Flying Hero Class (27 page)

McCloud was trembling but happy with the argument he'd put.

“Do you know why I believe the enemy this time?” Taliq asked, dragging a last time on an almost spent cigarette. “Do you know?”

“I'm sure you'll find a reason,” said McCloud, allowing himself the aggressive luxury of feeling cheated.

“I'll tell you,” said Taliq. “Only one of your dancers condemns you, but none of them defends you.”

Taliq looked piercingly into his eyes, and McCloud saw it was the truth, at least in the judicial sense. Useless to say, “But Whitey's defended me with a curse.”

“Have it your way,” said McCloud. “Your mental dishonesty will get you in the end.”

Taliq half smiled. “If a peer said that to me, I would worry,” he murmured.

He returned to one of the doorways and picked up one of the plane's intercom handsets to speak through, though the passengers were now so crammed together that his unadorned voice would probably have reached all of them.

“Friends,” he announced in his way, which should have sounded flatulent but in fact had all the potency, all the sharpness, of absolute judgment, “I present to you now the three criminals found guilty by our people's tribunal. It was necessary to choose a judge from amongst the oppressed people on this aircraft. On the evidence presented to him our judge, a plain, sane human being, has—as any plain, sane person would—found all three of these men guilty of crimes against humanity.

“So what will be done with them? If the Western powers do not arrange for the release of our brother and respected leader, the hero Mahoud al-Jiddah, and of his two detained brothers, they will be shot one at a time. Again—I trust you see this—we threaten punishment only against the most obviously criminal elements.”

“Oh, well,” Cale suddenly murmured to McCloud. “Oh, well, we'll see.”

McCloud got a sense that Cale was halfway enjoying himself, waiting avidly for an outcome, something which would entitle him to turn to Stone and say, “See?”

“But our judge? you ask. Who is it?”

McCloud continued to search for Pauline's face. He was aware that some in the mass of people in front of him were no more than vaguely interested in who the judge would be.

“Well, we have a judge. It is a man of a different history from that which my brothers Yusuf, Musa, Razir, and Hasni share with me. Different yet shockingly similar. The judge from your midst is a man called Kanduk Kannata, whose land is about to be taken from him by imperialist malice and deceit. Mr. Kannata is capable, however—like most victims of tyranny whose tongue has not been ripped out—of speaking for himself. And so I introduce him.”

The actor and film star and dancer, fearer of curses and former good companion, appeared from the forward compartment as if from the wings of a stage and took the intercom device which Taliq offered him. Like Taliq, the dance program called Bluey Kannata by his true name, Kanduk. Yet at all social occasions Bluey introduced himself by that standard Australian nickname, given to him on some cattle station of his childhood where his father had worked, where white men had seen the reddish streak in the young Kanduk's hair and labeled him with that wry antonym.

Anyhow, Bluey did indeed look blue by the enclosed light of the cabin: looked in fact the majestic purple which characterized the Barramatjara complexion and which McCloud had noticed in the dancers when they were extremely tired.

His voice sounded firm to McCloud and utterly lacking in the usual apologetic jokiness. There was a frightening resonance, too, as if Bluey had repented of all previous claims McCloud might have on him. He clicked the transmit button on the intercom a few times, casually, like a man about to make a speech at a bush dance. He looked convincing, McCloud was horrified to see. A man habituated to this sort of speech.

“These men who took over our plane,” Bluey began in a screech of static which soon gave way to clarity, “these men and all of us who are in it with them, are at war. This is a serious business here. Either we weed out those who are to blame for damage against people, or we
all
end up in pieces, falling down through the sky. I'm sure you agree with me on that one. That's a message you don't need to be Einstein to catch on to.”

The Barramatjara troupe, its other members, were not looking at Bluey, McCloud noticed from the corner of his vision. Philip Puduma and Tom Gullagara were half turned away. Paul Mungina the
didj
player was biting his bottom lip and screwing up his right eye. Perhaps he feared Bluey would shame him by saying something radical, by bad-mouthing the queen, for whom Paul had such respect.

