Slow Burn

by G. M. Ford

  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’s 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 particulants 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.

  I grabbed Dixie by the belt and pulled her along with me. Everyone was moving south at top speed, running like game before a brushfire.

  They needn’t have worried. The fire never got that far. Both helicopters roared at full throttle now, moving straight up into the sky, nose to nose, their pinwheel rotors no more than thirty feet apart as they rose above the buildings.

  Below the deafening din of the choppers, Jack’s ton of genuine “don’t weigh a thing” lava rock had been ripped airborne by the violent updraft of heat waves and rotor blades, forming a rapidly rising funnel cone of superheated material swirling around the air like locusts, rising higher, reaching to keep up with the machines, mushrooming far out over its central core. The air around me was suddenly hot and filled with debris; something hit me above the right eye with a sharp, searing pain and then again in the ear.

  I grabbed a tablecloth from a linen cart, threw it over Dixie’s head, and tumbled us both to the ground, where we lay shivering like penitents, bowed beneath a withering hail of small, hot rocks.

  Somewhere in the great beyond, Cotton Mather was grinning. This might not be the exact equivalent of the Old Testament fire and brimstone, but it was close enough for government work.

  “Jumpin’ Jesus!” I heard Dixie yell.

  It ended as suddenly as it had begun. Robbed of the pull of the rotors, the rubble reached the apex of its flight, lost momentum, and then rained quickly back to earth. And to think, the fun was only beginning.

  Jack had been right. Nothing held a heat charge like lava rock. If those little suckers were any cooler coming down than they were going up, you could have fooled those of us who were in attendance that day.

  Acrid smoke began to fill the pocket beneath the tablecloth. I jumped to my feet, hauling Dixie up with me as I went. The act of standing up slid one of the little boogers down between my ankle and my shoe. I screamed and tore at my foot. I wanted desperately to tell Dixie that her hair was on fire, but the agony of my ankle rendered me speechless. I hopped about on one foot, adding my agonized roar to the deafening collage of screams, curses, and shouts that filled the air. The ground around me was littered with smoldering tidbits. Sitting down would involve weeks in intensive care.

  I was screaming through my teeth before I got the shoe off and shook the little red marble to the ground. Dixie stood with her hands to her mouth, watching me without comprehension, small blue flames rising from the top of her head.

  “Jesus, Dixie, your hair’s on fire!” I shouted, looking wildly around for something with water. Dixie knew better. She reached up with her hand, grabbed the blonde mane, and threw it to the ground, where it flared into a fair-sized blaze. For reasons I’ll never understand, Dixie and I stood side by side and stomped at that tawny pelt of flaming follicles as if the future of the race depended on putting the sucker out. Shock, I guess.

  “That was my best hair,” she said as we stood back and admired our melted, smoldering handiwork.

  Behold, the Nagasaki cat.

  I can only speak to what was going on inside the fence. Over the next two weeks, everyone in America probably saw more of the carnage out in the street than I did. Weeks of feature stories milked every drop of coverage from that ten minutes of utter chaos. If I never see that shot of Clarissa Hedgpeth trying to extinguish her faux-fur jacket again, it will be too soon. Or the one of the horse cop jumping his mount over a cowering line of wide-eyed demonstrators. Or the countless shots of what the newspeople came to call the “hotfoot hoedown.” Hell, that one made a fortune for a couple of wily entrepreneurs who later spliced together the best shots. They showed shocked people standing openmouthed in the street, relieved to be alive, the camera catching them just as one of the atomic embers ate through their shoes and into their feet, then adding dance music appropriate to whatever frenzied jig the poor souls danced. For a while there, the direct-mail TV ad for the Hotfoot Hoedown video was on damn near as
often as Dorf Goes Fishing.

  Inside the fence, things were just as bad. Three tents were fully engulfed by flames. Jack and Candace emerged from beneath the mayor’s table, their faces smudged and wondering. Hard Hat peeked out once, but stayed put. Hard to blame him.

  Two figures were running our way. Bart Yonquist, Dixie’s purse still swaying on his arm, skidded to a stop in front of us.

  “Get Dixie out of here,” I said.

  Bart took her by the elbow and trotted her off into the smoke.

