Chapter 9

Jennifer went out of her way to stop at Ely to fill Magic Carpet’s tanks before she turned back toward the cabin. With the extra tanks full, she could fly direct to Phoenix on her way home without having to worry about stopping to refuel; it hadn’t been like that in the old days.

The ranch was like a lot of the Nevada countryside, which was to say a sagebrush desert, often interrupted by low mountains or dry lake beds. Over the years she had become familiar enough with the Bar H Bar Ranch that she had no problem flying directly to the dry lake where the cabin was located.

There had been no way to let Will’s folks know that she was coming or that she would be at the cabin. So just before she reached the place she turned on the CB radio that she’d had installed in Magic Carpet and made a call to the main ranch at the Bar H Bar. “I’m going to be at the cabin for two or three days,” she told Ellen, her mother-in-law. “I don’t know if I’ll be coming by the ranch or what.”

“It’d be good to see you,” Ellen replied. “I take it there’s no new word on Will?”

“Everything’s still pretty much the same the last I heard. If I don’t see you this trip I’ll see you soon.”

Although she was pretty sure the surface would be hard enough for Magic Carpet she made a low, slow pass over the place just to check it out. It looked pretty solid to her, so she swung around and set up for a slow soft-field landing. A little to her surprise the surface was a little loose, but it was more than solid enough – enough so that she could have landed Songbird there like she had done in the past. But that didn’t matter; she was glad she’d come here in the little Cessna that had carried her so many miles.

Magic Carpet landed easily and she quickly brought it down to taxiing speed, then made a turn to follow a track through the sagebrush to the tie downs, which were located a hundred yards or so from the cabin. With a psychic sigh of relief, she pulled out the throttle and cut the switches. Home again, she thought as the engine died. Finally.

She had not been here since early in January, and Will had been with her then. In fact, this was the first time ever she had been here without him, and that made it seem a little strange, but at least he could feel his aura around the place. That made her feel better.

Will had first brought her to this place nearly a decade before, on a horse-packing trip out of the main ranch to the south. It had mostly been an opportunity to get out and enjoy the desert, although it was also a trip to check the ranch’s boundary fences; here and there they had stopped to repair the fence, and it was nothing much in the first place. They’d come here to camp mostly because there was a wash coming down from the ridge behind the place, where Will knew there was a small rock-girt pool of water that never seemed to dry up.

Though in one way the place was nothing special since there was a lot of similar desert on the Bar H Bar, from the moment she had first seen it there had been a special magic to it. It wasn’t just because it was the first time that she and Will had made love. They’d had sex together before, and she had had lots of it with other men by then. This time had been different although they’d had a hard time trying to come up with the words to describe it, but it had been the place where Will had become her man – and she had equally become his woman.

Will had been on leave from the Air Force at the time, and he didn’t have much time remaining, but they’d stayed here for an extra day to enjoy the place and each other. It was her special place, and it was his, too – so much so that several years later he’d hired someone to build the cabin here not far from where they had camped, and had presented it to her as a token of his love.

Since that time she and Will had managed to spend a total of about six weeks together here, all of it in bits and pieces ranging from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. But in her mind this was home because it was where she and Will belonged.

She tied Magic Carpet down, then slung her luggage, which consisted of a small backpack, over her shoulders and started the short walk up to the cabin. In a way, it was small and nothing special, and very primitive with virtually no modern conveniences, but she liked it that way. She and Will had made several horse-packing trips in the years following her first visit here along with a trip in a raft down the Grand Canyon, so she was used to camping and living primitively. She especially enjoyed the horse-pack trips; while not a vastly experienced rider, she enjoyed it and rode comfortably.

The small and snug cabin proved to be pretty much like they had left it months before. While there wasn’t a great deal inside, what was there was neat and tidy, not much like the often-disorganized mess she lived in at her condo. It was uncomfortably warm inside, so she opened the windows to let the place cool off and air out. While she did that, she mentally catalogued what would have to be done to have the place ready for Will’s return.

There wasn’t much – a little dusting and sweeping the floor; as expected, there were a few dead flies lying around, but not many. Realistically the whole trip to get the place ready for Will could have been avoided except for her wanting to come here in the first place. She needed the peace of the place to get herself back in balance; a lot had changed in her life since she’d landed the Airbus at Keesler a year and a quarter before, and some things – many things – could never be expected to be the same again.

