The Fancy Dancer

a mop of black hair whom I hardly recognized as the grim beauty I loved, lie even found a stained old pair of satin basketball trunks.
    Fishing farther in the boxes, Vidal suddenly drew in his breath a little.
    “Look,” he said to me.
    Slowly, with the same reverence that I’d show my chasuble and stole, he drew up out of the box a magnificent feathered dance bustle like the kind the Plains Indians wore. Rows of feathers were sewn around its richly beaded disc.
    “It’s my old dancing stuff,” said Vidal.
    His parents leaned in the doorway, watching, with little smiles on their faces.
    He was pulling the rest out: the beaded rawhide moccasins, the bells, the loincloth, the beaded vest, the satin shirt (very wrinkled and faded). In the box beneath it, the great eagle-feather war bonnet was packed in lonely splendor, so it wouldn’t crush.
    Vidal held the things in his hands, his face suddenly gone pinched and painful. The ropes of bells in his hands gave out shivers of silver sound.
    “We always talk about how you danced,” said his mother.
    Carl Stump looked at me. “For an apple Indian, my kid was a helluva dancer.”
    Vidal looked up at us, and an unfathomable dark shadow had flooded into his eyes. Without a word he scooped the things up, went in the bathroom and locked tie door.
    When Vidal came out, I hardly recognized him. It was the same shattering image that I had seen in the poster all summer, above the bed where we made love. But now it was real and alive. The costume he’d made for the Silver State Ball had related to something further down in his subconscious—this one was simply the past, present and future. He carried in his mind an image of me, too, but I couldn’t know it or see it clearly. Each of us had dared to unlock, for the other, the closed image of the future. For one moment, I had a vision—quick as a flashbulb going off— of our common redemption worked by God through those images.
    “Dad, do you have a drum?” Vidal asked.
    “I’m not a drummer, I’m a cop.”
    But Carl Stump went in the kitchen and found a big 230
    turkey pan and a wooden spoon. He thumped the spoon on die pan and it made a musical hollow sound.
    We went out on the back porch. The last of the mosquitoes whirred like tiny helicopters through the porch light. Carl Stump sat down on the porch steps and started to thump a stately rhythm on the pan. Vidal walked slowly out onto the sunburned lawn. The dew glittered in the porch light, and his footsteps left dark spaces in it. The strings of bells wound around his legs made aimless jangling sounds.
    Suddenly he bent, stiffened and stamped his feet a few times. The bells slapped out slashes of sound that tore the evening. Mrs. Stump watched with her arms crossed over her stomach, rapt.
    Carl Stump started to sing in a high cracked voice. It was a minor-key melody that started on E and kept pretty much between E and the A below. He was singing in Blackfeet, throwing in a “hey-ah” here and there. I was aware that we weren’t exactly watching the kind of dance that Father Point had seen and sketched. But still, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up in awe and excitement, and little shivers ran up and down my back.
    Vidal was dancing in a slow circle, with a peculiar gliding stamping step that seemed to hang in slow motion a few inches above the ground. He bent lower, then higher, twining his body as he stamped along, as if following some invisible winding vine through the air. His hands were on his hips. The bustle slapped his buttocks and bristled smartly as if he was a ruffed grouse doing a mating dance. His face, under the waving eagle feathers and the beaded brow of the bonnet, was intent, framed by black and white animal tails hanging by his cheeks.
    My lover was dancing. No gay bar on earth would ever see him dance like that. In the light from the porch, he danced around and around on the grass, till circles of footprints were stamped in the dew. He straightened, almost skipped joyfully, then suddenly bent again to turn slowly, right on the spot, as he stamped. He was alone now, as I was. I didn’t exist for him anymore, except as someone in the past.
    77
    Far off down the crowded Main Street we heard the marshal’s whistle blow. The band struck up. The great one-and-only Bicentennial parade of the Cottonwood Fair, Rodeo and Horse Races was about to get under way.
    “Here they come!” said Father Vance.
    I had learned something new about my