Flying Hero Class (11 page)

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.”

“There are little folk dance troupes all over the world. They perform in church halls and attract polite if befuddled applause. Weren't you surprised when this one drew all that fuss, Mr. McCloud? All that support? All those limousines?”

“There weren't limousines. That's journalistic excess.”

“But such a fuss!” Taliq insisted. “Did the Micmac or the Sioux ever cause such a furor?”

“They're very good,” said McCloud of the Barramatjara. “They're absolutely compelling, for God's sake. And they do the painting as well. And I suppose on top of that they might have novelty value.”

“Oh, I see,” said Taliq, laughing without feigning it, “the curious savages, what? But I agree with you. They have great novelty. For one thing, they sit on diamond fields untainted by apartheid! That augments their novelty immensely.”

It was apparent now: Taliq did believe that Francis McCloud was a stooge, an agent of international deceit.

“Do you know what?” the Palestinian asked him gently. “You will become anxious for punishment. Believe me. I can tell that. You already know about yourself what we have just discovered.”

McCloud knew that if, within, he accepted Taliq's shrewd dictum, he was finished.

“I am guilty of vanity and stupidity,” he cried out, and for once it was not his all-too-familiar mea culpa. “But I would never knowingly dupe them. They're my friends, for God's sake! I sought them out because I was impressed by what they did, I wrote articles about them. I'm aware of the ironies of their situation, yes. But I contributed in a small way to their renown.”

Within three minutes, though, McCloud had—at Taliq's order—divested himself of his outer clothing, his watch, and his shoes and was kneeling in the aisle behind Cale and within his sour ambience.

When Taliq left the compartment, and the boy Hasni—who had returned from delivering the dancers upstairs—was distracted, Cale muttered over his shoulder, “You know why they're doing this to us?”

“No,” said McCloud.

Cale said, “Because it works.”

McCloud wondered what the beautiful Nakamura thought of his legs, gone a little flaccid from three sedentary years of novel writing, and of his flesh pallid, he was sure, with fear. But this question was small by comparison with the truth of what Cale had muttered: that it was all working. He felt in his mouth the salt of condemnation. Like a child cornered by older and more mysterious children, he was sure he gave off a sour musk of punishability. He wanted to urinate, and this only seemed to compound his blame.

If the news report was correct, he thought, then the Barramatjara Dance Troupe had been badly used. He too was aware of having meanly used them in passing, as a vehicle to bring his novel to New York. It might have been better if he had been the agent of malice Taliq thought him to be. His villainy would have given him more to resist Taliq with. His mere opportunism seemed despicable, left him without the sort of saving anger which tightens the musculature of the thorough-going miscreant.

He knew the Barramatjara would be lenient on him. The Barramatjara were gone, however. On their final migration. Upstairs.

CHAPTER FOUR:

Marsupial Rat

The ancestors of the Barramatjara came to the Australian desert some ice ages past across the shallow-bedded pools and spits of land which once connected parts of New Guinea and Indonesia to the great southern continent. Once, so long ago that it was not even referred to in their vivid mythic accounts of the Barramatjara beginnings, they had lived along a northern tropical coast. But unrecorded pressure from other immigrants arriving behind them, or else some forgotten voice of the kind which drove the Israelites into Sinai or sent the Anasazi Indians out of their fine cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, compelled them a thousand miles southwards into the deserts.

The Barramatjara, anyhow, unlike historians, did not believe they originated anywhere but in the Barramatjara desert country. They believed indeed that they had always occupied that place, with its unexpected charms and bounties. Their ancestors had hand-made it for them, sometimes through robust folly, sometimes through dazzling style and wisdom. For the Barramatjara ancestors displayed all the human qualities.

The people reenacted the earth-compounding journeys of their ancestors through dance and ceremonial and ocher sand paintings. Their dance and their paintings were liturgy and a kind of physics, a remaking of the eternal earth the ancestors had given them.

But perhaps five years past, as the program notes of the dance troupe announced, a white teacher came to the Barramatjara settlement called Baruda and persuaded some of the men to combine the painting and the dance into a remarkable one-day entertainment for city people.

The dancer/depictors began by touring the universities. They became a rage. Soon they were performing in theaters in Adelaide, Melbourne, in natural amphitheaters in Sydney. There, one lotus-eating summer's evening, Pauline and McCloud and the two children, equipped with picnic basket, iced orange juice, and chardonnay, saw the Barramatjara Dance Troupe perform.

The ancestors had combined human and animal characteristics, sometimes at the one time, sometimes serially, now man, now totem creature. Whitey and the lads had caught from the ancestors therefore a startling gift for animal mimicry, to a degree which transcended imitation and nudged at the edges of metamorphosis.