Snake Dance Disaster
A teenage boy fled out the backdoor of a rambling desert mansion. The instant he was outside, he locked his angry gaze onto the ground and muttered madly to himself while his feet shuffled him forward on a trail through saguaro cacti and dense desert brush. He shuffled for a long way without glancing back, but when the trail split on either side of a barrel cactus, he wheeled around and squinted at the mammoth adobe edifice silhouetted against the dawn. He was in time to see a light yellowish sky stroked with cloud wisps like the petals of an enormous daffodil.
He was safe. No one was coming out of the house after him. Although it had seemed unlikely, he'd probably, actually, escaped.
Along with eleven other boys, Tim Delfs, the boy who was running away, had arrived that dawn at the Katherine J. Bolls mansion. The home was owned by old Missy Bolls, an heir of Katherine J., a fierce woman who had made her fortune in Bolls Penetrating Cold Cream. Missy Bolls never stayed in her Arizona home in the sweltering summer; she preferred the family mansion on the Hudson River, and she generously donated the use of a wing of the house and the meandering trails of her vast desert grounds to the local Red Birds and Sparrows for their morning programs and overnight encampments.
Tim, who was a Boy Scout, ran along one of these trails wearing the costume of a Hopi Snake Priest, or-as he called himself-a Naked Fake Holy Roller Priest. His bare chest, arms, and face had been smeared with black greasepaint interrupted with white zigzag lightning symbols. An arc of white paint flowed from the corners of his mouth to his ears. A suede kilt, poorly decorated using the newest crafting craze, liquid embroidery, hung loosely on his hips. At the back of the kilt an eyeless and moth-eaten fox pelt dangled in resignation, its vacant eye sockets gawking, its flattened snout dragging in the dust. While real Snake Priests danced barefooted, Tim tripped along in canvas basketball sneakers. Of all the costume, the only authentic parts were the fox pelt and the buckskin strings which held a real turtle shell to each of Tim's calves. Inside the shells, dried deer hoofs tumbled with a noise like coconuts pummeling someone's head in a goofy Saturday morning cartoon.
Tim was expected, while in that ridiculous costume, to replicate a Hopi Indian Snake Dance; at least, that was what they had been practicing for three whole weeks under the stern tutelage of Mr. Holt Himmelstein. But the phony dance was going badly. None of them understood how to make the rattles on their legs work, and they couldn't keep track of the steps in the dance sequence. Tim hated the whole fiasco and he was dead-set against dancing it.
Tim had wanted to quit scouts for six months, due to his decreasing interest and his terror of Mr. Himmelstein, but he'd always lost his nerve. Try as he would, Tim couldn't get up the courage to write the letter and confront his father who romanticized his own time in scouting, and who worshipped at the altar of Baden-Powell. This inability to quit tormented Tim. Would he go on forever in scouting? Exactly how long, maximum, could they keep him? If he continued in scouting, Tim feared, one day he might be displayed with other scouting projects in an upright case at the county fair. He figured he'd be the nation's oldest, completely deranged scout, and his only friends would be squirrels, small boys, and people who liked to whittle.
Angry words floated about in Tim's head, words describing all the monstrous shams of the world, the fakery of the adult empire, its artifice and insincerity, its ridiculous requests of youth such as forcing them to replicate a Hopi Snake Dance, and how shams like this were perpetrated on teenagers such as him all over the world in the name of culture. How many poor Hungarian boys were parading around in ribbons? How many Oceana youths straddled logs and were coated in mud or were forced to swallow fire or toads? While he pitied these poor kids, Tim knew he wouldn't put up with these shams anymore, anywhere, anyhow from a father who wouldn't listen to reasonable objections, who sat at his desk twiddling a pen while smiling faintly as he relived his experiences in the world of acrid smoke, the distant campfire world of Eagle Scouts and his boyhood, some sham world of marvelous fishing camps by sparkling rivers in the Michigan woods. According to Tim's father, he had forged lifelong friendships in these camps with people he'd apparently never seen again. He had learned from the ways of the stoic Indian and yet knew nothing about modern Indian life. Hearing his father tell it, he had braved many things, taken on challenges which he couldn't describe adequately to Tim. Tim, who had noticed all his life that he was not living in Michigan, but in the Arizona desert, knew scouting and being an outdoors man, didn't have the same meaning to him as it did to his father.
