(1993) Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend Page 13

  As Michael turned to leave he asked, "Was the photograph behind you taken here?"

  "Yes, on the island where the Lake Palace is located. I'm told the photographer who took it came here often some years ago and always stayed at the Lake Palace."

  Down the path to the sanctuary office. Hundreds of Indian tourists milling around on the jetty below and several old excursion boats rocking in the water. Michael handed the room voucher to a wildlife officer at the office. He issued a boat ticket, saying Michael should show his hotel voucher to the pilot of the Miss Lake Periyar. The pilot would then drop him off at the hotel.

  It was a mess. Travel was never easy in India, and this was something altogether different. There were three excursion boats, two of them in the process of loading, one already packed with Indian tourists. Two hundred future boat passengers, porters, and assorted hangers-on were packed on the jetty. The loaded boat had Miss Lake Periyar painted on its starboard side.

  He fought his way through the crowd, got on the boat, and showed one of the hands the hotel voucher. The man seemed disinterested but nodded and indicated with a toss of his head that Michael should find a seat. The dominant feeling permeating all travel in India was one of ambiguity, and Michael had serious doubts as to whether the pilot would be notified he was to be dropped at the hotel.

  The boat was constructed with two levels, a glassed-in first level and an open upper deck. There were no seats left, but there was shouting and laughter and calls to those left on the jetty, the sum of which was pandemonium. Children ran up and down the steps between the first and second levels, people got off the boat to talk to those left behind, then got back on again.

  The boathand Michael had talked to was making a reasonable attempt at crowd control but was failing miserably, overwhelmed by the crush. How, Michael wondered, could any animals be spotted along the shore, if that indeed was the main thrust of the boat tour. The boat would sound like pharaoh's army coming over the water toward them.

  The boathand got tough when the engine turned over. He ordered people to sit down and stay seated. Michael checked again, but every seat on the boat was filled, so he hunkered down on the steps leading to the upper deck with a young boy sitting on the step just below his feet. The boy twisted his neck and looked at him while Michael stared out over the water.

  The boat moved away from the jetty and chugged slowly down the huge, narrow lake, a reservoir stretching for miles behind the Periyar Dam, constructed by the British in 1895. A narration came from small loudspeakers mounted at various places on the boat, sometimes in English, sometimes in one of the Indian languages, telling the passengers they might see various animals ranging from leopards to tigers to elephants to wild pigs. Michael figured if they saw any animals at all, they'd be flopped down in laughter at the strange mammals packed onto an old green contraption that should've sunk twenty years ago.

  Late afternoon now, sun dropping. Michael's boat and the two eventually following were the last sight-seeing runs of the day. Heavy jungle along the shore except for fifty feet or so of bare dirt running down to the water in some places. Michael stood up for a moment and could see a high hill with trees, looking as though it sat hard and straight in the boat's course.

  Ten minutes later the boathand shook Michael's knee and said, "Lake Palace." Michael was tight, so tight his breath was coming in short little intakes and exhales, as if he were finishing a long sprint, which he was. Across the sunlit water of India on a December afternoon Michael Tillman went, fearful, terribly so, of what he was going to find ahead of him.

  A wooden jetty stuck out fifteen feet from the island's shore, and he could see wide stone steps behind the jetty leading up into heavy forest. A long red tile roof was visible through breaks in the foliage. On the jetty was an Indian boy of about fifteen. The desk clerk at the Aranya Nivas had radioed the lodge to say a guest was on the Miss Lake Periyar.

  The pilot expertly swung the boat broadside to the jetty's end, and Michael jumped off. The boy pointed at the knapsack on Michael's shoulder, and Michael gave it to him. They began the long climb up the stone steps to the lodge, which sat a hundred and fifty feet above them. Halfway up Michael touched the boy's shoulder, signaling he wanted to stop for a moment.

