Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  “There are little folk dance troupes all over the world. They perform in church halls and attract polite if befuddled applause. Weren’t you surprised when this one drew all that fuss, Mr. McCloud? All that support? All those limousines?”

  “There weren’t limousines. That’s journalistic excess.”

  “But such a fuss!” Taliq insisted. “Did the Micmac or the Sioux ever cause such a furor?”

  “They’re very good,” said McCloud of the Barramatjara. “They’re absolutely compelling, for God’s sake. And they do the painting as well. And I suppose on top of that they might have novelty value.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Taliq, laughing without feigning it, “the curious savages, what? But I agree with you. They have great novelty. For one thing, they sit on diamond fields untainted by apartheid! That augments their novelty immensely.”

  It was apparent now: Taliq did believe that Francis McCloud was a stooge, an agent of international deceit.

  “Do you know what?” the Palestinian asked him gently. “You will become anxious for punishment. Believe me. I can tell that. You already know about yourself what we have just discovered.”

  McCloud knew that if, within, he accepted Taliq’s shrewd dictum, he was finished.

  “I am guilty of vanity and stupidity,” he cried out, and for once it was not his all-too-familiar mea culpa. “But I would never knowingly dupe them. They’re my friends, for God’s sake! I sought them out because I was impressed by what they did, I wrote articles about them. I’m aware of the ironies of their situation, yes. But I contributed in a small way to their renown.”

  Within three minutes, though, McCloud had—at Taliq’s order—divested himself of his outer clothing, his watch, and his shoes and was kneeling in the aisle behind Cale and within his sour ambience.

  When Taliq left the compartment, and the boy Hasni—who had returned from delivering the dancers upstairs—was distracted, Cale muttered over his shoulder, “You know why they’re doing this to us?”

  “No,” said McCloud.

  Cale said, “Because it works.”

  McCloud wondered what the beautiful Nakamura thought of his legs, gone a little flaccid from three sedentary years of novel writing, and of his flesh pallid, he was sure, with fear. But this question was small by comparison with the truth of what Cale had muttered: that it was all working. He felt in his mouth the salt of condemnation. Like a child cornered by older and more mysterious children, he was sure he gave off a sour musk of punishability. He wanted to urinate, and this only seemed to compound his blame.

  If the news report was correct, he thought, then the Barramatjara Dance Troupe had been badly used. He too was aware of having meanly used them in passing, as a vehicle to bring his novel to New York. It might have been better if he had been the agent of malice Taliq thought him to be. His villainy would have given him more to resist Taliq with. His mere opportunism seemed despicable, left him without the sort of saving anger which tightens the musculature of the thorough-going miscreant.

  He knew the Barramatjara would be lenient on him. The Barramatjara were gone, however. On their final migration. Upstairs.

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  Marsupial Rat

  The ancestors of the Barramatjara came to the Australian desert some ice ages past across the shallow-bedded pools and spits of land which once connected parts of New Guinea and Indonesia to the great southern continent. Once, so long ago that it was not even referred to in their vivid mythic accounts of the Barramatjara beginnings, they had lived along a northern tropical coast. But unrecorded pressure from other immigrants arriving behind them, or else some forgotten voice of the kind which drove the Israelites into Sinai or sent the Anasazi Indians out of their fine cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, compelled them a thousand miles southwards into the deserts.

  The Barramatjara, anyhow, unlike historians, did not believe they originated anywhere but in the Barramatjara desert country. They believed indeed that they had always occupied that place, with its unexpected charms and bounties. Their ancestors had hand-made it for them, sometimes through robust folly, sometimes through dazzling style and wisdom. For the Barramatjara ancestors displayed all the human qualities.

  The people reenacted the earth-compounding journeys of their ancestors through dance and ceremonial and ocher sand paintings. Their dance and their paintings were liturgy and a kind of physics, a remaking of the eternal earth the ancestors had given them.

  But perhaps five years past, as the program notes of the dance troupe announced, a white teacher came to the Barramatjara settlement called Baruda and persuaded some of the men to combine the painting and the dance into a remarkable one-day entertainment for city people.

