Flying Hero Class (22 page)

“Anyhow, we can't call Bluey a silly bugger, Frank,” said Whitey then. “Not out loud, mate. Not in front of this Taliq or the passengers.”

This was like a warning. Blood was thick. The initiated man might attract internal Barramatjara discipline, but his brothers would not call him a silly bugger in front of strangers.

“We were never into mining,” Whitey went on. “When our cousins up on the coast asked us to move up and work in the bauxite there, we said no. Our old men had dreams of all the country dead from the mining. So we said no. We're known all around Western Australia as the blokes who won't be in mining.

“And that other thing, the satellite stuff … there's been dreams about that, too, mate. We've got old fellers still round who dream of things long before they turn up in the flesh. There's one old man, an important one, dreams of white globes in Baruda, and the sun coming down and melting them.”

Whitey lifted his hand from the tray table. “That's what they say, don't they, Frank? The white protesters say it. That these tracking stations are targets for those nuclear bombs?”

A silence grew. In it Tom Gullagara arrived, nodded to McCloud, and then turned to Cale and stuck a lit, thin, cowpoke cigarette in the Englishman's lips. Cale sucked gratefully, but Tom vanished before he could be thanked.

“You knew about these Highland Pegasus blokes?” Whitey asked suddenly and with resonance. “Did you? And that satellite stuff?” Whitey now held McCloud's elbow through the tweed coat and shook it urgently. “Come on, Frank, you've really got to tell me that. Bugger it,
tell
me, Frank!”

He had swung his body so that McCloud now had no option but to stare into his face, into the smoky eye whites, into the complex green centers with blackness at the core. All the authority Bluey had earlier suggested Whitey possessed, all “the featherfoot stuff,” the power to induce hypnosis and oblivion and curses, certainly seemed to the frightened McCloud to be compacted there.

McCloud was terrified that Wappitji might not believe him. According to the literature on the subject, elders chose boys with such commanding eyes and raised them in the gift of detecting the wrongsayer, the one whose treachery lay coiled beneath familiar features and banal denials. After what had happened with Bluey in New York, McCloud had stolen looks at Whitey during performances and seen the eccentrically broken right little toe, the way that part of the dancing foot had been twisted up and over the usual plane of the rest.

So there was some truth to what Bluey had said, at least to the extent that something had been forced apart there, in Wappitji's foot, for whatever reason, and then pushed together again in a new way. This small sign of Whitey's authority had become hard for McCloud to ignore during dances, and he wondered if some of the audience noticed it and speculated.

But there was even more than that authority to Whitey's demand. There was frank anxiety in him, too. For, again,
he
had suffered the dream which commanded him to release the dances to a wider gaze. And the world's answer was this reported satellite-tracking betrayal and this diamond treachery.

Whitey wanted to know where he stood in the universe and who were his friends. He was permitted by Taliq to ask these questions, because Taliq was certain McCloud was a betrayer and had projected that certainty to Whitey during all the hours McCloud had been in the pit.

How could McCloud undermine Taliq's hours of conviction in a few sentences?

Full of fear, he said, “I knew nothing about Highland Pegasus, Whitey. I was wrapped up in my own business. I should have known. But I was ignorant as sin.”

He hoped Whitey could tell that behind the trite assurances lay the most serious attempt to utter the truth.

“I was too wrapped up in this book of mine,” he began again, “to give a damn about real things, about mining companies and satellite tracking. We don't
all
know everything that's wrong. There's too much wrong for us all to cover all that ground. Look, I'll tell you something I haven't told anyone else.”

And he told Whitey how he had been too busy selling his own dreaming, the dreaming of the McClouds and of Pauline's parents, too, even to be aware of any chance of allying himself with miners and governments. He confessed how poor the returns looked like being and how these failed hopes had fueled his drinking and his lapses as a manager. He let Whitey know even about Drury the impresario and the authoritative dreams of loss he had suffered about Pauline and the man. He expatiated on how he had not had the courage to take news of his failure to Pauline. He gave all these massive tokens of self away to Whitey so that Whitey would believe him.

