Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  This young woman had grown up in the country, and her fillings had been done by old-school dentists. As he would later tell Pauline in explanation of the new course he would set his life on, he became aware, as he watched the woman’s open mouth, of what he’d already known in an offhand, notional way. Like the teeth of a lot of country girls, hers had suffered considerable decay early in life. Each of her fillings had been marked on her dental chart, certainly. But he had never before paid full attention to the extent of the work which had been done. And most of the holes had been filled with gold. It must have cost her parents a large proportion of their wool checks to go on repairing their daughter’s mouth.

  Waiting for the ambulance, therefore, he spent a long time gazing into her golden mouth. He accepted the idea that there was something wrong with his gazing, though he acted with reverence and knew that—unlike the alcoholic carelessnesses of his father—his behavior would not attract the censure of the dental association.

  McCloud, who had grown up in one of the less preferred but still affluent reaches of the north shore, heard of this tragedy by eavesdropped adult rumor and because the Sunday papers loved the tale of the young woman’s death in the dental chair. In what the papers and adults muttered about the case there was the suggestion that Dr. Cross had known the woman as more than a patient. A photograph appeared in the tabloids of a New Year’s Eve party at some golf club where Dr. Cross sat next to the knight’s wife. Mrs. Cross had been sitting on Dr. Cross’s right-hand side in the original, harmless photograph, but the press had cropped her out for fear she marred the story and the imputation.

  Had Dr. Cross gassed or poisoned his mistress? That was the question which hung over all the suburban rumors and the circumstantial press reports. The earlier and startling Clark case had set people up, if they needed setting up, to ask such a question.

  At the time of the scandal Pauline was twelve and attending a Presbyterian ladies’ college on the north shore. McCloud did not know her then. In fact, when he first saw her she was twenty-four; it was at some party, and she was pointed out to him by someone who remembered the Dr. Cross story. Given that a great whisper had altered or perhaps ended his own childhood, he looked at her and wondered how the even juicier rumor which flared for a time in her life had been absorbed into her tidy beauty, her competent, square-shouldered, smallish frame, her air of briskness, reliability, and sensual promise.

  The coroner had found that the knight’s young wife died of a cerebral hemorrhage and had called the innuendos attaching to Dr. Cross unfounded and shameful. (Again, there was a parallel with the Clark trial, which to the young McCloud had been the McCloud case.) The judge uttered the devout hope that Dr. Cross’s patients would stand by him, for his professional reputation was intact. But there was never a chance that they would.

  Dr. Cross himself forestalled them. He closed his surgery and sold the practice to the first comer. He took to going to the bush and living, first for weeks at a time and then for months, in a tent on a friend’s farm on the old gold field at Sofala. After the absences became all but permanent, Mrs. Cross told him—for his daughter’s sake—to keep away from home. Life in a tent had by then made him a different man, an inadvertent and ragged one. He spent his time repanning old gravel beds and taking to the flanks of hills with a pick. It may have struck Mrs. Cross that he was looking for some image of her mouth, the mouth of the knight’s young wife. In McCloud’s novel, anyhow, the fictional Mrs. Cross would accuse her husband of that.

  Reworking the nineteenth-century mullock heaps and gravel beds, Dr. Cross grew old and uncomfortable to be with and became a brief ghost at the wedding of those two orphans of rumor, McCloud and Pauline. He had built a shack among old diggings and leftover cyanide treatment tanks used by prospectors who had earned a small living there during the Depression. Here he died of some respiratory illness; though of course to Pauline he had died first when he went to the bush, looking a century too late for all that Sheba bounty of Sofala.

  It was the twelve-year-old Pauline, the spruce child in an early stage of her ultimate bereavement, clearing away her homework books, who was a reproach to the novelist McCloud in his brief, random sleep beside Hasni.

  When Taliq’s voice came crackling—jagged with static—over the intercom, McCloud did not surface entirely but lay on the underside of the waves where there was light, some sound, and much meaning.

