Yardman was turning the Suburban onto a long bumpy lane. Here was the Flying S Ranch. A pair of badly worn steer horns hung crooked on the opened front gate, in greeting. Leonard pulled up behind Yardman and parked. A sensation of acute loneliness and yearning swept over him. If we could live here! Begin over again! Except he needed to be younger, and Valerie needed to be a different woman. Here was a possible home: a long flat-roofed wood-and-stucco ranch house with a slapdash charm, needing repair, repainting, new shutters, probably a new roof. You could see a woman’s touches: stone urns in the shape of swans flanking the front door, the remains of a rock garden in the front yard. Beyond the house were several outbuildings, a silo. In a shed, a left-behind tractor. Mounds of rotted hay, dried manure. Fences in varying stages of dereliction. Yet, there was a striking view of a sweeping, sloping plain and a hilly terrain — a mesa? — in the distance. Pierced with sunshine the sky was beautiful, a hard, glassy blue behind clouds like gigantic sculpted figures. Leonard saw that, from the rear of the ranch house, you’d have a view of the hills, marred only by what looked like the start of a housing development far to the right. Almost, if you stared straight ahead, you might not notice the intrusion.
As Leonard approached the Suburban, he saw that Yardman was leaning against the side of the vehicle, speaking tersely into a cell phone. His face was a knot of flesh. Kaspar the purebred Airedale was loose, trotting excitedly about, sniffing at the rock garden and lifting his leg. When he sighted Leonard he rushed at him barking frantically and baring his teeth. Yardman shouted, “Back off, Kaspar! Damn dog, obey!” When Leonard shrank back, shielding himself with his arms, Yardman scolded him, too: “Kaspar is all damn bark and no bite, din’t I tell you? Eh? C’mon, boy. Sit. Now.” With a show of reluctance Kaspar obeyed his red-faced master. Leonard hadn’t known that Airedales were so large. This one had a wiry, coarse tan-and-black coat, a grizzled snout of a muzzle, and moist dark vehement eyes like his master. Yardman shut off the cell phone and tried to arrange his face into a pleasant smile. As he unlocked the front door and led Leonard into the house he said, in his salesman’s genial-blustery voice, “...churches, eh? You seen ’em? On the way out here? This is strong Christian soil. Earliest settlers. Prots’ant stock. There’s a Mormon population, too. Those folks are serious.” Yardman sucked his fleshy mouth, considering the Mormons. There was something to be acknowledged about those folks, maybe money.
The ranch house looked as if it hadn’t been occupied in some time. Leonard, looking about with a vague, polite smile, as a prospective buyer might, halfway wondered if something, a small creature perhaps, had crawled beneath the house and died. Yardman forestalled any question from his client by telling a joke: “...punishment for bigamy? Eh? ‘Two wives.’” His laughter was loud and meant to be infectious.
Leonard smiled at the thought of Valerie stepping into such a house. Not very likely! The woman’s sensitive soul would be bruised in proximity to what Yardman described as the “remodeled” kitchen with the “fantastic view of the hills” and, in the living room, an unexpected spectacle of left-behind furniture: a long, L-shaped sofa in a nubby butterscotch fabric, a large showy glass-topped coffee table with a spiderweb crack in the glass, deep-piled wall-to-wall stained beige carpeting. Two steps down into a family room with a large fireplace and another “fantastic view of the hills” and stamped-cardboard rock walls. Seeing the startled expression on Leonard’s face Yardman said with a grim smile, “Hey sure, a new homeowner might wish to remodel here, some. ‘Renovate.’ They got their taste, you got yours. Like Einstein said, ‘There’s no free lunch in the universe.’”
Yardman was standing close to Leonard, as if daring him to object. Leonard said in a voice meant to be quizzical, “‘No free lunch in the universe’? — I don’t understand, Mr. Yardman.”
“Means you get what you pay for, see. What you don’t pay for, you don’t get. Phil’sphy of life, eh?” Yardman must have been drinking in the Suburban, his breath smelled of whiskey and his words were slightly slurred.
As if to placate the realtor, Leonard said of course he understood, any new property he bought, he’d likely have to put some money into. “All our married lives it’s been my wife’s and my dream to purchase some land and this is our opportunity. My wife has just inherited a little money, not much but a little,” Dwayne Ducharme’s voice quavered, in fear this might sound inadvertently boastful, “and we would use this.” Such naive enthusiasm drew from Yardman a wary predator smile. Leonard could almost hear the realtor thinking, Here is a fool, too good to be true. Yardman murmured, “Wise, Dwayne Ducharme. Very wise.”
Yardman led Leonard into the “master” bedroom where a grotesque pink-toned mirror covered one of the walls and in this mirror, garishly reflected, the men loomed over-large as if magnified. Yardman laughed as if taken by surprise and Leonard looked quickly away, shocked that he’d shaved so carelessly that morning: Graying stubble showed on the left side of his face and there was a moist red nick in the cleft of his chin. His eyes were set in hollows like ill-fitting sockets in a skull and his clothes, a tweed sport coat, a candy-striped shirt, looked rumpled and damp as if he’d been sleeping in them as perhaps he had been, intermittently, on the long flight from New York to Chicago to Denver.
Luckily, the master bedroom had a plate-glass sliding door that Yardman managed to open, and the men stepped quickly out into fresh air. Almost immediately there came rushing at Leonard the frantically barking Airedale who would certainly have bitten him except Yardman intervened. This time he not only shouted at the dog but struck him on the snout, on the head, dragged him away from Leonard by his collar, cursed and kicked him until the dog cowered whimpering at his feet, its stubby tail wagging. “Damn asshole, you blew it. Busted now.” Flush-faced, deeply shamed by the dog’s behavior, Yardman dragged the whimpering Airedale around the house to the driveway where the Suburban was parked. Leonard pressed his hands over his ears not wanting to hear Yardman’s furious cursing and the dog’s broken-hearted whimpering as Yardman must have forced him back inside the vehicle, to lock him in. He thought, That dog is his only friend. He might kill that dog.
Leonard walked quickly away from the house, as if eager to look at the silo, which was partly collapsed in a sprawl of what looked like fossilized corncobs and mortar, and a barn the size of a three-car garage with a slumping roof and a strong odor of manure and rotted hay, pleasurable in his nostrils. In a manure pile a pitchfork was stuck upright as if someone had abruptly decided that he’d had enough of ranch life and had departed. Leonard felt a thrill of excitement, unless it was a thrill of dread. He had no clear idea why he was here, being shown the derelict Flying S Ranch in Mineral Springs, Colorado. Why he’d sought out “Mitch” Yardman. The first husband Oliver Yardman. If his middle-aged wife cherished erotic memories of this man as he’d been twenty years before, what was that to Leonard? He was staring at his hands, lifted before him, palms up in a gesture of honest bewilderment. He wore gloves, that seemed to steady his hands. He’d been noticing lately, these past several months, his hands sometimes shook.