Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend Read online

  Michael went to the pop cooler and pulled a Coke from where it lay buried in ice and water. He held the bottle against one cheek, then the other. Stuck it up inside his shirt and laid it against his chest, shuddered once as cold met hot. No rain for weeks, dust devils moving down the roadsides.

  “Damnit, Mikey…”

  His father’s voice slurred and reverberated from inside the station. He put the unopened Coke back in the cooler.

  Michael slid into another car and pulled it into the service bay. His mother’s handwriting was on the work order, “lube & oil.” The Chevy lifted on the rack with a whirring sigh, and he unscrewed the oil plug on lawyer Dengen’s Bel-Air. While the used oil drained into a bucket he looked out at Route 16. One good road is enough, that’s what he was thinking.

  He walked over to the Vincent Black Shadow parked in the rear of the station, touched the handlebars. His father had taken in the big English motorcycle as payment for a repair bill and said it was Michael’s to keep if he’d fix it up and learn how to maintain it. He did and owned it, spiritually and physically, from that moment on. One good road— the Shadow could take him down that road if he learned all there was to know about valves and turning wheels and routes out of here. Michael was already practicing at night, running the Shadow at high speeds through the Black Hills even though he wasn’t legally old enough to drive.

  On winter nights when the Shadow waited for spring to come again, there was the jumpshot arching through the lights of small-town gymnasiums. People took notice of Ellis Tillman’s boy, said he might be good enough to play college ball. When he scored fifty-three points against Deadwood his senior year, they were sure of it.

  At pajama parties the high school girls giggled and talked about boys. They said Michael Tillman had sad brown eyes, lonely eyes, and grease on his hands that wouldn’t come off. They said he was shy but had cute muscles and looked good in his basketball uniform. They said he had a nice smile when he showed it, but he’d probably end up running his father’s gas station and never would get the grease off his hands. Sometimes he’d take one of them to a movie in Rapid City, but mostly he kept to himself. He worked at the station and fished the trout in summer, practiced his jumpshot in the city park until it became a thing of magic. The Shadow, the jumpshot, algebra and Euclid’s geometry—they were all of the same elegant cloth, universes contained within themselves, and he was good at them. He wasn’t quite so good with girls or rooms full of people or English classes where poetry was discussed until it didn’t exist.

  Rooms full of people he didn’t care about. Poetry could be dealt with sometime. But he wondered about girls who would become women. Somewhere out in these places of the world was a woman with whom he would make love for the first time in his life. And what would that be like? To be with a woman? Not sure. Not sure, but wondering. Would she be pleased with him, and how would a boy-man know what to do? Not sure yet. A little shaky thinking of it and reading the copy of What Boys and Girls Should Know About Each Other his mother had discreetly placed on his bookshelf. Neither she nor his father ever mentioned the book. As with everything else, he figured he was on his own. Nobody was handing out anything to anyone as far as he could tell, except small paperback books that were never mentioned and seemed pretty unromantic in any case.

  The jumpshot took Michael down roads where the Shadow couldn’t go. On a December night in 1960, Ellis Tillman leaned close to his Zenith portable and adjusted the tuning, trying to pull in KFAB in Omaha, Nebraska. The announcer’s voice came and went: “For… information… local Farm Bureau agent.” Long way, weak signal. Twenty below zero in Custer at 9:14, wind chill minus forty-eight. More static. He swore at the radio, and Ruth Tillman looked up from across the kitchen table. “Ellis, it’s only a basketball game, not the end of the world. Have they said anything more about Michael’s knee?”

  “No. He’ll be okay. He’s a tough kid.” Ellis Tillman took a sip of Old Grand-Dad and bent close to the radio. He was proud of his boy.

