Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  A New York director, who had been hired especially for the day to take the dance troupe through their cues, stood at the front of the stage yelling instructions and, through a radio, asking for guidance from the lighting director high in his booth at the back of the theater.

  The dance troupe were dispersed around the stage in their street clothes. Tomorrow at noon they were intended to start painting the publicly accessible representation of the Two Brothers at Wirgudja, which as Cowboy Tom had suggested in Baruda would make the whole audience relatives. The troupe would, before tomorrow night, produce the design around which the dance would be performed.

  Now, as the lights changed, the director advised them on the various “bridging” positions necessary for making the transition from one dance segment to another.

  Whereas in the dances themselves, in their balletic and dramatic content, the Barramatjara were their own directors and choreographers.

  The technical rehearsal was two-thirds over when McCloud became aware that Bluey Kannata had begun to weep on stage.

  He was very quiet about it at first, not making any sobbing noises. But then he became louder, and the director went to him and asked him, with a peculiarly theatrical Manhattan concern, what was worrying him.

  Philip Puduma had also moved to Bluey and stood by frowning, discerning—with his double lens of Christian- and Barramatjara-hood—the demons at work on Bluey.

  The others kept their positions, looking obliquely at their colleague, discreetly embarrassed by him. The noise of Bluey’s distress grew louder. It surprised McCloud, the way the others stood off, as if Bluey were acting in ways which excluded them from brotherly concern. McCloud himself began to move up toward the stage. But Bluey turned and fled.

  McCloud hurried backstage after him, through a door at the side of the theater. He was guided now by the noise of Bluey’s great hawking sobs. He followed the sound up a passageway to a door marked “Props Room.” The place had a table and chairs, a cutting table, some coat hangers vacant except for one splendid purple robe of the belle époque, a few bald polystyrene wig stands, and a bowler hat. Bluey wasn’t seated on any of the chairs. He was hunched, contorted by sobs, beneath the cutting table. Philip Puduma, who must have moved with great purpose to get there first, stood over the table.

  Like a man helpless on the edge of this conflagration of grief, Philip turned to McCloud. “Reckons someone cursed his uncle. If you ask me, that curse is inside Bluey, if you ask me.”

  He raised his eyebrows and spoke in a don’t-look-to-me-for-enlightenment sort of way.

  Obediently, not wanting to intrude in Barramatjara business, McCloud sat on one of the chairs. But at last he couldn’t stop himself asking, “What uncle?”

  “His uncle in Baruda,” said Philip, again trying to put an end to the questions. “Bluey had a stupid dream someone cursed his uncle.” Philip returned his gaze severely to his cousin Bluey. “It’s all the Jim Beam, and all them funny cigarettes,” he murmured. “That’s why he’s got those bad dreams.”

  The Barramatjara had a weakness for Jim Beam, rather than for Scotch. It might be all the country-and-western music they listened to, in which Jim Beam’s name was often invoked. If an unarguable cowboy like Tom Gullagara drank spirits, it was always Jim Beam.

  Bluey was growing exhausted with grief and had fallen sideways against the wall. Yes, McCloud thought, definitely an actor, even in a society of actors such as the Barramatjara. More likely in any society to dramatize his grief than would a solid citizen like his cousin Philip. There was some dementia, a St. Elmo’s fire of bluer excess, dancing about the surface of Bluey’s fit.

  The other three dancers had appeared in the corridor. Bluey looked up from under the cutting table, fixed his bleared eye upon Whitey, and then covered his face and slumped backward against the wall. He seemed to know there was something which separated him from them; something in his demonstration which they felt bound to distance themselves from.

  Whitey nonetheless came into the room briefly to stand with authority beside McCloud. McCloud stood up.

  “That one,” said Whitey Wappitji, looking McCloud in the eye. “That one there, he’s not well. That feller’s not well at all.”

  “What does ‘not well’ mean?” McCloud asked.

  “No one curses his uncle. His uncle doesn’t have a curse and just isn’t dead. There’s something inside that feller that’s the problem.”

  McCloud realized Wappitji was authorizing him. Saying, “There’s nothing I can do. You can move in with your normal suburban gestures of condolence.”

