Brokeback Mountain: прочти и топай дальше
Картина Анга Ли про ковбоев-гомосеков выходит в американский прокат только на следующей неделе, но репутацию самого скандального фильма этого сезона она заработала уже очень и очень давно.
Уверен, что вы уже давно в курсе о том, что упомянутая картина была поставлена по новелле Энни Пруа. Под этим катом вы как раз и можете найти эту самую новеллу. Читайте на здоровье! Сам же обзор по ней напишу только завтра, так как хотелось бы услышать еще и чьи-нибудь отзывы.
Annie Proulx. Brokeback Mountain (1999)
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-nofire
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 sh*t. 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 ride 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 sh*t, 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. Im 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 back tonight, 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, sh*t 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 f*ckin 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 f*ckin thousand dollars that year. f*ckin
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 f*ckin 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, f*ckin 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?"
"sh*t 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 f*ckin 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 rearview." 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 f*ckin 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. "sh*t. 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 f*ck. 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 used to 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 ate
them 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 f*ckin go right ahead. Go on and f*ckin yell. I'll make him eat
the f*ckin 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 the
Wind Rivers over and again, the Sierra Madres, Gros Ventres, the
Washakies, Laramies, 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 the margins. 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, weathereyed,
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 a long, 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 nightfall 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 deserved 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 f*ck 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 f*ck-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 f*ckin 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 tradeoff
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 f*ckin 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 f*ckin 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, f*ckin 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 f*ckin 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
f*ckin idea how bad it gets. I'm not you. I can't make it on a couple a
high-altitude f*cks 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 heartshot,
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 tenmile
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 a long 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 after he 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
he says. 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, brassheaded
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.
Уверен, что вы уже давно в курсе о том, что упомянутая картина была поставлена по новелле Энни Пруа. Под этим катом вы как раз и можете найти эту самую новеллу. Читайте на здоровье! Сам же обзор по ней напишу только завтра, так как хотелось бы услышать еще и чьи-нибудь отзывы.
Annie Proulx. Brokeback Mountain (1999)
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-nofire
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 sh*t. 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 ride 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 sh*t, 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. Im 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 back tonight, 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, sh*t 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 f*ckin 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 f*ckin thousand dollars that year. f*ckin
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 f*ckin 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, f*ckin 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?"
"sh*t 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 f*ckin 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 rearview." 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 f*ckin 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. "sh*t. 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 f*ck. 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 used to 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 ate
them 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 f*ckin go right ahead. Go on and f*ckin yell. I'll make him eat
the f*ckin 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 the
Wind Rivers over and again, the Sierra Madres, Gros Ventres, the
Washakies, Laramies, 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 the margins. 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, weathereyed,
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 a long, 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 nightfall 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 deserved 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 f*ck 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 f*ck-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 f*ckin 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 tradeoff
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 f*ckin 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 f*ckin 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, f*ckin 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 f*ckin 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
f*ckin idea how bad it gets. I'm not you. I can't make it on a couple a
high-altitude f*cks 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 heartshot,
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 tenmile
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 a long 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 after he 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
he says. 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, brassheaded
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.