About half of the Nevada brothels are named "Ranch" in some way or another, but Jennlynn soon discovered that Bettye’s Ranch was the only one where there were actually horses on the place. She walked alongside Shirley as the older woman took the horse back toward the corral near the main building, which proved to be a ranch house, large and comfortable. "One of the neat things here is that you don’t have to sleep in the bed you work in," Shirley explained. "There’s rooms in the bunkhouse out back. The deal is that we’re only licensed to have five girls on duty at a time, but we usually have seven or eight around, so we have to share out the rooms in the main lodge. It works out OK; the rooms are a lot nicer than they are at the Mustang. We’re a little shorthanded right now, but we have a couple girls who come out from town to help fill in on the weekends."

"The woman up at the Mustang said there’s no lockdown, like there is up there."

"Different county, different management, different rules," Shirley said. "As many girls as they have up there, they have to keep things pretty tight. I’d prefer that you stay here when off duty, but I’m not going to get snotty about you running into town to get something, or just to get away for a while, so long as I don’t hear of you doing independent stuff while you’re away. And I would hear about it. Do it and you’re out."

"Shirley, the only reason I’m doing it in Nevada at all is so that I can do it legally. I understand that being an indie is illegal in Nevada in any case, so I’m not doing it."

"Jennlynn, I think we understand each other," Shirley smiled. She pulled the horse to a whoa, then swung out of the saddle like she’d been doing it all her life. "Might as well just leave him saddled," she said. "I was heading up on the ridge when I saw you fly in, but first things first. We might be able to get out after lunch."

"Is that your horse?"

"No, one of my son and daughter-in-law’s," Shirley laughed as she tied off the reins to a hitching post. "Most of the horses they have here are pretty slow and tame, but Patches is a little more lively, so I brought him over here for a while. He wasn’t getting the exercise he needed. He’s getting a little old to be the work horse that he used to be. Do you ride?"

"No," Jennlynn shook her head. "I always wanted to. We lived in a small country town, and I knew kids who had horses, but I was never allowed to try it out."

"No reason why you can’t, if you’re willing to learn something about horse care," Shirley smiled. "We often take the customers on a little horse ride before we take them for a ride. There’s a couple of neat, quiet spots to stop off and party. It’s one of those special Bettye’s Ranch experiences. Like I said, the horses here are pretty slow and tame. They’re good to start out with. But, if we’re going to have you working here we’ll probably have to blow up the afternoon with paperwork, so I could start you out riding tomorrow."

"Sounds good to me," Jennlynn laughed. "Where do I sign up?"

They headed on inside – the main room proved to be rustic, but clean and comfortable – and after the tour they found a seat outside in the shade overlooking the pool. In a sunny spot, there was a blonde girl, slightly on the heavy side, sunbathing nude. "That’s Cindy over there," Shirley explained, "Trying to get her skin looking like mine." Cindy grinned and stuck out her tongue. "This is Jennlynn Swift, I guess she still wants to be called Rebecca," Shirley said by way of introduction. "This is the girl George was telling us about who flew her own plane into the Mustang last month."

"Well, hi," Cindy laughed. "That’s one way to get attention, I guess."

"Cindy, I’ve got to go over a few things with Rebecca," Shirley said. "You’re welcome to stick your two bits worth in if you want to."

"Sure, no problem, Shirley. Hey, who’s doing lunch today?"

"Claudia," the older woman smiled.

"Oh, God," Cindy shook her head. "Rebecca, you better have some Pepto with you."

"Oh, you just don’t understand real food," Shirley laughed, and turned to Jennlynn. "There’s a lot of things that they have at the Mustang that we don’t have here. One of them is the cook, so we share around the cooking. Claudia’s from Louisiana, she likes to cook and cooks Cajun. It gets a little hot sometimes. Do you cook?"

"Not much," Jennlynn admitted.

"We’ll help you get going," Cindy offered. "We usually keep it pretty simple, except when Claudia wants to show off, which is whenever she cooks."

