Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  Not that there were problems worth mentioning during their New York nights. Yet too often McCloud arrived at Pauline’s bedside in a brittle condition to find her sleeping lightly and with a frown, like a doctor on call, prepared for interruptions.

  McCloud’s experience of New York, the city which was now an unregarded wet blur outside Tom Gullagara’s window, hadn’t earned him tranquil sleep, and he knew that all night over the Atlantic and Ireland and Western Europe he would be hollow and tremulous and remorseful.

  To start with, Pauline was at the back of the plane. He’d hoped that seat vacancies up here would leave him a chance to approach one of the stewards. “My wife’s back there—you see, my ticket’s paid for by other parties. Whereas she’s traveling at her own expense. I wanted her to switch seats, but she’s determined. I don’t suppose she could …”

  The naive impulses of McCloud’s imagination could too readily envision her in a large seat, appeased by the superior booze and food of this end of things. The informed regions, however, projected the exact frown she would wear above the luxury items, wishing she had the proper amplitude of love in which to relish them.

  In wanting Pauline up here, at the front of the plane, McCloud couldn’t help favoring his simplest suspicions. They were his only source of guidance and had failed him so consistently in the past that he was addicted to them, sealed to them by habitual pain.

  All around the troupe, square-jawed and tired-eyed businessmen were disposing their fancy briefcases in lockers or slinging wads of computer printout negligently onto their seats, data to be devoured during the flight, indices to their coming success in West Germany. The most notable figure, however, was a handsome Japanese woman of about thirty or perhaps even thirty-five years. She was ridding herself of her coat, putting it into the hands of a steward.

  She was a chatterer, and the tendency seemed to have been wound to a high pitch by—perhaps—die exhilaration of this journey. She talked a lot in a cowboy drawl which marked her as an American Japanese. What did they call them—nisei, issei? She couldn’t have been in business like the eaters of data. For she was dressed exactly the wrong way for flying on business—in an undulant green dress suitable only for a cocktail party.

  “Why, thanks, honey,” she told the steward who had taken her coat.

  Even in the chastened condition his New York experiences had put him in, McCloud felt an aesdietic duty to savor the wonderful contrast between her cowboy voice and her broad Asian face.

  From the seat in front, however, he heard Paul Mungina murmur, “Bloody Nip!”

  For Paul was an old-fashioned patriot and xenophobe. As an instance, he believed in the queen of England and Australia and wouldn’t hear a fashionable, republican word against her. And he believed too in the idea that the Japanese had once, during World War II, done frightful things to innocent Australian boys. The fact that supposedly innocent Australian boys had done terrible things to Mungina’s tribe—including a massacre of some twenty-seven Barramatjara souls around a desert waterhole on the Northern Territory border as late as 1929—had done nothing to diminish Paul’s respect for Australian institutions and myths. The triumphs and the martyrdoms of Australia’s army belonged to Mungina, were part of his story of the world, more than they were for McCloud himself, the white manager of dance troupes, worldling and novelist-by-intent.

  McCloud heard the Japanese cowgirl say, “My, my!” as she accepted a fluted glass from a stewardess. “This Californian, honey?”

  “It’s French,” said the stewardess, showing the label.

  “My God,” said the woman. “You folks certainly live on the whole hog up here at the front of the plane!”

  It seemed that she had been luckily bounced upward, as the dance troupe had been themselves in view of their New York success—he with them. He wondered what booking accident had got her here and wished it had befallen Pauline.

  There was only one seat left—and that in the smoking section. The last passenger now shuffled in. He was dressed far less carefully than the businessmen who had already arrived. He had an old-fashioned, scuffed briefcase of the kind he had probably brought out of boyhood with him. His shabbiness marked him infallibly (McCloud thought) as British rather than American. He wore a yachting jacket which was not intended to fool anyone, and it was flecked either with ash or dead skin, the fallout of a whiskified middle life.