After the big and late lunch she’d had at the Redlite, she wasn’t ready to think about eating yet, and there were other things she wanted to do. Without thinking about it very much, she went outside, filled a bucket with water from a pitcher pump located near the door, took it inside and filled a canteen, then started off on a hike.

The route to the top of the ridge went up past the little pool that she and Will had enjoyed so much on their first visit here. It couldn’t be called a path and there were some places where she had to scramble through broken rock, but in half an hour she was at the top of the ridge, where she sat down to take things in. She couldn’t see the water pocket from where she was, but she could see the cabin below her, with Magic Carpet tied down nearby, and the dry lake just past it. In the distance there were more sagebrush flats running into another small mountain range several miles away. Nowhere, except for the contrails of airliners far overhead, was there any other sign of man.

Life seemed simpler here, and while she would dearly have loved to have Will with her, for once she was just as happy to be alone with her thoughts.

The whole idea of literally being given a big piece of the Redlite Ranch had come as a huge surprise to her. Oh, she’d had to pay a token sum but that would be paid back with the first dividends. She understood why George had done it and didn’t blame him, but at the same time it was another complication in a life that had become all too complex in the last year or so, especially when she much preferred the simplicity represented by the view before her.

Even before she had landed the Airbus at Keesler she had realized that people were going to be viewing her as Learjet Jenn the prostitute/pilot, and not Jennlynn Swift, the engineer/pilot with an unusual hobby. Even with her decision to try to be known as Jennifer Hoffman it really didn’t change that much, for after this morning it had become clearer than ever before that there wasn’t going to be any getting rid of her fame as Learjet Jenn, at least not anytime soon. Oh, she could spend much of her life living as Jennifer, but Learjet Jenn was always going to be there in the background, probably having to step out at the most inconvenient times.

But Norma, then George, and then Shirley – especially Shirley, who she trusted as much as anyone else in the world – had come right out and said that there were good reasons to be known as Learjet Jenn, at least some of the time.

Face it, she thought. Learjet Jenn is a public figure now, and she might as well accept it, and use the fame to make a few statements that needed to be made. Like Norma had said, as Learjet Jenn she could make some points about the evils of prostitution, especially the risks that some girls faced of getting sucked down a rathole of pimps, drugs, and literal slavery, like had happened to Nanci. What was more, she could use the platform she already stood on as Learjet Jenn to help Norma’s proposed program to rescue some of those girls.

On top of that, as Learjet Jenn she’d already started to make the point that there were good ways to go about being a prostitute, because her own history proved it. There was no hope of stopping prostitution; it was called “the oldest profession” for good reason, after all. As Norma had said, where there was a demand a supply will arise to serve it. As far as that went, there was no hope of ever plugging the ratholes girls could fall into, but perhaps a dent could be put into them, and that was about the best that could be hoped for. The Nevada houses were just about the only way in the country that the paradigm was being broken, but they represented only a tiny fraction of the ways the business was carried out. The fact that it was legal in some counties in Nevada was a fluke, and wishful thinking aside, there was little hope of legal house prostitution being started up elsewhere – but maybe Learjet Jenn could make a case for it and perhaps make a dent in that problem, too.

The fame of Learjet Jenn, much though she didn’t want it, might be of more use than she had thought.

Jennifer had never smoked, not even grass, but Will had occasionally been known to hand-roll a cigarette and smoke it as an aid to his thinking. She had to admit that what he wanted to think about usually ran more to which direction those stray cows might have gone, rather than what to do with fame and fortune. Right now, though, she would have welcomed a rollup if she had the materials and knew how to do it, which she didn’t.

One of the problems she had talked about with Norma was that many if not most of the girls getting into the business didn’t know what they were getting themselves into – and that included herself, although the direction her path had taken was considerably different than most. What if at least a few girls considering it had some idea? What if they knew a few of the pitfalls, the somewhat safer way to do things? She knew that competent and experienced streetwalkers knew ways to pick out potential danger and how to avoid it; she’d heard girls talk about them at the Redlite. And there were a lot safer ways to do it than streetwalking, too, even if they didn’t extend to being a Nevada house girl.

As far as that went, there were tricks to being successful, as well as being safe. Giving a client plenty of honey for the money for instance, rather than just being a body to fuck. Money management, too; there was no point in a girl blowing the money she made on booze or drugs when she could do something useful and more rewarding with it. In the long run booze and drugs would make her less appealing and that could quickly turn into a vicious circle that only led downhill to where the pitfalls and ratholes were waiting.

