By Annie Proulx 

Copyright ?1999 by Dead Line, Ltd. 

Ennis Del Mar wakes before five, wind rocking the trailer, hissing in around
the aluminum door and window frames. The shirts hanging on a nail shudder
slightly in the draft. He gets up, scratching the grey wedge of belly and
pubic hair, shuffles to the gas burner, pours leftover coffee in a chipped
enamel pan; the flame swathes it in blue. He turns on the tap and urinates
in the sink, pulls on his shirt and jeans, his worn boots, stamping the
heels against the floor to get them full on. The wind booms down the curved
length of the trailer and under its roaring passage he can hear the
scratching of fine gravel and sand. It could be bad on the highway with the
horse trailer. He has to be packed and away from the place that morning.
Again the ranch is on the market and they've shipped out the last of the
horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, "Give em to
the real estate shark, I'm out a here," dropping the keys in Ennis's hand.
He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another
job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in
his dream.
The stale coffee is boiling up but he catches it before it goes over the
side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid, lets a
panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention on it,
it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when
they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong. The wind strikes the trailer
like a load of dirt coming off a dump truck, eases, dies, leaves a
temporary silence.
They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state,
Jack Twist in Lightning Flat up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from
around Sage, near the Utah line, both high school dropout country boys with
no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered,
rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life. Ennis, reared by his older brother
and sister after their parents drove off the only curve on Dead Horse Road
leaving them twenty-four dollars in cash and a two-mortgage ranch, applied
at age fourteen for a hardship license that let him make the hour-long trip
from the ranch to the high school. The pickup was old, no heater,
one-windshield wiper and bad tires; when the transmission went there was no
money to fix it. He had wanted to be a sophomore, felt the word carried a
kind of distinction, but the truck broke down short of it, pitching him
directly into ranch work.
In 1963 when he met Jack Twist, Ennis was engaged to Alma Beers. Both Jack
and Ennis claimed to be saving money for a small spread; in Ennis's case
that meant a tobacco can with two five-dollar bills inside. That spring,
hungry for any job, each had signed up with Farm and Ranch Employment --
they came together on paper as herder and camp tender for the same sheep
operation north of Signal. The summer range lay above the tree line on
Forest Service land on Brokeback Mountain. It would be Jack Twist's second
summer on the mountain, Ennis's first. Neither of them was twenty.
They shook hands in the choky little trailer office in front of a table
littered with scribbled papers, a Bakelite ashtray brimming with stubs. The
Venetian blinds hung askew and admitted a triangle of white light, the
shadow of the foreman's hand moving into it. Joe Aguirre, wavy hair the
color of cigarette ash and parted down the middle, gave them his point of
view. "Forest Service got designated campsites on the allotments. Them
camps can be a couple a miles from where we pasture the sheep. Bad predator
loss, nobody near lookin after em at night. What I want, camp tender in the
main camp where the Forest Service says, but the HERDER" -- pointing at
Jack with a chop of his hand -- "pitch a pup tent on the q.t. with the
sheep, out a sight, and he's goin a SLEEP there. Eat supper, breakfast in
camp, but SLEEP WITH THE SHEEP, hundred percent, NO FIRE, don't leave NO
SIGN. Roll up that tent every mornin case Forest Service snoops around. Got
the dogs, your .30-.30, sleep there. Last summer had goddamn near
twenty-five percent loss. I don't want that again. YOU," he said to Ennis,
taking in the ragged hair, the big nicked hands, the jeans torn,
button-gaping shirt, "Fridays twelve noon be down at the bridge with your
next week list and mules. Somebody with supplies'll be there in a pickup. "
He didn't ask if Ennis had a watch but took a cheap round ticker on a
braided cord from a box on a high shelf, wound and set it, tossed it to him
as if he weren't worth the reach. "TOMORROW MORNIN we'll truck you up the
jump-off."
Pair of deuces going nowhere. They found a bar and drank beer through the
afternoon, Jack telling Ennis about a lightning storm on the mountain the
year before that killed forty-two sheep, the peculiar stink of them and the
way they bloated, the need for plenty of whiskey up there. He had shot an
eagle, he said, turned his head to show the tail feather in his hatband. At
first glance Jack seemed fair enough with his curly hair and quick laugh,
but for a small man he carried some weight in the haunch and his smile
disclosed buckteeth, not pronounced enough to let him eat popcorn out of
the neck of a jug, but noticeable. He was infatuated with the rodeo life
and fastened his belt with a minor bull-riding buckle, but his boots were
worn to the quick, holed beyond repair and he was crazy to be somewhere,
anywhere else than Lightning Flat. Ennis, high-arched nose and narrow face,
was scruffy and a little cave-chested, balanced a small torso on long,
caliper legs, possessed a muscular and supple body made for the horse and
for fighting. His reflexes were uncommonly quick and he was farsighted
enough to dislike reading anything except Hamley's saddle catalog.
The sheep trucks and horse trailers unloaded at the trailhead and a
bandy-legged Basque showed Ennis how to pack the mules, two packs and a
riding load on each animal ring-lashed with double diamonds and secured
with half hitches, telling him, "Don't never order soup. Them boxes a soup
are real bad to pack." Three puppies belonging to one of the blue heelers
went in a pack basket, the runt inside Jack's coat, for he loved a little
dog. Ennis picked out a big chestnut called Cigar Butt to ride, Jack a bay
mare who turned out to have a low startle point. The string of spare horses
included a mouse-colored grullo whose looks Ennis liked. Ennis and Jack,
the dogs, horses and mules, a thousand ewes and their lambs flowed up the
trail like dirty water through the timber and out above the tree line into
the great flowery Meadows and the coursing, endless wind.
They got the big tent up on the Forest Service's platform, the kitchen and
grub boxes secured. Both slept in camp that first night, Jack already
bitching about Joe Aguirre's sleep-with-the-sheep-and-no-fire order, though
he saddled the bay mare in the dark morning without saying much. Dawn came
glassy orange, stained from below by a gelatinous band of pale green. The
sooty bulk of the mountain paled slowly until it was the same color as the
smoke from Ennis's breakfast fire. The cold air sweetened, banded pebbles
and crumbs of soil cast sudden pencil-long shadows and the rearing
lodgepole pines below them massed in slabs of somber malachite.
