Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  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?”

  Stone would not be baited. “I can tell you with some degree of certainty that the first thing they will do is to subject some of us to special punishment on the basis of our backgrounds. Those who are not so selected will feel a distance developing between themselves and the punished. Believe me, this is the way it works. It’s an age-old technique, but it’s been studied constructively only in this century. You understand what I mean, ladies and gentlemen. The ones not selected for treatment will feel reassured. They’ll begin to tell themselves things. Such as: There’s some way in which the ones being punished are different, are more guilty, more foolish. That’s the trick we mustn’t fall for. My friends, I urge you not to be duped.…”

  The man surveyed them with his blue Eastern European and Manhattan eyes, and sat down.

  Why are they permitting us to stand unsupervised and make speeches? McCloud wondered. Was it negligence or itself a strategy?

  In any case, the American’s speech had been given in a hushed and wary voice, suitable for the situation. Whereas Cale seemed to want something like an open debate. He began grumbling from his seat, loudly enough for most people in the compartment to hear, “You’re right, my good friend. And it is some help to be forewarned, but—may I suggest?—very bloody little help. Because what’s stronger, Mr. Stone? Fraternity or—say—the resentment of America which many Europeans on board feel? What about the anti-Semitism which lies deep in all of us? Anti-Semitism which works so well, Mr. Stone, that even in the deeps of his soul the Jew cries slogans against himself?”

  A number of passengers hissed, not because they agreed or disagreed with Cale, but because they could tell he was a boat rocker, feverish, turbulent, indelicate.

  The American businessman had turned round in his seat. “You speak like you’re Jewish yourself.”

  For though Cale didn’t look Jewish, he certainly looked like the man he had been describing: a man who detested and punished himself, who fed himself badly, who went in for systematic poisoning of his system, who clothed himself as negligently as any enemy would.

  “I’m just your ugly goy, my friend,” Cale cried out, laughing, “commenting on a great mystery.”

  “Rumor is we’re civilized people,” said the American. “Don’t you believe a little solidarity is possible?”

  Cale did not answer at first but gave a shrug the man, given the awkwardness of his backward-looking posture, couldn’t see. “It depends how each of us looks them in the eye,” he said then. “That’s where salvation lies. For instance, how do we know that they’ve got a load of Plastique in the hold, as this Taliq chap claims? Do they really want to be consumed in a great blast? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I can’t guess. But I intend to show the buggers, in my demeanor, that I know it’s a bluff, that I could call it at any second.”

  “For Christ’s sake, don’t take any risks,” said one of the businessmen. “You aren’t out skiing, you know. You can’t endanger yourself without endangering the lot of us.”

  Cale seemed to ignore this. “And by the way, how did they get these arms and the Plastique aboard? Did they appeal to the solidarity of baggage handlers and luggage clerks? You bet your balls they did! They won them politically or they bought them or they most likely did both. I knew this would be one of the results of cracking down on the handlers! Putting television cameras in the baggage holds, stopping the lads creaming off a little jewelry here, a custom-made suspender belt there. It set them up as easy meat for boys like this.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Stone asserted, “how they got their arms and the Plastique aboard. We’re stuck with the fact they did.”

  “In that case,” said Cale, expanding the discussion,
his chin raised like a schoolboy debater’s, “we should remember that most of these people who’ve taken over here are mere infants. They will have spent time in the West, waiting for this Taliq and his superiors to call on them. They’ll know Westerners of their own age. This means to begin with that they could go to a lot of trouble to assert their revolutionary stance, to show that they haven’t been softened up and seduced.…”

  The limpid-eyed Daisy Nakamura stared at him as he rose and put his hands in front of him professorially. Cale grinned, warming to the business of informing such a sublime hostage as Daisy. “They want to show us their fiber. They want to show whomsoever it is who paid to send them to the West—the Iraqi secret police, the Syrians, I don’t know. But above all they want to show themselves.”

  Stone tried to resume what he had been saying earlier, but the unspeakable Cale drove over the top of him. “So, they’re asking themselves can they manage to shoot one or more of us? And they’re steeling themselves. And this makes them dangerous. But, you see, it makes them susceptible, too.”

