Son of Destruction

3




Lorna Archambault


Don’t ask me how it happened, don’t think you know what it’s like. Do you know what it’s like? Do you have any idea what it’s like? Did you quit gossiping or leave off gawking long enough to wonder how it felt to burn alive, with your heart splitting and a furnace in your fundament?

Or were you too busy surmising? Was it all about the phenomenon, and did you give me a second thought, or were you only scared because if it could happen to me, it could happen to you? Do not send your children to visit my grave, ladies, and leave me the hell out of your little lectures on playing with matches.

I know you despised me, and you know what I thought of you.

Poor Lorna. Nobody knows what happened, but everybody knows what she looked like at the end. It was in all the papers, on TV, those pictures! How humiliating for a proud woman like her.

In this town, extraordinary things come down – Fort Jude is the lightning capitol of the world. Sinkholes yawn and eat entire cars or get big enough to devour the house, the kids’ climber, the birdbath in your front yard. People by the thousands went to light Santeria candles outside a bank on Route 19 because they thought they saw the Virgin in the glass front. Storms blow up in seconds – hurricanes, tornados, rains that can sweep a man’s car into a culvert and drown him like that. At sunset, sharks come in to feed in the swash. Half a boxer dog floated to the top of Circle Lake and a family in Far Acres found an escaped boa constrictor coiled under the porch, but these things happen to outsiders, not people you know, although our mayor did get struck by lighting on the eighteenth hole.

In towns like ours, where lizards come indoors and scorpions as big as lobsters can tumble off rafters in old garages, anything can happen.

Anything.

But – spontaneous human combustion?

We’ve had three, right here in Fort Jude!

Now, people may combust in broad daylight in London or Paris or even in downtown Dallas, but never in Fort Jude. Some poor soul may burst into flames in public where you live, but not here. The society is much too private. We will do anything to protect our own. Fort Jude’s crimes and love affairs, the betrayals – our great mysteries – unfold in secret, late at night.

In Fort Jude, there are close to half a million people.

Then there are people you know.

The whole world knows about Muriel Keesler, although she wasn’t from here. She’s famous, because she was the first. Old Muriel combusted and burned to a cinder sitting in her chair back in the Fifties, and to this day nobody knows why. Experts still study it. People from all over the world come to Fort Jude to reconstruct the scene and come up empty. Nobody in town knew her until it happened.

Then everybody did. It’s a very great mystery. No sign of arson; it wasn’t suicide. Nobody broke in and set her afire. She just burned up, and nobody knows why. The only things burned were the chair she sat in and Mrs Keesler, of course. Charred bits that fell on the rug. Police and fire marshals, the coroner, scientists, nobody could explain it. Forensics experts and scientists, psychologists, journalists from all over the world came to investigate. Movie people came, even mediums came, psychic pathologists. They studied it from every angle; they wrote books about it, but it’s all speculation. All that snooping, all these theories and all these years later, we still don’t know how it happened, or why.

In the Sixties, a Mrs Arbruzzi flared up in her trailer and burned to a crisp, front page news in the Star, but she didn’t gather a crowd. It was interesting, but she was a foreigner, came here from Sicily or someplace like that. Everybody ooohed and ahed, but for families that have always lived here, it was like it happened to some old lady on Mars.

Things like that don’t happen to people like us.

But the third was Lorna Archambault. Lorna Archambault! Past president of the Junior League and the museum board, her father founded the Fort Jude Club, but she lit up and flamed out all the same.

As if such fires are specific to the person.

When these things happen to somebody in a society as tight as this one, the mystery lingers. Thirty years later, people still talk about it in the bar at the Fort Jude Club. What happened to Lorna Archambault, really?

How am I supposed to know?

Lorna was divorced: nobody to see, nobody to throw a blanket over her or pour water into the smoking cavity where her guts had been. Poor Lorna, how awful. And because she was prominent, it got in the papers and on TV. There were photographs of it in the Star – how embarrassing! Like the others, she just burned up from the inside out. As if a stealth missile homed in and exploded in her belly. Dead. The other two women had to lie in the charred ruins of their lives for hours before the landlady or some other stranger blundered in and found them dead.

When you’re prominent, like Lorna Archambault, they miss you. Somebody misses you and comes looking. They find you right away.

Poor Claudia Atkinson found Lorna, they were roommates in the Pi Phi house at FSU. We were leaving for Europe today. I brought the tour labels to stick on her bags! Her luggage was right there by the front door, all zipped up and ready to go. Imagine. How sad.

