Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue - Chapter 12
Title: Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue
Author: gwylliondream
Genre: AU
Pairing: Alma/Ennis, Ennis/Jack
Rating: NC-17
Words: 60K in 16 chapters
Warnings: Major character death (not Ennis or Jack), child abuse, religious persecution, homophobia, under-aged non-consensual kissing and groping, indecent exposure, attempted rape, unreliable narrator.
Summary: Ennis and Jack thought they had seen the last of each other when they parted ways on a windy day in Signal. They were wrong. Some people thought Alma would have remarried after her divorce. They were wrong, too.
A/N: Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue was written for NaNoWriMo 2012.
“Calling Me Back to the Hills” was written by Earl Shaffer, poet and friend.
Thanks: My deepest thanks to morrobay1990 for answering my veiled pleas for a beta over on DCF. She provided incomparable support during the 30 days of NaNoWriMo, from brainstorming, to cheerleading, to prodding, and to writing a passion-filled scene in her own inimitable style, which I happily included. Thanks to my wonderful DCF co-mod lawgoddess for audiencing this fic and giving it a thorough beta job. Thanks to soulan both for traveling to Salida to research the terrain at the foothills of the Rockies and for vehemently disagreeing with me years ago when I insisted that Alma Beers-Del Mar would never have remarried after her divorce from Ennis. If not for that spirited argument, this fic never could have been.
Dedication: Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue is dedicated to Andy, for whom the hills called.
Disclaimer: I did not create these characters. No disrespect intended. No profit desired, only muses.
Comments: Comments are welcome anytime, thanks so much for reading.
And submit to the mystic yet relevant call whose lure is to seek and to find
Ennis paused in his ascent of the second ridge, thinking he heard a plane flying in the distance. It sounded like it was heading south, but he couldn’t make it out against the bright morning sunshine that had flooded the mountain above treeline. He figured Jeff had put his search party in the air before he would let anyone hit the ground, especially after depleting his men’s energy and RMSAR’s resources the day before.
Catching his breath on the uphill climb, Ennis unclipped the radio from his belt and turned it on. He waited while it searched for an active channel that he might use to communicate with the crew at Twin Lakes. The damn thing didn’t have a wide enough range to reach Salida, otherwise he might have known that Jack Twist was the new hotshot chopper pilot that had been hired to work for Wayne.
If he had known... if only he had known that Jack was there, things might have been different. He had spent the past four years believing Jack was dead, never wondering what might have happened had he seen him again. No, John Twist had taken away that opportunity, Ennis’s only chance to dream about a life that could have been if he had been brave enough to reach for it. He hadn’t thought about it since that fateful day when he learned that Jack had been killed. But now the reality of the situation came crashing down upon him.
Why hadn’t Jack looked for him?
There was only one possible answer.
Alma.
Jack wouldn’t have wanted to interfere, knowing Ennis’s plans to marry Alma. Jack had no way of predicting what would come to pass after the ceremony was over, the tremendous fuck-up that messed up everyone’s lives from there on out. Ennis wondered if maybe the same thing had happened to Jack. He supposed he’d get a chance to ask him about it someday, if he could get his sorry ass up this mountain and find the bastard somewhere in the snow.
“Jaaaaaack!” he called into the wind.
Ennis’s voice was growing hoarse, but the break in his stride as he ascended the ridge gave him a second wind so he could call out for Jack, just in case Jack could hear him.
At the time, he thought taking up with Alma was the right thing to do. She was so pretty and soft and kind that Ennis was swept off his feet just as much as she was. He wanted to do the right thing, the honorable thing. His own folks never talked much about how they met or got married. They never did much of anything, except work on the ranch all day and half the night. They were dead and gone before Ennis could have thought to ask them what it was like, to fall in love, to want to spend the rest of your life with someone.
He figured it was more like a rite of passage, like learning how to jerk off, how to shave, or how to drive a truck. Getting married? That was the sissy stuff that girls all wanted to do, so when he found the first girl who wanted to marry him, he took his chances and popped the question.
He never gave it much thought, beyond that.
How could he have known that it would have gotten so fucked up from there?
How could he have known when he took a job with Farm and Ranch Employment, that all his feelings about life and love and sex would have gotten so mixed up?
He blamed it on the blue-eyed rodeo fool who took every chance he got to peel away Ennis’s tough exterior. Things were good for them on the mountain. Too good.
