Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  “It’s not the truth?”

  “Not exactly, Frank.”

  The light changed to Walk, and at Bluey’s side, McCloud made a troubled crossing of 21st Street. Bluey went to walk on, but McCloud took him by the lower arm.

  “So. What should the program notes say?”

  “Whitey had a dream. It was full of important old men. More important than the old men at Baruda. And the old man said, You’ve hung back, you’ve hung back, you haven’t let the white blokes see us. If you gave them more, if you let them see more, it would change them. That’s when it started, all this. David Ransome could have saved his breath if it hadn’t been for Whitey’s dream. And the old men in Baruda are saying, Don’t dance this in front of the white feller, don’t paint that. But Whitey had the authority to dance and paint more than ever before. Not from some white artist, but from his dream. Authority to civilize you poor people. So that’s what this tour’s about, cobber. We’re civilizing you bastards. You know what Tom says? We’re making you relatives! That’s what Gullagara says.”

  This business of making the audience relatives had always fascinated McCloud, though he was not sure he understood it fully. To see the designs which belonged to a particular person’s dreaming or mystery, you needed to be a relative. Did Tom Gullagara’s statement mean that Whitey and the others were admitting people to designs and dances only relatives usually saw? The size of a gesture like this shook and shamed McCloud.

  For he too had swallowed the schoolteacher story, grabbing for the European-style cause even in a world where causes were never so mechanical. He had swallowed the Ransome story with the same readiness as any amateur ethnographer or stockbroker dance fiend in the stalls. He had not had even a suspicion that things might be different.

  “Do you think we’re submissive like that?” Bluey mocked him. “A schoolteacher tells us it’s a good idea and shows us a pot of acrylic, and we call out, ‘Yes, no worries, sir. We’ve got the paintings you need! Yes, boss. No worries, bwana. Sure thing, sir!’”

  “It’s so obvious, Bluey,” McCloud admitted in a daze. “When you put it like that.”

  Before his eyes then, that day in New York, Bluey grew forgiving and laughed. It was that old-fashioned thing they used to call glee. “I could have told Whitey. I could have told him, ‘Give ’em whatever you like. But they won’t see what it is. They’ll make out of it what they want to see.’ But, see, you can’t argue with a bloke’s dreams. He’s got a lot of authority, Whitey.”

  “Maybe he’s right. Maybe people are getting the message. The reviews have been superb!”

  “Well, you know reviewers, Frank. They don’t review things outside themselves. They review the insides of their own heads. If they find space in there for you, then the reviews are what you call superb.” He imitated McCloud’s city accent, so different from his own, since his had been laid down by the Spanish and the Lutherans, the cattlemen and the miners of a rough era. “Listen, McCloud, I’m going to find some bastard who’s dealing, and you’re not coming with me. Because you’re bloody expensive, mate.”

  “No,” McCloud begged him. “Don’t buy any of that stuff.”

  Bluey tossed his head and jogged away, inserting himself deftly into the narrow spaces between pedestrians. It was useless to follow. He had disappeared with ease.

  The memory of that day, of the wrong information in the program notes, disturbed McCloud on the edge of sleep. If he had so misread the Barramatjara, who had no malice toward him, how could he read Taliq and the boys?

  He fretted at that question and then spent a further phase of torment over the Girl and the Boy, before being taken suddenly and in the midst of anguished insomnia by sleep.

  He was awakened, as many aboard the plane must have been, by light. All the lights in the cabin had been turned on, and there was a blush of dawn coming up from the south and showing under the merest crack of window blind. Either in defiance or by accident, Tom Gullagara had not closed the shade the whole way. All around people were stirring and stretching, and beautiful Daisy Nakamura rubbed her ivory jawline, reviving herself.

  Taliq led the good-looking Yusuf, son of a tailor, up the aisle to the front of the cabin. They both halted by the seat of Stone, the businessman who had counseled everyone toward solidarity.

  “You have two passports!” Taliq told the man. “You must have a diplomatic one you haven’t shown us.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” the American told Taliq calmly.