Police came, the ambulance came, the fire truck came, although it was too late. The coroner came for Lorna, and until her son Dorian the doctor vetoed an autopsy, the cause was in dispute, but of course she ended up at DeForest, where everybody who is anybody goes. And oh, forensics people in flocks. Experts came. Thirty years later, they’re still coming, convinced they can find the clue that everybody else overlooked. Everybody wants an explanation to things that can never be explained.

Like this one. Nobody broke into Lorna’s house that night, so it wasn’t robbery; her wallet and her diamonds were sitting on the dresser, in plain sight. Some of the exact same experts that came snooping around about Mrs Keesler came back to study Lorna’s case, for all the good it did. She didn’t use a space heater or cheap-jack kerosene stove, only poor people live like that. She used the divorce settlement to redecorate the house. Her designer had covered all the fireplaces, so it wasn’t a spark popping out on the rug. She had a brand-new furnace and all the wiring was up to code. Nobody came to see her that night, at least not that they know of. There were no signs of arson, but Lorna did smoke.

One doctor said maybe her cigarette set off her own gasses. It’s happened to ordinary old women in cheaper neighborhoods, but Lorna was a Southern lady. The idea! She would have died!

It could have been anything, but what? Alone in her empty house that night, snug in her nightie, Lorna Archambault kicked back in her plush recliner and mysteriously went up in flames, burning until the fire ran out of fuel. They found her lying there, split wide open like a hot dog left too long on the barbecue.

Where else but in Fort Jude? Now, the Keesler woman made history, because she was the first. Tourists still come looking for the house the way you’d visit Natural Bridge in Virginia, or in California, the Watts Towers. They keep coming even though there’s nothing left where she lived but a parking lot. This Mrs Arbruzzi was just a snowbird living in a trailer park, and she was foreign. The town is filled with old people from somewhere else.

They drift in from everywhere, looking for a better life. At 4:30 every afternoon you can see them poking at ATM machines on Central Avenue and lined up for Early Bird Specials in cheap restaurants from here all the way to the beach, restless old men and sad old ladies in workout suits or spunky Florida shirts; they’d talk to you if you weren’t in such a rush. They’re everywhere, like the three a.m. test pattern on a TV you weren’t watching.

See, Fort Jude may look like a big city to you, but to the lucky insiders who grew up on Saturday night parties and lessons in ballroom dancing and Sunday dinners at the Fort Jude Club, the ones who spend New Year’s Eve in the club ballroom and children’s birthdays at splash parties in the pool, it’s still a small town and it belongs to the generations. For them, everybody who matters in Fort Jude knows everybody else, and everything is related. Who you are, who your people are, and in this town, the truly local families protect their own. It is a given.

At the Fort Jude Club, somebody in the family – parents or grandparents – saw Lorna in the dining room the night she died, fresh from the hairdresser and dressed to kill, sitting down for a farewell dinner with her son. Dorian didn’t make his family sit down with her all that much, but it was a special occasion. Her favorite waiter brought her favorite Blanc de Noir and Dorian had a bottle sent to every table, so when he gave the toast the whole dining room stood up and drank to her. They still talk about how happy she looked.

These things don’t seem important until something happens. Then the least little detail stands out. Afterward, Dorian took Lorna home. He kissed his mother good night and that’s the last anybody saw of her. Except for whatever they scraped out of the chair.

What happened, really? Does a person like that feel it coming on? Maybe she mistook it for something else: Something I ate. Pressure on the heart. People do. For all we know, she could have been sitting in her BarcaLounger thinking, It’s just gas.

Then she erupted.

Unless she heard something. Intruder. Raccoon in the garbage can. Maybe she looked up, startled. Who’s that?

Or she thought horny, unfaithful Hal Archambault was coming back to her, and she lifted her head the way you do, so he wouldn’t see her wrinkles sag: You called?

Just before she started belching fire.

The police don’t really know if Lorna was awake or out cold when it started. Most people don’t want to know, although everybody wondered. Did she scream for help or try to dial 911? Was she drunk or out on pills, as in, she brought it on herself? These things go down easier when survivors have somebody to blame.

What a terrible thing!

For a few seconds there, oh, lady! She must have been glorious: lit up from within, glowing like a Japanese lantern in her purple silk nightie, which is what the coroner said she was wearing when the flames consumed her. Then the fire blossomed. She split and it came gushing out. Imagine light blooming in her belly, exploding in twin gouts rushing from the holes where her eyes had been, flame shooting out of her belly and her open mouth in a celebration of light.

What was she, anyway. What did she do that brought this down on her?

Was she excited? Scared? Was she in pain?

There are no words for what I was.