Read Online Flying Hero Class by Thomas Keneally - Free Book Online Page B

if impishly, knowing how utter was his control, disappear through the curtain toward the back of the plane.
    Almost at once, passengers became aware that they were for the moment without supervision. A few of them began to whisper to each other in the near darkness Taliq intended them to use for sleep.
    â€œThese are those PLO fellers, eh?” Tom Gullagara asked McCloud all at once.
    â€œSomething like that, Tom.” He remembered Arafat on television, with apparent good faith renouncing terror. He regretted he had not paid more attention to the maps and tables of Palestinian organization, of the fragments of Palestinian alienation and fervor, which sometimes appeared in the press. “Maybe just what they call a splinter group,” he said.
    Gullagara nodded. He may have been unfamiliar with parking meters but was something of a practical politician himself and understood splinter groups. Tom and all the Barramatjara had a different view of the white world, of what should be taken from it and given, from that of their cousins the Arritjula, who made what some might call a more “developed world” living in the bauxite mines to the northwest of Baruda. With Whitey, Tom flew off in light aircraft to Perth and Darwin to discuss matters of housing and health with the appropriate ministers of state, who needed to be told that what the Arritjula wanted was not always what the Barramatjara wanted. Splinter groups, if you liked!
    As well as that, news of the world, of the Intifada and Shamir and Yasir Arafat, came into Tom’s settlement at Baruda by way of a large white dish installed the year before.
    McCloud had in fact overhead Tom Gullagara discussing the Middle East with a girl at a party in New York. It had been the big news of the world that winter, and everyone’s attention had not quite yet been seized by the first indices of great change in Eastern Europe.
    â€œDo your people have contacts with the liberation fronts?” the girl had asked.
    Tom had not at first been sure what she meant.
    â€œThe PLO, for example?” she suggested.
    â€œNo,” said Tom, reflectively sipping beer. “We never met any of them. Not those fellers.”
    He must have known that some city Aborigines, of tribes far from his, terrified suburban Australia by trying to talk with Arafat or Qaddafi. But the Barramatjara, who could speak some of the idioms of Christianity, had not yet been introduced to what you could call liberation front idiom, to revolutionary jargon.
    Until now, anyhow. Taliq had already indicated there might soon be seminars here in the plane.
    The girl Tom had been speaking to at the time had been New York and Jewish and liberal. She had seemed to McCloud to stand enchanted within Tom’s circle of tranquility. She had told Tom energetically that the Palestinians should have a homeland.
    â€œYes,” said Tom with an authoritative shyness, a lack of assertiveness which had proved itself strangely adequate to settle most arguments during the Barramatjara Dance Troupe’s tour of the United States. “What I’ve seen, they get pushed round.”
    And although he could justly have impressed and horrified her with the history of the pushing round of the Barramatjara, of missionary follies and the treachery of cattle barons, of the arrogance of miners and the deceits of governments, he’d said nothing, keeping the Barramatjara chronicles deeply to himself, concealed in his own blood, where they meant something more than graphic tales for the cocktail hour.
    In the continuing absence of Yusuf, full-blown conversations began to break out.
    Daisy Nakamura addressed McCloud from across the aisle. “Can you beat it? My one and only international flight. My one and only first-class seat. And now my one and only hijack.” She laughed musically. “I remember my father. He had a little shrine. Before he ever took off in his pickup to sell vegetables along the road,