Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend (11 page)

“Hello, Michael. I came to help you find the ducks a new home.”

He cared for her more at that moment than ever before.

“Jellie… thanks for coming. It’s going to be something of a mess, I’m afraid. But the little folks need somewhere to go.”

She walked over to him, wrapped both her arms around one of his, and leaned against the Shadow, putting her head against his
shoulder. The physical contact was unnerving and surprised him, but he thought, Maybe we’re going to work it out and be friends,
nothing more. He only thought that for a moment. Being merely Jellie’s friend and nothing more was impossible for him.

The Humane Society troops pulled in, a professor from the biology department riding along with them. He had cages and a net
that could be fired out over the pond with small rockets, which took him about twenty minutes to get set up. Jellie didn’t
say much, Michael didn’t say much, watching the professor and his helpers from the Humane Society, all of whom wore chest-high
rubber waders. They strung the rocket net along the shore while the ducks woke up and swam around in circles, alarmed and
telling everyone who would listen about how they felt.

Jellie and Michael walked over near the water where the professor was crouched, making adjustments on his apparatus. He straightened
up and said, “Ready.” Everyone stood back while he threw bread crumbs onto the water. Alarm is one thing, bread crumbs are
something else, and the ducks swam toward them, quacking. When the ducks came within range the biologist fired his rockets,
which scared hell out of the ducks. But the net arched across the pond, went down past the face of a rising sun and over ten
frightened ducks.

The biologist waded into the water, motioning for the Humane Society to follow him. They got around on the pond side of the
net, gently pushing the net and ducks toward shore. The professor obviously had done this before. He glanced up at Jellie
and Michael. “We’ll hand you the ducks. You two can put them in the cages, very carefully, if you please.” So saying, he rolled
up his sleeves and began reaching under the net, which now formed a small semicircle near the shore. It was all very crisp,
easier than Michael had thought it would be. He and Jellie put the ducks in cages, Jellie petting them and talking in a low,
sweet voice as she handled the terrified birds.

The operation took less than ten minutes. The biologist rolled up his net while Michael and Jellie carried three cages to
the Humane Society truck and put them in the back. A woman in a tan shirt with a
Humane Society of the United States
patch on it said, “We’re taking them out to Heron Lake north of town. You know where that is?”

Michael nodded. “I’ll follow you on my bike.” He looked over at Jellie. “Want to come? There’s room in the truck, or you can
ride with me.”

She turned to the woman from the Humane Society. “We’ll meet you out there.” At that moment, Michael felt as if some kind
of decision beyond transportation had been made.

He kicked the Shadow’s starter and helped Jellie climb on behind him. She’d never been on a motorcycle before, so he gave
her a twenty-second lecture on where to rest her feet and how to lean with him in the curves. She wrapped her arms around
his waist and said, “This is fun, Michael,” as he pulled out behind the truck.

The campus was quiet early on a Saturday, air warming rapidly, prodded on by a fat, red sun. The Shadow rolled smoothly down
the streets of Cedar Bend and out into the countryside through tunnels of red and yellow leaves. Jellie’s arms tightened around
Michael. He could feel her body tucked against his lower back and rear. They could be far into Minnesota by evening if he
just let the Shadow run on toward wherever the highway went.

They swung into the state park entrance, still following the Humane Society truck and its little cargo. Through the park and
on to Heron Lake, lying cool and flat on a windless morning. The ducks were shown the water and knew what to do with it, waddling
out of their cages and paddling around, looking for food. The biologist said, “It’ll take them a while to adjust. With all
the people at the university handing out grub, they’re not used to foraging on their own. But I’ll check on them every few
days. Eventually they’ll get accustomed to life out here. Portions of the lake stay open during winter.”

This was the way it was meant to be, Michael was thinking as they rode back into town. Jellie and he, and the Shadow, and
bright autumn mornings with the road out in front of them. Instead he was taking her home to James Lee Braden HI, who probably
had tickets for the football game that afternoon. He glanced at his watch—eight-fifteen—it was going to be a long day and
a long life.

