Son of Destruction (4 page)

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.

I walked home from the office last week. It took all afternoon, minus the times I sat down to think. It’s six miles from Coral Shores to our house, and I had on the wrong shoes!

I was writing speeches to Davis that I wanted to give when Davis finally came in from work. Everybody said don’t marry him, you want somebody local, like Bobby, but Bobby was in love with Lucy at the time. I did want Bobby, but there was nothing I could do. They said, northerners just don’t
do
like we do and that is true. Davis taught at Junior College, he had the tweed jacket with the suede elbow patches, he was cute and now I’m stuck with him – except I’m not, because it turns out Davis is a rat.

I was at the office when I found out. It was the dead, still hour after lunch. The smartass kid realtors were all kicked back, romancing would-be clients on the phone, heavy-breathing over bayfront condos, square footage and with waterfront views and I was opening my mail, everything the same.

Then it wasn’t. It was the bill. The English Department secretary sends it to me because Davis is notoriously cheap. He calls long distance on the office phone. Usually I hold my nose and pay, but,
Fifty calls to Toluca Lake!
I must have yelled; when I looked up with my bare face hanging out like a wet girdle on the shower rail, seven kid realtors were texting madly, with flying thumbs and sly, snarky grins.

It’s cousin Gayle. His first cousin, what kind of a failure of the imagination is that? Scrawny Gayle Carson, that Davis grew up with, it’s incestuous, plus! Could he not have had the grace to call her on his cell? ‘Gayle’s invited us to California,’ he said last Christmas, all innocence. ‘Steffy’s never been!’ What was he thinking, using our daughter like that? ‘I can’t wait to see it through her eyes.’ Oh, Davis. I should have known that misty smile was not for me. I didn’t want to know.

I booked the trip, pretending not to know. Leaving that woman’s house after the awful week we spent there, I thought,
Out of sight, out of mind
. I thought,
Got to do something about that, just not now
, when I really meant,
Not yet. Please God, just not this year
. I’d been keeping us going, things as they are, but you can’t, not with everybody watching proof positive smack you in the face. All those kid realtors in their tight little outfits sitting there, just waiting for me to cry. I forgot everything and ran. By the time I realized I’d left my bag, my phone – my keys! – it was too late to go back.

Now I’m not a walker like my friends. They’re mostly free to look pretty and sign up for Jazzercize and waterobics if they want to, or dress up for board meetings followed by long lunches at the club, translation: unemployed. But, frankly, we couldn’t live on what Davis makes, not in this showcase at Far Acres. I wanted to live on Coral Shores with all my friends, but Davis insisted. There’s a world’s worth of difference between here and there; it’s just too far, and last week I went the whole distance. I walked every step of the way.

It was four blocks before I felt my shoes. Mocha slides from Nine West, sand kept coming in the toes but I just went on walking, like walking was the most important thing, which in a way, it was. No. It was the only thing.

I was too upset to wait for the light, even though Harrison Rivard got hit by a truck crossing this very street last year because he was too good to wait for stoplights. He used to live in Europe and you should have seen him when he moved back, all arty and continental, although he was probably CIA, and it was a hit to make sure he didn’t go spilling Company secrets in the bar at the Fort Jude Club. What a way to go, in your bloody sock feet with your groceries smeared all over the road. Poor guy, I never thought!

You don’t think, not when you’re sealed in your car, safe from everything, but walking, you’re exposed, like poor Harrison. Walking is like opening your diary, in a way. Our whole past is out there and to get home, I had to walk through most of it. Northshore Elementary is a mini-mart now, with a parking lot where the playground was, I still have the scar where Brad Kalen jumped off the swing and it hit me in the head and I was excited and sad, remembering. We went to dances in the old box factory all through junior high, all dressed up and obsessing about sex because it was so new, thank God I know more about everything now. I walked past the lake where boys drove us to park in high school and the Dairy Queen where they took us after, and oh, oh!

It’s a good thing nobody I knew saw me out in the open like that, trying not to cry. Outsiders wouldn’t see me looking that much different, but all the girls from Northshore would know it in an instant. With outsiders, you can be anything you want – more interesting, younger, new – but in this town we grow up with a history. We aren’t girls any more but we still know how old each other are down to the minute, we know who wet her pants in first grade and which one threw up in her desk. We’ve bookmarked every guy we were in love with, from third-grade crushes to the Coleman twins in eleventh grade – which twin was I in love with, really, was it Buck, or the sweet one that died? – to Bobby Chaplin in senior year . . . Oh!

Thought isn’t all that good for you. You don’t watch where you’re going. I was walking right over my old house before I even knew it. It’s buried like The Mummy’s temple, down underneath that parking lot.

My whole life used to be in this block. Our parents sold out and moved into condos so the company could build the super-Publix. We were all grown and the neighborhood was going downhill anyway, but it was awful. They tore down all our houses! My whole childhood is buried underneath that parking lot, my ruby ring that I lost in Sallie’s sandbox and my kitten Fuzzy, that we buried in my old back yard. I was walking over my parents’ fights that always came out all right, and birthday parties and almost-sex with Bobby in the glider when we were in ninth grade. Everything I cared about is covered with tons of asphalt which is ironic, because old Lorna Archambault’s house is still standing, right there on the other side of the street.

If you draw a straight line between Holt Realty and Far Acres where I was going, it would bisect the big old banyan tree in Lorna’s front yard. I was like an arrow aimed at the heart of Davis McCall, I could have made it home earlier, but the snaky roots hanging off Lorna’s banyan brushed my face like somebody who loved me when I was little, and it stopped me cold.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh!’

Lorna used to chase us out of that tree, coming down off her front porch like a battleship. ‘Rats,’ she said, ‘That tree is full of rats and scorpions.’ She said, ‘You girls get out of there before you get hurt, get out and go home,’ but that wasn’t what she meant. She meant that she didn’t want her precious granddaughter playing with dirty little girls like us. She was so shaking-mad that parts of her face flapped, and I remember thinking,
You’re so
old
.

‘Oh,’ I said to that tree even though you’re supposed to be polite to old acquaintances, no matter how much they’ve changed, ‘you’re so
old
!’

And for the first time ever, I was too. My knees buckled and I slid down the big old trunk and sat there until chiggers or redbugs or something started biting, unless it was the uglies. I jumped up. By that time I was feeling so bad that I had to pat the tree goodbye, and I said, ‘At least you’re OK,’ to make it feel better.

It was time to get home and put on makeup and pray to God that Davis got in today before high school play practice let out and Steffy came home. I wanted to face up to him and get it over with without her walking in, so I walked faster, practicing speeches, and next thing I knew, I was ranting at the stone lions at Pine Vista, two living signs of the ruination of our neighborhood.

Herman Chaplin’s development scheme went bust in the Twenties land crash, before even our grandmothers were born. He had a dream, but as far as he got was the lions and stone markers at every corner and the stucco wedding cake where Bobby grew up.

The Chaplins always were a little bit too good for us, even Bobby, but in high school we never knew it, stupid me, I was in love with him. They went to college up north and settled around Boston and New York, but something happened up there and now all three of them are back, seething around in that big old house like snakes in a basket that’s too small for them.

I used to dream up reasons for us to cruise Bobby Chaplin’s house, back when he ruled the school, but now I drive past on my way in from Far Acres without giving Bobby a thought. Usually I’m sealed in my car with the AC on and my favorite CD, but I’d been walking for too long, and it was worse than crossing 38th Street where Harrison got hit. I ducked my head down and hurried on by, figuring out ways to get back at Davis for betraying me.