That morning in June at dawn, he shuffled forward, jabbing the toes of his tennis shoes into the dirt with each step so that little puffs of dust shot up ahead of him. Puff by puff he made plans to leave the fake Boy Scout world. The dirt he made fly coated his legs as he trotted along, his clenched fists pounded the air beside him, his mouth mumbling words. Damned Boy Scouts, cursed Baden-Powell. That morning, at his friend Andy Shipman's urging, Tim was running away, if only temporarily, from the stupidity.
Tim stopped on the trail. "Andy?" he called in the direction of the arroyo that was now paralleling the trail. "A-A-Andy, I did it. I got away." He crouched down in some tall weeds, peering into the arroyo and around the barbed girth of another barrel cactus. Andy had promised him he would hide in the arroyo at a spot after the trail split. "Where are you, old buddy?"
"Over here," said a mesquite tree beside the arroyo. "Get over here before somebody sees you."
Tim doubled back, skirted a bed of purple-hued prickly pear cacti, and charged into the low branches of the mesquite. With his hands snapping the brittle black mesquite branches, and his tennis shoes crunching the old mesquite litter that covered the ground, he made his way into a small clearing. Once there, he hunkered down beside his friend.
Andy Shipman's slender chest, his face, and arms had been painted pink and he wore a white kilt, as poorly decorated as Tim's chestnut one. Andy was an Antelope Priest. In contrast to his friend's blonde crew-cut, Andy's hair was long and brown and parted low, so that it swept thickly over his forehead and one eye, surfer-boy style, like Brian Wilson on the cover of one of the latest Beach Boys' albums. Andy was a head shorter than Tim and more agile; they'd met in the Viet Nam Combat Club at Chaparral Junior High School when Andy had jumped on Tim's back unexpectedly. The next semester they'd joined the Rocketry and Airplane Club together.
"Andy, old buddy, old boy, we're free," Tim said.
"Yeah," said Andy, "Scratch one Antelope Priest and one Snake Priest."
"They're back there practicing right now," said Tim.
"Still?" asked Andy in disbelief.
"Mr. Himmelstein's making them work on their fluid, basal notes," Tim explained with a groan.
"Those poor idiots," sighed Andy. "If I hear about fluid, basal tones one more time I'll puke."
"Thank God we're out of that fiasco," said Tim.
"What's a fiasco?" asked Andy.
"It means a big mess. My sister Sharon, she's in college, she taught me that."
"That's a good word for it-fiasco. Mr. Himmelstein's flippin' fiasco."
"I'd sure like to get this greasepaint off and some clothes on," said Tim, wiping the black paint on his shoulder with his thumb.
Andy glanced at Tim's legs and noticed the turtle shell rattles. "Take off your rattles," Andy said, nodding toward two shells he'd hurled into the weeds. "I threw mine over there."
Tim obediently untied one rattle and handed it to Andy who chucked it aside. The second leather tie was more challenging; Andy watched Tim's clumsy hands struggle with the knot.
"Let's find the girl's camp," said Andy, clambering down the crumbling back of the arroyo. "If we stay in the arroyo nobody will see us." He sauntered away awkwardly, his sneakers sinking in the arroyo's deep sand.
"Wait," called Tim, "I'll come with you. Let me get this stupid thing off." Red-faced, groaning, Tim stretched the leather until it snapped. He tossed the rattle and scooted down the embankment.
&nbs
p; "I'm quitting scouts. I've made up my mind," said Andy when Jim caught up with him. Following his momentous announcement, Andy climbed a boulder and leaped into the sand.
Tim aped his friend's leap off the same boulder, but landed sideways, barely checking his fall with a wild wave of his arms. "I wish my dad would let me," he said, straightening up.
"Let you?" said Andy through clenched teeth, "Don't ask him. Tell him. Tell him afterwards, after you've done it. Tell him you're through making a fool of yourself with these moronic Indian rituals."
"I can't," said Tim, trudging along with his head down.
"You've got to get the guts to do it."
"I don't know how."
"You've got to get mad. That's all."
"I never really get mad," Tim explained. "Only in my head."
"Think about something that will get you mad."
"Thinking never gets me mad enough."
"Think!"
Tim hiked his sloppy kilt higher on his hips. "Well, I know one thing that's sort of getting me mad. If I stay in scouting, Sharon says she won't teach me to drive her Volkswagen and she won't let me work on it. I want to do a brake job on it with her, but she says she won't give me a chance to help her because she doesn't want to be associated with an Eagle Scout. She says it's too uncool."