And as he spoke he became hopeful. For Taliq had had nothing as large as this to give Whitey. Nothing as intimate. Tales of horror, certainly, but conveyed in a mode alien to Whitey. Surely alien!

For some reason it did not seem right to him to argue with the newsmagazine story out loud. Internally he
did
argue with it and might ultimately try to undermine its exactness in front of Taliq. For this politician in Canberra would not be the first of any stripe to have exaggerated for political advantage. But to say so to Whitey was not delicate or even wise, since what the politician had warned of was pretty much the standard level of chicanery for dealings between the wide world and the Barramatjara.

He
did
know, however, that in Barramatjara terms, as in Taliq's, ignorance was no surefire defense. When he gave his permission for the drilling, Bluey's uncle might have acted from a state of shock akin to ignorance. But that did not mean he was safe from being cursed. Bluey, knowing it, had brewed up out of such an awareness the phantasm of his uncle.

The truth was that McCloud's narrow range of ambitions had made him an excellent servant of governments, of sponsors, of those who wanted Whitey and Cowboy Tom out of Baruda. Whitey might well gather together the fragments of his guilty spirit and breathe into them now a horrible malediction. If he failed to, it would be purest mercy.

Yet this is Whitey, McCloud rushed to remind himself. Old Whitey. Droll and lean, sober and responsible.

Whitey's hand on McCloud's elbow now turned to a caress. “Okay, mate.” There was a grin. “You're just a dumb fucking whitefeller, eh?” And he smiled, brightly as rescue, and rearranged the coat around McCloud's shoulders. “You keep warm.”

Whitey stood. Could Taliq see, from the rear of the cabin, that Whitey was not returning with any certainty about the guilt of Frank McCloud, manager and novelist?

“He can talk, that Taliq,” said Whitey. “He can talk a streak.”

He might have been speaking about another man in a pub. Not of someone who had Plastique and lives at his disposal. Was he saying he thought that all Taliq's instruction was palaver?

“My friends?” asked McCloud. “Can't they have blankets?” He would be obscurely ashamed to have the warmth of his jacket when Cale and Stone had nothing.

Whitey surveyed Cale and Daniel Stone. When it came to them, though, there was a sudden hardness to him. He turned back to McCloud and said frankly, “Those blokes are very angry. Taliq and the other fellers. They got their good reasons for it, too. Those fellers. Bloody good reasons, Frank.”

A laugh came hacking out of Cale, who must have overheard from his seat across the aisle. “There you go. Turned. Sambo the dancer and the Arabs. Newfound friends!”

McCloud's vision was flecked with a sort of shock. Whitey turned away, but Taliq appeared, decisive and fast, stood beside Cale, and—like a stock terrorist in a film—put a blue-gray pistol to his neck. “You should be quiet just now, Mr. Bennett or Cale. It isn't your turn to speak yet. It may never be.”

“One thing I know,” said Cale. “You won't shoot me up here. Not in hero class! You want to save me to present to the masses!”

Cale had argued in the pit that the boys might be challenged and shamed and infected with doubt, but that Taliq couldn't be reached. Now he seemed—wantonly—to be ignoring his own advice. McCloud was almost edified when Taliq changed his cigarette to his left hand, made a fist of his damaged right, and silenced Cale with a blow against the back of the neck. The blow had the unreality, the unrelatedness, of all such acts. A red bruise began to appear there, and Cale blinked and swallowed and wavered in his seat. Taliq stepped back and gazed reflectively at the dazed, intemperate Englishman.

Whitey took this assault in with an economic gaze and an absence of facial reaction. Worse things happened in the desert. Nodding to Frank, he returned to the others in the rear seats.

I'm doing what they say prisoners do, McCloud acknowledged. I am putting the blame for my peril on Cale, the troublesome prisoner, rather than on the bandits. Others will do the same to me. We will pass on our chagrin to each other.

In fact, he remembered from the earlier procession, they already had.

He had of course become informed on this process not only by the conversation of Stone and Cale, but by reading in magazines analyses of what hijack victims went through. The writers of such articles always referred to the Holocaust, too, during which respectable and seemly Jews sometimes blamed outspoken, rebellious, visible, and awkward ones for the whole disaster. It was said to be a sort of mysterious transference. But even understanding that it would happen did not save McCloud now from hating Cale.

