Spontaneous Human Combustion A Novel by William E. Allendorf Spontaneous Human Combustion ©2008, William E. Allendorf All rights Reserved 1 Spontaneous Human Combustion A Novel by William E. Allendorf Chapter 1 I had bombed in Boston. Graduate school had been a huge bust for me. The folks sent me plane fare to ride home in the Spring of 1981, and I took them up on it. That should have been the end of the story. I would have stuck my unaccepted thesis on the Implications of Spontaneous Human Combustion in a drawer and pulled them out when I was in my forties, read them, laughed, and tossed them in the garbage along with my Hot Wheels collection and a pile of graduation cards. I remember riding back home in the back of a DC-9, looking out the window that evening there was the most wonderful array of thunderheads all up and down the Ohio River. Huge anvils, dwarfed by distance, flickered with lightning that I could watch all the way from the Pennsylvania line all the way down to Columbus. As we turned for Spontaneous Human Combustion ©2008, William E. Allendorf All rights Reserved 2 Cincinnati, I lost sight of them. It grew dark. It was hell in the air for while as we passed through the storms and landed. My folks were waiting for me. Mom was worried that I looked pale. That was how this all started. I came home to lick my wounds, go find a job, and settle into the suburban mediocrity of the Midwest. Dad talked about looking into insurance, and wanted me to have lunch with him and an old buddy. I agreed. Somewhere in my head, I heard a door slamming shut. Within a few days, I had dug up some friends from high school, found a job at a bookstore up by the University, and taken one of them up on sharing an apartment over on Ohio Avenue. It was getting on into warmer weather, I had reburied myself in a comfortable world not unlike the one I had left in Boston. Granted, the coffee was not as good, and you had to walk farther to find a jazz quartet playing. Still, it was a good spot to lick my wounds. If this was my autobiography I was writing, that would have probably taken a couple of chapters to write what has taken me just a few minutes to put down. There would probably be another chapter in there about going to lunch with Dad’s friend up at that big insurance company up on the north side of town, and the month I spent studying for a life insurance exam, and how I went to work for a short while, before the Dad’s friend got really trashed at lunch one day and how I quit and how I worried about how I was going to tell Dad his friend was a rude obnoxious drunk. “That’s okay,” said Dad. “Steve always was an incredible ass. I’m glad you had the sense to get out of there.” Spontaneous Human Combustion ©2008, William E. Allendorf All rights Reserved 3 Luckily I got my job back at the book store, the guy was a nice old fellow that kept a poodle. He had taken a shine to me, and was happy to have me return. I spent several hours a day over there shelving books, sorting collections that had come in, and working the register. What I did not blow on books, I blew on used records, trolling the twenty-five-centers at Mole’s. There was always food around the apartment, and everyone seemed happy for what I could kick in. Life was good. There is a park on the end of Ohio Avenue that is particularly magical, Belleview Park. It was the terminus one of the old inclines that used to dot the hills of Cincinnati. For a nickel at turn of the century, folks could escape the heat of summer by riding a funicular out of the bottoms and onto one of the hills. The Belleview Incline had been one of the favorites, since it had place called the Belleview House at the top. From all accounts it had been a good place to hang out on a summer evening, with good food and drink, a breezy veranda and a little action going on upstairs. The incline was gone, all that was left were a few limestone foundations on Clifton Avenue, and back in the woods. The Belleview House itself was long gone, replaced with an eccentric pavilion that looked like mushrooms growing over imported Italian pink concrete. It was largely forgotten by everyone, except a few neighbor kids, a few bums, and me. When I was not working at the bookstore, I would stuff a good book in my pack, grab something to eat and head out to the park and stay there all day. Most of the time I spent there was out beyond the broken chain link fence and rusted NO-TRESSPASSING SIGNS that kept people from falling off the cliff and down onto the pavement of Clifton Avenue. If you knew the right paths to go buy, you could be treated to a wonderful view of the city as Spontaneous Human Combustion ©2008, William E. Allendorf All rights Reserved 4 you sat on sturdy the limestone shelves that formed a point on the cliff. I loved it out there. It was a good place to go and heal myself. I had a lot of wounds to lick that Spring, and a lot of things to get sorted out. When I was not reading a book, I was often exploring the woods below. This was a wild and forgotten place. It had been a limestone quarry in the formative days of the city. By the time the Belleview House had been built, it was nothing more than a bare patch of limestone, sharp shale and clay. Over the intervening century or, the hillsides had acquired a veneer of Locust, Osage Orange, multi-flora rose, and honeysuckle. It was somewhat inhospitable, but it suited my mood well. On the south end was the long slope going down into Vine Street, and between the trees you could see the golden hand on top of the Lutheran Church in Over the Rhine pointing towards heaven. On the North End, you had views of the quainter parts of the Heights, Fairview, and beyond. It was on one of these journeys that I met one of the few other humans I ever saw in those woods. He was carrying a pack basket, a long-handled hoe that he used as a staff, he had on a drab field jacket and a well worn Tilley. I said hello, and we soon we got to talking. He and I must have spent a good several minutes making small talk, feeling each other out. No, neither one of us was an undercover cop. No, neither one of us was selling drugs. We were both straight, and neither one was intent on robbing, killing, or butchering the other—the simple things one needs to get through in a roundabout sort of way when two grown men meet up in the middle of a forbidden wood. He seemed like a nice fellow. Spontaneous Human Combustion ©2008, William E. Allendorf All rights Reserved 5 I asked him what he was doing with the hoe, and he said he was doing a bit of “guerrilla gardening.” I took to mean that he was putting out pot plants. That would have explained it all. We talked about many things, and when we decided to break and move on, I found that I had skipped lunch and was late for work. Stan, the boss, did not mind. It had been a pleasant morning. It had been a lost afternoon. That bothered me a bit, but I shrugged it off. The guy had been bloddy interesting to talk to, but I found myself unable to remember his name, when it came time to relate the story later that night. Over the next couple of days, I looked for the guy, but he never showed. In time, it became less of an issue. Soon, it was late May, and the trees were fully leaved. It was growing hot out on the cliff, and I started retiring to one of the picnic tables in the shade of the old pines more and more. It was also getting windy out on the cliff. Memorial Day weekend, I tried to take some friends out to see the view, but the wind was fierce, the bugs were biting, and the path was getting choked with a fresh grown of stickers. I was not into drinking much, but sometime around mid-June, I met a cute blonde on one of my rare forays to the Sand Bar, across the street from the bookstore. This was a hotbed of Parrotheads, devotees of Jimmy Buffet, margaritas and loud shirts. One night, as I was closing up for Stan, I saw the crowd of people, and it all started to look very attractive. Normally I would have stayed away. This was a hangout for the Law School—self-absorbed pricks blowing off steam. I went in and ordered a Scotch and was nursing it when the blonde came up and said hello. One thing led to another. It suddenly got hot in the Sand Bar. Both of us were hungry. The new Chinese place was only carry- out, and so we found ourselves walking with Curried Chicken, Happy Family, and some Spontaneous Human Combustion ©2008, William E.