(1993) Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend Page 14

  "There used to be a lot of them in the Black Hills. They go on like that. I have some fruit in my knapsack, and the bear can probably smell it. He'll go away after a bit."

  The bear left and was replaced by the tickety-tick of fast little feet running over roof tiles. Michael and Jellie lay in the darkness together. "Sounds like India on the move again," he whispered to her.

  Jellie went back to her room an hour before dawn. Michael lay awake, thinking about all they had talked about. Twenty minutes in front of first light he dressed and went outside into heavy, dripping fog wrapped around the lodge and turning open spaces into closed ones, turning the jungle into vague, threatening shapes in gray camouflage. Across the lake, which was only about a hundred yards wide where the island divided it, a monkey called, sounding far and lonesome. The classic jungle sound from old Tarzan movies. Elephants again, closer now. The monkey let go once more and was joined by a few others, along with intermittent calls from awakening birds.

  His small flashlight took him through the fog and down the stone steps to the water. Why he was doing this he wasn't certain. Something to do with loving Jellie and knowing where he stood with her, a little early morning celebration of his own, some time to rearrange how he saw her in light of what she'd told him about her early years in India. He sat on a jetty post where he could look out to the opposite side of the lake and down the shoreline to his right. He sat there and waited, listening for sounds beyond the lapping of small waves. First light came up, translucent through the fog.

  He was staring off into space, thinking about Jellie and Jaya asleep in the lodge above him, not looking at anything in particular. The fog swayed in an early breeze and began turning into a yellowish mist as the sun poked its way through a gap in the eastern hills.

  The tiger saw Michael before Michael saw him. The cat was thirty yards down the shore, drops of water coming off its muzzle as it lifted its head after drinking. It didn't move, just kept that big head pointing in Michael's direction, its body still perpendicular to the water. Long red tongue came out and flicked away the droplets on its white chin.

  The plan? What plan? Stupid, Tillman, real dumb, Michael was thinking. The lodge was a forty-second sprint up a flight of steep, rough steps, or longer via a jungle route, and a Bengal in full stride could cover a hundred yards in four seconds. If the tiger wanted him, Michael could do nothing. Running would be pointless. And pathetic.

  Somehow, though, Michael wasn't worried. He never quite understood why when he thought back on it. He just wasn't. In fact, all the time he was thinking how serious wildlife watchers would give up their butterfly nets for life if they could have this experience. Talk about a Saw-It! merit badge, talk about counting coup. A lot of folks were out there practicing a kind of visual banditry and grunted sourly when the stagecoach didn't stop. It had stopped here, in the fog, at dawn.

  Michael began to take pleasure in just staring back at the tiger, in the simple purity of contemplating its existence, in knowing not everything wild and strong had been snuffed out by condos and shopping malls. There was something good and exhilarating about that, about knowing that creatures who crawled toward trenches or went bump against your shutters in the darkness or stared at you from a misty shoreline in south India were out there, and they cared nothing for your passing joys and sorrows, and they were free to return to the jungle when they chose.

  The tiger lowered its head, lapped at the water, looked at Michael again, then shambled down the shore in the opposite direction. At fifty yards it turned to look at Michael once more, looked at him for a long time. At a hundred yards the big cat angled off into the jungle. The sun ran up its flag hard and bright, and the fog lifted.

  "Good morning, Michael."

  It was Jellie, and Jaya, carrying cups of hot tea for themselves and a big cup of coffee for the tiger expert who was busy sewing a merit badge on his sleeve: Saw It! Michael said nothing about the tiger, thinking they might feel sorry about having missed it and thereby spoiling a first-class sunrise for them. When he told them later they were both sorry and glad-sorry they'd missed it, glad they weren't there.

  "Michael"-her gray eyes were full of good, loving signals as they looked at him-"we didn't talk about travel plans. Jaya and I are booked here for another three nights, can you stay?"

  Stay? He'd have slugged it out with the Bengal for the privilege. "Jellie, I'm free until mid-January. My return flight is January twelfth. What's your program, as they say in India?" Jaya smiled.

  "Well . . ."Jellie was a little hesitant. He sensed it was money.

