James Burke: A Morning for Flamingos

It was a deer slug, a solid, round piece of lead as thick as the ball of your thumb, and it whanged off a metal barrel just in front of us and ricocheted into the tin wall of the hangar. Tony and I both dove between the barrels at the same time. I heard Boggs eject the spent shell onto the cement and ratchet another into the chamber. Tony was squatted down, breathing hard, his chrome-plated.45 held at an upward angle. I was standing, pressed back against the wall, and I got my.45 out of my fatigue jacket pocket, slid back the receiver, and eased a hollow-point round into the chamber. The men who had been drinking beer and cooking hamburgers at the picnic table had fallen to the floor or piled inside the office below the level of the windows.

Tony tried to look around the side of the barrel, and Boggs fired again, this time a round that was loaded with buckshot. It scoured off the side of the barrel behind us and ripped a pattern of five holes that I could cover with my fingers in the tin wall. Then somebody inside the office started firing with a pistol, probably a revolver, for he let off five rounds that danced all over the concrete; then he stopped to reload. When he did I aimed my.45 with both hands over Tony's head and fired at the office until my palms were numb from the recoil. My ears roared with a sound like the sea, and the breech locked open on the empty clip. The hollow-points blew holes as big as baseballs out of the toppled picnic table and sent triangular panes of glass crashing into the office's interior, but the lower half of the office wall was built of cinderblock, and the hollow-points splintered apart inside the concrete and did no harm to the men on the floor.

My hands were shaking as I pulled out the empty clip and shoved a full one into the.45 's magazine. Tony raked his springlike curls back with his fingers.

"We're seriously fucked," he whispered.

"We wait them out," I said.

"Are you kidding? If Jimmie Lee or one of those other guys gets outside, he can come around behind us and put it to us through the wall. It's a matter of time. I only got this clip. What have you got?"

"You're looking at it."

The skin of his face was dry and tight, his eyes as darkly bright as when he'd been loaded on black speed. He began breathing deeply in his chest, as though he were trying to oxygenate his blood. He looked at the big, round silver tanks of liquid propane that were lined against the adjacent wall.

"No," I said.

"You heard stories about it. But I lived through it, man. The captain called it right in on top of us."

"Don't do it, Tony."

"Bullshit. You got to go out there on the screaming edge. That's the only place to win. You don't know that, you don't know anything."

I wanted to put out my hand, push his gun down toward the floor, somehow in that last terrible moment exorcise the insanity that lived in his soul. Instead, I stared down at him numbly while he pivoted on one knee, aimed at a propane tank, and fired. The automatic leapt upward in his hand, and the round clanged off the top of the tank and hit an iron spar in the wall.

He rested one buttock on his heel, propped his wrist across his knee, lowered his sights, and pulled the trigger again.

This time the round hit the tank dead center and cored a hole in it as cleanly as a machinist's punch. The propane gushed out on the cement, its bright, instant reek like a slap across the face.

His.45 lay on the floor now, and his hands were trembling as he tore a match from a matchbook and folded the cover back from the striker. I could hear the men inside the office moving around on top of the broken glass.

"Tony-," I said. I was pressed back against the wall, between the barrels. The air was thick and wet with the smell of the propane.

"What?" he said.

"Tony-"

"It's the only way, man. You know it."

I touched my religious medal and closed my eyes and opened them again. My heart was thundering against my rib cage.

"Do it," I said.

"Listen, you get out of this and I don't, you keep your fucking promise. You look after my son."

"All right, Tony."

Boggs stepped out wide from behind the Coca-Cola machine and fired a pattern of buckshot that thropped past my ear and blew the top off a metal barrel. It rolled in a circle on the cement. Tony struck the loose match in his hand, touched the other matches with the flame, and flipped the burning folder out into the pool of propane.

The pool burst into white and blue flames; then the fire crawled up the silvery jet of propane squirting from the tank. I heard a window crash on the far side of the Coca-Cola machine, and I heard the men inside the office fighting with one another to get out the office door; but now Tony and I were out from behind the barrels, unprotected, and running for the opening in the hangar door.

The ignition of the propane tanks, the fertilizers, the air itself, was like a bolt of lightning striking inside the building. Through the hangar door I saw the rain falling outside, the sodden fields, the wind ruffling the tree line, then Tony hit me hard on the back and knocked me through the door just as the whole building exploded.

His body was framed against the flash, like a tin effigy silhouetted against a forge. He tumbled across the ground, his clothes smoking, his hair singed and stinking like a burnt cat's. The heat was so intense I couldn't feel the rain on my skin. We stumbled forward, past my pickup, into the field, as Jimmie Lee Boggs floored his van down the two-track road. Behind us, for only a moment, I heard screams inside the fire.

But Tony was not finished yet. He sat down in a puddle of water, his knees pulled up before him, aimed the.45 with both hands, and let off two quick founds. One tore through the van's back panel, but the second spiderwebbed the window in the driver's door and blew out the front windshield. It hung down like a crumpled glass apron, and the van careered off the road, whipping the grass under its bumper, spinning divots of mud from under the tires.

"Suck on that one, Jimmie Lee," Tony said.

The van seemed to slow as it made a wide arc through the field; then it lurched on its back springs as the driver shifted down, righted the wheel, and hit the gas again. The tin sides of the building were white with heat, as though phosphorus were burning inside; then they folded softly in upon themselves, like cellophane being consumed, and the roof crashed onto the cement slab. Boggs's van hit the main dirt road and disappeared into the corridor of trees.

Tony tried to get to his feet, but gave it up and sat back down in the water. His face was drawn and empty and dotted with mud.

"I'm going to leave you and come back for you, Tony. I'm borrowing your piece, too." I took the.45 gingerly from his hand and eased the hammer back down.

He wiped his eyes clear with the back of his wrist and looked up and down my trouser legs. Then his hand felt inside my thigh, almost as though he were molesting me. His mouth shaped itself into a small butterfly, and his eyes roved casually over my face.

"Where's your backup people?" he said.

"I don't know. My guess is, though, they've got the road sealed on each end."

"Yeah, that'd make sense."

"Will you wait for me here?"

"I'm going to start walking back."

"I don't think it'd be good for you to meet the guys in the limo."

"My limo's in the bottom of a pond by now, and those guys are halfway across Lake Pontchartrain." Then he said, "Was Kim in on it?"

"No. I never saw her before I got involved with your people."

"That's good. She's a good kid. Do me a favor, will you?"

"What?"

"Get the fuck away from me."

I didn't answer him. I got in my pickup and followed Jimmie Lee Boggs's sharply etched tire tracks down the dirt road bordered on each side by pine and hackberry trees, and cows that poked through the underbrush and lowed fearfully each time lightning snapped across the sky.