Flying Hero Class (19 page)

And he would hoot with laughter and beat the cab's window frame until the Haitian driver asked him to stop.

McCloud had noticed that he had not addressed his uncle with the familiarity of that standard Australian endearment “bugger” during their radiophone conversation. Respect had its ceremonies even in the debased English of the cattle camp and the reservation.

McCloud—with his arm slung around Pauline's shoulders—longed to tell her about his own relief. Whitey had been proven not to be a fatal influence. Bluey was fit again for rehearsal. And in a calm moment McCloud might have the chance to remind him that he should not give all dreams and phantasms equal ground.

Back at the hotel, the other dancers were waiting for them, gathered together in Whitey Wappitji's room, which had a little kitchen attached to it, and drinking coffee and beer. Bluey rushed into the place ahead of McCloud and Pauline. This was unusual; generally he would make very courtly gestures to send them through a door first. An old-fashioned boy, Bluey, apart from the abuse of modern and fashionable substances! But tonight he had to get inside quickly to celebrate and chortle and slap shoulders and discover for himself that Whitey's room was habitable to him. For Whitey, the featherfoot, the man of the reputedly broken toe, had not ambushed or cursed the old man.

Whitey had already popped open a can of Coors and placed it in Bluey's hand as the actor reached him. And Bluey held it celebratorily, a vessel empty of spells and full of merest froth. Embracing Whitey, he yelled, “This bugger's my mate, this old Whitey here!”

McCloud felt Pauline's hand grasp his—her friendship, her rejoicing—in the tribal room. To honor her, McCloud did no more than take a sip from Bluey's can—Bluey was in a mood, of course, to which drinking from a common bowl was appropriate.

There remained the medical question—why had Bluey seen his uncle, whitened to death, on the stage at the Lincoln Center?

Even Wappitji, the troupe's center of authority, raised that matter obliquely. “You got to watch them funny cigarettes, Bluey. Fair dinkum you have. They make you cry for the wrong things.”

For a second, Bluey was sobered by Whitey's diagnosis. He blinked and looked away. But then he yelled and reconsidered the black aperture which led into the liquor in his can. “Come on, you blokes. We're a long way from home, us fellers. And all brothers. Let's have a party, eh?”

Whitey considered him soberly. Whitey, who had had the authentic dream and was on his civilizing mission, like Cortez looking for the core, for the immutable soul of Montezuma. Whitey, who was making light in the darkness.

Later in the night, their bladders full, rather than use the bathroom water closet one at a time, they went to the communal urinals down the hall. The dancers and McCloud groaned, released themselves from their pants, and began pissing. The room was full all at once of a strange, subtle, and not unmusical whistling of which McCloud was not part. “Whistlecock,” the first Europeans into the desert had called this phenomenon. In the sundry grades of Barramatjara initiation, a young man was not only circumcised, but subincised, the underside of his penis cut open to the urethra. This was how it had been done by the Malu and the Two Brothers. The earth needed the blood from this incision. And when a man pissed you heard the full music of his manhood.

Which McCloud could not match.

The casual attender of the troupe's performance the following night had no way of seeing the neatness of the connection between the finale and what had befallen Bluey in the past two days.

During the afternoon, a considerable crowd that held tickets for the night performance came to one of the seminar rooms at Lincoln Center to drink wine and watch the dancers paint a canvas called the Emu Dreaming at Mount Wilson. Great circles of red and black dotted with white were connected across a landscape of white, blue, yellow, orange, and brown dots by sinuous and—in a few eccentric cases—straight lines. The whole thing looked like a continent seen in clear light from far space.

This making of the dance painting never worked as well indoors, McCloud thought, as it had outdoors in Australia with peculiarly Australian light. But it came up brilliantly at night with help from the lighting technician.

Emu Dreaming at Mount Wilson was a story like Prometheus, except of course that Prometheus was a Johnny-come-lately compared with that millennia-earlier fire thief, the emu ancestor, danced when evening came by Bluey. Wappitji danced the wedge-tailed eagle, casually replete with grace and authority and mana.