  "Let me suggest something. You're looking at a guy who lives in a cheap apartment, drives a thirty-year-old motorcycle and a fifteen-year-old Dodge Dart, and makes a passable salary. If the two of you feel like it, let's travel, go where we want to go. Take the canal boats through the Kerala estuaries, lay around up on the Goa coast for a while, ride the steamer up to Bombay and stay in the Taj Hotel. My treat and no holds barred."

  "That will cost a lot of money." She bent over and kissed him good morning.

  He whispered, "We can work it out on the kitchen table back in Cedar Bend."

  She rolled her eyes. "My new profession now becomes clear." Then Jellie laughed, arid Jaya laughed, too, though she seemed a little unsure of why she was laughing. But Michael thought he knew-she was laughing because her mother was laughing, because her mother was happy and loved a man and wasn't afraid to let her see it. She'd figure it out after a while.

  And they did that, traveled. Stayed on at the Lake Palace for three more nights, then went off to Kerala to see the famous Chinese fishing nets and stayed in the Malabar Hotel, where they swam in the pool and had late suppers served on white linen by the bay. They hit Goa and lounged on the beach, took the steamer to Bombay and checked into the Taj Hotel for five days. Flew up to Jaipur to see the Pink City and took a camel safari into the Rajasthani desert.

  On January 5 they put Jaya on a plane for Cochin and school, which left Jellie and Michael a week to themselves. They spent it in Pondicherry, staying with Innkeeper Maigrit ("Ah, monsieur, you found her, I see. May I politely say she was worth the search") and taking their evening meals in the small restaurants of Pondicherry. They went far up the beach one afternoon and made love in the sand, then swam naked in the warm Bay of Bengal and made love again in the water. And Michael lectured at the college, paying his debt to Dr. Ramani.

  Jellie was moved by the fact Michael had booked his return flight for the twelfth of January, that he'd been prepared to spend over seven weeks looking for her. He said, and meant it, "If I hadn't found you by the sixth, I was going to call home and tell them to find a substitute for the spring semester. I was-Jellie, I truly mean this-fully prepared to go on with my knapsack until I found you, no matter how long it might have taken."

  On January 12 they rode British Airways toward Heathrow, reading, laughing, holding hands. Then serious at times, preparing themselves for laying all of this in front of Jimmy.

  Between London and Chicago, somewhere over the Greenland ice pack, Jellie leaned her head against Michael's shoulder. He looked at the gray eyes, noticed something pensive in them.

  "What is it, Jellie?"

  "I was just thinking. People once called Dhiren 'the Tiger of Morning.' "

  She went to sleep then, resting against him. He gently fished a notebook out of his pocket and wrote, "The Tiger of Morning lives forever."

  Chapter Thirteen.

  James Lee Braden III was a middle-grade rationalist. What could not be explained in terms of empirical evidence did not exist. Except for God, who received immunity from rational inspection and was dealt with on Sundays at the First Presbyterian Church. Turn of the key, click of a door lock, and Jimmy looked up from the autobiography of John Maynard Keynes he was reading. His wife walked in with Michael Tillman behind her.

  This time Jimmy didn't cry. And he wasn't all that surprised. Parallel events-Jellie gone, Michael pulling out a few days later. Teeter-to
tters in the park, a faculty wife who had seen Jellie and Michael leaving the Ramada together, speculation in the offices. Matters passed over originally but recalled later on when the time was right-data, incomplete and soft, but data nonetheless. Induction and tentative conclusion:

  Maybe Jellie Braden and Michael Tillman were more than friends.

  January evening 1982, conclusion no longer tentative. Jimmy said he understood how Jellie and Michael would be attracted to each other. His primary concern was, in his words, "how we all carry on from here." He seemed almost relieved, more worried about style than substance.

  Jellie was less rational and quite a lot less stylish than her husband at that moment. She'd been married to Jimmy Braden for eleven years, that counted for something. She got herself worked up pretty good, telling Jimmy how sorry she was, how it was not right to behave as she had. Jimmy eventually said, "Our decision to marry was probably a good one at the time, but people change. There's no point living with choices made by people who were different eleven years ago than they are now."