  The stars shifted or sunspots went away, and the announcer’s voice came back in double time:

  The Big Red machine’s rollin’ now, on top of the Wichita State Shockers, eighty-three-seventy-eight, with just under four minutes to go. Tillman brings the ball up-court for the Shockers, still limping on the bad knee that took him out of action in the first half. Over to LaRoux, back to Tillman, half-court press by the Big Red. Tillman fakes left, drives right, double screen for him by LaRoux and Kentucky Williams.…

  “Go get ’em, Mikey!” Ellis Tillman stamped his feet on yellow linoleum and pounded the chrome-legged table so hard the radio bounced. Ruth Tillman looked at her knitting and shook her head slowly back and forth, wondering about men and what drove them onward to such insanity.

  Four hundred miles away in Lincoln, smell of sweat and popcorn and the crowd screaming and the coach signaling for what he called the Tillman Special and you’re moving right and slamming your left elbow into the face of the bastard who’s grabbing for your jersey and you’re cutting hard for the double screen LaRoux and Kentucky are setting up and a camera flash bursts from the sideline and your right knee is swollen to half-again its normal size from blood in the tissues… and you’ve done this a million times before… more than that… and the power in your legs and shoulders and the grace and balletlike movement and you’re high into the air, left hand cradling the ball over your head and right hand pushing it in a long and gentle arc toward an orange rim with silver metal showing where the orange paint has rubbed off from the friction of a zillion basketballs … and the ball clears the rim and slices the net just the way it used to in the backyard of your South Dakota home and the crowd screams louder and you land on a knee that crumples into nothing and you go to the floor with Kentucky Williams stumbling over you on his way back down the court…

  and you lie there

  and you know it’s over

  and you’re relieved it is.

  And four hundred miles northwest

  your mother bows her head.

  Two days later Ellis Tillman got his copy of the Wichita Eagle in the mail. He’d subscribed to it while Michael was playing ball and would drop the subscription now. On the sports page was the headline

  SHOCKERS FALL TO NEBRASKA, 91-89

  Tillman Hits 24,

  Suffers Career-Ending Injury

  He thought about cutting out the article and posting it in the gas station with the other clippings about Mikey. But Ruth Tillman wouldn’t hear of any such thing.

  Michael’s grades barely slipped him into graduate school, but once he was accepted, it was straight, hard work. Brutal work—six years of it, including his dissertation. In Berkeley he grew a beard and fell in love for the first time. Her name was Nadia, she wore black stockings and long skirts and came from Philadelphia where her father was a union organizer. They lived together for two years in the sixties when Berkeley was becoming the center of all that counted, so they believed.

  Nadia joined the Peace Corps and thought Michael should do the same. “Give something back, Michael,” she said.

  He’d been offered a fellowship for doctoral study and wanted to take it. “I’ll give something back another way,” he told her.

  Michael shaved off his beard. Nadia packed and left. Disappointed, but not angry, and on to other things. “It’s probably better this way,” she told him. “You’re an only child, and from what you’ve said about your life, and from what it’s like living with you, I’m beginning to think only children are raised to be alone. At least you were.” She softened, looked at him. “It’s been good, Michael.”

  He smiled. “It has been good. I mean that, Nadia. You’ve taught me a lot about a lot of things. Stay in touch.” He kissed her good-bye, watched two years of his life roll away on a Greyhound, and walked to the Department of Economics, where he handed in his letter accepting the fellowship. He went back to his apartment and could still smell the scent of Nadia, looked at her posters of Lenin and E
instein and Twain on the wall. He missed her already, but she was right: he liked being alone and had been trained for it. Only children understand it ultimately will come to that, and they live a life practicing for the moments when it happens.

  Three

  The Trivandrum Mail slowed down, halted, arms passing fruit and tea through the windows in exchange for rupees. Mosquitoes passing through the windows in exchange for blood. Sweat running down the curl of his spine, down his chest and face, Michael Tillman stared again at the picture of Jellie Braden. People in the fields working rice, bullocks hauling loads of wood down country roads, birds flying alongside the train for a short distance and then veering off. Whistle far up ahead as the engine plowed past another village.

  A face looked over his shoulder. The man smiled and pointed at the photo of Jellie. “Very pretty. Nice lady?”

