Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend Page 3

  After that he’d turn to the blackboard and grin to himself as he heard them digging out notebooks and pens they hadn’t anticipated using the first day. Michael Tillman, classroom serial killer.

  On Thursday he was keeping the office hours posted on his door:

  Tillman

  2:00-4:00 Tues. & Thurs.

  By Appointment Otherwise

  Early in the semester traffic was light. The students were still drinking beer and hadn’t really gotten into the books yet. Things usually picked up about three weeks farther on, right before the first examination. He was leaning back, feet on his desk, office door propped open with a book praising Reaganomics written by one of the faculty’s supply-side economists. It was understood he chose his doorstops carefully and rotated them periodically, a kind of floor-level editorial on the times around him. Quiet rap of knuckles on the open door, and he looked up into gray eyes: Jellie Braden, in tight jeans, red sweater with a white shirt collar peeking out of it, well-traveled hiking boots. Black hair tucked up under a round, short-billed wool cap.

  He hadn’t fully appreciated her long legs on Sunday. The skirt and boots she’d worn to the dean’s party had disguised her lower parts, though he would have guessed as much if he’d thought about it. An old green book bag was slung over her right shoulder.

  “Hello, Michael Tillman. I was on my way to Jimmy’s office and saw your door open.”

  He swung his feet off the desk, tossed the computer magazine over his shoulder, and said, “Hello yourself, Jellie Braden. Nice of you to stop by. Come in, sit down, the smoking lamp is lit in here.”

  “Okay. I have a few minutes before Jimmy’s out of class.” She gave the impression she didn’t have anything better to do with a little downtime, but he didn’t really think she meant it that way.

  “Jellie, you look like what the admissions crowd calls a mature student, knapsack and all.”

  “I am exactly that. Well, a student, anyway. My maturity’s an open question.”

  He was about to comment on what he saw as her rather obvious maturity but decided not to. “What are you taking?”

  “A course in cultural traditions of the North American Plains Indians—Native Americans, as we know them now. Another one in archaeological field methods. I haven’t been able to find a job yet, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to lie around the house all day and watch the soaps. What are you teaching this semester?”

  “A senior-level course in decision making and a graduate course in quantitative methods. Hot stuff, you ought to sign up for them.”

  “I thought you were an economist?”

  “I still am, sort of. Got interested in more applied topics a few years ago. Age does that to you.”

  “It all sounds pretty grubby to me. Something to do with making money and screwing consumers, I’ll bet.”

  Michael laughed. “Money, maybe. Screwing consumers, no.”

  “How do you separate the two? It always looks like the same thing to me.”

  “Good point. But I’d rather not think about it. I’m like the old A-bomb scientists; I just produce the knowledge, what the public chooses to do with it is not my responsibility. That’s rubbish, of course, but it gets me by if I dare to reflect too much on what I’m doing.”

  “Well, at least you’re honest about it. Don’t you wear a suit and tie when you’re teaching?”

  “No, I used to when I first started. Damn chalk dust gets all over the good material. Besides, this climate’s just too deucedly cold in the winter to dress very fancy. Somehow I never felt right wearing long Johns underneath pinstripes. As the tailors say, the cloth doesn’t hang properly. Jeans and sweaters work out okay. That also bothers the dean, but then just about everything I do bothers the dean, whether I’m trying to bother him or not.” Michael tapped a pencil on the desk and grinned at her. “I once designed a uniform for the dean, but he didn’t take to the idea.”

  Jellie grinned back. “Just what would a dean’s uniform look like?”

  “A jumpsuit plus face paint done in what I called ‘manager’s camouflage,’ mottled tones of brown and gray to blend in with filing cabinets and other office equipment. I told him, ‘Arthur, you’d be able to skulk around and do all kinds of secret things, check up on us to make sure we’re not dancing through the first-floor lobby with garlands in our hair.’

  Jellie’s grin twisted into a little crooked smile. “Exactly what did the dean say about your idea?”

