Slow Burn (33 page)

'Tve got a
ten-thirty meeting," she said, rising. "But I could be available for
lunch, should anyone perhaps feel indebted."

"Ifs
Friday. Barbecue day. Remember?"

On Jack's side
of the street, the entire block was behind a protective barrier of yellow SPD
sawhorses. The area between the sawhorses and the sidewalk was being patrolled
by SPD officers on real horses. Modern technology has done little to provide a
more effective crowd-control device than a well-trained horse-and-rider team.
The SPD approach is simple. Horsie wanna go over here. Either move or try not
to get hoofprints on your forehead. Thank you very much.

Abby and Lola
had called out the taxi squad for this one. To the south, Stewart Street was
filled with several hundred 4-H members and a collection of earnest parents
waving a sedate array of SAVE BUNKY and 4-H 4-EVER signs. To their left, right
at the elbow of Stewart Street and Third Avenue, were Steve Drew and his merry
vegans. Maybe a hundred of them, wedged in between the 4-H'ers and the animal
rightists from PAWS, waving MEAT IS MURDER signs and talking quietly among
themselves.

The area
directly in front of the restaurant was an odd mix of Clarissa Hedgpeth's NUTSS
people and Konrad Kramer's Animal Liberation Front. Clarissa held an ALL GOD'S
CHILDREN sign in one hand and Bruce's leash in the other. The Kramer corps were
wearing their terrorist scarves around their necks and holding a single large
sign which read: ANIMAL FREEDOM—AT ANY PRICE. Konrad himself was presently
engaged in a shoving match with an elderly man from Clarissa's entourage. The
old man's face was beet-red as he shouted at Kramer.

At the far end
of the block, another surging mass of placard-waving humanity pushed hard
against the barriers, chanting something I couldn't make out. As I walked down
the sidewalk, someone shouted, "Killer."

All three local
TV stations had mobile units on the scene. The cops had allowed them to set up
in the corners, inside the barriers. KING-TV's white van was being commandeered
by Melissa Wright, the weekend news anchor. Surprisingly, L-O-L-A Lola King was
nowhere to be seen. I figured the story had gotten so big, the station had made
a change.

Rickey Ray
perched on his stool inside the front door. "I knew you wouldn't miss it,
podna," he said with a smirk.

The restaurant
was dark and empty.

"Where is
everybody?"

"Outside.
The big doin's outside."

"Nice
crowd out there in the street."

"Man, I
didn't know there was this many tree-huggin', granola-suckin' mofos on the
whole planet. This a weird town, my man."

"Isn't
Jack worried about the ambiance?"

Rickey shook
his -head. "Seven o'clock the cops are gonna move 'em back two blocks in
every direction. Time the VIPs arrive, you won't even know they was
around."

"Must be
his charm."

"Must
be," he agreed.

I could feel
the heat on my left arm the second I stepped out the door, although the barbecue
pit was a good thirty feet to my left. Bunky wasn't going to like this at all.
Vertical heat waves shimmied upward, distorting my view of the bricks in the
building across the alley.

A hunter-green
tarp had been hung all along the inside of the fence, effectively hiding the
festivities from those in the street. The lot was alive with activity. Enough
wind swirled in the area to wind the pennants around their stanchions and keep
a thin stream of glowing sparks steadily moving upward from the metal fire pit.

Beneath the
green-and-white tents, what I estimated to be about forty tables were being
prepared for this evening's gala. An army of service people were tacking down
white linen tablecloths and arranging place settings. On my right, behind a
solid line of waiters, I could hear Dixie's voice going over table assignments.

Out in the
center of the space, in an area I supposed would be used later for dancing,
stood the old Jackalope. Candace was locked to his elbow like a terrier as he
made expansive gestures with his free hand. The guy in the yellow hard hat
nodded, and waved a hand-held radio toward the sky. I checked my watch. Quarter
to twelve. If everything had gone reasonably well down at the Brenner Brothers,
it shouldn't be long now. A voice startled me.

