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bath towel that constantly threatened to fall off (but never did). In one hand Two-Dogs-Fucking gripped a cooked leg of turkey vulture that he intermittently gnawed upon; in the other he held a rope that led a battered and sickly donkey, Alf the Sacred Burro. In a nearby juniper skeleton, a roost of turkey vultures trailed Two-Dogs-Fucking with resentful eyes.
    “And now is the time when we dance and draw upon the energy of the great spirit,” said Three Tooth, hopping on one foot and working up the momentum to switch back and forth from foot to foot. With his hips dropped low and his back arched up, Three Tooth jumped from foot to foot, throwing his head and hands toward the sky. And his slow, graceful movements, so unlike the crazed and flailing lunk-afflicted dancers, caught like a slow burn among the men. And all but Two-Dogs-Fucking mimicked Three Tooth’s movements and pranced in a circle around Alf the Sacred Burro and Two-Dogs-Fucking. The dancing men chanted in tongues unknown to Alf and slowly moved their party in the direction of John and Santiago.
    “Come now, dance my round little friend,” said Three Tooth to Two-Dogs-Fucking, slapping him on the ass to infect the slothful slug with dance fever.
    Ignoring Three Tooth’s call to the ghost dance, Two-Dogs-Fucking adjusted his towel, heaved his substantial gut in front of himself, and slowed the pace of his thick, bare, ham steak feet. “Sir,” said Two-Dogs-Fucking to Three Tooth, “I simply don’t feel motivated today. Perhaps instead of dancing I could sit a while and enjoy a mid-morning meal.”
    Two-Dogs-Fucking’s seamless transition from sluggard to laggard saddened Three Tooth. A tear leaked from his eye because he found himself growing tired of Two-Dogs- Fucking’s lack of motivation and general malaise. The round man’s apathy was infectious. It tainted Three Tooth’s psyche, making him prone to bouts of melancholy. Three Tooth found that he had developed a sad, leaky eye that watered at the slightest provocation since taking Two-Dogs-Fucking into his circle. The sadness made Three Tooth want to drink chicha much more than he used to. This was a problem. And the tear that trickled down Three Tooth’s cheek strengthened his resolve to remedy the Two-Dogs-Fucking situation.
    Alf the Sacred Burro and Two-Dogs-Fucking ambled at the most leisurely of paces and were circled by the slow-motion circular movement of the dancing men. Unlike Three Tooth and the others, Alf did not mind Two-Dogs-Fucking’s lack of motivation. Alf himself rarely felt the urge to do much besides sit on his haunches, munch at the desert grasses and flowers, and get his mangy head scritched by whomever might be so willing. Two-Dogs-Fucking was often the scritcher, and the scritching came at the expense of making any other contributions to the wellbeing of the crew. The dancing men moved their circle along, slowly, as if Alf and Two-Dogs-Fucking were an anchor they had to drag across the ground. Despite their burden, the men stomped about and threw their heads back and chanted in unison to the sky. Three Tooth and his gracefully prancing crew moved like a great sand-slug across the desert, eventually intersecting the course of John and Santiago on the red brick road. When the two groups met, Three Tooth’s eye dribbled a tear. And the sky commiserated with Three Tooth in a brief but heavy cloudburst.

     
    Three Tooth dismounted Morticia and walked toward John, his hands held up, palms out in a greeting and as a show of the absence of aggression. Behind Three Tooth, his men stayed in one spot, chanting and circling Two-Dogs-Fucking and Alf the Sacred Burro (who both sat on the ground, recuperating from their walk). At the precise moment that Three Tooth set foot on the red brick road, the rain ceased. And a bolt from the blue gashed the sky and struck nearby, the lightning forking and striking both a juniper tree and a thorn bush. A loud snap of instant thunder slapped the