  Taliq turned to Yusuf. “Shoot the man next to him. Shoot him dead in his seat.”

  McCloud couldn’t see the man who sat next to the businessman, could see only a balding head there.

  “No,” said Stone. “You’re right. I have another passport, but it’s in my luggage. I don’t have it here.”

  “Shoot the man next to him,” Taliq told Yusuf again. McCloud heard the automatic weapon click as Yusuf did something with it—set it to single shot, perhaps, for fear of puncturing the plane’s skin. There seemed no hesitation in Yusuf. To McCloud, all this appeared both astounding and normal. The tailor’s son about to shoot dead a neighbor whose features had barely been seen or remembered by the rest of the passengers.

  “It’s in my briefcase,” said the handsome American businessman in the aisle seat. “Please. Allow me to get it?”

  He stood up and fetched a briefcase out of a knee locker which lay on the far side of the threatened man with the bald head. He stood, put the briefcase on his seat, produced a passport from it, and handed it to Taliq.

  “Earlier, I said all passports,” Taliq told him reasonably.

  “I’m sorry,” said the businessman. “I don’t make use of that one very much.”

  “Especially not in Arab nations,” said Taliq nearly indulgently. He looked fresh, as if he might have had some sleep himself. He began to leaf through the American’s second passport like any average immigration officer. “And certainly not in this situation. You use this one to travel to Israel, and various countries friendly to her. When the Daniel Stone of your normal passport becomes the Ivrim Steinberg of this special passport of yours. I take it you work for someone influential. Without being too melodramatic about it, for your government or for the Israelis or for someone’s Department of Defense.…”

  “My company has some electronic contracts with a number of governments, that’s all. We all need to make a living, Mr. Taliq.”

  “Some of us do, it seems.”

  “I have a doctorate from Cal Tech in cybernetics. Surely you don’t expect me to earn my keep selling vacuum cleaners? I have considerable respect for your people.”

  “Your respect will grow, Mr. Stone. Please undress to your underwear. Take off your shoes and your watch and kneel in the aisle.”

  “You’re not serious!”

  Taliq turned to Yusuf. “Shoot the Zionist bastard now,” he told the boy.

  McCloud inspected Yusuf again and saw that he was pale but intent, his spirit coiled up for the act. McCloud thought it seemed very early in the enterprise to be making death threats. According to his reading, all that was supposed to begin after the issuing of some ultimatum to officials safe on the ground.

  “Please, I’ll do it,” said Daniel Stone.

  He took off his tie and his handmade shirt—McCloud could see a D. S. monogrammed on the striped pocket as it fell to the floor. He folded his trousers on the seat, picked up the shirt and folded it on top of them, and took off his shoes. He was as lean, sinewy, and broad-shouldered out of his suit as in it. Americans called it “working out.” This Stone fellow worked out. Though he himself might have been as much as ten years younger than Stone, McCloud knew he could not have stripped with the same credit.

  Taliq next told the American to kneel. Stone obeyed. His thighs and calves were tanned and seemed to have a healthy residue of oil as if, just before leaving the airport, Mr. Stone had had a rubdown. Disrobing, instead of undermining the man’s dignity, had somehow confirm
ed it.

  “I reckon I’d let him play in my football team,” Tom Gullagara murmured with approval.

  Taliq and Yusuf left Stone kneeling and progressed down the aisle, and for a second McCloud feared they were coming to punish Tom for his whimsical observation. But they stopped at Cale. Or Bennett, as McCloud now had to remember to call him. Cale was smoking a cigarette with his accustomed avidity.

  “Mr. Bennett,” said Taliq. He lit a cigarette of his own as he spoke and drew on it. “I want your other passport, please.”

  Cale burrowed his shoulders into his seat and answered drowsily, “I simply don’t have another passport, old son.”

  “I give you credit for being professional, Mr. Bennett,” Taliq reasoned. “Give me some credit in return. This plane is equipped with five radios. Two of them long distance. We have read your passport number to our associates on the ground, and they tell us that you have a second passport. And they are of sufficient eminence and influence to know these things.”