  He sat on a wooden bench beside the steps, put his head in his hands, and thought, imagining what he might see at the top of the steps and thinking about how he would handle whatever was there. The boy stood patiently, looking off into the jungle.

  After a minute or two, Michael got up and they continued. At the top of the stairs he followed the boy over a red dirt area where the jungle had been cut back around the entire circumference of the lodge. Off to Michael's right an Indian couple sat on the veranda in front of their room. They were drinking tea but paused to watch the new arrival come across the dirt and onto the veranda south of them. The manager appeared with a room key, looked Michael over, and said dinner would be served at seven, adding informal dress was appropriate. He asked if he could get Michael something to drink. Michael ordered two Kingfisher beers and followed the boy along the veranda.

  The room was spacious with a double bed and a bath area in a separate room to the rear, furniture of slightly battered white wicker. Two large windows with heavy wooden shutters that were closed faced the veranda, and an overhead fan turned slowly. A smaller window in the bath area also had the same heavy shutters. The boy put Michael's knapsack on one of the beds and scurried around, turning on lights. Michael tipped him, and he was gone, closing the door behind him.

  Michael looked at his watch. Three hours before dinner. He showered and dressed in a clean khaki shirt and jeans, traded his boots for sandals, drinking Kingfisher and preparing himself for what was to come. He was ready, if there was any real way to be ready for what he was sure he'd discover. No excuse to lounge around in the room, so he walked outside on the cement veranda, which was empty of people along the entire run of the lodge.

  A trench, about five feet deep and three feet wide, circled the lodge out beyond the open dirt area where the jungle began. Michael was pretty sure the trench was designed to hold at bay unreliable things snarling along on short legs or crawling on scaled bellies, tongues flickering.

  The Indian couple he'd seen earlier were standing near their room at the far end of the lodge. They were on the crest of a hill dropping off to the lake and were looking through binoculars at something across the water on the opposite shore. They called the boy over and asked him a question. "Wild pigs," he said.

  Purple-blue flowers curled from the roof. Far down the lake Michael heard a sound. It took him a moment to recognize it: elephant. In the distance he could hear the low beating of an excursion boat's engine. He sat there on the south end of a veranda in south India, lit a cigarette, and started on his second beer, feeling like a warrior about to enter battle.

  Behind him and north along the veranda he heard a door open and the sound of voices, one of them Jellie's, he thought. Adrenaline hit Michael Tillman's arteries in a surge faster and stronger than anything he'd experienced in his basketball days or, for that matter, ever before in any circumstance. The warrior had come to fight for his woman, his body was preparing itself.

  Now was the moment. Now-do it, Tillman. Do it and get it over with, settle your affairs, here in the jungle. Where else have men ever settled their affairs? He turned and saw a young Indian woman, fifteen or sixteen years, come out of an open doorway. Her black shining hair was in a long braid, and she had on a sari of a deep orange color, bracelets on her arms and around one ankle, silver toe rings, and straw-colored sandals.

  Jellie Markham/Braden/Velayudum, or whoever she was on that day, came out of the same doorway and looked across the stretch of open dirt toward the jungle. "It's a beautiful evening, Jaya," Michael heard her say.

  The young woman answered her, "Yes, it is. This is the loveliest place I've ever seen. The mountain air is so clean and cool after the lowland heat. I've always looked forward to our time here."<
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  Jellie looked down the veranda, gray eyes taking in the scenery, casually glancing at a man sitting by himself at a table. The young woman started to speak but saw Jellie's face and followed her eyes. They both stared for a moment, then the young woman looked again at Jellie's face, but Jellie never took her eyes off Michael Tillman. He waited for a man named Velayudum to come out of the doorway and put his arm around Jellie, but no one came.

  Jellie was frozen where she stood. Michael looked back at her. She wore the traditional Indian woman's outfit called a salwar kameese-long tunic and loose, flowing bottoms gathering themselves just above her white sandals, all of it done in the palest of lavenders. She had a red scarf draped around her neck with the ends of it hanging over her shoulders and down her back. And, like the young woman, she wore an ankle bracelet and toe rings. Her hair shone in the half-light on the veranda, and hung straight and long, parted off to one side, just as she wore it back in Cedar Bend, sometimes tucking it up under a tweed cap.