There ought to be a place where a girl considering the business could pick up a few of those things. A website perhaps, or maybe a book, kept short and written at an easy-to-understand level. In fact, she’d heard of both of those, but she suspected that not many girls read them because they didn’t know about them. A book like that written by, say, Dr. Norma Franceour, Ph.D. wouldn’t get any more attention than the rest. But one written by Learjet Jenn . . . well, a lot more people had heard about Learjet Jenn and would figure she knew what she was talking about, even if she really didn’t.

It could be a darn good idea – so long as she was willing to continue to be Learjet Jenn at least part of the time. Yes, it could be a pain in the neck, but it could be a worthwhile pain in the neck, too. Not worthwhile to her, necessarily, but perhaps worthwhile to some girl who was considering it but didn’t have a clue.

It didn’t have to be just a book or a website, either. A year ago there were any number of talk show hosts who had wanted to have Learjet Jenn as a guest, and Angela, the receptionist at Lambdatron, still turned down requests regularly. If the word got out that Learjet Jenn was doing interviews Angela might not have much time for company business. There would be a limit to what she could say on the air, but at least she could point people to the book or the website and maybe make a few points along the way. But again, it would mean having to be Learjet Jenn instead of Jennifer Hoffman at least part of the time.

Jennifer sat atop the ridge until the sun was low in the west just kicking around the ideas, and they kept coming. Finally she knew that she had to be getting back to the cabin or it would be too dark and risky to dare taking the rough route back down through the wash, so she got up and started back.

She got back to the cabin in plenty of time and closed the windows since it was starting to get cool and there was no point in letting it get too bad. She then took the opportunity to sit out on the porch of the cabin and watch the sun set. It was as nice and colorful a sunset as Nevada could provide. Once the sun was well below the ridge, she went inside to have some dinner.

While the cabin had a small wood cook stove, it was too much bother to fire up to heat a pint or two of water, so she turned to one of the few modern conveniences the cabin had, which was a small bottled-gas camping stove. She had brought several freeze-dried backpacking meals with her, partly because of the weight limits of Magic Carpet. The results didn’t quite match up with what a traditional cowboy meal cooked by Will over an open campfire would have tasted like, but it was food and that was good enough for now. By the time she was done it was dark enough to light one of the cabin’s kerosene lanterns, which was all the light she needed to drink a cup of coffee for dessert. She thought about lighting a fire in the fireplace – Will’s father had brought a small load of wood out to the cabin sometime in the past – but she decided it was too much trouble for tonight.

By now it was late enough that she could have called Will in his early morning hours, at least if she had been in Phoenix, but there was no hope of it here, no matter how much she wanted to talk to him. There was absolutely no cell phone reception here. When she and Will had been hiding out from the press over a year before, she had wanted to check in with Stan to see if it was safe to return to Phoenix and also clear away a couple other issues. It had been necessary to get in Songbird and climb several thousand feet heading south to get any reception at all. Even then, it had been pretty bad; she’d had to cut the engines to an idle and glide to kill the background noise enough to make out what was being said.

It would have been possible to get a satellite telephone if she’d thought about it – but she didn’t want to do it since it would clearly be the first step on the road to perdition. If she brought a satellite phone here, then she’d want to have satellite Internet and ye gods, television – and then maybe gas heat, or a generator for electricity, or an indoor toilet, and somewhere along the way the peace and simplicity of the place would be lost. She might just as well have stayed in Phoenix if she wanted all that, so why bother? A call to Will could be put off for a day or two since there wasn’t much he could do from the Persian Gulf besides talk anyway.

So all she could do was go to bed. She normally slept alone, except for the rare occasion when Will was with her and she was used to it, but unlike the others this bed seemed terribly empty without him in it, but once she got to sleep she slept better than she had in weeks.

She got up in the morning feeling rested in a way she couldn’t be in Phoenix. After making a backpacker breakfast and heating up a couple cups of coffee, she spent much of the morning cleaning the cabin and doing some other chores, most of which didn’t really need to be done but made her feel like she was accomplishing something. By the time she made herself a quick cold lunch, she’d run out of even those tasks. It was still early enough that she could have made it to Phoenix in daylight, but she didn’t want to head back just yet; she still felt like she needed to pull in more of the peace of the place.

