Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend (18 page)

Suddenly Dhiren was pushing Jellie, shouting for her to get out of the car and hide. She got out, carrying Jaya, and crouched
behind a jumble of deadfall. Dhiren pitched from the other side of the car and ran for the trees on the opposite side of the
road, nine-millimeter, Russian-made pistol in his hand. The sound of automatic weapons. Bullets spitting into the dust like
an animal with a hundred claws tracking him and closing fast, then crawling up and across his body. Dhiren spinning, stumbling
into the forest.

That night at the Lake Palace Hotel, Jellie and Michael sat on the veranda for two hours after Jaya went to bed. She told
the story, all of it, leaving out nothing. How she felt about Dhiren, her memories of him. How she carried her baby along
the night roads of south India after Dhiren had been shot, walking all night into Thekkady, where there were sympathizers
with the radicals’ cause. How the India government punished her by refusing to issue an exit visa for Jaya so Jellie could
take her to the States.

She told him how Leonard Markham had come for her, all the way to Delhi, and the words he’d said: “Let’s go home, Jellie.
We’ll find a way to get your baby to America.” She looked off into the night. “It’s amazing what parents can forgive.”

Jellie told him how she fought for years to get Jaya a visa and failed, her father helping her and pounding on authorities
from Washington, D.C., to New Delhi. But India put on its silent, impenetrable face, and nothing happened.

Jellie sat with her knees pulled up, her arms wrapped around them while she talked. “Chitra kept track of things on the Indian
side and wrote to say it was still not possible to get the necessary papers for Jaya. I tried to come back, but the Indian
government denied me an entrance visa.

“Can you imagine the agony, Michael? Three years it went on that way. I kept applying for a visa, and then for no reason I’ve
ever been able to figure out, they issued me one. I simply became unimportant to them after a while, I guess.

“I could have given up my U.S. citizenship and perhaps become an Indian citizen, but I wasn’t ready to do that, and I’m not
sure India would have accepted me. I still believed I could get Jaya out of the country. I even thought about smuggling her
out, but everyone I talked to said it was too risky, that I could end up in an Indian prison for years and leave Jaya without
any mother at all.”

Michael nodded, his face serious. When something important was being said, when attention was called for, Michael Tillman
was a world-class listener. And he was listening now to what Jellie Braden was saying. He narrowed his eyes, then rubbed them
with his palms, trying to settle himself as he started to understand things he hadn’t anticipated. It began to sink in, hard:
he’d underestimated Jellie. She wasn’t simply a bright, good-looking woman married to one of his colleagues. Instead, she
had lived another life alien to anything he could have imagined. She was far more an adult than he had realized, far more
sophisticated in a worldly fashion than he would ever be. She was talking about a different Jellie, who had lived before,
one he would not be able to comprehend or experience, no matter how much she told him, how much he thought about it. Jesus,
automatic weapons and mountain roads, a man who had given her a child in a swirl of flight and idealistic revolutionary doctrine.
She had laughed and cried with this man, and loved him wildly and freely and carried her baby as she ran with him. He felt
a strange combination of sadness for her and envy for Dhiren Velayudum, who had touched places in her that he, Michael Tillman,
could never touch. What a goddamned stupid joke, he thought, his wrong and undue assumptions about himself and Jellie and
how he presumed Jellie saw him—for the last year he had been measuring Michael Tillman against Jimmy Braden, not against a
man with the power and spirit of Dhiren Velayudum, a man who had lived for just the right amount of time and died at just
the right moment to create a larger-than-life image in the far back memories of Jellie Braden. It was an image that would
never have any equal, for it had never been lessened by the slog of ordinary, daily existence. Michael let out a long breath,
while Jellie caught hers and continued.

“All of this time Jaya was becoming a young Indian girl. I finally decided maybe it was best she be raised in Indian ways.
I didn’t seem to have any other choice. The decision was made: Jaya would continue to live with the Sudhanas until she was
old enough for boarding school, and I would visit her as often as I could.

“I sent money to the Sudhanas, tormenting myself all these years that I was not here to see my little girl growing up. Yet
I don’t know if it could have worked out any better. Jaya is a fine young woman. But I did visit every year, and we always
came out here to the Lake Palace for a while. So at least she got to know her real mother pretty well, though we have become
more like sisters than mother and daughter. I’ve always saved most of my salary from whatever job I’ve had over the years,
and that money went to India, to the Sudhanas and to Jaya. She entered boarding school when she was six and has been there
since.

“When I met Jimmy Braden and married him, all I said was I’d been involved with an Indian man who had died and I still had
a lot of friends over here who needed financial help. The lie rested in what I didn’t say. I told him I would be coming alone
to visit every year. Jimmy, I think, would have agreed to anything, just to get me to marry him—I know that sounds terrible,
but it’s true—so he said it was not a problem. He’s never complained once about my visits to India, and he’s never asked any
questions about what it is I do when I’m over here. As I’ve said before, Jimmy has his good qualities.”

Michael got up and walked behind her, put his arms around her, and kissed her hair. Jellie Braden looked off into the night.
Something large and moving fast crashed through the jungle fifty yards back of the lodge.

Jellie stood and looked up at him, put her hands on his face. “Michael, Dhiren was a lot like you, in some ways, but I don’t
want you to think you’re some kind of latter-day surrogate for him. That’s not true at all, and you must believe me when I
say it.”

He smiled and said, “I believe you, Jellie,” though he wasn’t quite as sure about it as he sounded.

“I came to India this time because I needed to think and to talk with Jaya about us. I wanted to make sure of how I felt and
for her to understand. When you found me this evening I was already turning for home, Michael. I was turning for home, toward
you.”

In his room he laid her down and kissed her in all the places she liked to be kissed. Later there was heavy scratching at
the door and the sense of great bulk moving around outside. Michael sat up. “What the hell is that? Sounds like a bear.”

“I think that’s what it is. I heard it last night.”

“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, and 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.”