Flying Hero Class (15 page)

McCloud felt grateful to Cale for making him feel less ill-starred.

But Cale—like the press he stood for—could not help himself taking with one hand what he'd given with the other. “And what if the article had appeared while you were still wowing them at Lincoln Center?” he asked. “I mean to say, Brother McCloud, wouldn't there have been the risk of what we might call ‘industrial action'?”

“If I'd seen the article first, I would have brought it to the troupe's attention.” It sounded a pompous claim. But it was the truth and should be permitted to stand. “They would have then discussed it amongst themselves. They're not political innocents, but they might have sought my opinion out of politeness. Then they would have voted on whether they wanted to go on with the tour. It would have been a powerful gesture indeed if they'd canceled their Frankfurt performances. It would have had powerful reverberations.”

“For you, too, mate,” Cale observed.

“No. My loyalty's to them. I'm not in this for my career!”

“Oh,” said Cale. “Independent wealth?”

“Independent ambitions,” McCloud explained. “I'm trying to become a novelist.”

“Oh, mate,” murmured Cale. “That's not a career. That's the last card in the bloody pack!” He shivered. “Christ, I could do with a cigarette now! Do you mean to say you wouldn't have told them the show must go on?”

“No. I wouldn't. For a start, it wouldn't have worked.”

“But you might have tried hard,” Cale persisted, still like the journalist he was and not from any animus. “For all we know, you might have been offered some inducements up front. By the interested parties, I mean.”

“I hadn't been,” said McCloud. “And if I had, it wouldn't have worked with the dancers.”

“But Taliq thinks they've already got to you, son. The parties of corruption!”

“Then he's bloody well wrong.” Again he had a sense that his life might depend upon his believing that with an absolute belief. Believing it himself. For he knew there was no skepticism, not even Cale's or Taliq's, as great as his own.

Cale had become thoughtful. “Do you know, our best hopes are in that little Nip tart in the green dress? That's the level of sensitivity of these chaps. At least two of them have done their balls over Miss Japan.”

“She's not Japanese,” McCloud said. “She's an American citizen, in fact.”

“Oh, that makes all the difference. But seriously, if Miss Japan would only come good for them, this business might end happily. She could become the intercessor, a not unlikely role for her.”

“Or else,” said Stone, “they'd turn her head around. The way they've done to that woman who started spitting at you, Mr. Cale. And she'd become mean as hell then. Maybe it's not a bad thing if she stays aloof for a while.”

“I suppose you'd need a computer programmed with Psychopar before you could tell?” Cale asked, making a joky mouth at McCloud.

“A computer programmed with Psychopar would certainly be a help,” said Stone.

“In any case,” said McCloud, “it's up to her. And she doesn't seem to want to. Her message is that she's got her standards.”

“That's why she wears a dress like that,” said Cale.

Stone seemed to ally himself, against the background of massed electrical fuses, with Cale. “She's certainly got bargirl manners. Reminded me of old times in Saigon. Nice body. And it might work if she put out for some of them and not for the rest. Split them apart, maybe. Make them resentful of each other.”

McCloud was unwilling to let go of the question. Obscurely, he felt that his honor was intertwined with Daisy Nakamura's. “If our salvation depends on Mrs. Nakamura fucking Taliq,” he told them, “then we're really in a mess.”

Cale and Stone exchanged looks, agreed to agree tacitly with each other and move on.

There was silence, but one full of thought. At last Cale said, “These Abos of yours? Do you think the boys upstairs will manage to condition them?”

“Condition them?”

“Turn them against us. Make them radicals.”

“No. I mean, they know how to talk to politicians and confuse them a bit. But they're not political ideologues. They don't use slogans at all. Besides, they're very loyal to their friends.”

“Ah,” said Cale. “But they may by now have seen the article and changed their mind about friendship.”

“I can't see that happening,” McCloud insisted.

Cale anyhow treated the answer with the same skepticism he'd shown at the idea that Daisy Nakamura might not be willing to accommodate hijackers en masse. “Let's take off these damn signs,” he suggested.

