The Spot: Stories

Facts Toward Understanding the Spontaneous Human Combustion of Errol McGee

The Fire

A violet rashlike spume of vapors circumnavigated his ankles and then spread over his shins — freckled, smeared with age spots — until, reaching the conflagration point, he burst into a senseless mass of orange flame. Presumably he didn’t writhe or squirm because by the time the fire hit (or perhaps before) he was unconscious. The position of his chair indicates that he probably had his heels up on the windowsill. Staring off at the lake with his feet up, the bottle tucked in his crotch, he was resting in a wicker chair, which of course remained miraculously unscorched. People found the things that weren’t burned astonishing: the chair, the curtains, the porch, the cottage itself. Above his skull, on the ceiling over the chair, a large blister of seared paint had formed. The first fireman on the scene couldn’t help himself. He popped it with the tip of his ax.

The Skull

There’s the undeniable physical reality of the evidence: the skull, cleaned of flesh, resting on the green seat cushion; window curtains — blue swirls of highly flammable Dacron — twisting in the lake breeze, perfectly intact after the conflagration, not even a singe except where, years ago, McGee’s ex-wife had let the iron rest a little too long. Again, the ceiling blister, so obviously the result of aggressive heat, but still only a blister. (Admittedly, the ceiling tiles had some asbestos fibers to retard fire, but not enough to prevent flames from driving through to ignite the furring strips and up into the dry-baked rafters. Presumably, a fire that was hot enough to carbonize bone — with the weird exception of the skull — would be enough to ignite a structure. Too neat, the fireman thought, seeing it. Too damn tidy.)

General Conditions

Full S.H.C. events leave nothing but a very faint trace of ash and a shadow of the deceased, if even that, and in rare cases a lamina of glass coating the object upon which the victim (for lack of a better way to put it) stood, sat, or reclined. Most often the victim is seated with some view or vista at hand: a lakeside or seashore or the broad expanse of some grand river, and in rare cases a wide field, or a savanna, and in even rarer cases no view at all except a television screen, in which instance the device is invariably implicated as the cause — or spark — of the event: blame placed willy-nilly, in the grope for an explanation, squarely on the shoulders of the boob tube (as it was called) and its ability to create flashes of stupid heat, produced out of the dull vagaries of mind-numb sitting when — the theory goes — all deep thoughts are purged to leave a void that is quickly filled with a flux of bodily processes: regiments of cells rebelling against a vegetative state and going haywire as they break into a symbiotic self-eating festival. A somewhat absurd reaction, admittedly, but perhaps justified, depending on the view.

Udall’s Natural Hair Ointment

McGee had steely gray hair combed neatly back and held to his scalp with a lacquer of Udall’s Natural Hair Ointment, vintage 1945, of which there were large quantities found in the cottage medicine cabinet and under the bathroom sink, sixty bottles in all, which led to one early theory that some of this tonic had saturated his skin and, in turn, his cell walls, and somehow, when he lit a cigarette (another key bit of evidence: a soft pack of Winstons, half gone, and a box of kitchen matches on the windowsill), sparked a violent combustion.

Before he fell into the bottle in a big way, McGee had been obsessive about his bodily care, although he had shunned modern products such as deodorant sticks for his own methods: that is, sprinkling his armpits with bay rum. In general, he was a man of outmoded customs: toothpicks for tooth cleaning; links to secure the cuffs; bandanas, and later fine linen handkerchiefs, folded neatly into the front pocket and occasionally taken out for a good, loud nose blow. McGee was a virtuosic nose blower, and his colleagues from his early days at the mill, those still alive, say he blew loud enough to be heard over the roar of the press drums and even the final rollers. One dubious theory has it that intense pressure in the nasal cavities can somehow induce spontaneous combustion.

The American Dream

Back when he was the head of Mear Paper, a firm that produced more wire-bound notebooks, check pads, carbon backing sheets, lined and unlined twenty-pound bond than any mill west of Maine, he used to say: It ain’t nothing to making goddamn paper. Find a few trees, chop ’em down, mash ’em up, add water. In just a few years he went from general mill hand to welder, to electrician, to manager, to owner and president.

Eventually, the large pond that settled to the west of the main plant and the plume of dioxins that leached into the aquifer were blamed for the cancer cluster that stretched in a tongue shape from Drake Street — old row housing originally built when the wax paper facility was erected in the early forties — to the end of Crane Avenue, where it ended abruptly at the location of McGee’s elegant Queen Anne — style home. His fall seemed mythic to those who saw him in his later years, dressed in his old mill overalls, stained black along the hip where his tool belt had worn a greasy spot, staggering outside of Hawks near the railroad station. Hawks, your bottom-end drunk bar and hobo hangout set as close to the double set of tracks — Chicago — Detroit, Detroit — Chicago — as it could get; Hawks, not much more than a tar paper shack with the obligatory single neon sign in the window, a pale pink outline of a cocktail glass sputtering epileptically.