"We also don’t have runners, maids, or custodians," Shirley said. "It really isn’t that big a deal if we share out the work and you pick up after yourself. We have a part-time local guy who helps out with the horses and stuff, does some of the chores, and can usually fix stuff if it gets broke. Walt’s OK; be friendly but don’t hit on him. He’s a Mormon and he has to do things his own way."

They spent the next half hour going over house rules and how things operated, and yes, things were a lot different than the Mustang. "Normally, I’m what would be the floor manager up there," Shirley said, "But if I’ve got a customer, someone else fills in while I’m tied up, usually Claudia."

"Do you see clients?" Jennlynn said, a little surprised that the wizened old woman might do such a thing.

"Only by special request, anymore," Shirley smiled. "I’m still carded, but I try to keep it down for the sake of the rest of the girls. Sometimes I’ll take care of an old friend or for a special situation, something like that."

"Hard to believe, isn’t it?" Cindy laughed. "Rebecca, let me tell you two things you’ll never hear from Shirley. There are a lot of guys who will tell you that Shirley was and still is the best there’s ever been. Any of the regular girls here will tell you that she knows how to teach it, too. You may think you know what it’s like to be a house hooker after a shift at the Mustang. You just had the 101 course. Shirley is grad school if you’re willing to learn. You listen to her. You’ll learn things you never dreamed."

"I want to," Jennlynn smiled, already fascinated in a way that she’d never been fascinated at the Mustang.

Lunch was exceptionally good – Jennlynn did like exotic food – and she met the rest of the girls, most of whom had still been asleep when she landed, since things had gone late the night before. Claudia proved to be nearly as tall as she was, maybe around thirty, a little more muscular, with flaming red hair, a thick southern accent and a mouth than ran a mile a minute, always fresh and bubbly. The women tended to be a bit older than they had been at the Mustang; Jennlynn was the youngest there. Everyone was friendly, which was not the case at the Mustang, and within minutes it was almost like having the sisters she’d never had.

As lunch was cleared away, Shirley piped up. "Rebecca has a plane, but no car. Would one of you girls like to run her into town to get going on her paperwork? It’s probably going to take a couple days to clear, so we might as well get started, and I want to get Patches up on the ridge today."

"Sure, I will," Cindy offered. "You need anything else while you’re in town, Rebecca?"

"I really need to get clothes better than a blouse and jeans," she said. "I got along at the Mustang for three weeks on a dress that I borrowed."

"You’re not going to find that kind of stuff at the Mercantile in town," Cindy shook her head. "And frankly, I could stand some shopping myself. Shirley, maybe I could take a day off and run Rebecca into Las Vegas."

"That’s a long drive," Jennlynn countered. "Especially when I’ve got a plane sitting outside. We can fly down there in a couple hours."

"Probably a lot more safely than Cindy drives, anyway," Shirley grinned.

The license process and health check were just about as involved as they had been up at the Mustang, but were a little more casual and people were a lot more friendly. The rules were a little different than up north, and they had to spend some time going over them. They got back to find out some customers had shown up; Jennlynn couldn’t help with that until her license was approved, so she offered to help the girl cooking supper – which was eaten family style with some of the customers. Partying went on till late, and Jennlynn basically tried to hang around the main room, acting friendly.

The next day, she and Cindy took Magic Carpet into the airport in Las Vegas, got a cab to a mall, and hit Victoria’s Secret and a couple other places hard. Jennlynn wound up spending over $400 of her hard-earned money, mostly on Cindy’s advice, but figured it was money well spent. They were back in the early afternoon and had time to take a swim before customers started to show up. Cindy helped to service them, while Jennlynn and Shirley sat out by the pool. "After the Mustang, this place is incredible," Jennlynn said, still amazed. "I never figured it could be like this."

"A lot of girls don’t like it," Shirley admitted. "It is a slower pace, and the money isn’t quite as good. Plus, you don’t have the wild atmosphere that a lot of the girls crave, like they have up at the Mustang. I mean, I worked there, back in the days when it was really wild, so I know. We consider ourselves artists here, not a production line. A lot of the girls up there, especially the younger ones, don’t think that way and think this place is boring."