  McCloud knelt by the cutting table. “Let me take you for some coffee,” he urged Bluey.

  The Barramatjara film star had begun to shiver.

  “Come on, Bluey,” said Philip Puduma. “Jesus loves you, mate. You’re okay.”

  The trite words conveyed nothing of Phil’s river-bed epiphany, when Christ appeared in a waterless river and seared Phil clean of alcohol.

  “Bluey,” McCloud insisted, “we’ll go over to O’Neal’s.”

  Though O’Neal’s had a bar, McCloud would ensure the overwrought Bluey Kannata would drink only coffee.

  When Bluey did not seem comforted, McCloud had further thoughts. “We can call your uncle, then,” he said.

  Baruda was not connected yet with everywhere else on earth by satellite. It kept itself difficultly separate. It was not part of the universe of interconnecting plaints and whispers. But it was possible, through irksome means, through special and time-consuming measures, to speak to the place from anywhere on earth by radio telephone.

  This promise seemed to have an influence upon Bluey. He looked at McCloud for the first time. “We can get through from here?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said McCloud, though he knew it could take two-thirds of the night. He bent to Bluey. “Was it a dream?” asked McCloud.

  “Clear as day,” whispered Bluey in awe.

  “And your uncle … wasn’t well?”

  Tears spilled down Bluey’s face again, but smoothly, without affecting his voice. Bluey whispered, “He was sung. They sung his book.”

  “But listen. How can you know for certain?”

  Bluey closed his eyes. He drew his knees up under his chin and huddled.

  “Can’t you tell me anything?” McCloud asked the others, Wappitji, Mungina, and Cowboy Tom Gullagara by the door.

  They said nothing. They turned their unscannable faces to various quarters of the room. Whitey said, “This one isn’t a real dream. That’s honest, Frank. It’s a whiskey dream.”

  “What about you, Philip?” McCloud asked the Christian.

  Philip got up, shaking his head, affronted. “I can’t handle what Bluey sees. What he thinks he sees. I can’t handle that. It’s stuff I left behind, Frank.”

  He thought a second. It was written on his face that he didn’t believe in the authenticity of Bluey’s dreams, and yet that it had its power. Unable to say any of that, though, he hurried out into the corridor. A man pursued, if you like. For the moment, Jesus—the shield, the lamb, the deep water—wasn’t with him.

  Whitey was still staring at McCloud, as if to say “You’re the manager. This is your problem.” They were very severe, the Barramatjara, in their demarcations of duty. It was no use arguing with them about it.

  McCloud suggested therefore that they all get on with the rehearsal. He would, he announced, take Bluey out for some coffee and a talk. He was grateful when the others failed to point out, though he knew they understood it, that the rehearsal did not make a lot of sense without Bluey Kannata, that his lack of a technical briefing might invalidate their own movements about the stage.

  Outside, in the great piazza between theaters, the air was brisk and fountains splashed with a steely glimmer they caught from the seasonal sky and its honed clouds. It was a subtle, treacherously cold day such as the Barramatjara, in all their millennia in the western desert, had never before seen.

  Shuddering in a p
aramilitary jacket, Bluey groaned, “Let’s go to The Ginger Man, McCloud.”

  For a man who believed in curses, he had a good working knowledge of where the bars were. That was his tragedy and his success.

  “Neither of us can be trusted there, Bluey. I want to talk to you clearly.”

  At this refusal, the shuddering increased again—it was as acute as it had been under the cutting table inside. “My uncle’s died of that curse, Frank,” he called out. “Don’t you ask me his name!”

  “Of course I won’t,” said McCloud. He understood that command; that you could not utter the names of the dead. To do so was to invite them to remain in the place they had died in, or else to infest the place where their death was known—to everyone’s hellish confusion.

  Poor Bluey was malleable, anyhow. He let McCloud push him across the street, in through the doors of O’Neal’s, away from the bar, and to a corner booth. The shuddering continued. His face was entirely slick—there was sweat on the brow, and tears irrigated the rest.

