Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  “But I am,” he said. “I am by Bluey’s. Absolutely.”

  Jaundiced with filtered light, Daniel Stone and the bruised Cale were now sleeping. Someone, perhaps Whitey Wappitji after all, had covered them with airline blankets.

  Daisy’s mouth widened as her conversation became even more secret. “That man at the window,” she said. “He got angry soon as he read that stuff in the magazine. He said it bore out everything he’d suspected. He got angry with his friends, too. They’re good democratic boys, and they wanted to hear from you. But he said he knew the world better than they did … he’d been in movies and he’d had white women. And this article was right on target. It put everything in place. The whole truckload, he said.”

  McCloud, however appalled, could feel no animus against Bluey. But he saw a forceful pattern of illogic in what had happened, an illogic which just the same made a profounder sense. The other dancers, who lived on their home ground all the time, had not condemned McCloud without a hearing. But Bluey, who felt love and fear for his home ground yet who rarely lived there anymore, who sometimes made fearful night journeys from the Ritz-Carlton in Cannes to Baruda but was always back by breakfast time, had been willing to condemn him in absentia.

  Daisy said suddenly, “I know you’ve got your own problems, Mr. McCloud. And I don’t know why I’m talking like this to you. Look around this cabin. Who else is there to talk to?” She spoke lower still, bowing her head. “Everyone here seems to think I ought to give in to him. Just give in.”

  “To Taliq?” asked McCloud, flinching. Because he thought it, too, and was ashamed of thinking it.

  “Taliq. Who else? Jesus, I sure hope there’s no one else!”

  “And everyone? Everyone wants you to?”

  “Absolutely. Why me? What signals are they picking up? How does Taliq pick up signals? And how do you? It isn’t like I’m some kind of geisha. But even your black guys, Mr. McCloud. The tall one and the one with the cowboy belt have both said it to me. What’s the cowboy’s name? Tom? Tom. They know the score, those guys. I mean, they put it nicely, but you can understand what they’re getting at. So we spend half the night listening to Taliq, and reading about you in magazines, and we meet that tough-looking little guy Razir, and the three boys as well, and they fill us in on what’s happened to them, and still we say, ‘Sorry, we feel real bad about what’s gone down, but we still can’t do it for you.’ We still know there’s no way we can stand up there in front of the other passengers like some sort of Chinese people’s court.

  “And that’s okay with Taliq. Because he’s the one who’s said up front and whether we want it or not that we’re his dispossessed brothers and sisters. And he can’t fire us, can he? You can’t be fired from that particular status just because you’re squeamish about executing folk.”

  She looked startled then and put her hand to her mouth.

  “Oh Jesus, sorry, Mr. McCloud! But since it’s been said, you ought to gather your wits. Even though you and I both know it won’t come to that. Anyhow, Taliq tells us, ‘You are still privileged people. Your consciousness needs raising, that’s all. And it will happen, too! It’ll just take a little time.…’ Meanwhile your friends, the dancers … they’re tough people themselves, and they seem to be realists, and they know Taliq is a tough man in a tough corner. And they take it as damn-well read that I’ll do something to sweeten him! For your sake, McCloud. For your sake! Can you imagine? No matter what the article says about the diamond people and the CIA satellites. They want to save you. But they can’t be seen to go against the guy in the window seat there, the one who’s gone quiet. So they want me to do everything for them!”

  She pulled the blanket tighter yet began shuddering. “Do you know, it scares me? The way Taliq says we have time. We have time to come round to him. As if we’ll be on this plane for weeks.…”

  She placed the palm of her left hand over her forehead, then moved it down over her ivory nose, her bud of a mouth. “It’s the presumption I hate, Mr. McCloud. The presumption about me. As if it’s my job or something.”

  He would have liked to be able to tell her to resist. But he could not say it. A seduced Taliq might well be less severe.

  “And Taliq?” he croaked. “Has he made … any overtures?”

