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Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
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Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
“Luke? Will, that’s wonderful!” It really was good news; Luke Air Force Base was just outside of Phoenix. That almost certainly meant that all the agonizing about moving up to the Bar H Bar could be put off for another three years – three years of living with Will virtually all the time, and much could change in that time.
“I think it’s pretty good news, too. Luke is just about the last place I thought they’d send me, and I figured it was gonna be back to the Persian Gulf, but I guess the bugs I put in some ears must have done some good.”
“It sounds like it to me too, Will. When does this happen?”
“The orders are for December 10, so we’ve got some time to make some plans. Miz Hoffman, I just found out about this and thought you ought to know because they’s still some decisions to be made, and one of them is whether I’m still gonna stay in the Air Force after all.”
“I thought you were planning on staying in if they sent you to Luke or some other place around here.”
“Well yeah, I am, but I don’t have to if you don’t want me to, but that’s not a decision that I have to make right now. The thing is that they could still change their minds, although they’re not likely to do it real quick after I’ve made the change of station. But I think I might’s well get my mind made up even though I don’t have to re-enlist right away.”
“I can see that.”
“Like I said, I just found out about this and I don’t know what to think about it yet since I really wasn’t expectin’ orders to Luke. I guess what I’m drivin’ at is that if I’m only gonna stay in the Air Force for a couple of months after I get there, it wouldn’t be any problem for me to stay at your condo and just drive out to Luke every day. I mean, I know it’s a long drive through city traffic and you’re on the wrong side of town for it to be easy, but I could put up with it for a couple of months.”
“We’ve put up with a lot worse.”
“We have indeed, Miz Hoffman. But what I was drivin’ at was that if I’m gonna stay in, driving out to Luke every day for three years ain’t quite as much fun. Just off the top of my head, I was wonderin’ if you could find somethin’ over on the Luke side of town where it wouldn’t be as big a hassle for me to get to the base. I know it would make it worse for you to get to Lambdatron but since you set your own hours a lot you wouldn’t have to be doin’ it durin’ rush hour all the time.”
“I hadn’t really thought about it, but I suppose it could be done. And I suppose I could work from home more, like I was talking about doing if we moved up to the ranch. It’s just that I wouldn’t have to set up satellite Internet and solar panels to do it.”
“I have to admit that I hadn’t even thought about that, but I s’pose you’re right. There ought to be something out there that would work fine for us. I have to say that I’d rather it wasn’t an apartment or some tiny little place. I think I’ve lived like that enough.”
“You know, that’s not a bad idea, Will. You’re saying you’d like me to look for something?”
“Well, you’re the one who’s in Phoenix and I’m the one who’s in Biloxi, so it’d be easier for you to look for somethin’ than it would be for me.”
“All right, I’ll see what I can do. I know Stan’s wife dabbles in investing in real estate a little, and she’d probably be able to give me some idea of where to start looking.”
“I figured you’d have some connection that could help out. I gotta get back to work, Miz Hoffman, but I’ll talk to you tonight.”
“I’ll be looking forward to it, Will.”
Jennifer hung up the phone in a great deal of relief. While this didn’t totally settle the question of moving up to the Bar H Bar in the near future, it sure put a different spin on it and made the inevitability seem a lot more remote.
In fact, there were a lot of possibilities . . . and more kept coming to mind each moment she thought about it.
Usually when Jennifer and Will got together on weekends it was in Mississippi, since it only meant one expensive round trip for Skyhook. This time it was different, and only partly because they had the three-day weekend of Labor Day to work with, for Jennifer had a piece of property she wanted Will to see.
Jennifer left work early, in plenty of time to get the Learjet to Gulfport-Biloxi in time for Will to get off work; after tanking it up they headed back to Phoenix. “I take it you’ve found something pretty special,” Will said to her as they climbed to cruising altitude.
“I think so,” she replied. “I don’t want to tell you everything about it until I can show it to you, but I think it has a lot of potential.”
“How’d you happen to come across this?”
“I figured it was a good idea to run it past Stan’s wife since she has a lot of connections in real estate. From there it turned into a friend-of-a-friend deal. You know how that works.”
“Strikes me that you’re pretty good at those.”
“Only in certain fields, Will, and real estate isn’t one of them. Look, I’m deliberately not telling you much about this because I want you to understand the whole package at once, but when you look at it from a macro viewpoint I think you’ll see some interesting possibilities. Let’s not say a whole lot more about it right now.”
“All right, I can see you’re bein’ mysterious, but when you get that way you usually have a good reason to. So have you been up to the ranch to see the folks and Robin?”