Jellie was trying to say something, but Michael couldn’t hear her over the wind and sound of the engine. He eased off the
Shadow, letting it slow down and coast, and tilted his head back toward her. She put her fingers on the side of his neck,
speaking in a soft voice, right into his ear: “Michael, can we go to your apartment?” He turned his head for an instant and
looked into the gray eyes. She was half smiling, half not smiling. A strange, warm, loving look.

He nodded and began to shake a little. She laid her cheek against his back and put her hand under his jacket and inside his
shirt, moving it slowly back and forth over his chest and stomach. The Shadow took him toward home, as it had taken him there
so many times over the years. And it took him and Jellie Bra-den toward a future he’d long ago decided would never come. When
they got off the Shadow at his apartment, smoke from burning leaves was drifting through the neighborhood. In the distance
voices were singing the university fight song at a morning pep rally.

He held the door for her and they went inside, into the world of a man who lived alone and stayed mostly to himself. Dishes
in the sink, a pair of jeans on the floor, streaks on the windows. Small kitchen, large living room, bedroom off through another
door. In a corner of the living room nearest the kitchen was a scarred maple table where he took his meals. The three chairs
around the table were each of a different kind and Goodwill rough. Plain, ceramic salt and pepper shakers sat on the table
next to a stack of paper napkins.

Near the table and along the wall was his work area. His desk was a nine-foot unfinished door laid across sawhorses. Brick-and-board
bookcases flanked the desk, with one long board running over the top of it, holding reference books. In the middle of the
desk was a computer, turned on and with words typed across the screen, cursor blinking. The far end of the desk held a stack
of audio equipment, tapes in desultory piles on and next to the equipment.

Jellie took off her stocking cap and laid her coat over the back of a chair. As she looked around, it struck her that she
knew very little about Michael Tillman. More than that, she’d never been completely alone with him. “I think I need a drink,”
she said. “Do you have anything with alcohol in it?”

“Beer, wine, and maybe“—he opened a cupboard door and looked inside—“a little whiskey.” He took out the whiskey bottle and
held it up. It was a third full. Clarice sometimes preferred whiskey when the nights were long and wild and getting wilder.

“About two fingers of the Jack Daniel’s over ice with a little water”—Jellie took a deep breath— “should do it.”

Michael stood for a moment, holding the whiskey bottle, looking at her. “You okay?”

“Yes.” She smiled and brushed loose strands of hair back from her face. “About eighty percent, at least.”

“I could take you home if you want.”

She shook her head, small silver earrings from her early days in India moving as she did it. “Let’s try the Jack Daniel’s
first.”

He owned four glasses. All of them were in the sink, dirty. He washed one and pulled an ice cube tray from the refrigerator.

Jellie walked slowly past his desk, trailing her finger along the edge of it. Above the desk were notes and two snapshots.
One of the pictures was her standing by a stone wall in Ireland. The other was a yellowed, curling, black-and-white shot of
a young woman in a long dress and a bearded man in a dark turtleneck sweater, jeans, and sandals. She stared at the second
photo and recognized the eyes. “Is that you?”

He looked up from the counter where he was fixing her drink. “Yes. A long time ago in Berkeley.” He poured Jack Daniel’s and
handed the glass to her. “The woman’s name was Nadia. She’s an implacable feminist now—was starting to become one then, in
fact—works for the National Council of Women. We exchange notes at Christmas.”

Jellie didn’t say anything. She read the words typed on the computer screen:
In this place I hear the quiet rasp of things as they used to be. I come at dawn, I come at nightfall, and all the hours in
between. I come to hear the rustle of twilight robes and songs from the time of Gregory. I come because old things live here,
things I understand without knowing why.

“Is this something you’re writing?” She sipped on her whiskey and pointed at the screen.

“Yeah, I keep fiddling around, thinking I might have a novel inside me.” He set the bottle of beer he was drinking on the
counter.

“Do you?”

“Maybe. It’s harder than I thought it would be. Writing the academic stuff and essays, you’re always bound to reality. So
far I’m having trouble dealing with the freedom to make up anything I want to say. It’s kind of strange—in fiction you get
to tell lies and are applauded for it.”