"That should do it. That would be enough to make me mad," said Andy, "if I wanted to do a brake job on a Volkswagen, I'd make sure I could do it! I'd be mad if I couldn't."
"Well, it does make me mad?kinda. Also, she says it's disrespectful for us to be doing these Indian dances. Heck, we're not even Indians! If we try to be authentic like Mr. Himmelstein wants, it's even dumber, because we can't be authentic 'cause we're not Hopis! American weren't even nice to the Hopis, ever, I mean not even once probably! Sharon's taking American History Revisited-this cool course at the university-and she says there's going to be protests against the kind of dumb stuff we're doing for Mr. Himmelstein. Protests. Protest marches. People are having sit-ins where they protest junk like this thing we're in today. They just show it to be the sham it really is. It's great. Heck, she might even protest us the next time, she said, even if she has to go by herself and gets arrested. She's real brave. She doesn't even care what my dad would think. Not at all. Not if a thing is a big sham like this thing."
"See, that's what you need. I wish she was protesting today, because they might call this thing off. Being part of a dumb thing like this makes me so mad."
"Yeah. It does me too."
"You don't sound convinced," Andy observed.
"Ah, well, you know, I told you I never really get very mad."
"Oh, man," said Andy, rolling his eyes. He veered to the side of the arroyo and scaled the bank for a glimpse above. Tim came up beside him and popped his head and shoulders over the top.
"Down!" said Andy, yanking him back, "Himmelstein."
Tim barely raised his head and saw Mr. Himmelstein, a former Marine, six foot three, with cold blue eyes and a glossy reddish face, pounding past.
"Do you think he's searching for us?" asked Tim in horror.
"No. I don't think so," whispered Andy. "I'll bet he's going down to the clearing." Andy, and then Tim, raised their heads tentatively; Mr. Himmelstein had vanished, and in the distance they spied a colony of young girls crawling over the peak of a boulder, scrambling up the crest on all fours, their hands and feet splayed on the rough stone surface, their bottoms thrust into the air so that they looked, against what was now the yellow of the still-rising sun, like a swarm of darkling beetles.
"The girl's camp," said Andy, jumping down from the side of the embankment. "Come on."
Tim plunged through the sand after him. "What about Himmelstein?"
"Forget him. We're going to see girls."
"Okay." Tim charged ahead of Andy. "Hey, maybe they're in their nighties."
"From now on, stay near the bank," said Andy, running up to Tim's side and sweeping an arm out to restrain his friend and herd him into the cover, the desert broom bushes, boulders, and overhanging mesquite trees, that the nearness of the bank afforded.
For the rest of their trek, they traveled along this verdant edge. The sun seemed to haul itself over the mountains and the cool morning air was rapidly being replaced by the scorching feeling on your skin of June in Arizona. Using the exposed roots of the mesquite trees for handrails, they crawled halfway up the steep bank several times in search of the girls' overnight encampment.
Eventually, Andy stopped. "Listen," he said.
"What?" asked Tim. Cicadas buzzed in the trees overhead; it was difficult to hear anything else.
But when Tim paused, he could hear it.
Shrill shouts rang out in the distance. "We're almost there," said Andy.
Ahead, under a brilliant green palo verde, flood waters had carved out a perfect hollow. "Up here," said Andy. Together they crept to the brim of the arroyo for a clear view of a peculiar scene.
Girls squatted around a ramada, each equidistant from the others. They were solitary, tending upturned red or green coffee cans. The sides of each can had been punch with holes; smoke puffed from some of the openings and there were eggs, sunny side up, sprawled on the upside down coffee can bottoms. Next to the lit coffee can stoves, there were tuna fish cans; they had been filled with paraffin poured over spirals of cardboard. Wax-dipped strings protruded from the center of the tuna fish cans like bombs and the girls with the unlit stoves wailed, "Light mine next!" A harried lady lit the bombs and place them under the stoves. Beside her a small glum girl doled out eggs from a carton.
"There aren't many older girls," said Tim after they had studied the scene for a while.
"Yeah, they're mostly Sparrows, not Red Birds," said Andy.
"Young Sparrows."
"Oh, there's the older ones." Andy pointed to a mesquite tree.
"I think the fourth one in line has boobs," said Andy, squinting.
Tim studied the line of girls carefully counting back four from the front. He stared at the subject's chest. "I guess so. She's pretty far away, though."
