The Fancy Dancer

gave him second prize.
    There seemed to be a stir in one comer of the ballroom. The MC said into the mike in a low discreet voice, “If there is a clergyman in the house, would he come to the bandstand, please?”
    There was a note of urgency in his voice. “Wonder what happened?” I asked the girl.
    My conscience told me I ought to go find out. But my fright held me back. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t care enough to move into action. We kept dancing. Someone needs help, I told myself. I should ...
    We kept dancing.
    Suddenly I said to myself: What kind of a man of God are you? Get your anointed ass into gear.
    We pushed our way over to the bandstand.
    “Oh, you’re a couple of minutes too late,” said the
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    MC. “Some old guy had a heart attack. He was scared to death and asking for a minister, any kind of minister, he said. They just took him out to the ambulance.”
    Just as he spoke, the siren started up in the park outside. We heard it fading away slowly into Helena.
    I almost told him a lie, that I’d been in the bar and hadn’t heard the appeal at first. But my teeth closed on this one just in time.
    “Did anybody come?” I asked the MC.
    “Nope,” said the MC, shaking his head sadly.
    I turned away kicking myself for being such a coward. Vidal had brought me there to show me the scene, and instead through him God had shown me the reality of myself. I had refused to help a lonely and desperate soul. Jesus would ask me about it on judgment Day. “And when you were at the drag ball, did you not deny Me three times until the cock crew?” “Yes, Lord, I did.” “Be cast out, then, into the darkness...”
    I walked gloomily away through the swirling dancers. The brief euphoria was ashes now. The crystal chandeliers seemed to press down on me with a crushing despair.
    In the bar, I ordered another whiskey. The girl ordered another gin. The gaslights and the Art Nouveau glass were starting to grind slowly around me like a merry-go-round.
    “Are you a clergyman?” she said.
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “Minister? Priest?”
    “Yeah.”
    Her drowned eyes searched mine. A bright flush had come out on her cheekbones—she must be getting pretty tight too. Through an open stained-glass window, we could hear the thunder roll nearer and the whisper of rain along the verandas. I thought she was going to ask me why I hadn’t gone to the bandstand sooner. Instead, she said:
    “Does God love me?”
    “Are you a Catholic?”
    She took my drink away from me. ‘You’re drunk
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    and you didn’t answer my question.” Her eyes seemed to focus with a blurry anxiety <
    “Yes, as a matter of fact, God loves you,” I said. “If He didn’t, I could walk out of here with a clear conscience.”
    She was looking at herself in the mirror behind the bar, her face almost lost in the rows of glasses. She put her kid-gloved fingers to her cheeks as if to touch that fever spot on her cheekbone.
    “God loves me,” she said wonderingly.
    “God loves everybody here, including my lover,” I said. “He even loves me.” I started to cry.
    The Broadwater Hotel was tilting over, like a sinking ship about to go under water. The bar kept trying to rise up and hit me in the face. The Magic Markers were staining down my cheeks.
    Then came a sickening car ride, a motel corridor, and vomiting in the toilet bowl.

» a a
    “Wake up, you crummy amateur sinner.”
    Vidal was bending over me.
    My eyes seemed to be held shut by cobwebs, and my tongue was a mildewed velvet pillow. An ax of doom was splitting my skull.
    “What time are you supposed to be at your folks’ house? Twelve?” Vidal asked.
    The bathroom mirror showed me a stranger’s swollen face with a butterfly on it, all smudged under the eyes. I scrubbed at it with soap and water. Panic: it wouldn’t come off. But finally it did. Shaking, I managed to wash up and shave.
    Vidal leaned in the doorway, watching me coolly. He was wearing jeans and his Yucatan wedding shirt
    “I thought you were mad at me,” I said.
    He shrugged. “I can’t stay mad at you, you’re such a mess. But your hangups get me sometimes. And then you went off and danced with that goddam queen.”
    “You danced with plenty of people.”
    He grinned. “I’ll be damned. The priest is jealous.” At twelve on the dot, we got to Stuart Street.
    My mother was at the door with her usual little shriek.
    “Mom and Pop, this is a friend of mine from Cottonwood, Vidal Stump,”