Sheila and Her Friends, Redux

"No, we don't!" they say together and giggle because they did it again.

Julie: "You said you'd tell us about...how you...about the past."

"Yes, you did baby vamp, don't hide your secrets from your girlfriends," Lily says.

Girlfriends! Muses Sheila, Who could've known that on this lonely night, so desperately hungry, I'd find two such loves, like a gift from the Goddess, after so many years.

They are walking down the hill toward the old fire station, now an art gallery. They stop before a long, narrow three-story red-brick building that seems built into a hillside of granite. Old mining shacks, long converted to houses, sit on the terraces above, stepping up, improbably, along the hillside. A rusted steel rail runs along the side of the building.

"I remember when Miss Betty first bought this peculiar one person elevator chair. You can just see the chair up at the top of the stairs if you follow that rail up. Betty was getting on in years, but she didn't want to abandon what was then still known as best whore house in Bisbee. They called it Cheroots, an irony since it was about the only place in town that didn't allow smoking or chewing. If she didn't have such a good stable of girls, I doubt anyone would trudge up these steep stairs for the pleasure of our company."

"Your company!" They say again, together.

Wow, Lily thinks, we only say things together when we are surprised and forced to step out of ourselves.

Yes, Julie acknowledges, Sheila as a prostitute--juicy! Maybe she'll tell us how to improve our love life with men.

God knows, we don't need any improvement with women! Lily thinks.

Back to my story, girls. Sheila intrudes on their thoughts.

"So as I was saying,'" Sheila says aloud to focus their attention. "at the top of these stairs was the premier whorehouse of Bisbee. We had the best, prettiest girls, and because Betty was such a good madam, we had good clients and not too much drama."

"How many women were there?" asks Lily. "If there was more than one there was drama! I'm a straight bartender in a gay bar--I know drama!"

"Straight?" smirks Julie.

"Well, formerly straight, miss call-me-curious virgin!"

"Speaking of drama, anyway, I said, 'not too much.' A little but nothing to distract us from our pleasure."

"So you like fucking men day-after-day-after-boring day?" Julie laughs. "I'm thinking after the initial discomfort of having to do it for work you might have discovered some good points."

(Or something, she giggles, as into her mind a row of pasty white, sooty miners parade with their cocks pointing toward them. Lily latches onto this vision and imagines Julie on her knees, not to put too fine a point on it, and giggles at her pun. Julie allows herself to knell before the men, captured in Lily's dream for her. Sheila watches amazed at the power and communion of their imagination, but interrupts them afraid they might become lost in fantasy.)

"Here we are...I like how you imagine things together. It shows how strong--and spicy--your bond is, but I'll show you the real thing." Sheila says.

At the top of the stairs, they cross a stone walkway onto a shady private porch. Almost flush against the adjacent hill, two big oak trees shade the porch. "I remember how we laughed when Betty planted those. We told her it was too narrow and shady most of the time. Now look at them."

The scrub oaks are unusually tall and leafy. Beneath them by the shallow gully between the house and the hill is the remnant of a rock garden. As they watch Sheila, she stares at the woebegone pattern of rocks: In their minds, they see a different garden, one with white-washed chairs, peonies, and some kind of hanging vine. They feel Sheila's shudder as she turns away, washing the image from her mind.

A row of rooms runs along the top floor of the building. Through the dusty windows on the porch they can look through to the other side and see the hillside across the valley, where the highway passes between the mountains at the western edge of town.

"Men would laze around this porch, smoking and spiting (they couldn't do it inside). Some would be eager; some would come just to chew the fat, talk about the mines and their fucked-up mine bosses. Some would gossip about this girl and that. We could hear them through the curtained windows. When a particularly boring customer would fumble away on top of us, we would while away the awkward time listening to them talking. The breeze would sweep over the valley and flow through the house up toward the mountain. (Good draft for a nasty habit, Miss Betty use to say. That breeze was the only reason she tolerated smoking on the porch. Anyone not using those damned spittoons we girls had to empty was banned.)"

"So you didn't like the men all that much?" asks Lily.

"I liked the girls better. They were mostly girls, too, not many stayed past age 20 or so. Most were married off or killed before then."

