The Fancy Dancer

swivel light flashing. We watched it go by.
    I pulled up by his bike, which was parked in front of Brown’s.
    But Vidal didn’t get out. He kept sitting there, slumped, his breathing a little easier now. The wad of wet red hanky was forgotten in his hand.
    “You’re right, Father. I tell myself that every day.”
    “Drinking takes away your motivation too. And so does fighting.”
    “It passes the time,” he said.
    He looked at me with that same strange dark look as in the church last night. In the dark of the car, you couldn’t tell his eyes didn’t match.
    “I get into fights because there’s . . . happiness locked up inside me,” he said.
    “Ask God for the key,” I said.
    He smiled a little. “You make it sound so goddam easy.”
    He reached out and plopped the soggy ball of the handkerchief into my hand, as if he were giving me a present instead of giving back something of mine. “Thanks,” he said.
    I still had my eye anxiously on the rearview mirror, watching for Winter to maybe come back. “Get going now,” I said. “Hurry up. See you tomorrow.”
    He grinned. “Why, Father, don’t you want to see me punished?”
    He got out and slammed the car door shut. He tromped on his starter and the big bike roared into life. The roar shattered the stillness of Main Street. The sound was almost like an angel’s trumpet waking up the beautiful embalmed goods in the glass coffins of the Store windows. With a little wave at me, he pulled his high-crowned hat firmly down on his head, and shot off down the street.
    I walked into the rectory at five minutes after ten.
    “You’re late,” barked Father Vance.
    "Sorry, Father,” I said. “My mother was having such a good time, I couldn’t tear myself away.”
    “These kid priests who think they can gallivant around at all hours,” ranted Father Vance, “like a bunch of no-good hippies ..
    I went to my room. The bloodstained handkerchief was still balled in my hand. It felt as alive and as incomprehensible as the Incarnation. Something, had definitely changed in my life. Something had become real.
    I raised it slowly and reverently to my lips, and kissed it.
    Monday went by slowly. I was like a little kid waiting for the last day of school to let out.
    That evening, I assumed Vidal would be late. After all, he had a sloppy life-style. But I was wrong. His motorcycle came roaring up to the rectory' ten minutes early. He sat in the waiting room up the hallway, while I finished talking to a young girl, Margaret Shoup, who was in serious trouble.
    Meg had said she wanted to confess and had missed on Saturday. She looked so adult that she wouldn’t have been asked for proof of age down in the Main Street bars. She was a curly brunette with glitter clogs on her feet, attractive in a pudgy kind of way.
    “How old are you exactly, Meg?” I asked.
    “Fourteen,” she said, looking up at me from where she knelt.
    I was floored.
    “I know, Father. Everybody always reacts that way. Even my boyfriend did.”
    “How long have you been pregnant?”
    “Oh,” she said, “five months, anyway.”
    “Why in God’s name did you wait so long before coming for help?”
    “Because I didn’t miss any periods, so I thought I was olcay.”
    So much for the success of the sex education course being taught in the Cottonwood high school, I thought.
    “Do your parents know?” I asked.
    “If they knew, they’d kill me. I’ve been pudgy like this since I was eleven, so they don’t suspect a thing.”
    I could well imagine her parents’ reaction. They were two of the stuffiest, most puritanical people in town. Her mother was the self-appointed head book-bumer of Cottonwood, and the bookseller on Main Street always shook in his shoes whenever he saw her coming. She had been in a bad mood ever since the court had knocked down her effort to have Salinger et al taken out of the bookstore.
    Meg went on with a feverish rush. “Father, I don’t know what to do. I’m too far gone to have a clinic abortion. It’d have to be in a hospital. But I’d have to have my parents’ signature for that. Anyway, I don’t have any money. I tried to borrow some from my girl friends, but they told me I was crazy to have an abortion now.”
    “Your girl friends are right,” I said. “Where’s your boyfriend?”
    “He went to Seattle. He said he was looking for a job. If I knew where he was, I’d go find him and get him to help me.”
    Abortion dilemmas always distressed me.