  To my left, Rickey Ray had vaulted the scorched earth and was barreling toward Jack and Candace. Jack opened his mouth as if to ask Rickey Ray just where in hell he’d been when the shit hit the fan, but Rickey Ray wasn’t listening. He scooped Candace Atherton into his gnarly arms and hotfooted it back from whence he had come, traveling, if anything, faster than he had on the way in. Even though Bart and Dixie had a ten-yard head start, they finished a fading second through the side door of the restaurant.

  Jack stood dumbfounded for a moment and then wobbled out into the middle of the yard, turning in circles, as if his mind refused to absorb the extent of the devastation. Smoke was beginning to rise from beneath his right foot. I was debating whether to tell him or not when the smell of burning grass pulled my head around.

  The rustic hay bales spread about and on the cattle truck were fully engulfed in flame, burning from the inside out as if embers had been driven directly into their centers. Directly through the fence, the frontmost pile spat and cracked as it gained internal momentum. Above the shimmering heat waves and the smoke, the big rig’s chrome gas cap was still visible.

  I sprinted for the far end of the lot and the gate to the alley. The 4-H contingent was no more than forty yards removed from the front bumper of the truck. If a couple of hundred gallons of diesel fuel went off in their faces, there wasn’t going to be much left.

  Grabbing a metal post to slow my momentum, I whipped myself around the corner and staggered headlong down the alley. Whoever had set out the hay had hung his baling hook from the rearview mirror. I snagged it on the way past, walked all the way beyond the pyre, putting my back to the street, and drove the hook into the side of the uppermost burning bundle. In a single motion, I lifted the bale, got my shoulder behind the handle, and followed all the way through, sailing the bale out over the barricade into the street.

  By the time I repeated the process six more times, the hairs on the back of my hook hand were gone, my right ear was burned shiny, and I had a small fire smoldering in the collar of my shirt. A symphony of sirens now rose above the human roar and the snapping of flames. The air smelled like roasting vegetarians.

  Jack sat astride the linen cart, his shoe in his hand. Across the yard, several fire extinguishers were belching out white clouds of flame retardant. Those tents that had not already been completely consumed were no longer showing flames. The sirens grew closer. I leaned back against the truck and took a deep breath. And the truck moved. Not a little, a lot. As if shaken on its springs by some giant hand. And again the big rig shook, rocking from side to side on its springs. And then the sound of rushing air, and it rocked from front to back.

  The street was filled with flashing lights and hoarse cries. I walked to the rear of the trailer, grabbed the handles on the ramp with both hands, and backed up until the ramp dropped into its notches.

  I dropped the ramp and went up the incline to the door, pulled the handle over and up, and, using both hands, rolled the door up and open.

  The big fella still had the chalk marks on his beautiful black hide. He didn’t like the smoke or the sirens one bit. His nostrils were flaring and his big brown eyes rolled in his head. I grabbed the dangling end of the lead and said, “Bunky, my man, I think we best be getting you the hell out of here.” I don’t care what anybody says, he knew what I meant.

  He must have, because he followed me down the ramp and out into the alley like a house-trained dog. His big black hooves clopped on the cement as we walked up the alley together. When we came abreast of Jack, I pointed to the bull in wonder.

  “Bunky,” I said.

  “Damn right,” said the Jackster, massaging his foot.

  “Paid over three hundred grand for that bag of guts; you didn’t really think I was gonna eat him, did ya? Kerriiist. The Jackalope ain’t crazy, ya know.”

  I decided not to tell him his wallet was smoking.

  I heard a joke once; the premise was that Heaven was getting so overcrowded that only those people whose last day on earth had also been the worst day of their entire lives could be admitted. On the first day of the new policy, Saint Peter spent the morning rejecting every applicant and then broke for a noon bite.

  When he returned from lunch, three guys were in line. The first fellow stepped up. Saint Peter says, “Okay, what’s your story?”

  The guy says, “I was sure my wife was having an affair, so I snuck home early from work one day. There she was, in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, looking guilty. I searched the apartment like a madman, high and low, but he wasn’t there. Then, just out of luck, I looked out the window, and there he was, hanging from my downstairs neighbor’s fire escape. I ran in, got my ball-peen hammer, climbed down, and beat his fingers. He fell, but some shrubbery broke his fall, and he wasn’t dead. I was still so crazy I ran back up, grabbed the refrigerator, and threw it down on him. It killed him, but carrying a refrigerator was too much for my heart, and I dropped dead.”

