Flying Hero Class (23 page)

“I wouldn't shoot you like a dog for ignorance, McCloud. Why, if all of us had to face the coup de grace because of questions we haven't asked, none of us would be left standing.” She lowered her voice even further. “I mean, I have to tell you I was hugely ignorant of what these boys, Taliq and the rest, have gone through. And that's on network news every night, hanging there above my head in the bar, while the cowboys are yelling for beer and a channel change to the goddamn basketball! I mean, in my opinion these boys have been asked to eat far too much dirt! Too much dirt. These are the Hopis of their part of the world. Simple as that.”

Should I ask for her intercession? McCloud wondered. He spent five seconds struggling with the idea he should. It wasn't right, though, since she felt as adrift here as he did. But maybe she could ask, for example, whether Pauline could be brought up here. He wanted to be certain of seeing her before the judgment everyone took as a certain event. He wanted even to know about Drury, too. Not that he would ask straight out. He wanted to gauge by signs. Then he might have a coherent chance of meeting the ends Taliq had planned for him.

What Mrs. Nakamura had meant by “judge” now came irrepressibly to his lips, a question like a bubble in a comic strip.

“He wants one of you to condemn the three of us?” he asked Daisy. “Right in front of the other passengers?”

“Exactly right, Mr. McCloud. People's court. It makes sense, doesn't it? Whatever happens to you, we all end up with a share of it. Not just Taliq and the boys. All of us up here.”

“And it's Bluey? The one by the window? The dancer?”

She dragged the blanket closer around her and looked away. “Is that his name? I get them mixed up. Their names aren't exactly out of the Flagstaff phonebook.”

“Well,” McCloud said. “God help me.”

Again he felt a physical yearning for the Boy and the Girl, together with a strange prickling in his brain and a painful surging of the musculature of the chest and upper arms. Bluey's furious confusion, what Whitey called Bluey's “big anger,” had brought itself to bear on
him
. Bluey did not want to condemn Cale and Stone. He was indifferent to them. He would fiercely condemn McCloud, however. For McCloud was the deceiver, the sleeping agent of all the film producers who had taken him away from the Barramatjara country and confused him with Hiltons and dope, the factor of all the miners who imperiled uncles, all the statesmen who told deferential lies. Everyone who had said, “We respect your ancient culture,” while reserving for the cocktail hour, far from the tribal ground, the observation that none of it could last. McCloud would carry the buck for all of them now.

And Bluey, who knew the size of the buck, was the perfect judge.

McCloud didn't know whether he should try to rise from his seat and argue his innocence with Bluey. He did, however, feel some admiration for Taliq. Ten hours ago it had seemed fantastical of the Palestinian to bring these five genial desert nomads of international renown upstairs to this ideological heaven, this platform of dialectic behind the flight deck. But Taliq had already known of McCloud's blamewor-thiness then, had been able to sniff it out at an hour when McCloud still vainly considered himself merely an unrewarded novelist with a tendency to drink.

“Listen, honey,” said Daisy Nakamura at his side. “I'll do what I can with all this. Oh Jesus God. I don't need any of it! Here I am, a registered Republican voter, American to the core. Say I was Jewish and told Taliq that! He'd put a placard round my head and decide to shoot me. As it is, he says it just shows how I've been conditioned to lick the oppressor's hand. But Mr. McCloud, I've got news for Taliq. I haven't been conditioned to do anything. I am American, and America has made me what I am. I'm Republican because they believe in arresting the child killers and the rapists and punishing them real good. And they aren't deceived by the lies of the other side.”

“The other side?” asked McCloud.

“The East,” she said. She lowered her voice further. “I say what any American would say. America's been wonderful to me.”

“But they didn't tell you, your Republicans, what was happening to Taliq and the others!” McCloud argued.

Her eyes slewed away. “They can't cover everything, can they?” She looked away across the aisle. “The other two,” she murmured, gesturing surreptitiously to Cale and Stone. “They're guilty as hell.”

“No,” McCloud told her. “I don't think they are.”

He thought of Stone's father, the handbag repairer. It seemed to be a detail of such humanity that it ought to exempt Stone from being shot.