  The dancer/depictors began by touring the universities. They became a rage. Soon they were performing in theaters in Adelaide, Melbourne, in natural amphitheaters in Sydney. There, one lotus-eating summer’s evening, Pauline and McCloud and the two children, equipped with picnic basket, iced orange juice, and chardonnay, saw the Barramatjara Dance Troupe perform.

  The ancestors had combined human and animal characteristics, sometimes at the one time, sometimes serially, now man, now totem creature. Whitey and the lads had caught from the ancestors therefore a startling gift for animal mimicry, to a degree which transcended imitation and nudged at the edges of metamorphosis.

  McCloud and Pauline had seen the casual corroborees Northern Territory Aborigines, brought in from the reservation by bus, performed in Alice Springs and Katherine; the dancing of mere tales, of fables fit for children. In those events a kind of justifiable kidding of the callow, suburban travelers was in progress. Just to drive home the point that nothing of heavy worth was being given away, the dancers asked men and women up on the stage or out into the clearing at the end of the show and provoked them, against the mocking background music of the didj, to weave about clumsily, manically, painfully.

  There was none of that jokiness about the Barramatjara dancers McCloud first saw in the Sydney dark. You felt rightly or wrongly that you were being admitted to serious and even dangerous transmutations. McCloud’s children were spellbound by the hairsbreadth nature of what was happening. Would these men return from being emu or wallaby? And then—five minutes later—would they come back from the rim of incarnation as the cassowary? They were playing all the time at that gate between humankind and the rest of nature, the gate which most people had felt bound to close shut so that the city and the steam train, the automobile and the jet, the computer and the garbage compactor, could occur. The dancers sucked and weaved you toward the door of loss and bade fair to drag you through it. They let you off that experience only after you had suffered delicious shock and exaltation.

  The evening McCloud first saw the dancers left him in a state very close to literal enchantment. He felt that a door in the face of his own continent had been opened, and that he had glimpsed through it a garden of unsuspected wonders. He talked a magazine editor into letting him travel to Baruda to see the dancers in their homes and to write something about them. They were by now famous throughout the nation—although Bluey had been famous in his own right for the past ten years. Like Bluey, the others had calmly, almost negligently, let themselves now be persuaded to sign on with various film agents.

  So when he first met the Barramatjara it was as someone who had come to inquire about their fame and write something about it.

  McCloud landed at Baruda in a light aircraft one late afternoon. Heeled over in the passenger seat during the approach, he had seen red dust, a thread of empty river with desert oaks and eucalypts growing in it, and hills built of fragments of rock. Stones bounced the sun so sharply into your eyes that you would have sworn—wrongly—that it had recently rained and that every surface was glossy with water.

  Bluey Kannata was away at the time, acting in what the other dancers called “some picture.” McCloud met, though, with the others—Whitey Wappitji, Paul Mungina the didj player, Philip Puduma, and Tom Gullagara—be
neath the brush shelter outside the settlement store.

  McCloud found Tom Gullagara, with his modest beer gut and his huge-buckled cowboy belt, the frankest of the four of them. Tom nodded toward some old men on the fringe of the camp. “Those old fellers keep an eye on us, case we give away something secret. They don’t want us painting much, dancing anything too secret. Some of them come all the way from Easter Creek to check up on us, whether we give too much away to visitors.”

  Then Whitey said, “If you want to get something serious back from people, you’ve got to give something serious out.”

  The troupe told him they’d paint him a design on canvas laid out on the sand the next morning. Instead of the old dyes, which were so hard to make, they would use acrylics mixed with water. They would paint one of the sober Whitey Wappitji’s designs, one that was owned by him.

  “It’s going to be that marsupial rat dreaming from Mount Dinkat,” said Whitey, sitting very upright on his haunches and speaking with half-closed eyes. “He’s my dreaming, that feller. He’s no rat. It’s bad business to call him a rat. He’s Tutinjinga. That’s his real name. He’s come across from Haast’s Bluff, an awful long way, and he gets into the lizard-women round there at Mount Dinkat. You can see the lizard-women still lying down, five miles out there. You can find their eggs out there. Just five miles out on the Hall’s Creek road there.”

