Flying Hero Class Read online

  Before the force of her continuing contempt, Yusuf smiled behind his seducer’s mustache. McCloud felt a sudden improper pity for him. If the Plastique was not detonated, he, Yusuf, more than anyone else on the plane apart from his brothers, had such a strong statistical chance of becoming a casualty. For it was established, he’d read somewhere, that the death rate among the inflictors of terror was—in relation to those they imposed terror on—very high. And like Hasni in the rear of the aircraft, Yusuf was just a child, overarmed, overinformed of the past, instilled with awesome motives, and yet ecstatic at any attention at all from a woman of Daisy Nakamura’s compelling presence.

  “You know how to make me walk,” said Yusuf. “But you won’t make Taliq walk. Let me tell you, women are hypnotized by that guy Taliq.”

  “I can’t wait, sonny,” said Daisy. “Meanwhile, why not let these gentlemen kneeling here sit in their seats? They’re not going anywhere.”

  Yusuf did not answer but smiled. A lustful boy content to leave the conquests to an older man. A brother, as Hasni put it.

  Hasni, the polite reader of newsmagazines, appeared in the compartment. He spoke to Yusuf in Arabic. Yusuf went to the front of the compartment and ordered Whitey Wappitji, principal dancer, to stand up and move down the aisle.

  McCloud, his hams trembling, stood up as a manager should and blocked Whitey’s passage.

  “Where are you taking my friend Mr. Wappitji?” he asked Yusuf.

  “It’s okay,” said Whitey with that long-browed, lean-featured authority which was his forte—a Barramatjara characteristic, in fact, of which he and Tom Gullagara were the main exponents among the dancers. “It’s cool, Frank.”

  He’d picked up that “cool” from lighting and other technicians at the Mark Taper in Los Angeles, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, at the Lincoln Center in New York. It wasn’t his usual idiom. He gave a slow, solemn wink, but it was more than the normal insider’s rictus. It was a command.

  “You just look after yourself, Frank,” he advised McCloud. “See, I think we’re all jake with this mob.…” He nodded toward Yusuf. “I’m not so sure everyone else is.”

  Look after yourself, mate … we’re all jake. The oddments of Australian English Whitey had picked up working on cattle stations in his youth. No doubt a flash horseman, a real gun, as all the tribespeople of the central and western deserts of Australia had a reputation for being.

  Having barely seen a horse before 1900, the Barramatjara had at first considered the horseman and the beast one animal. In the spirit of that first sighting—which was after all within living memory—when they rode they became in turn the one, rhythmic animal. “Flash horseman,” they said. “Gun rider.” The sublimest praise.

  But what was the texture of the Barramatjara tongue itself? McCloud knew only occasional words. He had heard of Malu the Kangaroo Ancestor. He knew from Bluey that badunjari were journeys taken in sleep or in trance, and that Bluey was plagued by a form of badunjari as others might be by migraine. He knew from casual conversation that djimari was a knife, and that redjabu was their name for Baruda, the central Barramatjara settlement.

  But these were oddments, and he could only guess how much better the Barramatjara language, after such a long residence in the desert, fitted the Barramatjara earth than the most plenteous and rich of English might. For English, Portuguese, or French or any other come-lately tongue, McCloud surmised, must be a very loose tool to apply to the Australian deserts.

  If only Wappitji had that subtle option to talk to Taliq in, instead of the few tokens, the few loose spanners and wrenches of English which were spoken in remotest Australia! How would “jake with this mob” come up in Barramatjara, if you had the gift to see Barramatjara from the inside? That was something on which they’d never given McCloud any intimation. Nor, though they were members of a waning language group, had they ever expressed aloud to him a sense of loss or a reproach.

  Wappitji and Yusuf passed McCloud and went upstairs. Hasni was left. His eyes met McCloud’s. They were as young as Yusuf’s but lacking in Yusuf’s sensual ambition. Hasni was in a way beautiful—he had the sort of translucent, spiritual, and epicene Arab beauty which, according to latest word on the matter, had excited T. E. Lawrence.

  He said, “Your wife is well and tells you not to worry.”