  “Come on, Mr. McCloud! I can tell. One thing I’ve felt: I’ve felt the accumulated heat of cowboys and truckers wafting across the bar. Not that Taliq is a cowboy or a trucker. Wish to God he were!” Her eyes were misted with sudden tears. “See, Taliq’s young boys don’t know just what they are. I mean, they’re good at handling orders and they know how to use their weapons and all that. But they behave like a cross between a gangster and a goddamn social worker.”

  Earlier, McCloud remembered, Cale had said something like that.

  “But Taliq knows exactly what he is. He’s a soldier. And soldiers, I suppose, take the women they find in their path.”

  She sighed at the idea of this ancient and deplorable hubris.

  “But that’s not the whole story, either,” she went on, distracted, talking it out to herself. “Because he thinks he’s a special kind of soldier. According to his lights, he wants to use people properly. He doesn’t want to say, ‘I’ve got the gun, so come my way.’ Just the same, he got me up here for reasons of his own, for fake reasons, and he knows it now even if he didn’t before. I’m not oppressed, Mr. McCloud, I’m American. And he’s bright enough to know it, too. I mean, there he is pretending I’m like your people, who really have a beef. I don’t have a beef, Mr. McCloud. It isn’t like I’m Navajo or something. I should be downstairs, not here. They want an imperialist to beat up on? I’m an imperialist, McCloud! God bless America! May we all be dumb and happy, and may renegade Mormons come over the Utah border and drink their beer at my place!”

  What was horrifying was that she was working her way toward asking him not just for sympathy, but for advice.

  “I mean,” she said then, “in some ways Taliq’s only a boy. Can’t be more than thirty-two or -three, and for a man that’s young.…”

  She let the sentence hang, but the figure she uttered took McCloud by surprise. He hadn’t thought lately of Taliq as the possessor of a finite age.

  “I don’t know what to say, Mrs. Nakamura,” McCloud admitted. “I mean, Taliq tells us he can tear the plane apart in an instant with his load of Plastique. He also told us there was a primed grenade at the pilot’s head, and the pilot’s head is ours. I think he’s relented a little on the grenade: the pilot is cooperative. But the Plastique …”

  There was an unspoken connection between the Plastique and the task everyone had placed on Daisy. Daisy might be able to save everyone from Plastique by giving way to Taliq. But what if she went with Taliq and the Plastique was still detonated? That seemed to McCloud an achingly sad prospect, a wasted sacrifice for Daisy. For some reason, he could scarcely bear the idea without tears.

  “Whatever happens,” he told her, “there is the possibility we’ll all live anyway, and it has to be on terms we can stand.”

  All this was a revelation to him, to hear himself uttering these ordinary yet genuine sentiments. He hadn’t believed until now that he thought in such simple and quotidian terms. The writing of a long novel had given him the illusion that his emotions were as serpentine and subtle as those in his novel. He had also come to believe that on the level of behavior he was a man of compromise, a fellow with a nose for convenience.

  The idea of his own plebeian solidarity with Daisy, which he seemed to be observing from a long way off, startled him. It was as if this journey had forced on him the same stolid valor which the Scotland–Australia run had forced on his ancestors.

  A glimpse of Cale’s mottled, sleeping face across the aisle made him want all the more, though, that she would distract Taliq, would stoop to humanize him with a sumptuous climax, Beirut and Budapest, Arizona reconciled and fused to one benign view of what should be done to this plane and its population.

 
; “See,” Daisy Nakamura was saying, arguing with herself still, “his reasons add up, but his conclusions—well, I don’t go along with them. Not all the way. They scare me real bad, McCloud. Here’s a body—Taliq’s body, I mean—which really doesn’t give a dollar for whether or not it will be ground beef this time tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” said McCloud, “Mr. Cale over there thinks Taliq gives a dollar for his life. Mr. Cale thinks Taliq’s got political ambitions.”

  “Political ambitions?” asked Daisy, obviously thinking of politics Arizona style. “Are you kidding? I mean, this is a man, who says, ‘Daisy, come on, come upstairs, because you’re some sort of political heroine or other. And anyhow I like you and your green cocktail dress.’ And in the same breath says, ‘By the way, I just might press this little button here and pulverize the lot of us, you, me, your green dress, the people in row fifty-four.’ I mean, I’ve had some crazy friends …” But she could not continue. Clearly, none of her gentlemen friends had ever taken a grenade to bed with him. “Those black guys of yours …” Again there was a grimace. “They don’t know what they’re asking.”

