Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  Anyhow, Bluey did indeed look blue by the enclosed light of the cabin: looked in fact the majestic purple which characterized the Barramatjara complexion and which McCloud had noticed in the dancers when they were extremely tired.

  His voice sounded firm to McCloud and utterly lacking in the usual apologetic jokiness. There was a frightening resonance, too, as if Bluey had repented of all previous claims McCloud might have on him. He clicked the transmit button on the intercom a few times, casually, like a man about to make a speech at a bush dance. He looked convincing, McCloud was horrified to see. A man habituated to this sort of speech.

  “These men who took over our plane,” Bluey began in a screech of static which soon gave way to clarity, “these men and all of us who are in it with them, are at war. This is a serious business here. Either we weed out those who are to blame for damage against people, or we all end up in pieces, falling down through the sky. I’m sure you agree with me on that one. That’s a message you don’t need to be Einstein to catch on to.”

  The Barramatjara troupe, its other members, were not looking at Bluey, McCloud noticed from the corner of his vision. Philip Puduma and Tom Gullagara were half turned away. Paul Mungina the didj player was biting his bottom lip and screwing up his right eye. Perhaps he feared Bluey would shame him by saying something radical, by bad-mouthing the queen, for whom Paul had such respect.

  Whitey, head cocked, examined the ceiling, the pattern of lockers and lights.

  McCloud believed he could recognize their embarrassment. They had stood like that at the door of the little costume room at Lincoln Center, waiting for the spasm and the unfamiliar curse to fade, while Bluey huddled under the cutting table. It was all they could do: be patient until he returned to his skin. They couldn’t disown another Barramatjara man, it wasn’t allowed for a Barramatjara to deny brotherhood with Bluey. And none of them were denying it. They were politely not going the full way with him. As on the day he became frenzied in rehearsal, he was under a visitation. And now his last sentence, the plea for assent—“I’m sure you’ll all agree with me on that one”—had somehow, by its weakness, convinced them that he would come back. You could see that. It was legible in the fearsome passivity of their faces.

  All at once Bluey Kannata rose, however, above the wateriness of that sentiment, that appeal for approval. Having recognized the lapse himself, and what it could mean, he was strong again. He reset his body, so that the other dancers were no longer in his line of vision. He had come to a decision not to refer back to them, as he did in most normal conditions, acknowledging them at each turn of the day and the dance: the man who had left the Barramatjara country, earned big money and the compliance of white women, neglected his tribal wife and his ceremonies, seeking just the same their unarguing approval. None of that now, his new posture said. For Taliq had given him a means of being free of the Barramatjara system, of being his own judge. And Cale’s, too, and Stone’s and McCloud’s.

  “So here we have one feller,” cried Bluey, “the Englishman there. He writes lies about these people. We’ve all seen these people losing their own country. We come back to our hotel rooms late at night and test the television button, and there it is, every night, happening. Always there. Every night. Before the sport and before the weather. Always. These people. But nothing is done about it, we don’t feel we have to do anything. And the reason we don’t is that we’re lied to. Do you see that Englishman there, do you see that beergutted Englishman? He writes the lies, the deadly lies, brothers and sisters, for a rag we know as the London Daily Telegraph.”

  Bluey was not talking anymore simply in the argot of the desert cattle station. The Barramatjara spoke in their deliberately simplified cattleman/stock rider idiom whenever they were not speaking Barramatjara. The word mate peppered everything they said, along with you fellers and you blokes. And all politics, all ritual, and the negotiations for the performance fees of the Barramatjara Dance Troupe themselves were—as McCloud had once mentioned to Pauline—covered by the words pretty serious business. Such a term had already occurred in Bluey’s speech, but it was seasoned with terms Bluey would not normally use. Deadly, deadly lies, for example. And that awful phrase damage against people.

  McCloud had always had a glimmer of a suspicion that the dancers might sometimes speak a more sophisticated English than their usual elliptical, evasive cattle station talk, or at least have it at their disposal. He wondered what inhibited them from using it—maybe a desire not to get out of their depth or give too much away in big cities like Sydney or New York. Maybe a polite care not to surprise the outsiders with too much eloquence or not to arouse them, for that matter. Maybe a fierce willingness to keep their place.