Ennis never understood how his transformation began, how a quick drunken fuck in a cold tent turned into something that changed his life. When he thought back to their time on the mountain, he figured it all started the night he sat all alone by the fire. The knotted wood of the gnarled log pressed uncomfortably into the back of his thighs. No matter how he shifted in his seat, the dull ache of loneliness seeped up his body and into his heart. It was what he was used to every day of his life. This was no different than any day on a ranch, trying to make ends meet, worried about having spending money for beer or a second-hand shotgun. Only, it was different this time... Jack made it different.
With his hat pulled down tight, he clenched his jaw like he had done the whole time he had been on the mountain. He clamped down on his words to keep them from escaping into the night air. The fire crackled, the last of the dampness hissing out of the green wood Jack had chopped early in the morning.
Jack.
Ennis’s head stayed low, amber eyes watching the glow of the diminishing flames. He wished Jack could forget about what happened the night before.
At only nineteen years of age, Ennis had been worn down by life, but the loneliness was something that he had accepted for so long that it required none of his attention. He couldn’t wait until he got off this mountain and back to Alma. He hadn’t realized how lonely his life was until Jack came into the picture. It was as if the promise of something he couldn’t have made him crave it all the more.
Ennis watched Jack take the pot of boiling water from the fire. It was his turn to clean their mess after a silent dinner. He scraped the pots with the rusty spatula that they’d used to flip their eggs in the morning. Ennis remembered his Mama doing the same thing when they’d lived in a two-bedroom cabin in Sage with no indoor plumbing. She’d rinse the dishes and dry them with a ratty green dishtowel or she’d set them on the wooden rack for the water to drip from their chipped edges. He wondered how she’d decided the proper technique for drying each object or dish. He would have asked her how, if he could. But since his Pa missed the only curve in the road, orphaning him and his older brother and sister on a rainy night, he never got the chance. So many things he would have asked them both now, had they been here to listen.
Ennis’s callused hands encircled the dented tin coffee cup. His nicked fingers hung on for dear life as a shot of whiskey loosened his tongue. His brother and sister did right by him, he was able to say with the liquor unfurling in his belly. The smoothness crept up his throat to set his words free. Both siblings had gone off and gotten married, started families of their own, abandoning Ennis. K.E with his wife Laurie, and Ellen with Chet-there was no room in their lives for a third-wheel younger brother. It was time for him to support himself, to stand on his own two feet. Besides, Ennis didn’t want to be a bother to either of them.
On the mountain, he had no cares or worries. As he and Jack sat by the fire at the campsite on Brokeback, Ennis had no responsibilities except to ride up to the pasture to bed down the sheep. Once their nightly camp tasks were completed, he could stretch out on the bedroll next to Jack for forty winks, dozing under the waning moon.
He’d watched Jack move, gracefully pulling the rope hand over hand, raising their food bag to keep the vermin out of their stores. Jack had tied the knot and caught Ennis’s eyes from across the firelight. Ennis had hidden his smile behind thin lips pressed tight for so long that he almost forgot how to curl them into a grin.
Ennis always wondered if other young men felt the same way he did, like running away and hiding when they discovered what they really desired.
Jack had shoved his leather work gloves into his back pocket, and stepped across the campsite toward him.
Ennis reminded himself that Jack was spared the lesson taught in blood and violence by Ennis’s father. No, Jack’s easy ways made Ennis decide that not all other boys shared Ennis’s fears. Other boys weren’t forced to condemn themselves because of a parent who brought them to see the effects of their immoral thoughts on what was once living flesh. Other parents might have done worse.
Jack slumped down onto the log, squeezing between Ennis and a rough spot. Ennis wondered if Jack had his share of trouble back home or in school. He thought maybe he did, even if his father hadn’t instilled in him the fear of the tire iron and the threat of a redneck lynching. Jack must have known the same misery of being different, knowing he wasn’t like the other boys. He must have known the same daily struggles that Ennis faced. Keep your head down. Become a sophomore. Stay out of trouble. Get through this year and the next and the next. Get married, raise some kids. Don’t let no one find out about you.
At the edge of the clearing, their tent was pitched for the night. The warmth rose off Jack’s skin. He’d drop his head to Ennis’s shoulder, telling him wordlessly that things didn’t have to be the way Ennis’s Pa taught him. No matter that Ennis had known no other way, with no place for him except the darkness of being alone, one eye open watching to see from which direction the next blow would come.