They reviewed the line again.
After a few minutes, Andy nudged Tim and pointed at a large white-haired woman in green shorts who was guarding a cauldron of boiling water. "Look at that," he said in awe. "It's Huemac's four-hands-wide woman."
"What?"
"Remember in honors Spanish? That nutty Aztec king who was looking for a lady with a big rump? Four-hands-wide?"
"Oh-really? We actually had that in class?" said Tim.
"Sure. Mr. Grandillas laughed a whole bunch about it."
"I don't remember that. I shoulda been paying attention to that. You were a lot better in Spanish than me."
The large woman squirted pink dishwashing liquid into the pot and stirred it with a ladle. When she finished, some of the other the girls who had eaten took turns dipping bags made out of dishrags sewn together with shoelaces and holding aluminum camp ware into the boiling soapy water and then into a rinse tub. They hung the dripping bags on the mesquite tree's limbs and flocked to another, more remote ramada.
Andy and Tim watched the younger girls eat their fried egg breakfast and mill around slapping hands and singing songs. When they sang about a chalet in Switzerland, Tim noticed a pretty girl who kept turning her sneakers inward, pointing her toes together in a dainty fashion. She wore a beaded Indian belt which held up an oversized pair of shorts. With the belt tightly cinched, the big shorts gaped in the back. Tim observed another girl collect something from under the picnic table and slip it down the gap.
"What was that?" asked Tim when he realized Andy had been watching the same girl.
"I think the girl found one of those cicada bug husks. She put that down the other girl's pants."
"Oh, gee," said Tim. He wanted to slap the sneaking girl who'd done that. With an infuriated gaze, he followed her movement about the camp. He was enjoying this stir of protectiveness when Andy suddenly fell on him, squashing him down.
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"Hey," said Tim, "what's going on?" He tried to throw Andy off his back, then froze.
A woman sprinted down the arroyo, her boots thrashing the sand, shooting it everywhere. "Get back here!" she shouted to a small girl in front of her. She grabbed one of the girl's hunched shoulders and pulled her backwards. The girl's feet sank into the sand and one foot came out of its shoe. With her anklet drooping down, the girl posed for a moment like a little pony with an injured hoof. Then she fought to escape, ducking and bobbing at the waist. While coming up once, she glanced into the hollow.
"Oh," she said. "Oh look." The lady, who had a firm hold of the girl, bent down. She looked directly into the hollow at Andy and Tim.
"Damn," said Andy softly.
"Hell," said Tim.
"What are you doing in there?" asked the woman. "Are you scouts?"
"Damn," said Andy again, licking his lips. "Yes, ma'am," he said, coming out with Tim behind him. "We're cutting more cottonwood for the bower. For the Snake Dance." He looked frantically about him for the white trunk of a cottonwood tree. "You don't happen to know where any cottonwoods are, do you?"
"No, but I've just seen Mr. Himmelstein coming down the trail and I intend to ask him about this. Our agreement was that scouts would not come into this part of the camp."
Andy and Tim backed away in the direction they had come from. "He knows we're here, ma'am. He does. He asked us to come down and cut more cottonwood, muy pronto," Tim said.
"Stay right there," ordered the woman, moving up the side of the arroyo, pulling the small girl with her.
"Go!" said Andy and he shoved Tim the instant the woman turned her back on them.
They ran, ignoring the lady's shouts, and they might have gotten away, if Tim hadn't turned around.
Mr. Himmelstein stood on the arroyo's bank. "Andrew Shipman! Timothy Delfs! Get up here right now!"
They stopped.
"Damn," said Andy, blowing out his breath.
"Oh hell," said Tim. He bounced the toe of his sneaker off another rock that was buried in sand in the middle of the arroyo.
"Sir?" called Andy, buying time.
"Get up here!" Mr. Himmelstein hollered.
Andy sighed and squinted back at Mr. Himmelstein's tall figure.
"Now!" he yelled.
"Oh brother," said Tim to Andy. "I'm sorry." He hurried away toward Mr. Himmelstein.
"We're doomed," groaned Andy, following more slowly.
They climbed out of the arroyo with their heads hanging low.
"Where are your leg rattles?" roared Mr. Himmelstein.
They had expected him to ask them what they had been doing.
Andy opened his mouth, preparing to invent an explanation.
"Never mind," said Mr. Himmelstein, who was completely preoccupied. "Get back up the trail. We're about to make our entrance."