  For they might be dancers and New York stars today, but the great first shock of white contact had taken their fathers into the service of white cattlemen, and that was the remembered glory of their manhood and the remembered wound. The language of that experience was their chosen argot.

  By speaking as he did now, in a language marked in part by cattleman English but also breaking free of it, Bluey may have been outflanking and separating himself from the other men of the dance troupe. By these means he could show them and McCloud the seriousness of the enlightenment which had struck him on the upper deck.

  “The man next to the fat man,” Bluey continued, “is an American and sells computer systems to the Israelis. There is every reason to believe that he is some sort of agent. Both these men traveled with two passports each. This computer American traveled with two passports. So he’s a man who wants to deceive people. But he hasn’t deceived us. Do you travel with two passports, ladies and gentlemen?”

  It was noticeable that Bluey did not push the rhetorical question. He was as adroit as any prosecutor could hope to be. McCloud dreaded therefore that a special intent would enter Bluey’s voice now. For it was time to speak of criminal number three.

  McCloud flinched when he heard the altered timbre as Bluey arrived at the question of him.

  “This third man … this third man. He’s the man who has dragged my brothers and me around the world, showing us to audiences as if we were clever apes. The organ grinder’s monkeys. While all along he understood what the plot was. It was to deprive us of our own country, to take from us land which I know with my own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, and have known since I was a baby. Which I know in myself and I know through my ancestor’s eyes. Land close to me as this skin.”

  And Bluey displayed the flesh of his forearm.

  “This man’s wages are paid by the mining companies and the governments who want us out of the way, who find us an inconvenience. Who want my brothers—Wappitji, Gullagara, Puduma, Mungina—up here, here in the air, on the other side of the world, away from our holy ground. So they can make way for the drilling rigs and the satellite stations. Who think they can say, ‘We gave you a trip around the world! We let you dance in Frankfurt! Don’t be ungrateful with us!’

  “And this man … this man who smiled at us and called us by our names, he knew all about it. And brought us along softly. And we danced in our innocence and in our friendship. And only today, in a newsmagazine, we read the truth about him, about us. We read what he was keeping from us.…”

  All Bluey’s limbs had begun to shake. Even Taliq looked all at once concerned for him. “This man is the man who should be shot first. If I had my say, I would finish him whether or not those English and the Americans send Taliq’s friends to our plane. For this man, and because of his lies, my uncle has to bear curses.…”

  Bluey’s voice was aquiver as well now. His arms moved toward the prisoners, shuddering with a ferocious will to do them some damage. He was no longer ineffectual Bluey. He was a vengeance named Kanduk Kannata.

  “Look at him!” he screamed. “Look at him, my friends! He is a bundle of softness. And he writes stinking little books. I mean to find out if these people who are taking my country promised him that, too! That they’d publish his stinking littl
e book. The one he’s been writing for years. For years! A lost cause, this endless bloody book of his.

  “A week ago … a week ago, knowing we were all to lose our land, he set up some little telephone call home to make me feel better. To give me small comfort. When all along he knew what was intended for the Barramatjara folk! This one, this man … I would shoot him first! Of the three of them, him first!”

  Bluey bared his teeth and gave out a rhythmical scream. He stamped one foot. It was like the beginning of a dance. He pointed one finger at the prisoners, and the first sound he uttered fell on them like a bludgeon. He began to advance on them, cursing them as he came. But there was still some disorder in his limbs, which shivered in ways that weren’t connected with the dance. This wasn’t the normal Bluey Kannata graciousness of movement. Some powerful fever worked in each arm and leg. His forward foot slipped before he had come a yard. He fell against a seat, twisted, and landed on the floor on his back.