The War in Vietnam

As one theory goes: McGee was fascinated by the protest immolation of monks in Vietnam, and had once been overheard saying he could understand the notions that get behind a man when he douses himself with gas to make a point. Inside his mill locker — kept as a gesture of solidarity with his employees — he had taped a magazine photo of Thich Quang Duc being consumed by flames. He studied it occasionally and marveled at the discipline of the monk in relation to the hungry disorder of the fire itself.

He talked sometimes of napalm: In retrospect it seems fit, to those who speculate on the cause of his S.H.C., to note that his son, Haze, was killed by the arrant use of this weapon/product in that war, a fact laying a bit of credence to the theory that McGee’s combustion was a sympathetic reaction, albeit delayed a few decades, to the news delivered by a soldier one May morning to the Queen Anne house on Crane Avenue. It is not inconceivable — to those who have endured the same kind of grief — that a man, on a hot summer night, reminiscing about his son, would draw up the deep pain of that loss much the way the wick (see “Wick Theory,” below) supposedly draws the melted fat, and in doing so might himself become overheated with the fires of melancholy and explode into sorrow-fueled flames.

Gloria

Some say McGee had a lover, a Chicago showgirl/call girl named Gloria who with his help came up on the New York Central and settled into the Delvic Hotel downtown. His old friend Marlin Duke recalls hearing him mumble something about his love flame, or having to attend to his love flame.

Perhaps in the white heat of memory, conjuring up the smooth skin of her forearms, the glossy smooth plain of flesh at the base of her spine, the husky elocutions of her smoky voice, or more specifically the way she had stood amid the long, slanting sun shafts in Union Station one fall afternoon, clutching her bag, reaching to adjust the pin that secured her pillbox hat, McGee had simply drawn too deeply from the well of memory that evening at the lake, sucked it all eagerly back, so that it stood in a stasis between his body and mind, in that delicate tissue, where it had congealed and fermented into a single spark bright and hot enough to ignite that final, albeit limited, inferno.

The Great Depression

Temperance workers attributed S.H.C. to drink and found a neat way to attach their moral/political agenda to the phenomenon by saying: That’s where the drunk burned, lost to the sins of corn whiskey, hard cider, boot brandy, bourbon, and ripple, until his body — mercy be to the Lord our host — absorbed too much of the distillate and burst forth in a fire of Judgment. Up and down the Dust Bowl countryside, at the bottoms of hopper cars, in the corners of empty reefers you’d find them, bleached white, skulls and feet, the relics of the Lord’s Judgment left to remind the living of the necessity for Temperance.

Wick Theory

In one controlled experiment a sedated pig was wound in cotton gauze — wrapped tight, swaddled like a newborn — and then set ablaze to prove the “wick effect.” The theory: The fire, fed by the bubbling fat as flames wicked through the cotton, would sustain itself in a concentrated form until the fat and bones were carbonized and the cotton itself burned away and only the head, falling from the flames, would be left with the proverbial pile of ash and some smoke stains on the laboratory ventilation bib. Throughout the experiment, the subject’s snout moved up and down, softly nodding.

Early Flame Experience

Through the smoked goggles the flame looked tight and made small, lip-smacking twists as it touched the metal and then blew out the spark bloom. At an early age, McGee proved himself a brilliant welder and could draw a clean, neat line that tapered out to a beadless end. His relationship with fires in general and flames in particular was a good one, his coworkers said; and after he went to electricians’ school in Detroit, he returned to the mill with a deep understanding of spark formation and an assured intuition that allowed him to tinker in high-voltage boxes without shutting the power. It was said he could grab one of the giant fuses barehanded and yank it without a flinch. How these facts connect with the overall mystery of his end remains unclear, although it is often said that beneath any mystery lies another, even deeper one, and some speculate that his abilities around electrical forces and, in turn, the fires they could or might create were connected to the fact that on that summer night, alone in his cottage, he found some neat and tidy final arrangement with the demise he had avoided so easily at a time when his life was moving with such vigor and ease into an ascendancy. So it seems natural to some that all of the avoided fires — the curse of any electrician — would finally come back to haunt him in one singular burst, and in so doing provide his decline with a terminal end.

Family

First the divorce from his wife, Angel, after she discovered he was hiding his lover at the Delvic; then the death of his son in the war; and then a few years later, the automobile accident that took his daughter, Grace, on a road north of Gary, Indiana.

The Lake & Cottage

On the evening of his death the water was serene and flat and unusually glossy as dusk hung over the lake. The failing daylight lent it an unusual copper color, so that from his vantage, on the porch, he watched while all that remained of the day poured itself out into the water and then was sucked into an obsidian form surrounded by the silhouettes of trees and, above those, a blue-black sky with stars peeking through — all this on an evening when the first hints of fall entered the air. (No one can say exactly why, but it seems important that it was a mild evening, not too hot, not too cold, and that the fire that consumed him could not be attributed, say, to one of the long hot spells that plagued the state with blazes that summer.) His cottage had degenerated from pristine, freshly painted each year, to shabby and run-down, with scales of lead flakes coming off the clapboards and a rank odor emerging from beneath the porch. The pavestones on the steps down to the beach had crumbled like blue cheese, and the dock, left out to freeze in the ice over the years, lurched vulgarly to one side.

