The Fancy Dancer

mesmerized. It rang again. All I had to do was not answer it, not see Vidal, tomorrow or ever. On the other hand, I could make sure that all we did was talk.
    The phone rang again. If I let it ring too long, Father Vance would notice.
    I picked it up.
    “Coward,” said Vidal’s voice. “You were sitting right there, and you were too chicken to answer.”
    “Don’t rub it in,” I said.
    “I’m in Room 203. You don’t even have to go in the front. Just park in the lot and go in the side door, like you’re going to your own room. There’s a million people here, nobody’ll notice you. Go up the side stairs there. You come right out on the corridor where my room is. It’s the third door on the right Got it?”
    “I guess so.”
    “What time do you leave there in the morning?”
    “About ten-thirty. So I should be there about eleven. You going to sleep now?”
    “I think I’ll go down to the bar and get a little drunk. See you tomorrow, Tom. Sweet dreams.”
    His voice hadn’t softened at all—it still had that ironic tone in it.
    “Yeah, sweet dreams yourself,” I said in the same tone.
    When midnight came, I was still sitting there, with cold coffee in the cup, playing with the ledgers. Outside the window, the lilac bushes whispered in the cool night breeze. I was only the fourth priest in nearly a hundred years to listen to their sweet and senseless rustling.
    In my mind, I was rehearsing the virtuous conversation we’d have tomorrow morning, during which I’d convince him to just continue being friends.
    The late show that night was some nineteen-thirties musical that I didn’t pay much attention to. I should have been praying for my life. Pray, Father Matt had said.
    8
    The next morning, my head was spinning with exhaustion and guilt. I felt drunk:
    At ten-thirty, just as I was leaving, Father Vance said, “Oh, Tom, on your way out of town, drop by and see Missy Oldenberg. She’s in pretty poor shape.”
    This would delay me—I was furious.
    Missy Oldenberg and Clare Faux lived on what had been an old dairy farm at the edge of town. The bam had fallen in, and they now sold their crocheted and knitted things to handicraft shops in that part of the state. Missy had been ailing from a gallbladder problem for some time.
    Obsessed with the thought of Vidal, I spent a bare half hour with Missy and Clare. Then I roared on out town.
    This time the car radio was turned off. I drove grim and tight-lipped.
    The country had changed since the last trip to Helena—the green grass had now burned into a sun-cured tan. The phlox and wild roses were gone, and the milkweed had already turned into silvery white umbels that blew apart in the hot wind. The yellow sweet clover bloomed tall and rank along the highway.
    The Holiday Inn sits where the Interstate crosses over the Continental Divide, at thirteen thousand feet. Its bland modem architecture, picture windows, patch of lawn and parking lot are a curious insult to the bare grandeur of the timberline country around it. Behind it were a few patches of stunted pine, and the dizzy rock slopes of Mt. Magan.
    Before the Inn, on the other side of the highway, the land falls away in a terrifying thousand-foot cliff called the Magan Wall. Below, the timbered Rockies roll away in one of the most spectacular views you could find anywhere between the Tetons and Glacier Park. From the Holiday Inn parking lot, you can see a million square miles of mountain peaks. The locals like to say that when God got done making the world, He dumped the tailings here.
    As Vidal had said, the parking lot was crowded with cars, and a few people came and went. But the place was eerily quiet, and a cold wind whipped down off the bare rock faces above.
    My body shivering with nervousness, I walked straight in the side door, trying to look as normal as possible, and up the stairwell. The hallway was carpeted with plush red mg, and smelled sweetish and stuffy after the alpine cleanliness outside.
    I knocked softly on the door of Room 203.
    After a long, awful moment, during which I thought it might be the wrong door, Vidal opened it. His face wore the same look of strain that mine must have. I went in fast and he shut the door.
    Motel rooms always manage to exist outside of time, space, history and humanness. This one had plush red wall-to-wall carpet, a phony Spanish bed with a caissoned headboard, a color TV, and the usual bathroom as sterile as a hospital.
    On the other side of the