When she’d hiked up to the ridge the afternoon before she’d stopped by the little water pocket that held pleasant memories for her, to discover that it was both clean and comfortable. That sounded like a good idea. It was only a quick hike up to the pool, where she stripped off all her clothing and slid into the water, which was a little on the cool side but otherwise just right. She realized that she still had other things on her mind that needed to be sorted out, and one of them was the surprise that George had dropped on her the day before, and her winding up owning a significant share of the Redlite Ranch.

She had realized right from the beginning that she really didn’t want to do it, but it was a favor to an old friend. It solved a lot of problems, and not just for him; if the Redlite could be maintained at a traditionally high level, it could still be a model of how the business could be done elsewhere for a long time to come. That much had been clear, so it hadn’t taken much thought to go along with him on it.

The problem was money, but it wasn’t the usual money problem. In a way, she was like George: they both already had enough money to do what they wanted to do and live the lives they wanted to live. She suspected that if she were to ask some billionaire if there were such a thing as too much money, she would be told that there wasn’t, but she didn’t agree with that. After all, she had enough money that she didn’t concern herself much with the cost of hopping into Skyhook and flying to Biloxi to spend the weekend with Will, and in spite of everything the Learjet was not cheap to operate.

In some way she couldn’t put her finger on, it made her uncomfortable to think of making money from the Redlite. It wasn’t necessarily the prostitution angle, either; after all, the roots of her fortune had been built upon the months she’d spent at Carson City and Bettye’s Ranch years before. The money she’d earned there had paid for her finishing college and getting her flight instruction, and the contact that had first led her to Lambdatron had been made in one of the rooms at Bettye’s. She’d made good money from it in her years since then, but it had not been money she’d had to earn; it had just been fun money, earned as an extra benefit from doing something she primarily did for fun. It was not like that for most girls in the business, and that could be why she felt uncomfortable with the idea.

There ought to be some better place that money could be used, she thought. As it was, she paid several thousand dollars each year to an accountant to try to minimize the bite the Internal Revenue Service took out of her earnings. One of the ways she had to cut down the government bite was to make donations to worthy causes, like the Cessna 207 she’d donated to a missionary organization in Bolivia the year before. They had been very appreciative of it, partly because they needed the plane badly, but when she made a donation of equal size to, say, the United Way all she got was a printed form letter for thanks.

She had already told Norma that once her proposed organization got the formal nonprofit status that she would help support it . . . well, why not?

One of the things she and Norma had talked a lot about was how they were going to fund the still-unnamed project. There was the possibility of some grants and the like out there, but finding them was clearly going to eat up a lot of time and effort that could be put to other things. If nothing else, this could get the ball rolling and build up a little reputation that might lead to other funding sources. And this funding source wouldn’t have the illusions and preconceptions about prostitution that others might have.

It seemed humorously ironic as she lay nude in the little water pocket. Why couldn’t the dividends she earned from a house of prostitution go to an organization that tried to rescue girls from prostitution? Once Norma got things going, there wouldn’t be any need to stay quiet about it, and George would get some publicity he would never have expected. In fact, under the circumstances he might kick in, too. On top of that, even he and Shirley had said that the Redlite represented resources that might not be easily available otherwise.

Ironic though it might sound, there was a synergy to the idea that was appealing.

She’d have to talk it over with Norma, of course, but she suspected her friend would have about the same reaction. One of the things they were both well aware of was that money could solve a lot of problems, and it might solve a few of these.

She was getting cool in the water, so she got out and lay down on a sun-warmed rock to tan a little. She hadn’t been getting a lot of sun recently, and although she knew she wouldn’t be able to be out long like that, it felt good.

After a while she got up and pulled on her socks and shoes, but none of her other clothes. It felt good to walk back to the cabin in the nude; somehow it made her spirit feel a little freer than it had been. It wasn’t something she could do in Phoenix, of course – but here, with no one around for miles, it didn’t matter. Only when the sun got low and the evening began to cool down did she get dressed again.

In the morning, she got up and got dressed, and then after a light breakfast she packed up her few things, closed up the cabin, and walked out to Magic Carpet with her mind considerably more at ease than it had been when she arrived there two days before. As she sped south in the little plane toward Phoenix, where she could call Norma and later Will, for the first time in a long time Jennifer Hoffman was glad that Learjet Jenn was flying along with her.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.