Variants

Perhaps it helps to imagine those recently discovered variants of lightning that appear between sky and space along the upper reaches of thunderheads: red sprites, mushrooming elves, electric (smoke) rings clutching at the sinkhole of space.

Perhaps it helps to imagine the small sparks of current between the cell walls, bunching up into the endoplasmic reticulum, congealing in the ribosome; those tight nuggets of life until, swarming like killer bees, certain charges cohere, gather heat, and then — well, then there is nothing but raw resistance and flame. Perhaps it is simply useful to remind oneself that there are still unseen mysteries at hand.

Square Dancing

Even when he was president of Mear Paper, riding shotgun in his modified Checker with its chrome sideboards, wet bar, and flashy leather backseats, he’d order his chauffeur to stop at the VFW hall so he could watch the Friday square dance called by Burt Michigan Wolverine, whose barking voice created intricate patterns as partners linked arms and rotated in that effortless yet demanding tension when there is just enough lust (and love) between pairs to make their temporary partings seem lonely and tragic until their reunifications at the end.

Potentially Related Strange Phenomena

Barns catching fire — on hot summer afternoons — out of the blue and for no apparent reason; a person disappearing in the dead of night, leaving only a pile of blankets on the bed and an ash-stenciled outline of his or her last sleeping formation; war hoots along the border of Kansas; the lonely, dim-throated voice of Riding Thunder, or Kit Carson, seeping into the radio static.

Additional Theories: The Spiral Notebook

Word was McGee had a fascination with the idea of the spiral notebook, and even claimed that he had invented the product himself. He expressed admiration for the curl of wire embracing the punched holes, drawing the pages into a tight alliance. One old-timer remembers seeing him in the break room during his electrician days, fiddling with wire, twisting it around a dowel. Only through stubborn will is it possible to fit his obsession with the spiral notebook into the manner in which he died that evening at the lake, and in doing so one has to turn to a grand theory that includes the ideas of symmetry and of the spiral in relation to the stress — and heat and friction — certain bond papers produce when a sheet is torn away. But that is a stretch.

Additional Theories: Dynamite

In order to make room for the proposed civic center, a crew came up from Chicago and examined the Delvic’s structure and set packets of explosives in strategic spots and wired them all together. There was something hopeful in their bright orange hard hats and the casual manner with which they handled the deadly materials. They spent an inordinate amount of time locating and packing the mythic main beam — that singular elemental piece of iron that acted as the crux for the entire superstructure. They stood in the street with surveying tripods and figured the angles and odds and estimated the rate of fall and the potential width of the dust ball that would come out of the mass like a giant furry beast. The fat ornate facade of the hotel — which had at one time lent the town an optimistic sense of grandeur and hope, with its curly cues of rococo molding and Louis Sullivan — inspired terra-cotta, and its gargoyles froglike and malformed, hunched in the top corners and visible only at twilight when the sun spread across the heavens — stood even after the blast, while the skeletal innards slid down in slow motion, the way a warm wedding cake might melt (all this transpiring in a few seconds of dust-bloom wonder); but if you looked closely — people say, people who were there — you could see the facade heaving, radiating hairline fractures as it struggled against its forthcoming demise. Other onlookers swear they didn’t see a thing.

Gloria

Some say McGee was in the audience on Bronson Street, sitting in the bleachers with the rest of the crowd, when the signal was given and the wired packets exploded and the building held still for a dignified moment, emitting small puffs of smoke. Some town folk claim that Gloria waved to him — her hand, in a white glove, mistaken for one of the many pigeons leaving their roosts at the last moment. She had hidden herself in a storage closet, amid galvanized buckets and the stagnant smell of wet mop heads and pink floor soap, emerging into the empty hallway only when the building was silent and the evacuation team was gone. (Common assumption is that she hid herself away with the expectation that McGee would stop the explosions and rescue her; others say she was mentally ill and paranoid and couldn’t imagine herself living anywhere else. Most agree that McGee thought she was safely out of the building.)

The fire marshal says that when they dynamited the Donavon Hotel in Chicago — previous home to an assortment of vagabonds and junkies, a remnant of the great flophouse culture of the Depression — they found the bodies of three men dressed in old tuxedos and the top hats of industrialists, with cigars still clenched in their teeth and cards in their hands. One, he says, had a pretty good hand, a full house, and seemed to be smiling, as if in that final moment of brain spark he had found deep pleasure not only in the good luck of his draw but also in meeting a benevolent grace-giving God who could at once provide justice and allow the persistence of deeper mysteries, the things that went beyond perhaps even His (God’s) own wide providence during yet another troubled period in American history. (See “The Great Depression,” above.)