Flying Hero Class (7 page)

Tom Gullagara leaned toward McCloud. “What's that he says about his grandmother?” he asked.

“She was raped,” murmured McCloud, trying not to move his lips. He saw Tom Gullagara close one eye and consider this news. From across the aisle he could hear distinctly the journalist Cale's words. “I was in Palestine in '48 when the mandate ran out. The Arabs couldn't have organized a farting contest! Now it's everyone's fault but theirs that they were beaten.”

“Shut up, fatso,” called Yusuf. Yet casually, as if he hadn't heard or cared about the content of what Cale said.

Cale is mad and dangerous, McCloud decided. Wanting to keep his profession a secret but making sure Yusuf notices him. Seeking anonymity but crying, “I was in Palestine in '48.…”

One of the American businessmen asked now if he could use the lavatory. Yusuf searched him, feeling for weapon bumps on the man's body. Cale—forcing the issue again—rose in his place at once, as if he intended to go step by step with the American. But Yusuf seemed bent on ignoring Cale as a problem figure in the cabin. He muttered to him in passing that it was to be one at a time.

McCloud watched the American go past. He walked slowly. He was the one McCloud had seen close his eyes as he yielded up his passport: one of those well-made, middle-aged men who wear a tan in autumnal New York, as if they spend every second weekend in the Bahamas.

Through all this—the serving of meals, the speech by Taliq—the Barramatjara Dance Troupe seemed to McCloud to sustain their normal calm. Bluey Kannata, star and troubled soul, remained penned in the window seat by Whitey Wappitji. McCloud had seen his head following events in the cabin, darting in that birdlike way he reproduced when dancing the emu or the brush turkey.

Across the aisle, Daisy Nakamura in her emerald dress had actually fallen serenely asleep. McCloud was astonished by
her
calmness, as distinct from the calmness of the Barramatjara Dance Troupe, by now well canvassed by the press and commented on in feature articles.

When the businessman returned, Yusuf searched Cale, who stepped forward up the cabin as if to accommodate the hijacker. The search over, the Englishman turned and, brushing against McCloud's seat, murmured, “You come next. First toilet on your left.”

McCloud considered not putting his hand up. But then he wondered why Cale had specified the cabinet on the left. Did he plan to leave something there? And if McCloud did not pick it up, wasn't Yusuf sure to find it in the end? McCloud therefore flinchingly raised his hand like a child in the classroom. He feared the Englishman was somehow going to give him an extra care, on top of his care for the troupe and for Pauline. It struck him now that he very likely had more responsibilities than anyone on the plane other than the captain and, of course, the handsome Taliq, who also had—after his own strange fashion—responsibilities of a dual nature.

Yusuf, searching McCloud now, gave off a musk of mint and fresh, moderate sweat. A boy with a pleasant savor.

“Made in Singapore by Vincent Fong Tailors, Orchard Road,” Yusuf read from a label on the inside of McCloud's jacket. He did not seem to be adducing the label as evidence of imperialist decadence. He seemed interested in an old-fashioned way in cloth and stitching. His features, McCloud thought, were little different from those of Lebanese immigrants who ran menswear stores in Australian country towns.

“I was in Singapore with a chamber orchestra last year,” McCloud said, an excuse if it was needed. He chose not to say it was a twenty-four-hour jacket—“I don't wear suits,” he'd told the incredulous and natty Mr. Fong. McCloud felt guilty enough ordering the thing, since he knew that however good the cloth, no one could make a twenty-four-hour jacket without sweated labor. He'd imagined a Singapore Chinese machinist working a treadle sewer by dim light while two of her small children coughed and were restive on a mattress in the corner. Such were the dreams of an uneasy foreign devil ordering clothes in Singapore.

“My father was a tailor,” murmured Yusuf, continuing the search. “Even at home we used to see this Asian stitching. It stinks, you know.”

“I know,” said McCloud, displaying a section where the lining had come adrift.
You have grievances? This is my grievance!

When he entered the cabinet and locked the door, he could not see any evident signs, unless you considered the sodden towel Cale had left in the basin a sign. He pulled open the small tray where after-shave and skin lotion were kept and found a note.