McCloud loved this dance for its simplicity and force. Emu, his eye glittering with avian ambition, tries to deprive the Two Brothers of eagle feathers which were their usual and beloved ornamentation. He frightens the brothers away from the eagle nest atop Mount Wilson by telling them of a serpent who occupies the peak. When the eagle itself, divinely enraged, discovers emu's attempt to corner the speed and potency inherent in eagle feathers, he renders the emu flightless.

Bluey was that night and as always superb as the long-legged, long-necked emu whose greed has produced a straitened world. Now he and the Two Brothers, in an eagleless earth, have only ashes to mark themselves with. Even with this limited form of power emu tries to corner by stealing fire from the Two Brothers.

The Two Brothers (Phil the Christian and Cowboy Tom), with Wappitji the eagle wheeling far to the north ordaining the result, pursue the fugitive emu and his small ball of fire, spear him, and take from his body a bone with which they pierce the septum of their noses. Emu perishes in the bewilderment common to those who try too hard to find the ritual keys to the earth. The eagle rewards the Two Brothers by giving them feathered feet for the pursuit of wrongdoers.

That night as every night, the audience was meant to approve the punishments brought down on emu, but in Bluey's performance there was always such a yearning to span all forms of mastery that during the sequence people could frequently be heard weeping.

CHAPTER EIGHT:

In the Pit II

McCloud, who often found it hard to wait for a sandwich to be made or for his call to be put through to some administrator, assumed an unusual patience in that great fusebox where he sat cross-legged with Cale and Daniel Stone. If he had known he must wait twenty minutes here, he would have invested himself into the cramp of his legs, into his fierce desire to urinate, into the prickly sweat which broke from him now that the plane sat hotly in the morning sun. The
Mediterranean
morning sun, as they all agreed it must be.

But since he did not know how long all this would take, what span of confinement Taliq had in mind, he let his pains grow remote from him, external, a kind of luggage.

“What about Larnaca?” said Daniel Stone suddenly. “That's an airport hijackers seem to use.”

“This isn't Larnaca,” Cale told him. Cale was perfunctory and dismissive. “Even with a tailwind, we haven't been flying long enough.”

Cale turned awkwardly toward McCloud. “You ever been to North Africa before?”

“No. I'd imagine, though, you have.” Why else the question?

“Oh yes, son! I was an officer in Britain's now much correctly booed-at attack on the Suez Canal. Thirty-one years ago. If I'd been shot then, I would have died happy but knowing fuck-all. Now I know fuck absolutely everything. I can look this chap Taliq in the eye. I even profess to know what drives a fellow like him. Perhaps it's time I was shot. I know too fucking much.”

McCloud said, “I'm not so sure I do. The dancers are still educating me.”

“Come on. You don't really mean that, sonny Jim. It's okay to manage them—it's as good a way as any to make a living. But when it comes to the indigenes, Aborigines, natives, first-comers, and so on, I subscribe to what D. H. Lawrence says, you know. When he was down there at that ranch in New Mexico. Well; he went to see the Pueblos dance and said it was all twilight stuff. He said those Europeans who want to idealize this stuff are renegades. What do you think of that?”

“I think he was a man of his day,” said McCloud, not wanting to waste time being angry.

“And you're not a man of yours? Just because we've had a few scares—Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and so on—does that make primitives desirable, wiser, niftier? Christ! I mean, it's charming and all. But as I said to you earlier, let's not call it art.”

McCloud was tempted to tell him about the elders who had come to Whitey in a dream and urged him to release the embargoed dances and the painting which skirted the very edge of danger, but he resisted it. Cale was the sort of rock against which all such dreams shattered.

“Lawrence used to beat his wife as well, Mr. Cale,” McCloud said instead. “Not secretly, either. He boasted about it. Do you think that's a good idea of his, too?”

“Jesus Christ!” cried Cale, hooting. “An Aussie intellectual. A fucking living contradiction in terms! An oxymoron in underpants!”

But there was a sort of acknowledgment in Cale's laughter and even a pleading that allowances be made.

McCloud chose to smile warily, someone bringing up a tender subject. “You were so much in need of a drink last night. You don't seem to need one now.”