  Michael said she was very nice. The dam crumbled, everyone within a radius often feet immediately wanted to see the photo. They handled it carefully, passing it from one to the other and nodding, looking up at Michael and smiling.

  “Your lady?” one of them asked.

  He’d never thought of her that way and paused before answering. Then he grinned—“Maybe, I’m not sure“—while the train rolled on through the late afternoon and into a purple evening.

  Two hours into the ride a seat opened up. He started for it, then noticed the pregnant woman off to one side, the one he’d helped onto the train. He pointed to the seat. She nodded in thanks and sat down. Soon after he felt a tug on his sleeve. Two Indian men had jammed against each other, leaving a corner of their seat for Michael. He tossed his knapsack in the overhead rack and crouched on the space they’d created.

  Talk began, mostly sign language, but progress was made. The men were farmers going home from market. They asked simple questions and discovered Michael’s profession. Immediately he was honored in the way Indians honor teachers—respect, awe, gratitude. “The highest calling,” one man said in heavily accented English, and the others agreed, smiling and nodding. Maybe he’s right, Michael thought. It’s easy to lose perspective and become cynical when you’re close to a profession or a person for decades. You start focusing on the ugly parts, forgetting the overall beauty of what’s up close to you.

  He’d begun graduate study with soaring thoughts of becoming a scholar and a teacher, indeed the highest calling as far as he could tell. In his early twenties he’d imagined bright students he would lead through the intricacies of advanced economic theory, maybe a Nobel Prize out there if the scholarship was diligent. But in some way he’d never been able to define, graduate school and his early years as a professor had taken the dreams away from him. Something to do with the emphasis on method, with plodding data collection and analysis. Something to do with social scientists trying to operate like physicists, as if the roiling complexities of social reality could be handled in the same way as the study of nature. And something to do with students who cared only for job preparation, who demanded what they called “relevance” and had no real interest in the abstractions he found so lovely, so much like a clear, cold mountain stream running through his brain. “Good theory is the most practical thing you can study,” he told them. They didn’t believe him.

  He gave a little speech at a College of Business and Economics faculty meeting. “We are interested, it seems, not in creating, but only in maintaining— maintaining our comfortable, enviable life-style. If the taxpayers ever discover what’s really going on around here, they’ll march on us. We’re like the goddamned students and the students are like us dumb bastards: it’s come down to cooperate and graduate.”

  Two heads out of 137 nodded in agreement, 135 wished the dean would get on with the meeting and talk about next year’s salary prospects. Michael didn’t make any more speeches after that.

  So the dreams eroded. And Michael Tillman began to turn inward, to follow only what made sense to him. He was trying to get back the old feelings, the awe he’d once experienced in contemplating the great sweep of time and space, wondering about the peculiar evolutionary magic that had put him and not someone else here at this particular time in a universe still expanding.

  People saw him as distant, and he was. People saw him as arrogant, but he wasn’t, quite the opposite. He simply decided to go off by himself, go his own way. People mistake shyness and reclusive-ness—both of those—for arrogance. It’s a convenient label slapped on by those who see only the surface of things and nothing more. He understood as much and let them believe what they chose to believe.

  As a teacher he was different, but effective. Good students liked him, the middling ones were afraid of him. The poorer students avoided his classes. He wasn’t a kindly Mr. Chips, and never would be, yet he respected grit and determination, spending long hours with those who had trouble in his classes. And he reserved a special disdain for the talented ones who lazed through their student years.

  “Do what he asks and you’re okay, dead meat otherwise,” the graduate students said. “He walks around barefoot in the classroom sometimes, but he knows what he’s talking about.”

  The undergraduates wrote good things and bad things on his evaluations:

  “Tests are too hard. Needs to understand young kids and parental pressure better.”

  “He’s a little scary but gives me a lot of help outside the classroom. This is a hard course.”

  “His ideas have caused me to reevaluate my life.”

  “Seems arrogant at times, self-centered.

  Nobody can be as smart as he seems.”

  “I liked his aproach [sic].”

