat.
(It felt that way on the inside of Jeptha, too, changeable. He thought different things depending on the slant of light. He believed things that were not true—that he could understand the awful thoughts of horses—and did not believe things that were fact—that he would one day die. He had a headache all the time. Sometimes all he thought about were the pins, the way they played in the gutters of his sight. The very sound of them knottering together rearranged the headache and made it, if not better, then more interesting.)
“I’m a sneak,” said Jeptha now. “You sleep like a sweet baby, with your little arms thrown over your head.” He put his hands in the air to demonstrate but didn’t take his eyes off the bowl.
“Don’t do that,” said Joe.
“Well I know you are an innocent man.”
This set something ticking in the back of Joe Wear’s head. “Was it you?”
“Pardon?”
“Set the fire.”
“Oh no. Joe! No! No: spontaneous combustion.” Jeptha was still looking at the bowl. “Leg is how you can tell.”
“Tell what?”
“Cases like this. Careful you don’t—”
It was a staggering amount of ice cream. Joe kept eating.
“You’ll headache yourself,” warned Jeptha. “Cases like so. A fire burns that hot, that fast, now, why weren’t any of the other chairs touched? And nothing but combustibles all around, lanes, pins, balls? And how come it happen when he was all alone? And the leg,” said Jeptha. He touched his own. He seemed to consider how it might look, burnt free of his body.
Joe looked up from the bowl. The cat rubbed against his shins consolingly. “You’re a ghoul.”
“No sir I
am not. He just went up. Only other explanation is the Pukwudgees. But I don’t reckon they’d do it.”
“The who?”
“The little people. Most mischief is Pukwudgees.”
“But how did you get in here?”
“Keys. Boss gave them to me.”
“Boss?”
“Truitt. She loved me, Joe.”
“She did.” Joe looked at the dark beams of his ceiling. Jeptha had been the alley’s first employee, there forever and always. Before even Joe. He might have been born in the pits. Bertha had doted on Jeptha Arrison, had treated him like a child: she bought Jeptha sacks of candy rock and nut zippers, sweaters when it was cold. She let him walk the baby. Poor Jep, Bertha had called him, with great delight, as though he were a stroke of luck.
“Do you know,” Joe said, “I always dreamt she left it to me. In her will. You, more likely.”
“The alley?” Jeptha scratched his Adam’s apple with one finger. “Not to me neither. Nahum Truitt more likely.”
Joe put his spoon down. “Who’s that?”
“Her son. Think he’s Maineward. The lawyers are looking. When Bertha died the alley went to the doctor, and the doctor’s will leaves it to Nahum. If he exists. Not everyone says so. They think he might be a figment. But he’s not. Bertha confided in me. Joe Wear: I know secrets.”
“Do you,” said Joe uneasily. A son. The possibility of Truitts he’d known about, but never a son. If he’d known, he’d never have felt hopeful, or angry. He would have walked out years ago. It was getting dark out, but neither man reached up to pull on the light.
Jeptha laughed. “Some people think I’m a figment, too, but I’m here. I did not mean to watch you sleep, Joe. Good thing I did, hey?”
Those years ago in the Salford Hospital, when the patients on the ward dreamt of Bertha Truitt crawling under their covers: that was Jeptha. He’d stolen her perfume, Fleur Qui Meurt, dabbed it behind his ears as he’d seen Bertha do. In the night he sat on beds or sinuated underneath. He was all sorts of unexplained phenomena, Jeptha Arrison.
“You’ve eaten the lot,” he said now.
Joe looked into the bowl. “I’m sorry.”
Bowlaway Page 11
