(1993) Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend Read online

It all went smoothly, and he brought the Shadow back toward Cedar Bend, starting with the Black Hills and staying on secondary highways for the entire distance. He ran into heavy rains a little east of the Missouri River, but he was short of time and pushing hard, his yellow slicker flapping in the wind. Night caught him at the Iowa border.

  He looked down at his old friend, patting the gas tank. The engine was bolted directly to the frame, and he could feel the vibrations at the level of his cells. "Let's open things up a bit, big guy, see what you're made of here on your thirty-seventh birthday." The Shadow responded and ran like a black cat over the wet pavement, its headlights sweeping across woodlands on the curves.

  It happened in the hills east of Sioux City. The semi slid around a blind curve, drifting into the other lane. Michael's visor was a little fogged, and his night vision wasn't what it used to be. He blinked, then squinted hard. The truck was moving fast in the hands of a sleepy driver hammering eighty thousand pounds of vehicle and its load of tractor parts toward Omaha. The driver came to full alert as the truck skidded, fought to control his rig, and saw the yellow slicker fluttering a hundred feet straight ahead of where his hood ornament pointed.

  Michael was blinded by the lights, truck closing and no way to lay the Shadow down and slide. He thought of Jellie and tigers. For some reason he thought of Jellie and tigers in that instant, then took the Shadow off the road and into the trees at seventy miles an hour. A yellow blur rocketing 30 feet into the forest ... 100 feet . . . 200 feet . . . steering and braking and running the maze in a wild flash of tigers and Jellie and the way she looked at him in those times, holding her breath, eyes wide and her breasts and belly coming up to meet the tiger and him, Michael Tillman, and he smiled, and for a moment, just a wild and fleeting moment that became vanishingly small, he believed he was going to make it. Until the yellow blur became a butterfly gone.

  In those stretches when he was conscious, Michael could hear the hum of life-support systems to which he was fastened. Sort of a faint and steady background noise. Sometimes a certain machine kicked in and the noise would get louder, which he didn't like but which he couldn't do anything about.

  He was pretty well beat up. The doctors laid it out straight and hard: cracked pelvis, two broken arms, compound fracture of one leg, internal injuries. He thought he was dying, so did the doctors, and he tried to come to grips with that fact, hanging on until Jellie could get there, hanging on to see her again. He concentrated on Jellie's face, formed it up cool and clean in his mind, got her to smile for him, and he was still around in the morning.

  Outside his room at the desk guarding the intensive care unit, he vaguely heard a panicked voice. "Where's Michael Tillman, please, I'm his wife." His wife-he'd never thought of Jellie that way.

  She bent over him: "Oh, Michael . . . Michael. I came as fast as I could. Michael, get better, and I'll take care of you forever. Don't worry, it'll all be fine."

  "Jellie, touch my face." His throat was wrapped around a tube, and he couldn't talk above a whisper, a hoarse one, but she heard him and stroked his cheek. He felt tears, big tears, coming out of both eyes, his eyes. It wasn't self-pity . . . well, maybe it was. He didn't know, didn't matter. He was feeling the touch of her hand on his face, thinking about how much he loved her and that they'd never make their old, sweet laughing love again, and that he'd never take her out to Heron Lake on the back of the Shadow again, and that they'd never sit on the veranda of the Lake Palace Hotel again, looking for tigers he knew were out there because he saw one once on a foggy morning when the world was beginning to turn his way.

  Jellie was crying but trying to hide it from him. He floated in and out of consciousness for days, but finally the old body decided to give him another chance. He blinked open his eyes on a rainy Tuesday. She was sitting near his bed and looked up at him, smiling. "Welcome back, Michael."

  In a few weeks Michael was on his feet, with Jellie's help, looking like a clumsy snowman, in his casts. He was not a patient patient; his mind called for action while his body wanted rest. After the casts were off, Jellie would come home from the university, where she was working as a temporary instructor, and find him attempting push-ups or sitting bent over his desk chair, trying to make the muscles in his arms learn to type again.

  "For God's sake, Michael, I'm doing all I can do to get you better, and you're not helping. I have classes and shopping and you, and that's a full load. You have to cooperate a little, take things slow as the doctor said. And don't look at me in that little boy cranky way of yours; I'm too busy for nonsense."

  "I feel inadequate, that's all. Sloppy, too, lying around here drawing disability pay."

  "Think of it as if you were practicing the jump-shot, Michael. Invest now, get the benefits later."

  "Too logical, nurse Jellie, too logical."

  "You're the logician, Michael, except when it comes to yourself."

  "That puts me in the great mainstream, right? Only time I've ever been there, and I don't like the feel of it."

  "Well, you can like it or not like it. I'm going to the library. I have six hours of preparation to do for the survey course."

  She put on her coat and stomped out. Two hours later she called him from a pay phone in the library. "You okay?"

  "Yep. The little boy is no longer cranky and will attempt to remain as such. Sorry for the hassle. Christ, I did this to myself, and now I'm externalizing the results of my own stupidity on to you."