  “That’s not quite true,” McCloud told her. His sense of the sadness of what she was being asked to do now passed. She should understand Whitey and Tom and the reticent didj player Paul. “Oh yes, they do,” he said. It was vital, he knew, that if she decided to yield, she should understand what it meant: that she could alter Taliq, she could give a rebirth to all the passengers. She could be emu-mother, she could be lizard-wife. “They know exactly what they’re asking. Listen … Whitey, the tall one, his world more or less started when someone called marsupial rat fucked the lizard-women. The whole human world was made by a particular seduction. That’s what he believes.”

  Daisy Nakamura dismissed this. “Mythology.” As if she’d heard the word muttered in the wake of Indians in her bar in Budapest.

  “Not to him it isn’t, Daisy.”

  “Sounds like the goddamn Navajo again,” she murmured.

  McCloud took her hand, the one which had been clutching the blanket tightly around her throat. The palm was so warm, and the fingers translucent, it seemed, so that you believed you saw the ivory bones within. “If you do speak with Taliq,” he said, knowing that he was asking too much, “could you see if we could get Pauline, my wife, up here? She’s had a strange life, too, and I need to talk to her in case things happen.”

  He had messages for the Girl and the Boy. He should not go into the dark without talking to them. The reason he should not was that they would always count it an injustice if he did. The image and lesson of Pauline’s father the mad Dentist was in his mind.

  With a minute gesture of the hand, she conceded that she would try. “I just want to visit my sister. I don’t want any adventures. I’ve had all the adventures I want.”

  The young terrorist Hasni appeared above her, wearing all the appurtenances of the hijacker, the radio, the grenade belt, the automatic rifle. And the further appurtenance of his gentle, Arab scholarship face.

  “May I have this seat, Mrs. Nakamura?” he asked.

  As if to some inner alarm clock, some sign peculiar to their faction, the young man called Musa had also risen now from the seats where he had been sleeping. He looked aft with enormous Bedouin eyes, eyes which made the concept that he had been dispossessed all too credible.

  By now Daisy had vanished. So the dialogue would be different now.

  “It is my rest period,” said Hasni, settling beside McCloud. “But your wife sends her greetings and hopes you are well. I told her your health is out of my hands now, I am afraid.”

  “Is it?” asked McCloud.

  “I did not deceive the native peoples as you did,” Hasni reproved him.

  “How do you know that article is accurate? You don’t trust the Zionist imperialist press as a whole. So why trust it in this case?”

  Hasni took thought over this. “Because one of your dancers has verified it. He told us you deceived them.”

  “But I didn’t deceive them.”

  “One of them is sure you did. And the others are tormented by doubt, Mr. McCloud. They are gentle people. They still show the subservience we’ve all been bullied into feeling. All those who are exiles in their own land.”

  It was futile to argue, especially since there was truth there, and, in any case, messages were still to be exchanged with Pauline. But what could be said through this straight-laced boy terrorist?

  “Would you give her a note from me?”

  Hasni frowned and pushed his lips forward.

  “A sealed note, Hasni. For Christ’s sake it may be our last exchange.”

  “You’re not serious,” murmured Hasni.

  “What could I put in a private note that could hurt you?”

  “This happened in training,” said Hasni with a confessional smile. “People think I’m the weak one at first and find out slowly I’m the strong one.”

  Training. So had they rehearsed this hijack? Somewhere in a cave, maybe. Were Syrian or Iraqi recruits the subjects of the experiment? And had they chosen Hasni as the apparent weak link?

  McCloud said, “I don’t think you’re weak. I think you’re stronger than Taliq. Stronger and more innocent.”

  “What? Is that your psychological skill at work? Anyhow, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean that you’ve seen Taliq extend favors to the Japanese-American woman. Can’t you extend favors to me?”