"Killed?"

"It was a hard life. Things could go south quickly. A girl could get in the way, especially if she hung around the bars. Some drank like fish and would get careless with their flirting. Prospecting for a husband, we called it, and would tell them not to dig themselves a grave. I've trudged up that hill over there more times than I liked. She points to a twisty road, just barely seen between the wooden shanty's far up the hillside along a row of dim street lights. There's a kind of potter's field up there. We can go up there sometime. I'll introduce you to the fallen angels who were my friends."

Lily and Julie look at each other, as the unspoken thought surfaces, Aren't they dead?

Sheila laughs, "No they aren't the undead. I meant that you could meet them in my memories. You'll meet some soon enough, anyway, when I tell you about Cheroots and Miss Betty and the girls she was so proud of. I'm the only one that crossed over...to...whatever."

Lily walks to the window. A small nightlight casts a shadow over a large room in which some sofas sit around a coffee table. The street lamps from across the way light the curtain-less windows on the far side. She wonders whether anyone is home.

No, thinks Sheila, no one's been here for a while.

Can we go in? Julie asks, afraid they might be intruding.

So, says Lily, her mind wandering, remember Julie's admonition not to let you come without telling us about...everything. What a big fail that was...you washed us all over the edge.

You're complaining? Sheila smiles.

No, just asking, changing the subject, she asks, How can you be sure no one's home?

If I concentrate, I can sense a beating heart, oh, blocks away. I can tell who is in all these houses. I think it's a survival instinct.

Who?

Yes, man, woman, child, cat, dog, rat...each heart beats differently. Many I know by name once I hear their particular heart beat. I should have known about you, Lily since you worked at that bar, but somehow we never met.

"Do you have a heart?" Julie whispers, blushing. "I thought I felt it when I was kissing between your breasts, resting my cheek there."

"It beats slowly, steady like a drum. My metabolism has changed. Since I don't eat solids, my body has become like those ancient yogis you hear about in India."

"The ones that can rise off the ground?"

"Yes, when you're able to 'speed' in an instant of what you might think of as slowed motion--like when your clothes were removed—then survival is strengthened.

"Let's go in. You've nothing to worry about."

They go through the double doors of beveled glass, the panes along the edge are a cloudy pink, barely tinted from the glow of the nightlight. "If I didn't spell this place it would be filled with vagrants and this rare rose glass would have been broken or stolen ages ago."

A spell?

Yes, like the remnant of a bad feeling, a sense that can linger over a place, like something edgy that makes people believe in ghosts and unconsciously turn away.

We didn't feel it, did we? Julie thinks, looking at Lily.

No...

You wouldn't. We're like sisters somehow. Bonded. You may not do the things I do, but I have never felt this tethered to anything or anyone.

"Anything?" Lily asks, "You certainly got cloudy back there by the rock garden!"

"Yeah!" says Julie, "I felt it too. Like I was lost somehow, drifting in a fog."

How tightly woven we are! Sheila thinks, again lost in the past, Someone told me what it would be like when...well whenever, it would be like drifting on the skein of consciousness, threaded through the needle of fate... and shakes her head, Don't mind me...!

In the parlor of the old whore house, she tells them. "Men would stand around the back of these sofas. At least five girls, sometimes more, would saunter about, preening ourselves. Some slouched on the sofas, legs apart showing petticoated pale thighs without the expected bloomers. Some would lean over the shoulders of their friends, heads nestled together suggestively. Girl-on-girl provocation was almost as speculative among the men of the 1800s as it is now—if you believe the internet. We were like exotic birds, feathery, frilly, and colorfully apart from the norms that bound respectable people to their missionary positions."

Julie stares at the brocaded sofas, seeing if she can summon the familiarity she felt back at the bar where they met Lily.

"Can you feel anything, Lily?" she says aloud.

"It feels like home." Lily says, slumping onto the couch and looking about the room, "But not like I felt in the bar when I saw you, Julie. Later, when you put your hands on my body, it felt as natural as a hand fitted to a glove. It felt right."