"I can see that," Jennlynn admitted. "I think the girl who told me about this place thought that, but to each his own. You must see it differently. But then, you’ve been doing this for a long time. How’d that happen, anyway?"

"Oh, long story," Shirley smiled. "You’ll hear bits and pieces of it as long as you know me, but to give you an outline, I grew up on my daddy’s little cattle ranch, over near Ely. Well, not real near, about fifty miles out of town. It’s not in the middle of nowhere, but you can see it from there. Back in those days, if you wanted to go to high school they didn’t have buses, so you had to find some place to stay in town during the week. I wound up staying with a woman who was the cleaning lady at one of the old houses they had over there. Well, that was back during the war, the mines were busy as hell. Miners will be miners, so they had trouble getting girls. I knew what went on and it interested me, so I asked the woman I was staying with if she thought I could work there. She said she didn’t mind, but we’d better hope my daddy didn’t find out. So, we went to talk to Maybelle, who ran the place, and Maybelle said the same thing, and the next damn thing you know there I was in my first lineup. Worked out all right; I usually only worked Friday and Saturday nights since I was still in school, and when summer came I went back out to my daddy’s ranch. Just a normal Nevada girl, you know?

"I worked there weekends, some weekday nights, all through high school. I had one close call. I saw my daddy drive up, and I thought he’d found me out, so I ran and hid. It turned out he was just there to see a girl, so I guess it was just as well I skipped the lineup. Well, when I was a senior in high school, not too far from graduating, one night Carl came in. He’d just got out of the Army, and let me tell you, we hit it right off. Cindy may say that I’m the best there’s ever been, but he really was, and I fell in love in a minute. He came back the next night and asked me to marry him, and I said yes, but he’d have to wait until I got out of high school. So, I graduated and quit working, and we got married. Daddy wasn’t doing too well; he had cancer, so Carl and I moved right out to the ranch. Daddy died not too long after that, and Carl and I wound up owning it, me just pregnant for the first time, back the tail end of ’47."

"You got an early start then."

"Too young, really, although I didn’t think so at the time, and we were more mature when we were young then. It comes from growing up on a ranch, and I just about grew up on horseback. Don’t let the movies and the stories fool you; being a cowboy is a hard life. That and being a ranch wife along with being a hooker was pretty much what I did for the next twenty years. Anyway, like I said, I’d quit working when we got married, and we had three kids one right after the other, but along about ’52 times got tough. We had a couple bad breaks, and we didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. So, I suggested to Carl that just to get a little cash in the house, that I go back and work for Maybelle for a while, and I was just a little surprised that he agreed. That meant he had three kids to watch out for along with the cattle, but he made it work. Well, I frankly liked that better than being out in the middle of nowhere on the ranch, but I’d get tired of it after a while, too, and then the ranch would look pretty good, so that was pretty much what I did for the next twenty years. Not always at Ely, but mostly there; sometimes Elko, sometimes Tonopah, a few times in the old houses over near Reno like Conforte’s Triangle River, sometimes just weekends, sometimes full shifts.

"Well, Carl got killed in a truck wreck in ’70, bless him, but Duane, my oldest son, he thought he wanted to be a rancher, and he’d just married a girl from over around Austin. She thought she wanted to be a rancher’s wife, and I thought, well, let ’em give it a try, and I sort of wanted to get away from it because it was about that time that my youngest son, Dave, was killed in Vietnam."

She shook her head and was silent for a moment before going on. "Now, up to about this point, at least in the smaller places, prostitution wasn’t quite illegal, but it wasn’t quite legal, either, and in places like Ely it was just sort of allowed if not admitted to. Well, then they managed to jimmy legal prostitution by local option through the legislature, and they opened the Mustang. Let me tell you, the guy who owned the Mustang and maybe still does, no one knows for sure, he understood the market. I worked there a lot over the years and always did well, even though I was getting on up there in years and wondering how much longer it was going to last. I worked there and in some of the other bigger bar houses off and on over the next ten years, and when I was off I went back to the ranch to help watch the grandkids and help out with the herding. But I knew I was slowing down and couldn’t keep up with that pace any longer, so I semi-retired, came down here to work with Bettye, and I’ve been here ever since. I’m just managing it for her now. She’s not well at all, but she shows up once in a while just to make sure the place is still here."