During the day Ennis looked across a great gulf and sometimes saw Jack, a
small dot moving across a high meadow as an insect moves across a
tablecloth; Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on
the huge black mass of mountain.
Jack came lagging in late one afternoon, drank his two bottles of beer
cooled in a wet sack on the shady side of the tent, ate two bowls of stew,
four of Ennis's stone biscuits, a can of peaches, rolled a smoke, watched
the sun drop.
"I'm commutin four hours a day," he said morosely. "Come in for breakfast,
go back to the sheep, evenin get em bedded down, come in for supper, go
back to the sheep, spend half the night jumpin up and checkin for coyotes.
By rights I should be spendin the night here. Aguirre got no right a make
me do this."
"You want a switch?" said Ennis. "I wouldn't mind herdin. I wouldn't mind
sleepin out there."
"That ain't the point. Point is, we both should be in this camp. And that
goddamn pup tent smells like cat piss or worse."
"Wouldn't mind bein out there."
"Tell you what, you got a get up a dozen times in the night out there over
them coyotes. Happy to switch but give you warnin I can't cook worth a
shit. Pretty good with a can opener."
"Can't be no worse than me, then. Sure, I wouldn't mind a do it."
They fended off the night for an hour with the yellow kerosene lamp and
around ten Ennis rode Cigar Butt, a good night horse, through the
glimmering frost back to the sheep, carrying leftover biscuits, a jar of
jam and a jar of coffee with him for the next day saying he'd save a trip,
stay out until supper.
"Shot a coyote just first light," he told Jack the next evening, sloshing
his face with hot water, lathering up soap and hoping his razor had some
cut left in it, while Jack peeled potatoes. "Big son of a bitch. Balls on
him size a apples. I bet he'd took a few lambs. Looked like he could a eat
a camel. You want some a this hot water? There's plenty."
"It's all yours."
"Well, I'm goin a warsh everthing I can reach," he said, pulling off his
boots and jeans (no drawers, no socks, Jack noticed), slopping the green
washcloth around until the fire spat.
They had a high-time supper by the fire, a can of beans each, fried
potatoes and a quart of whiskey on shares, sat with their backs against a
log, boot soles and copper jeans rivets hot, swapping the bottle while the
lavender sky emptied of color and the chill air drained down, drinking,
smoking cigarettes, getting up every now and then to piss, firelight
throwing a sparkle in the arched stream, tossing sticks on the fire to keep
the talk going, talking horses and rodeo, roughstock events, wrecks and
injuries sustained, the submarine Thresher lost two months earlier with all
hands and how it must have been in the last doomed minutes, dogs each had
owned and known, the draft, Jack's home ranch where his father and mother
held on, Ennis's family place folded years ago after his folks died, the
older brother in Signal and a married sister in Casper. Jack said his
father had been a pretty well known bullrider years back but kept his
secrets to himself, never gave Jack a word of advice, never came once to
see Jack ride, though he had put him on the woolies when he was a little
kid. Ennis said the kind of riding that interested him lasted longer than
eight seconds and had some point to it. Money's a good point, said Jack,
and Ennis had to agree. They were respectful of each other's opinions, each
glad to have a companion where none had been expected. Ennis, riding
against the wind back to the sheep in the treacherous, drunken light,
thought he'd never had such a good time, felt he could paw the white out of
the moon.
The summer went on and they moved the herd to new pasture, shifted the
camp; the distance between the sheep and the new camp was greater and the
night rides longer. Ennis rode easy, sleeping with his eyes open, but the
hours he was away from the sheep stretched out and out. Jack pulled a
squalling burr out of the harmonica, flattened a little from a fall off the
skittish bay mare, and Ennis had a good raspy voice; a few nights they
mangled their way through some songs. Ennis knew the salty words to
"Strawberry Roan." Jack tried a Carl Perkins song, bawling "what I
say-ay-ay," but he favored a sad hymn, "Water-Walking Jesus," learned from
his mother who believed in the Pentecost, that he sang at dirge slowness,
setting off distant coyote yips.
"Too late to go out to them damn sheep," said Ennis, dizzy drunk on all
fours one cold hour when the moon had notched past two. The meadow stones
glowed white-green and a flinty wind worked over the meadow, scraped the
fire low, then ruffled it into yellow silk sashes. "Got you a extra blanket
I'll roll up out here and grab forty winks, ride out at first light."
"Freeze your ass off when that fire dies down. Better off sleepin in the
tent. "
"Doubt I'll feel nothin." But he staggered under canvas, pulled his boots
off, snored on the ground cloth for a while, woke Jack with the clacking of
his jaw.
"Jesus Christ, quit hammerin and get over here. Bedroll's big enough," said
Jack in an irritable sleep-clogged voice. It was big enough, warm enough,
and in a little while they deepened their intimacy considerably. Ennis ran
full-throttle on all roads whether fence mending or money spending, and he
wanted none of it when Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his
erect cock. Ennis jerked his hand away as though he'd touched fire, got to
his knees, unbuckled his belt, shoved his pants down, hauled Jack onto all
fours and, with the help of the clear slick and a little spit, entered him,
nothing he'd done before but no instruction manual needed. They went at it
in silence except for a few sharp intakes of breath and Jack's choked
"gun's goin off," then out, down, and asleep.
Ennis woke in red dawn with his pants around his knees, a top-grade
headache, and Jack butted against him; without saying anything about it
both knew how it would go for the rest of the summer, sheep be damned.
As it did go. They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only
in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the hot sun striking
down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting,
no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word except once Ennis said,
"I'm not no queer," and Jack jumped in with "Me neither. A one-shot thing.
