Flying Hero Class Read Online Free Page A

so recently believed to have descended on him were forgotten.
    â€œNo. Listen, Bluey, just go to the toilet like a dancer on tour and leave it till we take off. The Englishman had to admit he was an alcoholic out loud.”
    â€œWell,” said Bluey, “a little more working on it, and you and I could fit that ticket. Eh, mate?”
    But then with one quick, somber wink, he had straightened and gone.
    It was believed that men of Whitey Wappitji’s or even Bluey Kannata’s level of knowledge could render themselves invisible. Could insert themselves through an aperture in time and inhabit for a moment a parallel but not apparent world or scheme, but one from which they could intrude and act on the seen and the known. Critics had even said Wappitji and the others danced like that, always on the edge of disappearing, a remarkable but habitual achievement. Not art so much as shadow play.
    Sometimes, as now with Bluey, they even walked like it.
    In following Bluey’s hypnotic passage aft, McCloud’s eyes met those of the Japanese-American woman, the nisei or issei in the green dress.
    â€œHello,” said McCloud.
    â€œHello to you,” she replied. “Daisy Nakamura.”
    She had surrendered her name innocently and without caution. In the same spirit, McCloud surrendered his.
    The captain had just announced that they were waiting for a wheelchair passenger. There was so much demand on airport wheelchairs tonight, he’d told them in that rural, easy way favored by airline pilots; the voice of the common man exalted to technological management of this prodigious machine.
    â€œIf it weren’t for the big winds off the Great Lakes,” the nisei or issei woman told McCloud, her face succulently earnest, “we’d be hours late into Frankfurt. When I flew out of Flagstaff at dawn, I swear there was a fresh three feet of snow on the ground, and it was drifting. You couldn’t see the San Francisco Peaks. I had those winds on my tail all the way flying here, couldn’t drink a cup of coffee it was so rocky. But the weather’s a little milder now. We should get what’s called positive assistance over the Atlantic, but it won’t spill our drinks.”
    McCloud took in the fine, broad features leaning toward him across the aisle, her sublimely sculpted features. He could imagine some airline official assuring her at the check-in counter. Oh no, ma’am, no more weather problems. From now on only positive assistance .
    McCloud kept watch over any reflex desires, though. He wanted to achieve a worthiness, a greater leverage, perhaps, against the time he would get a chance to speak to Pauline.
    â€œWhere are you from, Mrs. Nakamura?” he asked. He risked the Mrs . since there was something connubial about her which denied the evidence of her single-girl green cocktail dress.
    â€œOh, I’m from a place named Budapest. Northern Arizona. Navajos and Mormons and cowboys called Kelly and Campbell! And then truckers—there’s always scads of truckers! And Colorado River rafting guides and back-country mule wranglers. That’s about the sum total of the Budapest traffic. This is just about my first time out of Arizona, though I did go to Salt Lake once to see the temple up there, the one with the golden angel on the spire. It’s certain it’s my first time out of the U.S.” She dropped her voice. “Why, I bought no more than a small coach ticket, and here they just upped me to first class as if I knew the board of directors. See, what happened, they gave my preselected seat to a fairly antsy asthmatic gentleman who always takes a particular bulkhead nonsmoker. That meant there was just one other place they could put me. The luck of the Irish!”
    She could laugh very ripely, like a woman who had not yet learned to be careful. McCloud felt sure Pauline wasn’t laughing like that, back there in her straitened seat.
    â€œYour