The Flying C is the Stryker family property where a private dump, ranch equipment, and the main house form a secluded setting for concealment. Though no longer a working ranch, the property retains practical infrastructure that Larry Stryker can use to dispose of evidence and clean the house after Gayle Stryker’s violence.

Property and Facilities

Generations of Gayle Stryker’s family used a private trash heap about a mile and a half from the house. A tin shed at the dump stored a backhoe and front-end loader, and Larry arranged for a mechanic from Catalina to service the equipment twice a year. The ranch’s former working life had ended, but its machinery remained maintained and ready for tasks that ordinary household disposal could not manage.

Concealment at the Ranch

After Gayle’s attack left the basement and its furnishings bloodied, Larry transported the mattress, tarps, bedding, and other waste to the dump. He used the backhoe to dig a trench, then left the heap looking as though it had not been disturbed for years. The setting thus turns routine ranch infrastructure into part of a concealment effort: equipment preserved for practical work also enables Larry to bury material evidence.

Larry then returned to the house and scrubbed the truck bed, porch, stairs, and basement. A drain had been installed in the basement’s polished concrete floor during an earlier remodel, ostensibly to deal with an overflowing washing machine. Larry now used it to wash away blood. The ranch’s house and dump serve different stages of the same attempt to remove traces: one is scrubbed, the other made to look untouched.

Planned Disappearance and Significance

Gayle had arranged to give the property to the Nature Conservancy. The terms of the gift required that, after her death, all buildings be blasted away, leveled by bulldozer, and left for the desert to reclaim. The Flying C therefore carries an unsettling double purpose in the story: its private dump helps conceal the past, while its planned future makes the ranch itself subject to deliberate erasure. The contrast between the property’s long family use and its eventual dismantling gives the landscape a role beyond backdrop—it is both an instrument of concealment and a place scheduled to vanish.