  Saint Peter is moved. “That’s really terrible” he says. “Go on. You can go in.”

  The next guy stepped up.

  “Let’s hear it,” says Saint Peter.

  “You won’t believe this,” the guy says. “I’m on my fire escape working out one afternoon. I’m doing some chinups to build upper-body strength when all of a sudden my upstairs neighbor comes running down the stairs with a hammer. He starts pounding on my fingers. I fall, but get lucky and land on some bushes. I’m just lying there, thanking the Lord I’m not dead, when next thing I know, I look up and there’s a refrigerator coming at me. It broke my neck.”

  Saint Peter is again moved, and the man is admitted to Heaven.

  When the third guy stepped up, Saint Peter says, “Whatever you’ve got to tell me better be real good.”

  The guy leans in close.

  “Okay, Peter,” he says. “Picture this. I’m hiding naked in a refrigerator…”

  The search warrant was the refrigerator of my day. I limped up the ninth-floor corridor toward my room with the hole in my sock exposing a seeping burn the size of a quarter, an ear which had already begun to blister, and a fifty-dollar Ralph Lauren pullover with half the collar burned off. I’d been subjected to fire and brimstone, and was in all likelihood going to appear prominently in tomorrow’s morning editions, leading a bull down Marion Street on a leash. It was a sight which I personally find somewhat lacking in the kind of hard-bitten image I generally prefer to cultivate. My hopes to save a modicum of media attention for my client had been an abject failure. After this afternoon’s rain of fire, Le Cuisine Internationale would be lucky to make the travel section. I’d been prodded, deposed, medically inspected, had my grievous injuries declared minor, been unable to extricate my car from the worst traffic jam in Seattle history, and thusly forced to walk back to the hotel, where I find, taped to my door, a search warrant authorizing the SPD to pillage my hotel room. Not only that, but they’d left the place a mess. Is that a Kelvinator I see coming down? Frost-free? Automatic ice maker?

  The red numbers on the digital clock said it was 3:23 in the afternoon. I could have sworn it was later; I felt like I’d been on a three-day binge. I pushed the door toward closed, walked across the room, and sat down on the foot of the bed. I braced my hands behind me on the bed and leaned back into a stretch; I yawned and rolled my neck. A cramp began to tense one of the muscles in my lower back, so I lay all the way down on the bed and put my hands behind my head. I yawned again.

  I was han
ging from that fire escape, moving from hand to hand as my upstairs neighbor beat my fingers to jelly. Bang bang bang…

  The clock read 5:50, I was in a strange room, and somebody was beating on the door. It seems simple enough now, but it took me a full minute to put it together. As the door swung open, I remembered I hadn’t closed it all the way. I rose. It was Rowcliffe.

  “I hope I’ve not disturbed you, sir,” he said.

  “No, no,” I said. “Come in.”

  He stood with one foot in the room and the other in the hall.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “It’s Sir Geoffrey.”

  “What happened?”

  “The authorities have taken him.”

  “Taken him where?”

  “Down to that same room above the lobby, I believe.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “Because he would not go willingly.”

  Probably didn’t like the entrée.

  “Why not?”

  Rowcliffe told me. At about ten this morning, a herd of SPD officers descended upon the hotel, served their warrants, and proceeded to search Sir Geoffrey’s quarters, the Del Fuego suite, and the Meyerson suite. “They appear to have been here as well,” he commented.

  “They need work on their housekeeping,” I said.

  “They left a frightful mess. Sir Geoffrey was livid.”

  “And then later, they asked him to come downstairs?”

  “He was practicing his speech for this evening.”

  “And he refused to go.”

  “Yes, sir. They threatened to load him on a baggage pram if he refused to locomote.”

  I’d pay Sonics ticket prices to see that one.

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Less than ten minutes.”

  “What can I do?”

  “I fear he is sufficiently incensed to do something unfortunate.”

  “And you want me to crash the party and make sure he’s not filling the air with vitriolic oaths?”