Sheila looks into the questioning faces, "This place may not stir those faint memories of the past for you, Julie, but there were other places, some quite unexpected, where we've met. It was a boom town back then, and only ladies of a certain bent would congregate together, and only in certain places."

She laughs, in her mind floats a scene that looks right our of a wild west movie: They see the bar they just left through her eyes. A few women are dancing with men to a set of fiddlers on a raised platform at the back of the barroom. A wood stove radiates heat in the corner near the fiddlers. Dim yellow light from two sets of chandeliers casts a glow over the merrymakers. Several mustached bartenders man the long, busy bar where patrons lounged, hats on titled heads, intent on their whiskies and beer. They stand in various postures, their feet resting on the brass foot rail. Plumes of cigar and cigarillo smoke drift up to the tin plate ceiling and swirl around the proud heads of stuffed animals peering down from the walls. Card tables are scattered about. Onlookers stand around the tables, including the girls, arrayed in red and green feather boas with white but dusty petticoats, like colorful birds amid the drabness of the miners.

"Are you here?" laughs Sheila, her spoken words breaking through the reverie, "Are we sisters of the night? Do you remember calloused hands touching your soft flesh?"

She pauses and looks closely at Julie and Lily, a gleam in eye, "Maybe you were occasional customers, one of the coarse men, in clothes dirty and oily enough to stand on their own, who pleasured their unwashed bodies on my lily-white flesh. They delighted in the contrast between their stink and our clean bodies that we washed daily, under Miss Betty's careful eye."

Sheila sits on the coach and motions the girls to join her. She grins broadly and wraps her arms around their shoulders as they snuggle happily next to her. "There was another part of that bar the male customers never saw..."

Now they float with Sheila to the back of the building where the bar is, following her eyes as they pause before a narrow, indistinct door and hear the curious three-toned signal taped on the door's wood slats. As the door is opened, they feel the first hint of warm steamy air. A narrow hallway leads them along a stone floor, where handholds are tacked into granite walls. They come to a mist-filled room where the laughter of women vanishes their apprehension. Hooks on the walls hold the colorful dresses, the petticoats and boas that before gave color to the bar. Surprised, their eyes follow the folds of cloth to the corner of the room where pink bodies float among the steam, beautiful mermaids swimming in a rock pool fed by a warm spring. Girls emerge from the mist to pour steaming water over rosy flesh. As they dip and pour, the loose white slips they wear like uniforms reveal the gentle swell of waiting breasts. The women stroke their legs and giggle. Sometimes they pull one the girls into the pool and fondle them through their clingy white cloth. Soon another mermaid is freed from her covering...

"Well, well," Sheila breaks into the astonished stares of the girls, "this brings a flood memories, doesn't it."

Through an odd fog, layered like lazy lifetimes wandering in fields where only the gods frolic, they feel Lily's shock as she recognizes herself in the slight black girl carrying a big copper bucket of hot water from the source of the spring to the pool. They see her struggling, a towel wrapped around the handle to keep from being burned. As she pours the hot water, a slim white arm gracefully reaches out of the pool and slides hesitantly up her leg almost causing her to drop the bucket. She feels warm fingers stroking her thin thigh, squeezing here and there appreciatively as they travel up her. She is still, now trembling at the odd pleasure this unexpectedly gentle caress brings to her harsh life. The owner of the arm is a gorgeous red-haired woman. Like a gentle nymph, a pretty butterfly, she rests lightly on the slight girl's damp flesh. When the nymph speaks, Julie and Lily both start as they recognize Julie in the notes of her voice. "Hello, dear heart. You are so pretty..." Mesmerized, they both feel the fingers caress and lightly fondle, finding at long last the old ratty cloth of the girl's bloomers. Breathless, they feel the fingers brush the frayed edge. The girl's heart is beating so fast as a slender finger slips through a hole in the coarse cotton and onto curiously silky hair. The tip of the finger now wet with the black girl's excitement, strokes the sweet folds of her pussy, so engorged she thinks she will burst. Julie feels herself start to swoon with lust and longing, how beautiful we were so long ago...

