What was their impulse? Was it a heroic ignorance of the distances involved? Was it something more visionary? Whatever it was, he was sure it must have cast a light over his own undistinguished (except in one regard) suburban childhood; that it must cast a light now. The ancestral migration—of which he knew so little—was the dimension which redeemed his life, just as ancestral motion had made the Barramatjara world. He, he liked to imagine, was in his own sense an animist and a worshiper of forebears.
He had liked—maybe with a little vanity—to imagine that this was why he felt such fellow feeling for the Barramatjara Dance Troupe and their vigor as artists and dancers.
“I took bad to the grog,” the quiet Christian Philip Puduma had told McCloud as he dotted the spirits into the emblematic landscape he and the other members of the dance troupe were painting during McCloud’s Baruda visit. “Them old Germans tell me my body is a temple, but I didn’t believe ’em. I started to buy that awful stuff, rosehip and meths. I went to Alice and knew some real bad women in that riverbank there. It was about ten, twelve years back. Jesus himself come up to me in the river bed in Alice, and that Savior says to me, ‘Philip, why are you letting booze kill my temple?’ Yet he wasn’t against my ancestors, like old Freiniemer was. He just wanted me not to bugger myself up. That turned me round. I joined that Evangelical church, the one that started up in Hall’s Creek, just for us blokes, just for my people. These days I never touch a drop. Not these days. I preach to the young fellers. I brought round lots of wild fellers in the other settlements, too. Not me. But the Lord.”
This latest Christianity of the Barramatjara, at least of those like Philip who observed it, seemed to have arisen by its own impetus. It was a separate visitation. You got the idea from Philip that it would have happened whether Dom Estevez and the Lutherans had come or not and whether they had failed or not. Christ won Philip by appearing in person to him and a number of other Barramatjara rakehells in the beds of dry rivers. For Philip, this phenomenon did not derive from any history of imperialism and its religious variations. It was so much a matter of Christ and Phil that it had nothing to do with Estevez and Freiniemer.
And, seated on his rug, Philip dotted in the spirit places with the same energy as the others. As Whitey, who’d paid no more than lip service to the idea of the Savior. This design version of the marsupial rat’s wholehearted seduction of the lizard-women! It was clear that the Christ who came to him in the river bed countenanced marsupial rat. That though marsupial rat might stand for some mysteries, there were others—including the mystery of grog—for which Christ alone could stand. For Phil, Christ was that miraculous Deity, a Deity who never appeared in the suburbs of the north shore. An unjealous god.
On that visit to Baruda then, it had been all the dreamings. And Christ walking on waterless rivers. None of the Barramatjara Dance Troupe had mentioned drillers or Highland Pegasus or the CIA.
CHAPTER FIVE:
In the Pit
The balding, stocky Razir appeared in the first-class cabin now. The last time McCloud had seen him he had been holding a primed grenade high in his hand so that all in the rear of the plane could see it. He was not flourishing anything like that anymore—it must have been rendered safe and returned to one of the pouches on his belt. Now there was earnestness rather than threat on his square face with its traces of boyhood acne. He looked like a tough child undergoing rehabilitation for some passionate but forgivable crime. He carried in his hands three placards made of white cardboard and covered with large and exactly hand-drafted English script. His own work. With a half smile he displayed them to Hasni, who nodded.
“I know what these are,” murmured Cale.
McCloud knew, too. He was aware he should see them as fatuous, laughable items from some bizarre system of governance, yet he wasn’t able to. Razir handled them as matter-of-factly as a plumber handles a wrench, and this too somehow gave them force. The stale slogans and words Razir had inscribed seemed more acute than knives.
Razir checked the message on each of them against the features of the kneeling men. It was clear the slogans meant something to him. They were not mere tokens. The cardboard was heavy-duty and well chosen to bear the weight of hanging around the neck. Holes had been carefully punched, with some exact device and the neck strings were deftly tied.
