Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  At the back, by the galley, the other four members of the dance troupe sat and stood about, listening to Taliq, who was speaking softly, a cigarette held in his ravaged right hand, his eyes half-closed rather in the manner of Whitey Wappitji. Two steps closer, and McCloud saw Daisy Nakamura was there also, minute in a large seat, a little shrunken in her green dress, a blue blanket shawled around her shoulders.

  “Leave them there, Hasni,” Taliq called musically. “Make them kneel.”

  The idea turned McCloud desperate. “For God’s sake, we can’t bloody-well kneel. We’re half-crippled already with cramp. Do you want to try men who can’t even stand?”

  Taliq was amused and gestured with the cigarette he was smoking and weaved his handsome head about. “Stand, then,” he lightly ordered. “But be still. I haven’t finished speaking yet to my friends.”

  He extended his hand to indicate the dance troupe and Daisy Nakamura, none of whom looked in the direction of McCloud and the other two guilty persons.

  This gesture of Taliq’s, this including wave of a damaged hand, was that of an apparently emotional man, and its warmth somehow alarmed McCloud.

  He tried to attract the attention of Bluey Kannata, hoping that Bluey’s eyes, bruised with fear of curses, would turn brimming with reassurance toward him. But Bluey kept staring out the window. But I sat with you half the night at a transmitter, McCloud wanted to yell.

  Out there, beyond the Perspex, in the sky Bluey frowned at, it seemed to McCloud there were no points of reference; nothing but a great plain of bright cumulus.

  “We’re thirsty, too,” called Daniel Stone suddenly.

  “The Jew is thirsty,” said Taliq. “‘Cut me, do I not bleed?’ Pour something into each of them, Hasni.”

  What a curious sound that command had!

  McCloud had not been aware of the extent of his own thirst. He had been fixed on cramp and cold and the dull ache of his bladder; that feeling he’d had on bad afternoons in the classrooms of his childhood: that unreleased fluids were turning to stone inside him. But now the American had alerted him to thirst he found that yes, he was parched.

  Hasni went to the drinks trolley behind Taliq and took three small cans of cola from it. He opened the first. The stuff sizzled in its contact with the plane’s cold air. Still the dance troupe and Daisy averted their eyes. Was it that they took no pleasure in any of this? Or was it that they were no longer interested?

  Hasni brought the can and placed it to McCloud’s mouth. Given a choice, McCloud would have liked to assert his brotherhood with Stone again and to have said, “Him first.” But the metal was hard up against his teeth—Hasni would not let him enjoy the dignity of holding the thing—and he had no choice but to drink. And drinking, he became desperate to find every drop Hasni was pouring, to prevent any of it from wasting itself down his chin and into the stubble of his chest.

  When his can was empty, he could not prevent himself watching Stone drink. Self-possessed Stone, McCloud was somehow pleased to see, was similarly avid to take in the moisture. His lips too worked prehensilely against the rim of the can.

  But when it was Cale’s turn to be offered drink, he told Hasni, “Let me hold it, son.”

  Hasni could tell somehow that this was a crucial demand. That if it was agreed to, things between Cale and himself would be changed for good.

  Hasni held the can in the air but distant from Cale. “Do you want to drink?” he asked airily, like a schoolboy with a weak teacher at his mercy.

  “Go and fuck yourself!” said Cale.

  McCloud was torn between admiration at this defiance and a supine bewilderment at the man’s lack of thankfulness. Hasni stood still and began to pour the cola over Cale’s head. The demeaning beverage marked out all Cale’s weaknesses, the rolls of plumpness at the back of the neck, the steeply etched lines which divided his cheeks from the region beneath his nose, the depression—almost a pool—at the base of his thorax.

  “Yes,” said Cale when Hasni had finished. “And when you are in prison, son, people will do the same kind of thing to you. For what occurs to you, the same shall be done!” He wiped his face with one long sweep of his right hand and shook the droplets off his fingers. “You little prick!”

