The Fancy Dancer

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    At supper the next night, Father Vance sat considering my request for permission to eat at Vidal’s.
    On his plate were the last crumbs of Mrs. Shoup’s chocolate cake, and his Messenger was open before him. He was deeply engrossed in getting his swollen fingers to roll one of his handmade cigarettes. His pouch and his package of La Riz rolling papers lay beside the magazine. He had switched to home-rolled as part of our cost-cutting program, after he added up how much cigarettes cost him a year.
    He looked doubtful about my request.
    “We made some progress at the first counseling session,” I said. “But he seemed a little stiff in the rectory. Maybe it’ll help if we talk at his home. Because I do have the feeling that I can get somewhere with him.”
    “Well, I suppose it’ll be all right,” he said. “But you be home by ten. And I trust you won’t come home drunk.”
    Father Vance never touched any liquor except the wine at Mass, and he was fond of saying that he wished the Lord had used milk at the Last Supper.
    He highly disapproved of the fact that I sometimes accepted a drink when I went on parish visits, though I never had more than one.
    I left the table feeling uneasily happy. I had lied to Father Vance. But it was a Jesuitical kind of a lie, partly truth. What I hadn’t told him was that Vidal was becoming as much a friend as a penitent.
    “I’m lonely,” I wanted to tell Father Vance. “I have so little in common with Vidal, but it’s worlds more than I have in common with you.”
    But there was no telling that to the old priest, of course. Because he would have lectured me on the pitfalls of becoming emotionally involved with parishioners’ problems. “A good priest is like a good dentist,” he was always saying. “He drills without hearing the patient say ouch.”
    The next evening, I put on my social uniform—the black pants and turtleneck and sports jacket. About six p.m. I drove across town. Once again I felt the same giddy apprehension as when I was driving to Helena.
    The weather had changed, and it was a typical cold rainy June night in the Rockies.
    Vidal lived on “the other side of the tracks.” My windshield wipers swiped aside the spattering raindrops as the car bounced over the railroad crossings. The Milwaukee and Northern Pacific railroads cut Cottonwood in half. Behind me, on the east side of the- tracks were the “nice” residential areas and the business district. Ahead of me on the west side was the not-so-nice area, which ranged from lower-class to shantytown.
    I drove past the weathered red depot and the deserted yards. The two Amtrak trains a day didn’t stop at Cottonwood—they just highballed through, blowing their whistles.
    I drove across the concrete bridge. The little Cottonwood River was running bank high with the last of the melt waters from the mountains.
    I turned the Triumph onto Willow Avenue.
    In Cottonwood, Willow Avenue was synonymous with “poor.” The homes were every kind of poor. Some trailer homes and cheap prefab houses had tiny overgrazed pastures behind them, with underfed horses that the local ASPCA was always making noises about. There were even a couple of ancient log houses that dated right back to the early days of the town.
    At the end of Willow Avenue there was a dreary little clapboard house known as the Allerton house, though all the Allertons were in the cemetery now. Blizzards and cloudbursts had -scoured the paint right off it, and the bare silvery wood had the clean look of bone. A tangle of Virginia creeper covered the porch, so that the lone rocking chair with no seat was in a cool green cave. By the front step, one huge old peony plant was in full bloom—it was probably planted by the family that built the house seventy-five years ago. The rose-pink exotic blooms, bent over on the steps by the rain, only made the house look shabbier.
    The backyard was just an alkali flat, bordered by the willow brakes at the next bend of the river. The stains and crumbling of the house’s granite foundation showed that, in years of higher water, the house had been flooded.
    Vidal’s bike stood on the porch, out of the wet. It was secured to the wall of the house by a heavy chain and padlock.
    Vidal rented this house for $150 a month. The lights in the windows looked warm and inviting. I was a little cold from the rain, because we didn’t keep the temperature very high in the rectory. The prospect of a warm supper and