Side by side, Andy and Tim tramped back to the mansion with Mr. Himmelstein at their heels. The sun was a brilliant yellow orb, well above the horizon, beating down on them mercilessly, broiling their grease painted chests.
"It's got to be ninety degrees already," said Andy quietly.
"We're going to die," replied Tim simply.
In a longing backward glance, they watched the girls lining up and marching away. They'd see them next during the absurd Indian dance, when Andy and Tim were certain to be objects of derision. With Mr. Himmelstein behind them, escape now was impossible.
Soon the Bolls mansion appeared through the thickets of cacti, palo verde trees, and towering saguaros that surrounded it. Andy and Tim's troop had gathered outside the mansion under the scant shade of a mesquite tree.
When the prodigals approached, they saw two boys, one painted pink, the other black, fighting for possession of a small bowl of water. Several of the black Snake Priests skipped around the mesquite tree, their chestnut kilts slipping down on their narrow hips, their fox pelts flopping in the dust. One somber antelope priest clutched a green plastic bowl against his flabby stomach. He glanced into the bowl at a heap of yellow corn meal and rolled his eyes upward, sighing.
A boy darted to Andy and Tim and thrust gourd rattles into their hands. "Where'd you guys go?" he asked. "We kept looking for you in the bathrooms."
"Oh, it's a long story," said Andy. He noticed several of the boys listening. With Mr. Himmelstein out of earshot, he added, "We didn't want to do this dumb thing."
"Nobody does," one boy claimed. "Except for that weirdo," he whispered, "the one who plays with snakes."
"Mr. Himmelstein's pet," said Andy. They all looked for the tall boy in horn rims. He was new to their troop and they didn't know his name.
"There he is," said someone, "El Freako Plenty." They regarded him, their nemesis, where he sat with his back leaning against another mesquite. Earlier, he had bragged about someone from the newspapers being there to take pictures of him handling the milked rattlesnakes.
"He looks kinda sick," said Tim, cheerfully.
"He always looks that way," said Andy.
Mr. Himmelstein approached. "All right," he said, "I want the Antelope Priests first." He made a chopping motion with one arm to tell them where to queue.
Tim fell back and Andy shuffled into his place in the line of pink painted priests. Andy glanced over his shoulder and gave Tim a feeble wave of his rattle. Mr. Himmelstein inspected the boys in the gruff manner of an ex-Marine and gave the command that sent them forward. The Antelope Priests trotted off, their fox furs swallowing dirt, their jittery rattles completely uncoordinated.
"Snake Priests!" bellowed Mr. Himmelstein. The blackened boy, including Tim, blundered into a line where the others had stood.
"We're going to mess this whole thing up," moaned someone in front of Tim.
"It's going to be ugly," said someone else.
Mr. Himmelstein watched the Antelope Priests depart. When the last of the stiff pink figures had disappeared around the bend, he sent the Snake Priests forward.
Tim felt a wave of sickness tear through him when he jogged ahead; he'd forgotten the whole dance. How many times were they supposed to circle the clearing at the beginning? And what came before they jumped on the stupid plank?
After traveling a short distance, Tim realized Mr. Himmelstein wasn't directly behind them. Others in the line, sensing Mr. Himmelstein's absence, relaxed, slowed down, and even turned around to share morbid jokes about their fate.
"Wipe those silly grins off your faces! Your faces need to be taunt, as I have told you a thousand times!" shouted Mr. Himmelstein, dashing in upon them from a side trail. They cringed and sped up, their expression as 'taunt' as teenaged boys painted black in such extreme temperatures could manage.
They were almost to the clearing. One bend of the trail remained. Mr. Himmelstein shouted more orders, but Tim couldn't hear any of them anymore.
As the line of boys rounded the last bend, a horrid wailing cry and rattling noise met them. Tim was shocked to hear how poorly the Antelope Priests sang. Then he saw the line of pink priests, surrounded by hundreds of shrieking and laughing Sparrows and Red Birds, standing in a circle and sitting on two bleachers. Every girl's face seemed to turn up the trail to see the black Snake Priests arriving.
"Here we go," said one boy sadly.