"Do you
believe this?"

Bart Yonquist
looked as if he'd stepped out of the Monkey Ward catalog. The perfect preppie
right down to the penny loafers. That is, if you didn't count the large square
purse he carried in his hand.

I put my hands
on my hips and said, "I'm sorry. A straw bag? Before Easter? Excuse me,
but I don't think so."

"I'm a
fashion innovator," he told me.

"And no, I
don't believe it."

"I'm out
of here. I feel like I'm in a bad foreign film. Whenever the cops stop
harassing us, I'm on the next plane back to Cleveland. I've got most of the
money I need. I'll borrow the rest."

"Good
move. I was beginning to think I was the only one who thought this whole mess
was completely off the wall."

"You know,
Mr. Waterman, I've got a feeling that when I'm older and have a family ... I
think maybe these last six months are going to comprise the best story I tell
for the rest of my life."

"I
wouldn't be a bit surprised."

"I gotta
go," he said. "Dixie needs some Rolaids."

Still
grimly
clutching the purse, he disappeared inside the building. Jack was still
engaged
in an animated conversation with Hard Hat, so I walked along the row of
tents
on the Third Avenue side and watched the preparations. Halfway down the
row, Dixie appeared at my left shoulder. "How you doing?" I asked.

"Evathing
I can, honey."

"Somebody
better." . "Ain't it the truth." She shielded her eyes and
checked the sky. "You seen Bart?"

I told her
where he'd gone. Dixie raised a hand and massaged her middle. "Wish to
goodness he'd hurry. I'm about to eat a hole in myself and fall out the
bottom."

"What’s
the L stand for?"

"What
L?"

"The L in
Donnareen L. Pye."

"Loretta."
She said it with the accent on the first syllable. "Mama named me after
Loretta Lynn."

She pulled her
head back and took me in. "You been snoopin' after me?"

I showed her
both palms. "I'm with you on this one, Dixie. As far as I'm concerned,
he's as crazy as a shit-house rat."

She wasn't
satisfied. "You know," she said, "I don't think I like—"

She never got a
chance to finish. The stories I'd heard from 'Nam vets about how you could hear
the choppers long before you could see them must have been true only in the
jungle.

Mike Bales
brought the chopper in fast and low, cutting his way among the buildings as if
he expected rocket fire. You only had to watch him fly for a moment to
recognize an artist at work. Without so much as an extra turn, he came zooming
over the parking garage, spun the copter to the left over the Drop Zone and
began to hover some hundred and fifty feet above the ground.

Outside the
fence, a roar began to rise from the crowd as the quick explained to the dead
what was happening. In the stone confines of the urban canyon, the rotors
slapped the air like many hands driven flat upon the water; the new slaps mixed
with the reverberations to form a single pulsating beat.

I looked
around. All three news teams were standing atop their vans feverishly shooting
film and mouthing copy. The staff had come out from beneath the tents to watch.
Jack, Candace and Hard Hat were backing away from the DZ, moving slowly south
toward the mayor's table and the 4-H'ers beyond the fence. Hard Hat was talking
into the radio. The line of airborne sparks was swollen to a stream as the
moving air pulled an orange plume of fire skyward.

Bales knew what
he was doing. He was as low as he planned to get. The helicopter had barely
begun to hover when the load started steadily toward the ground. The whine of
the winch could be heard above the percussive slapping of the rotors. Bunky was
coming down in a hurry and right on target.

Dixie
was still holding her midriff, but her
eyes were bright as she scanned the area. "Ifs CNN tonight, darlin',"
she enthused.

The pallet was
no more than forty feet from the ground and closing fast when things started to
go haywire. Accounts of what happened next are far more numerous than there
were people on the scene. In the coming weeks, nearly everyone in the Central
Sound area would claim to have been standing in the street when it happened.