  “That’s nonsense, sonny,” said Cale. “Do I look to you like a man important enough to bother with a second passport?”

  Taliq turned to Yusuf, at the same time pointing to Daisy Nakamura, who sat behind Cale/Bennett. “This woman is an American citizen. We’ll lose no credit in our world for shooting her.”

  McCloud thought that a curious term. Lose no credit.

  Yusuf’s eyes turned quite predatorily to Daisy Nakamura. It was frightening to see the distance the young man contemptuous of Asian stitching had moved, yet his present willingness to consider shooting Daisy did not seem a break from his earlier, conversational, flirtatious self. It was just another face of that exaltation of fright, that revolutionary intent, that fixity of will which mad Cale had earlier described.

  McCloud heard someone say, “That’s ridiculous.” He didn’t know it was himself until Taliq turned to him. And now he must say more or be left to drift with those two banal words for buoyancy.

  “She’s American, yes, but Japanese-American,” he explained. “If you’re concerned with the dispossessed, then her people fit your description. Don’t you know your bloody history?”

  He let a heady anger swell that question. He was determined not to be cowed. Maybe this was like the brave fury which moved mad Cale. He wondered where this bravery and folly came from. But he felt a duty to embrace it and to finish his argument. “Or is it only one section of history you’re interested in?”

  “Well said, old fellow,” said Cale/Bennett.

  Taliq turned his attention to Daisy Nakamura and studied her for some time under her new status as specimen of history. McCloud too watched her. If Taliq adjudged her a victim, then she and McCloud were both saved. Under Taliq’s gaze, Daisy looked levelly ahead, neither hanging her head nor taking on Taliq’s gaze. McCloud noticed that she swallowed, and her throat was appallingly white.

  “What does the woman herself say?” Taliq asked the cabin at large. “Is she an American or isn’t she?”

  “Mr. Taliq,” Daisy announced, “I’m a registered Barry Goldwater Republican, and an American, and newly widowed. I don’t appreciate this. You’ll get no trouble from me, but you won’t get me to say I’m someone I’m not. Aside from that, I haven’t even owned one passport until August last.”

  Taliq nodded. He flexed the fingers of his right hand in front of him. McCloud noticed scarring on the knuckles and the back of the hand, and it seemed the gesture was meant to get the muscles working. Or else it was hesitation. He brought the hand down and laid it briefly over Daisy’s on the armrest of her seat. He exerted an emphatic pressure for a few seconds. It looked to McCloud like reassurance and even a sort of claim.

  Producing a pistol then, he turned and pushed its muzzle beneath Cale’s left eye.

  “From the Crusades onwards, the English have been the instigators of all our grief. That’s history I do know. Find me your passport, please.”

  McCloud was alarmed to sense in himself the magnetic drag of Cale’s nihilism. Cale—you could tell—sat there considering whether after all this mightn’t be the appropriate time to perish.

  Twenty seconds afterward McCloud, trembling, found it fascinating to consider what it must have been which turned the balance. The thought of a girlfriend in London? An unfinished manuscript? A sick wife? Or a concern that once the hijackers made one execution, they would become habituated to it, and active terror would supplant the present passive version.

  In any case Cale got his briefcase from beneath the seat in front of him, opened it, unzipped an inner compartment, and produced a second passport. Taliq considered it, leafing through its pages. When he spoke, it was to demand the same of Cale as he had of the American businessman.

  The condition of Cale’s clothes as they came off and of his body as it was revealed was not edifying to watch. McCloud noticed that Daisy Nakamura averted her eyes until, groaning and flinching like an arthritic, Cale knelt.

  In the aisle Taliq walked to middle ground between the two kneelers. He considered for a while the now obvious scar tissue on the back of his hand and the cigarette which emerged from the mess of healed skin and knuckle. Then he raised his head and addressed the passengers again.

  “These two are our enemies,” he said wearily. The weight of turpitude the earth and even the air held seemed to oppress him. “Mr. Stone is a Zionist and does business with Mossad. Mr. Cale, who tried to pass himself off as Mr. Bennett, is a notorious Zionist of the London right-wing press.”

