Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  McCloud remembered how in the dance, according to the Barramatjara orthodoxy, the dancer became the hero. He was lost to himself and might remain awesomely lost forever unless he awoke. Paul Mungina would in fact leave his didj at the end of the evening’s entertainment and tap the four dancers on the shoulder, returning them to their daily identities.

  “That’s a bit of bullshit for the tourists,” Mungina had explained once.

  But there was a truth behind the levity and an awareness of a threat. That the ancestor could capture the soul.

  Maybe now Phil could see a kind of soul capture in Frank McCloud and felt bound to warn against it.

  Phil whispered, “Don’t put your faith in any curses, brother Frank. Don’t you swear by any name but Jesus’s name. Okay? This is really serious business!”

  He rose from the kneeling position, and his leg creaked. Once he had broken it, McCloud seemed to remember having been told, working with horses on Easter Creek cattle station.

  “And listen, another thing. You know Bluey? We’ve got to get Bluey back to Baruda, working on the diesels. No more of them movies or discos or Jim Beam for Bluey. The truth is not in them, brother. We’ll get Bluey home, eh? So … Jesus your redeemer, Frank.”

  Since Phil was inviting him to take part in Bluey’s rehabilitation, Phil thought he, McCloud, would last.

  There was a wink from the Christian then, so innate with meaning that McCloud felt his ribs expand.

  It seemed important, however, that Phil shouldn’t be deceived. “Phil,” McCloud pleaded, “listen. The only hope I’ve had in this whole shitheap is from … from signs Whitey’s given me. I’m ready to meet whatever comes. But don’t confuse me now, Phil. For Christ’s sake, don’t!”

  Phil sighed, shook his head, and looked away. What the Spanish Benedictines and the German Lutherans would make of this! What the drowsing Hasni at his side would think, for that matter. A Presbyterian pleading with a Barramatjara elder for the freedom to believe in Wappitji’s visions and curses.

  “You got the message, Frank, anyhow.”

  But McCloud was as willing as any heretic to die clinging to the only beliefs which made the universe habitable.

  In this case the belief in no Plastique and in a siege-by-curse of the blood of the chief hijacker. In the effect these two articles of faith had on his will and his intentions.

  Credo, thought McCloud. Credo. And no recanting.

  The theological argument with Phil the Christian was interrupted then by an event which had been long prefigured but took McCloud’s breath. By a further clear slippage—that is—of Taliq’s power. The chief hijacker edged past Phil and, looking unsteady in the legs, progressed down the aisle toward the cockpit. Beyond the curtain by the lavatory, lacking strength to drag the drape back into place, he knelt all at once. More accurately, he fell onto his kneecaps like someone struck, and on his knees he began to rock his body.

  Stone could not see this, but it was visible to McCloud, who believed the image was designed anyhow for him, that he was authorized to behold it.

  Was the codeine eating the lining of Taliq’s stomach, as the German doctor had darkly suggested it might? In any case, its action was interrupted now by Daisy.

  Hasni had risen beside McCloud and was ready to go and help. He was preempted by Daisy, though. Pushing palely past McCloud in her green dress, free of her blanket, she came rushing up from her seat toward Taliq. The sweet green garment, McCloud noticed, had declined further. Its mileage had always been a cocktail party of two hours or—at a stretch—a transatlantic novice flight of six. It was not designed to stand up against an all-night, all-day hijack, to carry a woman through a revolutionary education.

  Where McCloud and Phil could still see her, she knelt as Taliq had and took his head onto her shoulder. The flesh Taliq leaned against was alabaster, and with his forehead he nuzzled the green fabric of her shoulder. Daisy looked aft across the crown of his dark hair. Her frank eyes met McCloud’s. They were not easily convivial—as they would have been behind the bar of the Polka Barn in Budapest, Arizona.

  “Yes,” McCloud believed they said. “Yes, don’t worry. I’ll take away what he has left.”

  Her hand reached up, and she dragged the curtain across.

  “Not right,” said Phil, departing for his seat as if for the moment his message was delivered. “Her going sweet on Taliq.”

  But even Phil, McCloud thought, lacked conviction.

