2. Galen

Chapter 2

Galen

A s Galen waited for the prison van to show up on a fine Monday afternoon, he thought, not for the first time, how very different Farthingdale Valley was from Farthingdale Guest Ranch.

On the guest ranch, you could see for miles. If you stood in the right place, you could see all the way to Montana. It was gorgeous. The people were friendly, the customers, all rich, were fairly down-to-earth. The work was straightforward.

The valley, on the other hand, rather than being at the top of a hill that sloped down into a glassy river, was tucked in a scoop of land, thick with trees. It was currently populated with four team leads and a bunch of ex-cons who were obviously taking the easy way out by doing their parole in a situation which wouldn't ask very much of them. They'd skate by, living off handouts. Lazy freeloaders.

When Galen had left his father's farm two years prior, he'd made a home for himself at the guest ranch, working through two summer seasons. In the winters, he'd gone home to help his dad with the bees and the goats and the fields and, come spring, mulching and tending in preparation for going back to the ranch. All in all, a good life.

But, the summer before, in the middle of a typical week tending horses, hauling hay, helping guests, Galen's dad, Earl Parnell, had passed away.

For Earl, it had been a gentle going in a hospice facility in Cheyenne. There, due to complications from a summer pneumonia, brought on by who knew what—working in the rain or a kid with a cold at the local McDonalds, or some germ—he'd passed away.

Galen had held his dad's hand all the while. He'd signed papers, then signed more papers. He drank bitter cups of coffee from the machine at the hospice until a kindly attendant showed him how to work the machine.

That coffee had been milky and sweet, like a kiss from an angel. Which didn't stem Galen's tears, nor his grief.

At least his dad had not been in pain. Instead, he'd been tended to night and day by the hospice workers, angels in soft blue and pink uniforms, cheerful sweaters. Galen would be forever grateful to them.

He'd be forever grateful to Leland Tate, as well, who ran Farthingdale Ranch, a hideaway-getaway for rich folks who wanted to play at being cowboys.

Galen was a mere ranch hand, but Leland had given Galen two full weeks off with pay, and held his job for him until his return. The offer of funds, a no-interest loan, if Galen wanted it. Time and patience and understanding. More time off if he needed it.

Which would have been nice, but once his father was buried in Iron Mountain Cemetery, there wasn't anything Galen wanted more than to be distracted by work.

Even with his job at the ranch, he struggled with the mountain of medical debt and the small stack of regular farm bills that needed to be paid.

He sold the goats, a small herd of soft eared does and one billy. Then he used that money to hire a guy to harvest the lavender, then the money from lavender sales to put out ads for someone to rent the farm the following summer.

He even made a deal with a Colorado-based beekeeper, Jared Keating, to come and harvest the honey. They split the proceeds from that, fifty-fifty, and made an agreement for the following fall.

Over the winter, Galen had spent most of his time at the old farm table, elbows on the red-and-white checked oil tablecloth, chin in his hands, watching the snow fall as he looked out the large windows at the white landscape. Swamped in grief and memories, he felt like an old man, rather than a twenty-eight year old with his whole life ahead of him.

His dad's passing had left a jagged hole in his life, his soul. With his head tangled with all he needed to do, the fear that he wouldn't ever live up to being as good a man as his dad had been grew into an almost insurmountable pain that stabbed at his heart.

He'd looked at his finances. Then looked at them again.

He needed new tires for his truck. The medical debt from his father's treatment and passing needed paying off. He wasn't sure about the taxes that needed paying, as his dad had always taken care of that, but Galen was sure the bill would come due at some point.

All the while, he wondered if he should take up his father's life, that of running the farm. Which was certainly too much for one person, though the thought of leaving it behind stabbed at him until his heart was bleeding.

He found a young couple to rent the place for the summer. When they showed up with their two-year-old in the spring, they had cheerful smiles and hundred-dollar apron smocks. They talked of making bread by hand and how they were going to take photos and videos for their Instagram account, and how wonderful everything was.

With handshakes and a verbal agreement about what needed paying attention to—the gate, the irrigation system, the shed door, the screen door—Galen headed back to the guest ranch, expecting to get back to his regularly scheduled summer life. Horses and guests and hay. Eating in the large but inviting dining hall. Watching the sunsets over Iron Mountain, which loomed in the west, ever present, always watching.

The snag came when Leland Tate, forman of Farthingdale Guest Ranch, wanted Galen to be a team lead in his newly launched Fresh Start Program.

The program used ex-cons as labor to develop the valley into a first class, high-dollar retreat. The ex-cons, in return, were able to do their parole and learn life skills along the way.

Galen knew about the program, which had been an experiment the summer before. Leland had assigned Jasper, the guest ranch's blacksmith, the task of taking charge of an ex-con by the name of Ellis. Jasper had, in essence, become Ellis' parole officer, with the goal of teaching Ellis how to be a blacksmith.