  “The Arab Youth Popular Socialist Front action commando is now happy to inform you that there has been some dialogue between ourselves and authorities on the ground. It is possible to make known to you, as earlier we have to the ground, the reward we are doing all this to achieve. The traitors of the Palestinian National Front have been holding three of our heroes and dear brothers, including our general, Mahoud al-Jiddah, as their prisoners in North Africa. The National Front have been so corrupted by the blandishments of America and its allies that they recognize the Zionist state of Israel as if it had a right to exist on the bones of our fathers and mothers, our brothers and sisters. Because Mahoud and our other brothers could not so far forget their principles as to string along with these betrayals, they have been kept imprisoned by the very people who were once their brothers and allies.”

  More static, and then Taliq cutting it!

  “I can tell you that we have asked, indeed demanded, the release to us of Mahoud and our brothers, their delivery from the grasp of these lickspittle renegades who call themselves Palestinian but who disgrace the name. This does not suit the treacherous faction who hold him. It does not suit their corrupt politics to release him. But their friends the imperialists of Britain and the United States and France and Germany have given us undertakings that they will use their influence to see that Mahoud and our brothers are delivered to us when next we land. If that should happen, all passengers except the three criminal prisoners can look forward to leaving the plane and greeting again their families.

  “Our destinies therefore rest with the not-always-reliable intentions of the Western bourgeois nations. Let us pray that they have all our interests at their hearts.”

  “Why do they talk like that?” McCloud asked, a murmur which could not be heard. “Why do they talk that stilted way?”

  Maybe Taliq should have got Hasni to make the announcement. For in his vanity, Hasni might have transcended the clichés.

  But then it came to McCloud that this planeload of people might depend and rely on the standard pabulum of Taliq’s hijacker idiom. He relied on it himself and though scoffing at it privately was somehow soothed by it even when it excluded him.

  It struck him too that in Taliq’s wooden argot, Pauline’s release was promised. Conditionally, of course. The conditions nearly choked the promise and yet not entirely. Calmly he imagined Pauline the widow, mother of orphaned and—one had to hope—apparently reconciled children. He foresaw the comforters, Peter Drury the impresario among them. Divorced and not yet settled with a woman. How good he’d be for the Girl and the Boy. What legitimacy and joy and gifts Pauline could bring him!

  From the blind side of his consciousness, McCloud saw far above him Taliq the ideologue emerge from the cockpit carrying a small blue box with a white cross on it. Whitey Wappitji met him. Whitey took the bandanna off Taliq’s wounded hand. The congealed fabric, coming away from the injury, made Taliq flinch on one side of his face. The other side, however, retained its sober style, appropriate to the governance of the aircraft.

  Bluey had risen from his seat and snatched the bandanna. He returned to his window with it, dropping it with a gesture of deliberateness on the aisle seat beside him. From his own place, McCloud could see it sitting there, more or less in Bluey’s care.

  Meanwhile, with cotton wool and gauze, Whitey wrapped up the wound expertly. “Real St. John’s Ambulance stuff,” McCloud believed Whitey said.

  Taliq began to smile in gratification. The dressing restored his wholeness. Whitey deftly finished the bandaging, fastening it altogether with an elastic
clip.

  After some words of thanks which McCloud could not hear, Taliq went back to his coterie at the rear of the cabin. McCloud, cold and airless beneath the solidity of his drowse, both saw him and did not see him. How in any case could McCloud observe all this, given that the cushion behind his head blocked his view? Yet with something like clarity he saw Taliq sit and Daisy Nakamura take his hand by the wrist and consider the bound-up wound, while Taliq himself watched her with somber desire.

  Some time later, though still believing himself to be sleeping, McCloud saw Whitey go forward through the curtain, open the lavatory door, and stand in it, facing outward so that even within the rules of normal eye lines McCloud could see him. He took out the bandanna impregnated with Taliq’s blood. Where had he got it from? Of course, Bluey had fallen asleep by his unshuttered window. Whitey had treacherously stolen the thing.

  Whitey considered it, more or less in its own right but also half turning on occasion to observe its reflection in the mirror above the washbasin.