“Oh,” said Cale lightly, “I'm the worst sort of pisspot. I'm an alcoholic by choice, not by need. Nicotine—now there's a genuine addiction. Whereas I drink only from boredom, and I love to talk people—stewards, pub owners—into bending the letter of the liquor laws. They're nectar, those drinks. Nips of whiskey which violate some silly sod's law. I particularly enjoy booze in nations where having a snort is subject to penalties of flogging and jail. But in other circumstances, if the stuff's not there, I don't climb up the fusebox.”

Creaking internally in small ways, the plane remained on the earth.

They heard a reverberation from beyond the pit, as if someone were striking the outer skin of the aircraft with a wrench. They listened to it, faces raised. Like a sailor deep in some quarter of a hostile sea, McCloud felt a smothering alarm.

The noise ceased. Even Cale and Stone did not try to discuss what it meant. The possibilities were too numerous or terrible. Was it plane maintenance? Was it sabotage on behalf of the passengers or sabotage on behalf of Taliq? Were armed men joining the plane to reinforce Taliq or—for some reason equally as frightening to the three men in the electronics bay—to take his life? Had all the passengers been let go; and had these three been forgotten or retained for special purposes?

Twenty seconds or more passed, and their breath grew normal again. You could see Cale actually gather himself for further conversation.

But as a result of a sudden illumination whose origin he couldn't guess at, but which grew from his philosophic accommodation to the cries of his body, McCloud spoke first. “Taliq … he won't bring us out of here yet. Surely he'll be busy dealing with authorities on the ground?”

Stone was engaged at the time in slow flexings of his neck, maybe doing exercises he remembered his masseur recommending. “He'll ask for something no one's likely to deliver,” he said as if that much were obvious. “Cale's right about one aspect. What we're seeing is probably an attempt to prevent rapprochement. Okay. So the exploit works of its own nature. But they might as well tack on a shopping list. Something specific they want. The release of political prisoners.…”

“Indeed,” said Cale. “Indeed.” He conveyed to McCloud that he was gratified by the rate at which Stone was catching on. “And there's another possibility with Taliq's little enterprise you no doubt wouldn't countenance, Mr. Stone.”

Stone stopped doing his exercises. “How can you know that? I'll countenance any damned thing. Don't for God's sake tell me what's within my powers to contemplate. You don't know that.” He raised his hand. “Oh, forgive me! We understand you know everything. It's just that that fact doesn't seem to have done us much good. So just tell me what you have in mind. I'm willing as the next man to run it under the light.”

Cale adjusted his underwear. “Okay, sonny, here it comes! There are voices in Israel who don't want reconciliation either. Israel has accumulated its record of shame, too, and I regret that. Because the boys upstairs will no doubt bore us with the details over coming hours or even days.”

“Oh Jesus!” Stone cried. Angry now and not as concerned with tidy gesture, he cast his eyes wildly upward. “You mean that the wicked Zionists themselves buy a raid from the Arabs? So they'll have a reason for keeping things as they are? That's what you're saying?”

“It seems to have happened in the past,” said Cale. “And you and I acknowledge that. An innocent like Mr. McCloud here—it's news to him. But it's not news to me as a journalist. Nor to you as a—what is it?—computer contractor?”

“Jesus Christ! I
am
a computer contractor! I have my master's from MIT and my doctorate from Cal Tech on the wall of my den! They were bought with student loans and at some price of time and effort. And I resent your whole supercilious Limey drift, Cale. There's one thing I agree with those Arabs about! You and your fucking empire made this grief for all of us! Scratch any human misery of this century and you guys are behind it!”

“Oh yes?” asked Cale. “But, my boy, I didn't drive the poor sodding Palestinians out of the orange groves of Haifa! My government didn't make those nifty emergency laws to cover the Gaza strip land grab. Heaps of paternalistic folly—oh yes, that's us all over, and I confess to it! We
permitted
the conditions for your success over the Arabs. We didn't actually drive the spike into the poor bastards' hearts!”

“That same tired old Limey mind trick!” said Stone. “‘Our intentions were
too
good! The mean natives took advantage of us.…'” He appealed to McCloud. “Only one thing more pitiable than the argument is that all the sons-of-bitches actually
believe
it!”