  McCloud ordered them coffee, during which Bluey studied the menu through the distorting lens of his fear.

  “Listen, McCloud,” said Bluey when the urbane young waiter was gone. “Don’t nag me about the stuff I smoke.”

  Some years past, Bluey had been sent down from Baruda to learn the electrical trade at a technical college. He was on his way back, to attend to his mysteries and to service the Baruda diesel generators, when one of the rising young Australian film directors had noticed him in an airline queue and asked him had he ever acted. He read for the part, sang a song or two, charmed everyone in the production office. Within two weeks the young director was introducing him to film writers and other journalists at a press conference. Everyone was captivated.

  On the set of the film, some white actor had passed Bluey a brotherly joint. Hash which languidly strums the brain! The wholesome and innocent model of booze! The Navajo had their peyote buttons, and the Barramatjara movie star should have a similar catalyst of visions. Such was the fashion of thought in those days. The gesture was a gesture of friendship by a member of Actors’ Equity who had read Carlos Castaneda and his tales of narcotic illumination. No one considered the influence the joint might have on Bluey’s particular Barramatjara catalog of dreams.

  The film became a critical success and a winner of festival awards, among them the Gold Palm at Cannes. The world asked, “Where did he learn to act?” Bluey achieved a white kind of fame. He smiled his broad and crooked smile in rooms blue with cannabis smoke. He saw the topless, decadent girls of La Croisette prancing beneath the billboards of the Cannes Film Festival. Far beyond the usual reach of marsupial rat and the Two Brothers, he made contacts.

  But he did not look like a man with a wide circle of friends today, not in O’Neal’s, under pressure from a different dream from Whitey’s. You could tell when the memory of the dream of his uncle’s death recurred to him, for he would begin weeping again in the middle of mouthfuls of coffee, spilling tears and coffee wildly down his chin and even onto his shirt.

  “You listen to me, Frank,” he pleaded. “I can tell a booze dream from a grass dream, and a grass dream from a fair dinkum dream. What I saw then, on the stage … it was a fair dinkum dream.”

  “We’ll see,” McCloud promised. “We’ll get through on the radio telephone and we’ll see exactly what it was.”

  “I don’t need any radio telephone to know,” said Bluey, crumpling his hands in front of his eyes. “I saw it all happen.”

  In the end, just as a mercy, McCloud ordered him some cognac, which arrived in a large brandy balloon with a lit candle so that Bluey could enhance the texture over the flame. If he had chosen to.

  “You know, those geologist blokes have been out west of Baruda. My uncle’s country, that one. Mount Gilbert, it’s called. It’s my uncle’s. And they went and did some drilling. You know, they take these core samples. And they drilled, those blokes. And they reckon there’s diamonds out there. Out there towards Mount Gilbert. My uncle’s country. And they reckon there’s diamonds.”

  The dancers sometimes told their stories this way, moving in circles, repeating chief ideas, teasing the fabric out. It appeared a Barramatjara tale rolled, as well as had straight momentum.

  “So these blokes are very keen on that place, of course, on that Mount Gilbert country of my uncle’s. And they take their bits of core sample away. And all at once there’s one of those classy planes, the ones that carry about a dozen heavies. Executive jet or something like that. It comes into Baruda. One of those classy bloody planes that … it touches down. And blokes wearing those Singapore-style tropical suits and silk ties are on it.

  “And they want to go into a conference with my uncle and some of the other old blokes. All these old fellers who have something to do with Mount Gilbert, who have to do its ceremonies. These are the old men the classy blokes want to talk to. And they talk to them, but nothing gets settled. There’s a talk session goes on for two days. And no one says yes or no, can or can’t. Because it’s my uncle’s country, but he can’t just say yes. He can’t say, ‘Keep drilling, blow the shit out of it with gelignite.’ He has to check with all his cousins, because it’s their country, too. That one called Mount Gilbert. Not just my uncle’s, but his cousins’ as well.

