Chapter 5 – Buffalo Dance
“I promise you, Manetti, tonight, I’m gonna to sit right up there at the front of Satinka’s stage. I’m gonna stretch my arm and offer my palm all full of shiners, and Satinka’s going to purr her way over to me and let me run my hands all up and down her thighs, is gonna just smile and moan as I work my way over all over her curves and swells.”
Manetti rolled his eyes. “Don’t ruin my memory of Satinka with any of your dreams, Toby. I can’t stand to imagine any image of you touching my Satinka. And you better not do anything to get us kicked out of the Palace.”
“That’s your problem,” Toby snorted. “You never push for anything. How do you know what you’re capable of feeling if you never even try? You settle too much for all the easy things.”
“Maybe so,” and Manetti peeked again towards the Palace’s purple curtain, “but don’t forget that I polish just as much glass as you.”
Toby wanted to kick the back of his friend’s knees until Manetti fell onto the ground. He despised his friend’s height. Manetti had to be close to seven feet tall, and Manetti didn’t have to stretch to get a clear view towards the stage upon which Satinka would soon be dancing. Toby, however, was well short of six feet, and he would have to jump and jostle between shoulders to get any peek of Satinka. Yet Toby didn’t dare kick at the back of his companion’s knees. He didn’t want Tarence to toss hom out the door. He wasn’t about to risk missing the next time Satinka took the stage.
“Talk on the towers says Satinka’s planning a real special dance for tonight.”
“Don’t tell me anything I already know, Manetti.”
“Where do you think Satinka came from?”
Toby shrugged. “I don’t care where Satinka came from as long as I get to look at her.”
“Some say she blew in with the dust.”
“And that would be fine with me,” Toby chuckled. “Let the dust carry something nice to us for a change. Let the dust give us something all us polishers don’t have to wash away. Who knows? Maybe the dust’s trying to make friends out of us polishers.”
“I think she comes from the pits.”
Toby grunted. “Seriously, Manetti? The pits? I can’t believe for a second that any of those dull gypsum diggers could ever mate with one of those thick-boned pit women to produce a daughter that looks like Satinka.”
Manetti thought about punching Toby’s teeth down his throat, but he also feared the Palace’s doorman. “My family came from the gypsum pits before we migrated to the city to help clean all the glass towers.”
“Thus proving my point.”
Manetti shook his head and imagined Satinka growing up in the gypsum community of his forefathers while he waited with the other polishers for the appearance of their favorite dancer. Manetti imagined Satinka making a dusty, gypsum father proud, imagined how Satinka might have given life to one of the small pit communities covered in ash. Manetti dreamed of the songs the simple gypsum miners might have composed upon their simple guitars in celebration of Satinka’s beauty. He imagined how Satinka may have helped those who worked the pits remember finer things than all the gypsum gray – watercolors of rainy and smudged valleys, ermine fabrics and satin bedding, the tingle and taste of bourbon, the smell of a lover’s perfume.
Manetti was not alone in such dreaming. While Satinka danced upon the Crystal Palace’s stage, the polishers couldn’t resist imagining her hips against them, her breath in their ear. No line or wait was too long for the opportunity to watch her. For Satinka returned life to a barren and dusty realm. The polishers washed the dust from the towers, and Satinka’s danced washed that grime from them. Polishers invented so many stories upon their scaffolds concerning their favorite dancer’s origins. Some said she rose from some mountain hovel after being conceived in one of the coal mining communities hewn into the rock. Others claimed Satinka came from the wild, barren lands, where the wind lifted the dirt before delivering such dust to the glass towers, so that perhaps Satinka was an offering from the sky after the wind had tormented the polishers for so long. Still others argued that Satinka must’ve originated in a much more distant land, that she must’ve walked out of the gray sea, a favorite girl of some far-flung coastal villa forced to hunger while the waters continued to spoil. Collected all together, those stories spoke of the many lands the polishers long ago knew before riding the lift man’s cages; and all those stories expressed the polishers’ fear that too much dust, and too much ash, choked the world of their time, and all those stories spoke of the polishers’ hopes that a woman shaped liked Satinka might, somehow, return a small acre of green to a world turned white with bone.
The Crystal Palace’s purple curtain swayed, and the polishers erupted in delight.
“He she comes, Toby.”
“I warned you, Manetti, not to tell me anything I didn’t already know.”
Satinka danced onto the stage, dressed in a strange wardrobe of brown hides. The polishers swooned for the way a headdress of horns and feathers accentuated the sway of her hips. The polishers stared upon the braided locks of Satinka’s dark hair, their appetites pushing their imaginations to see the figure concealed by those dark tresses falling beyond her shoulders. The polishers whistled and jeered. Those in the rear of the crowd pushed against those in the front, and those in the front threw elbows at those in the back. Heated blood charged the air. Wild fever gripped the polishers, and the smallest spark threatened to send the polishers into a madness that endangered Lady Finch’s Crystal Palace.
The drums started to beat just as the polishers roared in their hunger.
“She looks more incredible than ever. I’ve never seen her in such a dress. What do you think it means, Toby?’
“How should I know? Isn’t it enough to just stare at her?”
The rhythm seeped beneath the polishers’ skin and stilled their hearts so that the catcalls and the cheers silenced. Satinka arched a hip and leaned a curve of her shoulder forward. The buffalo hide upon her back billowed and twirled. The horns upon Satinka’s buffalo crown rose and fell. Satinka’s feet stomped a dance like none ever seen in the Crystal Palace. She made no move towards that garish, golden pole. She didn’t approach any of the polishers leaning over the stage, no matter how the shiners jangled in their clutching hands. Her hands didn’t move any of those locks of dark, black hair to offer even the slightest glimpse of any of the flesh resting beneath.
Yet the polishers were mesmerized all the same. They inhaled a collective breath, and the anger in their hearts vanished to give room for another sensation. They stomped their polisher boots to the rhythm of those drums and the rhythm of Satinka’s dance until Lady Finch’s walls trembled.
Time spent upon the towers took a toll upon a polisher’s vision - no matter the quality of sunglasses the polisher wore on those bright days when the dust remained quiet and the sun’s reflection burned within the glass. But none of the polishers in that Palace would say that stigmatisms of the eye or filmy layers of cataracts could explain what they believed they saw next in Satinka’s dance. The polishers believed something miraculous hovered above Satinka as she stepped her dance, some primal power that throbbed over her head. The beating drums grew louder. Satinka arched to the booms. The polishers stomped harder and harder.