With Jack there, Ennis dared to wade through the brambles of longing, pushing aside their prickly barbs to stand free of their stabs at his skin and their tugs at his clothing. With Jack, there was someone to understand Ennis, someone to tell him it was all right to stop pretending he was something he wasn’t. It was okay to stop the fear. It was okay to have the need, and the hope.
Jack had let out a long breath. With his hands on his knees he pushed himself off the log and stood by the fire.
“Ennis?” Jack asked, taking one of Ennis’s work-rough hands in his own.
Ennis let Jack pull him into the canvas tent. He let him flick open the buttons of his shirt one by one before he collapsed to the dirt floor, his head cradled in Jack’s arms.
Ennis sighed, belonging for a moment in the place where he could finally breathe for the first time in ten years, where he could exhale slack-jawed and relaxed in the middle of nowhere, where no one could judge him. He could finally be as his maker made him.
The relief felt undeserved, but it overwhelmed him anyway. Ennis knew it could be stripped away by the sound of a stranger’s voice, by a plane overhead, or the barking of a tame ranch dog, but he thrived on it, wallowed in it, lived it for the first time, unencumbered by the weight of what society would think… until the day the snows came. Snow like the interminable snow beneath Ennis’s feet right now. It ruined his plans back in ’63, and it ruined his plans today when he wanted nothing more than to catch that man again and ask him why it had to be this way? Why had it turned out the way it did with Alma? Why couldn’t it be different for them? Could it be different for them now? He needed answers, and the only man who could give them to him was somewhere in the wilderness.
“Jaaaack!”
Ennis’s footsteps were slow now. He could barely catch his breath if he stopped to rest between every few steps. The thin air and the exertion, fueled only by a half Thermos of coffee wasn’t enough to push him through. Just a few more steps and he’d be to the top of the ridge with the world laid out below him, an eagle’s view of the land where Jack was somehow found and then lost again.
Ennis topped out on the ridge and fell onto his ass, his chest heaving for an unhindered breath. He didn’t know how long he would sit in the snow, waiting for his heartbeat to return to normal.
~~~
“Are we ready to do this?” Jack asked as Brian stood in the opening they had made to the outside of the ruined chopper. It hurt to breathe, but sitting in the stagnant air of the cockpit was maddening. He felt like he had eaten enough ice chips that he shouldn’t be dehydrated, even though his piss was the color of a ripe lemon when he took a leak in the snow.
“Maybe we should piss an S.O.S. out on the slope,” Brian said with a chuckle.
“Maybe I ought to check your head again, make sure you’re not concussed,” Jack said.
It was hard to try to crack a joke when his chest was on fire, but Jack made the best of it.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Brian said, running his hands through his curly hair.
“Checking your head?” Jack asked.
“No,” Brian said, agitated. “Writing a message in the snow. A big S.O.S. for when the rescuers come. We can make an arrow pointing downhill, so they’ll know which way we went.”
Jack would have laughed, if he could. Brian’s idea was a good one, but they had nothing to mark out the slope with. It would have been different if they had some spray paint or charcoal with them to use as a marker, but no, they couldn’t find a damn thing in the cockpit that they could use to help get themselves off the mountain. They’d have to head downhill and hope for the best.
Outside the cockpit, Jack gazed at the bottom of the avalanche runout where the chopper lay in a heap of wreckage. He looked through the pine trees that surrounded them. There was a chance that a plane or another chopper wouldn’t even be able to see the debris from the sky, let alone follow his and Brian’s footprints as they descended the mountain.
The avalanche had carried them to the floor of a ravine. It was doubtful that a spotter in an aircraft would be able to tell that they slid down into the ravine with an avalanche on their heels after they had crashed. There would be such little hope that there would be survivors, he doubted they’d deploy a ground crew until all the snow melted. They’d be lucky to be found by the end of August.
“Okay, we can make an arrow,” Jack said, catching his breath.
They had already cannibalized all they could from the hypothermia-wrap that had protected Davis’s body. They donned the clothing, without paying any attention to which layer belonged next to their skin and which should be worn as a protection over their dry clothes in case rain should fall during their hike out.
Jack leaned against the chopper’s remains while Brian stamped out an arrow pointing downhill.