  “Needs a haircut and sometimes takes the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “Good in class but never seems to be around except for his office hours. I’m working at Kmart to pay off my Camaro and my schedule doesn’t fit with his.”

  “Knows his stuff but lives in another world.”

  “Great teacher. One of the two best I’ve had.”

  Michael had come out of graduate school on the run. The twenty-six articles on his résumé got him tenure in 1970 and a full professorship in 1978, a week before his fortieth birthday. After that he raised his head and began looking around, trying to get the magic back. People still called and asked what he was doing on this or that subject. “Nothing,” he’d tell them. “On to other things.”

  “Like what?” they’d ask.

  He kept it vague, enigmatic, matching the drift of his own mind. “I’m fooling around with Jeremy Bentham’s early work on the pleasure-pain calculus and its applications to problems of contemporary democracy.”

  That stopped them. There’d be a moment of silence down the long lines of Mother Bell. Then: “I see. Too bad you didn’t keep working on the earlier material; I thought you were on to something with that.”

  It went along that way, a life of slightly unsettled contentment, all right in general but cut through with an aloneness he simultaneously treasured and disliked. He had his work and the Shadow. He had a woman or two he saw occasionally. And then came Jellie Braden. And then came the Trivandrum Mail running southward into traditional India, where the old ways endured.

  The train pulled into Madurai at ten o’clock. Michael asked about a place to stay, and the conductor directed him to a small hotel just up the street from the station. “Very clean, very pleasant,” he said. Michael trusted him.

  When he went through the front door the action level cranked up. Most of the small Indian hotels are designed for people traveling in basic Indian ways, white faces being rare at their registration desks. The desk clerk was obviously pleased with Michael’s choice of hotels, and three bellboys virere assigned to take him to his room, even though he carried only a knapsack.

  One of them ran ahead and slid six feet on the floor tile, stopping exactly at Michael’s room and opening the door. Another spoke a little English and said the hotel restaurant was closed, but he would be happy to run down the street and get something.

  Micha
el knew he could count on an omelet. He asked the bellboy to fetch one, along with some bread and tea and cheese or yogurt. Twenty-five minutes later the boy returned with tea, bread, yogurt, chutney, and a three-egg omelet. Just where the eggs came from was useless information at that point. Besides, it’s an inquiry Michael never made in India, regardless of the circumstances.

  After food, sleep. One of the boys knocked on Michael’s door at first light, as requested. Michael cold-showered, had cereal and goat’s milk along with toast and tea in the restaurant, then started looking for a car to take him on to a place called Thekkady in the western mountains. The hotel manager was happy to assist, and a white Premier, one of the small, ubiquitous, Indian-made sedans, pulled up in front of the hotel thirty minutes later.

  “He has an all-India license,” the manager said.

  Michael wasn’t sure about the significance of that but took it to be a good omen. The driver used a whisk broom to clean off the backseat, and they headed out on the trail of Jellie Braden.

  The day after Michael first met Jellie at the dean’s reception, somebody somewhere yanked an autumnal lever and the aging rocket ship called college lifted off. He had a Tuesday-Thursday teaching schedule but went in even though it was Monday and frittered around. He read mail that had come in his absence, posted his office hours, straightened out the schedules of a few students who couldn’t get the classes they wanted. Word along the student grapevine was, “Tillman knows how to get around the bureaucracy, go see him if you need help.”

  He was still thinking about Jellie Braden. He hadn’t reacted that strongly to a woman for a long time. Maybe never. No, not maybe … never. The physical attraction was there, and maybe something else, too. He’d spent a restless night thinking about primal things versus rectitude, with no conclusion having been reached.

  He opened up on Tuesday with his standard lecture, “Complexity and the Boundaries of Human Policymaking,” dazzling the seniors with a little fancy stuff out of combinatorial mathematics. A typical first class session, letting them know this was going to be serious business. Most of the faculty merely handed out syllabi and directions to the restrooms. But he’d walk in, look at the students, and say, “We begin with complex systems, an examination of our own limited intellects in a contest with unlimited possibilities.”