They removed their placards and began to stack them at the aft end of the compartment, behind McCloud's back.

McCloud said, “Why don't we sit on the bloody things?”

“A capital idea,” said Cale.

They stood and lined the hard steel floor with their sentences. Cale settled himself on the laid-out cardboard. So did Stone. McCloud would still not come to terms with this steel hole, however, and he stayed on his haunches, his flesh itching with the cold.

Lightly, Cale said, “You realize this is to be a show trial and that at least one of us is meant to be shot. Our crimes are not the point. The shamefulness of the West is the bloody point.”

They played with this idea: the West's shame and their part in it.

“I bet conditions are more comfortable,” murmured McCloud, “up where Taliq has the dancers.”

He almost said
my
dancers.

CHAPTER SIX:

Singing the Book

Apart from Tom Gullagara's reference in Baruda to bauxite mining in the north, there had also been more than a mention of it one afternoon in New York, early in the tour. Memory of this came bitterly to McCloud as he sat trembling in the cold air of the electrical compartment, listening to Cale expatiate on the psychology of terrorists, the subject on which he had written so plentifully and which he couldn't leave alone.

As McCloud had told Daisy earlier, the Barramatjara Dance Troupe on tour did not have ordinary rehearsals. They had in a way been rehearsing for millennia. They had no one to direct them in the use of each stage they encountered on their tour. There was no one to say, “You're bunching,” or, “Paul, you should move upstage behind Bluey at this point.” McCloud himself was certainly not competent to give such advice. Happily, the Barramatjara had a natural skill in—as an American watching them said—“relating to their space.”

But they did need technical run-throughs and to familiarize themselves for an hour or so with the stage.

It was during one of these lighting and stage rehearsals, when the dance troupe was learning something of the newly presented space they were to perform in at Lincoln Center the following night, that the matter of mining came up.

A New York director, who had been hired especially for the day to take the dance troupe through their cues, stood at the front of the stage yelling instructions and, through a radio, asking for guidance from the lighting director high in his booth at the back of the theater.

The dance troupe were dispersed around the stage in their street clothes. Tomorrow at noon they were intended to start painting the publicly accessible representation of the Two Brothers at Wirgudja, which as Cowboy Tom had suggested in Baruda would make the whole audience
relatives
. The troupe would, before tomorrow night, produce the design around which the dance would be performed.

Now, as the lights changed, the director advised them on the various “bridging” positions necessary for making the transition from one dance segment to another.

Whereas in the dances themselves, in their balletic and dramatic content, the Barramatjara were their own directors and choreographers.

The technical rehearsal was two-thirds over when McCloud became aware that Bluey Kannata had begun to weep on stage.

He was very quiet about it at first, not making any sobbing noises. But then he became louder, and the director went to him and asked him, with a peculiarly theatrical Manhattan concern, what was worrying him.

Philip Puduma had also moved to Bluey and stood by frowning, discerning—with his double lens of Christian- and Barramatjara-hood—the demons at work on Bluey.

The others kept their positions, looking obliquely at their colleague, discreetly embarrassed by him. The noise of Bluey's distress grew louder. It surprised McCloud, the way the others stood off, as if Bluey were acting in ways which excluded them from brotherly concern. McCloud himself began to move up toward the stage. But Bluey turned and fled.

McCloud hurried backstage after him, through a door at the side of the theater. He was guided now by the noise of Bluey's great hawking sobs. He followed the sound up a passageway to a door marked “Props Room.” The place had a table and chairs, a cutting table, some coat hangers vacant except for one splendid purple robe of the
belle époque
, a few bald polystyrene wig stands, and a bowler hat. Bluey wasn't seated on any of the chairs. He was hunched, contorted by sobs, beneath the cutting table. Philip Puduma, who must have moved with great purpose to get there first, stood over the table.

Like a man helpless on the edge of this conflagration of grief, Philip turned to McCloud. “Reckons someone cursed his uncle. If you ask me, that curse is inside Bluey, if you ask me.”

He raised his eyebrows and spoke in a don't-look-to-me-for-enlightenment sort of way.