  The well-made businessman, Mr. Stone, laughed. “So you know these guys, eh? Met their kind before?”

  “I’ve spent time on their turf,” admitted Cale. “In that sense I suppose I know them. What I’m saying is: Watch the little buggers. You’ll learn more that way than by depending on some sort of brotherhood with your fellow passengers.”

  McCloud was still frowning over the question of Cale/Bennett and why a man who wanted to keep a secret should talk loudly and unnecessarily like that, when Bluey Kannata stood up in his place. “Listen, I’m not patient enough for this sort of stuff. All this stuff about sticking together or looking them in the eye. I’m willing to rush them if you blokes are. Sod it!”

  It seemed that some nihilism in Cale had infected Bluey. McCloud was pleased to see Wappitji trying to sit Bluey down as other passengers groaned.

  Cale had begun laughing. “You chaps, you dancers! You can afford to sit tight. You’re going to have privileged status on this flight. Believe me. They’ll love you.”

  “Love us?” said Bluey. “Why would they love us?”

  “Because they believe you’ve been cheated. Like them. Because they think you’d be likely to love them.”

  “I don’t love those buggers,” said Bluey. “And listen. I’m nobody’s victim, nobody’s favorite bloody exhibit. In the first place, I’m a paid-up member of Actors’ Equity.”

  He’d said it with a jaunty, teasing smile. He often told people that. It was part of his professional vanity that like any man of gifts he didn’t perform for nothing. “Some of them Africans,” he’d told McCloud once, “go dancing round the world just for their keep and tucker. Supposed to be happy they’re getting a trip to America! Bugger that for a joke. If you’re good enough to perform in front of a paying crowd, you’re good enough to earn a living like any other dancer!”

  Acting in movies under the aegis of Actors’ Equity had taught Bluey such propositions.

  “Please, please, gentlemen,” Stone was saying. “I’m just trying to prepare people. This wasn’t meant to be a seminar.”

  Cale growled. “It’s very kind of you to enlighten us, mate. Except the methods these people use—the people who have us—are more psychologically effective than any little corporate study can tell you.”

  McCloud could tell that Stone would have liked to stop talking, but Cale’s willful disinformation had to be answered. “That doesn’t happen to be the truth. My corporation has advised governments in this very area.…”

  “All the more reason to keep your counsel, Mr. Stone.”

  Cale, who had wanted to stay so obscure that he’d put the weight of his alias on McCloud, moved forward now toward Stone, who in his ardor to advise the people of the cabin had himself begun to advance into the aisle.

  “The size of the egos!” Daisy Nakamura remarked to McCloud.

  “Okay, comrade,” Cale/Bennett cried. “You say you want unity, and you advise us against division. But we’re already divided. We have here, on the other side of the aisle, representatives of an ancient race who have no reason to show solidarity with you and me. We aren’t like a township, old chap. We have no ties of shared experience or blood or memory. In a plane, nobody knows his neighbor. No one belongs to the same Rotary Club or garden society as the person across the aisle. We’re just a slice of the history of the world, grievances and all. My old son, this solidarity you urge is purest bloody fantasy in these circumstances. I wish to God you’d stop pushing that particular barrow.”

  Like everyone else, McCloud was beginning to feel anger toward both men. “Do you think they left us alone by accident?” he asked. “They left us alone to ensure we’d have an argument just like this.”

  There was a clatter of feet on the stairs leading from the upper deck. The dozen or so passengers who had been seated up there appeared briefly and were herded aft by the wiry young man in the cricket sweater whom Taliq had identified earlier as Musa. Yet the last time McCloud saw Musa he had been downstairs blocking the way to the rear of the plane. So Taliq’s men were all moving, changing places, vanishing and appearing.

  The clearing of the upper deck was an obvious arrangement for anyone taking illicit control of a plane to make, yet the sight of the mute transit of these passengers down the spiral staircase seemed to chasten everyone.

  All the comforts the plane had to offer now seemed to McCloud used up, sucked dry. The air flowing from vents above his head turned at once more sour. It was at that time, with the jailhouselike procession of the upstairs people, that the plane declared itself—without any ambiguity—a prison.