  "Michael, I love you, really I do. But it's not easy sometimes. You understand that, don't you?"

  "Yep again. Do you really have six hours of class preparation?"

  "No. I was just escaping from the Walnut Street rehab ward for a while. I think I'll come home and fix us something to eat."

  "Wrong. I'll rustle up some soup or its equivalent, have it bubbling when you get here."

  Eventually, Michael's ability to type came back, ideas started to form, and the computer screen glowed blue in the evenings. After three months he could walk outside by himself and started jogging slowly a few weeks afterward. There was laughter again, and there was loving.

  But living with Michael's intensity was not easy. Jellie had known it before the accident, and that intensity came back even stronger as he recovered. It was constant, unrelenting, a never-ending push toward frontiers of the mind and spirit, frontiers he redefined as he approached them, causing them to recede so the chase could go on. Michael chased frontiers and Jellie helped him chase the things he lost because his mind was always somewhere else, never paying attention to where he put car keys or checks or his latest draft of an article.

  "Michael, you don't 'look' well. You riffle around through a stack of something or shove things here and there on top of the refrigerator and think you've really searched. After that, you yell, 'Jellie, have you seen ...?'"

  "I use the lost horse method for finding things." He was eating an apple and had just finished complaining that he couldn't find last month's paycheck, which he was taking to the bank as soon as he located his car keys and found his gloves.

  "What's the lost horse method?"

  He was holding the apple between his teeth and scrounging around on top of the refrigerator, talking through the apple at the same time. He sounded as if he had a severe speech defect. "If you lose a horse, go where you saw him last and start there."

  "What if you took the horse somewhere, to start with, and forgot where he was before you took him somewhere else? Your system wouldn't work, would it?"

  "All my methods are flawed." He grinned, flipping the half-eaten apple over his shoulder from behind his back and catching it with his other hand. "Help me find the goddamn check, Jellie, so I can then look for my goddamned keys after which I'll search for my goddamned gloves. Please, Jellie. You're looking at a disabled searcher. All men have the disability; it's another one of those many flaws in the Y chromosome."

  Jellie continued working as a temporary instructor at the university and enjoyed the teaching.
Michael became more and more unhappy with the constraints of an academic bureaucracy that operated, as he saw it, for its own benefit, for its own survival and nothing else. Jellie could ignore that, and took delight instead in her students and her own research. This was new territory for her; Michael was more than two decades into it.

  In 1990, after talking it over, they moved to White Bear Canyon. Jellie had misgivings about the move, about surrendering her own professional life to follow the drift of Michael's ways. But he had been unhappy at the university, and there was the possibility of a teaching position for her at Spearfish State. Life in the canyon was quiet and pleasant, but Jellie was restless. Though Michael worked alone and enjoyed it, Jellie needed an organization, a place where she could teach and do conventional research in her field.

  A year later Jellie went to India alone. The birth ofjaya's second child was a complicated delivery, and she needed help afterward. Jellie stayed on longer than she'd intended. Two months, three months. India starting pulling on her again, Elsa Markham's genes turning her in directions that pointed a long way from White Bear Canyon and the problems of living close with a difficult man. A French architect from Auroville invited her out to dinner. He was handsome, worldly. She went with him once to the Alliance Franqaise but declined the next time he asked. It didn't seem fair to Michael. The architect continued to call her. He sent flowers, left notes tacked to her door.

  Michael knew nothing about the Frenchman, but he was worried. He called and asked, "When are you coming back?" His voice was pensive.

  "I don't know," she said in a flat, noncommittal way.

  "There's a job for you at Spearfish State beginning next fall. They called two days ago."

  "I don't know right now. That's all I can say."

  Spearfish State versus the excitement of a cosmopolitan life in Pondicherry. Dinners at the Alliance Franqaise, a handsome Frenchman who was smooth and attentive, who seemed to understand and appreciate the feelings of women. She went out with him again. He wanted to take her to Paris and show her around. It was simple, uncomplicated, living this way. No problems. And she was near Jaya and the grandchildren, which enabled her to do penance for the mother she never had been. The university in Pondicherry offered her a part-time job, and she almost went to bed with the Frenchman on a night when the sweet smell of jasmine rode on slow winds from the Bay of Bengal, but she pulled back at the last minute. She was falling into something different, another life that seemed far off now. The next time she wouldn't pull back.

  Michael called again. His voice was cooler than she remembered. He'd lived alone before, he could do it again, she knew that. He'd come to India after her once; he wouldn't do it a second time. When they said good-bye, his voice changed, got a little soft and sad.

  "I miss you, Jellie/JahLAY."

  And she cried then for reasons she didn't understand.

  In the white sun of an India morning, the seawall at Pondicherry curved into the distance and looked like something from Mediterranean lands. Come evening, the locals strolled there while the streets and buildings of the city breathed out the heat of the day just past. After talking with Michael, Jellie walked to the seawall and sat there for a long time. A slice of yellow moon hung thirty degrees up, off in the general direction of Burma.

