The Fancy Dancer

he sat down slowly and made room for me. I sat down by him.
    He kept looking straight into my eyes with a hard, earnest look. It puzzled and disturbed me.
    His face was the most arresting thing about him. It was handsome, but it was marred by the clash of races. His skin was so fair that it showed his beard, but it had a faint, patchy look—a pigmentation fault common in mixed bloods. His eyes were alert, hard, expressive, set off by long sooty lashes—but only after a minute did you notice that one eye was blue and the other was green. His features were so fine-cut and Caucasian that he didn’t look Indian at all.
    Yet these flaws gave his face great character, like the pockmarks on Richard Burton’s face. It was the face of someone who had done a lifetime’s living before thirty.
    He leaned forward tensely, one hand gripping the edge of the pew. He smiled a little.
    “How do you stand it in that lousy little box?” he said.
    “It’s funny,” I said. “We’ve passed on the street a lot.”
    “You remember that?” He said it almost shyly.
    “What do you want to do? Come see me once and maybe tell me more about what’s troubling you? Then, if you want to go on, we can take it from there.”
    He looked a little suspicious. “Do we have to talk here in the church? It’s always crawling with people.”
    “No. We do counseling at the rectory. I have my own office, so it’ll be completely private. And don’t worry—I don’t discuss anything with Father Vance.”
    At this, he seemed to relax.
    “That sounds okay,” he said. “How about tomorrow?”
    I shook my head. “I have to play for Father’s high mass at nine, and then I’m driving to Helena to see my family. It’s my mother’s birthday. Could you come Monday at seven-thirty?”
    He seemed crushed that he had to wait two days. Now that he had made up his mind to act, the pressure inside him must have been unbearable.
    “Okay,” he said. He clapped his hat on his head.
    We stood up. “I’ll see you Monday.”
    He pulled on his black motorcycle jacket. “Goodbye, Father,” he said, with that funny shyness again.
    I didn’t have the heart to tell him to take off his hat in church.
    As he turned to walk away, I saw the back of his jacket. There, where bikers usually have the name of their gang or club, or a death’s head, was printed the word ME in large silver studs.
    He walked away down the aisle with a graceful catlike swagger. I had seen that walk before, in militant young Indians on the state’s campuses. They had borrowed it from Super Fly.
    As he opened the door, I saw a patch of glowing turquoise evening sky above the mountains. Then the door banged shut. A minute later, his bike coughed into life outside.
    I couldn’t help smiling. His unconfessed sin wasn’t funny, of course. But he had left me with the poignant impression of a strong personality: harshness and wildness mixed with humanity and warmth.
    I couldn’t remember the last time I’d smiled.
    Father Vance would be mad at me—I was now fifteen minutes late for supper. I hurried to turn out the lights and lock up.
    It was a cool summer night in the Rockies. You’d know it was June even without a calendar—the lilacs were in bloom, and their perfume was a blessing after the staleness of the confessional. Masses of the old shrubs grew around the church and the rectory, where they had been planted a century ago. They were now nearly fifteen feet high, tangled and woody, and the children had made paths and tunnels through their jungle.
    I walked slowly along the sidewalk to the rectory, feeling a strange savage joy. God had sent Vidal to me.
    » » «
    The rectory was built in the same year as the church, of the same dark red brick. It looked like a regular one-story Victorian house of the period, with tall windows and a wide pillared porch. The lilac bushes had grown up in front of the windows, and Father Vance refused to have them pruned down. “When you’re doing the Lord’s work,” he said, “you don’t need a view out the window.”
    As per our pennypinching policy, the only lights burning in the rectory were in the kitchen and the dining room. I went up the steps and into the side door.
    “I’ve put your chicken on the back of the stove,” said Mrs. Bircher kindly. “Sit down, and I’ll bring it right in.”
    “Thanks,” I said. “Sorry I’m late.”
    The old dining room was paneled with yellow oak. On the walls were large framed old