Read Online Give Me Your Heart by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online

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