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.”
“You were hungry,” said Jeptha, as though this was the worst accusation he could make.