  “He didn’t say anything. Just shook his head and walked away. That was after I went on to tell him how the uniform could be coupled with what I called the ‘administrator’s go-squat,’ a modified duck walk that would keep him down at desktop level. I demonstrated the go-squat for him in the hall outside his office and guaranteed him he’d have the ultimate in close supervision if he’d adopt the uniform and the walk. Guess he didn’t grasp the concept. Carolyn liked the idea, however.”

  Small talk, nothing talk. It went on from there. Jellie began dropping by his office once a week or so, and she and Michael whacked their way toward each other through the old thicket of ignorance separating strangers. Sometimes he had a partial erection just talking to her and was glad he wore his jeans snug, which kind of held events under control. He’d given up on organized religion years ago, but it’s handy when you need it, and he said over and over to himself, “O Absolute, give me Jellie Braden; somehow You must do as much for a simple man.” The words became a mantra that never left his mind.

  At the fall picnic on a Sunday, Michael sat on one end of a teeter-totter in a park along the river, languidly watching the accounting department take on the marketing department as part of an exciting volleyball tournament organized by the dean and his secretary. His secretary liked Michael even less than the dean did, calling him impertinent. Michael thought about impertinence and factored in cigarette smoking, which the dean complained about. The result popped out: Be gladdened in your heart you have tenure. He was glad, and the sun was late-September pleasant.

  The economists were anxiously waiting in the wings for their second crack at the marketeers, part of a double-elimination scheme designed by a sports fanatic in the operations research area. The genius had used some fairly high-powered mathematics to make up the pairings based on the departmental won-loss records from the last three picnics and had run off a four-color diagram on one of the Apples.

  The dean shot up into the far reaches of delirium when he saw the printout and insisted everyone look at “Don’s good work,” as he called it (an extra two hundred for Don at salary time, Michael guessed). Michael thought it was using a sledgehammer to drive a tack and said so when the dean asked his opinion of Don’s brilliance. What he said was, “I think Don-Don applied high thinking to low living.”

  Jesus, the faculty was out of shape. Flabby bodies whacking a volleyball into the trees, stumbling around, falling down, the dean tooting on his whistle. He looked to see if the hospital emergency unit was standing by.

  “Wanna teeter, Tillman-Michael?” Jellie was coming across the grass toward him, smiling. He’d seen her earlier from a distance. Anytime he was in the same physical area as Jellie his radar kicked in, and he was aware of her location at all times. She and Jim had arrived an hour earlier. Michael had come alone on the Black Shadow, goosing it a little as he passed the dean’s car on his way into the park and waving to Carolyn when he went by. No Deanette T-shirt this year, and he felt bad for her. That’s why he had a bookstore make him up a T-shirt reading Possible Dean and was wearing it.

  “No, I have the totter end. You’ll have to teeter. That’s the easy part, anyway, and it’s what I do during the week.” He stood up a bit, lowering the other end of the seesaw. He outweighed her by about sixty pounds and scooted up the board to balance things out, then tossed her a beer out of the little six-pack cooler by his feet.

  “How does Jim feel about his wife sharing an unsanded plank with another man?”

  “Mostly he doesn’t pay any att
ention to that sort of thing, but he can be jealous in a petulant way sometimes. And for no good reason, I might add. But he likes you and knows we’re friends, so that’s different. Anyway, he’s totally focused on pounding the marketing department to smithereens in the next round of wretchedness over there.”

  She was luminous in the soft, slanting light of an autumn afternoon. Her breasts rose and fell pleasantly beneath her cotton blouse as they teetered and tottered. Her jeans stretched tight across her hips and thighs where she straddled the board. Did the Absolute build in this much torment as a last delicious bit of private entertainment for Him or Her or Whatever? Michael Tillman wondered.

  “No volleyball, Michael? You look like you’re in good shape, and judging by the pathetic little war going on over there at the net, you’d be a dominant force.”