  McCloud was aware that Hasni had witnessed Daisy’s comforting of Taliq. The boy knew at the same time that McCloud had also seen everything. He glanced toward McCloud, but the eyes did not engage. He had not yet consulted with himself about this, had not developed a policy, had not reconciled himself. There was something undisguised and painful to watch, McCloud thought, in the young hijacker’s vague pain at this business of Daisy and Taliq, at the struggle first to absorb the scandal into himself and then to decide what attitude to take toward the world.

  Hasni decided on a policy, though, and turned bravely to McCloud. His lips had a scholar’s, a seminarian’s, delicacy as he framed the words.

  “Taliq is a hero, a combat soldier,” he said. “He’s been through things we cannot imagine. He has led battalions on the Euphrates. He’s raided Iran’s oil wells. Mossad have sent men to Baghdad to kill him. He dodges out of buildings a half second before the enemy blows them up. He has had to swallow his own fear, day by day. So now he is in pain. Did you expect me to condemn him, Mr. McCloud? Just because he’s rightly chastised me?”

  McCloud wondered what they thought of this Arab kid at Tulane or wherever his hall of residence was located. What did they think of him with his relentless convictions and his old-fashioned words like “chastise”? In America they said “bawled me out,” “busted my chops.” They wouldn’t have heard of “chastise.”

  While Taliq and Daisy remained beyond the curtain, the air the plane traversed scarcely nudged the wings. While Daisy distracted him with her mouth, the smooth African night cosseted and—McCloud felt sure about this—betrayed Taliq.

  When Daisy reappeared at last she wore a worldly, twice shy face such as the truckers and drinking Mormons and Navajos of Budapest may never have seen. Otherwise she seemed the old immutable Daisy, the one McCloud felt he had known a lifetime. Holding her right shoulder with her left arm, as if to imply that blows had been traded in there, she readjusted the curtain behind her. Taliq was not with her. His pain arrested for the moment, he must have gone through into the flight deck to speak to the pilot or to deal with the negotiators on the other end of the radio. He must have seen himself as restored and fortified and made sharper.

  Daisy and McCloud knew better. Did Hasni know better, too?

  Hasni seemed to have lost interest now, though. He dozed again under his bruised brow. McCloud dredged from his singlet one of the seditious wads and handed it to Daisy as she passed. Frowning, she opened it, read it, and her eyes widened—in her case a wonder of anatomy, so broadly written were they on her face in any case.

  She frowned down at McCloud. But, he felt sure, it was a frown of belief. He was certain to her too this was news which changed everything, which guaranteed or at least held out hope for a communal survival of the flight.

  His missionary work, he thought in unalloyed delight, was doing better and working more instantly than Taliq’s missionary work. Taliq, with the persuasion of his special if stilted oratory and with the backing of muzzles, had powerfully converted Bluey. But in minutes, with a scribbled message in dim blue fished out of his string vest, his sweaty singlet, he had converted the Jew and the Japanese. So broadly based was his mission and the catholicity and breadth of what he uttered!

  Daisy handed the message back to him. It was not a rejection. It was that something so dangerous should only be handled by its creator.

  He saved it for further use.

  Air turbulence reasserted itself. Daisy was jolted on her way back to her seat.

  In such a
bountiful planet as the Frankfurt flight now seemed to be, there had been options to spare. The option of Hasni’s grenade, for example. Except that he had not needed it. And as for Daisy, the workable universe which McCloud saw from his own seat had no need for her anymore. McCloud himself was surprised to feel no gratitude. The Jewel of Budapest had done her part, as he would do his. Gratitude would at the end be meaningless, though those who had acted would never cease—of course—to be bound to each other.

  Musa, who had shot Cale, rose from his seat in front of McCloud now and went aft, and Hasni got up, stepped across the conspirator McCloud, and followed Musa. If you were my terrorist, I would discipline you for that loose stud, McCloud promised. It was the erosion of Taliq’s powers of surveillance which made the loosened belt stud go unnoticed. It was a symbol of the woe Taliq was earning.

  The changes of light outside the blinds, the deeper blue ascending now from earth, told McCloud that the negotiation he intended to have with Taliq, one not yet listed on Taliq’s agenda, the coming crux and crunch and standoff, would take place in the meat of an African night.