The people in
the street saw it first. I was so focused on the descending ton of beef that it
took the collective gasp of several thousand of my fellow creatures to get my
attention. Holy guacamole.

The KING-TV
"Eye In the Sky" chopper was dropping into the picture from the east,
moving down between the buildings, overfilling the crowded piece of sky. Why it
chose to fly so low depends upon who you ask. The pilot later claimed that Lola
had insisted that she wanted to shoot the drop from below and had belittled and
berated him into flying beyond the portals of his better judgment.

Lola, when you
later sorted out her many and often contradictory public utterances concerning
the incident, seemed to be using a variation of the Act of God Defense, in
which she blamed the event on a wide variety of atmospheric and karmic
variables far beyond the ken of mere mortals. The fact that, after the hoopla
had died down, I never again saw her on the tube leads me to believe that upper
management may have viewed things otherwise.

Randall Chung,
the cameraman, refused, on the advice of his attorney, to issue any statement
whatsoever, and I believe his lawsuits, against both Lola and the station are,
to this day, still pending.

The roar was
deafening now. The reporters, still standing on the tops of the vans, had
slipped their mikes under their arms and were using their hands for ear
protectors. The door was off Lola's chopper and I could see her sitting rigid
in the seat, her skirt flapping about her legs, as the copter settled even with
Mike Bales.

~ From my
humble vantage, I imagined the whites of Mike Bales' eyes when he first spotted
the other chopper. He freed his right hand from the stick and waved the copter
frantically off. The winch had stopped. Bunky was still thirty feet from the
ground and turning slowly in a circle. Bales kept waving and pointing upward. I
saw his mouth move as he shouted into his headset. The other chopper inched
lower.

The stream of
fire rising golden from the pit suddenly became a glittering river. The
combined rotor-wash was lifting the fire from the ground. Without willing it
so, I began to reel backward toward the fence. In a great burst of gray, the
barbecue pit delivered up its burned charcoal residue in a single great geyser
of ash and spark.

In an instant,
the TV chopper was enveloped in a cloud of thick gray smoke and burning ash.
The machine began to twirl in a circle, falling lower and moving awkwardly to
the south, toward the cable connecting Mike Bales to his load.

Bales had no
choice but to swing his chopper off to the south, away from the careening Lola
and toward the tallest of the surrounding buildings. With almost a hundred feet
of cable out, the slightest swing of the pallet translated into a violent jerk
to the helicopter. The machine lurched around the sky as Bales fought to stay
directly over his load.

The KING-TV
pilot spun on his tail, wobbled violently a couple of times and regained a
stable hover, waiting for the dense smoke to clear from his cockpit. It was a
hell of a piece of flying by feel. There was no way he could see the
instruments. Later, pictures confirmed that the ball of smoke and ash which had
inundated the cockpit had contained a significant array of superheated
particulates that had left the exposed areas of Lola, the pilot and Randy Chung
with the approximate look and texture of a New York pepper steak.

Mike Bales
hadn't been so lucky. Faced with the prospect of either smashing into one of
the surrounding buildings or crash-landing among the demonstrators, at great
human cost, Bales did the only thing he could. He turned loose his load and
climbed for all he was worth. Although it saved his life, it was otherwise a
most unfortunate combination of actions.

For a brief
moment, just as the cable snicked away, Bunky and his pallet seemed to almost
hover in the air; then, slowly, ever so slowly, the package fell heavily toward
the ground.

As L-O-L-A Lola
would say so many times in the following days, it was only by the grace of God
that nobody was killed.

Bunky hit the
right side of the stage, driving the metal supports into the ground like tent
stakes. In retrospect, I don't think the stage even slowed him down. Poor Bunky
had been reduced to a round mound of ground round.

Slowly, like a
steel cauldron disgorging its white lava ingots, the pan full of fire collapsed
forward, spilling its flaming load upon the ground in a curling wave of molten
slag.