Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  Stone gazed up at the blue-and-yellow, emerald-and-crimson switches and fuses which must mean something to an engineer but whose code was inscrutable. “But there you go. You’re still trying to give them some damn nobility. They don’t know what in the hell they’re doing. I mean, you saw them—threatening that girl in the green dress and ogling her at the same time. All they want is anarchy. My stepson’s light-years from that, and so is any other balanced kid.”

  McCloud was tired now of this half-naked discourse. He tended anyhow to think of truth as a blend rather than an essence. He wanted to be let out soon to urinate, and this need overrode the intellectual vanities which dominated the fusebox.

  “I reckon,” he ventured, “both your models would be of use at various times.”

  Neither of them were happy, of course, to hear it.

  “Okay,” Stone conceded at last. “Say they were in any way like my boy … what does that tell you, Cale? Where would it get you?”

  “Some way,” Cale boasted. “It means they’re subject to doubt, these boys, just like your lad. They’re forced to harangue themselves internally. This is right, this is right, this is right! Just like the average young haranguing themselves. And like the average young, they carry their weapons not only to intimidate us, but to intimidate themselves. To show themselves the size of what they’re doing. And given its size, its rightness.”

  “So we work on that?” asked Stone. “That’s what you’re saying. The way we’d work on a normal kid’s uncertainty?”

  In that second, as he looked at the sedulous Stone with some envy, McCloud felt his all-too-common bemusement of spirit set in again and unman hope and comprehension and courses of action. Stone was admirable. He was a fighter. His body was a fighter’s body. Until last night he’d thought perhaps the fight was against inflation and cholesterol, but he had now switched his restrained defiance and his watchfulness to this new threat, the threat of Taliq’s boys.

  Whereas McCloud, confused in marriage and in creation, divided in care for both Pauline and the Barramatjara, was still in the process of framing his resistance to what had befallen him. His limbs threatened to fall apart—so it seemed to him—while Stone’s tightened.

  He tensed his brain, looking for the focusing idea to take hold of, still utterly unsure what it might be.

  “At some stage,” Cale told Stone conclusively and with a confidential smile, “we will each be alone with one of them. Even at the risk that he might shoot us between the eyes to prove how right he is, we must work on his doubts.”

  “Okay. Say for a second they did respond to string pulling the way ordinary kids do. What about Taliq?”

  “Taliq’s lost,” said Cale, and in saying it, even though flaccid and cirrhotic, took on again an authority adequate, when combined with the interior torment of the bladder, to impair McCloud’s breath. Air was restored to him, however, by the impact—felt even and perhaps particularly here in the electronics bay—of their aircraft’s suspension talking the impact of landing.

  On the night Bluey called from New York to inquire into his uncle’s death, the microphone at which he was placed sat alone and mute in the dead center of a metal table, looking like an exhibit in some museum of telephony. And mutely, waiting for it to speak and confirm his dream, Bluey Kannata regarded it. Across the room, the technician beyond the glass strolled from panel to panel, flicking switches, bored, it seemed, with serving that shrinking portion of the earth which the satellite and the laser beam did not instantly make a linkage with or provoke news from. His yawns were very nearly an insult to Bluey’s aching focus on the radio-telephone mike.

  To distract Bluey’s gaze, which threatened to become riveted for good into the mesh of the mike cover, McCloud went out now and then for sandwiches and cups of coffee. Early evening in New York coincided with a morning hour in Baruda when the Barramatjara people would have breakfasted and begun turning their gaze from the morning sun. By then the table in lower Manhattan was covered with detritus—wrappers smeared with mayonnaise from America’s wholehearted sandwiches, cups with lees of coffee, Coke cans crushed to pass the time. Yet still the mike did not speak. Bluey seemed to believe with increasing fixity that the silence and delay confirmed his dream.

  It had been a hard room for McCloud and Bluey to find in a building just as hard, surrounded by the shuffling homeless with their polystyrene begging cups. Yet toward seven o’clock admirable Pauline found it. She had stopped briefly at the hotel to pick up news and directions from the dance troupe. She came in still flushed from a day of riding on horseback with her mother’s cousin among western Connecticut’s burnished autumn trees.