Nobody's business but ours." There were only the two of them on the
mountain flying in the euphoric, bitter air, looking down on the hawk's
back and the crawling lights of vehicles on the plain below, suspended
above ordinary affairs and distant from tame ranch dogs barking in the dark
hours. They believed themselves invisible, not knowing Joe Aguirre had
watched them through his 10x42 binoculars for ten minutes one day, waiting
until they'd buttoned up their jeans, waiting until Ennis rode back to the
sheep, before bringing up the message that Jack's people had sent word that
his uncle Harold was in the hospital with pneumonia and expected not to
make it. Though he did, and Aguirre came up again to say so, fixing Jack
with his bold stare, not bothering to dismount.
In August Ennis spent the whole night with Jack in the main camp and in a
blowy hailstorm the sheep took off west and got among a herd in another
allotment. There was a damn miserable time for five days, Ennis and a
Chilean herder with no English trying to sort them out, the task almost
impossible as the paint brands were worn and faint at this late season.
Even when the numbers were right Ennis knew the sheep were mixed. In a
disquieting way everything seemed mixed.
The first snow came early, on August thirteenth, piling up a foot, but was
followed by a quick melt. The next week Joe Aguirre sent word to bring them
down-- another, bigger storm was moving in from the Pacific -- and they
packed in the game and moved off the mountain with the sheep, stones
rolling at their heels, purple cloud crowding in from the west and the
metal smell of coming snow pressing them on. The mountain boiled with
demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken-cloud light, the wind combed
the grass and drew from the damaged krummholz and slit rock a bestial
drone. As they descended the slope Ennis felt he was in a slow-motion, but
headlong, irreversible fall.
Joe Aguirre paid them, said little. He had looked at the milling sheep with
a sour expression, said, "Some a these never went up there with you." The
count was not what he'd hoped for either. Ranch stiffs never did much of a
job.
"You goin a do this next summer?" said Jack to Ennis in the street, one leg
already up in his green pickup. The wind was gusting hard and cold.
"Maybe not." A dust plume rose and hazed the air with fine grit and he
squinted against it. "Like I said, Alma and me's gettin married in
December. Try to get somethin on a ranch. You?" He looked away from Jack's
jaw, bruised blue from the hard punch Ennis had thrown him on the last day.
"If nothin better comes along. Thought some about going back up to my
daddy's place, give him a hand over the winter, then maybe head out for
Texas in the spring. If the draft don't get me."
"Well, see you around, I guess." The wind tumbled an empty feed bag down
the street until it fetched up under his truck.
"Right," said Jack, and they shook hands, hit each other on the shoulder,
then there was forty feet of distance between them and nothing to do but
drive away in opposite directions. Within a mile Ennis felt like someone
was pulling his guts out hand over hand a yard at a time. He stopped at the
side of the road and, in the whirling new snow, tried to puke but nothing
came up. He felt about as bad as he ever had and it took a long time for
the feeling to wear off.
In December Ennis married Alma Beers and had her pregnant by mid-January.
He picked up a few short-lived ranch jobs, then settled in as a wrangler on
the old Elwood Hi-Top place north of Lost Cabin in Washakie County. He was
still working there in September when Alma Jr., as he called his daughter,
was born and their bedroom was full of the smell of old blood and milk and
baby shit, and the sounds were of squalling and sucking and Alma's sleepy
groans, all reassuring of fecundity and life's continuance to one who
worked with livestock.
When the Hi-Top folded they moved to a small apartment in Riverton up over
a laundry. Ennis got on the highway crew, tolerating it but working
weekends at the Rafter B in exchange for keeping his horses out there. The
second girl was born and Alma wanted to stay in town near the clinic
because the child had an asthmatic wheeze.
"Ennis, please, no more damn lonesome ranches for us," she said, sitting on
his lap, wrapping her thin, freckled arms around him. "Let's get a place
here in town?"
"I guess," said Ennis, slipping his hand up her blouse sleeve and stirring
the silky armpit hair, then easing her down, fingers moving up her ribs to
the jelly breast, over the round belly and knee and up into the wet gap all
the way to the north pole or the equator depending which way you thought
you were sailing, working at it until she shuddered and bucked against his
hand and he rolled her over, did quickly what she hated. They stayed in the
little apartment which he favored because it could be left at any time.
The fourth summer since Brokeback Mountain came on and in June Ennis had a
general delivery letter from Jack Twist, the first sign of life in all that
time.
Friend this letter is a long time over due. Hope you get it. Heard you was
in Riverton. I'm coming thru on the 24th, thought Id stop and buy you a
beer Drop me a line if you can, say if your there.
The return address was Childress, Texas. Ennis wrote back, you bet, gave
the Riverton address.
The day was hot and clear in the morning, but by noon the clouds had pushed
up out of the west rolling a little sultry air before them. Ennis, wearing
his best shirt, white with wide black stripes, didn't know what time Jack
would get there and so had taken the day off, paced back and forth, looking
down into a street pale with dust. Alma was saying something about taking
his friend to the Knife & Fork for supper instead of cooking it was so hot,
if they could get a baby-sitter, but Ennis said more likely he'd just go
out with Jack and get drunk. Jack was not a restaurant type, he said,
thinking of the dirty spoons sticking out of the cans of cold beans
balanced on the log.
Late in the afternoon, thunder growling, that same old green pickup rolled
in and he saw Jack get out of the truck, beat-up Resistol tilted back. A
hot jolt scalded Ennis and he was out on the landing pulling the door
closed behind him. Jack took the stairs two and two. They seized each other
by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other,
saying, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key
turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard, Jack's big
teeth bringing blood, his hat falling to the floor, stubble rasping, wet
saliva welling, and the door opening and Alma looking out for a few seconds
at Ennis's straining shoulders and shutting the door again and still they
clinched, pressing chest and groin and thigh and leg together, treading on
each other's toes until they pulled apart to breathe and Ennis, not big on
endearments, said what he said to his horses and daughters, little darlin.
