Snake Dance Disaster
Lorraine Ray
Copyright 2011 Lorraine Ray
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.
“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