  After all the threats of the past quarter hour, and even with Cale kneeling half-naked and flaccid in the aisle, McCloud became suffused with a dangerous gratitude toward this clear-faced young man. He chose to fight it just the same.

  “Thank you. Would you let her join me here?”

  Hasni smiled painfully. You could see in the smile that he was wound up tightly like Yusuf. Yet at the same time he seemed to cherish the vanity of being thought the considerate hijacker.

  “Well, if not that,” said McCloud, “tell her to take care of herself and sit still and wait. You can’t disapprove of that advice.”

  “No, that is our advice to everyone. Except for those who must kneel.”

  “Is that necessary? Surely they can sit?…”

  “No, they can’t. And you know why?” Hasni was shaking his head didactically. “They’re kneeling to show they’re separate from the rest of you. Okay? You understand that?”

  “We understand it all right,” said McCloud. He took the chance of saying, “It’s exactly what some of us guessed would happen.”

  Hasni did not like that. He had a young zealot’s sudden onset of lack of humor. “Make shrewd guesses all you want, Mr. McCloud. You won’t keep up with us. You won’t keep up with Taliq, anyhow.”

  The radio at his hip began to chirp among his leather-pouched grenades; sufficient there for mayhem or a violent siege.

  Hasni lifted the instrument and punched a button. McCloud couldn’t stop himself flinching, on the chance that some electrical quirk set off the Plastique in the hold. Hasni listened to the thing with a frown, made an answer, and returned the radio to his belt. He went to the front seat and ordered Bluey Kannata to stand up, then Mungina the didj player and Philip Puduma, the balding Christian dancer. Next he leaned across McCloud’s lap and gestured that Tom Gullagara should stand up, too.

  “Excuse me, mate,” said Tom Gullagara, rising and passing into the aisle. He looked wary, and McCloud could see he was being brave. He didn’t know what any of this separating out meant. He was sure, though, that they had the power to do it.

  McCloud half stood in his seat. “We are a dance troupe. I’m the manager appointed at the request of the dancers.” That was very nearly the truth. “Where they go, I have to go, too.”

  “No,” said Hasni. Even in refusal, he showed some of that American college-boy courtliness. “You are not to come, sir. They have been under your management too long.”

  “They haven’t been under my management, as you put it. But they are prodigiously talented people, and I’m responsible for their convenience and well-being.”

  Except of course when Pauline took all that over and he, McCloud, became merely a counselor and boozing companion.

  Hasni held up a hand. “No. You have no responsibility. Not anymore. Didn’t you ever question whether they are capable of being responsible for themselves?”

  “They are responsible. But someone has to order transportation from the airport to the hotel to the venue. Do you want them to have to do all that and dance as well?”

  Bluey Kannata drew level with McCloud. “You’re not coming, too, Frank?”

  “They say not.”

  “Jesus, mate. Who’ll pour the beer?”

  And Bluey, movie star and dancer, laughed in his uproarious, brittle way. He was no more afraid than he might usually be. No more bewildered than when he won Best Actor at the Toronto Film Festival or when his film won the Golden Palm at Cannes. No more in trepidation than when he was plagued with badunjari dream journeys or believed that his uncle had been fatally cursed.

  As McCloud watched the Barramatjara Dance Troupe ascending toward Taliq
, he believed that for the moment they were in danger from nothing but rhetoric. Though Gullagara and Wappitji might regularly shake hands and make deals with politicians, though their profound gaze might compel and alter the crassest parliamentarian, they were not used to fitting their daily arguments to the language of twentieth-century revolutions. They were going upstairs, therefore, to be given these new implements of discourse, this lexicon of insurrection. Taliq would imbue them with the jargon, and although God knew they had grounds to be revolutionaries, it would all be unfamiliar terminology to them. They would sit mutely and politely while the words were cast like dice—the international proletariat, the Zionist conspirators, the imperialist cartel. As they had sat mutely while the cattlemen dealt them terms like flash, guns, cleanskin cattle, and taught them to expect that everything would be jake.