"So, you never planned to make a life in this business?" Jennlynn smiled.

"I can’t say as I never planned to, it just sort of happened, at least until I came here and decided to try and hang on for a while. It didn’t have a reason to be, but it proved to be a good life, all in all. My daughter, Dorothy, she married a slot machine mechanic down in Vegas. They’ve had a good life pretty much, although her husband still can’t quite figure the rest of us out. We get along OK, and I’ve got three grandkids – they’re getting near to grown, too. Duane and Ellen have two kids, their oldest is a girl, Sara, and she’s graduated from college and getting married here pretty soon. I’m getting to think that maybe when I’m a great-grandmother it might be time to be hanging it up. But I probably won’t."

Jennlynn threw back her head and laughed, she couldn’t help herself. "What’s so funny?" Shirley smiled.

"Oh, Shirley, I shouldn’t," Jennlynn grinned. "I’m just trying to imagine my grandmother in your position. I’m sorry, I just can’t imagine it."

"It’s not the ordinary thing," Shirley shook her head. "But the kids, and the grandkids too, well, it’s something they grew up with. You do what you have to do sometimes. When Sara was younger she used to tell me she wanted to try it out when she got old enough, but it worked out that she’s going to get married instead, and it’s probably just as well. It kind of runs in the family; Duane met Ellen in a house up in Elko, and she had to work a few shifts to keep the ranch going, too, but it really was more ‘got to’ than ‘want to’ for her."

"You and they sound a lot more, well, realistic about it, than my folks ever would," Jennlynn nodded sadly.

Shirley was silent for a moment and looked at her quietly. "I kind of got the idea yesterday that you had some problems with your folks," she said. "What happened? You have a fight with them?"

"They had a fight with me," Jennlynn replied quietly. "It’s . . . it’s not simple."

"Would you like to talk about it?" she said gently. "I think you need to get it out."

"I don’t want to dump it on you, of all people," Jennlynn said. "But damn, I want to talk it out with someone."

"I’ve heard a lot of tough stories in nearly fifty years in this business," Shirley said. "I don’t think I’ll overload on one more."

Over the next few minutes, Jennlynn told Shirley how things had been going downhill for some time. Her father was a minister, she explained, rather conservative, and her mother about as conservative. She’d grown up in Bradford, a small town in Southern Michigan, and had done very well in high school. She’d been the valedictorian of her admittedly small class, had great SAT scores, and an interest and talent in engineering. She hadn’t really had much hope when she’d applied to Caltech, but not only had she been admitted, it was with a very liberal scholarship!

Except for the fact that her folks were less than thrilled about her going that far away to college, whether it was the best engineering school in the country or not. They would much rather she’d have attended a very conservative Christian college closer to home, where she also had a full scholarship – but nothing in course work that interested her.

It had not been easy to get them to allow her to go to Caltech, more than half the country away and in a large city, and it was a miracle she was able to talk them into it. While she’d managed good grades her first two years, she took advantage of being out from under her parents’ sneering eyes.

The freedom gave her the opportunity to discover sex. "I was a virgin when I got to Caltech," she related. "But I didn’t stay one long. It was a little scary the first time, but I discovered that I really liked it. Not just having a boyfriend, because I didn’t, but just having fun with boys. Sometimes, two or three different ones a week. I enjoyed it from the first. I mean, really enjoyed it."

One of the boys had been in the aviation program, and during her freshman year had taken her flying out over the desert east of Los Angeles – and she fell in love again, not with the guy, but with the flying. "I almost changed my major to aviation," she said. "But the job market is marginal unless you’ve come up through the military, so I decided to keep it a minor, and maybe I can work out something that involves both electrical engineering and flying."