  From his kneeling position, Cale said, “I am not a Zionist. Not in your sense. Look at me, for Christ’s sake. What sort of fucking threat am I to you, comrade?”

  Taliq spoke quietly to his acolyte. “He had his chance to be brave. If he speaks again, execute this man.”

  And Taliq put his ruined, cigarette-holding hand on McCloud’s wrist and was so close for a moment that McCloud could smell his musk again, the after-shave and the gamy redolence of his strength of purpose.

  Cale did not speak, and Taliq lifted his hand, which had held both Daisy’s wrist and McCloud’s, and left the compartment. In his wake, McCloud watched Cale scratching his armpit. He felt intimately connected to the man. Cale wore a most unmuscular undergarment, what the English called a vest and the Australians a singlet. His underpants were linen and voluminous, not athletic at all but unexpectedly pristine. Kneeling, he looked like a fat boy under punishment in a boarding school. But not a vulnerable fat boy. A dangerous one who dreamed up humiliations for the staff.

  Terrified at the risks he had already taken, McCloud felt tears prick his eyes for his potentially orphaned children—the Boy and the Girl. Waking to be told the news, or being called out of class to receive it.

  He’d thought earlier of himself in the mass of passengers, and—though they had primacy among all other children—of them as sharing somehow in the communal anxieties of the mass of passengers’ children. But he had deliberately brought himself to Taliq’s attention. He had been for a time and in a sense Taliq’s preeminent passenger and so Taliq’s preeminent candidate for a bullet. Again, he knew well, having written about it for the past three years, how oddities of event altered a child. He and Pauline had both been children of sudden and yet not outrageous or particularly memorable oddities of direction. How much more would his children be marred if they became hijack orphans!

  Was it possible, too, McCloud asked himself, that Pauline was taking risks with Hasni at the rear of the plane?

  The lights remained on after Taliq had gone. An unacknowledged day prevailed beyond the windows. McCloud exchanged a tight smile with Daisy Nakamura the Arizonan. Yusuf seemed to notice it. For he walked down the aisle and stood above Daisy. Some minutes before he had been ready to execute her, so there was a certain unreality, McCloud thought, about his sudden air of Levantine charmer.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked her pleasantly.

  “I’m a widow, son,” she said. “And you wouldn’t believe it, but I’m old enough to be yo
ur mother.”

  “You are a very beautiful woman,” said Yusuf, shy and assertive at the same time. His hips trembled. If she’d been at a cafe table, he would have done a little seducer’s dance around it.

  “Son, let me say … I don’t turn on for men with automatic weapons,” said Daisy Nakamura, unyielding.

  In Yusuf’s eyes there appeared something between anger and regret. Closer to regret, however, than to the other.

  “Like any soldier in a total war,” he said, “I am under orders. Does this mean I have no finer feelings? Ma’am, all of us, my brothers and I … we are all men of sensitive emotions and educational ambitions. We would all be richer if we forgot our people and became doctors and engineers and lived in San Diego, and sent an occasional sentimental donation to those who are fighting the battle. Right? And then we would not have had to take jet planes over. Right? And wave automatic weapons at beautiful women.”

  Daisy shook her head, but with an expression of lenient reproof even McCloud in his anxiety found charming. It was as if she were lumping Yusuf’s behavior with all the other male mysteries, all the cowboy perversities of Budapest, all the crassness, drinking, whoring, and telling of lies.

  Yusuf of course could sense at once he might be partially forgiven, though Daisy said nothing.

  “It’s sad the world does not let me take the normal course, ma’am. I would rather drink brandy with you than meet you like this. But my family is a family without a home and a nation. We once had a home, in Jaffa, where my grandfather is buried. What sort of man would I be if I forgot that? I would be untrue to his memory if I did not carry arms.”

  “Oh Jesus!” Cale said from his position on the floor, though Yusuf did not seem to hear him.

  “My grandfather’s buried in an internment camp in the Rockies,” said Daisy Nakamura with a small shake of her shoulders. How exquisitely adamant she was. “You don’t find me threatening to shoot people aboard aircraft.”