The Fancy Dancer

holding me back. Later on I looked back at it and thought it was my vocation beginning. I thought it meant that I had a vocation to be celibate..
    “So you must have had feelings about men.”
    “I had friends ...”
    Something was cutting into my head like a huge chopper.
    "... a couple of friends that I loved, maybe not what you’d call love, but it was the most feeling I ever had for any person ...”
    Something was chopping my chest open, tearing out my lungs. Surely the penitents waiting outside could see the blood pouring out of my side of the confessional from under the musty red velvet curtain.
    “Tell me about them,” said Vidal.
    “One, in high school, Eddie Machin, he was on the football team with me and he went to the same church I did in Helena. I would have died for Eddie. And you know, one day, I put my arm across his shoulders and the parish priest saw me do it and he told me that men who do things like that, even little things, just automatically are damned. He told me it was the unforgivable sin...”
    Voices came whipping at me out of a long dark corridor, voices like knives.
    “Any more?”
    “A boy in the seminary, Doric Wilton, we got to be friends...”
    From somewhere, the tears had come up, to dribble down my cheeks, hot as blood from a cut. The mention of Doric’s name brought them up. I’d trained myself not to think of Doric for such a long time that he’d almost become like something I’d read about in a book.
    “Go on ...” said Vidal.
    “We never touched each other. But Father Matt could see that something was going on between us, he’s no dummy. He was pretty kind about it, but he told me that he thought it was a dangerous friendship, without being specific about what he meant, and he must have talked to Doric too. Because without saying a word to each other about it, we decided to be less friendly. Doric is somewhere in Colorado now. After we were ordained, I never saw him or heard from him.”
    It was hard to talk in a whisper and cry at the time.
    “Any more?” asked Vidal.
    “No. Except you.”
    We were silent for a moment.
    “Listen,” I said, “you’d better get the hell out of here, or people are going to start wondering.”
    “I’ll see you at breakfast tomorrow.”
    “I can’t. Tomorrow is Sunday. I’m going to Helena to see my folks.”
    Vidal thought a minute.
    “All right, here’s what we’ll do. I’m sick of seeing you half an hour here, fifteen minutes there. Tomorrow we’ll meet somewhere and talk for a couple of hours.”
    “I can’t. I’ll be with my family, and then I have to see Father Matt, and then I have to come back here.” “Then we’ll meet on the road to Helena somewhere.” He thought a minute. Obviously he had a lot of practice at fixing up things like this. “You know the Holiday Inn on the pass?”
    ‘Yeah.”
    “I’m going to drive up there tonight and get a room. If I do it tomorrow morning it’ll look funny. So I’ll go home now, grab my knapsack, and go straight there, like I’ve been traveling all day and I’m played out. I should be there by eleven. So you be at your office phone at eleven tonight, and I’ll call you and tell you what the score is.”
    “Vidal, we shouldn’t...”
    “No more bullshit from you. You be at that phone when I call.”
    “And if I’m not?”
    Vidal laughed softly, and put on his queen voice: “Then I’ll sit in the Holiday Inn and I’ll make a little bitty voodoo doll with a little bitty cassock on it, and I’ll stick my hatpin right through it.”
    He got up and pushed out through the curtain. I could hear his footsteps going away along the side aisle.
    There were two more penitents. I hardly heard what they said, and they must have wondered at the little penances they got.

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    As eleven o’clock neared, I was sitting in my little office with a cup of coffee, pretending to be balancing the parish books. The total collections last Sunday were $149.50, which was very disappointing. Father Vance was still in his office, writing a couple of letters.
    I was so exhausted that I could hardly keep my eyes open. My eyes wouldn’t focus on the columns of figures written down the ledger pages.
    If I went to the Holiday Inn and visited with Vidal for a couple of hours, it would be a classic example of putting myself in an occasion of sin. Tired as I was, I saw it with terrible clearness.
    At exactly eleven o’clock, the phone on my desk rang. I stared at it,