“Justifiable lies,” she said. “I suppose that happens sometimes in real life, too.”

“If you’re a relativist it does. And maybe now and then if it’s absolutely necessary to cushion someone from a world gone
too harsh and bitter.”

In the far corner of the room was an easel folded and leaning against a window. “Do you paint?” Jellie asked.

Michael grinned, shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “I try. I know a guy named Wayne Regenson over in the art department.
He and his wife periodically fight like hell. When that happens he drops by for a little male support, which I’m not very
good at, but better than nothing, I suppose. In return he’s been trying to teach me oil painting. It’s coming real slow. Real,
real
slow. In some ways, though, it can be a lot like mathematics—true mathematics—the same feelings in your brain. The elegance
of saying much with little, bringing together left-brained technique and right-brained shapes.”

“Like the long-range jumpshot, too?”

He thought for a moment. “Yes, that too.”

“Is this one of yours?” She was looking at an oil painting, framed and hanging on the wall. It was a group of black, vertical
lines sprouting slashes of green and a ribbon of yellow winding away from the viewer, back into the vertical lines. Farther
and farther the streak of yellow wound, disappearing then in a splash of red.

“Yes, it’s the only one I can bear looking at. Actually I kind of like it.”

“So do I. Does it have a title?”

“I call it
Butterfly Gone.”

Jellie tipped her glass and took a serious drink of Jack Daniel’s. She turned and looked at him, then out the window. In the
hard, south light of November, he noticed for the first time the early lines of age coming to her face.

“This seems very strange, Michael. All our talks, our resolutions about right and wrong… all of that.” The university band
was marching down the street a block away, playing the fight song,
“We will go undaunted, hear our cry, hear our cry.”
Jellie Braden watched the dark curling leaves of late autumn stir and begin to tumble across the grass as a light breeze
came in from the west.

Michael always remembered how she had looked that morning in Cedar Bend, staring outside at the things of autumn. Still looking
out the window, she’d reached up and taken the elastic band from her pony-tail, shaking the thick black hair loose and long.
She’d looked over at him then, the gray eyes soft and no longer like an arrow in flight, saying, “I’m a little shaky. It’s
been a long time since… well, a long time.”

“When are you expected home?”

“I have the day. Jimmy’s attending a reunion of his fraternity on campus. They’re all going to the game and out to dinner
after that. All that arm punching and male bonding was more than I could think about tolerating. Besides“—she smiled—“there
were the ducks.”

In midafternoon they heard the roar of the football crowd from the stadium. The sound of it came faintly over tapes of Cleo
Laine ballads and sweet obscurities whispered in Tamil by Jellie Braden on an autumn afternoon in the high latitudes.

“If God lives at all, God lives in moments like these,” a man had once said to her. And she had said that to Michael Tillman
in English, looking up at him, touching his face with her hands, loving him and missing that other man and sometimes confusing
the two of them even though she didn’t want to on that afternoon.

Michael looked down at the pulse of blood in her throat, at her eyes widening as she arched her breasts and belly toward him,
eyes looking first at him and then straight upward as India rolled within her and time went back to the high country of an
older land where dark hands had moved over those same breasts and a voice had commanded her, “Wider now, Jellie, wider still,
everything, Jellie. Give me all of you, and I’ll give you back yourself when we have finished.” And in the high country she
had screamed aloud in some combination of fear and pleasure. And she had done that once more in a bed in Iowa, then turned
the scream into a dwindling, involuntary cry for all the things she had once felt and now felt again with another strange
man who lived in his own far places.

Michael had a sense that day she was feeling and doing things not attributable to her life with Jimmy Braden. It was obvious
this was a woman who had gone before into sensual frontiers where he was sure Jimmy never ventured. Something about how nakedness
did not bother her. Something about how she moved freely and uninhibited beneath him and with him, how she touched him with
hands that were practiced and surprising in what they did. Something about the directness of her words when they first lay
on the bed, still dressed, and she had pulled back from him, smiling. “I seem to remember it’s necessary for me to take off
my jeans if this is going to work out in the best possible way.”