The door opened again a few inches and Alma stood in the narrow light. What
could he say? "Alma, this is Jack Twist, Jack, my wife Alma." His chest was
heaving. He could smell Jack -- the intensely familiar odor of cigarettes,
musky sweat and a faint sweetness like grass, and with it the rushing cold
of the mountain. "Alma," he said, "Jack and me ain't seen each other in
four years." As if it were a reason. He was glad the light was dim on the
landing but did not turn away from her. "Sure enough," said Alma in a low
voice. She had seen what she had seen. Behind her in the room lightning lit
the window like a white sheet waving and the baby cried.
"You got a kid?" said Jack. His shaking hand grazed Ennis's hand,
electrical current snapped between them.
"Two little girls," Ennis said. "Alma Jr. and Francine. Love them to
pieces." Alma's mouth twitched.
"I got a boy," said Jack. "Eight months old. Tell you what, I married a
cute little old Texas girl down in Childress -- Lureen." From the vibration
of the floorboard on which they both stood Ennis could feel how hard Jack
was shaking.
"Alma," he said. "Jack and me is goin out and get a drink. Might not get
backtonight, we get drinkin and talkin."
"Sure enough," Alma said, taking a dollar bill from her pocket. Ennis
guessed she was going to ask him to get her a pack of cigarettes, bring him
back sooner.
"Please to meet you," said Jack, trembling like a run-out horse.
"Ennis -- " said Alma in her misery voice, but that didn't slow him down on
the stairs and he called back, "Alma, you want smokes there's some in the
pocket a my blue shirt in the bedroom."
They went off in Jack's truck, bought a bottle of whiskey and within twenty
minutes were in the Motel Siesta jouncing a bed. A few handfuls of hail
rattled against the window followed by rain and slippery wind banging the
unsecured door of the next room then and through the night.
The room stank of semen and smoke and sweat and whiskey, of old carpet and
sour hay, saddle leather, shit and cheap soap. Ennis lay spread-eagled,
spent and wet, breathing deep, still half tumescent, Jack blowing forceful
cigarette clouds like whale spouts, and Jack said, "Christ, it got a be all
that time a yours ahorseback makes it so goddamn good. We got to talk about
this. Swear to god I didn't know we was goin a get into this again -- yeah,
I did. Why I'm here. I fuckin knew it. Redlined all the way, couldn't get
here fast enough."
"I didn't know where in the hell you was," said Ennis. "Four years. I about
give up on you. I figured you was sore about that punch."
"Friend," said Jack, "I was in Texas rodeoin. How I met Lureen. Look over
on that chair."
On the back of the soiled orange chair he saw the shine of a buckle.
"Bullridin?"
"Yeah. I made three fuckin thousand dollars that year. fuckin starved. Had
to borrow everthing but a toothbrush from other guys. Drove grooves across
Texas. Half the time under that cunt truck fixin it. Anyway, I didn't never
think about losin. Lureen? There's some serious money there. Her old man's
got it. Got this farm machinery business. Course he don't let her have none
a the money, and he hates my fuckin guts, so it's a hard go now but one a
these days -- "
"Well, you're goin a go where you look. Army didn't get you?" The thunder
sounded far to the east, moving from them in its red wreaths of light.
"They can't get no use out a me. Got some crushed vertebrates. And a stress
fracture, the arm bone here, you know how bullridin you're always leverin
it off your thigh? -- she gives a little ever time you do it. Even if you
tape it good you break it a little goddamn bit at a time. Tell you what,
hurts like a bitch afterwards. Had a busted leg. Busted in three places.
Come off the bull and it was a big bull with a lot a drop, he got rid a me
in about three flat and he come after me and he was sure faster. Lucky
enough. Friend a mine got his oil checked with a horn dipstick and that was
all she wrote. Bunch a other things, fuckin busted ribs, sprains and pains,
torn ligaments. See, it ain't like it was in my daddy's time. It's guys
with money go to college, trained athaletes. You got a have some money to
rodeo now. Lureen's old man wouldn't give me a dime if I dropped it, except
one way. And I know enough about the game now so I see that I ain't never
goin a be on the bubble. Other reasons. I'm gettin out while I still can
walk."
Ennis pulled Jack's hand to his mouth, took a hit from the cigarette,
exhaled. "Sure as hell seem in one piece to me. You know, I was sittin up
here all that time tryin to figure out if I was -- ? I know I ain't. I mean
here we both got wives and kids, right? I like doin it with women, yeah,
but Jesus H., ain't nothin like this. I never had no thoughts a doin it
with another guy except I sure wrang it out a hunderd times thinkin about
you. You do it with other guys? Jack?"
"shit no," said Jack, who had been riding more than bulls, not rolling his
own. "You know that. Old Brokeback got us good and it sure ain't over. We
got a work out what the f*ck we're goin a do now."
"That summer," said Ennis. "When we split up after we got paid out I had
gut cramps so bad I pulled over and tried to puke, thought I ate somethin
bad at that place in Dubois. Took me about a year a figure out it was that
I shouldn't a let you out a my sights. Too late then by a long, long while."
"Friend," said Jack. "We got us a fuckin situation here. Got a figure out
what to do."
"I doubt there's nothin now we can do," said Ennis. "What I'm sayin, Jack,
I built a life up in them years. Love my little girls. Alma? It ain't her
fault. You got your baby and wife, that place in Texas. You and me can't
hardly be decent together if what happened back there" -- he jerked his
head in the direction of the apartment -- "grabs on us like that. We do
that in the wrong place we'll be dead. There's no reins on this one. It
scares the piss out a me."
"Got to tell you, friend, maybe somebody seen us that summer. I was back
there the next June, thinkin about goin back -- I didn't, lit out for Texas
instead -- and Joe Aguirre's in the office and he says to me, he says, 'You
boys found a way to make the time pass up there, didn't you,' and I give
him a look but when I went out I seen he had a big-ass pair a binoculars
hangin off his rear view."
He neglected to add that the foreman had leaned back in his squeaky wooden
tilt chair, said, Twist, you guys wasn't gettin paid to leave the dogs
baby-sit the sheep while you stemmed the rose, and declined to rehire him.