As to how successful that had been, the proof was in the valley program, already underway. But, in spite of Galen's personal opinion that the whole thing was a bad and enabling setup, the grapevine had it that the valley program was bringing in more tax dollars for the valley and the ranch than even Leland had foretold.

The valley was to the south of the ranch, a long green swath of land with a deep blue lake at the bottom of it. The only way you could get there was to climb to the top of the wind-swept hill above the ranch, and then go down a very steep road that was all switchbacks.

Galen had never been to the valley, but he'd gone along the road that was parallel to the valley, on his way to the hospital, and then hospice, in Cheyenne.

From the road, the valley playfully lurked behind a curtain of green pine trees, through which could sometimes be seen Half Moon Lake, or Guipago Ridge, or even Horse Creek River, glistening, like a secret string of blue diamonds among the trees.

"Work with ex-cons?" Galen had asked rather bluntly as he'd sat in Leland's office, taking the bottle of home-brewed root beer but not drinking it. "Me?"

"You'd be great at it." Leland leaned forward, his own bottle of root beer between his two strong hands, elbows on his knees, as if that would, in any way, diminish his height or his control of the conversation. "I need you there."

"Can I be honest?" asked Galen.

"I'd appreciate it," said Leland.

Galen echoed Leland's pose, elbows on his knees as he held his bottle of root beer in exactly the same way.

"I am not interested in working with ex-cons." Galen's voice came out a bit more stridently than he'd expected, so he softened it. "They were stupid enough to commit crimes, and now they're getting a free ride? Training? Food and lodging? They have it easy."

"These aren't violent criminals," said Leland, as if that were the issue. "And they've all done their time."

"I don't care if they were arrested for shoplifting gum." Galen sat up, putting the bottle of root beer on Leland's wooden desk with a loud clonk. "I've worked hard all my life and no matter what dire straights I was in, I would never commit a crime. I'm not interested."

"There's a five thousand dollar bonus at the end of summer." Leland took a swig of his root beer and then placed his bottle next to Galen's on the desk, an echo. "You could pay off the rest of your medical debt and still have money for tires for your truck."

"I said no." Galen stood up, ready to leave.

He'd worked hard all his life. So had his dad. They'd made a life that did not involve stealing from other people. There was nothing Galen would ever commit a crime for and he wasn't about to participate in any program that gave criminals an easy time of it.

"It's important to me," said Leland. "I need you in this program." He paused and looked right into Galen's soul. "Please?"

Galen knew he owed Leland for more than the time off when his dad had passed. The comfort and support Leland had offered was an invisible debt that could never be repaid. More, Leland's quiet please struck him to his heart.

Looking through the open doorway of Leland's office into the lofty space of the main barn, where ranch hands hustled, and the smell of warm hay filled his lungs, he thought of what his dad, Earl, might say at that moment.

Earl hadn't been as dismissive of an ex-con living and working at the guest ranch as Galen had been. Earl was of the mind that you just never knew. That you made your own luck and trusted in the future. Feelings and opinions that Galen would have been happy to share had Earl lived.

Now, the bitterness surged up, almost swamping him, but through it all he could almost hear his dad's quiet, slightly rumbly voice. Say yes, son. It'll give you time to figure out what to do about the farm. It's yours now. You get to decide .

"Yes," said Galen. He breathed out a long, slow breath. "Okay, I'll do it."

"Great." Leland rubbed his hands together, though he was the farthest thing from an evil overlord gloating about his plans for world domination coming together. Well, almost.

Leland usually got his way. While he didn't own the guest ranch, he managed it. He did have partial ownership in the valley; it was his baby, his pet project. He wanted it to succeed, and when Leland wanted something to happen, it usually did.

"You can keep working to help set up for the season at the ranch, then I'll send you to a two-week training course in Torrington."

They shook on it, then Leland said, "Thank you. I think you're going to be a real asset to the program."

Wondering if he'd made a huge mistake, Galen went back to work at the ranch, doing his best to normalize, to get back to the life he remembered before his dad passed.

Or at least he tried to normalize. But he'd been lonely.

One mistake he'd made after his dad's funeral service was to blindly reach out for companionship. His attention had landed on one of the ranch's star hands, Zeke Malloy.

Zeke was an ex-bull rider who'd busted his leg reaching for eight seconds and couldn't do the rodeo circuit anymore.

Zeke had told Galen that he'd tried trucking, and working in a granary, feedlot, slaughterhouse. And had landed at Farthingdale Ranch the summer before.

He was lanky and lean, with an insouciant walk, and a slow drawl that crawled up Galen's spine, making him feel things he thought he'd forgotten how to feel.

Flirting with Zeke took Galen's mind off everything. Everything.