For Taliq, he was frightened to find, he was tempted to harbor a kind of infantile reverence.

After punishing Cale, Taliq vanished. There was what McCloud identified as an interval. He did not rest. He knew that not everyone was finished with him.

At last it was Daisy Nakamura who turned up, in stockinged feet. She sat—without a word—beside him. Nor did she look at him. Her eyes were focused forward, in the direction of the cockpit.

“Hello,” she said. Should I be flattered, McCloud wondered, that it's to me that they're coming to test what they've heard from Taliq? To match all that against my plain face?

McCloud noticed that the fiber of the green cocktail dress was spotted with dropped coffee. Around her shoulders and head she still wore tightly clamped the airline's blue blanket. She resembled a disaster victim, which was of course what she was.

When her eyes moved to him, he expected her to speak. It would have been characteristic of her—she was a busy chatterer. But she'd been rendered philosophic up here. She studied him. It was a thorough inspection, so frowning and intense that he got tired of its weight and turned his head away.

“I'm surprised you're allowed to visit me,” said McCloud. Yet he was not really being visited. It was as if he were being seen from beyond glass and in dim light.

“It's okay now,” she said in her western twang after a long time. “We've got freedom of movement. It's a democracy up here. If you want to put it like that.”

“Now?
You said it's okay now?”

“Mr. Taliq there, he believes he's found himself a judge from amongst us. He's keen on judgment, that gentleman Taliq.”

“Judge? I don't understand.”

She stared at him as if he understood perfectly what she meant. And so he did. He knew Bluey was staring freely out of the window. There was plenty of information in that.

“The rest of us are a serious disappointment to that gentleman. I mean, we're sympathetic, and he hasn't stopped working on us, either. He's got more faith than a Mormon, that boy. But now he's got one of us to come his way.” She spoke with a sort of finality, letting her hand stray out of her blanket and touch his knee. She gave the kneecap a preventive jostle. It meant he wasn't to ask too much. “I can't be my old self up here,” she said. “Such heaps of lecturing. We've been talking all night. With just one little sleep while this great contraption was on the ground.”

“On the ground where?”

“That, Mr. McCloud, I just don't know.” There was a narrow, ironic guffaw from her narrow, full-lipped mouth. “Friend Taliq didn't share
that
piece of information with me. Our intellects were all too taken up with other stuff. I swear it was intense. Like a whole year of political science in some college.”

She raised her eyes. Even so tired and diminished, she was wonderfully companionable.

“Why'd you do it, Mr. McCloud?” she asked. “To those dancers there? I read the article, see. Required reading up here, you might say. But how it seems is, you bring them to New York and Frankfurt, and while they're gone strangers take their land. Neat trick, Mr. McCloud. Neato! That's how it seems.”

He stared at her. So he might be off the hook with Whitey. Yet in his exhaustion, in his shrunken, four-mile-high brain, more ready to declare his guilt to her than to anyone! If she would open her blue blanket and take him to her heart, he would plead guilty beyond question, guilty without any shade of ambiguity, any mental reservation, any redeeming circumstance.

So before this tribunal as well, McCloud uttered what was becoming his standard plea.

“Oh Christ, Mrs. Nakamura. I don't know! Do you think I've been sworn in as an agent? That they paid me for treachery, for God's sake? They didn't have to, Daisy. They could depend on my lack of genuine interest in what they were up to. Oh, I've had designs on the Barramatjara. I've been part of a plot. I've been to the Barramatjara country to write about sand paintings and dancing. But my interest never went so far as asking whether or not some geologist had found promising core samples there.”

Daisy expelled her breath. Even after three decades in the Wild West and a night of Taliq's instruction, she still had that flowerlike neatness of expression, that lilac redolence, that preciseness of gesture, which the West went frantic about in the Japanese. The occidentalizing of Daisy Nakamura had extended to her larynx and her habits of expression, but the waters of Japaneseness were still located profoundly in her.