He went on, "Yeah, that little punch a yours surprised me. I never figured
you to throw a dirty punch."
"I come up under my brother K.E., three years older'n me, slugged me silly
ever day. Dad got tired a me come bawlin in the house and when I was about
six he set me down and says, Ennis, you got a problem and you got a fix it
or it's gonna be with you until you're ninety and K.E.'s ninety-three.
Well, I says, he's bigger'n me. Dad says, you got a take him unawares,
don't say nothin to him, make him feel some pain, get out fast and keep
doin it until he takes the message. Nothin like hurtin somebody to make him
hear good. So I did. I got him in the outhouse, jumped him on the stairs,
come over to his pillow in the night while he was sleepin and pasted him
damn good. Took about two days. Never had trouble with K.E. since. The
lesson was, don't say nothin and get it over with quick."
A telephone rang in the next room, rang on and on, stopped abruptly in
mid-peal.
"You won't catch me again," said Jack. "Listen. I'm thinkin, tell you what,
if you and me had a little ranch together, little cow and calf operation,
your horses, it'd be some sweet life. Like I said, I'm gettin out a rodeo.
I ain't no broke-dick rider but I don't got the bucks a ride out this slump
I'm in and I don't got the bones a keep gettin wrecked. I got it figured,
got this plan, Ennis, how we can do it, you and me. Lureen's old man, you
bet he'd give me a bunch if I'd get lost. Already more or less said it -- "
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain't goin a be that way. We can't. I'm stuck with
what I got, caught in my own loop. Can't get out of it. Jack, I don't want
a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don't want a be dead.
There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich --
Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they
was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old and they found Earl
dead in a irrigation ditch. They'd took a tire iron to him, spurred him up,
drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the
tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore
down from skiddin on gravel."
"You seen that?"
"Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it. Me and K.E. Dad laughed about
it. Hell, for all I know he done the job. If he was alive and was to put
his head in that door right now you bet he'd go get his tire iron. Two guys
livin together? No. All I can see is we get together once in a while way
the hell out in the back a nowhere -- "
"How much is once in a while?" said Jack. "Once in a while ever four fuckin
years?"
"No," said Ennis, forbearing to ask whose fault that was. "I goddamn hate
it that you're goin a drive away in the mornin and I'm goin back to work.
But if you can't fix it you got a stand it," he said. "shit. I been lookin
at people on the street. This happen a other people? What the hell do they
do?"
"It don't happen in Wyomin and if it does I don't know what they do, maybe
go to Denver," said Jack, sitting up, turning away from him, "and I don't
give a flyin fuck. Son of a bitch, Ennis, take a couple days off. Right
now. Get us out a here. Throw your stuff in the back a my truck and let's
get up in the mountains. Couple a days. Call Alma up and tell her you're
goin. Come on, Ennis, you just shot my airplane out a the sky -- give me
somethin a go on. This ain't no little thing that's happenin here."
The hollow ringing began again in the next room, and as if he were
answering it, Ennis picked up the phone on the bedside table, dialed his
own number.
A slow corrosion worked between Ennis and Alma, no real trouble, just
widening water. She was working at a grocery store clerk job, saw she'd
always have to work to keep ahead of the bills on what Ennis made. Alma
asked Ennis to use rubbers because she dreaded another pregnancy. He said
no to that, said he would be happy to leave her alone if she didn't want
any more of his kids. Under her breath she said, "I'd have em if you'd
support em." And under that, thought, anyway, what you like to do don't
make too many babies.
Her resentment opened out a little every year: the embrace she had
glimpsed, Ennis's fishing trips once or twice a year with Jack Twist and
never a vacation with her and the girls, his disinclination to step out and
have any fun, his yearning for low paid, long-houred ranch work, his
propensity to roll to the wall and sleep as soon as he hit the bed, his
failure to look for a decent permanent job with the county or the power
company, put her in a long, slow dive and when Alma Jr. was nine and
Francine seven she said, what am I doin hangin around with him, divorced
Ennis and married the Riverton grocer.
Ennis went back to ranch work, hired on here and there, not getting much
ahead but glad enough to be around stock again, free to drop things, quit
if he had to, and go into the mountains at short notice. He had no serious
hard feelings, just a vague sense of getting shortchanged, and showed it
was all right by taking Thanksgiving dinner with Alma and her grocer and
the kids, sitting between his girls and talking horses to them, telling
jokes, trying not to be a sad daddy. After the pie Alma got him off in the
kitchen, scraped the plates and said she worried about him and he ought to
get married again. He saw she was pregnant, about four, five months, he
guessed.
"Once burned," he said, leaning against the counter, feeling too big for
the room.
"You still go fishin with that Jack Twist?"
"Some." He thought she'd take the pattern off the plate with the scraping.
"You know," she said, and from her tone he knew something was coming, "I
usedto wonder how come you never brought any trouts home. Always said you
caught plenty. So one time I got your creel case open the night before you
went on one a your little trips -- price tag still on it after five years
-- and I tied a note on the end of the line. It said, hello Ennis, bring
some fish home, love, Alma. And then you come back and said you'd caught a
bunch a browns and atethem up. Remember? I looked in the case when I got a
chance and there was my note still tied there and that line hadn't touched
water in its life." As though the word "water" had called out its domestic
cousin she twisted the faucet, sluiced the plates.
"That don't mean nothin."
"Don't lie, don't try to fool me, Ennis. I know what it means. Jack Twist?
Jack Nasty. You and him -- "
She'd overstepped his line. He seized her wrist; tears sprang and rolled, a
dish clattered.
"Shut up," he said. "Mind your own business. You don't know nothin about
it."
"I'm goin a yell for Bill."
"You fckin go right ahead. Go on and fuckin yell. I'll make him eat the
fuckin floor and you too." He gave another wrench that left her with a
burning bracelet, shoved his hat on backwards and slammed out. He went to
the Black and Blue Eagle bar that night, got drunk, had a short dirty fight
and left. He didn't try to see his girls for a long time, figuring they
would look him up when they got the sense and years to move out from Alma.