“I haven’t been there since last week, and I told you about that. Robin is really taking to horses and ranch life, that’s for sure.”
“Strikes me it might be a bit lonely for her out there. It was for me at times.”
“I think she’s feeling it a little,” Jennifer shrugged. “To the best of my knowledge she hasn’t been to town except for the time I flew her to Piute Wells to talk to the prosecutor there, and you know as well as I do that there isn’t much to see in Piute Wells.”
“So is she gonna testify against this Lonnie character?”
“That’s the plan at the moment. The case against him is more of a he-said, she-said and isn’t as solid as the other one, so it’s not a slam-dunk, but they seem to think it’s still a good one.”
Somehow they managed to make it back to Phoenix without talking very much about the property deal Jennifer wanted him to look at. It was still early enough in Phoenix to have a good dinner, and then they headed back to her condo to enjoy themselves.
The next morning they went out for breakfast, then got back in her car, which was as disreputable as ever, and started driving across the city and out into the desert of the countryside. “Isn’t this gettin’ pretty far out?” Will asked after they’d been driving for a while.
“Yes, it is,” she replied. “That’s one of the downsides, and there are others, but it’s something I think you can live with when you see the positive sides of the place. I’ll admit it isn’t real convenient to Luke, but it isn’t real convenient for me, either.”
“This has got to be some place to have you so enthusiastic about it.”
“I think it offers a lot for the both of us. We’re getting close now, and I want to show you the place a little before the guy from the property management company shows up.”
They were indeed getting close. They had passed through some irrigated farmland, but in a relatively short distance it got more scattered and they were mostly in desert with scrubby brush. Finally Jennifer pulled into a driveway that led back to a large ranch-style house. The land here had mostly been cleared, and they could see that there were no close neighbors. But there were a number of fences around, making up corrals and grazing areas; a barn could be seen not far behind the house. “Miz Hoffman,” Will said in surprise as she pulled to a stop behind the house, “this looks like it’s a horse ranch!”
“It is,” she smiled. “Or at least it was. Nobody’s lived here for a couple of years, I guess. I’ve been in the house and we’ll get a look at it a little later. Frankly, it needs some work after sitting empty this long, and I’m not exactly in love with the way it’s decorated, but those are things we can fix. The way I understand it is that this property was bought up by a land development company to turn into a subdivision, but they couldn’t get the extra water they’d need, and I got the hint that there were zoning issues. Finally they gave up on the idea and decided to get rid of the land, so here we are.”
“This ain’t no little patch of land.”
“No, it’s got some acreage, and if they’d been able to subdivide it I can imagine what it would look like with cute little suburban houses all jammed in on top of each other. That’s not going to happen, and from what I can find out it’s not going to happen nearby, either.” She put the car into gear, and pulled away saying, “There’s one other thing I want to show you.”
They drove down a graded lane with weeds growing up in it a little, heading toward the back of the property, and there, hidden behind some more scrubby brush, was a second fairly large house. “It comes with a bunkhouse, I guess for the wranglers they hired,” she explained. “From what I was told the people who owned this place before the developers bought it were horse hobbyists who hired someone in to do the heavy work, and they lived back here.”
“Have you been in it?”
“Yes, and it’s not in bad shape for not having been lived in for a while. We’ll go through it when the guy from the property management outfit gets here, but I wanted you to see it so you’d know it’s there.”
“This is an interesting piece of property, all right,” he agreed as she put the car back into motion to drive back toward the front of the property. “Them fields look like they could stand a little bit of work, but you could have quite a few horses here if you was to buy some fodder. I don’t see how the place could support more than three or four horses without it.”
“That was my guess,” Jennifer explained. “I haven’t actually talked to the people who had their horses here, but I guess they had eight or ten.”
Will looked thoughtful. “I could see raisin’ horses here,” he said after a moment. “I think that’s the thing I’ve missed the most not bein’ up at the ranch.”
“I know that,” she smiled. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have spent so much time working with horses for other people in your spare time.”
“You got me figured out on that,” he laughed. “And you know I really enjoy workin’ with horses that have been mistreated, tryin’ to make them happy animals again. Without knowin’ anything about it, I’d bet that there are some around here that could use the attention.”
“There are,” she nodded, knowing she had him hooked now. “I didn’t spend a lot of time looking into it, but I talked to someone from the local humane society who said they’d really like to have someone else they could call on.”
“Miz Hoffman, this is temptin’, an’ I can see why you wanted to show me this place. But I gotta say, while I ain’t been lookin’ at a map, it seems like this place has to be a hell of a long way from Luke.”
“It isn’t close,” she admitted. “Although it seems like a lot of the way you’d be going across the rush hour traffic rather than along with it. But there might be a way around it entirely.”
