The Fancy Dancer

some casual talk was nice.
    For some reason my stomach was churning with nervousness. I knocked on the door.
    After a couple of minutes, Vidal opened it. He was wearing Levi’s, an undershirt, and no shoes. His hair was damp. His bare arms and shoulders were as faintiy patchy as his face. But you forgot that fault when you saw how well muscled they were.
    “Hi,” he said, grinning. “I just took a shower. Come on in.”
    Then he added in a low voice, “Now don’t pay any attention to my wife. She can’t help the way she is.”
    I looked around the living room, and my giddy an-59
    ticipation melted away into the rain streaming down the windowpanes.
    Few homes in Cottonwood were as squalid as this, of the ones I’d made house calls to. Vidal made a good wage as a mechanic, so it couldn’t be poverty. It had to be because neither of them cared about the way they lived.
    Two muddy mongrel dogs slept on the sagging sofa. The chintzy fake Oriental rug hadn’t been swept for a month. Well-chewed bones, even a corncob or two, were scattered on the floor, along with baby rattles and seeds from the parakeets’ cage by the window. The cheap old TV was blaring loudly. A bundle of greasy mechanic’s overalls and dirty diapers lay on one of the armchairs.
    Vidal’s wife had decorated the walls by cutting a lot of color pictures out of magazines and pasting them up. It was a mural celebrating a consumers’ Garden of Eden: wild animals, movie actresses, glimmering glasses of jello, flowers, bombs bursting, American Beauty roses.
    Through the doorway, I could see into the kitchen. Dirty dishes, glasses, cups, cereal and cracker boxes stood on the table, and one of the wooden chairs was tipped over on the floor.
    Vidal turned down the TV a little.
    “This ain’t the Ritz, is it?” he said. “Sit down, Father. Just kick those mutts off the couch. Now, I’ve got whiskey and wine.”
    “Whiskey,” I said.
    Vidal unearthed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from a cabinet by the sofa, and a couple of tumblers that were pretty clean. He poured us two shots.
    “Cheers,” he said, and poured his down his throat.
    Just then Vidal’s wife came wandering out of the kitchen. She was carrying a baby over one arm, and a ratty beaded handbag over the other, as if she was going out. She was wearing absolutely nothing but an old peach-colored taffeta slip. It was too big for her, except where her swollen breasts and slumped stomach stretched it tight. Her nipples had to be oozing milk, because there were two dark stains over them.
    Her rumpled ash-blonde hair was pinned back from
    her face with about twenty bobby pins.
    She must have been around nineteen years old, but the early sag in her body made her look much older. To judge from the vacant look in her gray eyes, Father Vance had not been cruel, just truthful, when he said she was an idiot. If I had been the kind of priest who was freaked out by the sight of raw womanhood, she might have made me faint.
    Vidal took one look at her and groaned.
    “Just an hour ago, I had her all cleaned up,” he said.
    Gently he propelled her into the bedroom. “Father, would you help me with her?”
    The bedroom was as sad as the rest of the house. The “bed” was an old double box spring and mattress right on the bare floor. It was unmade, with cheap flowered sheets. A huge old veneered dresser disgorged tag ends of clothes. On the floor in one comer lay a squashed sanitary napkin stained with fresh blood.
    On three of the bedroom walls were more magazine cutouts. On the fourth wall, over the bed, a huge poster was tacked up.
    It was one of those posters that head shops will make up for you from a snapshot. On it, a young Indian was performing in full dance regalia. As a blurred frozen crowd watched in the background, he was frozen in the middle of a bend and a twine, his moccasined feet stamping up a little white dust. He was wearing an eagle-feather bonnet, a red satin shirt, a beaded vest, a beaded loincloth, and some kind of feather bustle strapped over his buttocks. Around his bare brown legs were wound strings of bells.
    Vidal was busy dressing his wife. He was pulling a drip-dry blouse up over her arms.
    “Now Patti Ann,” he said musically, “we’ve got company. So it’s very important to keep your clothes on. Do you hear me, Patti Ann?” She kept trying to pick the baby up, and he kept prying the baby away from her, so that he could button the blouse. “Father,
    grab that