  He spent what seemed to McCloud a long, long time studying the bandanna, reading Taliq’s blood. Only when he had achieved a level of certainty did he breathe on it and begin to sing or intone—you could tell it was not usual conversation by the length of time Whitey’s lips were apart, the extent of the vowels. There wasn’t any doubt about it. He was persuading not so much some malignity, but some sort of inevitable event to enter Taliq’s veins.

  For me? McCloud tried to ask. For me? To save me from my own ignorance?

  He was reduced to sobs at this unasked-for benefit from Whitey, this vote of forgiveness.

  At last Whitey was finished and pocketed the thing and closed the lavatory door. As he came aft he paused above McCloud.

  “Frank,” he uttered, piercingly but privately. “He’s not a well man, this Taliq. He’s not a well man.”

  He looked at McCloud significantly. McCloud was sure he was meant to take courage from this pronouncement. The promise was that Taliq’s intentions would turn cloudy and imprecise.

  He was so pleased with this news, with Whitey’s infallible reading of the blood and with the curse of confusion and illness Whitey had sung into it, that he believed he must inform Pauline. Then she would not need anymore to threaten Taliq. For Whitey had driven the threat against Taliq underground, where it was more potent.

  Whitey threw the bandanna back down on the aisle seat beside the window one where Bluey slept. So neat, this operation!

  McCloud felt himself rise up for a second, but then the weight of water pulled him down to an angle deep in the sky from which he saw their aircraft, their threatened planet, lazier than a yacht, stuck in a transparent firmament.

  CHAPTER TEN:

  Judgment and Conversation

  At the bottom of the sky’s coldest socket, Hasni shook him awake.

  “There is an hour before we land,” Hasni solicitously told him. The boy’s eyes shifted away then to Cale and the American businessman, who were already standing shivering in the aisle. Their blankets had been stripped from them. Even Stone’s flesh looked porous, cheeselike, on the edge of dissolution. McCloud dreaded joining them in their nakedness. He hoped he wasn’t about to become again the meat in their debate over the substantial difference between Stone’s stepson and Hasni.

  Nonetheless, he was on his feet suddenly and without question. There was no one else here, on this upper deck, in Taliq’s garden of ideologies. While he slept, the population of the place had been cleared.

  Cale was smiling. “Show trial time,” he muttered. He seemed totally recovered from the punishment he’d taken earlier from Taliq.

  Hasni set himself to straightening their placards, which were dog-eared now but which had nonetheless proven sturdy. It made you drink that little bullet-headed Razir probably had a gift for the placard business, had maybe—for the Iraqis—hung them around the necks of captured Iranian officers.

  Hasni himself quivered now and then, without meaning to, from the cold. He was dressed for his destination—the balmy shore of Libya, perhaps. He nodded to them, and they turned and began to descend the stairs, Stone first, then Cale. McCloud at the end. He wondered was there any use trying to read meanings into the order.

  The front cabin downstairs was utterly empty. An unreasoning fear from the pit reasserted itself. Had the exchange taken place already? Mahoud al-Jiddah and the other brothers for the passengers? And he had slept through it? Had Pauline already been absorbed by her future?

  Turning aft, however, they discovered everyone in the middle of the plane, crowded two and three to a seat, wan in the sepia light of the high, shuttered aircraft. At the front of the assemblage, by one escape door, stood the balding veteran called Razir and young Musa, the one who spoke British Midlands. As if he might have to sit for a test, McCloud’s brain fumbled for the memory of the wrongs Hasni said had been done to their separate families.

  Hasni halted the three prisoners by the bulkhead which carried the screen where normally films were projected. The pure white side of the screen had been exposed to the population of the plane, and against it Hasni placed the three, wanting them to stand out starkly, isolated in their malfeasance. It was Razir, of course, the one McCloud thought of as “the little veteran,” who orchestrated this, who really knew about light, background, and the displaying of the captured.