“Flush this,” it said. “In view of the passport thing, my name is not Cale. My name on the passport I handed in is Bennett. Be careful with this Taliq, old son. My early judgment is: a complicated and well-trained fellow of some psychological resources. Again, flush this.” And then below that, C for Cale.

The onus is not so great, then. A drunk named Cale had become a drunk named Bennett. I needn't call him anything at all, since no one need know the two of us have talked.

Finished urinating, a gush of startled yellow, he watched Cale's slip of paper disappear in a swirl of blue water as he obeyed the man and flushed.

Instead of moving back to his seat, he decided to risk getting a sight of Pauline, maybe even speaking brief words with her. For it seemed the hijackers were in unchallenged command now, as they weren't when Hasni first ordered him forward. He wanted to share this observation with his wife, to give comfort and be comforted.

McCloud turned right toward the rear of the plane and came through a curtain. A stocky man in a sports shirt and jeans and a sort of cricketing sweater blocked his path. This must be, McCloud concluded from the automatic weapon the young man held in his hands, one of the
brothers
—Musa, temporarily down from upstairs. “Back, back,” Musa yelled.

“I want to visit my wife,” he said. McCloud felt tears prick his eyelids. “Please. My wife is back there. I want to tell her everything will be all right. Have some compassion.”

“You've had a chance to start the compassion. All you damn fools up there. You've had a chance to set the tone,” said stocky Musa. He spoke with a Midlands British accent and smiled ironically but without too much enmity. “You should let her travel with you. I thought only the unwashed Arabs did such things to their wives.”

“It was a mix-up,” McCloud began to explain.

“Don't worry,” said the young man. “I'm a Christian just like you. Orthodox. We treat our women like shit, too. Back, back, or I'll shoot you. What do I care for your sodding little marriage?”

A small yelp escaped a middle-aged couple in the window seats who were listening to this exchange. He saw in their faces an unfeigned shock at the idea that there were people who could so brutally deny an appeal to do with marriage.

Musa pushed him from behind with the metal handle of the weapon. Such hard edges! From the door of the first-class compartment Musa yelled in Arabic at Yusuf, abusing him for being too relaxed.

Yusuf seemed to reply good-naturedly. Then he spoke in English to the passengers. “My brother Musa is ready to shoot dead anyone who tries to go out.” He gave a shrug, again a sporting man's, a skirt chaser's shrug. “That's the way it is.” He walked down the aisle toward McCloud. “Sir, from now on you will need to piss and shit in a corner, in full view. Your lavatory rights are canceled.”

But Yusuf sounded so friendly about it, McCloud was left with a basis for hoping this was as severe as they'd be on him.

The lights were dimmed. Taliq announced from the flight deck that passengers should take some rest while he and his brothers of the Arab Youth Popular Socialist Front examined their passports. There was actually, McCloud thought, a quotient of paternal care in his voice.

McCloud noticed that Tom Gullagara did not settle to sleep. He sat upright, as if to have a solid think. Occasionally he rolled a thin cigarette and smoked it. Tobacco, which the Barramatjara had encountered as a gift from cattlemen and governments, which had kept them captive in their reservation and soothed them and served as their wages when they worked livestock on the great stations! Now Tom smoked the first skinny stockman's cigarette, the first bush durry, of his life as a hostage.

CHAPTER THREE:

Searching Out the Guilty

Few seemed to sleep, McCloud noticed, but all—even Cale/Bennett—seemed passive in the cabin. McCloud knew that in the version of this plane which they carried in their heads, there was a grenade on the flight deck above and Plastique in the hold below. People were sandwiched by these threats, and Yusuf strolled the aisle with an air of easy knowledge of how most of them breathed shallowly for fear of acting as a trigger.

Secretly watching him around the edge of his seat, McCloud saw the young hijacker, as if impishly, knowing how utter was his control, disappear through the curtain toward the back of the plane.

Almost at once, passengers became aware that they were for the moment without supervision. A few of them began to whisper to each other in the near darkness Taliq intended them to use for sleep.

