Give Me Your Heart (7 page)

If he guessed. What?

The Suburban was pulling away again, passing an eighteen-wheel rig. Leonard could turn off at any time, drive back to the airport and take a flight back to Chicago. He’d told Valerie that
he would be in Chicago for a few days on business, and this was true: Leonard had a job interview with a Chicago firm needing a tax litigator with federal court experience. He hadn’t told
Valerie that he’d been severed from the Rector Street firm and was sure that there could be no way she might know. He’d been commuting into the city five days a week, schedule
unaltered. His CEO had seen to it. He’d been treated with courtesy: allowed the use of his office for several weeks while he searched for a new job. Except for one or two unfortunate
episodes, he got along well with his old colleagues. Once or twice he showed up unshaven, disheveled; most of the time he seemed unchanged. White cotton shirt, striped tie, dark pinstripe suit. He
continued to have his shoes shined in Grand Central Station. In his office, door shut, he stared out the window. Or clicked through the Internet. So few law firms were interested in him, at
forty-six: “down-sized.” But he’d tracked down Yardman in this way. And the interview in Chicago was genuine. Leonard Chase’s impressive resume, the “strong,
supportive” recommendation his CEO had promised, were genuine.

Valerie had ceased touching his arm, his cheek. Valerie had ceased asking in a concerned voice,
Is anything wrong, darling?

This faint excitement, edginess. He’d been in high-altitude terrain before. Beautiful Aspen, where they’d gone skiing just once. Also Santa Fe. Denver was a mile above sea level, and
Leonard’s breath was coming quickly and shallowly in the wake of Yardman’s vehicle. His pulse was fast; he was elated. He knew that after a day, the sensation of excitement would shift
to a dull throbbing pain behind his eyes. But he hoped by then to be gone from Colorado.

Mineral Springs. This part of the area certainly didn’t look prosperous. Obviously there were wealthy Denver suburbs and outlying towns, but this wasn’t one of them. The land
continued flat and monotonous, and its predominant hue was the hue of dried manure. Leonard had expected mountains, at least. In the other direction, Yardman had said with a smirk—but where?
The jagged skyline of Denver, behind Leonard, to his right, was lost in a soupy brown haze.

The Suburban turned off onto a potholed road. United Church of Christ in a weathered wood-frame building, a mobile home park, small asphalt-sided houses set back in scrubby lots in sudden and
unexpected proximity to Quail Ridge Acres, a “custom-built,” “luxury home” housing development sprawling out of sight. There began to be more open land, ranches with grazing
cattle, horses close beside the road lifting their long heads as Leonard passed by. The sudden beauty of a horse can take your breath away; Leonard had forgotten. He felt a pang of loss that he had
no son. No one to move west with him, raise horses in Colorado.

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 open 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.

Yet 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. 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 pure-bred
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. Fuckin’ 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 up 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 fleshly lips, 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, glancing 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 stained beige wall-to-wall 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. Philos’phy 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. 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 overlarge, 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. Fuckin’ busted now. Every one of em in
the fuckin’ family, ain’t it the same fuckin’ story.” 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, which seemed to steady his hands.
He’d been noticing lately, these past several months, that his hands sometimes shook.

Just outside the barn, Yardman had paused to make another call on his cell phone. He was leaving a message, his voice low-pitched, threatening and yet seductive. “Hey babe. ‘S me.
Where the fuck are ya, babe? Call me. I’m here.” He broke the connection, cursing under his breath.

At the rear of the barn, looking out at the hills, Yardman caught up with Leonard. The late-afternoon sky was still vivid with light, massive clouds in oddly vertical sculpted columnar shapes.
Leonard was staring at these shapes, flexing his fingers in his leather gloves. Yardman swatted at his shoulder as if they were new friends linked in a common enterprise; his breath smelled of
fresh whiskey. “Quite a place, eh? Makes a man dream, eh? Big sky country. That’s the West, see. I lived awhile in the East, fuckin’ hemmed in. No place for a man. Always wanted a
nice li’l ranch like this. Decent life for a man, raise horses, not damn rat-race real estate . . . Any questions for me, Dwayne? Like, is the list price negotiable? Or—”

“Did you always live in Makeville, Mr. Yardman—Mitch?” Dwayne Ducharme had a way of speaking bluntly yet politely. “Just curious!”

Yardman said, tilting his leathery cowboy hat to look his client frankly in the face, “Hell, no. The Yardmans is all over at Littleton. Makeville is just me. And that’s
temp’ry.”

“Yardman Realty & Insurance is a family business, is it?”

“Well, sure. Used to be. Now just me, mostly.”

Yardman spoke with an air of vaguely shamed regret.
Burned out,
Leonard was thinking. Yardman’s sulky mouth seemed about to admit more, then pursed shut.

“You said you lived in the East, Mitch . . .”

“Not long.”

“Ever travel to, well—Florida? Key West?”

Yardman squinted at Leonard, as if trying to decide whether to be amused or annoyed by him. “Yah, I guess. Long time ago. Why’re you askin’, friend?”

“It’s just, you look familiar. Like someone I saw, might have seen once, I think it was Key West . . .” Leonard was smiling; a roaring came up in his ears. As in court, he
sometimes had to pause to get his bearings. “Do you have a family? I mean, wife, children . . .”

“Friend, I know what you mean,” Yardman said grimly. “Some of us got just as much family as we need, know what I’m saying?”

“I’m afraid that—”

“Means my private life is off-limits, Dwayne.” Yardman laughed. His face crinkled. “Hey, man, just kidding. A wife’s a wife, eh? Kid’s a kid? Been there, done that.
Three fucking times, Dwayne. Three strikes, you’re out.”

He’d been married three times? Divorced three times? Risky for naive Dwayne Ducharme to say, with a provocative smile, “No love like your first. They say.”

“No fuck like your first. But that’s debatable.”

Leonard froze. Had Valerie been Yardman’s first? One of the first, maybe. Leonard believed this must be so.

Now Yardman meant to turn the conversation back to real estate: in his hand was a swath of fact sheets. Any questions? Mortgages, interest rates? “There’s where Mitch Yardman’s
expertise kicks in.”

“Yes. I have questions.” Leonard’s voice quavered; his mouth had gone dry. For a moment his mind had gone blank. Then, pointing: “Those hills over there? Is that area
being . . . developed? On the way in I saw some bulldozers . . .”

Yardman scowled, shading his eyes. As if he’d never seen such a sight before, he said, shrugging, “Seems there might be something going on there, that ridge. But the rest of the
valley through here, and your own sweet li’l creek that your boy will be crazy for wading in, running through it, see?—that’s in pristine shape.”