  “Do you have spirits?” he asked the girl who was offering him a drink. She explained that there was no whiskey until they were certain thousands of feet above the earth.

  “Then I’ll wait,” he said. “If you don’t mind, love.”

  To McCloud, this man looked all at once ill beyond bearing, hung over at least to the same limit as McCloud himself, and barely consoled by sleep. From his unfashionable briefcase he took a book printed in German, slung it on his seat. Then he disposed of his case, flopped, and lit a cigarette.

  So that was it. Every damn seat was done for now.

  In the front row, Wappitji ordered a 7-Up, as if to teach Bluey moderation. But Bluey insisted on champagne. “Champers,” he intoned as if he were an English rake.

  McCloud noticed the scuffed Englishman watching Wappitji and Bluey from across the aisle. With frank interest he studied first them, then the dancer and the musician in the next row, and then McCloud himself and Tom Gullagara. He rose and approached McCloud, a cigarette in his hand in spite of the No Smoking sign.

  “You’re with that dance troupe?” he asked McCloud. “The famous Abo one?”

  “Yes,” said McCloud. He took the hand the man offered and said who he was: McCloud; troupe manager.

  The Englishman shook his hand. “I should tell you, everyone was talking about them in Manhattan. Absolutely everyone!”

  “Yes,” McCloud laughed. The idea of the troupe’s glory produced in him a sort of pride and a wry joy. “I know all about it.”

  But as always when the troupe casually attracted frenzies of approval, McCloud thought one way or another of the novel he had taken the opportunity during the tour to leave with six New York publishers. No one was talking about it. Everyone was talking about the Barramatjara Dance Troupe, and they didn’t even relish fame. Fame was an irrelevance to them. Only for their manager was it a raging and unrequited need.

  “But tell me,” said the Englishman, dropping his voice, “they don’t have any sense of high culture, do they? Isn’t it a case of they dance because they dance because they dance? Isn’t that so? They don’t dance for the same reason the kids at Juilliard or Covent Garden do, that’s for sure.” The voice dropped theatrically further. He was not a man being wary of his opinions. He was playing at it, though. “So, given that, isn’t there something artificial to their appearing in dance theaters?”

  McCloud didn’t want to discuss this question. He had already earnestly faced it from a dozen aging and wrinkled Manhattan smart alecks at receptions for the troupe; while the Barramatjara cut their sundry swaths through cocktail receptions in New York, he’d been stuck with the sour inquiries.

  He knew it was based on some knowledge of what people annoyed him by calling primitivism. But it was so clever an idea that it missed everything, it disqualified the questioners from the Barramatjara joy.

  For he had learned that the troupe had their cogent reasons for dancing.

  “In one sense, you’re right,” he said. He didn’t like talking about the dancers like this, in the third person, in the anthropologist mode. But Tom Gullagara was comatose for the moment, and the others could not hear. “People come to see them for that very reason. That they don’t care. And believe me, they don’t care. Not in that artistic sense. And that’s why they succeed.”

  “Sure,” said the Englishman, mocking McCloud as a sentimentalist.

  “Don’t worry. They’ve got a powerful motive to dance.”

  “And what’s that?” asked the Englishman.

  “They want to civilize us.”

  “No,” said the Engl
ishman, turning away with lenient little guffaws. “No. Sorry. I’m sure they’re dynamite. But I just don’t go for that.”

  They’re civilizing you, McCloud considered saying, but he’d said too much anyhow, that idea of the Barramatjara on a humanizing mission: something Bluey had confessed in anger one morning, something not meant to be repeated or used against any stray Englishman.

  So McCloud switched back to mere questions of art. He was surprised to notice that although he wanted to rout the man, he wasn’t as angry with him as he expected. The fellow had a crooked charm of some sort.

  “As for the other kind of stuff,” McCloud continued, “you know, the dance and the art. I just wish we could all stop ourselves trying too damn hard. Because they can, and people love it.”