  Facing the plane’s population, McCloud looked for faces—for the blond woman who had punched him in the back; for the cripple who had wept for them; for the man in the glossy baseball jacket who had screamed at them on their first procession through the plane; for the woman who for her sleeping children’s sake had cursed Cale. And of course for Pauline.

  But the crush of people was awful. Nothing distinct could be seen in that mass of crammed, coerced features. Clearer, opposite Hasni, were the Barramatjara Dance Troupe—apart, he noticed, from Bluey. Frail-looking Daisy Nakamura was there, still wearing her blanket, and Taliq smoking reflectively, not with his normal rapacity for the tobacco.

  Then where is Yusuf the tailor’s son? McCloud asked himself, anxious to make a check on what had become the established order of things. Oh yes, of course, Yusuf—the critic of Singapore stitching—was on the flight deck with the avuncular captain. Ready to blow the cockpit to fragments.

  Taliq walked over to where McCloud stood against the screen.

  “Hasni tells me,” he said confidentially, “you feel badly done by. You paint a picture of an unreliable politician pursuing his own agenda. Is that not so?”

  “Yes,” said McCloud. “It’s so. I’m innocent. And you’re believing the enemy press, which you condemn as liars. So why don’t I get credit for the fact they lie?”

  McCloud was trembling but happy with the argument he’d put.

  “Do you know why I believe the enemy this time?” Taliq asked, dragging a last time on an almost spent cigarette. “Do you know?”

  “I’m sure you’ll find a reason,” said McCloud, allowing himself the aggressive luxury of feeling cheated.

  “I’ll tell you,” said Taliq. “Only one of your dancers condemns you, but none of them defends you.”

  Taliq looked piercingly into his eyes, and McCloud saw it was the truth, at least in the judicial sense. Useless to say, “But Whitey’s defended me with a curse.”

  “Have it your way,” said McCloud. “Your mental dishonesty will get you in the end.”

  Taliq half smiled. “If a peer said that to me, I would worry,” he murmured.

  He returned to one of the doorways and picked up one of the plane’s intercom handsets to speak through, though the passengers were now so crammed together that his unadorned voice would probably have reached all of them.

  “Friends,” he announced in his way, which should have sounded flatulent but in fact had all the potency, all the sharpness, of absolute judgment, “I present to you now the three criminals found guilty by our people’s tribunal. It was necessary to choose a judge from amongst the oppressed people on thi
s aircraft. On the evidence presented to him our judge, a plain, sane human being, has—as any plain, sane person would—found all three of these men guilty of crimes against humanity.

  “So what will be done with them? If the Western powers do not arrange for the release of our brother and respected leader, the hero Mahoud al-Jiddah, and of his two detained brothers, they will be shot one at a time. Again—I trust you see this—we threaten punishment only against the most obviously criminal elements.”

  “Oh, well,” Cale suddenly murmured to McCloud. “Oh, well, we’ll see.”

  McCloud got a sense that Cale was halfway enjoying himself, waiting avidly for an outcome, something which would entitle him to turn to Stone and say, “See?”

  “But our judge? you ask. Who is it?”

  McCloud continued to search for Pauline’s face. He was aware that some in the mass of people in front of him were no more than vaguely interested in who the judge would be.

  “Well, we have a judge. It is a man of a different history from that which my brothers Yusuf, Musa, Razir, and Hasni share with me. Different yet shockingly similar. The judge from your midst is a man called Kanduk Kannata, whose land is about to be taken from him by imperialist malice and deceit. Mr. Kannata is capable, however—like most victims of tyranny whose tongue has not been ripped out—of speaking for himself. And so I introduce him.”

  The actor and film star and dancer, fearer of curses and former good companion, appeared from the forward compartment as if from the wings of a stage and took the intercom device which Taliq offered him. Like Taliq, the dance program called Bluey Kannata by his true name, Kanduk. Yet at all social occasions Bluey introduced himself by that standard Australian nickname, given to him on some cattle station of his childhood where his father had worked, where white men had seen the reddish streak in the young Kanduk’s hair and labeled him with that wry antonym.