He watched Brian stand back to admire his work, his useless arm in a make-shift sling, his head still leaking an occasional trickle of blood that stained the snow crimson.
“Ready?” Jack asked.
“Ready,” Brian said.
They left the chopper behind, and began to trudge down the snowy slope. In five miles or more, they might reach the highway. If they were lucky, they’d be intercepted by a search and rescue team first.
“Stay with me,” Jack said. “We can take turns breaking trail.”
Jack picked his way through the frozen mess that littered the area downhill from the wreckage. Boulder-sized chunks of snow had firmed up in the night and made a formidable obstacle course. They soon reached the end of the runout, where the snowy surface turned smooth again, unaffected by the avalanche’s path.
Although his ribs ached, Jack plunged through the thigh-deep snow heading south, downhill. Each step he took had him wishing that he had snowshoes to ease his way across the drifted snow that had gathered in the ravine. His lungs ached for lack of oxygen. He had only been in Colorado for a couple weeks and hadn’t fully acclimatized to the change in elevation or the terrain. The snow-covered slopes were about as far as you could get from the jungles of Vietnam.
He doubted they’d make enough progress to reach the road, even if they traveled downhill all day. The snow was so deep in the sheltered ravine that not much of it had yet begun to melt in the spring weather. Winter clung to the Rocky peaks and valleys for much longer than it did the prairie and plains below.
With every fourth step, Jack paused to catch his breath and make sure that Brian was right behind him. He knew he could only keep up this trailbreaking for fifteen minutes or so, at most, before he’d need to let Brian take a turn at breaking through the snowy barrier. At least they were heading downhill.
“Jack,” Brian shouted, “do you hear that?”
“What?” Jack asked, turning to check on Brian’s progress.
Both men remained silent for ten seconds or more. Jack heard nothing.
“I could have sworn I heard a plane,” Brian said.
Jack shook his head as he watched Brian hugging his broken arm to his chest. He supposed that it wasn’t uncommon for Brian to have imagined that he heard the sound of a plane’s engine. When a soldier was as lost and as desperate as Brian and Jack were now, his mind could play tricks on him, presenting an image of what he wanted most, right in front of him.
Jack was wary about believing his own ears, distrusting them when he thought he heard a recon plane flying overhead. It seemed just as ludicrous as thinking he saw a search party trudging up the ravine to meet them, or Ennis Del Mar riding down the hill on Cigar Butt with saddlebags bursting with food.
Some things were too good to be true.
~~~
While Alma waited for Laurie to return from dropping Lisa off at school, she climbed the stairs and helped herself to a cup of coffee in the kitchen. Laurie had made the coffee in a real percolating coffee pot-there was none of that instant coffee shit like her parents used at their house. In fact, K.E. and Laurie’s house had some appliances and gadgets that made it surge miles ahead of the Beers’ household when it came to luxury.
K.E. must have taken after some distant Del Mar relative who was both ambitious and hardworking. Ennis was more hardworking than ambitious. He seemed to truly care about the responsibilities of his role as a new husband, but when it came to fulfilling those responsibilities, he fell short.
He seemed to have had so much promise when they first met.
Alma couldn’t believe it when Ennis asked her to go to the movies.
She hadn’t been on a date since the time Colin Woods nearly raped her in the front seat of his Cadillac.
She wished she could forget about Colin. Standing at Laurie’s kitchen counter, she said a Hail Mary to remind herself that she had the Holy Mother to protect her. It was hard for Alma to remember that night. She crossed herself and went to the living room to look out the window to see if Laurie was walking up the street with Linda, hoping their return would interrupt her bad memories. Unfortunately, the street was empty.
Alma had just finished her junior year of high school, the same school year that had begun with Dan Donovan’s attempt to kiss her. She was excited about her senior year. It had seemed like such a long wait until she got to be a senior, but those days were finally here, and with them came many privileges. There was a dance scheduled in June to coincide with graduation and to celebrate the juniors moving up. Alma didn’t think she stood a chance for a boy from her class to ask her to the dance. She sullenly resigned herself to spending the night alone.
Her mother had been right, after all. Margaret Quinn had found a new boy to date, confirming Alma’s suspicion that she would never be as popular or as desired as the girl who could sing like an angel and get all the boys to knock on her door, while none knocked on Alma’s. So imagine Alma’s surprise when Janet offered to set her up with a boy she knew from Hiland-Colin Woods.