Obediently, not wanting to intrude in Barramatjara business, McCloud sat on one of the chairs. But at last he couldn't stop himself asking, “What uncle?”

“His uncle in Baruda,” said Philip, again trying to put an end to the questions. “Bluey had a stupid dream someone cursed his uncle.” Philip returned his gaze severely to his cousin Bluey. “It's all the Jim Beam, and all them funny cigarettes,” he murmured. “That's why he's got those bad dreams.”

The Barramatjara had a weakness for Jim Beam, rather than for Scotch. It might be all the country-and-western music they listened to, in which Jim Beam's name was often invoked. If an unarguable cowboy like Tom Gullagara drank spirits, it was always Jim Beam.

Bluey was growing exhausted with grief and had fallen sideways against the wall. Yes, McCloud thought, definitely an actor, even in a society of actors such as the Barramatjara. More likely in any society to dramatize his grief than would a solid citizen like his cousin Philip. There was some dementia, a St. Elmo's fire of bluer excess, dancing about the surface of Bluey's fit.

The other three dancers had appeared in the corridor. Bluey looked up from under the cutting table, fixed his bleared eye upon Whitey, and then covered his face and slumped backward against the wall. He seemed to know there was something which separated him from them; something in his demonstration which they felt bound to distance themselves from.

Whitey nonetheless came into the room briefly to stand with authority beside McCloud. McCloud stood up.

“That one,” said Whitey Wappitji, looking McCloud in the eye. “That one there, he's not well. That feller's not well at all.”

“What does ‘not well' mean?” McCloud asked.

“No one curses his uncle. His uncle doesn't have a curse and just isn't dead. There's something inside that feller that's the problem.”

McCloud realized Wappitji was authorizing him. Saying, “There's nothing I can do. You can move in with your normal suburban gestures of condolence.”

McCloud knelt by the cutting table. “Let me take you for some coffee,” he urged Bluey.

The Barramatjara film star had begun to shiver.

“Come on, Bluey,” said Philip Puduma. “Jesus loves you, mate. You're okay.”

The trite words conveyed nothing of Phil's river-bed epiphany, when Christ appeared in a waterless river and seared Phil clean of alcohol.

“Bluey,” McCloud insisted, “we'll go over to O'Neal's.”

Though O'Neal's had a bar, McCloud would ensure the overwrought Bluey Kannata would drink only coffee.

When Bluey did not seem comforted, McCloud had further thoughts. “We can call your uncle, then,” he said.

Baruda was not connected yet with everywhere else on earth by satellite. It kept itself difficultly separate. It was not part of the universe of interconnecting plaints and whispers. But it was possible, through irksome means, through special and time-consuming measures, to speak to the place from anywhere on earth by radio telephone.

This promise seemed to have an influence upon Bluey. He looked at McCloud for the first time. “We can get through from here?” he asked.

“Yes,” said McCloud, though he knew it could take two-thirds of the night. He bent to Bluey. “Was it a dream?” asked McCloud.

“Clear as day,” whispered Bluey in awe.

“And your uncle … wasn't well?”

Tears spilled down Bluey's face again, but smoothly, without affecting his voice. Bluey whispered, “He was sung. They sung his book.”

“But listen. How can you know for certain?”

Bluey closed his eyes. He drew his knees up under his chin and huddled.

“Can't you tell me anything?” McCloud asked the others, Wappitji, Mungina, and Cowboy Tom Gullagara by the door.

They said nothing. They turned their unscannable faces to various quarters of the room. Whitey said, “This one isn't a real dream. That's honest, Frank. It's a whiskey dream.”

“What about you, Philip?” McCloud asked the Christian.

Philip got up, shaking his head, affronted. “I can't handle what Bluey sees. What he thinks he sees. I can't handle that. It's stuff I left behind, Frank.”

He thought a second. It was written on his face that he didn't believe in the authenticity of Bluey's dreams, and yet that it had its power. Unable to say any of that, though, he hurried out into the corridor. A man pursued, if you like. For the moment, Jesus—the shield, the lamb, the deep water—wasn't with him.