The Fancy Dancer

and trucks, or just standing around talking on the street comers. Nearly everyone, even the women and children, seemed to be wearing sun-faded jeans and denim jackets.
    As we stopped at stop lights, the flash of black eyes and the occasional babble of the Blackfeet language that we heard from older passersby gave me a sudden feeling of getting off an airplane in a foreign country and going through customs. It suddenly surprised me that my lover was from this town. His Indianness had never been very real for me, maybe because it wasn’t very real for him either.
    “I hope my folks are home,” Vidal muttered as he turned off Main Street by a supermarket.
    “You mean you didn’t tell them you were coming?”
    “Didn’t have the nerve,” said Vidal.
    We came to a small but painfully contemporary ranch house on a comer lot, and Vidal said, “They’re here.”
    The house sat exactly in the middle of a square of sunburned lawn. Except for a few juniper bushes at the comers, there was no shade. It looked as if the Stumps were too busy to putter in the garden. In front of the walk, a battered brown Chevy was parked, with a red squad-car hght on the top.
    Vidal grinned, though I could see he was uneasy.
    ‘People’s habits don’t change,” he said. “I knew if he wasn’t out on a case, he’d be here for supper at six-thirty on the dot. Don’t let people tell you that punctuality came over on the Mayflower. It was invented by the Indians, mainly my dad.”
    When we knocked on the door, it was opened by a rotund little middle-aged man with short coal-black hair and a gray policeman’s uniform. He wasn’t built soft and round, but hard and round, like a grizzly bear. You had the feeling he could roll a redwood tree over looking for ants to eat. This was Carl Stump.
    A small smile cracked his moon-round face.
    “Well, well,” he said. “The prodigal son returns. Come on in, kid.”
    We went in. I sensed that Vidal felt as self-conscious as I did.
    At first, in the living room, I looked in vain for anything “Indian.” The furniture was vintage trading-stamp modern, with decorative copperware hanging on the wallpapered walls. The sofa and armchairs were overstuffed brown velvet. But then I noticed several amateurish but arresting landscape paintings on the walls, signed by one John Wolf Necklace. Around the fireplace there were half a dozen stuffed heads of deer and elk—Vidal had said his father liked to hunt in the reservation foothills.
    Vidal’s mother came in, wiping her hands on her flowered apron. She was tall and spare, six inches taller than her husband. Weathered and grayed as she was, her face with its good boning and hazel eyes was strikingly handsome. Looking at her, you knew where Vidal had gotten his Black Irish good looks.
    “Vidal!” She hesitated a second, then said, “Well, I’ll set two more places at the table.”
    Both Mr. and Mrs. Stump studiously ignored me. She herded us all into the kitchen. It was a suffocatingly bright and cheery little room. The picture window looked out into a sunscorched back yard with a clothesline and a white picket fence. The tile floor was flowered, the walls were yellow, and the gas range was new. It burned Indian gas—the federal government had sold oil and gas leases all over the Blackfeet reservation.
    Vidal looked around as we sat down at the yellow formica table.
    “You’ve done the kitchen over. The tribal council must have given Dad a raise.”
    Carl Stump snorted. “They did. But your mother has a job now.”
    As Mrs. Stump passed us the dishes, the atmosphere was very stiff. Unbelievably, we were eating the same brand of frozen tamales that I had eaten that first night at Vidal’s house.
    “Tamales!” said Vidal. “What happened to fry bread?”
    “Fry bread has too much cholesterol,” said Mrs. Stump crisply. She was a dietician at a clinic on the reservation.
    “Our relatives in Mexico did pretty good on tamales for a couple thousand years,” said Carl Stump.
    “Look what it got them, though,” said Vidal. “Spanish names and the Catholic religion.”
    “Vidal, you haven’t changed a bit,” said his mother. “Since when are you such an Indian nationalist?” said Carl Stump.
    “Who says I’m a nationalist?” said Vidal. “I just stated a fact.”
    “I can see you haven’t changed in one other respect,” said Carl Stump. “You haven’t outgrown all that kid stuff.” He glanced at me.
    Vidal met his father’s