  It had been only ten minutes before she arrived to reinforce him that McCloud had given in to Bluey’s request for a real drink. For Bluey had kept turning his head a second from the mike, still keeping one eye fixed on it, and saying levelly, without his normal roguishness, “A man could do a drink!” It was a serious request, McCloud was sure, from a man at an extreme of anxiety.

  So when Pauline came in, there had stood the half-pint of vodka wrapped in its paper bag, sitting upright and uncapped among the tumbled coffee cups.

  He feared she might think it had been lightly bought and drunk.

  For the moment, though, she bent to kiss Bluey on the cheek. His eyes flickered away from the microphone for one frantic instant.

  “Gidday, Pauline love,” Bluey told her with forced jollity. “No word yet. Waiting for news from Baruda, you know.”

  Pauling said, “It will come. It will make you happy, too.”

  “Bloody doubt it, love.”

  She looked at McCloud. Her green eyes had that wonderful fresh glitter she’d picked up in the countryside. She came closer and spoke to him in a whisper. “Is the booze a good idea?”

  “In the circumstances,” McCloud murmured, “perhaps. This is serious business.”

  That was a phrase the Barramatjara used to describe the major workings of the earth; benefits and maledictions, blossomings and deaths.

  Pauline held McCloud’s gaze calmly and with a margin of reproof. He had, during the writing of his book, flirted with alcoholism. A certain risk to the brain and reins, it had seemed justified then by the scope of the work he believed he was writing.

  “Well,” she said, giving up ground with a smile. “I suppose you got the smallest bottle you could.”

  Her father the Dentist had been an abstainer, of course; his excesses had transcended alcohol. But her grandfather, a dentist also, had been famous in parts of Sydney for damage he’d done with drills and needles while inexact from whiskey, for the wrong teeth he’d pulled, for the ultimate trouble he had got into with the dental association. That shame had hung remotely over her childhood home, soon to be overshadowed by further shames and a new generation of trouble from the Dental Association. It had, of course, all given her a weakness for the company of topers and—at the same time—a fear of their likely excesses. McCloud satisfied both those impulses.

  Well then into the New York night and the Baruda morning, the technician in the control room hammered on the glass. Simultaneously a voice, barbed with static, tore from the microphone. It jolted Bluey’s head back.

  “Baruda main council office here,” it said. “Over.”

  Familiar with the radio telephone, Bluey flicked the switch on the base of his microphone. “Bluey Kannata here, all the way over there in New York. That you, Norman? Over.”

  “Bluey! How’re you going in that scary place, you bloody scoundrel? Over.”

  “It’s a bloody madhouse, Norman. But don’t worry about that. Tell me straight, man. That uncle of mine? My mother’s brother? How can I say his name, mate? I dreamed he got sung, Normie. This afternoon he was right on the stage here, bloody Lincoln Center stage in New York, Normie. His name … it can’t be said, can it, mate? Isn’t that so? Poor old feller’s all finished, isn’t he, Normie? Over.”

  And Bluey crucially flicked the switch again.


  McCloud massaged his own sweaty palms. What sort of frightful mourning and hiding-away would Bluey embark on in this alien city? What overdoses of this and that might he try to take, catching and assuaging in himself the infection of his uncle’s death?

  “Norman here again, mate. Saw the old feller just an hour back outside the store. Eyesight didn’t look too good. Apart from that he’s there, on his rug. Going to play cards. Waiting for Dulcie Yaminata and Billy Dimiti to turn up with the pack. Over.”

  A yelp of hope came from Bluey; it was one of those rich and alien sounds of the kind the Barramatjara were able to utter and enchant strangers with all night.

  “Mate, mate. Could you get him here, mate? Hour’s a bloody long time. A man could go sixty times over in an hour. Right? Over.”

  “Don’t go away, Bluey. I’ll see what I can do. Just hang on to the line, son. Over.”

  Bluey flicked the switch, instantaneously strangling the static deep in the line. “I’m not going anywhere, mate. You bring that old man, eh? Over.”

