The Short Stories of Jim Stallings
Lizards Bluff .....by Jim Stallings
In the hush of the telegraph office the tapping key signalled the besieged mining town.
Stop. Stay put. Don't panic, it said in dots and dashes, help is on the way! Then the line went dead.
There was a collective sigh in Lizard's Bluff and a carousing rush for the bar in the Gopher's Emporium. Drinks-on-the-house!
"It's okay to be what you are!" the telegrapher proclaimed, pushing back his green eyeshade and toasting his fellow citizens. "Sure's shootin' we'll be rescued by tomorry noon!"
Volleys of hot slugs from six shooters riddled the dusty ceiling.
"Bring on the dancing girls!" the grizzled boys chorused. "Bring on La Belle!!!"
The jaundiced piano player took a long pull on his beer and lit into two old favorites: "The Jolly Roger" (a fast right-hand pirate ship survives a storm of left-hand tidal surges), and "The Calico Cat, She Warn't No Lady" (a bawdy ballad of a chord-romping feline). The saloon was packed with everyone in Lizard's Bluff--cowboys, miners, shopkeepers, sheriff and mayor, doctor and undertaker, banker and lawyer, and every other bona fide drunk. "Bring on La Belle! Bring on La Belle!" they chanted, tossing bruised saloon girls about the glowing room.
(Meanwhile, surrounding the tiny mining town in the foothills of the desert was the Enemy, armed to the teeth. Unseen in daylight, indeed, favoring night attacks, they crept closer to the town's outskirts, sensing the strange atmosphere of the besieged in celebration. They relaxed in the shade of stunted trees and marked time while picking their teeth with cactus spines. A few hours before sunset. Time to consider their options, there being so many.)
La Belle was in her dressing room powdering her pocked face and talking with the Gopher's owner, Colonel James McGregor Hunt. His glossy black boot rested jauntily on the chair by La Belle's makeup table. He idly spun the boot's silver spur and listened to its cash register jingle. He was filthy rich and all of Lizard's Bluff wore his brand, including his star performer, who he now admired primping in the half-mirror.
"You're the most beautiful woman I've ever known, La Belle," he whispered huskily into her frosted hair.
"You're a lying sonofabitch, Colonel honey, but you pay good and you're real sweet...sometimes." La Belle powdered her neck and gave him a sly wink. "You know I'm just pulling your leg, lover boy." She stood up and kissed him on the cheek. He tried to press his lips to her exposed shoulder but she brushed past him and looked out the window.
"What's wrong, honey? You seem so...so, nervous," the Colonel drawled and moved behind La Belle to comfort her. "Is it the heat again?"
"No, it ain't the heat and it ain't that time of month." She pulled away from him and jabbed a ragged, red fingernail at the scrub hills behind the town. "It's the dark. There's really something out there! It ain't good, it's evil and you've got to do something!" La Belle let the Colonel take her in his arms.
"Sugar lamb, don't fret. The telegram just came through and reinforcements are on the way. There's nothing to worry about, you'll see." He stroked her scented hair and worried that her grease paint might soil his ruffled dress shirt. Afterall, he had his image as a southern Colonel and riverboat gambler to maintain. "They're calling for you. Go ahead. Go out there and give'm what they need... Maybe you'll chase away those, those--"
"DEMONS?!" whined La Belle, her eyes crossing. "They're demons, aren't they? They come down from the mountains out of the old mine shafts. That old Indian squaw told me--" "Who?"
"That one that sweeps up. She said the white man let them loose by digging up the silver and gold. She said they'd never, never let us out alive." La Belle stared up at the Colonel's cocky smile.
"You been listening to The Princess? She don't know diddley-squat!" the Colonel boomed. "Demons? Pshaw! That's cheap Injun talk...You really want to know what's got us pinned down here?"
La Belle shook her head eagerly. The Colonel stepped to the window and stared off into the vacant hills. He could feel their presence and his mind searched for a label for their mystery.
La Belle's hands shook as she clutched at his ruffled breast swollen with false confidence. "Of course I want to know. You mean you know, really, truly know?"
"Of course I know, sweetheart. It's quite obvious: we've got ourselves a renegade problem, plain and simple," the Colonel intoned and gestured woodenly at the anonymous hills. He was feeling a speech coming on, for he was certain he knew the Enemy now. "Those hills are alive with renegades--deserters, bushwhackers, half-breeds, bounty-hunters, fools, varmints and prophets--the scum of the desert." He smiled and patted her bowed head. "They're a joke! They're nothing and what's worse, they know it! Tomorrow they'll be hightailing it to the four ends of the territory."
La Belle bounced on her toes and her blonde curls tossed like a child's. "Oh James, is that it? Of course we can stand off those silly old renegades. Why didn't you tell me before, you naughty boy?"
"It's not a woman's worry, dumplin'," the Colonel consoled her with a kiss on her dainty upturned nose. "Now my flower, on with the show." He gave her padded rear a squeeze and guided her gently but firmly to the door.
(In the town's dump on the outskirts they ripped through the refuse of Lizard's Bluff. The one on listening duty on the hilltop slid down to the dump and reported that the Colonel had just made a particularly arrogant speech about "their identity." The Colonel was dead wrong. Maybe it was time to show themselves. They huddled in a dry gulch east of town and filed their fangs in a noxious cloud of obscene speculation. Twilight approached.)
At the Gopher's Emporium La Belle was earning her pay. She sang a sultry first number, "My Desert Rose," and writhed about a velvet love couch with an imaginary lover. Up front several earnest fistfights broke out and two tables of drunken miners had to be clubbed back into their seats. Despite the uproar, La Belle went on with her second number, a saucy rendition of "Polly Put the Kettle On." With each tea-serving, Polly flounced her skirts and flashed yellow bloomers embroidered with a red heart that entreated "Kiss Me!" Fighting spread as the men howled their pain in Lizard's Bluff. The Colonel climbed to the stage and fired several rounds into the chandelier and brought a temporary lull to the bedlam.
La Belle finished with "Come To Me, Oh, Come To Me!" --a plaintive love song of a young working girl calling for her errant lover. As the curtain rose, she returned to her drab apartment after a hard day at the company store and began singing quietly of heartache and burning love. She wandered about the apartment forlornly, her singing slowly rising with passion. She slipped behind a translucent oriental screen and began lazily removing her clothes--her shoes, skirt and blouse, followed by a flurry of filmy garments.
When the last lacey item arced through the smoke-filled air to the stage floor and her sumptuous body was silhouetted--the ripened curves of breasts, belly and buttocks--she cried out in anguished soulful climax -
Ah--My Arms A-Wait,
Your Strong Swift Embrace,
Come, Lover, Tis Our Fate,
Let Me Your Sweet Kisses Taste!
The slobbering mob went stark-raving mad and swept like crazed buffalo over the footlights, trampling the Colonel and La Belle behind the screen. The lights went out and the frenzy of the lunatic mass churned into the streets abusing everything in its path.
The Enemy had arrived.
By morning they had leveled Lizard's Bluff. A shred of La Belle's skirt hung limply from a charred stake. Next to it lay the gnarled silver spur of the Colonel.
Reinforcements never came. The telegraph message had been a hoax perpetrated by the Colonel's so-called "renegades."
Years passed. Cactus and mesquite reclaimed the rubble of Lizard's Bluff, and dust devils whispered down the main street. And what of the good citizens of that forgotten town?
Legend says their memory lives on, deep in abandoned mines, down deep where belching demons recline...picking their teeth with cactus spines.