These were props in whose effect Taliq, Hasni, and Razir believed.
Razir hung the first placard around the American businessman Stone’s neck. The American did not demur but stood up as he was told and faced aft. In thick display pencil on the cardboard was written “Zionist Agent.”
Even bearing the placard, McCloud noticed, the American came out predictably well from his seminakedness. His legs, though strangely ageless and lacking in hair, were so well proportioned. If the placard sits on him, McCloud irrationally thought, then all the more definitely will it sit on me.
Cale accepted his sign without any argument, but as he stood he bent over whimsically and read the inscription upside down. “‘Zionist Hack’? You got it half-right!”
There was a second of tentativeness in the way the nuggety Razir responded; a sort of tension, like that of a young teacher who fears that the wild children will put too much pressure on his goodwill.
“What is a Zionist?” asked Cale, grabbing the minute advantage. “A Zionist is someone who recognizes the right of Israel to exist. Therefore Yasir Arafat is a Zionist. But I suppose that’s your whole point, isn’t it, son?”
Little Razir, the remaining placard—McCloud’s—under one arm, paled astoundingly. He shoved the barrel of his Polish automatic under Cale’s left ear.
“You will not speak about your sign. We own the sign. You own only the shame.”
When Cale had kept silent for ten seconds, Razir rearranged himself, left Cale, and came and hung the last placard around McCloud’s neck. It said “Exploiter of Landless People.”
In spite of its quotient of falsity, it did not seem a laughable burden. There was surely more truth to it—even as read upside down by McCloud himself—than he would have believed an hour ago.
Hasni pushed past McCloud and lifted him from behind by the armpits and turned him about. It wasn’t rough handling. It felt solicitous. There was something about it which, combined with Hasni’s earlier studious reading of the newsmagazine, gave McCloud the idea that the boy might be able to be reached.
Surprisingly, Cale had already stood. Without being asked.
It was to be a procession, apparently—McCloud, Cale/Bennett, Stone/Steinberg. Three culprits on their march.
But at the curtain between first class and the bulk of the plane, Hasni rearranged his three prisoners. “You first,” he said to the American as if his crime were the worst. He positioned Cale in the middle.
McCloud’s face was already burning. Even doubts about the condition of his underwear burdened him.
Hasni brushed the curtain aside. “Go,” he told the American. “Out now, gentlemen.”
McCloud flinched from the stares of all the pale faces raised to view him. Progress was at shuffling pace, since the aisles were full of the people from upstairs sitting resignedly cross-legged. The procession had to tread among them, avoiding a knee here, an elbow there. And Taliq was there, standing before the cross-legged passengers in the aisle.
“These!” he yelled through an intercom telephone at a nearby door, resonating throughout the cabin above the quiet susurrus of the engines. “These are three guilty men from amongst your fellow travelers. One is an agent of Mossad. The second is a writer of lies for the newspaper which maligns my people worse than any other. The third has duped and cheated the native peoples of his land, in exactly the same way that my people have been duped and lied to, cheated and deprived of their land. You should curse these men for boarding the same aircraft as you. Your enemies and mine.”
At the head of the column, Hasni motioned the three labeled culprits to resume the procession. At first, McCloud kept his eyes down—i
t was not shame for a supposed crime, for he was not yet totally convinced of his crime. He cringed because that mean redolence normally held in by clothing and security of the person was now released to the cabin at large. Compounded in part of uncertain guilt, which seemed more despicable than exact blame, it infringed on his breathing; and there was fear, too, and the shame of the unsuccessful writer and the careless lover, and of the manager who does not inquire too closely into the causes of his employment.
Then he fixed his eyes on Cale’s baggy underwear. There was a big creature moving assertively there. Behind the undistinguished fabric, Cale seemed to know and live by his own name (even if there were two of them) and was sure what to believe of his captors.