  Pauline and McCloud stared at each other. Can an old man on his way to play nine-up die of a curse within an hour? Had some wise woman, a featherfoot ally, turned up with the cards and dealt him his last breath?

  Bluey had set the radio telephone mike to Reception, and after two minutes an aged squawk took him by surprise.

  “Bluey Kannata? You’re well, son? Over.”

  Bluey surprised McCloud by being gruff. “What about yourself, Uncle Jimmy? Over.”

  “I got these problems with my eye, son. Can’t see the bloody cards, you know. The others try to dud me, Bluey. Why you calling me on the radiophone? You back home? Over.”

  A mighty giggle, musical yet assonant, a laugh whose tone McCloud once again imagined might have been capable of vivifying stones, shook out of Bluey. “But you’re alive, you old man, eh? You’re full of beans and playing that nine-up? And that old woman of yours, Auntie Nancy? How is that Aunt Nancy? Over.”

  “Too late to trade her in on one of them young sheilas. She ain’t got the same problem I got, and she can read the newspaper. Prime minister come up here, she bowls up to the bugger and says, ‘Hey, Bob.’ She knows how to push a bloke round, that woman Nancy. Over.”

  “She’ll be still bossing politicians round when you’re gone, old man!” cried Bluey, still laughing in whoops. “She’s going to be cheating at gin rummy years yet, Uncle. Over.”

  There was an answering laughter from the uncle. It spun around the room in New York. “Over, over,” stammered the old man with the giggles.

  “I’m real glad you’re well, old man! Over.”

  Bluey had chosen to make his joy sound average now. Not average enough to mislead the uncle, though.

  “Bluey, son? Why’d you call on the radio telephone? You had some dream about me? Over.”

  “No. What bloody dream, Uncle? I had some business there with Norman. I wanted to ask him about my missus. Had some worries about her. Wondered was she okay, you know. Over.”

  “You ought to come and see that missus, Bluey. And the nippers. Over.”

  Bluey put his hand over his eyes. He didn’t want to pursue this.

  “I will, Uncle. Bit hard from here. Over.”

  “Want to talk to her now, Bluey? You know a woman’ll only start looking at other blokes. It’s the way things go, Blue. Want to talk to her? Over.”

  “Can’t right now, Uncle. They want me to get off the line here. Radio telephone, it’s a real rigmarole here, Uncle. They’re not set up like us. Over.”

  He had the time now to wink at McCloud, as if Frank too were a man beset with wives.

  “Listen. Don’t drink too much liquor, Bluey. You’re a devil for that stuff. That stuff’s a killer, son. Over.”

  “One last thing, Uncle. Those blokes in the Singapore suits, them miners. They been back? Over.”

  “Haven’t seen them, Bluey. Haven’t been no drillers. Might have blown over, son. Over.”

  “Hope so, Uncle, hope so. You keep well, then. Love to Auntie Nancy. Over and out.”

  All the way back uptown in the cab, there were gales of laughter from Bluey. “That old bugger,” he would say in a voice which implied he was pinching his uncle’s ear. “He still cheating at that gin rummy and nine-up, eh?”

  And he would hoot with laughter and beat the cab’s window frame until the Haitian driver asked him to stop.

  McCloud had noticed that he had not addressed his uncle with the familiarity of that standard Australian endearment “bugger” during their radiophone conversation. Respect had its ceremonies even in the debased English of the cattle camp and the reservation.

  McCloud—with his arm slung around Pauline’s shoulders—longed to tell her about his own relief. Whitey had been proven not to be a fatal influence. Bluey was fit again for rehearsal. And in a calm moment McCloud might have the chance to remind him that he should not give all dreams and phantasms equal ground.

  Back at the hotel, the other dancers were waiting for them, gathered together in Whitey Wappitji’s room, which had a little kitchen attached to it, and drinking coffee and beer. Bluey rushed into the place ahead of McCloud and Pauline. This was unusual; generally he would make very courtly gestures to send them through a door first. An old-fashioned boy, Bluey, apart from the abuse of modern and fashionable substances! But tonight he had to get inside quickly to celebrate and chortle and slap shoulders and discover for himself that Whitey’s room was habitable to him. For Whitey, the featherfoot, the man of the reputedly broken toe, had not ambushed or cursed the old man.

