Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend (2 page)

They sat on the dean’s back steps, where she bummed a cigarette from him. He asked, “When were you in India, and for how long?”

“Some time back. I spent three years there.”

She was being casually imprecise, and he wondered about that. “What part?”

“Southeast, mostly. Pondicherry.”

“I’ve heard of it, never been there. Old French city, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” She blew smoke out across the dean’s azaleas and didn’t say anything else.

“Like it?” he asked. “Dumb question. Must have if you stayed three years.”

“It was up and down. Overall, pretty good. I went to do some work for my master’s thesis in anthropology and kind of got caught
up in India in general. Never finished the paper.”

“That happens. India pretty much splits people into two categories, you love it or you can’t stand it. I’m in the former group.”

They were sitting only about a foot apart, and she looked over at him. “So am I.”

“How’d you meet, you and Jim?”

“After I came back from India I wanted to hang around Bloomington even though I wasn’t in school. I wangled a job as secretary
in the economics department. Jimmy was a junior professor, just out of graduate school with his bright, shiny degree. He always
was polite to me and wore expensive suits, wrote articles on esoteric topics I didn’t understand but which I dutifully typed.
I was pretty much lost and wandering back then. When he asked me to marry him, I couldn’t think of any good reason not to,
so I said yes.”

Michael listened to what she said and how she said it. She married Jim Braden because she couldn’t think of reasons not to.
That was a strange way of putting it. Close to her like this, gray eyes steady on his, he upgraded his earlier idea about
putting her on the dean’s kitchen table. The new plan involved stripping her naked, taking off his own clothes, and flying
in that shimmering state of affairs all the way to the Seychelles, first class. Upon arrival it would be a headlong and forever
plunge into lubricious nirvana. He was quite certain Jellie Braden would look better than wonderful under a jungle waterfall
with a red hibiscus in her hair.

“How long ago was that, when you got married?” As soon as he asked, a voice in his head groaned, “You dumb ass, Tillman, why’d
you say that? It’s more than you need to know and too damned forward—you just met the woman.” He stood up and stomped out
his cigarette on the dean’s driveway. Anyplace else he field-stripped them and stuck the butts in his pocket, but not in the
dean’s driveway. Michael was like an old dog there, staking out his territory, making sure he left a little something behind
for Arthur to sniff.

She walked over to her car and put hers out in the ashtray. “Jimmy’11 complain like crazy when he sees that. He won’t let
me smoke at home when he’s there. I’ll get a lecture on our way out of here, and he’ll spray the car with air freshener two
minutes after we hit the driveway.” She looked at him and chewed lightly on her lower lip. “Jimmy and I have been married
ten years. I suppose we better go inside.”

He started pulling off his tie. “You go ahead. I’m going back to my apartment and snuggle down with Joseph Conrad.”

“Nice meeting you,” Jellie Braden said.

“Same here. See you around.”

She smiled. “Sure.”

And Michael thought of a waterfall in the Seychelles that would be just perfect. Fifteen months later he rode the
Trivandrum Mail
into south India, toward places he’d never been, looking for her.

H
igh summer 1953, a far place called Da-kota and the wind hot and making your greasy clothes stick to your body. Michael Till-man
was fifteen then, leaning under the hood of Elm-ore Nixon’s car, banker Nixon of First National in Custer. T-shirt riding
up his back and toes barely touching the cement, he listened to the big V-8’s erratic turn, adjusted the carburetor, listened
again as the engine smoothed out and settled down.

“Mikey, get tha’ sonabitchin’ Olds finished. We got three more to go yet.” His father was staggering around, whiskey flask
buried deep in the back pocket of gray-striped coveralls.

Outside at the pumps his mother was filling the tank of a grain truck and wiping her forehead with the back of her arm. July
27, 4
P.M.
at Tillman’s Texaco, a world of heavy smells and flaking paint in fading greens and peeling whites. Roar of traffic on Route
16 out in front; tourists with suitcases lashed to car tops, on their way to see the faces of Rushmore.

Straightening up, Michael removed the protective cloth from the Olds’ fender and slammed the hood. He backed the car out of
the service bay and parked it off to one side, stood there for a moment, wiping his hands on a cloth. A Lakota Sioux in rundown
cowboy boots, short and sweating into his pockmarks, waited by the roadside for someone or something or some other time better
than the one in which he lived.

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
Einstein 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.

T
he
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.