They were no longer young men with all of it before them. Jack had filled
out through the shoulders and hams, Ennis stayed as lean as a clothes-pole,
stepped around in worn boots, jeans and shirts summer and winter, added a
canvas coat in cold weather. A benign growth appeared on his eyelid and
gave it a drooping appearance, a broken nose healed crooked. Years on years
they worked their way through the high meadows and mountain drainages,
horse-packing into the Big Horns, Medicine Bows, south end of the
Gallatins, Absarokas, Granites, Owl Creeks, the Bridger-Teton Range, the
Freezeouts and the Shirleys, Ferrises and the Rattlesnakes, Salt River
Range, into theWind Rivers over and again, the Sierra Madres, Gros Ventres,
the Washakies, La
ramies, but never returning to Brokeback.
Down in Texas Jack's father-in-law died and Lureen, who inherited the farm
equipment business, showed a skill for management and hard deals. Jack
found himself with a vague managerial title, traveling to stock and
agricultural machinery shows. He had some money now and found ways to spend
it on his buying trips. A little Texas accent flavored his sentences, "cow"
twisted into "kyow" and "wife" coming out as "waf." He'd had his front
teeth filed down and capped, said he'd felt no pain, and to finish the job
grew a heavy mustache.
In May of 1983 they spent a few cold days at a series of little icebound,
no-name high lakes, then worked across into the Hail Strew River drainage.
Going up, the day was fine but the trail deep-drifted and slopping wet at
themargins. They left it to wind through a slashy cut, leading the horses
through brittle branchwood, Jack, the same eagle feather in his old hat,
lifting his head in the heated noon to take the air scented with resinous
lodgepole, the dry needle duff and hot rock, bitter juniper crushed beneath
the horses' hooves. Ennis, weather-eyed, looked west for the heated cumulus
that might come up on such a day but the boneless blue was so deep, said
Jack, that he might drown looking up.
Around three they swung through a narrow pass to a southeast slope where
the strong spring sun had had a chance to work, dropped down to the trail
again which lay snowless below them. They could hear the river muttering
and making a distant train sound a long way off. Twenty minutes on they
surprised a black bear on the bank above them rolling a log over for grubs
and Jack's horse shied and reared, Jack saying "Wo! Wo!" and Ennis's bay
dancing and snorting but holding. Jack reached for the .30-.06 but there
was no need; the startled bear galloped into the trees with the lumpish
gait that made it seem it was falling apart.
The tea-colored river ran fast with snowmelt, a scarf of bubbles at every
high rock, pools and setbacks streaming. The ochre-branched willows swayed
stiffly, pollened catkins like yellow thumbprints. The horses drank and
Jack dismounted, scooped icy water up in his hand, crystalline drops
falling from his fingers, his mouth and chin glistening with wet.
"Get beaver fever doin that," said Ennis, then, "Good enough place,"
looking at the level bench above the river, two or three fire-rings from
old hunting camps. A sloping meadow rose behind the bench, protected by a
stand of lodgepole. There was plenty of dry wood. They set up camp without
saying much, picketed the horses in the meadow. Jack broke the seal on a
bottle of whiskey, took along, hot swallow, exhaled forcefully, said,
"That's one a the two things I need right now," capped and tossed it to
Ennis.
On the third morning there were the clouds Ennis had expected, a grey racer
out of the west, a bar of darkness driving wind before it and small flakes.
It faded after an hour into tender spring snow that heaped wet and heavy.
By night fall it turned colder. Jack and Ennis passed a joint back and
forth, the fire burning late, Jack restless and bitching about the cold,
poking the flames with a stick, twisting the dial of the transistor radio
until the batteries died.
Ennis said he'd been putting the blocks to a woman who worked part-time at
the Wolf Ears bar in Signal where he was working now for Stoutamire's cow
and calf outfit, but it wasn't going anywhere and she had some problems he
didn't want. Jack said he'd had a thing going with the wife of a rancher
down the road in Childress and for the last few months he'd slank around
expecting to get shot by Lureen or the husband, one. Ennis laughed a little
and said he probably d
eserved it. Jack said he was doing all right but he missed Ennis bad enough
sometimes to make him whip babies.
The horses nickered in the darkness beyond the fire's circle of light.
Ennis put his arm around Jack, pulled him close, said he saw his girls
about once a month, Alma Jr. a shy seventeen-year-old with his beanpole
length, Francine a little live wire. Jack slid his cold hand between
Ennis's legs, said he was worried about his boy who was, no doubt about it,
dyslexic or something, couldn't get anything right, fifteen years old and
couldn't hardly read, he could see it though goddamn Lureen wouldn't admit
to it and pretended the kid was o.k., refused to get any bitchin kind a
help about it. He didn't know what the fuck the answer was. Lureen had the
money and called the shots.
"I used a want a boy for a kid," said Ennis, undoing buttons, "but just got
little girls."
"I didn't want none a either kind," said Jack. "But fuck-all has worked the
way I wanted. Nothin never come to my hand the right way." Without getting
up he threw deadwood on the fire, the sparks flying up with their truths
and lies, a few hot points of fire landing on their hands and faces, not
for the first time, and they rolled down into the dirt. One thing never
changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by
the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.
A day or two later in the trailhead parking lot, horses loaded into the
trailer, Ennis was ready to head back to Signal, Jack up to Lightning Flat
to see the old man. Ennis leaned into Jack's window, said what he'd been
putting off the whole week, that likely he couldn't get away again until
November after they'd shipped stock and before winter feeding started.
"November. What in hell happened a August? Tell you what, we said August,
nine, ten days. Christ, Ennis! Whyn't you tell me this before? You had a
fuckin week to say some little word about it. And why's it we're always in
the friggin cold weather? We ought a do somethin. We ought a go south. We
ought a go to Mexico one day."
"Mexico? Jack, you know me. All the travelin I ever done is goin around the
coffeepot lookin for the handle. And I'll be runnin the baler all August,
that's what's the matter with August. Lighten up, Jack. We can hunt in
November, kill a nice elk. Try if I can get Don Wroe's cabin again. We had
a good time that year."