“What are you pullin’ out of your hat now, Miz Hoffman?”
“I don’t have all of the answer to this, and you’re going to have to be the one to do the research. But didn’t you tell me that when you were working on your private pilot’s license you were doing it on base?”
“Yeah, in the flying clubs in Dover and Okinawa. I’ve been in the one at Keesler but I never fly more than an hour or two a month, just to keep my hand in.”
“Those are civilian planes, right? I mean, not owned by the Air Force?”
“Well, yeah, they’re the property of the clubs.”
“So they let civilian planes fly in and out so long as all the paperwork is complete and it’s someone in the Air Force flying them, right?”
“Well, yeah. It’s more complicated than that and I don’t have all the details ’cause I never needed to know them. I do know the rules aren’t the same at all the bases, though, so I suppose it might be possible at Luke although I don’t know for sure. It’s a trainin’ base mostly, not an operational base, so that ought to make things a little looser. But I still don’t see what you’re driving at.”
“Will, take a look at that field out there. If we were to move a couple of fences and do a little grading, there’d be more than enough runway for Magic Carpet.”
Will broke out laughing. “Miz Hoffman, you sure got all the angles, don’t you?” He laughed a little more and went on, “I don’t know if you know how it works, but on an air base, the rated officers, the ones with wings, sort of look down on anyone who don’t fly. I can just imagine the reaction they’d have when a master sergeant flies his own plane into work, and then they find out the master sergeant’s wife owns a Learjet!”
“That might raise an eyebrow or two,” she laughed along with him. “We’ll have to get you rated in the Learjet sometime just so you can fly it into the base and really raise some eyebrows.”
“We’ll have to see about that. I mean, there’s no point in takin’ things too far. But havin’ Magic Carpet right here would mean it would be a little more convenient to fly up to the ranch if we had to, right?”
“That was part of my thinking too, Will.”
“You really have had your thinkin’ cap on, haven’t you? Miz Hoffman, you just about got me sold on this. I gotta ask, can we afford it? Especially without gettin’ into the lottery money so I can finish buying up the ranch shares?”
“The answer to that is yes, we can. First off, it’s a very good price, and I did check that. I can’t totally do it out of petty cash, and I’d have to roll off some stock if we were to buy it outright, but it’s an investment, too. Land values anywhere around Phoenix have been steadily rising the last few years, Will. I’m thinking that if I put up a good down payment and mortgage the rest, I’ll get a better deal out of it, partly through the tax situation, and partly because the increase in land values have been higher than mortgage rates.”
“Well, I guess you pretty well have me sold,” he smiled. “If it don’t work out that I can fly Magic Carpet into the base, it’d still be worth the extra driving.”
“I figured you’d see it that way once you saw the whole idea. Let’s not jump into it just yet, at least until you’ve seen the inside of the house and the bunkhouse. There might be something there I’m missing.”
“I doubt you’re missing anything and I don’t think you ever have. So what are you thinkin’ about the bunkhouse? Rentin’ it out, or somethin’?”
Jennifer got a sneaky-looking grin on her face. “Well, sort of,” she told him.
He looked at her for a moment, and then the next piece of the puzzle fell into place. “You were tellin’ me the last time we were together that you needed some sort of a hideout retreat for the girls you an’ Norma are gonna be dealin’ with? I mean, sorta like you did with Robin up at the ranch?”
“Got it in one, Will.”
He thought about it for a moment before he replied, “You know, that’s a good one all around. That’d mean there’d be someone here to keep an eye on the place if we had to be gone – feed the stock, and that kind of thing – and we’d be here at least a lot of the time if trouble were to brew up back at the bunkhouse. You are sneaky, Miz Hoffman.”
“You still haven’t quite got it all, Will,” she laughed. “You’re going to be working with rescue horses here, and we both know it. We could put a sign out front that could say something like ‘Hoffman’s Rescue Ranch’ and people would think we were just talking about horses. The bunkhouse is hidden enough that most people might not think that there’s another type of rescue going on here.”
“Like I said, you are sneaky, an’ that’s one of the things I love about you. I take it Norma has seen this place?”
“Yes, and she was thrilled with the idea. She says it’s better than anything she could have dreamed. It’s a big piece of the puzzle that was missing for Hearts of Gold, and this way we get to kill several birds with one stone.”
“All right, unless the house is a total disaster area, and from what you say it probably ain’t, I’d say to do it. I guess it’s gonna be your money that has to do it, but this ain’t like helpin’ me buy up the shares of the ranch. Maybe instead of payin’ them off now I’ll just stick the money back somewhere and use it for when I need to buy somethin’ for here. If we ain’t movin’ up to the ranch I guess there ain’t no rush to pay it off.”