Alma was hesitant to go to the dance with a boy who she had never met. And to be honest, she was more than a little wary about Janet as a matchmaker. Janet seemed to know so much more about the workings of the world than Alma did. It was daunting for Alma to try to keep up.
In the end, she gave Janet’s friend a chance.
Alma saw Colin for the first time when he came to pick her up for the dance. He was tall and lanky with a head of black hair that had been slicked back with Brylcreem. He looked much older than any high school boy she had ever seen, with fine crinkles framing his eyes and a trace of stubble on his chin.
Alma’s parents, especially her mother, were thrilled at the prospect of a date for their daughter. Alma could tell by the way Ann admired Colin’s Cadillac in the driveway of their Riverton home that her reaction was more about the car than the boy himself. The late model Cadillac was a sign of prestige that the Beers family didn’t often encounter. Alma was certain that her father asked Colin how he had acquired the vehicle, something Alma didn’t dare to ask about, although she had secretly wondered.
After a time, Colin must have satisfactorily answered all of George’s questions about his intentions, because the next thing Alma knew, she was being whisked off to the Riverton Country Club for the Junior Frolic. She had been assured that they were going to pick up Janet and her date along the way.
But Alma never made it to the dance.
Colin took her to the parking lot of the Wind River Mercantile, where they met up with Janet and her date, Robert Tinkham. Robert had driven his own car and had picked Janet up. She had undoubtedly arranged the meeting ahead of time with Colin. Alma should have known better. Janet didn’t want to go to a silly old dance. She had probably never planned to go to it in the first place.
Colin leaned out the car window and spoke to Robert, trying to figure out where to get some food and find a place to go afterwards, but Alma couldn’t hear many of the details. She simply sat in the passenger’s seat and fidgeted with the strap on her purse while the boys discussed where they were going to go.
Alma was fuming mad at Janet for arranging such a thing. Before she had a chance to voice her displeasure, Colin peeled out of the parking lot, following Robert’s car down Main Street.
Alma was too scared to ask Colin where they were going. Besides, a boy was supposed to be in charge of their activities when he asked a girl on a date. It would be impolite of Alma to think poorly of Colin just because he had a change of heart about going to the dance. Alma had been taught to be demure and poised if she wanted to have any chance of getting a boy to knock on her door. So far, it had worked. She was a perfect lady in every way, and Colin came along. She should have known it was too good to be true, but the fear of disappointing her mother was too great for her to think clearly.
If Colin wanted to take her somewhere, she would go along with it. She took a deep breath and watched the farmers’ fields go by as they sped down the highway. Her mother would have been proud of how ladylike she was behaving, even though she was a little afraid of where Colin was taking her. She tried to breathe slower, remembering that Janet and Robert were part of this plan too. Janet wouldn’t let anything dangerous happen to Alma.
It didn’t cross Alma’s mind that her definition and Janet’s definition of dangerous might be two entirely different things.
They pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald’s. Alma wasn’t sure exactly where they were, but it was somewhere outside of Riverton. Thermopolis, maybe. They had driven for nearly an hour.
Colin got out of the car, and without bothering to go to Alma’s door to open it for her, he asked, “Are you coming in?”
Alma was shocked by his ungentlemanly behavior, but since he was her date, she had no choice but to tolerate it. She tugged at the handle of the car door and accompanied him inside the restaurant, with Janet and Robert following close behind.
While the boys waited in line to order food, Alma got Janet’s attention and all but dragged her into the ladies’ room. Janet laughed the whole way there, her high-heels skittering across the ceramic tile floor.
“Janet!” Alma gritted out through clenched teeth. “What are we doing here?”
Janet’s eyes looked glassy bright. She twirled Alma around, stumbling over her own feet.
“Colin is so adorable,” Janet said. “You two make such a cute couple.”
Alma cringed.
“What’s wrong with you? I thought we were going to the dance?” Alma asked. She checked her pale lipstick in the mirror above the sink while Janet peed.
Colin was cute, but whether she was willing to be coupled up with him was an entirely different matter.
“Oh, come on, Alma,” Janet said. “We’re just having a little fun before the dance. The guys are still going with us.”
“I’m not so sure,” Alma said. She watched Janet warily for a moment before she ducked into a stall to pee.