In postures outlandish and with much squirming and twisting, the blackened boys danced into the clearing to join the pink boys. They tried to maintain the correct form-to raise their feet and bring them down loosely with the heel barely striking the ground-but many of the leg rattles slipped toward the boys' ankles as though the turtle shells wanted to slink away as much as the boys did. Other leg rattles made weak rustling noises because the hoofs inside had jammed. In desperation the boys with the noiseless rattles resorted to jiggling their legs up and down, or, in a futile attempt to free the hoofs, they did a twist with the turtle shells whipping from side to side.
There was a frightened hopelessness, a terror rising in them all, which made them continue when they should h
ave quit. They willed the turtle shells to rattle correctly. They beat themselves to make them do so. They flung themselves, jived, jumped, shivered and leaped; but the rattles omitted only slight clattering, chattering noises.
One by one, their chests heaving from the tremendous effort they had made to make their feeble rattling, many of the Snake Priests, including Tim, adopted dramatic postures in a line across from the pink Antelope Priests. A small number of boys kept going. They tried in a surreptitious manner to urge those who had stopped to resume. Finally every boy but one had stopped. The lone dancer flounced about the clearing in a rapt, seizure-like fashion, quaking, quivering. He was a liquid body of thump and bounce, his eyes closed, his trembling, jellified body moving forward to some very wrong inner beat. The audience snickered.
The dancer's eyes shot open, and he halted in the middle of the hideous contortion with one shoulder high and the other low, his hips pushed out, arms and rattles akimbo. In one corner of the clearing, Tim noticed Mr. Himmelstein glowering at the boy with a look capable of singeing a hole through steel. The boy dashed to the end of the Snake Priest line.
What was next? They shook their gourd rattles meekly and stared ahead, thinking. A bower of cottonwood branches had been placed in the northeast corner of the dirt clearing; a heavy plank lay nearby. In a panicky manner a Snake Priest with greasy black hair bolted to the plank. En mass, the other Snake Priests tripped after him; Tim felt himself moving forward with them, then being swept along, jostling for position in the line. Halfway across the plank, the lead boy stopped, jumped up awkwardly and came down with a tremendous stomp. The retort when he landed sent a white-winged dove rocketing off the top of a nearby saguaro cactus and made the circle of girl applaud. Passing over the plank, they each stomped it mightily. At his turn, Tim did his best to crush the plank, but he blushed to feel, under his kilt, the Y at the front of his underwear yawn open at the effort.
A large boy crossed the plank last. He marched to the center and stomped and jumped and stomped and jumped and the crowd of girls applauded until he lost his footing and fell off sideways. When he scrambled up and limped away, the girls howled. Mr. Himmelstein's furious blue eyes locked on the exuberant boy.
"Oh God," said a Snake Priest beside Tim, "I feel so hot."
The Snake Priests had reformed beside Tim, their gourd rattles quivering weakly. Was this when they were supposed to emulate the sound of a giant rattlesnake?
"Is this when we-" began Tim to the boy who had spoken to him.
"I don't know," said the other priest, shaking his head, "I can't think straight in this heat."
Just then, a weak whimper, like a child's wheedling impression of a ghost, emerged. As more boys joined in, some began swaying back and forth. Swaying and swaying and swaying. Hah. Hah.
That song petered out without anything replacing it. Some of the still-swaying boys frowned.
The Antelope Priest with the plastic bowl of corn meal staggered forward. Walking nervously in the clearing, he pinched a bit of the yellow meal between his thumb and forefinger and threw it out as though he were discarding a weevil.
Out of the Snake Priest line, El Freako Plenty stepped boldly. Startled to find himself alone, he rejoined the line. Words were exchanged, and two boys stepped out with him a second time. The three performed a strange, shivery, leaping dance. Around and around the circle, like a herd of pitiful, wounded animals, the boys milled, their gangly leaps and hops propelled them in unpredictable directions. During one especially dramatic lunge by the tall Snake Priest, the boy with the corn meal, stepped out. A full force smash between the two of them resulted. The bowl pitched forward and corn meal flew out in a yellow cloud. The whole ring of girls shrieked with laughter.
"This is awful," whispered the boy beside Tim. "I feel faint. And there are newspaper people here." The boy pointed his rattle to a spot where a man with a camera and another with a notebook stood.
Tim braved a glance at Mr. Himmelstein and saw that his head was bent forward and he was slowing massaging his brows.
El Freako Plenty seemed stunned by the accident with the corn meal bowl and he paused to shake himself. He then bounded into the boughs of cottonwood, which were heaped in a spot near the plank. Tim saw the boy bend down and open the door of a small cage. He came out quickly, holding himself strangely upright.