Whitey, head cocked, examined the ceiling, the pattern of lockers and lights.

McCloud believed he could recognize their embarrassment. They had stood like that at the door of the little costume room at Lincoln Center, waiting for the spasm and the unfamiliar curse to fade, while Bluey huddled under the cutting table. It was all they could do: be patient until he returned to his skin. They couldn't disown another Barramatjara man, it wasn't allowed for a Barramatjara to deny brotherhood with Bluey. And none of them
were
denying it. They were politely not going the full way with him. As on the day he became frenzied in rehearsal, he was under a visitation. And now his last sentence, the plea for assent—“I'm sure you'll all agree with me on that one”—had somehow, by its weakness, convinced them that he would come back. You could see that. It was legible in the fearsome passivity of their faces.

All at once Bluey Kannata rose, however, above the wateriness of that sentiment, that appeal for approval. Having recognized the lapse himself, and what it could mean, he was strong again. He reset his body, so that the other dancers were no longer in his line of vision. He had come to a decision not to refer back to them, as he did in most normal conditions, acknowledging them at each turn of the day and the dance: the man who had left the Barramatjara country, earned big money and the compliance of white women, neglected his tribal wife and his ceremonies, seeking just the same their unarguing approval. None of that now, his new posture said. For Taliq had given him a means of being free of the Barramatjara system, of being his own judge. And Cale's, too, and Stone's and McCloud's.

“So here we have one feller,” cried Bluey, “the Englishman there. He writes lies about these people. We've all
seen
these people losing their own country. We come back to our hotel rooms late at night and test the television button, and there it is, every night, happening. Always there. Every night. Before the sport and before the weather. Always. These people. But nothing is done about it, we don't feel we have to do anything. And the reason we don't is that we're lied to. Do you see that Englishman there, do you see that beergutted Englishman? He writes the lies, the deadly lies, brothers and sisters, for a rag we know as the
London Daily Telegraph
.”

Bluey was not talking anymore simply in the argot of the desert cattle station. The Barramatjara spoke in their deliberately simplified cattleman/stock rider idiom whenever they were not speaking Barramatjara. The word
mate
peppered everything they said, along with
you fellers
and
you blokes
. And all politics, all ritual, and the negotiations for the performance fees of the Barramatjara Dance Troupe themselves were—as McCloud had once mentioned to Pauline—covered by the words
pretty serious business
. Such a term had already occurred in Bluey's speech, but it was seasoned with terms Bluey would not normally use.
Deadly, deadly lies
, for example. And that awful phrase
damage against people
.

McCloud had always had a glimmer of a suspicion that the dancers might sometimes speak a more sophisticated English than their usual elliptical, evasive cattle station talk, or at least have it at their disposal. He wondered what inhibited them from using it—maybe a desire not to get out of their depth or give too much away in big cities like Sydney or New York. Maybe a polite care not to surprise the outsiders with too much eloquence or not to arouse them, for that matter. Maybe a fierce willingness to keep their place.

For they might be dancers and New York stars today, but the great first shock of white contact had taken their fathers into the service of white cattlemen, and that was the
remembered
glory of their manhood and the
remembered
wound. The language of that experience was their chosen argot.

By speaking as he did now, in a language marked in part by cattleman English but also breaking free of it, Bluey may have been outflanking and separating himself from the other men of the dance troupe. By these means he could show them and McCloud the seriousness of the enlightenment which had struck him on the upper deck.

“The man next to the fat man,” Bluey continued, “is an American and sells computer systems to the Israelis. There is every reason to believe that he is some sort of agent. Both these men traveled with two passports each. This computer American traveled with two passports. So he's a man who wants to deceive people. But he hasn't deceived us. Do you travel with two passports, ladies and gentlemen?”

It was noticeable that Bluey did not push the rhetorical question. He was as adroit as any prosecutor could hope to be. McCloud dreaded therefore that a special intent would enter Bluey's voice now. For it was time to speak of criminal number three.