  The Englishman seemed to have had his fun out of the argument, and now he dropped it. He stubbed out a cigarette and said his name was Victor Cale, and that he worked for the London Daily Telegraph.

  He now did an awkward knee bend until he was on a level with Tom Gullagara’s window. He squinted out through the Perspex and the rain at slurred, meaningless lights. “I hope we’re not too much delayed. This French lollywater they’re handing out is no use to me. Scotch is more or less heart, blood, and gender to me. Wouldn’t say so in front of the wife. You wouldn’t happen to have any duty free, would you?”

  McCloud said he hadn’t. The Englishman offhandedly cursed himself for not having gone to the trouble of fetching some.

  “But I didn’t have time, you see. I had to interview the secretary of state at the Helmsley Palace, and the bastard was late!”

  The Englishman glanced around them, looked dolefully at the happy woman in the green dress, and, like a genuine dipsomaniac, did not seem to see her, except perhaps as a debased being satisfied with French fizz.

  Meanwhile Pauline McCloud was back there, amongst the seats in the tail. Her elbows tucked in in the narrow limits of one of the middle seats, she faced a night journey which refused to begin and which she doubted the wisdom of making in any case. In that crowded tail McCloud wouldn’t even be able to sit beside her and try appeasement. They could perhaps have a muffled, elliptical talk outside the bank of lavatories, while polite fraus—returning from visiting their war-bride sisters in New Jersey—came and went, excusing themselves.

  The Englishman wandered off without warning. McCloud could hear him—genially imperious—urging a steward to release some whiskey to him. The steward invoked a new federal regulation. The bar, at least as regarded spirits and cocktails, was to remain sealed until the plane achieved international airspace.

  “Come on, man,” Cale could be heard saying, slipping ironically into the New York idiom in a way which should have made the steward want to hit him. “The Grand Republic lies behind us, Sonny Jim. Either we crash at takeoff, son—in which case my blood alcohol will be burned off, wouldn’t you say?—or else we’re as good as in God’s own sky right now.”

  Glancing over his shoulder, McCloud saw the steward pressing some whiskey miniatures and a glass with ice into Cale’s hand.

  “You’re a Christian, man,” said Cale sarcastically.

  Bluey Kannata had risen from his seat, climbed over Wappitji’s legs, and come sauntering down the aisle. He nodded sagely at Mungina the didj player and had just about passed McCloud when’ he bent like a bird swooping, an appropriately balletic movement which startled McCloud just the same.

  “Hey, mate,” he whispered. “They gave the Pommy bastard whiskey, mate. Why don’t they give us whiskey?”

  “He had to be rude to them to get it,” McCloud told Bluey.

  McCloud could feel Bluey’s impishness, like a minor electric crackle in the air. “I reckon it might be some more of that race discrimination, mate. What do you say?”

  But he was smiling in his crooked way. All the curses he had so recently believed to have descended on him were forgotten.

  “No. Listen, Bluey, just go to the toilet like a dancer on tour and leave it till we take off. The Englishman had to admit he was an alcoholic out loud.”

  “Well,” said Bluey, “a little more working on it, and you and I could fit that ticket. Eh, mate?”

  But then with one quick, somber wink, he had straightened and gone.

  It was believed that men of Whitey Wappitji’s or even Bluey Kannata’s level of knowledge could render themselves invisible. Could insert themselves through an aperture in time and inhabit for a moment a parallel but not apparent world or scheme, but one from which they could intrude and act on the seen and the known. Critics had even said Wappitji and the others danced like that, always on the edge of disappearing, a remarkable but habitual achievement. Not art so much as shadow play.

  Sometimes, as now with Bluey, they even walked like it.

  In following Bluey’s hypnotic passage aft, McCloud’s eyes met those of the Japanese-American woman, the nisei or issei in the green dress.

  “Hello,” said McCloud.

  “Hello to you,” she replied. “Daisy Nakamura.”

  She had surrendered her name innocently and without caution. In the same spirit, McCloud surrendered his.