  One of the women flight attendants, clearly trained to deal with fits in passengers, arrived and put a wet towel between his teeth. A middle-aged German who said he was a doctor knelt over Bluey’s convulsing body. He seemed very competent, as if he had the habit of being efficient in chaotic circumstances. A practitioner of emergency medicine, perhaps. He looked at Bluey’s eyes, took his pulse, and calmly held his clenching hand.

  “Take him!” yelled Taliq, alarmed both as a new friend and perhaps in case the fit had put Bluey’s judicial authority in doubt. “Take him in there, and let him rest!”

  He pointed to the forward part of the plane, and the doctor and the flight attendant-nurse lifted Bluey by the armpits, and Philip Puduma, the oldest dancer, and Paul the didj player took him by the ankles. Does this mean a split? McCloud wondered. Are Phil and the didj player halfway in agreement with Bluey?

  Whitey Wappitji, who had been ordered in a dream to become a dancer and painter, and his lieutenant, Cowboy Tom Gullagara, were still impassive, watching Bluey being carried away.

  There were now voices from amongst the passengers. “This is ridiculous,” one familiarly accented voice said, and McCloud saw that it came from the young German wheelchair case who had burst into tears when he and Stone and Cale had first been paraded. “Sir, this does not stand up under any system of law!”

  The voice had the same liquid and desperate emphasis in it as the earlier outburst on their behalf. But it suffered from competition. Someone else was crying, “Shame, shame!” It was impossible to know whose shame they were talking about—Taliq’s, Bluey’s, McCloud’s.

  The balding chief purser rose and made some observation to Taliq which could not be heard above the hubbub.

  And then Pauline could be seen, climbing upright on a seat she shared with another woman, her voice rising in contest with the cries of “Shame” and the cripple’s imputation of Taliq’s lawlessness.

  Pauline was determined to be heard. She called, “Absurd! Absurd! My husband’s guiltless.”

  McCloud lost his breath. It was taken up by admiration for her high Irish-Scots color, the mark of her divine forthrightness. He wanted to tell her to stop, though he felt exalted that she would not.

  “My husband,” said Pauline, “writes his books and makes a living managing cultural troupes. To cast him as one of the three guilty people on this plane is … is utterly absurd.” Under pressure of noise, including the hisses of those who did not approve of her, her voice grew shrill. But it sounded to McCloud an appropriate shrillness. She was gesturing and prodding the air with an outstretched arm, her gift of genuine oratory echoing Bluey’s terrible eloquence. “That dancer, that Barramatjara man, is a very disturbed man and not to be listened to! Listen, Brother Taliq. You haven’t even asked about the accuracy of this story you mention. You haven’t even done that! I tell you that if you shoot my husband, you had better be sure to shoot me, too, because I’ll hound you. I’ll testify against you wherever they try you. I’ll put you in prison, where men will beat you and sodomize you in a most unenlightened way. I do not recognize your power to appoint any judge, to carry out any sentence at all.…”

  It should have been ludicrous: a small woman unsteady on a seat and uttering threats of a relentless pursuit. Yet it wasn’t. It had a most serious authority. No one else had dealt with Taliq as frontally, as thoroughly, as this.

  Except that now Pauline was forced to yell at increasing volume because other passengers were crying out now, submerging her argument, utterly nullifying the young German cripple’s voice and that of the man shouting, “Shame! Shame!”

  “Sit down, bitch!” men yelled.

  “What’s wrong with her?” cried the suddenly visible blond woman who had earlier hit McCloud in the back and who was now trying to cast Pauline as a dangerous and heretic voice.

  Some of the furor may have been kindly advice to Pauline—McCloud hoped so—but most of it sounded hostile. A solid man in a ski jacket left his place and reached over two other passengers to begin silencing the young German by putting a hand over his mouth. Pauline was being dragged down; hands—maybe kindly, maybe not—grabbed her beneath the knees; blows landed on her hips. Intentions blurred. People raised fists to strike Pauline, and other people caught the wielders by the wrist.

  McCloud stepped forward but was pushed into place again by Hasni.

  “Please,” said Taliq indulgently but with force. “Please, ladies and gentlemen.”