  He glanced toward the net and saw James Lee Braden III in his horn-rims, sweatshirt, and floppy khakis doing side-straddle hops as he warmed up for a second run at the marketeers. Braden HI went into the dirt when he tripped over Dr. Patricia Sanchez’s foot. Then he realized he hadn’t answered Jellie’s question and she was watching him watch her. He took a hit of beer and said, “Nope. I did my four miles on the road this morning at dawn. That’s enough for one day. Besides, I might fall into Kipperman-the-accountant’s stomach and not find my way out by class time Tuesday.”

  Jellie Braden laughed, and they went up and down on a September afternoon in Iowa.

  Four

  In the countryside west of Madurai the morning was sweet and clear, in the way India feels before the heat and dust come up. Especially sweet and clear, because if it all worked out, Jellie was four hours ahead in the high country of the Western Ghats. Maybe tomorrow wouldn’t be as sweet and clear. Maybe he had no business doing this, following her. The old doubts again, bothering him for this whole trip. Forget it, push on. Jellie had her problems, whatever they were, and Michael had his —forty-three, sinking toward a time when it would be too late for this kind of thunder in his brain and body. If it came to war, it could be sorted out in the hills of India, as good a place as any. She could send him away, and he’d be no worse off than he was sitting back in Cedar Bend listening to gossip about Jimmy Braden’s wife running off on some existential quest.

  * * *

  At Thanksgiving their first year in Cedar Bend, the Bradens invited Michael for dinner. They’d only been in town for three months, but Jimmy was set on having what he called “a major do.” Jellie protested, saying they didn’t know many people and somehow Thanksgiving had always seemed a special time for family and close friends. Her parents were coming from Syracuse, that was probably enough. But Jimmy made up a list, looked at it, and said if two-thirds of them came, it would be a respectable showing.

  Jimmy’s list was predictable, safe. He said, “I thought about inviting Michael Tillman, but I doubt if he’d come. He doesn’t seem the type for Thanksgiving dinner. Then again, Michael’s single and so is your friend, Ann Frazier, from sociology. They’re both kind of different, maybe we can do a little matchmaking over turkey.”

  Jellie thought about it. She imagined Michael sitting at their dining room table. Strange and different Michael Tillman, big-shouldered and brown-eyed with brown hair longer than the approved length for a business school faculty member. A little something out of the ordinary. Sunburned in the face, almost a workingman’s face, as if he’d be comfortable cashing his paycheck in a bar across the street from where he might have worked as a machinist. And his long, smooth fingers with the faintest imprint of grease even hard scrubbing couldn’t remove.

  A month before, she and Jimmy had been coming home from a local theater production. The night streets were wet from October rain, and suddenly there was Michael beside them when they stopped for a light. He sat on the Shadow, revving its engine. She remembered the car radio was playing a song by Neil Diamond, “Cracklin’ Rosie,” while Jimmy was telling her to find the public radio station devoting an entire evening to Beethoven. It stuck in her mind, the song playing at that moment. From that time on, she could be anywhere and hear “Cracklin’ Rosie,” and instantly she was back on the streets of Cedar Bend, looking at Michael on the Shadow.

  Jimmy had leaned out the window of the Buick and said, “Hi, Michael.”

  Michael—yellow bandanna tied around his head, leather jacket, boots, and jeans—turned and waved to the Bradens, then looked straight ahead. When the light changed he gunned the Shadow and was gone, straddling that smooth black machine of his and disappearing into the countryside.

  Jimmy said, “I think it’s a bit chilly and wet to be riding a motorcycle, don’t you?”

  But Jellie didn’t hear him. She was watching the Shadow’s taillight moving away from her. And she wanted to be riding with Michael Tillman, to be going out there where she had once traveled and was now afraid to go again. She wanted to climb on that black machine and feel the beat of its engine between her legs and the roar of wind in her ears.

  Admit it, she’d always had a taste for a peculiar kind of man, the sort that seems ill designed for the world in which they live (Jimmy is a whole other story—those were her break-even years). Michael Tillman was like that, she sensed, as if a great fist had reached back and plunked a hard-drinking, hard-cussing, nineteenth-century keelboatman into the 1980s, given him an intelligence out beyond where the rest of us live, and said, “Now, behave yourself,” all the while being doubtful that he would. And he didn’t.