"You know, friend, this is a goddamn bitch of a unsatisfactory situation.
You used a come away easy. It's like seein the pope now."
"Jack, I got a work. Them earlier days I used a quit the jobs. You got a
wife with money, a good job. You forget how it is bein broke all the time.
You ever hear a child support? I been payin out for years and got more to
go. Let me tell you, I can't quit this one. And I can't get the time off.
It was tough gettin this time -- some a them late heifers is still calvin.
You don't leave then. You don't. Stoutamire is a hell-raiser and he raised
hell about me takin the week. I don't blame him. He probly ain't got a
night's sleep since I left. The trade-off was August. You got a better
idea?"
"I did once." The tone was bitter and accusatory.
Ennis said nothing, straightened up slowly, rubbed at his forehead; a horse
stamped inside the trailer. He walked to his truck, put his hand on the
trailer, said something that only the horses could hear, turned and walked
back at a deliberate pace.
"You been a Mexico, Jack?" Mexico was the place. He'd heard. He was cutting
fence now, trespassing in the shoot-em zone.
"Hell yes, I been. Where's the fuckin problem?" Braced for it all these
years and here it came, late and unexpected.
"I got a say this to you one time, Jack, and I ain't foolin. What I don't
know," said Ennis, "all them things I don't know could get you killed if I
should come to know them."
"Try this one," said Jack, "and I'll say it just one time. Tell you what,
we could a had a good life together, a fuckin real good life. You wouldn't
do it, Ennis, so what we got now is Brokeback Mountain. Everthing built on
that. It's all we got, boy, fuckin all, so I hope you know that if you
don't never know the rest. Count the damn few times we been together in
twenty years. Measure the fuckin short leash you keep me on, then ask me
about Mexico and then tell me you'll kill me for needin it and not hardly
never gettin it. You got no fuckin idea how bad it gets. I'm not you. I
can't make it on a couple a high-altitude fucks once or twice a year.
You're too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch. I wish I knew
how to quit you."
Like vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of
things unsaid and now unsayable -- admissions, declarations, shames,
guilts, fears --rose around them. Ennis stood as if heart-shot, face grey
and deep-lined, grimacing, eyes screwed shut, fists clenched, legs caving,
hit the ground on his knees.
"Jesus," said Jack. "Ennis?" But before he was out of the truck, trying to
guess if it was heart attack or the overflow of an incendiary rage, Ennis
was back on his feet and somehow, as a coat hanger is straightened to open
a locked car and then bent again to its original shape, they torqued things
almost to where they had been, for what they'd said was no news. Nothing
ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved.
What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor
understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had
come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some
shared and sexless hunger. They had stood that way for a long time in front
of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their
bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the
round watch in Ennis's pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into
coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis's
breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight
and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming
like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep
but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but
still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said,
"Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you're sleepin on your
feet like a horse," and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the
darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words "see you
tomorrow," and the horse's shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone. Later,
that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless,
charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it,
even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face
because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And
maybe, he thought, they'd never got much farther than that. Let be, let be.
Ennis didn't know about the accident for months until his postcard to Jack
saying that November still looked like the first chance came back stamped
DECEASED. He called Jack's number in Childress, something he had done only
once before when Alma divorced him and Jack had misunderstood the reason
for the call, had driven twelve hundred miles north for nothing. This would
be all right, Jack would answer, had to answer. But he did not. It was
Lureen and she said who? who is this? and when he told her again she said
in a level voice yes, Jack was pumping up a flat on the truck out on a back
road when the tire blew up. The bead was damaged somehow and the force of
the explosion slammed the rim into his face, broke his nose and jaw and
knocked him unconscious on his back. By the time someone came along he had
drowned in his own blood. No, he thought, they got him with the tire iron.
"Jack used to mention you," she said. "You're the fishing buddy or the
hunting buddy, I know that. Would have let you know," she said, "but I
wasn't sure about your name and address. Jack kept most a his friends'
addresses in his head. It was a terrible thing. He was only thirty-nine
years old."
The huge sadness of the northern plains rolled down on him. He didn't know
which way it was, the tire iron or a real accident, blood choking down
Jack's throat and nobody to turn him over. Under the wind drone he heard
steel slamming off bone, the hollow chatter of a settling tire rim.
"He buried down there?" He wanted to curse her for letting Jack die on the
dirt road.
The little Texas voice came slip-sliding down the wire. "We put a stone up.
He use to say he wanted to be cremated, ashes scattered on Brokeback
Mountain. I didn't know where that was. So he was cremated, like he wanted,
and like I say, half his ashes was interred here, and the rest I sent up to
his folks. I thought Brokeback Mountain was around where he grew up. But
knowing Jack, it might be some pretend place where the bluebirds sing and
there's a whiskey spring."
"We herded sheep on Brokeback one summer," said Ennis. He could hardly
speak.
"Well, he said it was his place. I thought he meant to get drunk. Drink
whiskey up there. He drank a lot."
"His folks still up in Lightnin Flat?"
"Oh yeah. They'll be there until they die. I never met them. They didn't
come down for the funeral. You get in touch with them. I suppose they'd
appreciate it if his wishes was carried out." No doubt about it, she was
polite but the little voice was cold as snow.
The road to Lightning Flat went through desolate country past a dozen
abandoned ranches distributed over the plain at eight- and ten-mile
intervals, houses sitting blank-eyed in the weeds, corral fences down. The
mailbox read John C. Twist. The ranch was a meagre little place, leafy
spurge taking over. The stock was too far distant for him to see their
condition, only that they were black baldies. A porch stretched across the
front of the tiny brown stucco house, four rooms, two down, two up. Ennis
sat at the kitchen table with Jack's father. Jack's mother, stout and
careful in her movements as though recovering from an operation, said,
"Want some coffee, don't you? Piece a cherry cake?"
"Thank you, ma'am, I'll take a cup a coffee but I can't eat no cake just
now."
