“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-maché, 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 fire. 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.”