  The next morning, after he had spent a fitful night in the empty labor ward of the Baruda clinic, McCloud watched the four of them set to, sitting on rugs around the margin of the canvas set on a flat, granular patch of earth and painting as if for a performance.

  Though this design was a dreaming which lean Whitey claimed to own more than the others did, the other three men also seemed to have some relative ownership and to be confident in what they did. The main pattern, as left behind by the hero marsupial rat when he violated the blood laws with the lizard-women, was blocked out with a blackened stick by Whitey. For he was the one who had received it directly from an uncle and also—according to what Cowboy Tom Gullagara would say later—had it confirmed in a dream by this being, Tutinjinga himself.

  Whitey started the design at the center of the spread canvas, which was the size of a small room. He worked his way outward, brushing away any red dust with a switch of gum leaves as he backed from the center of the pattern.

  “This isn’t any deep secret version,” Tom Gullagara told McCloud. “This is serious. But it’s the one a lot of relatives can look at. This is the one for the uninitiated fellers, but when you see it you get to be as good as a relative of ours, Frank. Just the same, this bloke here”—he nodded to the pattern Whitey was making—“he’s not dangerous to anyone.”

  Yet there were designs known to these men which did have a dangerous form. That was obvious. All the ancestors were capable of forms which blasted the unprepared. You got that idea of danger from the inherent threat and promise of the Barramatjara dancing.

  The Christian Philip, Cowboy Tom, the didj trickster Paul, on their rugs around the outskirts of Whitey’s canvas, began to apply paint—red, yellow, blue, black, but never emerald, since emerald never seemed to occur in the Barramatjara country—to this ritual depiction of the holy desert as made at Mount Dinkat by Whitey’s old father and intimate ancestor, marsupial rat.

  They leaned inward, advancing at last over the dried outer designs to complete the inner particulars of the tale. Sometimes one of them stopped to roll thin cigarettes or spit tobacco juice. The paint dried quickly in the heat. They worked the brushes with a nonchalant style.

  The designs to do with the marsupial rat ritual at Mount Dinkat, a plug of stone visible away to the north and the venue for tricky Tutinjinga’s seduction of the lizard-women, were a sort of pictorial code which you would need to be a Barramatjara to read. The conventions seemed to be that water and spirit places were circular, with concentric rings, like Dante’s Inferno. In the open ground between circles, each of the troupe would place his own patterns of white dots. The spirits of the earth were at least as numerous as these dots.

  The circles and lines and dots were not literal accountings of marsupial rat’s great Mount Dinkat rut. But so sweetly did the designs connect that everything the Barramatjara painted had a satisfying assonance to it. They could have given lessons to Klee or a host of the Modernists. They were the only people who had been Modernist for fifty thousand years.

  McCloud sat for a time near Philip Puduma, who did not chew or smoke. Philip was the oldest, perhaps forty-five years. He had taken off his stockman’s hat, and sweat glimmered in his thinning hair and along that long, solemn jawline which typified the Barramatjara. He wore a crucifix around his neck.

  A question which in some lights seemed crass occurred to McCloud. At length, in the interests of journalism, he asked it.

  “This marsupial rat, what do you think of him, Philip? What I mean is, he goes up to Mount Dinkat and fornicates?”

  “Oh, this is a good story,” murmured Philip lightly. “This one … it tells you not to interfere with women of the same blood. There’s nothing wrong with this one. This one’s like King David and Bathsheba, this feller.”

  As the morning wore on, McCloud became a little embarrassed by the time they were spending on this demonstration just for him. Occasionally he thanked them. But they did not say, “It’s no trouble!” Nor did they behave any differently than if they had been performing the painting in front of an audience of thousands.

