Snake Dance Disaster Read online

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 disastrou
s 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