The Fancy Dancer

looking God in the eye, had always been hard to protect from the exhaustions and distractions of parish work. But now this got a little harder, because at the end of the half hour was the sight of Vidal’s face through the dusty cafe window and the leaves of the rubber tree.
    Sometimes, during that half hour, voices came back to me from the seminary. “Beware of friendships that distract you from the love of God.” “The priest’s loneliness exists to be filled with the love of God.” “You have no friends for the same reason that you have no wife and children.” “You belong to no one, so that you can belong to everyone.”
    Sometimes those eerie voices, coming to me as if down some long hallway, filled me with a feeling of subdued panic.
    But when I walked into Trina’s, and the smell of frijoles and frying ham hit me in the face, I was happy.
    Safe and private amid the public clatter of plates 79
    and cups, and the boom of the jukebox, and the raucous laughter of cowmen telling rowdy stories on each other, we sat at a table along the wall in the back, and we talked.
    Sometimes I did worry about Mrs. Shoup. Surely she wouldn’t go so far as to have me watched or bugged. Vidal wasn’t too worried, though. We did change tables every day. Anyone who’d had human territoriality in mind would have thought this strange.
    My lies to Father Vance stayed Jesuitical white lies: Vidal and I did talk about the Church’s teachings at breakfast. He grumbled about what an Injun scallywag Vidal was. But, hoping that the scallywag’s soul would be saved, he didn’t object.
    Sometime during our second breakfast, Vidal stopped calling me “father.” He didn’t ask my permission to change, and I didn’t protest, when he called me “Tom.”
    He was by far the most delightful human being that I had ever known.
    First of all, he had the wry Indian sense of humor. He could have me half hysterical with laughter on the other side of the table. I hadn’t laughed so much since I was in grade school and my elderly eighth-grade teacher’s petticoat fell off one day when she was marching around in front of the blackboard.
    When he told a story, he had a talent for turning into everyone in it. If it was a story about some famous bronc upon the Blackfoot, his face got long and equine. If it was about some effeminate type gay that he’d met in a bar in L.A., his eyes flashed and his voice rose an octave and his shoulders moved suggestively, and I could visualize a real “queen” without ever having seen one. But I always had the feeling that his talent for mimicry had something to do with eat or be eaten, like the tan of the antelope that matches the tan of the dry hills around Cottonwood.
    In front of everyone else, he put on a face of tough straight guy. Around the garage, when I went there to buy gas or get my car fixed, he was Clint Eastwood in greasy coveralls, squinting, silent, mysterious, somber. But in Trina’s every morning, he shed much of this, and let me see his anxieties, and his fantasy, and the little peace of mind he had.
    I learned that his violence didn’t come naturally to him. It wasn’t just a directionless Indian-reservation kind of violence. It was also his frustration at having settled his sexual orientation but not his existential problems. I could imagine how he would look some day, all calmed down, in a classroom somewhere, wearing a cheap business suit, teaching history to eighth-graders and making them crack up with laughter.
    One morning I asked him: “Don’t you ever leave town and lack up your heels? I mean . . . aren’t there any other gay people in this part of the world?”
    He smiled a little.
    “There are six gay bars in Montana,” he said, “and all of them are at least eighty miles from here, and if it was a couple years ago, I’d be crazy enough to drive there. There’s a few gay people over in Missoula, and a bath in Great Falls, and there’s even a gay dude ranch up at Ronan. But I’m sick of that whole scene. Sick of tricking, sick of games, sick of catting around. I don’t even like straight bars anymore. I’m kind of on a high lonesome for a while.”
    “You must be living as celibate as I am,” I kidded him.
    “Yeah,” he drawled, “except I can masturbate and you can’t.”
    In the next couple of weeks, I got to care for him more than for any friend I’d ever had—even Doric Wilton. The feeling for him went so wide and so deep that sometimes I wondered