Snake Dance Disaster Read online

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 have 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, th
inking. 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