Snake Dance Disaster

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.

  “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