  “These blokes in the suits, they’re from the Department of Trade and the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, too, and the department of this and the department of bloody that. They say to my uncle, ‘You don’t mind helping Australia out, do you, mate? What with its adverse balance of payments and all that shit? You’re a patriot, aren’t you, old feller?’ And you know what, Frank? They’re doing the work for those drillers. And they’re saying, ‘There’ll be all these mineral royalties, and you can buy schools and trucks. And there could be other things here in the end, on this Barramatjara freehold. There could be foreign governments come in here and pay you a big rent for a little bit of this country. But before that happens, they want to see you Barramatjara blokes are interested in progress!’ And they go on talking the poor old feller blind.”

  Bluey gave another yelping sob, and McCloud rushed in to prevent it developing.

  “Keep going,” he urged Bluey. “Take a sip of that stuff, just a sip.”

  “It’s terrible for those old blokes,” said the Barramatjara film star, the tribe’s only sniffer of white powder. “It’s pretty terrible for us fellers who’re away all the time. But in a different way, you know. The heat’s really on blokes like my uncle. On old fellers like that. ‘Traditional owners.’ There was a time traditional owners were traditional owners and took it for granted. But now those words are in the law. ‘Traditional owners.’ The blokes in the Singapore suits have to keep chattering away at them. And not only the old blokes. I mean, I got my responsibilities up there in the Baruda country, too. I’ve got a wife up there, you know.…”

  “I know. I met her.”

  “She talked to you?”

  “No, she didn’t talk. Not particularly.”

  “She’s pretty shy,” said Bluey, conceding a grin toward the memory of her shyness. “Not like that rowdy sheila I’m living with in Sydney, not like that. A bloody old-fashioned girl, that one. My Barramatjara missus. My wife’s country’s way over near Giles Weather Station. I got ceremonies in the Baruda country I gotta go to, I got ceremonies in Giles, I got ceremonies all over the bloody place. But I’m never there. I’m always making bloody pictures. Or going to the opening of malls. Or poncing round in New York or somewhere.”

  And he went into a staring contemplation of his destiny, before lowering his voice.

  “Frank, I go back into all that country, anyhow. Badunjari. You know badunjari? It’s that dream journey you can make. It buggers you, mate. There you are in the fucking Carlton-Ritz, shagged-out, rooted, absolutely buggered, trying to sleep. And then your spirit gets up. Your spirit comes up out of you. You might have checked into the fucking Carlton-Ritz, Frank. But not all of you. And your
spirit, you know … he travels you to Easter Creek or Giles or Mount Dinkat or Gilbert or any of those places. You see those places in daylight. You sing to their stones, Frank. You’re half-dead with that badunjari. But you can’t get out of it. And at eight o’clock in the morning, when they wake you up, there’s some press conference you got to go to.

  “And those journos and critics, they don’t know any of this, and you can’t say anything. And they think, What a dumb fucking Abo! They don’t know, Frank, I could’ve been singing those stones half the night. That’s why I’m not what you’d call a good bloody traveler. But you know what, Frank? Let me tell you! That Jim Beam stops badunjari, and I love it like a brother! And that little white snow you snort up your nose! And screwing yourself stupid with a white girl! That’s what works. You get a rest from that badunjari, Frank. And Christ, I like a rest.”

  “Oh, dear God,” cried McCloud, who had never heard a story of such anguish, such wrenching of the spirit. “What can I say, Bluey? Do you want to go home? To Baruda, I mean?”

  Bluey forlornly considered the idea. Then he halfway smiled. “Don’t think so, Frank. Too much of a bloody nomad now.”

  McCloud looked beyond the glass of the restaurant window, at pale faces which seemed not so much burdened with dream journeys as with their lack.

  “So my uncle,” said Bluey, resuming that tale at last, “caves in and agrees to letting them have a mining lease. They can drill his country! What else can he do? He’s big on the queen, my uncle. Like Paul Mungina the didj bloke, you know. You can’t say a word against the queen in front of either of them. So the queen wants him to let the diamond drillers cut loose. That’s the way he thinks about it, poor old bugger. And he thinks, I’m over sixty, and I can’t stand the talk and the pressure, and my cousins will sing me for it, but that’s okay. I had my life, he thinks. And so he says okay. He says, ‘You can drill!’”