  “Go below, Hasni,” called Taliq. He sounded happy, and there was an oddity to that. It was simply that happiness seemed irrelevant to this flight, an agenda item for which there was no place. “There is only one of us down there now,” Taliq said then, so composed in this company of Daisy and the dancers that he could freely speak of points of weakness.

  Only one of us. But a whole planeload, McCloud wanted to say in the wake of Cale’s brave abstinence from moisture, united in nothing but their fear.

  “You may wait there, gentlemen,” Taliq advised the three of them before turning back to what seemed to be his master class.

  Locking his knees, McCloud slipped into sleep. A confused, standing coma filled with a rich, vaporous stream of visions. These possessed the same quality of light as that which came in through the window where Bluey Kannata sat. His late father occupied one stanza—if you could call it anything as extended as a stanza. Mr. McCloud was there for a pulse, and then for another. He was smoking Tom Gullagara—style cigarettes he made himself and sitting at a kitchen table, but in this sort of sleep McCloud was not so much enjoying as suffering, there was very little furniture. There were mainly faces and voices, including those of Pauline’s small-boned mother and of her father the Dentist and gold seeker; and then a lot of serious but elusive argument which slipped with simian conviction around the wrecked uprights of logic.

  The Boy and the Girl wanted to be taken somewhere, but Taliq was in the kitchen, laughing and against it. McCloud began to tongue-lash Taliq. A furious eloquence he could not afford to display on the plane spilled from him now in his childhood kitchen.

  The argument moved on then to the face and name of Peter Drury, Pauline’s friend, the urbane man, the theatrical entrepreneur. In dreams, the news had for the past year been coming to McCloud—with a potency of loss which the day-time McCloud submerged—that Drury and Pauline were habitual lovers. He would wake with the conviction that it was so and find out then that that particular dream fact was without basis, had not yet broken the surface in the real world.

  The argument about Drury the impresario and Pauline and the children’s demands and the sundry parents slid through his grasp then but tantalized him. It all had to do with his novel, for which he had plundered the histories of both families, Pauline’s and his. Most fearsomely of all, even more incisive than the question of Pauline and Drury, it had to do with the story of Mrs. Clark and his father.

  But then, as was customary in dreams, Pauline and Mrs. Clark became the one woman. Even their faces were not distinct.

  A high school teacher, Mrs. Clark had taught McCloud English and history when he was fourteen. In the objective world, the one in which she was not merged with Pauline, she had been a tall, ripe woman, a Presbyterian who took her faith seriously. She wore blouses designed for probity but which somehow drew the engorged imaginations of McCloud and his classmates to the riches contained.

  In a sunny land, the boys’ passion for her was heightened by her pallor and by her occasional dizziness. Whenever her dizziness came she would totter sideways all at once, her hand on the blackboard, her orderly writing slewing away in a skid mark of chalk. Or else it would happen in the butcher’s, a second before she put her hand out for the wrapped steak, or else at bus stops, perhaps when the sight of the bus made the waiting passengers stir themselves. She would gather herself for a particular act, and one leg would go from under her.

  McCloud’s mother had noticed this failing and speculated on it at the dinner table. For the English and history teacher Mrs. Clark, the soberest woman you could imagine, compelled everyone’s impassioned interest.

  “It’s either anemia or pregnancy,” Mrs. McCloud suggested.

  McCloud could see now, in his ten-sec
ond coma on the hijacked plane, what he could not see as a child, when all adult statements had seemed magisterial and based on absolute verities rather than on the grindings and slippages which characterized all souls in all seasons. He could see before it happened the day when Mrs. Clark stumbled on the teacher’s rostrum; when the brown hair which the boys in the class had always believed to be her own fell from her head.

  It was an unnerving transformation when it happened. What the boys had thought of as a lush paleness which, in their rawest dreams they saw themselves soothing, had now shown itself to be a waiflike nakedness.

  This incident seemed related somehow—in the mind of the young McCloud—to what had happened in the school library a little time before. In his search for images of nudity, one of the class had come upon pictures of Lithuanian women stripped by the SS for their execution. He called the others to see, but no one had thought there was any merit in this find. The faces were crooked with fear, the hipbones angular from bad food. These doomed women possessed a nakedness beyond nakedness. Even the most tumescent of McCloud’s friends were unsettled by the picture. A few experimental jokes hung sourly in the air of the library, and then someone turned the page for good.