A rattlesnake wiggled in one hand.
From the crowd, there came several long, unconfined screams closely followed by a wave of nervous laughter.
The Snake Priest danced the circle with his snake. The Antelope Priests and the left-over Snake Priests chanted and vibrated their rattles. Tim couldn't remember the chant that went with this movement of the dance so he mumbled something. An Antelope Priest, brandishing a wand, whisked by. The tall boy placed the rattler on top of his head and then draped it around his neck.
Tim looked away, he couldn't watch anymore. The dumb dance was nearly over, but he felt defeated. If he stayed in scouting there were bound to be more of these humiliations. The next meeting Mr. Himmelstein might yell at him for disappearing with Andy. And Andy would be gone, having already quit. Andy was right; he ought to get mad. It was time to rebel. If he didn't like scouting, why should he stay in? But quitting-how could he get the nerve?
When he glanced back at El Freako Plenty, something seemed wrong. Like a sleepwalker. He had drooping arms and a strange sideways gait.
"What's he doing?" whispered the boy beside Tim who was noticing the change in El Freako Plenty.
"I don't know," said Tim. "I don't think this is part of the dance."
El Freako Plenty raised the arm without the snake slowly as though he were seeking permission to be excused.
"He looks kinda funny," said Tim.
A stricken look appeared on El Freako Plenty's blackened face when his knees buckled and he swooned, flopping to a seated position, leaning forward on the arm without the snake.
Every gourd rattle stopped. The circle of girls shaded their eyes with their palms and seemed to be saluting El Freako Plenty.
"It's heat stroke!" someone shouted.
"Don't panic," cried another.
"Raise his feet," shouted someone else. "And get him in the shade!"
From high in the bleachers came a long, piercing cry, "He's been bitten!"
Tim started at a sudden strange movement at his side. "I feel fa?fa?," mumbled a voice. The boy beside Tim sank to his knees. Tim tried to step away, but the boy seized the bottom of Tim's kilt and yanked it down, yanked it all the way to Tim's ankles. Tim was conscious that the eyes of many of the girls diverted to his predicament. Tim bent over and, wrenching the boy's hand off his kilt, he tried to snatch the waist of kilt up to his thighs while he hobbled away. Tim noticed another boy who had swooned and then another. Then the whole line of black Snake Priests were either on the ground or wobbling, only Tim stood upright.
Then El Freako Plenty fell to the sand, prone, his glasses underneath him pushed halfway off his face. The rattlesnake squirmed slowly away from his neck.
The rattler darted toward the bleachers and the circle of girls broke outward, and fell back screaming. A chaos of running legs, a hullabaloo of fallen hats, hollers, and general hysteria ensued.
"Help!" screamed three stationary little girls. The snake headed directly for them.
Mr. Himmelstein bellowed, "Get the cage!" A wild-eyed Antelope Priest hopped into the bower to retrieve it.
Tim blundered to the edge of the clearing. Everywhere there were people terrified by the imagined snake. A stooped-over man and woman surrounded a creosote bush. "I saw it go in there," said the woman.
"No, listen. It's over here," said another man, running past.
"She's right. It's the wavy thing in that shadowy part," said the stooped-over man, pointing with his stick.
Tim saw the four-hands-wide woman stumble up a trail in the direction of the Bolls mansion. As she ran she was circling her huge arms and whooping: "Move girls! It's coming!"
>
Andy raced over to Tim.
"Did anyone see me? Did any girls notice," asked Tim. "Did they see that guy beside me faint and pull my kilt down?"
"No. Everybody was looking at the snake. Come on. Let's get out of here. It's all over."
Tim let himself be dragged forward by Andy. Girls could be seen far down the side trails, running, screeching. Andy and Tim ran with them. In moments ambulance sirens shrieked onto the Bolls estate and someone spoke into a megaphone, repeating complicated commonsense commands.
"Jeez, are you absolutely sure no one saw my kilt go down?" said Tim.
"Sure, I'm sure," said Andy. "They were all looking at the snake and El Freako Plenty on the ground. Wasn't it great when he fainted?"
"Nothing was great!" replied Tim. "My pants were pulled down! I'm never going to be able to forget this. This is going to be the nightmare of my entire life. All I can think about is girls seeing my pants go down. A bunch of girls saw me in my underwear!"
"Don't sweat it."