  Jellie gathered herself and her things and moved in with Michael. They painted his old apartment and gradually converted it into something both of them could tolerate. The Shadow stayed in the living room. That was not open for debate or compromise. Jellie did suggest a dropcloth to protect the nice oak flooring from greasy tools. Michael smiled and said it was a large concession but agreed.

  He rolled back into teaching, dog-paddling his way through the wash of sideways looks and gossip that ultimately became a minor part of the university saga. Jellie retrieved her maiden name, finished her M. A., and was accepted in the anthropology Ph. D. program. And Jimmy? He went away. Arthur Wilcox found him an associate deanship at a private school in the Northeast, near Jimmy's parents. All were pleased.

  Well, not everyone. Eleanor Markham was appalled and forever would view Michael as a social misfit and home wrecker. She was especially appalled at his travel habits and happened to be looking out the window of her Syracuse home one afternoon when the Black Shadow rolled up her driveway. The Shadow was no longer an amusing abstraction sitting in some lunatic professor's living room. It was real now, and her forty-four-year-old daughter was riding behind the lunatic. Probably it was Jellie's leather jacket, boots, and mirrored sunglasses that got her. It'd been a long life, and she'd hoped for something better.

  Michael and Jellie's father escaped to the trout streams. Leonard Markham never said harsh words about anybody, and he mentioned Jimmy only once in Michael's presence. He was laying out a Royal Coachman fly after several elegant backcasts. The Coachman landed soft as you please below a big rock where the water eddied. He puffed on his pipe, twitched the fly, and said, "Jim Braden was afraid of water. Can you imagine that, Michael?" Michael didn't say anything. Leonard twitched the fly again. A brookie rolled beside it but thought better of the enterprise and left the fly alone, in the way Leonard Markham left the subject of Jimmy Braden and never came back to it.

  Jellie and Michael traveled to India once a year. In 1984 they brought Jaya back to meet her grandparents. Afterward the three of them visited Michael's mother, who was confined to a nursing home in Rapid City. She was old and pretty wobbly, but sentient most of the time. Ruth Tillman took Jaya's hand and held it for a long time, smiling. It was the best Michael could do in the way of a grandchild, and in some strange way Ruth Tillman found it enough.

  So it went. Not undiluted peace and tranquillity, but workable part of the time, most of the time. Michael Tillman was a loner, something of a recluse, always had been, always would be. He would go away from Jellie, sometimes on the Shadow, sometimes only in his mind. And she resented that.

  "People aren't motorcycles, Michael. You can't just take the chain off and hang it over a chair until you get around to it."

  He grinned at her. "You're right. You're always right about that stuff. Women know things men don't when it comes to the gender interface. . . . Jesus, how's that for psychobabble . . . gender interface. Next thing you know I'll become a 'gender reconciliation facilitator.' Saw that in a magazine the other day. There are hot new job opportunities out there I never dreamed of."

  She rolled her eyes, crossed her arms. "I don't think you're the least bit interested in facilitating gender reconciliation, here or anywhere else."

  "You're right again, mostly, wrong about here. I'm a good ol' boy from the bad ol' days in certain respects. Nadia Koslowski made some inroads in taming the Y chromosome, but she left before the work was finished. You've continued where Nadia left off and already discovered I'm only marginally educable in that area. I'm interested in peaceful coexistence, but I'm also interested in my work and fishing and riding around on shadows, two-wheeled ones and otherwise. My attention shifts, I wobble like Mercury's orbit. I'll try to do better, really I will. But I probably won't improve a whole lot. And I'm not altogether sure you really want me to change all that much. You might end up with a limp, obsequious piece of crap you don't care for."

  "Michael, sometimes I think I should pour plastic over you and preserve you just the way you are in these moments. We could prop you up in the Smithsonian and hang a sign around your neck that says Homo past-hopeus, let future and more enlightened generations stare at you. Carolyn was right when she said you're incorrigible."