  Her taste in men probably had something to do with the genes arching forward from her great-great-grandmother, Elsa, who had been a radical feminist when it was considered improper if not immoral for a woman to think about such things, let alone speak and parade in the streets on behalf of them. Elsa Mark-ham had left her husband, taken up with an equally radical socialist, and gone on the road as a warrior for women’s rights and free love. The Markham family didn’t talk much about Great-Great-Grandmother Elsa.

  Jellie kept that side of herself hidden for a long time. Not totally suppressed, hidden, tucked way back where it couldn’t get hold of her and disrupt the well-designed life her parents had drafted in clear terms for their two daughters. Jellie’s older sister, Barbara, had shouldered arms and marched straight into that well-designed life. She got her degree in elementary education, married a successful insurance broker, and stayed in Syracuse. The Markhams were pleased with Barbara’s choices, and the world was good.

  In their late girlhoods, Barbara read Little Women and loved it. Jellie told her it was cloying. Jellie read Madame Bovary and loved it. Barbara told her it was trash. Then she ratted on Jellie and told Mother Mark-ham that Jellie wanted to be Emma Bovary. Mother grabbed Jellie’s copy of Flaubert and read it in one sitting, concentrating on the passages Jellie had underlined. A lecture on virtue followed, but Jellie got out of it by saying she didn’t want to be like Emma at all and that you could look at Madame Bovary as a kind of primer on how not to live. What she really wanted to say was Emma handled it all wrong by being loose with money. A true romantic would have concentrated on the sex and let it go at that.

  Given that Elsa Markham’s restless ways had somehow fluttered down to her, it was nearly inevitable Jellie’s life would turn out as it did. Her India experiences early on gave her some pause, however, and Jimmy came along. She was in a space where she needed to paddle flat water for a while, fatigued from the emotional roll and toss high adventure brings with it. Jimmy looked stable, and he was. Jimmy looked comfortable, and he was. Jellie needed peace and quiet. When he proposed she said yes for reasons she wasn’t sure of, but they had something to do with stability and comfort and peace and quiet.

  Jellie fought hard against the tug of Elsa’s genes for years; still, they wouldn’t leave her alone. Inside the good faculty wife with a degree in anthropology was a keelboatman’s woman who wanted to put her bare breasts against Michael Tillman’s face and feel his mouth come onto them.

  When Jimmy showed her his list of invitees for Th
anksgiving, she hesitated. Her first inclination was to go for comfort and stability. But Elsa Markham took hold of her arm, and Jellie scratched “M. Tillman” at the bottom. “I think that’s a good idea. Ask Michael and see what he says.” She decided at that moment to wear her red dress with the long puffy sleeves if he accepted their invitation.

  Michael Tillman didn’t celebrate holidays—any of them—but Thanksgiving at the Bradens was a chance to be around Jellie, and he couldn’t pass it up. Jim had said there would be a few other people, but he and Jellie especially hoped Michael would come, and oh, by the way, bring a friend if you want.

  He came in from his morning run, got his dog and cat fed and squared away, then read for a while. Around one o’clock he stood before his bedroom closet and pulled out a gray tweed jacket and a blue, button-down-collar shirt. Most of his ties had fallen onto the closet floor a thousand or so years ago and looked like it, the silk ones wrinkled and dusty. But a dark red wool number, decorated with Save the Turtles rampant on a field of the swimming reptiles, looked like a candidate for resuscitation with the help of a good brushing. He pulled out a pair of wrinkled charcoal slacks and held them up. Malachi, the border collie who was named after Michael’s favorite professor in graduate school, put his head on his paws and made small, whining sounds. “No dice, huh, Malachi?”

  Michael turned, showed the slacks to Casserole-the-cat, and asked, “Whaddya think, Cass?” She blinked, yawned, and headed for the living room. With that kind of poll results on the slacks, he shoved hangers around, located a pair of presentable jeans, and finished off this exercise in hesitant elegance with gray socks and the old reliable cordovan loafers.