  Our children, thought McCloud then. He and Pauline called them “the Boy” and “the Girl.” The argot of the kitchen. It had all begun when they were so small that talking about them in the third person was normal and then became habitual. They were prisoners, too. Their breath and their education would be in suspension once this news got out, and it would reach them, since they were a little too old—eight and ten years—for people to hide newspaper headlines from them or switch channels when the news came on.

  “Oh, my children,” he murmured aloud. He’d always believed they would never have to carry any clan baggage, that they would not grow up to be the sort of men and women who were pointed out at parties. “Did you ever hear what happened to their parents?”

  He had marked them by catching a hijacked plane. How could he make this up to them?

  On the edge of sleep, McCloud suffered one of those sharply defined memories which occur at such times. On their first morning in New York, Bluey had invited him to go on a visit to an address a long way down the island, in what New Yorkers called “the Lower East.” It was credible to McCloud that Bluey, who had been for a time a common figure on daytime television in New York, should have contacts all over the city.

  The building he and McCloud came to that morning, however, was not some elegant condominium. It was one of those 1890s cast-iron structures, its facade tarnished by a subsequent, dirty century. Opposite its stoop and entryway stood a precinct house of the New York Police Department. Squad cars full of hefty Celts and tall Hispanics were double-parked in the street.

  McCloud was astonished therefore when Bluey knocked at the first door on the left inside the building, paid over a hundred-dollar bill to a fat man who answered the knock, and received from him a clear plastic packet of white powder. Bluey placed the sachet casually in the pocket of his jacket. The fat man vanished into the dimness without a word.

  McCloud took Bluey by the elbow and held him back from going out of the hallway onto the street. “Bluey, you might have noticed. There’s a police station opposite this bloody place!”

  “It’s okay,” the worldling Bluey reassured him. “I reckon if they’re as close as that, Frank, they probably know something about it. Must be part of their retirement fund, eh?”

  “But this is hopeless, Bluey,” McCloud complained. “I don’t mind so much tha
t you’re compromising me. But you’re compromising the troupe and the tour.”

  Bluey looked at him, and the familiar, oblique smile came crookedly back. “Don’t be a bloody old maid, Frank. It isn’t your tour, mate. It’s our tour. It’s called the Barramatjara Dance Troupe, eh? Not the Frank McCloud bloody dance troupe.”

  “I never said it was mine. It’s the others I feel sorry for.” Because they were not members of Actors’ Equity. They did not distinguish between the professional from Actors’ Equity and the wanderer upon whom the hero ancestors breathed. They had never been to New York before or ingested powders so far up in the Caucasian scales of infamy as the powder in Bluey’s sachet.

  “Yeah.” Bluey winked. “What’ll the white racist bastards at home say about a junkie dancer, eh?”

  “Look, if you don’t think there’s a chance of arrest … Well, I have to tell you there is one, that’s all. I want you to hand me the powder, Bluey.”

  Bluey made a number of unbelieving noises. He produced the sachet and held it before McCloud’s face. “I don’t know if I ought to give you this, Frank. You white blokes have no self-control. Look what you’re like with booze.”

  McCloud grabbed the sachet, rushed to a bank of letter boxes, and pushed it inside the one nearest to hand. He expected Bluey’s rage but was not prepared for the stuttering grief, the gasp of pain. Though it soon enough resolved itself into a kind of mockery. “Fuck you, McCloud. I know a dozen places I can get more.”

  All the way up Broadway that day, as far as the twenties, keeping by Bluey’s side, McCloud had felt hunted and had listened for a siren, the one meant for him as distinct from the general cacophony of sirens in that city. Whereas Bluey could have been, had the presence of, a city-wise American black who knew how the law advantaged him.

  Then, as they waited together at a traffic light, Bluey turned to McCloud. “D’you know why this started, Frank? All the painting? All this dancing stuff? The souvenir program says it all started when a schoolteacher called David Ransome put the idea to us. No one questions that, Frank. Every white fat arse in the audience reads that and thinks, Yes, it had to be something like that. And we’re too polite to say otherwise.”