She heard the door slam and when she came out to wash her hands, Janet was gone. Alma hurried out of the restaurant to see Robert and Colin sitting on the bumper of Colin’s car while they each ate a Big Mac.
“Here, I got you some fries,” Colin said, handing the greasy little bag of French fries to Alma.
“Thanks,” Alma said, unsure of whether she really should be thanking Colin for taking her so far from home without her parents’ knowledge.
She supposed it was okay. Her parents seemed awfully fond of Colin, although they had only spent about fifteen minutes with him.
“Can we go to the dance now?” Alma asked sheepishly, as she popped a French fry into her mouth.
“Sure,” Colin said, crumpling the Styrofoam package from his sandwich. As he walked to the front of his car to toss it into the trash bin, he nudged Robert on the arm.
At least he had the decency to open the car door for Alma this time. She slid onto the passenger’s side seat and waited for Colin to start the car. It must have been nearly eight o’clock. If she were lucky, she’d get to spend an hour at the dance before having to return home for her ten o’clock curfew.
She watched as Robert and Janet pulled out of their parking space and drove away.
Colin fidgeted with the cover to the steering wheel.
“So, Alma,” he said. “What do you want to do now?”
Alma snorted a stream of breath out through her nose. It was the most ridiculous question ever.
“Well, go to the dance, of course,” she said, glancing at him sideways.
“What if I can think of something better to do?” Colin asked, his voice deep and sultry.
As soon as the words left his lips, he reached across the seat and squeezed Alma’s thigh.
Alma tried to get away. She pressed her back against the vinyl of the car seat and kicked with her legs against the floorboards until she was wedged into the corner between the seat and the car door, the metal handle digging into her arm.
“What’s the matter, Alma?” Colin asked, pulling away. “I thought you liked me.”
Alma could scarcely breathe. She panted heavily, her nostrils flaring.
Colin leaned forward and cupped his palm to Alma’s breast.
Alma’s body went completely stiff and she couldn’t take another breath.
“Jeez, Alma, you act like no one has ever touched you before,” Colin whispered.
She didn’t know what to do next. Colin had passed all the tests that Alma’s father had for him, and her mother had become so fond of him in the short time that she had known him. She had to question why this was happening. Maybe Colin was the one? Maybe it was her destiny to marry Colin Woods?
He groped her breast even more forcefully. She wanted to slap his hand away, to run screaming from his fancy car. But she was conflicted. Touching her breast was something that only a married person would be permitted. If Colin wanted to touch her breast, did it not mean that he wanted to commit to a lifelong relationship with Alma? Wasn’t touching her breast as good a sign as any for expressing his desire to marry her?
What else could she possibly think?
Alma screamed when the policeman rapped on the window with his nightstick, the bright beam of his flashlight illuminating the interior of the front seat.
“Roll down the window,” the policeman barked out.
Alma nervously complied, her hand shaking as she fought to turn the crank.
“Is everything all right in here?” the policeman asked as he shined his flashlight in Colin’s face.
Alma was horrified to see the hazy look of lust on his face, the instant before his pupils dilated in the flashlight’s beam.
“Sure, officer,” Colin said. “Everything is fine. I was just looking for something in the glove box.”
Alma nodded to the policeman, noticing the layer of condensation that had steamed the interior of the windows.
“You’d best be on your way,” the policeman said.
Colin never said another word. He drove back to Riverton like the devil was on his tail, dropped Alma off at her house, and took off into the night.
Alma later learned that Colin was twenty-one years old. She never forgave Janet for fixing her up with a boy that was so much older than the boys from her high school. More than a year would pass before she met Ennis Del Mar.
Just then, in the K.E. Del Mar’s kitchen, Alma caught a glimpse of Laurie pushing Linda in her stroller as they turned the corner onto their street. She finished the last of her coffee and put the cup into the dishwasher.
Near the end of her senior year in high school, Alma had gotten a part-time job at the Riverton Drug Store, working the soda fountain and making root beer floats two days each week after school. That was where she met Laurie Hobbs, her co-worker who was soon to be married to K.E. Del Mar.
Laurie was friendly to Alma in the way that suggested they had been the best of friends for much longer than the short months that they had known each other. At the soda fountain, Laurie often talked about setting Alma up with her boyfriend’s brother, Ennis. The boys, along with their older sister, Ellen, had been orphaned a few years earlier when their parents died in a car accident. Fortunately, the Del Mar children were in their teens and able to care for themselves.