  Hasni seemed distracted for a moment. He inspected the pouch in the back of the seat in front of him. He fingered the in-flight magazine, the sick bag with the advertisement for twenty-four-hour photographic development, the safety instructions card. He looked to McCloud almost like someone who rummages in a briefcase or handbag out of embarrassment. Once he had decided what he wanted to say, he gave up the rummaging and sat back in the seat, closing his eyes for a moment and adjusting his automatic.

  “What’s the trouble?” asked McCloud.

  “Just that you are so typical,” the boy announced.

  “I’m sorry,” said McCloud. “But I have children. And as well as that, all couples have their mysteries. They want to refer back to them when they’re in danger.”

  “Oh, Mr. McCloud, that’s not what I mean by typical. And if you think I give a damn about your squalid mysteries—if that’s what you insist on calling them—then you couldn’t be more mistaken. You’re typical in another sense, a sense which causes me to be ill. All you people, all you nice people with nice wives and what you call nice mysteries. You think that after all that’s happened to me I’m still really like you!”

  “I don’t think you’re as exclusive as you think, Hasni,” McCloud said, angered.

  “Perhaps not. But I’m not like your type. Oh, you all have different accents, but the soul is the same. A soul sticky with silly, liberal half-truths. You’ve read books on most of the human catastrophes. You can give a garbled history of all the century’s great uprootings and massacres. And you use this comic book history as a measuring device to exploit me. And to belittle my history, or Musa’s, or Yusuf’s. ‘Why should we give a damn about the Palestinians? Why do they posture like that? Haven’t they heard of the Armenians? The Kurds? The Kampucheans? The Jews, for that matter?’”

  McCloud studied the boy, the way he put his argument. To be damned in this weighty, undergraduate style of Hasni’s seemed a curiously bitter destiny; damnation uttered by a serious child.

  “Why should you give a damn what my mental habits are?” McCloud asked. “You’re going to shoot me anyhow, aren’t you?”

  McCloud was, of course, in the light of Hasni’s boyish polemic, hoping for a denial that this was so.

  Hasni merely said, “I would like to see the light dawn in someone’s eyes. That’s all.”

  McCloud suspected he should go on pushing the boy, should inflict a shock if he could. “In that case, watch me when the bullet goes in. You might see something dawn then.”

  �
�See,” Hasni told him, sounding a bit flustered. “You treat the moment of death in that bourgeois manner. A moment of enlightenment! The truth is, nothing is learned at that second. Nothing.”

  It was hard for McCloud to tell whether—in spite of Hasni’s reply—his audacity had the right result. Certainly it caused Hasni to close his eyes and compose himself. Cale had said that hijackers possessed a sort of vanity, that they yearned for the victim’s approval. This hooding of Hasni’s eyes seemed a sign from the boy that it might be true.

  So, was it best to let Hasni sleep now? Or should there be an effort to bring about the desired instability, the kind in which self-doubt doesn’t cause the pulling of a trigger? For Cale had already delineated the other one, the instability which caused the hijacker to go trigger-happy, to produce a dead body as evidence of the seriousness of his history, the inhuman weight of his commitment.

  What Hasni had said about garbled histories struck McCloud in any case as close to the truth and distracted him a little from the obligation of confusing the boy. Acting from his own garbled and inadequate history of the Barramatjara, he had taken the job of troupe manager. Was there justice in the idea that investigating the good faith of the sponsors of their tour was a courtesy he had owed Whitey and the boys?

  It could even be argued in this febrile morning light, so high on this fragment of pirated stratosphere, that anyone who benefited from the world of diamonds, from the valves and pistons and machine coolings, all without inquiring into the price, might also be considered guilty.

  And though this was a practically absurd proposition—it meant that all passengers had to be shot, if not the whole Western world, and without a Western passenger and a Western world to use as lever, the hijacker was himself powerless—McCloud felt the shadow of the argument, the draft off it, strongly enough to inquire of Hasni, “Well, then, what is your bloody history? This one I discount? This one which means I can’t send a note to my wife? Tell me, for Christ’s sake! Tell me what it is!”