For some reason this reminded him of the Girl and the Boy, and the duty he had for their sake to meet the gazes of others. Looking straight ahead, McCloud could not avoid registering what passengers he passed on either side and the ones looking up at him questioningly from the floor.
For the first ten paces there was silence. The combined population of this part of the plane was still assessing the three of them, gauging the credibility of their shame.
The procession drew level with a fine-featured boy in an aisle seat. He had shrunken legs, and it was perhaps for him that the wheelchair had been needed earlier, an age ago, in New York, the wheelchair of which that barely remembered, benign voice of the captain had spoken.
The boy, the cripple, now cried out in German-accented English, “This is asinine. This is scapegoating. You are making criminals, when all along you are the criminals!”
The effect of this brave outburst was at once weakened. For the young man began to weep wildly. His argument could now be written off as mere hysteria. McCloud saw Hasni, in advance of the procession, brush the young man’s courageous outburst aside like a vine in a jungle.
At last they were through the tangle of hostages from upstairs, and the aisle was clear. McCloud saw that many of the passengers stared fixedly ahead, not taking account of the three prisoners one way or another. There was something frightening there: these passengers were locked into the question of their individual connections with Taliq and the boys. No other connection, especially not a connection with three labeled men in underwear, was worth looking at.
Then he saw Pauline’s face aimed at him from the far side of the plane. Her gaze was level, and she frowned slightly as she nodded briefly, a crisp and competent nod which seemed to promise she had strategies in mind. He felt a brief, berserk happiness. In a minute or so, if the procession was to take in both aisles, he would pass close to her area of cleverness, her field of concern.
They had nearly reached the battery of lavatories, the limits of the plane, when McCloud saw a man wearing a baseball jacket and, far from blinkering his gaze, staring at them with what seemed a disappointed spectator’s directness.
“Bastard!” he cried, still seated, at the American businessman, and then with increasing intent, he repeated the word to Cale and then McCloud. Judging by his volume, you would have thought he had taken Taliq’s grading of the separate culpabilities of the three prisoners as read. In ascending order: the agent, the hack, the exploiter. “Bastard!” he screamed at McCloud.
It would have been comforting to think that the man was yelling to prove himself to Taliq. But it wasn’t the case. His eyes did not shift for approval to any of the hijackers. His outcry existed for his own sake. He had read the labels and the faces and found in them a cause for autonomous anger.
After that, a greater silence than ever descended for a moment along the line of the march. Glancing back, McCloud saw the man’s wife soothing him, settling him back into the seat with her hands. Over her shoulder, she directed a certain wifely reproof at McCloud. “You’ve made my husband very angry.”
Ahead, even Cale now seemed slumped and overburdened with threats.
They passed along the rear row of seats and began their progress back to the front of the plane.
The Barramatjara Dance Troupe were not here, in this crowded aftersection, among the passengers from upstairs who huddled in the aisles. McCloud understood that they would not be encountered. They must therefore still be in Taliq’s heaven, upstairs by the cockpit. This meant they were exempt from political demonstrations. They were Taliq’s brothers and did not need a mass circus like this to bring them to awareness.
As McCloud passed Pauline’s seat, she reached out across the wan young woman who held the baby and detained him by the hand. It was a ferocious grip. “Frank,” she said. “Frank, I won’t let them do anything to you.”
It was an impossible statement, but he could see she was convinced of it. She stood, and the wan girl lifted her baby to make room in front of her for the grip Pauline kept of McCloud’s arm.
There were nuances in what she said—she understood perfectly his confusion and dread. She did not despise him for his fear. He understood in fact that she cherished him for his average fear, his pedestrian shame. It was exorbitant fear and shame she hated—the kind her father the Dentist had displayed.
He was as saddened and grateful as a child when she let go of him and permitted him to make up ground with the others.