  There was a chance, surely, that one or two of the dancers might find in the terminology of Taliq’s revolution a weapon or a device by which to unleash the fury they should—McCloud assured himself he would be the first to acknowledge it!—feel.

  Yet it didn’t seem credible of these laughing cowboys and stars of the dance. The greater danger was probably that Taliq would take their silent and customary politeness as a rejection and an insult.

  In the absence of the dancers, McCloud hungered even more to see Pauline, who was—in her own sense—dispossessed. Though her birthright had not been stolen by any nation, by anyone who owned a jet, her parents had nonetheless been forced forth from their accustomed track. She too had been a marked child and a child of exile. Maybe not, however, sufficient for her to be taken upstairs—to Taliq’s zone of kindness and instruction—with the dancers!

  And then handsome Taliq returned. As he stood over Daisy Nakamura, he held a color magazine in his hand, one of the glossy American weeklies.

  “Madam,” he said, “you must forgive what happened earlier. Events move very quickly and often in a confused manner.” Again he put a hand gently, stylishly, over Daisy’s wrist. It was an older man’s performance of the same gesture Yusuf had tried on her earlier. “We are living at a terrible pace,” he sighed.

  “Yes,” said Daisy, giving nothing. “I’d guess about five hundred miles an hour.”

  “Come, come,” said the chief hijacker in his old-fashioned British style. “You know what I mean.”

  He increased the minor pressure. His hand was large and at the same time militant and subtle.

  “Oh dearie, Mr. Taliq,” said Daisy. She was frowning. “How did you get into this business?”

  “Madam, if we are delayed by other parties and suffer their prevarications, you may have the leisure to discover that.”

  They all talked like that, McCloud noticed. They liked to pretend that what they were doing was the equivalent of any other exacting profession.

  Taliq withdrew his hand from Daisy’s wrist, patted her shoulder deftly with the rolled magazine in his other hand, and turned then to McCloud.

  “Mr. McCloud,” he said. There was a certain reproof in his voice, but it sounded beneficent. “You must read this. The Zionist press itself. Did you think it published nothing but praise for the dancers? This item condemns you. Not me, but you.”

  He thrust the magazine, opened at a given page, into McCloud’s hands. A childish nausea rose in McCloud. Taliq could have been a teacher handing back a sloppy essay and demanding that it be exposed with all its gaps to the whole class.

  “Go on,” Taliq urged him. “Take your time and read it.”

  In the middle of the print he noticed a color photograph of the Barramatjara Dance Troupe in midchoreography. Whitey was center stage, a startling figure, his breast marked with diagonals of white-and-ocher lightning, his midriff streaked with waves of white. His left knee was bent and raised, and his left foot tucked in above the joint of the right leg. In both hands he held bunches of eagle feathers. In this potent photograph, metamorphosis—man to bird—seemed only an instant away.

  In the same picture Phil the Christian, armed with a spear, stalked Whitey from the perimeter of the stage, and Paul Mungina crouched, cheeks inflated, in the act of making the didj wail. The caption read, BARRAMATJARA DANCE TROUPE—WHO’S PAYING THE PIPER?

  “I haven’t seen this article before,” McCloud stated.

  “Today’s edition, Mr. McCloud,” said Taliq. “Copies would have just made it to the aircraft. A misfortune for you, though the dancers are praised in the review pages. But read!”

  There was also a photograph of Bluey Kannata in one of his film roles—a grinning antediluvian cowboy on a horse. One being. Gun rider.

  The article began by listing the various indices of the dance troupe’s New York success. A reception at Lincoln Center, frenzied acclamation in The New York Times. A seminar at the Juilliard, a welcoming from the city’s mayor, and limousines all the way.

  McCloud felt the normal inside reader’s pulse of irritation at these last two items. There had been few limousines, simply the rented van about whose parking Gullagara had asked the meter question. And the embattled mayor had not appeared but had delegated instead his cultural commissar to make a small speech of greeting. McCloud irrationally resolved to remember these falsehoods and bring them up at the right moment. They might be able to be used as a defense, when he knew what it was he was to defend himself against.