She’d headed home for the summer following her freshman year, didn’t mention anything about her newfound avocations, but when she returned to school in the fall, she started in on the aviation program. She’d gotten her private pilot certificate earlier in the year and planned on picking up several ratings in the years to come, even though there didn’t seem to be any way she could afford to do it. Then she discovered that she could do most of the program in her own airplane if she had one. She’d discovered Magic Carpet – the name came with the plane, lettered on the cowling – down near San Diego at a price she figured she could afford.

Not quite a month ago, she’d fired up Magic Carpet down at Brewer Airport east of Pasadena, and turned it toward Michigan – her first great aviation adventure. The little Cessna wasn’t all that fast, and it took two days of hard flying to get to Michigan, but she was feeling proud and triumphant when she got to Bradford at the conclusion of her adventure.

Things went to hell as soon as she got in the door. Her folks hadn’t known about the Cessna, or her getting into the aviation minor. Jennlynn wasn’t sure how they’d heard about some of her sexual adventures in the dorms around Caltech, but it was thrown in her face as soon as she walked in the door. Early in the fight, she was informed that she could forget about Caltech, since they’d arranged for her to marry a guy she knew and didn’t like at all, just to keep her out of trouble. The icing on the cake was that when she told them what she thought about that, she was accused of being a prostitute to be able to afford the airplane. Finally, she was physically thrown out of the house, her still-unopened bags tossed out after her. Hurting and in tears, she carried them to the house of a kid who had once been a friend and was able to beg a ride back out to the airport.

She was angry and still in tears when she got into Magic Carpet and just took off. She had no real plans other than the thought that she’d head back to California – but her father and mother charging her with being a prostitute kept burning at her as she thought about it. She thought about Mary, and thought about her father, and as she crossed the Mississippi River, she changed course from the southwest that would take her to Los Angeles to the west that would take her to Reno and the Mustang Ranch.

"So, by God, they got what they wanted. Since they thought I was a prostitute and wanted me out of their life, that’s just what they’re going to get, and I’m just going to remind them of it every now and then. Shirley, I made the first payment the morning I left the Mustang. You know they’ve got those souvenir postcards there that say "Mustang Ranch," and make it real clear that it’s a bordello?"

"Sure, we have some like that here," Shirley grinned, pretty sure she saw what was coming.

"I sent them one," Jennlynn replied bitterly. "All I wrote on it was, ‘Having a wonderful time, glad you sent me here.’"

"Jennlynn," Shirley smiled. "You realize that’s going to go over like the proverbial lead balloon, don’t you?"

"That’s fine with me," she replied. "That’s just exactly how I want it to go over."

* * *

In her later life, Jennlynn could sum up the next three months in one word: idyllic. She pretty much considered it that way at the time, too.

She learned a lot. Yes, Shirley was a great teacher in her field, and Jennlynn learned plenty of things about sex and making a man happy – and making herself happy in the process – that she’d never dreamed existed. But there was a lot more to it than that; one of the mottos around the place was, "Don’t come to Bettye’s if you don’t plan to have fun," and that went as much for the girls as it did for the customers. She had a lot of fun, both with what went on with the customers and with the other girls. There was nude sunbathing around the pool in the quiet hours of the mornings, evening visits to the hot tub, sometimes with customers, sometimes not, and an awful lot of pure grabass play, teasing, and fooling around.

Between the real work and the chores, she managed to stay fairly busy. Shirley and Walt, the Mormon handyman who hung around the place, taught her a lot about riding and horse management, and Jennlynn always enjoyed spending part of the day with the horses, just grooming, feeding, and riding. She rode many days, sometimes with just Walt or Shirley or one of the other girls, but often with some of the customers, sometimes just to ride, sometimes to find a quiet spot to party as part of the process.

Jennlynn’s mother, the real Rebecca, had been an indifferent cook at best, but at the hands of Shirley and Claudia and a couple other girls, Jennlynn learned things about the kitchen that she’d never dreamed, as well.