“They're guilty,” Daisy Nakamura assured him, putting her hand for emphasis on his knee again. “Taliq has the evidence on them. It kept coming in by radio while we were parked down below. I mean, they're guilty by Taliq's lights, and he and his boys are working by the rules of war here, and for Christ's sake, Mr. McCloud, when it comes to sorting out the sheep from the goats, the rules of war aren't bad, and were not so long ago applied in Budapest. But as for you, I can't see you guilty by anyone's lights or rules or principles.”

“But I am,” he said. “I am by Bluey's. Absolutely.”

Jaundiced with filtered light, Daniel Stone and the bruised Cale were now sleeping. Someone, perhaps Whitey Wappitji after all, had covered them with airline blankets.

Daisy's mouth widened as her conversation became even more secret. “That man at the window,” she said. “He got angry soon as he read that stuff in the magazine. He said it bore out everything he'd suspected. He got angry with his friends, too. They're good democratic boys, and they wanted to hear from you. But he said he knew the world better than they did … he'd been in movies and he'd had white women. And this article was right on target. It put everything in place. The whole truckload, he said.”

McCloud, however appalled, could feel no animus against Bluey. But he saw a forceful pattern of illogic in what had happened, an illogic which just the same made a profounder sense. The other dancers, who lived on their home ground all the time, had not condemned McCloud without a hearing. But Bluey, who felt love and fear for his home ground yet who rarely lived there anymore, who sometimes made fearful night journeys from the Ritz-Carlton in Cannes to Baruda but was always back by breakfast time, had been willing to condemn him in absentia.

Daisy said suddenly, “I know you've got your own problems, Mr. McCloud. And I don't know why I'm talking like this to you. Look around this cabin. Who else is there to talk to?” She spoke lower still, bowing her head. “Everyone here seems to think I ought to give in to him. Just give in.”

“To Taliq?” asked McCloud, flinching. Because he thought it, too, and was ashamed of thinking it.

“Taliq. Who else? Jesus, I sure hope there's no one else!”

“And everyone? Everyone wants you to?”

“Absolutely. Why me? What signals are they picking up? How does Taliq pick up signals? And how do you? It isn't like I'm some kind of geisha. But even your black guys, Mr. McCloud. The tall one and the one with the cowboy belt have both said it to me. What's the cowboy's name? Tom? Tom. They know the score, those guys. I mean, they put it nicely, but you can understand what they're getting at. So we spend half the night listening to Taliq, and reading about you in magazines, and we meet that tough-looking little guy Razir, and the three boys as well, and they fill us in on what's happened to them, and still we say, ‘Sorry, we feel real bad about what's gone down, but we still can't do it for you.' We still know there's no way we can stand up there in front of the other passengers like some sort of Chinese people's court.

“And that's okay with Taliq. Because he's the one who's said up front and whether we want it or not that we're his dispossessed brothers and sisters. And he can't fire us, can he? You can't be fired from that particular status just because you're squeamish about executing folk.”

She looked startled then and put her hand to her mouth.

“Oh Jesus, sorry, Mr. McCloud! But since it's been said, you ought to gather your wits. Even though you and I both know it won't come to that. Anyhow, Taliq tells us, ‘You are still privileged people. Your consciousness needs raising, that's all. And it will happen, too! It'll just take a little time.…' Meanwhile your friends, the dancers … they're tough people themselves, and they seem to be realists, and they know Taliq is a tough man in a tough corner. And they take it as damn-well read that I'll do something to sweeten him! For your sake, McCloud. For your sake! Can you imagine? No matter what the article says about the diamond people and the CIA satellites. They want to save you. But they can't be seen to go against the guy in the window seat there, the one who's gone quiet. So they want me to do everything for them!”

She pulled the blanket tighter yet began shuddering. “Do you know, it scares me? The way Taliq says we have time. We have time to come round to him. As if we'll be on this plane for weeks.…”

She placed the palm of her left hand over her forehead, then moved it down over her ivory nose, her bud of a mouth. “It's the presumption I hate, Mr. McCloud. The presumption about me. As if it's
my
job or something.”

He would have liked to be able to tell her to resist. But he could not say it. A seduced Taliq might well be less severe.

“And Taliq?” he croaked. “Has he made … any overtures?”

