Bizzy Coy
She couldn’t see the sign. Had it been stolen? Impossible. She pulled her mothy hair into a kerchief and put on her glasses and went outside. The sign was still there, its hinges creaking in the wind, but it was blocked by a towering heap of tumbleweed. Had there ever been a year with more tumbleweed? One tourist had mused, squealing the postcard rack, how he always imagined tumbleweeds were lonesome rollers, but now that he’d come out West he understood they traveled in packs.
It took an hour to wrest the tumbleweeds away from “Welcome to Buckaroo Bluff.” There was too much to do, as always. She tidied the Trading Post and swept the age-warped boardwalk and batted a broom at the dusty doorway of the Saloon. The bar inside was a disaster. Loomis had promised to clean the soda guns in their grimy holsters, the sticky glasses in the cracked bus tub. She could do it herself or she could wait for him. She would resent him either way. It was a high-noon duel, and she was shooting at herself.
Loomis. Still in bed, probably. That lifeless lump. He wouldn’t even take five seconds to spray the postcard rack with WD-40, no matter how much it grated against her, an endless carousel of screeches. She tolerated his laziness. That was her own fault. She could not afford to be picky, out in the empty foothills of nowhere.
She relayed her complaints to Stan Stan the Piano Man, perched at the player-piano in a fringed vest and red bandana. Stan Stan was the first animatronic she had rigged, when Dormann’s department store went out of business and she struck gold with a dumpster of mannequins. She pressed a button and the piano plinked. Stan Stan’s arms yanked up and down above the keys, pulled by fishing wire.
Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight?
Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight, and dance by the light of the moon?
She pressed another button and Dolly the proprietress swayed on the spindled balcony, her red brocade swishing, her stringy ostrich plumes flopping. Oh, the things Dolly might’ve seen, back in the Old West. Knuckle-fights and nasty johns, men drunk on the promise of untold riches—grabby men, greedy men, men too exhausted to behave. Not like Loomis, who didn’t have a single drop of passion left inside. He had found her beautiful, once. What happened? She still had needs. Her urge had never lessened, even after her womanly bits were scooped out like pulp from a cantaloupe. She might as well rub herself against the fencepost.
Cleaning the Jailhouse was pointless since she couldn’t tell where the artificial cobwebs stopped and the real cobwebs began. She pressed a button and Zane’s wrists jangled, clanking his handcuffs. Poor old Zane. Locked up for what? She couldn’t remember. She should put Loomis behind bars sometime. That’d jolt him out of his complacency. A taste of frontier justice.
She stooped to collect pennies from the wooden Wishing Well, pennies that were mostly hers, vague wishes for happiness, for a change that would not require her to change with it. She ate dinner alone, her whole body aching from labor. Loomis lay on the couch.
Sliding into the crisp cotton sheets she noticed, for the first time all day, her feet. The numbness had started months ago on the soles and then gone up the sides. She could barely feel the grainy scratch of sand that collected at the foot of the mattress. The numbness went to her ankles now. How far would it go? Her calves? Her knees? All the way up to you-know-where? In olden times it’d be a simple fix. A hawker rolling into town with a wagon of elixirs. A swig of medicine straight from a brown bottle.
It was not a bad idea. She tiptoed to the Saloon, her white nightgown aglow, and poured a whiskey. If her feet were going to be numb, she might as well numb the whole damn thing. She had numbed herself to Loomis anyway. She wanted him. But the more she wanted, the less he gave, until she had to convince herself she had no wantings in the first place. An awful cycle.
She downed two more shots and pressed the piano button. Stan Stan the Piano Man flailed obediently.
I asked her if she’d have a dance, have a dance, have a dance,
I thought that I might have a chance to shake a foot with her.
She pressed the button to make Dolly speak and she heard her own voice, thirty years younger, crackling through the hidden speaker: You know what they say: Any man’s better than no man at all! She chucked the empty glass into the cracked bus tub with the others. Sloshing with courage, she scampered home and dragged Loomis to bed. She mounted him in the fashion of cowgirls, grinding her pelvis against his, bucking, braying. He did not push her away, but his eyes were blank. Fixed on the ceiling, not her. Was she so hideous? Was she so terrible? Her head swirled dizzy as a dust-devil. She grabbed him to steady herself and his arm fell off.
She retrieved the fallen arm from the floor and reattached it, fast and quiet, not wanting to embarrass him. He would not even look at her. There would be no lovemaking now for a long time. With numb feet and numb heart she lay upon her pillow. Loomis gave off no warmth beside her. She cursed her needy loins for trying.
The tumbleweeds came overnight again, swallowing the Ford in a bristly mound. She would not have cared except she was supposed to drive to the ridiculous doctor to have her feet
looked at. She took the tumbleweed as a sign to stay home and drink herself to death, the numbness rising an inch at a time until she lost her whole body, every organ paralyzed. But if she died—oh, if she died!—who would take care of her life’s work? She owed it to Stan Stan and Dolly and Zane and yes, even Loomis. To stay alive.
She called the fire department who promised to send a volunteer to dig her out. While she waited, she cleaned the Blacksmith’s Shop. Wrought iron hung from the ceiling, hooks and horseshoes, bits of fence and links of chain. Loomis was supposed to show tourists how to whack metal with a hammer, but it had been months since anyone stopped in, months since he fulfilled his duties. Loomis had worked so hard, once, with a virile spirit. Those days were long gone.
A pickup truck pulled in. The kid from the fire department said it was a neat place, that he must’ve driven past a hundred times, and he had no clue it was open for business.
He attacked the tumbleweed with rake and shovel while Loomis watched from inside the Trading Post. She was terrified the kid would spot Loomis in the window and ask why he wasn’t out there helping. She wouldn’t know what to say. How to explain the sad realities of living to a young’un who had just begun. Thankfully, the kid didn’t notice Loomis. He asked if she was all alone out here, ma’am?
The kid was straight like a ladder and oh, how she wanted to climb him. He was handsome in the way all young men were handsome, through no effort of their own—windswept, taut, all forearms and eyebrows and razor-nicked acne scars. She felt fresh just looking at him. She grinned and whistled and he took up her song:
I danced with a gal with a hole in her stockin’ and her heel kept a-knockin’ and her toes kept a-rockin’
I danced with a gal with a hole in her stockin’ and we danced by the light of the moon.
She returned from the useless doctor to see that the sign was now half-covered by tumbleweeds: “Welcome to Buck.” Even worse, Loomis was not waiting for her at the Trading Post. Had he gone and left for good? She felt an impulse to spin the postcard rack, to punish herself with the terrible wrenching squeal that had become the soundtrack of her loneliness. But there was no squeal. It turned smooth and soundless. Her heart quickened. Loomis. Had he sprayed the WD-40 as she had asked so many times before? Could it be? She scurried to the Blacksmith’s Shop, careful not to raise her hopes too high.
There he was. She pressed the button and he swung his hammer, strong and steady and true. He did not explain himself, and she did not ask him to explain. She could only imagine he had gotten jealous of the handsome kid smiling at her and singing her song. He loved her. He really did. There was always hope to be had. Folks had a way of coming back around.
#
Bizzy Coy’s work appears in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Vulture, Grand Journal, Litt Mag and The Catskiller. Her humor collection, Personal Space, is available at bizzycoy.com. Recent honors include a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, MacDowell residency and Fulbright scholarship. Bizzy received her MA in creative writing from Dublin City University. She is a lifelong resident of New York State.