The old man sat silent, his hands folded on the plastic tablecloth, staring
at Ennis with an angry, knowing expression. Ennis recognized in him a not
uncommon type with the hard need to be the stud duck in the pond. He
couldn't see much of Jack in either one of them, took a breath.
"I feel awful bad about Jack. Can't begin to say how bad I feel. I knew him
along time. I come by to tell you that if you want me to take his ashes up
there on Brokeback like his wife says he wanted I'd be proud to."
There was a silence. Ennis cleared his throat but said nothing more. The
old man said, "Tell you what, I know where Brokeback Mountain is. He
thought he was too goddamn special to be buried in the family plot."
Jack's mother ignored this, said, "He used a come home every year, even
afterhe was married and down in Texas, and help his daddy on the ranch for
a week fix the gates and mow and all. I kept his room like it was when he
was a boy and I think he appreciated that. You are welcome to go up in his
room if you want."
The old man spoke angrily. "I can't get no help out here. Jack used a say,
'Ennis del Mar,' he used a say, 'I'm goin a bring him up here one a these
days and we'll lick this damn ranch into shape.' He had some half-baked
idea the two a you was goin a move up here, build a log cabin and help me
run this ranch and bring it up. Then, this spring he's got another one's
goin a come up here with him and build a place and help run the ranch, some
ranch neighbor a his from down in Texas. He's goin a split up with his wife
and come back here. So hesays. But like most a Jack's ideas it never come
to pass."
So now he knew it had been the tire iron. He stood up, said, you bet he'd
like to see Jack's room, recalled one of Jack's stories about this old man.
Jack was dick-clipped and the old man was not; it bothered the son who had
discovered the anatomical disconformity during a hard scene. He had been
about three or four, he said, always late getting to the toilet, struggling
with buttons, the seat, the height of the thing and often as not left the
surroundings sprinkled down. The old man blew up about it and this one time
worked into a crazy rage. "Christ, he licked the stuffin out a me, knocked
me down on the bathroom floor, whipped me with his belt. I thought he was
killin me. Then he says, 'You want a know what it's like with piss all over
the place? I'll learn you,' and he pulls it out and lets go all over me,
soaked me, then he throws a towel at me and makes me mop up the floor, take
my clothes off and warsh them in the bathtub, warsh out the towel, I'm
bawlin and blubberin. But while he was hosin me down I seen he had some
extra material that I was missin. I seen they'd cut me different like you'd
crop a ear or scorch a brand. No way to get it right with him after that."
The bedroom, at the top of a steep stair that had its own climbing rhythm,
was tiny and hot, afternoon sun pounding through the west window, hitting
the narrow boy's bed against the wall, an ink-stained desk and wooden
chair, a b.b. gun in a hand-whittled rack over the bed. The window looked
down on the gravel road stretching south and it occurred to him that for
his growing-up years that was the only road Jack knew. An ancient magazine
photograph of some dark-haired movie star was taped to the wall beside the
bed, the skin tone gone magenta. He could hear Jack's mother downstairs
running water, filling the kettle and setting it back on the stove, asking
the old man a muffled question. The closet was a shallow cavity with a
wooden rod braced across, a faded cretonne curtain on a string closing it
off from the rest of the room. In the closet hung two pairs of jeans
crease-ironed and folded neatly over wire hangers, on the floor a pair of
worn packer boots he thought he remembered. At the north end of the closet
a tiny jog in the wall made a slight hiding place and here, stiff with long
suspension from a nail, hung a shirt. He lifted it off the nail. Jack's old
shirt from Brokeback days. The dried blood on the sleeve was his own blood,
a gushing nosebleed on the last afternoon on the mountain when Jack, in
their contortionistic grappling and wrestling, had slammed Ennis's nose
hard with his knee. He had staunched the blood which was everywhere, all
over both of them, with his shirtsleeve, but the staunching hadn't held
because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering
angel out in the wild columbine, wings folded. The shirt seemed heavy until
he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down
inside Jack's sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he'd thought, long
ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons
missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack's own shirt, the pair
like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into
the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for
the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but
there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of
Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.
In the end the stud duck refused to let Jack's ashes go. "Tell you what, we
got a family plot and he's goin in it." Jack's mother stood at the table
coring apples with a sharp, serrated instrument. "You come again," she said.
Bumping down the washboard road Ennis passed the country cemetery fenced
with sagging sheep wire, a tiny fenced square on the welling prairie, a few
graves bright with plastic flowers, and didn't want to know Jack was going
in there, to be buried on the grieving plain.
A few weeks later on the Saturday he threw all Stoutamire's dirty horse
blankets into the back of his pickup and took them down to the Quik Stop
Car Wash to turn the high-pressure spray on them. When the wet clean
blankets were stowed in the truck bed he stepped into Higgins's gift shop
and busied himself with the postcard rack.
"Ennis, what are you lookin for rootin through them postcards?" said Linda
Higgins, throwing a sopping brown coffee filter into the garbage can.
"Scene a Brokeback Mountain."
"Over in Fremont County?"
"No, north a here."
"I didn't order none a them. Let me get the order list. They got it I can
get you a hunderd. I got a order some more cards anyway."
"One's enough," said Ennis.
When it came -- thirty cents -- he pinned it up in his trailer,
brass-headed tack in each corner. Below it he drove a nail and on the nail
he hung the wire hanger and the two old shirts suspended from it. He
stepped back and looked at the ensemble through a few stinging tears.
"Jack, I swear -- " he said, though Jack had never asked him to swear
anything and was himself not the swearing kind.
Around that time Jack began to appear in his dreams, Jack as he had first
seen him, curly-headed and smiling and bucktoothed, talking about getting
up off his pockets and into the control zone, but the can of beans with the
spoon handle jutting out and balanced on the log was there as well, in a
cartoon shape and lurid colors that gave the dreams a flavor of comic
obscenity. The spoon handle was the kind that could be used as a tire iron.
And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy
and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.
There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to
believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've
got to stand it.