  That was the kind of hideous undress by which Mrs. Clark now confused the desires of twenty-seven antipodean boys. Down on her knees and with unfocused eyes, she felt around her feet for the wig. She was like someone looking for a dropped handbag in the dark. Shaking her head slightly, her eyes still uncertain, she put the thing back on her head.

  Some oaf at the back of the classroom was trying to get a hacking chorus of laughter going, but very few of the most influential classroom barbarians joined in. It was as if they were learning too early for their comfort that fine breasts and a tightly made backside were no protection. That the desirable were struck with the normal humiliations. Like some tortured medieval monk, they had seen the skull behind the lineaments of desire.

  It was worst of all that Mrs. Clark hadn’t been embarrassed. She had been merely like any old woman who drops her stick on the ground and doesn’t have the sight or the musculature to retrieve it.

  Inherent to the standing dream of his father and Peter Drury, of Mrs. Clark as modified by Pauline, of Pauline knit seamlessly into Mrs. Clark, was the memory of the evening editions of the city tabloids and the piercing news of Mrs. Clark they carried for a season. Mrs. Clark’s apparently lucky but frowning husband, a man every boy and half their fathers considered wildly lucky, was arrested. He was charged with slowly poisoning his wife. She had compliantly drunk her tea with enough sugar to mask the taste of the thalium he laced it with. Thalium was a subtle substance he brought home with him from work. It collected in Mrs. Clark’s liver and pituitary. It gave her dizziness and nausea and caused her hair to fall out. In time, it would have killed her.

  Fantasies of rescue bloomed in the class then. The young hero, lust tempered with reverence, doing an odd job around the Clark house and seeing Mr. Clark put the poison in the tea. And warning Mrs. Clark, nursing her back from her paleness and receiving in the end unutterable tokens of her thanks.

  But these imaginings were of course vitiated in part by the memory of her dropping of the wig in class.

  Some months later, at Mr. Clark’s trial, his lawyers hit on the strategy of depicting him as an honest husband tormented by his wife’s games and possible adulteries with other men. It was a defense which fooled no one. The idea of Mrs. Clark as flirtatious or, better still, licentious, was too fantastic for belief. Certainly none of the fourteen-year-olds now turning fifteen believed it of this north shore madonna. If she’d been such a goer, she would have flirted with one of them.

  But among the names Mr. Clark flourished in court was Mr. McCloud’s.

  McCloud was humiliated for his mother’s sake, but also for his own. There was exquisite horror in the idea of being known by your peers to desire a woman who herself, according to public report—however unreliable—fancied your father.

  All four men named by Clark were subpoenaed, but the appearance of the first one was such a disaster for Clark’s case that Mr. McCloud was never called. When Clark got life, the sentence was read by everyone as condign punishment not only for his trying to poison his wife, but for maligning four innocent men as well.

  And yet the possibility that there might be some truth there became something of a submerged rock against which the ship of dreams always ran, as it ran now, even as McCloud slept on his locked knee joints. Mr. Clark’s poisoning of the earth’s most exquisite teacher, a woman every fourteen-year-old was willing to cherish, and the naming of his father by Mr. Clark, were the most astounding events of McCloud’s childhood.

  Both his parents were dead now. His father, who had been vindicated by the judge; his mother, who had been reassured. The question was, Can you write about such a thing as the Mrs. Clark story? And the other question: Can you avoid writing about such a thing? Can you make up some other filter through which to look at your childhood, knowing it will be inferior to the real thing?

  And so, there was his father in the novel. A neat and unexceptional man. And there was the reproachful ghost in the standing dream. Whom McCloud had sold, it seemed now, for $12,000.

  Was it any wonder that such a son should justly be cuckolded, and that he should feel such dream jealousy and grief?

