Flying Hero Class (18 page)

McCloud watched Cale consider the wisdom of such a method and seem to dismiss it. How wonderful that stripped, labeled, and imprisoned, he and Stone had space for such passion.

“Oh God!” declared Cale now. “All I want to do is—I'm trying to project from normal people the sorts of people Taliq's boys are. They're tribal patriots, they remember history as any young man should, they're
compelled
by history, in fact, and they want more of an education than they'll get on the West Bank. A combination of motives. I recommend you listen to these kids, Stone. Their own words will tell you.”

“Not so far they haven't,” said Stone.

With a meaty hand, the English journalist made a concession. “Oh sure. They
are
different from your lad in some respects. At least in the sense they've probably already been through some initiation he wouldn't even think of. Even though he—like the rest of us males—has probably done crazy enough things in the holy name of initiation into whatever group he wants to be part of. Jesus Christ, I still think most boys are the same. Halfway between a rebel and a rapist. Now those boys upstairs may have placed an explosive device in a nightclub in West Berlin, or thrown a bomb into a swimming pool in Athens—you perhaps remember the Glyphada Hotel there, a delegation of handicapped Britons bobbing around in the pool. Two killed, nine wounded.” But at that, suddenly and as if in self-reproof for overstepping limits of taste, Cale shook his head. “Most likely, however, nothing dramatic like that. Probably a raid on a savings and loan in New Jersey or on a post office in Manchester. Funds for the cause, you see, and a rite of passage. And there's excitement and brotherhood in all that!”

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?”