  Back home she went to a mirror and looked at herself. Fifty-one. The Frenchman said she looked no more than forty. Men still turned to watch her when she passed, and that was good, she supposed. She brushed her long black hair, straightened her scarf, and returned to the mirror. She whispered, "Jellie Markham . . . Jellie . . . the song is almost finished. Just what the hell are you doing here when the only man you truly care for is half a world away?"

  Two days later she walked slowly along a winding road in the high country near Thekkady. Dhiren seemed far back. Twenty-five years had passed since that day of blood and fear in the dust now covering her feet. The afternoon breeze lifted her hair while she sat quietly on a log and remembered her warrior-poet, remembered him and the way he touched her, remembered him running for the trees. That evening she visited an old woman named Sudhana. They ate simple food and talked of other times.

  Chitra Dhavale rode with Jellie to the airport in Madras. "I'll miss you, Jellie, but I am glad you are going back. It's the right thing."

  "What a strange, messy life it's been, Chitra. Irresponsible, too." Jellie had tears in her eyes. They were standing near the gate to Jellie's plane.

  Chitra put her arms around her and said, "Yes . . . strange and messy . . . and irresponsible in some ways, I suppose. All of that . . . and quite wonderful also when you think about it, depending on who's doing the measuring and by what standards. But you at least know what it's like to come into high plumage and catch the southern winds. Most of us don't and never will. It's a lucky person who can have a single great love in her life. You've had two. One when you were a girl, and the other when you became a woman."

  Jellie smiled then. "And one was a warrior-poet and the other is a motorcycle man. God help us all." They laughed together while she dried her tears, and forty minutes later Air India lifted off. Chitra Dhavale watched morning light flash from the 747's wings as it turned toward South Dakota.

  Jellie had not told Michael she was returning and rode the airport limo by herself from Rapid City through the Black Hills. On the front porch of the cabin in White Bear Canyon was a disassembled motorcycle, the Shadow II. Michael had found it six months before at a convention of motorcycle enthusiasts and was rebuilding it. It would never take the place of the old Shadow destroyed in the accident, he knew that. The original was a symbol of his youth, and when it was gone, some boyish part of him went with it. He mourned both the losses.

  The cabin was empty. But she could smell traces of pipe smoke. Her father's suitcase was in the spare bedroom. Michael had said Leonard Markham was planning on visiting him to fish the trout. Packages of fly line lay on the kitchen table along with lures, a bottle ofjack Daniel's, and Michael's beat-up cap with its Real Men Don't Bond logo. She'd given the cap to him as a birthday present just after his accident. When she'd handed him the sack containing the cap, she'd said, "This is in no way capitulation to the good ol' boy in you. Understand that. I just thought you'd like it."

  She stood quietly, looking around. It felt a little strange, but also familiar in good ways. Casserole lay on Michael's desk, old but doing fine apparently. Jellie walked over and petted her. The cat stretched and yawned. Out back, Malachi was barking at something.

  Michael's first novel, Traveling with Pythagoras, lay on the desk. He'd written it from the viewpoint of Pythagoras' mother, who, legend had it, accompanied her mystic son on his journeys through Egypt and Babylonia. It had done pretty well for a first novel, thirty thousand copies. She picked it up and read the inscription on the title page: "For Leonard Markham, who gave me a woman to love." Beside it lay Michael's second book, a nonfiction work dealing with philosophical issues in applied mathematics, The Algebras of Illusion.

  Underneath the books was a manuscript. She stared at the cover page-The Tiger of Morning-then laid the books on top of it again. She knew Michael carried a low, burning, and unspoken sense that he could never replace Dhiren. Maybe this was his way of getting it out of his system. Jellie figured he'd tell her about the manuscript when he was ready.

  She opened the back screen door and looked out through the trees toward the trout stream fifty yards away. Her father was bent down along the shore, fussing with his tackle. Michael, wearing sunglasses, and the sleeves of his blue denim shirt rolled to the elbow, was wading deep water that surged around him, cigar clenched in his teeth, favoring the leg he'd injured in the motorcycle accident. He was fifty-three, and the leg was going to give him trouble the rest of his life. She held her breath for an instant when he stumbled and nearly fell, but he caught himself on a boulder in midstream.

  He straightened up and began his backcasts. Jellie Markham leaned against the door frame and watched him, remember
ing what Chitra had said about high plumage and southern winds, about warrior-poets and motorcycle men. And she smiled, shook her head, and began laughing softly to herself. "God help us all." She changed out of her India clothing and walked down toward the stream in an old sweater, jeans, and hiking boots. Malachi saw her and came running, bouncing and barking. Leonard Markham heard the dog and looked up, put his hand high above his head, and waved to her. Behind him, water sprayed jewellike off Michael Tillman's fly line as he reached back in the last sunlight of a blue, mountain evening.