Flying Hero Class Read Online Free

considered saying, but he’d said too much anyhow, that idea of the Barramatjara on a humanizing mission: something Bluey had confessed in anger one morning, something not meant to be repeated or used against any stray Englishman.
    So McCloud switched back to mere questions of art. He was surprised to notice that although he wanted to rout the man, he wasn’t as angry with him as he expected. The fellow had a crooked charm of some sort.
    â€œAs for the other kind of stuff,” McCloud continued, “you know, the dance and the art. I just wish we could all stop ourselves trying too damn hard. Because they can, and people love it.”
    The Englishman seemed to have had his fun out of the argument, and now he dropped it. He stubbed out a cigarette and said his name was Victor Cale, and that he worked for the London Daily Telegraph .
    He now did an awkward knee bend until he was on a level with Tom Gullagara’s window. He squinted out through the Perspex and the rain at slurred, meaningless lights. “I hope we’re not too much delayed. This French lollywater they’re handing out is no use to me. Scotch is more or less heart, blood, and gender to me. Wouldn’t say so in front of the wife. You wouldn’t happen to have any duty free, would you?”
    McCloud said he hadn’t. The Englishman offhandedly cursed himself for not having gone to the trouble of fetching some.
    â€œBut I didn’t have time, you see. I had to interview the secretary of state at the Helmsley Palace, and the bastard was late!”
    The Englishman glanced around them, looked dolefully at the happy woman in the green dress, and, like a genuine dipsomaniac, did not seem to see her, except perhaps as a debased being satisfied with French fizz.
    Meanwhile Pauline McCloud was back there, amongst the seats in the tail. Her elbows tucked in in the narrow limits of one of the middle seats, she faced a night journey which refused to begin and which she doubted the wisdom of making in any case. In that crowded tail McCloud wouldn’t even be able to sit beside her and try appeasement. They could perhaps have a muffled, elliptical talk outside the bank of lavatories, while polite fraus —returning from visiting their war-bride sisters in New Jersey—came and went, excusing themselves.
    The Englishman wandered off without warning. McCloud could hear him—genially imperious—urging a steward to release some whiskey to him. The steward invoked a new federal regulation. The bar, at least as regarded spirits and cocktails, was to remain sealed until the plane achieved international airspace.
    â€œCome on, man,” Cale could be heard saying, slipping ironically into the New York idiom in a way which should have made the steward want to hit him. “The Grand Republic lies behind us, Sonny Jim. Either we crash at takeoff, son—in which case my blood alcohol will be burned off, wouldn’t you say?—or else we’re as good as in God’s own sky right now.”
    Glancing over his shoulder, McCloud saw the steward pressing some whiskey miniatures and a glass with ice into Cale’s hand.
    â€œYou’re a Christian, man,” said Cale sarcastically.
    Bluey Kannata had risen from his seat, climbed over Wappitji’s legs, and come sauntering down the aisle. He nodded sagely at Mungina the didj player and had just about passed McCloud when’ he bent like a bird swooping, an appropriately balletic movement which startled McCloud just the same.
    â€œHey, mate,” he whispered. “They gave the Pommy bastard whiskey, mate. Why don’t they give us whiskey?”
    â€œHe had to be rude to them to get it,” McCloud told Bluey.
    McCloud could feel Bluey’s impishness, like a minor electric crackle in the air. “I reckon it might be some more of that race discrimination, mate. What do you say?”
    But he was smiling in his crooked way. All the curses he had