  He held up his hands in a position of surrender. "Hell, I'm guilty as charged. I've discovered it's easier to plead guilty to everything. Less argument that way. And even though I don't share your faith in the wisdom of future generations, I kind of like the Smithsonian idea. But make sure I'm sitting on the Shadow with a fly rod in my hand. And make sure you remember Dhiren and how happy you were with him, and how unhappy you were with Jimmy Braden. You once told me Jimmy was so conciliatory and ambivalent it damn near drove you crazy. You're a strong woman in a lot of ways, Jellie Markham, but you like your men a little wild and untamed. I will, however-and being completely aware of my failings and general unworthiness-extend my offer of marriage once again, as I do almost weekly."

  She scuffed her tennis shoe on the floor and looked down it. In some ways he was right. She'd never quite sorted it out, the tradeoffs. The men she truly cared for made her happy in some ways, unhappy in others. Still looking at her shoe, she said, "As I've mentioned before, being married twice is enough. Three times seems a bit much somehow." She cooled down and smiled at him. "Thanks for the proposal, however. I always appreciate it when you ask. Maybe sometime I'll surprise you and say 'yes.' "

  "The offer remains open. How about two fingers' worth of Jack Daniel's, a bath, and then the kind of reconciliation we seem to do best. Cut and paste, make peace and make love."

  "We need groceries. You always get hungry afterwards."

  He pulled on his leather jacket, grinning. "So do you. In atonement for my many sins I'll go to the store. Got a list?"

  "No, do you?"

  "No. I'll buy beer, potatoes, and whatever else I think of on the way."

  An hour later they were sitting in the small tub together, hot water deep and soapy. She put her feet on his shoulders, he ran his hands along her thighs and told her for the thousandth time she had the greatest breasts in the universe. She looked at him over the rim of her glass and started laughing.

  "What's the matter? Your breasts are serious business."

  "Nothing. I was just thinking about plastic and the Smithsonian again. Think I'll do it when you're gone and defenseless."

  "Okay by me. You can prop Arthur Wilcox up beside me, label him Homo go-squatis, Driven Bonkers by Homo past-hopeus. Put some blueprints in his hand." He leaned back in the tub. "Let me change the subject. Remember that nice area in the Black Hills called White Bear Canyon I showed you once?"

  "Yes."

  "After you finish your degree, let's move out there. I'll quit teaching, get my retirement annuity under way, and do a little writing. There's a small college called Spearfish State nearby. Maybe you could get a teaching job there if it suits you."

  "It's
a possible; I'll think about it later." She put her legs around him and slid up on his lap, arms around his neck. "Right now I'm getting a lot more interested in moving to the bedroom." She leaned her head back and shook it. "UUhhh, men! You're all nuttier'n hell."

  Michael kissed her long and sweet, oh her mouth, on both her breasts, and ran his tongue along her throat. "Not all of us are nutty . . . only the ones you like."

  Jellie received her doctorate in 1987. Michael was allowed to attend the ceremony in full academic regalia, though his robe and soft, six-pointed cap, which had lain unused for years, needed two runs at the dry cleaners before they were presentable. When she walked across the stage and was handed her diploma, he damn near fainted with pride, knowing how much it meant to her. Michael threw a small party for her at the apartment and had a bottle of champagne all to himself, grinning while he sat on the Shadow and watched her gray eyes as people congratulated her. Jellie Markham had become whole, professionally, at least.

  Later that evening when the guests had stumbled back to wherever guests go when they leave, she came out of the bathroom with her academic gown and mortarboard on. Michael was still sitting on the Shadow, barefoot in T-shirt and jeans, a bottle of champagne balanced on the gas tank. He said, "Dr. Markham, I presume."

  She grinned that old salacious grin of hers, the one she put on when it was time for serious matters of the flesh, then parted the robe and showed him she was wearing nothing beneath it. "Dr. Markham is now ready for her graduation present, if Dr. Tillman is prepared." He was indeed, and the evening concluded in splendid fashion with Michael straddling the Shadow and Jellie straddling Michael, Miles on the tape deck. Jellie chewed on his ear and whispered "Vroom, vroom," while she moved slowly up and down with quiet, blissful intensity on the motorcycle man.

  Michael's mother died in 1988. A realtor called eight months later and said he had a buyer for the little house in Custer. Classes started in a week, but Michael cranked up the Shadow and headed out.