Yet her promise remained with him. It had been full of breath. You could call it primitive, and this gave rise to his fear that she might try to attack them with her fists. He looked back at her. She had quite muscular shoulders—one of those little women who played good hockey and swam with a tight, sinewy ferocity gangling girls lacked. What they used to call in the nineteenth century “a pocket Venus.”
“Don’t do anything,” he cried. “I’m all right. The boys aren’t in danger. I wish I could …”
He wished he could write her a letter advising her against any rash move.
He felt a push against his right shoulder blade and presumed it must be Razir, the placard maker.
Turning without volition, he saw, though, that it was a tall, blond girl, who had stood and must have wanted him to move out of her zone.
“You looking for sympathy or something?” she challenged him. She moved aft toward the toilets, and Razir allowed her passage.
McCloud wanted to say aloud that he was looking for justice. But he decided that was a dangerous proposition.
Now they came to stewards, male and female, strapped in their seats. Some studied him with a tight-lipped secretive regard and concern, men and women waiting for a sane chance to do something yet doubtful it would come. One man, balding and wearing a badge which said “Chief Purser,” rose and said, “Don’t do anything foolish. We are keeping our eye out for you.”
The tendency to smile in gratitude toward the chief purser was undermined by a quick look at some of the other crew, who looked to McCloud as if they regarded the prisoners with that glum reproach and slightly pursed mouth reserved only for passengers who ask for untimely drinks or service late in a night flight. Through his unfortunate behavior, these crew members seemed to suggest with their eyes, he had deprived them of any rest this entire night. And now a demanding day was breaking beyond the shuttered windows.
It was beyond the stewards that the air of reproof really thickened, reached a head, and became normal. A short woman, no more than thirty-five years of age, dressed comfortably for the journey, red-faced as if she had been weeping and distraught for some time, rose from an aisle seat and stood in Daniel Stone’s path. McCloud could see her two small children sleeping, locked together by the window. “These are my children you put in danger!” she screamed. “You dirty swine!”
She began to beat the tanned arm of the businessman, her punches fading against his shoulders as he drew away from her. She turned to deal with Cale, but her aggression had exhausted her, and she was panting. “Son-of-a-bitch!” she told Cale, and to McCloud as he drew by her, she cried, “Jewish son-of-a-bitch! What’s it like now? The boot’s on the other foot? Eh? The other foot?”
“Madam,” said Cale, “will you please stop hitting me?”
A you
ng man in a button-down shirt had stood to take her place and now spat fair in the journalist’s face. It was apparent that Cale was the favored and obvious target. A string of spittle hung from his nose.
Hasni had turned around and made gentling motions toward the young man. These movements seemed to say, “I approve of your enthusiasm. But there will be plenty of time for punishment.”
The speed with which this miscreant hatred had developed among a section of the passengers astonished McCloud.
The first row of the compartment had been cleared of travelers. Taliq instructed the three prisoners to step up onto these seats and face the rear of the plane. So they did, McCloud finding it hard to keep his balance on the spongy upholstery. Three culprits on a shaky scaffold, he thought. The melodrama of it should have made the passengers laugh, but there was no sound. Taliq and the boys controlled the tone of this street—or aisle—theater. They had made everything serious, even the risible placards.
Standing on the seat allotted to him, McCloud could see the look of neutral inquiry and assessment on many blanched faces, a sort of amateur-dramatic scowl of hate on a few, and on others still the same unforced but authentic contempt which had produced assaults on the circuit around the rear of the plane.
Taliq, however, was not there to be influenced by this feigned or real revulsion. He was still at the curtain space by one of the doors, ready to broadcast again.
“Later in the flight,” he promised, “when we have communicated adequately with the ground, these criminals will be tried and punished.”
This pledge seemed to produce an almost inaudible sigh of edification from the passengers. Surely they can’t all want to see us punished? McCloud wondered.
“But first there are things to attend to,” Taliq continued. “Your breakfast, the breakfast of the innocents. And we must land somewhere. The prisoners will be confined. Thank you, my friends, for your attention.”