Claudia opined one day that Jennlynn was indifferent to her appearance, which was kind of sad for a potentially beautiful woman like her. Jennlynn agreed, and admitted that she leaned toward low maintenance rather than looking elegant. Claudia told her that there was no reason that looking elegant couldn’t be fairly low maintenance, and that men appreciated a sharp-looking woman. Not long afterward, at Claudia’s hands – she’d trained as a hairdresser, but had only rarely worked as one – she got a styling and some redesign that Jennlynn and everyone else thought was downright spectacular. It was a full hair style that looked casual and sophisticated at the same time, yet took no more maintenance than her long, straight hair. Being a minister’s daughter, Jennlynn was close to totally innocent of things like jewelry and makeup; Claudia set out to fix that with the help of the other girls. And, Claudia, with help from others, taught her a great deal about how to select and wear sharp-looking clothes, and not just hooker clothes, but business and casual wear. It proved to be neither much more expensive nor troublesome than wearing blue jeans, but there were several trips to Las Vegas, often but not always with Claudia, to go shopping. Thereafter, blue jeans were only appropriate for horseback riding or changing the oil in Magic Carpet.

Now that she was at Bettye’s, Magic Carpet got all the use Jennlynn had planned over the summer, and then a little. There were the occasional trips to Las Vegas, of course, but often Jennlynn would just fire the Cessna up in the morning and get out for an hour of air work, flying around working on maneuvers she’d need to have mastered when she got into her commercial flying license in the fall. But, several times she took customers on short flights around the ranch, strictly as a fun thing since she couldn’t legally charge for them, but the flights were almost always rewarded with a big tip or a more liberal agreement on her regular services. Once she had a customer give her a tip, not in cash, but for an hour of dual time in his twin-engine Cessna 310.

Cindy proved to be bisexual, and not reticent about it. One day while they were talking, she and Shirley suggested that it might be handy for Jennlynn to know how to service a woman in case the situation ever came up, as it well might in a threesome. Jennlynn agreed that they might have a point, and they worked on it a couple afternoons back in the bunkhouse. The first time it was a lot stranger than her first turnout with George up at the Mustang, but she got over it, and Cindy taught her a lot. Jennlynn thought it was all right, considering, but given a choice, she preferred a man, although she could do it with a woman if she had to. She also made a mental note to slide the word "lesbian" under her parents’ nose if the chance ever arose, along with the word "prostitute."

So, all in all, the summer went well. There were a few bad experiences with customers, not many, not as many in three months as she’d had in three weeks at the Mustang – and a lot more good ones. In general, she discovered that Shirley had been right – the people who came to Bettye’s were more interested in artistry than they were in production. She wasn’t as busy as she had been at the Mustang, but the quality of experience was higher. In general, she didn’t make quite as much per day as she had at the Mustang, but she’d done well by anyone’s standards and enjoyed Bettye’s a whole lot more.

As August rolled around to a close, it was tempting, very tempting, to say the hell with Caltech and just stay there; Bettye’s had become almost like home, the only real home she had, now. But, when she mentioned it around the lunch table one noon, Shirley and every one of the other girls told her she was crazy to not go back to school. This life was all right for a while, but even Shirley got tired of it and had to take breaks, too. There had been comings and goings all summer, although Claudia and Cindy had stayed the whole time, and even the new girls made it clear that there were better things that she could do with her life. But, Shirley told her that if she ever had a few days free, she was welcome to drop in and stay a while. Jennlynn told her that if it was all right, she’d be back over Christmas break. It was a little slower then, Shirley said, but she’d be welcome.

She stayed as long as she could, but one sad day she loaded Magic Carpet with her things, gave Shirley and the girls a big hug, then got in and flew off. In her pocket was a cashier’s check for $32,572, which was what she’d accumulated at the Mustang and at Bettye’s, even after the expenses of new clothes, gas for the plane and the like. Not only could she cover her living expenses and the extra costs of the aviation program with that, she could pay off Magic Carpet if she felt like it, so the summer had been as productive as she could have dreamed and more. In the end, she decided not to pay off the plane, just so she’d have some reserve funds in case something happened.

Although the summer had started with a nightmare, it ended like a dream.

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