  The melee subsided, and everyone faced Taliq. There was a sound of sobbing, but McCloud was pleased to find it did not seem to be Pauline’s.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Taliq at last, “I see you have the dissenters well in hand. You can recognize the enemy as clearly as we can. For all else we are in the hands of others. Please return to your seats now in good order with no more outbursts, however well intentioned. I would simply remind you that we shall land within an hour.”

  McCloud heard a cry from Pauline as he was pushed and hurled forward again, shivering. Glancing back, he saw her borne aft by two determined people, a man and a woman. Both of them looked as if they might be acting from a regard for her safety, as if they were either rushing her from danger or else were very functional jailers.

  “Pauline!” he could not prevent himself from screaming. His cry for the nurturing and familiar woman. He realized it was the sort of cry heard on battlefields from terrified men, and that by letting it out he had in a sense defined himself as finished. He looked at Cale, open for advice. But Cale shrugged.

  “Save it, son,” muttered Cale through lips which in this air higher than Everest’s had turned purple. “They won’t hurt her,” he wheezed. “A good woman! Not too ashamed to go over the top.…”

  Forced forward, McCloud saw, laid across four seats in the middle of the plane, Bluey. Tended by a doctor and a stewardess, gazed upon by Paul the didj man and Phil Puduma, he did not see the prisoners go by on their way upstairs again. His eyes were not closed, but he had no focus.

  Kanduk. Torn apart by demons. Of which, McCloud knew well, he himself was considered one; the false voice, speaking the language of unbottomable slyness.

  The German doctor called to Taliq, “I have given him some sedatives I had. It was a grand mal fit. This young man should be in hospital on medication.”

  There was contempt in the doctor’s voice: he was an unquiet hostage, not easily scared.

  Behind the prisoners, Taliq groaned. “It is very likely we can let the poor fellow go. But in the end, it depends on the goodwill of our Western masters.”

  “That’s nonsense,” murmured the doctor. “Surely you could let him go anyhow.”

  But Taliq was not going to let his judge go, his one clear success from the sessions on the upper deck!

  Returned to his seat upstairs and in despair about the messages he had not passed on to Pauline, McCloud watched the condemned Cale and Stone, thrown onto their seats, slip glibly back into sleep or reflection. They reminded him again of two rival scientists: each believed his th
eory could be proved right only by the passage of time.

  Through his own fevered, speckled vision he observed the four Barramatjara men as they mounted the spiral staircase and passed him. He noticed that Paul Mungina had fetched his didj and carried it in a way which gave McCloud an indefinite hope, as if Paul meant to use it as part of some reasonable transaction or feed its sound subtly to others through the intercom.

  “Make us some music, Paul,” McCloud pleaded, thinking irrationally that it might reach and soothe Pauline.

  Mungina looked at him. Other than Bluey, he was the youngest of the dancers, and very earnest.

  “Okay, Frank,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”

  But he seemed confused about it.

  Phil Puduma the Christian’s eyes were half-closed, and his lips moved. He gave you the idea he was voiding into the air something crucial, though you couldn’t tell whether what was being jettisoned was something of the Christ of the river bed or of the marsupial rat at Mount Dinkat.

  Tom Gullagara, in his high-fashion version of a stockman/cowboy’s uniform, a big brass bull still contending with the lariat-swinging brass cattleman in the middle of his enormous belt buckle, looked embarrassed. Beyond all wishfulness, McCloud felt certain it was a kind of shame for Bluey, one which he couldn’t have the comfort of uttering.

  Whitey’s eyes, it turned out, immense and neutral in passing, sought McCloud’s.

  “That German doctor,” he said. “Seems a good man in his field.…”

  “Yes,” said McCloud. I have been condemned to death, and my wife has been abducted or rescued to the back of the plane. And we discuss the professional manners of a doctor.

  “Bluey’s beyond himself,” Whitey murmured, as if in apology.

  Whitey bent to the aisle seat where Bluey had kept the bandanna and lifted and pocketed the thing with one easy, gliding motion which signified possession.