Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend (3 page)

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.

Michael 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.”

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:

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.’