Flying Hero Class (10 page)

And Taliq put his ruined, cigarette-holding hand on McCloud's wrist and was so close for a moment that McCloud could smell his musk again, the after-shave and the gamy redolence of his strength of purpose.

Cale did not speak, and Taliq lifted his hand, which had held both Daisy's wrist and McCloud's, and left the compartment. In his wake, McCloud watched Cale scratching his armpit. He felt intimately connected to the man. Cale wore a most unmuscular undergarment, what the English called a vest and the Australians a singlet. His underpants were linen and voluminous, not athletic at all but unexpectedly pristine. Kneeling, he looked like a fat boy under punishment in a boarding school. But not a vulnerable fat boy. A dangerous one who dreamed up humiliations for the staff.

Terrified at the risks he had already taken, McCloud felt tears prick his eyes for his potentially orphaned children—the Boy and the Girl. Waking to be told the news, or being called out of class to receive it.

He'd thought earlier of himself in the mass of passengers, and—though they had primacy among all other children—of them as sharing somehow in the communal anxieties of the mass of passengers' children. But he had deliberately brought himself to Taliq's attention. He had been for a time and in a sense Taliq's preeminent passenger and so Taliq's preeminent candidate for a bullet. Again, he knew well, having written about it for the past three years, how oddities of event altered a child. He and Pauline had both been children of sudden and yet not outrageous or particularly memorable oddities of direction. How much more would his children be marred if they became hijack orphans!

Was it possible, too, McCloud asked himself, that Pauline was taking risks with Hasni at the rear of the plane?

The lights remained on after Taliq had gone. An unacknowledged day prevailed beyond the windows. McCloud exchanged a tight smile with Daisy Nakamura the Arizonan. Yusuf seemed to notice it. For he walked down the aisle and stood above Daisy. Some minutes before he had been ready to execute her, so there was a certain unreality, McCloud thought, about his sudden air of Levantine charmer.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked her pleasantly.

“I'm a widow, son,” she said. “And you wouldn't believe it, but I'm old enough to be your mother.”

“You are a very beautiful woman,” said Yusuf, shy and assertive at the same time. His hips trembled. If she'd been at a cafe table, he would have done a little seducer's dance around it.

“Son, let me say … I don't turn on for men with automatic weapons,” said Daisy Nakamura, unyielding.

In Yusuf's eyes there appeared something between anger and regret. Closer to regret, however, than to the other.

“Like any soldier in a total war,” he said, “I am under orders. Does this mean I have no finer feelings? Ma'am, all of us, my brothers and I … we are all men of sensitive emotions and educational ambitions. We would all be richer if we forgot our people and became doctors and engineers and lived in San Diego, and sent an occasional sentimental donation to those who are fighting the battle. Right? And then we would not have had to take jet planes over. Right? And wave automatic weapons at beautiful women.”

Daisy shook her head, but with an expression of lenient reproof even McCloud in his anxiety found charming. It was as if she were lumping Yusuf's behavior with all the other male mysteries, all the cowboy perversities of Budapest, all the crassness, drinking, whoring, and telling of lies.

Yusuf of course could sense at once he might be partially forgiven, though Daisy said nothing.

“It's sad the world does not let me take the normal course, ma'am. I would rather drink brandy with you than meet you like this. But my family is a family without a home and a nation. We once had a home, in Jaffa, where my grandfather is buried. What sort of man would I be if I forgot that? I would be untrue to his memory if I did not carry arms.”

“Oh Jesus!” Cale said from his position on the floor, though Yusuf did not seem to hear him.

“My grandfather's buried in an internment camp in the Rockies,” said Daisy Nakamura with a small shake of her shoulders. How exquisitely adamant she was. “You don't find me threatening to shoot people aboard aircraft.”

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!