The Fancy Dancer

I'm supposed to tell you.”
    “You don’t sound like you’re much convinced,” he said. “Hell, Father, how could you be? If you really believe that stuff you told me the other night about a person’s conscience, then you have to throw this thing right out the window.”
    We were being careful to talk in low voices and not to use red-flag-type words that people at other tables might hear. I was intrigued to see how quickly I had picked up his paranoia.
    “What statements stopped you dead?” I asked.
    Vidal pushed aside his platter. He hadn’t touched his breakfast. As he flipped back through the booklet, he looked so endearingly owlish that I could imagine what he must have looked like poring over education textbooks at Montana U.
    “Well, for instance, this here about lasting and fulfilling relationships are not found very often.’ And that’s very true. They’re not. But the reason is that the straight world puts all kinds of pressure on you, to break your relationship up. Man, I wish I could find a steady lover. I’ve never had one, and I’ve given up looking.”
    “Do you know any happy... lovers?”
    “I know a couple just sixty miles from here. But I’ve never been that lucky. Then this bullshit here about prisons. Prisoners who frequently submit to homosexual acts under terror are not entirely inculpable.’ The guy that wrote that was never in jail.” “How did you manage in jail?”
    “I managed okay. It was either that or be a fish.” “Fish?” I said.
    “Gang rape,” he said. “Actually, people have made sex in prison seem very negative. It isn’t all bad..
    I couldn’t resist looking around a little. But the men at the next table were now talking about how poachers had killed off nearly all the pronghorn antelope in Cottonwood County.
    “Why, I used to have two, three dozen of them on the Myers Place up there,” said the man in the tan hat. “And then when I went up there this spring, there wasn’t but two or three of them, and one fawn. Even the old buck wasn’t around anymore ..
    Vidal was still flipping through the booklet.
    “And this stuff from the Bible. My dad and the priest both threw that at me when I was a teen-ager. When I was in college, I sat down with the goddam Bible, and I read all those passages. And I noticed that Jesus didn’t say a thing about what we’re talking about. And I noticed that the Jews hated it because all their enemies did it. Also, they had to have babies and survive. That’s just politics, Father, it has nothing to do with divine truth.”
    The waitresses were still bustling around. But the ranch people were thinning out, and more town people were coming in. You could tell them by their clothes and shoes and their pale faces. The jukebox was now playing “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.”
    Vidal pushed the booklet back to me, cover down. “What I’m saying is, I read this crap, and I can’t fit it into the reality that I know,” he said.
    Father Matt hadn’t been kidding me. This was going to be a tough one.
    “So you’ve known about yourself for a long time,” I said.
    “Ever since I was ten or eleven.” Vidal finally started to cut up his cold gluey eggs. “There’s a moment that you know you are, "and you know you always have been. You maybe don’t know how you got that way, and maybe it’s not important. But you know you are, and you know that it’s real, and you know you can’t change it.”
    “How do you feel about women?”
    “I don’t have anything against them. I'm just a lot more comfortable with men. It’s more than sex. It’s the whole thing, companionship, emotionally, spiritually. I balled a few girls when I was a kid, but it wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.”
    “How about Patti Ann?”
    “Are you kidding? I might as well fuck a corpse.” One of the ranchers near us said, “. . . I’m not 75
    against poaching if you’re hard up and hungry, but some of these guys, they do it just so they can show off. They think they’re real big men ..
    Vidal got up and fished a quarter out of his pocket Muttering something about goddam golden oldies, he went over to the jukebox, put in the quarter and punched some buttons. Then he came back.
    A waitress came bustling by and poured us second cups of strong black cow-country coffee.
    “Do you feel guilty about the way you are?” I asked him.
    “I used to. I went through an awful thing there, for a while. And you know where I finally got my peace of