Sheila and Her Friends Pt. 01-04

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

"Speaking or drama, anyway, I said 'not too much,' A little but not anything 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 interrupts them.)

"Here we are...I like you imagining 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 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. Look at them now." The scrub oaks are unusually tall and very 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: 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 (and their) mind.

They are back to the here and now, leaning against the railing of the porch and looking at the house. From the porch, it is one long row of rooms along the third and top floor of the building. Through the dusty windows on the porch they can look through to the windows on the other side and see the hillside across the valley, down from which the highway passes between the mountains at the western edge of town.

"Men would laze around this porch, smoking and spiting (since they couldn't do those things in the house). Some would be eager; some would come just to chew the fat, talk about the mines and their fucked-up 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 from the porch.)"

"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 too much. Many of them 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 along the hillside, highlighted by a row of dim street lights. There's a kind of potter's field up there. We can go up there sometime, if you like. 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 I would remember them and 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...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 illuminates the curtain-less windows on the far side. She wonders whether anyone is home.

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

Can we go in? Julie asks silently afraid now that 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. Like how can you be certain no one is home?

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

Who?

Yes: man, woman, child, cat, dog, rat...each heart beats differently.

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

"The ones that can rise off the ground?"

"Yeah, but that is more like a parlor trick. I'm sure the yogi's don't feel that way, since their focus is on the divine. 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 your power to survive is reinforced. Let's go in. You've nothing to worry about."

They go in 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 cast a protective spell over this place it would be filled with vagrants and this antique 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 together. You may not do the things I do, but I have never felt this tethered, if you will, 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 mutters, "Someone once told me what it would be like when...well whenever, it would be like feathers drifting on the skein of consciousness, threaded through the needle of fate...they said" shaking her head, "Don't mind me...!"

She escorts them into the parlor of the old whore house. "Men would stand around the back of these sofas. At least five girls, sometimes more, would saunter about, preening ourselves. Some girls 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. (Well, at least among the men who visited places like this.) 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.

"No, not like I felt in the bar. First just looking at you, then Sheila. Later, when you put your hands on my body, it felt as natural as a hand fitted to a silk glove. It felt right."

Sheila looks into the questioning faces, "This place may not stir those faint memories of the past, but there were other places, some quite unexpected, where we might have met in Bisbee. 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 length of the busy bar where patrons lounged, hats on titled heads, intent on the whiskies and beer before them. They stand in various postures, their feet resting on the brass foot rail that follows the length of the bar. Plumes of cigar and cigarette smoke swirl around the proud heads of stuffed animals peering from high on the walls. It drifts up to the tin plate ceiling, its squares angling down the bar into the smoky dimness from whence the music comes. Card tables are scattered about. Onlookers stand around the tables, including the pretty girls, arrayed in red and green feather boas with colorful petticoats, made all the more predominant by the drab colors 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 young 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, washed daily, under Madam 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, and follow her eyes as they pause before a narrow, indistinct door. The hear the curious three-toned signal taped on the doors various slats of wood. Then they feel the air inside, steamy and warm, as the door is opened. A narrow hallway leads them along a stone floor, where handholds are tacked into granite walls, from there into a cosy room where the laughter of women warms the heart. Hooks on the walls hold the colorful dresses, the petticoats and boas that before gave color to the bar. Surprised eyes follow the folds of cloth to the corner of the room. There pink bodies float among the steam, beautiful mermaids swimming in a large 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 the clingy white cloth. Soon another mermaid is freed from her covering...

"Well, well," Sheila breaks into the astonished stares of the girls, "This little bath 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 thighs, 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 girl. Like a gentle nymph, a pretty butterfly, she rests lightly on the little black 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 black girl's bloomers. Breathless, they feel the fingers brush the frayed edge. The black 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 black 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 black eyes of a Lily. The white arm hesitantly wraps itself around the black girl folding her into the nook of her shoulder (how warm!) where she whispers, "Don't be afraid." The red headed woman plunges on unable to restrain her rising wonder, "Please come live with me. I...I seem to know you. I will buyout your contract so that you can stay with me."

Lily feels the black girl shudder and settle into the folds of the red headed woman. The black girl moves her head then to look again into those fabulous green eyes, to judge perhaps for the last time whether this miracle of...of 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 is 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 Navaho. 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--a little sarcastically because she was black, and, as we thought back then, uppity. Clare was more protective than a mother to Izzy.

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?"

"Of course!" 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 or the attic. I'm perfectly content to be with you, day or night.

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