  The book had revived all the ambiguous questions, since that was the purpose of books. Had some astounding passion flared between Mrs. Clark and McCloud, Senior? And if it hadn’t, did the son somehow profoundly wish it had? And what conversations did Mr. and Mrs. McCloud hold on such subjects, conversations the boy McCloud never heard? The book had provided potential answers for all these questions.

  In the argument of the dream, someone, a woman he didn’t know, an amalgam of agent and wife and mother-in-law and teacher, was brightly showing the connection between McCloud’s father’s case as he had used it in the book and his ignorance of Highland Pegasus and its intentions toward the Barramatjara. At the profoundest level, it was all so troubling. More troubling and more mysterious than any accusation in waking life. Subtler than Taliq’s placard.

  The amalgamated woman offered him a coat to wear, since he was cold even in his sleep.

  “McCloud,” he heard the woman say huskily. But it was Whitey Wappitji at his elbow.

  Returned to the cabin, McCloud checked on everything—Bluey in the shaft of light from his opened blind; Daisy Nakamura, with her head cocked sideways in the rear seat; Whitey Wappitji at his elbow, offering his own tweed jacket back to him. Whitey put the jacket over McCloud’s shoulders.

  “Thank you, Whitey,” said McCloud. “Thank you.”

  Was Whitey still a missionary? After what he had read in the newsmagazine? His manner suggested that like that earlier missionary, Dom Estevez, he was saddened but still lenient.

  “Come and sit down, McCloud. Here.”

  Whitey directed him into a seat behind the one where Musa was sleeping. McCloud let himself fall sideways, crookedly, his right shoulder landing deep in the first-class plush. Whitey sat beside him. For some reason about which McCloud was curious, but which he knew might not be fully explained to him, Wappitji had the freedom—under Taliq and the Palestinian boys—to give people their coats and direct them to warm seats.

  Across the aisle, Stone and Cale also took to a seat, without being given any permission McCloud was aware of. Cale had a glass of water in his hand. Had Whitey provided that?

  Cale sipped the water and dipped a paper towel in it, to wipe the cola stickiness off his face.

  “Bluey won’t look at me,” said McCloud, beginning to cry. He felt childishly that he might deserve better from someone for whom he’d kept a vigil in a radio telephone booth in lower Manhattan, in a mean room amid a city of delights.

  “Let me tell you,” said Whitey. “Bluey’s all buggered up. You know that, Frank. Jesus, you don’t need to be Sherlock to know how he’s all set up and ready for some big anger.
Well, now he’s found it, Frank.”

  But there was more than that buggering Bluey up, McCloud could see. There were other factors which Whitey Wappitji with normal Barramatjara politeness did not mention. Whitey’s gaze flitted across the cabin ceiling, speculating on objects, calculating the mysterious algebra by which his announcements would be governed. Then he undid the tray table in front of McCloud, let it clatter down. He put his large, bony hand there, presenting it as if it were a gift. He still avoided McCloud’s eyes.

  “This Highland Pegasus thing, and that CIA stuff—it’s serious business. You remember Bluey crying for his uncle. It’s all in there. That whole dirty shebang, mate. Highland Pegasus and all the rest. And all them lies people get told when someone’s dead keen to get hold of their country.”

  The lies caused him to sigh. He didn’t seem enraged, though. Taliq had not managed to unleash Whitey’s big anger.

  “Bluey’s mad at me, too,” murmured Whitey. It seemed a casual statement, but it was a glimpse into the largest Barramatjara question: reveal or conceal, admit or rebuff. Maybe Bluey saw all this strife of hijack as caused by Whitey’s policy of reveal, of admit. Of making the audience relatives and understanders.

  “Anyhow, we can’t call Bluey a silly bugger, Frank,” said Whitey then. “Not out loud, mate. Not in front of this Taliq or the passengers.”

  This was like a warning. Blood was thick. The initiated man might attract internal Barramatjara discipline, but his brothers would not call him a silly bugger in front of strangers.

  “We were never into mining,” Whitey went on. “When our cousins up on the coast asked us to move up and work in the bauxite there, we said no. Our old men had dreams of all the country dead from the mining. So we said no. We’re known all around Western Australia as the blokes who won’t be in mining.