  Throughout the day, a number of older women with capacious sagging breasts, a block of stomach, high-boned hips, and delicate desert ankles would come up and joke with the painters in the Barramatjara tongue. A stone’s throw away, under the shade of an enormous river gum, a breed of tree so skilled in spreading wide on a pittance of water, younger men and women sat on a rug playing gin rummy and a game called nine-up. Their laughter, like the conversations of the older women and the painters, sounded alien to McCloud and had that exciting quality of coming from an ancient throat: the first throat to clench in hilarity in all this great desert! So it seemed to the suburban aesthete McCloud, whose senses were being stretched by what he saw and heard in Baruda.

  One young woman, full-lipped, round-headed, threw in her cards and stood up. She passed the dance troupe at their work, averting her eyes. McCloud saw how she shifted a wad of narcotic weed behind her teeth, around her pink mouth. Paul Mungina made a teasing noise with his own mouth, a sound like the didj at which he was the master.

  “That there, that’s Bluey Kannata’s missus,” he said, breaking out of his normal reticence. “She never been to Sydney or Melbourne or New York like Bluey.” He made yet another, more jazzy didj noise. Without malice he said with a smile, “Bluey’s got other girls there. Them disco girls.”

  “And keep her only to yourself, as long as you both shall live,” the Christian Philip murmured, not necessarily to anyone.

  When the painting was finished, they let McCloud take some pictures of it and then drifted away to drink tea. Doing the thing, being empowered to do it, was what mattered to them. They did not seek to preserve it after the fact, and McCloud felt that it would be wrong, a gaffe of some kind, for him to remove it from where the painters had left it. Dogs and children wandered across the painting, and if any of the card players walked by it, they skirted it yet took no pains to avoid kicking dust across its surface. McCloud felt a desperation, like that of a man in a short story he had read, who had encountered in the sand of a beach where the tide was coming in a sketch made by Picasso. And who had sought to preserve it against the merciless pull of the moon.

  The scholars called it “animism,” the religion, the cosmogony which informed the painting and the dance of the Barramatjara Dance Troupe. The name animism was applied also to the world system of Dayaks in Borneo and Comanches in Texas and the Nuba of the Sudan, so it seemed to McCloud to serve not to distinguish the Barramatjara, but to lump them in. However, as McCloud would learn both in Baruda and on tour, it did mean
that their apparently empty earth teemed with spirits. A man and woman were not enough on their own to produce a quick child. It was the spirit which quickened the womb.

  McCloud himself had been raised intermittently as a Presbyterian. There had been a lot of Presbyterians on the north shore of Sydney. Most of them, like McCloud’s family, found it more a satisfying label than a satisfying faith. It told you who your friends and suitable neighbors were. You and they were not some unkempt and overbreeding crowd of Catholics or some flamboyantly decorative Jew. You and they were solid people. He knew that Pauline’s parents, against all the evidence of flamboyant events which struck them in the midst of their lives, saw that same set of guarantees in their Presbyterian background. And spirits did not roam the orderly suburbs or challenge the orderly virtues of Caledonia Australis, where among the gum trees people felt no weight of ghosts and sent their children to well-maintained schools named Scots or Knox Grammar.

  McCloud had been bored by religion before thirteen, tormented by it for a year or two thereafter, argumentative about it in an acned, smart-aleck way for a further year or two, and then indifferent. When he became an apostate—about the same time he drank his first schooner of beer—he believed he was doing it because the doctrines were irrational and beyond the belief of a reasonable fellow.

  But irrationality—he saw through his experiences as a friend and associate of the Barramatjara—wasn’t a problem anymore. It never had been for humans. Irrationality of the right kind—ordered by practice—was bread and meat to the spirit. The problem was finding the irrational system which fitted you; the satisfying faith.

  The closest McCloud could come to that now was a sort of ancestor worship, a vague fabulous memory of McCloud immigration. Great-grandparents had left the rigors of what you might call lower-middle-class Clydeside life and for some reason taken the earth’s longest option, all the way to the antipodes, known also as Sydney, Australia.