Zeke had a dry laugh in response to Galen's small wit, his eyes crinkling at the corners, their green sparkling like emeralds in rich earth, blazing against his dark tan.

Encouraged, Galen had tried harder, only to learn to his dismay that Zeke was as straight as an arrow.

"You're a good man, Galen," said Zeke, arms folded across his muscled chest, every inch of those muscles hard-won, honestly won, through long hours of work. "But I am straight. Why, I dated Betty Sue for three years before I busted my leg. She only wanted a buckle-winning kind of man. Not a broken one. Hence, I am on the shelf, on the lookout for a nice woman to settle down with."

Galen had admitted defeat. Outwardly, he'd behaved in a gentlemanly manner. Only to feel, on the inside, like a loathsome worm for bothering Zeke that way. Practically throwing himself at a man who was straight? The worst manners. The worst .

So, perhaps, packing up to go to training for team leads in Torrington, and then moving into a green canvas tent in the valley wouldn't be such a bad idea. The change of pace might also do him good.

Absenting himself from anywhere he might run into Zeke was also a smart move. He could still remember the hard flush on his cheeks, the way the heat crawled down his chest when Zeke had turned him down. The maze of embarrassment that took him ages to work his way out of.

His training in Torrington included a whole lot of close-up examples that only supported his distaste for Leland's valley program.

On his first day, one of the guards had taken him and a few other special guests on a small tour of Wyoming Correctional.

During the tour, one woman had remarked how polite and well-mannered all the prisoners seemed.

It was something that Galen had been thinking as well and he wasn't altogether surprised when the guard said, "Many of them are at their most docile behind bars."

After the fast-paced blur of his training at Wyoming Correctional, he had a notebook from his training, and the files on the members of his small team. He had read those files and shaken his head at the stupidity of any man who thought that the way to go about things was to simply take what they wanted.

Two of the men on his little team, Toby and Owen, were small-time crooks, arrested for a short string of breaking and entering.

From their descriptions, they seemed almost harmless. The kind that might be secondary characters in a cop show, low-level men to heighten the effect of another criminal, higher up in the food chain.

They were still stupid, even if their files didn't describe either of them as particularly violent. He probably wouldn't have any trouble with them.

The doubt in his brain sped up when he'd reviewed Obadiah Deacon's file. If the darkly scowling mug shot of Deacon didn't spell danger, then reading his file certainly set off all kinds of alarm bells in Galen's head.

The image in the mug shot was rude, crude, and tattooed. Deacon was an oily haired thug in all the ways that mattered.

There were also surveillance pictures that showed Deacon in a three-piece suit, tipping a valet as he handed over the keys to a very nice sports car. Deacon slipping past a velvet gate that someone had lifted for him. Images in motion, images of a man of power.

Deacon's file included not just information about his five-year stint in Wyoming Correctional, but also the fights he'd gotten into, his several sessions in solitary.

There was a long passage about his odd and unwholesome relationship with Kelliher Dodson, a parolee who'd entered the valley program a few weeks prior, and also the long list of crimes Deacon had committed before he'd gotten arrested. Drug-related crimes. Making, marketing, and selling.

And though the crimes didn't include selling meth and cocaine directly to children while lurking at the edge of a schoolyard, the potential connection made Galen's skin crawl just the same. Those drugs had probably been used by kids, because if parents were buying, their kids might have access.

If Galen might have some sympathy for Deacon, it was when he read about the shootout that had disrupted some tawdry drug deal. In that back alley, several drug dealers on both sides of the line had lost their lives due to the spray of bullets coming from all directions.

One member of Deacon's gang had died, and three on the other side. Two cops had gotten injured. Blood had drained into the gutter in red ribbons before drying to brown. It had taken at least a week to clean up the mess, though Galen imagined the ramifications were still continuing.

Deacon had not been the only drug dealer arrested that day, though, due to overcrowding in the local jail system, he'd been moved up to Wyoming Correctional.

A hand-scribbled note indicated that the transfer had also removed Deacon from contact with the jailed members of the other gang. To keep the peace, as ironic as that was.

Galen had been hearing about the valley program for weeks before he'd moved into the valley. As far as he knew, Deacon was one of the most violent criminals, one of the most depraved, that the valley had ever taken on.

It might be the valley had other violent criminals, like Kurt, who'd tried to kill another ex-con, but for the most part, all the parolees seemed to be more like Toby and Owen. Low level crooks just looking for a handout. An easy way to do their parole.

Which begged the question: how the hell had Deacon slipped through the cracks? Just who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to let that guy walk free? Let alone breathe free air in the valley? Get handouts? Opportunity and training? It was all bullshit.

Well, his was not to judge, but rather to just do his job.

He was not like them. He would work for his pay and earn the bonus and the trust Leland Tate had invested in him. He could do that much. Then, at the end of summer, he'd just have to see which direction his life would take.