  But was the success and renown of the Barramatjara Dance Troupe a spontaneous phenomenon? the article asked. Or had it been engineered? An Australian leftist politician whose name McCloud dimly knew had claimed in the Australian Parliament in Canberra that the CIA had an interest in the Barramatjara traditional ground in the Australian desert. They had made an “as yet secret proposal” to build a satellite tracking and communications station there, on Barramatjara freehold earth. The politician had wondered whether the great dance tour was merely a means of softening up the elders, some of whom were members of the troupe.

  It was, the politician in Canberra argued, an outrage to people of this ancient, gifted race to keep them ignorant of the satellite station plan and at the same time fete them in America.

  But it was not only the CIA who were pursuing a secret agenda, the politician had asserted. The second-largest diamond driller in the world, a company named Highland Pegasus, had discovered a potential industrial diamond field on the western edge of the Barramatjara land. Although the Barramatjara people had given permission for the drilling, the results were being kept from them, and one of the most influential Barramatjara leaders, a man named Whitey Wappitji, had—at a crucial time—been neutralized by his membership in the touring dance troupe. When Highland Pegasus had announced its find, Mr. Wappitji and his lieutenant, Tom Gullagara, had been as far from Barramatjara country as both the CIA and Highland Pegasus could have wished. Both instrumentalities, said the politician, turning ironic, would have preferred an Arctic tour for the dance troupe, but New York wasn’t a bad alternative.

  McCloud was familiar with the fact that Highland Pegasus was a sponsor of the tour. Their name appeared discreetly in the list of sponsors on the inner back page of the dance program. A memorable name, with its overtones of kilts, claymores, and flying horses, even though third or fourth in a small-print roster.

  McCloud looked up at Taliq, who drew on a cigarette and watched him with an aquiline intent, waiting for a confession of movement in his face.

  I am trussed and delivered up guilty, McCloud thought.

  Despite the growth of peaceful intentions on earth, the Americans seemed to like the deserts of Australia. They went to them to build white domes from which the passage of satellites across the firmament could be measured. From sky-eyes governed by the decisions of men sitting in bunkers in the center of the continent, the emissions of rocket firings in China and Central Asia could be read. The mail of a dangerous cosmos.

  So he had heard of the CIA and their yen for Australian wildernesses. But when it came to Highland Pegasus, he didn’t even know what they did for a living. He had had no idea
that they had taken a mining lease on Barramatjara ground. The entire continent of Australia was covered with an invisible grid of mining leases. But, of course, his ignorance might be the point Taliq was pushing. Or perhaps Taliq thought him an accomplice in this plot to do with satellites and mining, an officer of the conspiracy!

  McCloud had an impulse to say to Taliq, “All I wanted to do was to come to New York and sell my novel.” But he knew at once how blameworthy that would sound. Not only that, he understood—beneath Taliq’s gaze—how blameworthy it was.

  He temporized and went back to the text of the magazine article. When he could no longer pretend to be reading, he raised his eyes again, expecting once more to meet Taliq’s avian stare. In fact, though, Taliq’s attention had moved back to Daisy Nakamura.

  In the aisle, the kneeling Cale held the index and middle fingers of his right hand together and waved them in the air, like a man invoking luck. The luck, that is, of an attraction growing between Daisy and Taliq.

  “Is something a problem?” Daisy asked the hijacker.

  “You do not understand us, madam?” said Taliq. “It is the same as with the other passengers. We don’t seem real to you.”

  Daisy closed her eyes for a time before opening them and staring ahead. “Mr. Taliq, let me say you seem real enough. You’ve got two guys kneeling in their Fruit of the Looms in the aisle. That’s real real in my book.”

  Cale shook his head, as if he wished Daisy would take a softer line.

  “Yes,” said Taliq softly. “You pay attention to what we do. But you can’t understand why it’s done.”

  Yet he smiled so jovially at her that McCloud felt a curious envy. She was not being handed press reports which confirmed her culpability.

  Now he turned back to McCloud again.

  “Well, Mr. McCloud? How is your reading?”

  “I know nothing about any of this,” said McCloud, handing the magazine back to Taliq. “If I had known, I wouldn’t have traveled with the troupe.”