Flying Hero Class Read Online Free Page B

friends?” said Daisy Nakamura, gesturing toward the dance troupe. “They’re African gentlemen or something?”
    He told her who they were.
    â€œWild!” she said. “You don’t mean it! You say they paint the set they’re going to dance on?”
    â€œYes. And not just with any designs. With designs they own, that they’re entitled to use. People come at noon, bring a hamper with smoked turkey and champagne, and watch them work all afternoon, getting the dance cloth ready, painting the designs. And then in the evening, without rehearsal, they dance around what they have painted. Well, almost without rehearsal. They need what are called lighting and technical rehearsals.…”
    â€œI’ll be switched,” Daisy Nakamura breathed. “Out our way, we got the Navajo, like I said. Very mysterious people, too.” She waved her hand as if resisting a burning sensation. “ Very mysterious, sir, let me tell you. And some Hopi, too, working on a water project. Mysteriouser still. Heavy dudes! Mean drinkers, the ones that’re drinkers. Real mean drinkers. Though there’s no meaner a drinker than a Mormon breaking the rules of a lifetime!”
    In the end McCloud could not in the course of talk help asking why she was going to Frankfurt.
    She volunteered the information that she had a sister who was married to an American officer in West Germany, at an airfield not far from Munich. She hadn’t seen the sister for six years. “Now I’m a widow,” she said improbably, since her sumptuous green dress seemed to have little to do with widowhood. “I want to be close to family, you know how it is. When I was married to Mr. Nakamura, Ronnie … my life was so full I just didn’t have the urge to go visiting. And we were so busy with the roadhouse. We have this roadhouse called the Polka Barn. Ronnie bought it from a Polish gentleman who wanted to move to San Diego. You can only work those long hours with someone you have a special thing with, like Ronnie and me. We had a special thing.”
    Pitiable remembrance had entered her face.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she continued. “I suppose I’m lucky, with a chance to visit my sister. The leisure to go all the way over there to Frankfurt.”
    With a lustrous sensuality still shining in her face, even in bereavement, how the gentlemen of Budapest, Arizona, must have longed to offer her fraternal comfort!
    She said, as if in fact she read the thought, “Oh, I had lots of friends. Ronnie never was strict. And he was a good quarter century older than me. What they call an issei. Him and his parents were in the detainment camps out there in the wilderness during the big war, and my parents were, too, though the two sets didn’t really know each other well. Ronnie himself was a kid in the camps, and his brother fought in the American issei battalions in Italy and was killed. When the war ended, my folks were scared of going back to California, so they stayed on in Arizona, market gardening near Flagstaff. Arizona people aren’t too bad. Very short on college professors, a place like Budapest. Very short on great minds of the Western world and table manners. Kind of limited, like I suppose I am. But not bad people. If you stick with them.”
    She hooded her eyes and let her mind run on the clientele of the Polka Barn and the populace of Budapest.
    â€œAnd I had lots of these friends, guys who were casual with me, and Ronnie was kind of lenient. But when Ronnie went, all those friends, men and women, didn’t mean anything at all, sir. All I wanted to do was draw close to my own blood, to my sister and the others. Why, I went all the way out to Los Angeles, to the Japanese fishing fleet, for the Shinto funeral of an uncle I’d only met when I was a kid, and never once since. I really liked that—that was a real funeral. The Shinto priest chanting in a beautiful black