“These are those PLO fellers, eh?” Tom Gullagara asked McCloud all at once.

“Something like that, Tom.” He remembered Arafat on television, with apparent good faith renouncing terror. He regretted he had not paid more attention to the maps and tables of Palestinian organization, of the fragments of Palestinian alienation and fervor, which sometimes appeared in the press. “Maybe just what they call a splinter group,” he said.

Gullagara nodded. He may have been unfamiliar with parking meters but was something of a practical politician himself and understood splinter groups. Tom and all the Barramatjara had a different view of the white world, of what should be taken from it and given, from that of their cousins the Arritjula, who made what some might call a more “developed world” living in the bauxite mines to the northwest of Baruda. With Whitey, Tom flew off in light aircraft to Perth and Darwin to discuss matters of housing and health with the appropriate ministers of state, who needed to be told that what the Arritjula wanted was not always what the Barramatjara wanted. Splinter groups, if you liked!

As well as that, news of the world, of the
Intifada
and Shamir and Yasir Arafat, came into Tom's settlement at Baruda by way of a large white dish installed the year before.

McCloud had in fact overhead Tom Gullagara discussing the Middle East with a girl at a party in New York. It had been the big news of the world that winter, and everyone's attention had not quite yet been seized by the first indices of great change in Eastern Europe.

“Do your people have contacts with the liberation fronts?” the girl had asked.

Tom had not at first been sure what she meant.

“The PLO, for example?” she suggested.

“No,” said Tom, reflectively sipping beer. “We never met any of them. Not those fellers.”

He must have known that some city Aborigines, of tribes far from his, terrified suburban Australia by trying to talk with Arafat or Qaddafi. But the Barramatjara, who could speak some of the idioms of Christianity, had not yet been introduced to what you could call liberation front idiom, to revolutionary jargon.

Until now, anyhow. Taliq had already indicated there might soon be seminars here in the plane.

The girl Tom had been speaking to at the time had been New York and Jewish and liberal. She had seemed to McCloud to stand enchanted within Tom's circle of tranquility. She had told Tom energetically that the Palestinians should have a homeland.

“Yes,” said Tom with an authoritative shyness, a lack of assertiveness which had proved itself strangely adequate to settle most arguments during the Barramatjara Dance Troupe's tour of the United States. “What I've seen, they get pushed round.”

And although he could justly have impressed and horrified her with the history of the pushing round of the Barramatjara, of missionary follies and the treachery of cattle barons, of the arrogance of miners and the deceits of governments, he'd said nothing, keeping the Barramatjara chronicles deeply to himself, concealed in his own blood, where they meant something more than graphic tales for the cocktail hour.

In the continuing absence of Yusuf, full-blown conversations began to break out.

Daisy Nakamura addressed McCloud from across the aisle. “Can you beat it? My one and only international flight. My one and only first-class seat. And now my one and only hijack.” She laughed musically. “I remember my father. He had a little shrine. Before he ever took off in his pickup to sell vegetables along the road, he'd offer up some rice and saki. Maybe I should have done the same thing before I left Phoenix. Because—let me be the one to tell you!—he always came home okay.”

McCloud saw her delicately made shoulders trembling with laughter in the green dress. Old Ronnie Nakamura had known the score, putting her behind a bar to chatter and twinkle for lonely cowboys and truckers.

The handsome American man who had been the first to the lavatories now stood up in the aisle and turned to face his fellow passengers. He held out his hands in a conciliatory gesture in front of him. Even in the dim light there was a gloss on his blue-black hair, hair soft and well tended beyond the dreams of his emigrant ancestors. Perhaps, as was likely in such a perfected and deliberately ageless man, surgically implanted hair, so much more impeccable than the vegetable uncertainties of nature!

“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, while our hosts are out of the room. My name is Stone. I'm not unfamiliar with this sort of event. My corporation's done some studies on these matters. Enough to know the best hope we have here is solidarity with one another. Jew with Gentile, black with white.”

Cale made a satiric face across the aisle at McCloud. “No shit, pardner,” he said. He called then, “And how is this solidarity achieved, comrade?”