  And though the didj music had stopped, it still seemed to be there to McCloud, just beyond the angle of hearing like a familiar animal. Still there as the wheels ground down and locked in place; as from the intercom came one groaned, paternal sentence, a sentence of the captain’s. “Folks, we’re going in. Strap yourself down if they’ll let you.”

  McCloud listened for the yelp of wheels on runway and the panicked scream of air brakes. When they occurred, his breath fled him. Yet his imagination stayed resolute. He could still achieve a mental picture of what he meant himself to do.

  Before the touchdown was fully accomplished, Taliq had moved warily into the cabin from the flight deck. He was beginning—it seemed to McCloud—to doubt whether Daisy had done him well, for he trod like someone facing the risk of ambush. Blue patches of bad blood stood beneath his eyes. He believed, however, McCloud could tell, that he had oxygen and peace enough to accomplish the result, and that then he could sleep.

  “Very well,” he told Hasni and Musa.

  The boys pulled Stone and McCloud upright, adjusting yet again their tattered placards, those stale inscriptions bullet-headed Razir had written an age ago and which the people downstairs must know by heart.

  “It’s over and settled,” McCloud, despite himself, found himself quaintly telling Hasni and Musa. “Taliq and Daisy are the one flesh. Daisy won’t ever escape the weight of his husbandry.”

  “Give it a rest, mate,” said Musa in his Midlands accent, not understanding a word.

  He was very pleased that the boys ignored him and took his submission for granted. He decided that he had better stop himself from talking like a prophet. That he had better be on his watch against that.

  Along with Daisy, the four dancers were also gathering themselves to go downstairs. Why this time and not last time? Was this Taliq’s choice—to have the justified present to witness what he hoped were final transactions? Or had they asked to be counted in?

  Whitey called ponderously to Taliq, “We think Frank isn’t to blame. That doesn’t mean the other ought to be shot.”

  “What?” asked Taliq. “Don’t presume on our friendship, Mr. Wappitji.”

  Daisy also, however, wore a frown. “Nothing’s going to happen to these two boys,” she stated as a fact, nodding toward Stone and McCloud.

  “It is not up to me,” said Taliq.

  Daisy became gloriously enraged. “That’s not what you said,” she shouted. “That’s not what you told me.”

  Taliq shook his head as if to clear it. “Madam,” he said, “please don’t misunderstand me. I said I would try to save them, and I will. But it is not up to me, and I also said that.”

  “So, nothing’s changed?” asked Daisy, agitated. “You know what? You want them dead. You want all of us dead. You love the dead, you son-of-a-bitch. Because their ideas are straightened out!”

  It was hard to tell whether Taliq was more enraged than affronted. “Madam, that’s not just or fair.” He kept putting his hand to his mouth, seemingly to check nausea or fatigue. “The saving of these men is out of my hands. I put it in the hands of others.” He took a profound breath. “I will not argue,” he said. “If you are going to shout and be unruly, you can stay here. If you come downstairs, you will be silent throughout.”

  It was like a scene from a classroom, as bathetic and as farcical. Daisy and the Barramatjara said nothing.

  “You are a serious disappointment,” said Taliq, waving a finger of his bandaged hand. But the authentic threat had returned to his manner, and he did not sound querulous. His oneness with them had its limits. Even in Daisy’s case, he was willing to end intimacy with a bullet. “But you will have enlightenment,” he promised them. “You will have it.”

  And so everyone began to leave the upper deck.

  Downstairs, where Bluey Kannata, actor and dancer, was still resting, it was dark. As McCloud and Stone and their guards passed through, Bluey rose from the seats where he lay. Kneeling upright as the German doctor grabbed for him, Bluey was not to be denied.

  “That one!” cried Bluey, pointing at McCloud. “He knew my face, that bastard! My face was in front of him. He still sold it off to people! That one! That one!”

  The doctor and a steward wrestled Bluey back down but, “That one! That bastard!” Bluey kept yelling.

  McCloud understood Bluey but felt unrepentant. He used the turmoil to pass one of his tracts, perhaps the one already handled by Daisy, to the doctor.