  The captain had just announced that they were waiting for a wheelchair passenger. There was so much demand on airport wheelchairs tonight, he’d told them in that rural, easy way favored by airline pilots; the voice of the common man exalted to technological management of this prodigious machine.

  “If it weren’t for the big winds off the Great Lakes,” the nisei or issei woman told McCloud, her face succulently earnest, “we’d be hours late into Frankfurt. When I flew out of Flagstaff at dawn, I swear there was a fresh three feet of snow on the ground, and it was drifting. You couldn’t see the San Francisco Peaks. I had those winds on my tail all the way flying here, couldn’t drink a cup of coffee it was so rocky. But the weather’s a little milder now. We should get what’s called positive assistance over the Atlantic, but it won’t spill our drinks.”

  McCloud took in the fine, broad features leaning toward him across the aisle, her sublimely sculpted features. He could imagine some airline official assuring her at the check-in counter. Oh no, ma’am, no more weather problems. From now on only positive assistance.

  McCloud kept watch over any reflex desires, though. He wanted to achieve a worthiness, a greater leverage, perhaps, against the time he would get a chance to speak to Pauline.

  “Where are you from, Mrs. Nakamura?” he asked. He risked the Mrs. since there was something connubial about her which denied the evidence of her single-girl green cocktail dress.

  “Oh, I’m from a place named Budapest. Northern Arizona. Navajos and Mormons and cowboys called Kelly and Campbell! And then truckers—there’s always scads of truckers! And Colorado River rafting guides and back-country mule wranglers. That’s about the sum total of the Budapest traffic. This is just about my first time out of Arizona, though I did go to Salt Lake once to see the temple up there, the one with the golden angel on the spire. It’s certain it’s my first time out of the U.S.” She dropped her voice. “Why, I bought no more than a small coach ticket, and here they just upped me to first class as if I knew the board of directors. See, what happened, they gave my preselected seat to a fairly antsy asthmatic gentleman who always takes a particular bulkhead nonsmoker. That meant there was just one other place they could put me. The luck of the Irish!”

  She could laugh very ripely, like a woman who had not yet learned to be careful. McCloud felt sure Pauline wasn’t laughing like that, back there in her straitened seat.

  “Your friends?” said Daisy Nakamura, gesturing toward the dance troupe. “They’re African gentlemen or something?”

  He told her who they were.

  “Wild!” she said. “You don’t mean it! You say they paint the set they’re going to dance on?”

  “Yes. And not just with any designs. With designs they own, that they’re entitled to use. People come at noon, bring a hamper with smoked turkey and champagne, and watch them
work all afternoon, getting the dance cloth ready, painting the designs. And then in the evening, without rehearsal, they dance around what they have painted. Well, almost without rehearsal. They need what are called lighting and technical rehearsals.…”

  “I’ll be switched,” Daisy Nakamura breathed. “Out our way, we got the Navajo, like I said. Very mysterious people, too.” She waved her hand as if resisting a burning sensation. “Very mysterious, sir, let me tell you. And some Hopi, too, working on a water project. Mysteriouser still. Heavy dudes! Mean drinkers, the ones that’re drinkers. Real mean drinkers. Though there’s no meaner a drinker than a Mormon breaking the rules of a lifetime!”

  In the end McCloud could not in the course of talk help asking why she was going to Frankfurt.

  She volunteered the information that she had a sister who was married to an American officer in West Germany, at an airfield not far from Munich. She hadn’t seen the sister for six years. “Now I’m a widow,” she said improbably, since her sumptuous green dress seemed to have little to do with widowhood. “I want to be close to family, you know how it is. When I was married to Mr. Nakamura, Ronnie … my life was so full I just didn’t have the urge to go visiting. And we were so busy with the roadhouse. We have this roadhouse called the Polka Barn. Ronnie bought it from a Polish gentleman who wanted to move to San Diego. You can only work those long hours with someone you have a special thing with, like Ronnie and me. We had a special thing.”