“That’s one we need to run by the accountant, Will. I can’t tell right off whether it would be better one way or the other.”
“Well, like I said, there ain’t no rush. I guess I’m just as glad that we ain’t gonna be havin’ to move up to the ranch next spring. I wasn’t exactly crazy about it.”
That was a surprise to Jennifer, to say the least. For years – almost as long as she’d known him – his one goal in life was to get back to living at the ranch. “Will?” was all she could find to say.
“It didn’t come clear to me all at once, Miz Hoffman,” he replied shyly. “Do you really know why I wanted to finish up my twenty in the Air Force?”
“I thought it was because you wanted the retirement money.”
“Well, yeah,” he agreed. “I figured that livin’ up at the ranch I’d need it to make ends meet, to be able to live there at all. The place ain’t that profitable, Miz Hoffman, an’ you know that. I mean, my folks live there all right but that’s mostly because it’s paid for. Even then it’s a struggle sometimes.”
“I always figured that, but never quite that directly.”
“That’s part of the deal,” he replied. “Let’s face it, no matter who owns the shares, that place is the folks’ ranch, always has been, and will be as long as they want to live there. When you get right down to it, there ain’t no room for me there most of the time as long as they want to run it. I knew when I went into the Air Force that about the time I got my twenty in they’d be ready to give it up and I’d be able to go up there and take over without bein’ an underpaid hired hand.”
“And if they weren’t ready to give it up at that point, you could keep going for thirty,” she said as understanding began to dawn on her.
“That was my thinkin’, Miz Hoffman. But then you came along. I don’t mean when you and grandma rescued me from out on the dry lake back when I was in high school, but when you and me took that pack trip ridin’ fence.”
“Where we wound up falling in love when we were camped up at the water pocket behind where the cabin is now,” she smiled. It was one of her favorite memories, the couple of days on that trip where she found out not only how to fall in love, but how to make love as opposed to having sex.
“That’s right. That’s when things changed, but I didn’t realize it then. It wasn’t until we got married that I realized I was going to have to work out the idea of what to do about goin’ back to the ranch. You always seemed eager to go back there with me, so when I decided I’d really rather be with you rather than bein’ in the Air Force, I realized that I had to go back to the ranch whether I wanted to or not. I didn’t want to go back, ’cause honestly, it gets awful damn lonesome out there an’ I’ve come to be used to havin’ people around, at least a little bit. But then I knew you wanted to do it, so I decided I had to do it whether I wanted to or not.”
“Will, I love the ranch, I really do. Our little cabin is heaven to me, and I need the peace and quiet once in a while, especially if you’re with me. It’s not as much fun when you’re not around, and I learned that back when I was there with Robin and the others. I have to admit I wasn’t exactly crazy about moving up there permanently. That’s why I came up with the idea of the new house and the satellite communications, so I could at least stay a little involved with my life here.”
“I sort of suspected that,” he admitted. “I know you weren’t gonna come right out and say it because you didn’t want to hurt my feelin’s and wantin’ to support what I wanted to do even if I didn’t really want to do it. In the last few months I’ve been gettin’ the idea that was how you felt whether you said it or not.”
“You’re right. I really didn’t want to move up there full time, but I didn’t want to take you away from your dream, either.”
“I’ve been comin’ to realizin’ that,” he admitted. “It’s been hard since we’ve been apart so much and don’t get to talk to each other like we should. But then you bring me out to this place, and show me how I can have everythin’ I dreamed of. That means you, but it also means havin’ a horse ranch that ain’t so far from civilization that I’d have to drive half a day over rough roads just to buy a pack of chewin’ gum. Makin’ this place the horse ranch I can see in my mind ain’t gonna be easy, and it’s gonna be more work than you think, but this way I think we can have both our dreams.”
“I think we can manage it, Will. It’ll be worth the effort, especially if we can learn to be honest with each other and not keep our feelings hidden for fear of hurting the other. So what happens with the Bar H Bar?”
“Pretty much nothin’ changes for now, other than I’ll be able to go up there and lend a hand once in a while if the folks need it. I’ve got a couple ideas for when the folks don’t want to live there no more, but it ain’t gonna happen soon so I’m not gonna worry about it much.”
“That sounds like it would work for now.”
“You know what the best part is, Miz Hoffman? When we have to get away from everythin’, we’ll still have the cabin to go to. In fact, I’d like to hop in the plane and go there right now, but if this guy comin’ up the driveway is the one who’s gonna show us the house, I guess that means we’re gonna be too busy to do it for a while.”