  Glancing back, McCloud saw Whitey Wappitji, Phil Puduma, and Daisy Nakamura detach themselves from the rear of the procession from upstairs and stand by Bluey. Whitey and Phil said nothing, but Daisy spoke soothingly, according to the traditional pacifying tasks she had assumed to herself. Phil Puduma fetched drinking water, and the doctor produced two white pills and surreptitiously checked the strip of paper in his hands.

  The door by which Cale had perished had already been swung back. Hasni, carrying the heroic bruise on his forehead, and Musa the home mechanic pushed McCloud and Stone downward, making them kneel there, on the rim of the stain. Again the soft air from beyond the plane warmed their exposed arms. This is the last time, McCloud was sure, we’ll feel that mere exhalation of the outside, living world.

  Stone shifted his limbs in small ways and made occasional sighs. McCloud felt a childlike anticipation of revealing himself, of startling the company, of turning events in his own direction. He knew that Whitey too was expecting something, a phenomenon. He and Whitey were one in expecting an end to Taliq, or at least an acceptable end to themselves.

  Emanations of Cale from the bloodied carpet fortified him. Cale, who had approved of stirs as a means of managing people. Now—in Cale’s absence—McCloud himself was the potential stirrer, the ordained arouser and confuser. Such were the febrile excitements, he understood, which would now keep him on his fixed, unlikely course.

  “Is Mahoud here?” the kneeling Stone suddenly asked his captors, Musa and Hasni. They stood in full view of Stone and McCloud. They looked very calm, as if this time there would be no hesitations and no doubts. “Is there any word at all?”

  Along with all the other questions of the day, there was this one: Why hadn’t Taliq replaced the sensitive Hasni on this execution squad? Had Hasni pleaded for the chance? Or was this like the grenade-belt stud: another symbol of creeping inadvertence in the Taliq camp?

  “Is Mahoud here?” Stone reiterated. Clearly he had given up all theorizing about whether Mahoud was the first or side purpose of this exercise of Taliq’s. He seemed to believe he was finished if Mahoud did not appear.

  But from the door could be seen only blue perimeter lights and some indefinite movement of trucks and men in quasi-military uniforms.

  Hasni and Musa made a mouth at each other. Obviously neither of them knew, and Taliq was not there to ask, was away upstairs again with the captain’s radio, wavering over it,
no doubt, corroded with codeine and suspicion.

  “Oh Jesus,” Stone said with level despair. “I knew there wouldn’t be any Mahoud. They don’t release these guys anymore. It just isn’t policy.”

  McCloud was struck by the polite regret in Stone’s voice, as if he wished Mahoud al-Jiddah and his colleagues nothing but a felicitous escape and a bountiful future.

  It made you worry if he had really absorbed the message about no Plastique.

  This time McCloud could hear Taliq returning down the stairwell precisely because his tread was so light, unmilitant, irregular. His arrival sounded like that of a man with little strength left, yet when he appeared in front of McCloud and Stone his eyes retained a vigorous glimmer.

  He spoke softly to Hasni.

  “They are playing with us. Clearly. They are playing. They tell us now that Mahoud will arrive in thirty-five minutes by helicopter!”

  Musa and Hasni shook their heads.

  “Thirty-five minutes! It’s a fiction. There have been too many improbabilities. We will need to feed them another one.”

  Hasni, though ready in principle, seemed not to have quite gathered himself for the task, and McCloud was still collecting himself for his performance, when Stone began to speak in a direct and sensible voice. “If it could be the truth, why not wait the thirty-five minutes and see?”

  “Oh, Mr. Stone,” said Taliq. He was not smoking anymore. Perhaps he was too ill. “You understand all this as well as anyone. ‘Tell them thirty-five minutes,’ they say on the ground. ‘Buy time, buy time! And when the thirty-five minutes is up, buy another slab of time—tell them there are contrary winds, or a rotor has broken.’” He covered his mouth for a while. Settling his gorge, McCloud hoped, and not succeeding. “If I had one of your computers to play with, it would tell me to do this. Isn’t that the case? So be brave, Mr. Stone. Man of two passports!”

  “But after you’ve used McCloud and me? What then? No more class and race criminals left!”

  Taliq pinched the bridge of his nose and laughed privately and with weary tolerance. “You don’t believe that on a packed plane like this there won’t be a second wave of criminals? And a third? There are always criminals, Mr. Stone.”