"Would they do war dances?"

"War dances! This was a party, man! They would throw on some heavy jams, some Curtis, some James Brown, Tower of Power, you name it! These cats would put 'Soul Train' right outta business. They had this dynamite dance called the Funky Buffalo, lemme see if I remember it." Stony got up, thinking fast. "Now gimme a sec, it's an old ancestral dance. I gotta remember how to do it." Stony finally decided to get down on all fours, made grunting noises and kicked his legs back while moving in a circle.

"Tha's weak!"

"I woun't dance wit' choo, man!"

All the kids laughed, slapping their knees and imitating Stony's buffalo grunts.

Stony got up, his face flushed, laughing along with them. "Well, y'see they had to dance like that, you know, on all fours, 'cause the women in the tribe were only nine inches tall, man, an' if you do one a these numbers"—Stony did a high-stepping rain dance—"you dance like that, you likely to wipe out the whole ladies' club if you ain't careful. But I'm gettin' away from the story here. One day for the initiation they send this young brave way back in the cave, and they're all on the outside waitin' an' they hear"—Stony tapped on the chair seat—"from inside 'cause he's tappin' the ax, right? Then all of a sudden they hear this 'rrrrrr.' " Stony made a rumbling noise in the back of his throat. "An' all of a sudden everything went Boom! It was a cave-in! Rocks started flyin', the earth shook, clouds a dust came bloomin' outta the cave, oh, it was terrible!" Stony held his head.

"What happened to the Indian?"

Stony started tapping on the seat. "Well, they heard him tappin' inside, so they tried to dig him out soon as the earth settled, an' the rocks stopped flyin' an' the dust cleared. But the cave was blocked to the sky with gigantic boulders and they couldn't get in more than two inches an' they tried, boy, they tried, they pulled, an' yanked and tugged, but they couldn't move one boulder. I mean they tried for hours while they could still hear that tappin' and all the women were weepin' an' wailin' and the men were gruntin' an sweatin' but nothin' from nothin\ man."

Stony kept tapping as he told the story. "There wasn't one Indian who wasn't knocked out to the bone. They just couldn't go on anymore. Even the women and children were exhausted. Then all of a sudden the tapping stopped."

Stony stopped tapping the chair.

"He was dead?" In a whisper.

"Instead of havin' a celebration they wound up havin' a funeral." Stony sadly shook his head. "They never tried another cave initiation again. They just put flowers in fronna the blocked cave for the dead young brave's spirit and called it a day. That woulda been that, except that the next year on the first anniversary of the cave-in, in the middle of the night"—Stony started tapping his chair and said in a hoarse whisper—"the tapping started again!"