  Whitey had already popped open a can of Coors and placed it in Bluey’s hand as the actor reached him. And Bluey held it celebratorily, a vessel empty of spells and full of merest froth. Embracing Whitey, he yelled, “This bugger’s my mate, this old Whitey here!”

  McCloud felt Pauline’s hand grasp his—her friendship, her rejoicing—in the tribal room. To honor her, McCloud did no more than take a sip from Bluey’s can—Bluey was in a mood, of course, to which drinking from a common bowl was appropriate.

  There remained the medical question—why had Bluey seen his uncle, whitened to death, on the stage at the Lincoln Center?

  Even Wappitji, the troupe’s center of authority, raised that matter obliquely. “You got to watch them funny cigarettes, Bluey. Fair dinkum you have. They make you cry for the wrong things.”

  For a second, Bluey was sobered by Whitey’s diagnosis. He blinked and looked away. But then he yelled and reconsidered the black aperture which led into the liquor in his can. “Come on, you blokes. We’re a long way from home, us fellers. And all brothers. Let’s have a party, eh?”

  Whitey considered him soberly. Whitey, who had had the authentic dream and was on his civilizing mission, like Cortez looking for the core, for the immutable soul of Montezuma. Whitey, who was making light in the darkness.

  Later in the night, their bladders full, rather than use the bathroom water closet one at a time, they went to the communal urinals down the hall. The dancers and McCloud groaned, released themselves from their pants, and began pissing. The room was full all at once of a strange, subtle, and not unmusical whistling of which McCloud was not part. “Whistlecock,” the first Europeans into the desert had called this phenomenon. In the sundry grades of Barramatjara initiation, a young man was not only circumcised, but subincised, the underside of his penis cut open to the urethra. This was how it had been done by the Malu and the Two Brothers. The earth needed the blood from this incision. And when a man pissed you heard the full music of his manhood.

  Which McCloud could not match.

  The casual attender of the troupe’s performance the following night had no way of seeing the neatness of the connection between the finale and what had befallen Bluey in the past two days.

  During the afternoon, a considerable crowd that held tickets for the night performance came to one of the seminar rooms at Lincoln Center to drink wine and watch the dancers paint a canvas called th
e Emu Dreaming at Mount Wilson. Great circles of red and black dotted with white were connected across a landscape of white, blue, yellow, orange, and brown dots by sinuous and—in a few eccentric cases—straight lines. The whole thing looked like a continent seen in clear light from far space.

  This making of the dance painting never worked as well indoors, McCloud thought, as it had outdoors in Australia with peculiarly Australian light. But it came up brilliantly at night with help from the lighting technician.

  Emu Dreaming at Mount Wilson was a story like Prometheus, except of course that Prometheus was a Johnny-come-lately compared with that millennia-earlier fire thief, the emu ancestor, danced when evening came by Bluey. Wappitji danced the wedge-tailed eagle, casually replete with grace and authority and mana.

  McCloud loved this dance for its simplicity and force. Emu, his eye glittering with avian ambition, tries to deprive the Two Brothers of eagle feathers which were their usual and beloved ornamentation. He frightens the brothers away from the eagle nest atop Mount Wilson by telling them of a serpent who occupies the peak. When the eagle itself, divinely enraged, discovers emu’s attempt to corner the speed and potency inherent in eagle feathers, he renders the emu flightless.

  Bluey was that night and as always superb as the long-legged, long-necked emu whose greed has produced a straitened world. Now he and the Two Brothers, in an eagleless earth, have only ashes to mark themselves with. Even with this limited form of power emu tries to corner by stealing fire from the Two Brothers.

  The Two Brothers (Phil the Christian and Cowboy Tom), with Wappitji the eagle wheeling far to the north ordaining the result, pursue the fugitive emu and his small ball of fire, spear him, and take from his body a bone with which they pierce the septum of their noses. Emu perishes in the bewilderment common to those who try too hard to find the ritual keys to the earth. The eagle rewards the Two Brothers by giving them feathered feet for the pursuit of wrongdoers.