“Come on, Mr. McCloud! I can tell. One thing I've felt: I've felt the accumulated heat of cowboys and truckers wafting across the bar. Not that Taliq is a cowboy or a trucker. Wish to God he were!” Her eyes were misted with sudden tears. “See, Taliq's young boys don't know just what they are. I mean, they're good at handling orders and they know how to use their weapons and all that. But they behave like a cross between a gangster and a goddamn social worker.”

Earlier, McCloud remembered, Cale had said something like that.

“But Taliq knows exactly what he is. He's a soldier. And soldiers, I suppose, take the women they find in their path.”

She sighed at the idea of this ancient and deplorable hubris.

“But that's not the whole story, either,” she went on, distracted, talking it out to herself. “Because he thinks he's a
special
kind of soldier. According to his lights, he wants to use people properly. He doesn't want to say, ‘I've got the gun, so come my way.' Just the same, he got me up here for reasons of his own, for fake reasons, and he knows it now even if he didn't before. I'm not oppressed, Mr. McCloud, I'm American. And he's bright enough to know it, too. I mean, there he is pretending I'm like
your
people, who really have a beef. I don't have a beef, Mr. McCloud. It isn't like I'm Navajo or something. I should be downstairs, not here. They want an imperialist to beat up on? I'm an imperialist, McCloud! God bless America! May we all be dumb and happy, and may renegade Mormons come over the Utah border and drink their beer at my place!”

What was horrifying was that she was working her way toward asking him not just for sympathy, but for advice.

“I mean,” she said then, “in some ways Taliq's only a boy. Can't be more than thirty-two or -three, and for a man that's young.…”

She let the sentence hang, but the figure she uttered took McCloud by surprise. He hadn't thought lately of Taliq as the possessor of a finite age.

“I don't know what to say, Mrs. Nakamura,” McCloud admitted. “I mean, Taliq tells us he can tear the plane apart in an instant with his load of Plastique. He also told us there was a primed grenade at the pilot's head, and the pilot's head is ours. I think he's relented a little on the grenade: the pilot is cooperative. But the Plastique …”

There was an unspoken connection between the Plastique and the task everyone had placed on Daisy. Daisy might be able to save everyone from Plastique by giving way to Taliq. But what if she went with Taliq and the Plastique was still detonated? That seemed to McCloud an achingly sad prospect, a wasted sacrifice for Daisy. For some reason, he could scarcely bear the idea without tears.

“Whatever happens,” he told her, “there is the possibility we'll all live anyway, and it has to be on terms we can stand.”

All this was a revelation to him, to hear himself uttering these ordinary yet genuine sentiments. He hadn't believed until now that he thought in such simple and quotidian terms. The writing of a long novel had given him the illusion that his emotions were as serpentine and subtle as those in his novel. He had also come to believe that on the level of behavior he was a man of compromise, a fellow with a nose for convenience.

The idea of his own plebeian solidarity with Daisy, which he seemed to be observing from a long way off, startled him. It was as if this journey had forced on him the same stolid valor which the Scotland–Australia run had forced on his ancestors.

A glimpse of Cale's mottled, sleeping face across the aisle made him want all the more, though, that she
would
distract Taliq, would stoop to humanize him with a sumptuous climax, Beirut and Budapest, Arizona reconciled and fused to one benign view of what should be done to this plane and its population.

“See,” Daisy Nakamura was saying, arguing with herself still, “his reasons add up, but his conclusions—well, I don't go along with them. Not all the way. They scare me real bad, McCloud. Here's a body—Taliq's body, I mean—which really doesn't give a dollar for whether or not it will be ground beef this time tomorrow.”

“Oh,” said McCloud, “Mr. Cale over there thinks Taliq gives a dollar for his life. Mr. Cale thinks Taliq's got political ambitions.”

“Political ambitions?”
asked Daisy, obviously thinking of politics Arizona style. “Are you kidding? I mean, this is a man, who says, ‘Daisy, come on, come upstairs, because you're some sort of political heroine or other. And anyhow I like you and your green cocktail dress.' And in the same breath says, ‘By the way, I just might press this little button here and pulverize the lot of us, you, me, your green dress, the people in row fifty-four.' I mean, I've had some crazy friends …” But she could not continue. Clearly, none of her gentlemen friends had ever taken a grenade to bed with him. “Those black guys of yours …” Again there was a grimace. “They don't know what they're asking.”