McCloud flinched when he heard the altered timbre as Bluey arrived at the question of him.

“This third man … this third man. He's the man who has dragged my brothers and me around the world, showing us to audiences as if we were clever apes. The organ grinder's monkeys. While all along he understood what the plot was. It was to deprive us of our own country, to take from us land which I know with my own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, and have known since I was a baby. Which I know in myself and I know through my ancestor's eyes. Land close to me as this skin.”

And Bluey displayed the flesh of his forearm.

“This man's wages are paid by the mining companies and the governments who want us out of the way, who find us an inconvenience. Who want my brothers—Wappitji, Gullagara, Puduma, Mungina—up here, here in the air, on the other side of the world, away from our holy ground. So they can make way for the drilling rigs and the satellite stations. Who think they can say, ‘We gave you a trip around the world! We let you dance in Frankfurt! Don't be ungrateful with us!'

“And this man … this man who smiled at us and called us by our names, he knew all about it. And brought us along softly. And we danced in our innocence and in our friendship. And only today, in a newsmagazine, we read the truth about him, about us. We read what he was keeping from us.…”

All Bluey's limbs had begun to shake. Even Taliq looked all at once concerned for him. “This man is the man who should be shot first. If I had my say, I would finish him whether or not those English and the Americans send Taliq's friends to our plane. For this man, and because of his lies, my uncle has to bear curses.…”

Bluey's voice was aquiver as well now. His arms moved toward the prisoners, shuddering with a ferocious will to do them some damage. He was no longer ineffectual Bluey. He was a vengeance named Kanduk Kannata.

“Look at him!” he screamed. “Look at him, my friends! He is a bundle of softness. And he writes stinking little books. I mean to find out if these people who are taking my country promised him
that
, too! That they'd publish his stinking little book. The one he's been writing for years. For years! A lost cause, this endless bloody book of his.

“A week ago … a week ago, knowing we were all to lose our land, he set up some little telephone call home to make me feel better. To give me small comfort. When all along he knew what was intended for the Barramatjara folk! This one, this man … I would shoot him first! Of the three of them, him first!”

Bluey bared his teeth and gave out a rhythmical scream. He stamped one foot. It was like the beginning of a dance. He pointed one finger at the prisoners, and the first sound he uttered fell on them like a bludgeon. He began to advance on them, cursing them as he came. But there was still some disorder in his limbs, which shivered in ways that weren't connected with the dance. This wasn't the normal Bluey Kannata graciousness of movement. Some powerful fever worked in each arm and leg. His forward foot slipped before he had come a yard. He fell against a seat, twisted, and landed on the floor on his back.

One of the women flight attendants, clearly trained to deal with fits in passengers, arrived and put a wet towel between his teeth. A middle-aged German who said he was a doctor knelt over Bluey's convulsing body. He seemed very competent, as if he had the habit of being efficient in chaotic circumstances. A practitioner of emergency medicine, perhaps. He looked at Bluey's eyes, took his pulse, and calmly held his clenching hand.

“Take him!” yelled Taliq, alarmed both as a new friend and perhaps in case the fit had put Bluey's judicial authority in doubt. “Take him in there, and let him rest!”

He pointed to the forward part of the plane, and the doctor and the flight attendant-nurse lifted Bluey by the armpits, and Philip Puduma, the oldest dancer, and Paul the
didj
player took him by the ankles. Does this mean a split? McCloud wondered. Are Phil and the
didj
player halfway in agreement with Bluey?

Whitey Wappitji, who had been ordered in a dream to become a dancer and painter, and his lieutenant, Cowboy Tom Gullagara, were still impassive, watching Bluey being carried away.

There were now voices from amongst the passengers. “This is ridiculous,” one familiarly accented voice said, and McCloud saw that it came from the young German wheelchair case who had burst into tears when he and Stone and Cale had first been paraded. “Sir, this does not stand up under any system of law!”