"Don't sweat it? Is that all you can say? This is the worst thing that ever happened to me. This is worse than throwing up on Francesca Vasquez in fourth grade!"
"Forget it," said Andy.
"You know what?" said Tim.
"What?" replied Andy.
"I feel really mad."
"What, finally!" screeched Andy happily.
"Finally."
"Really?"
"I feel so mad about being undressed in front of people who were girls."
"And so?"
"I'm going to quit scouts. I'll come over to your house this afternoon. You get out your typewriter and I'll write my letter of resignation to send to Mr. Himmelstein."
"Wow!" said Andy. "We can send them in at the same time."
"I'm so mad. Some guy just pulled my pants off in front of a bunch of girls."
"I think you're mad, but say it like you mean it."
"I'm mad."
"Louder."
"I'm mad!" screamed Tim.
Just then two Red Birds in pigtails came along a path that merged in front of Tim and Andy and at the sight of the screaming priests in pink and black greasepaint they hugged each other.
"I'm really, really, really mad!" screamed Tim.
"He's been bitten," yelled one of the girls, pulling her friend back from Andy and Tim until they both got the courage to turn and flee.
The next afternoon, after the disastrous Snake Dance, Tim visited Andy's house and together they relished typing and sending their letters of resignation to Mr. Himmelstein.
The next weekend Tim's big sister congratulated him for doing something in what she deemed 'the progressive movement,' and one glorious Sunday she let Andy and Tim help her boyfriend do a brake job on her Volkswagen Beetle.
But, unfortunately for Tim, other, bad consequences emerged from the Snake Dance.
Tim's father refused to speak to him for weeks after he discovered that Tim had sent the letter to Mr. Himmelstein and quit scouting. Their eyes never met during that time and Mr. Delfs sniffed whenever he saw his youngest son, which was seldom because his scowling father avoided him. Then, a week later on a Sunday morning in early July, Tim's father called his son into his office.
Tim's father sat placidly at the desk, watching the monsoon rain drip from the eaves onto a small patch of Bermuda grass, and after the two of them had sat there quietly Mr. Delfs launched into a long, slow series of quiet, impassive questions, a line of subtle questioning, about Tim's intentions and motives for quitting scouts. He made Tim question his own inability to confront his father directly. He talked about the mistake of letting the fear of others rule your life, and he asserted that you could have fear even when you rebelled, that rebellion didn't banish fear and that the only way to banish fear was to accept your responsibilities and fulfill them.
He made Tim explore the true nature of quitting and discussed whether quitting was going to become a way of life. Was he going to start lots of projects and stop them? Tim felt horrified by the suggestion; he had always excelled in school. Besides, Tim objected, he hadn't started the Snake Dance project. The whole thing had been Mr. Himmelstein's idea. Tim explained that imitating Native Americans was no longer cool and he had liked many activities in scouting until the sham ceremonies began and then he objected on the grounds that replicating Native American ceremonies was silly and disrespectful. Tim's father was silent and then contrasted Tim's quitting with his older brother's integrity and will-power in becoming an Eagle Scout and later starting his own engineering firm. Did success in life mean sometimes compromising your high ideals and carrying through with something that you didn't agree with 100%? No matter where you worked wouldn't there be something objectionable about it? Would wives and children disappoint Tim later? Could he quit on them?
Then Tim's father paused and asked if Tim would be following his older sister's lead in his life choices? Where did he think following a sister, a female, would take someone? Did successful people ever take their ideas from women? When had he ever heard of a successful man taking his ideas and ideals from a woman, especially a young woman? Did Tim identify with females more than males, asked his father? Tim squirmed when his father said that. There seemed to be strange implications, weird side issues, branching off from his decision which Tim had never imagined, and which seemed absurd. Tim tried to contain and hide his apprehension for weeks after the interview ended.
That October, when Mr. Delfs planned the annual fishing trip to Aguabampo on the Sea of Cortez, he included his two older sons, but not Tim.
Startled by his father's ferocity and staying power over the silly issue of the Snake Dance, Tim felt himself being cautious and mistrustful around people and he withdrew more from situations. Though Tim remained close to his sister and formed a happy marriage and had children, time could never break through the divide, the cold fury and disfavor, which his father had built up against his youngest son. As the years went by, Tim's father never offered to help with college career choices or money. The bitterness remained palpable between them for all the years after and their relationship suffered, though, oddly, nothing more was ever said about scouting.
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THE END
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On the Rio Mayo