  Cedar Bend? Where in the hell was that? Did it exist anymore, or had it ever existed? Maybe . . . maybe somewhere in another time, somewhere back down along the crinkled chain of living and loving and working, it had once existed. Back in the same, forgotten, and ancient world as Custer, South Dakota, where a boy worked late in the night shooting baskets and repairing an old English motorcycle that would take him over the roads of his life, eventually with a woman named Jellie riding behind him.

  Jellie took the girl's hand and came toward him. He stood up, saying nothing, watching her eyes, which never left his. She let go of the girl's hand, put her arms around his waist, and laid her head against his chest. He touched her hair. She lifted her face and kissed him.

  She turned to the girl. "Jaya, this is Michael Tillman, the man I've been telling you about." Her eyes on Michael's face again, steady eyes. "Michael, this is my daughter, Jaya Velayudum."

  Chapter Twelve.

  Dhiren Velayudum: revolutionary, member of a radical separatist group that fought everyone and everything connected with the central Indian government. And Jellie Markham, young and idealistic back in the middle sixties, young and idealistic and off to India to write her thesis. Movie stuff: Tamil warrior-poet meets young American woman with her own dreams of how things ought to be. At bottom, Dhiren Velayudum was a terrorist, and Jellie became his lover and confidante. Though it didn't seem like terrorism in their nights of loving and days filled with quixotic visions of a great revolutionary flow that could not be halted. She married Dhiren in a traditional Indian ceremony. The shrieking death-dance of her parents when they found out could be heard all the way from Syracuse.

  Things went bad for the radicals, and there were wild months of running with Dhiren, hiding in villages and cities. Then came an afternoon road winding high into the Western Ghats, the same road Michael would travel one day years later. The car in which Dhiren and Jellie were riding moved slowly around hairpin curves.

  Suddenly Dhiren was pushing Jellie, shouting for her to get out of the car and hide. She got out, carrying Jaya, and crouched behind a jumble of deadfall. Dhiren pitched from the other side of the car and ran for the trees on the opposite side of the road, nine-millimeter, Russian-made pistol in his hand. The sound of automatic weapons. Bullets spitting into the dust like an animal with a hundred claws tracking him and closing fast, then crawling up and across his body. Dhiren spinning, stumbling into the forest.

  That night at the Lake Palace Hotel, Jellie and Michael sat on the veranda for two hours after Jaya went to bed. She told the story, all of it, leaving out nothing. How she felt about Dhiren, her memories of him. How she carried her baby along the night roads of south India after Dhiren had been shot, walking all night into Thekkady, where there were sympathizers with the radicals' cause. How the India government punished her by refusing to issue an exit visa for Jaya so Jellie could take her to the States.

  She told him how Leonard Markham had come for her, all the way to Delhi, and the words he'd said: "Let's go home, Jellie. We'll find a way to get your baby to America." She looked off into the night. "It's amazing what parents can forgive."

  Jellie told him how she fought for years to get Jaya a visa and failed, her father helping her and pounding on authorities from Washington, D. C., to New Delhi. But India put on its silent, impenetrable face, and nothing happened.

  Jellie sat with her knees pulled up, her arms wrapped around them while she talked. "Chitra kept track of things on the Indian side and wrote to say it was still not possible to get the necessary papers for Jaya. I tried to come back, but the Indian government denied me an entrance visa.

  "Can you imagine the agony, Michael? Three years it went on that way. I kept applying for a visa, and then for no reason I've ever been able to figure out, they issued me one. I simply became unimportant to them after a while, I guess.