The girl shudders, sinks to the floor, and leans against the rocky edge of the pool. The fingers that touched her are gone, their absence an empty wanting. She turns to stare into the smitten green eyes, a shadow of Julie staring into the deep dark eyes of Lily. The arm hesitantly wraps itself around the girl folding her into the nook of her shoulder (how warm), where she whispers, "Don't be afraid." The woman plunges on unable to restrain her rising wonder, "Please come live with me. I...I seem to somehow know you. I will buy out your contract so that you can stay with me."

Lily feels the black girl shudder and settle into the arms of the redhead. The girl moves her head then to look again into those fabulous green eyes, to judge perhaps for the last time if this miracle of... if this closeness is real. There is a joyful tear now swimming there and then she nods, letting it and herself fall back into Julie's seemingly eternal embrace.

Lily sighs loudly, expelling the air of the past and breaks away. Flippantly, she says, afraid to sink back into the past made so unbelievably vivid by their collective memory. "Why don't I have kinky hair down there? I could feel how your finger marveled in its silkiness." Lily smiles shyly to let them know she knows she's changing the subject.

"You were a half breed or quarter breed, I guess, your black mother whom I knew well was half white, your father half black and half Navajo. Your mother was one of my best friends. She did the knitting and mending for the girls at Cheroots. I think that's why I unconsciously choose you at the bar and that's why Julie knew you. You and the Julie of back then became the best of friends. You were with her when she died not so many years later. Her name then was Isabel, we called her Izzy."

Later I'll tell you more about her and the black girl whose name was Clarissa. We called her Miss Clare sometimes--a little sarcastically because she was black, and, as some thought back then, uppity. Clare was more protective than a mother to Izzy.

"I hardly recognized you Lily, there in the mist, that memory we just saw was yours, long forgotten. Like Julie, we share a past, too. Years earlier, the Clare that loved Izzy, was my friend and lover. No wonder the three of us together are so fine and fabulous!" Sheila says aloud, her voice soft, her eyes focused on the friends and their discovered past.

Both! Both of them!

Maybe we should rest now. It's been a day of discoveries. I own this building. Sheila hesitates, oddly afraid of being rejected, and says aloud, "Would you like to live with me here...at least for a while?"

"How can we resist! You have to tell us everything!" Julie says instantly, sweeping away Sheila's hesitancy, knowing in their spooky bonded way as she says it that Lily feels that same way.

No, Julie adds silently for Lily's benefit. We are under no obligation. We can come and go when we want. And do whatever.

I hope we do some more 'whatever' soon, smiles Sheila. I'm glad you want to stay with me. There are no coffins in the cellar, no surprises in the attic. I'm perfectly content to be with you, day or night, although the bright sun can be a little much.

Lily laughs nervously, "No undead, no coffins, no 'helpers' during the day. What myths about vampires will go next?"

Chapter Part 5

Where We Meet Again

"Here's the story of a strong-willed girl," Sheila says as Julie and Lily snuggle closer. "A girl who finds her heart's desire while exploring the steps and alleyways of Bisbee.

"Mistress Sheila on another of her walks is unknowingly about to discover her destiny. She sees the girls of Cheroots lounging on the porch in their ratty nightgowns, capturing the morning sun, drinking coffee, idly chatting. They wave, beckoning her to come join them. How happy they look! She smiles shyly but continues to climb the stairs past their porch. When she reaches the road at the top of that ridge, hidden by a tree, she stares down at them, small and childlike at play on their porch. Laughter and odd curses waft up the hill. Lonely, she wishes she could know them.

As a proper girl, your Sheila lived in that big house on the hill behind the Copper Queen, one of the few with a cobble-stoned road by its door. I was from a wealthy family--a young mistress you would hardly expect to venture into the sun without both a parasol and a chaperone. My father told me never to walk alone, to bring the maid or a brother, but your girlfriend wanted none of it. She wants to explore, even if being free means danger--shivers of fear on those occasional close calls when she meets a mean drunk or two. (Looking back, I was probably immune from the dangers a woman walking alone might face, after all everyone knew who the mine boss's daughter was.)

Unconsciously, she walks more often past Cheroots. The pretty sleepy girls and their friendly waves become a special part of her morning ritual. She wonders who they are. What they do to earn their morning's freedom from the long hours of hard work others must do during the day.