  "I could have given up my U. S. citizenship and perhaps become an Indian citizen, but I wasn't ready to do that, and I'm not sure India would have accepted me. I still believed I could get Jaya out of the country. I even thought about smuggling her out, but everyone I talked to said it was too risky, that I could end up in an Indian prison for years and leave Jaya without any mother at all."

  Michael nodded, his face serious. When something important was being said, when attention was called for, Michael Tillman was a world-class listener. And he was listening now to what Jellie Braden was saying. He narrowed his eyes, then rubbed them with his palms, trying to settle himself as he started to understand things he hadn't anticipated. It began to sink in, hard: he'd underestimated Jellie. She wasn't simply a bright, good-looking woman married to one of his colleagues. Instead, she had lived another life alien to anything he could have imagined. She was far more an adult than he had realized, far more sophisticated in a worldly fashion than he would ever be. She was talking about a different Jellie, who had lived before, one he would not be able to comprehend or experience, no matter how much she told him, how much he thought about it. Jesus, automatic weapons and mountain roads, a man who had given her a child in a swirl of flight and idealistic revolutionary doctrine. She had laughed and cried with this man, and loved him wildly and freely and carried her baby as she ran with him. He felt a strange combination of sadness for her and envy for Dhiren Velayudum, who had touched places in her that he, Michael Tillman, could never touch. What a goddamned stupid joke, he thought, his wrong and undue assumptions about himself and Jellie and how he presumed Jellie saw him-for the last year he had been measuring Michael Tillman against Jimmy Braden, not against a man with the power and spirit of Dhiren Velayudum, a man who had lived for just the right amount of time and died at just the right moment to create a larger-than-life image in the far back memories of Jellie Braden. It was an image that would never have any equal, for it had never been lessened by the slog of ordinary, daily existence. Michael let out a long breath, while Jellie caught hers and continued.

  "All of this time Jaya was becoming a young Indian girl. I finally decided maybe it was best she be raised in Indian ways. I didn't seem to have any other choice. The decision was made: Jaya would continue to live with the Sudhanas until she was old enough for boarding school, and I would visit her as often as I could.

  "I sent money to the Sudhanas, tormenting myself all these years that I was not here to see my little girl growing up. Yet I don't know if it could have worked out any better. Jaya is a fine young woman. But I did visit every year, and we always came out here to the Lake Palace for a while. So at least she got to know her real mother pretty well, though we have become more like sisters than mother and daughter. I've always saved most of my salary from whatever job I've had over the years, and that money went to India, to the Sudhanas and to Jaya. She entered boarding school when she was six and has been there since.

  "When I met Jimmy Braden and married him, all I said was I'd been involved with an Indian man who had died and I still had a lot of friends over here who needed financial help. The lie rested in what I didn
't say. I told him I would be coming alone to visit every year. Jimmy, I think, would have agreed to anything, just to get me to marry him-I know that sounds terrible, but it's true-so he said it was not a problem. He's never complained once about my visits to India, and he's never asked any questions about what it is I do when I'm over here. As I've said before, Jimmy has his good qualities."

  Michael got up and walked behind her, put his arms around her, and kissed her hair. Jellie Braden looked off into the night. Something large and moving fast crashed through the jungle fifty yards back of the lodge.

  Jellie stood and looked up at him, put her hands on his face. "Michael, Dhiren was a lot like you, in some ways, but I don't want you to think you're some kind of latter-day surrogate for him. That's not true at all, and you must believe me when I say it."

  He smiled and said, "I believe you, Jellie," though he wasn't quite as sure about it as he sounded.

  "I came to India this time because I needed to think and to talk with Jaya about us. I wanted to make sure of how I felt and for her to understand. When you found me this evening I was already turning for home, Michael. I was turning for home, toward you.

  In his room he laid her down and kissed her in all the places she liked to be kissed. Later there was heavy scratching at the door and the sense of great bulk moving around outside. Michael sat up. "What the hell is that? Sounds like a bear."

  "I think that's what it is. I heard it last night."