Eventually, Ennis began to make deliveries to the Riverton Drug Store from Richardson’s Dairy Farm where he worked as a hand. He ran errands and delivered milk and cream in the old box truck that old man Richardson kept around just for that purpose. Alma always suspected that Laurie had pulled some strings to arrange a meeting between Alma and Ennis.
While Alma supposed that Ennis lived in a bunkhouse with the other roughneck hands who worked on the dairy farm, he was much quieter than the other boys she knew.
Alma was older now and she knew the difference between a respectable boy and a boy who only had one thing on his mind. With his tattered jeans and his quiet manner, Ennis was different. Alma took a shine to him right away.
Ennis Del Mar was nothing at all like Colin Woods.
That’s why when he asked Alma to go to the movies with him right before her graduation, Alma jumped at the chance.
~~~
Author: gwylliondream
Genre: AU
Pairing: Alma/Ennis, Ennis/Jack
Rating: NC-17
Words: 60K in 16 chapters
Warnings: Major character death (not Ennis or Jack), child abuse, religious persecution, homophobia, under-aged non-consensual kissing and groping, indecent exposure, attempted rape, unreliable narrator.
Summary: Ennis and Jack thought they had seen the last of each other when they parted ways on a windy day in Signal. They were wrong. Some people thought Alma would have remarried after her divorce. They were wrong, too.
A/N: Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue was written for NaNoWriMo 2012.
“Calling Me Back to the Hills” was written by Earl Shaffer, poet and friend.
Thanks: My deepest thanks to morrobay1990 for answering my veiled pleas for a beta over on DCF. She provided incomparable support during the 30 days of NaNoWriMo, from brainstorming, to cheerleading, to prodding, and to writing a passion-filled scene in her own inimitable style, which I happily included. Thanks to my wonderful DCF co-mod lawgoddess for audiencing this fic and giving it a thorough beta job. Thanks to soulan both for traveling to Salida to research the terrain at the foothills of the Rockies and for vehemently disagreeing with me years ago when I insisted that Alma Beers-Del Mar would never have remarried after her divorce from Ennis. If not for that spirited argument, this fic never could have been.
Dedication: Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue is dedicated to Andy, for whom the hills called.
Disclaimer: I did not create these characters. No disrespect intended. No profit desired, only muses.
Comments: Comments are welcome anytime, thanks so much for reading.
And submit to the mystic yet relevant call whose lure is to seek and to find
Ennis paused in his ascent of the second ridge, thinking he heard a plane flying in the distance. It sounded like it was heading south, but he couldn’t make it out against the bright morning sunshine that had flooded the mountain above treeline. He figured Jeff had put his search party in the air before he would let anyone hit the ground, especially after depleting his men’s energy and RMSAR’s resources the day before.
Catching his breath on the uphill climb, Ennis unclipped the radio from his belt and turned it on. He waited while it searched for an active channel that he might use to communicate with the crew at Twin Lakes. The damn thing didn’t have a wide enough range to reach Salida, otherwise he might have known that Jack Twist was the new hotshot chopper pilot that had been hired to work for Wayne.
If he had known... if only he had known that Jack was there, things might have been different. He had spent the past four years believing Jack was dead, never wondering what might have happened had he seen him again. No, John Twist had taken away that opportunity, Ennis’s only chance to dream about a life that could have been if he had been brave enough to reach for it. He hadn’t thought about it since that fateful day when he learned that Jack had been killed. But now the reality of the situation came crashing down upon him.
Why hadn’t Jack looked for him?
There was only one possible answer.
Alma.
Jack wouldn’t have wanted to interfere, knowing Ennis’s plans to marry Alma. Jack had no way of predicting what would come to pass after the ceremony was over, the tremendous fuck-up that messed up everyone’s lives from there on out. Ennis wondered if maybe the same thing had happened to Jack. He supposed he’d get a chance to ask him about it someday, if he could get his sorry ass up this mountain and find the bastard somewhere in the snow.
“Jaaaaaack!” he called into the wind.
Ennis’s voice was growing hoarse, but the break in his stride as he ascended the ridge gave him a second wind so he could call out for Jack, just in case Jack could hear him.
At the time, he thought taking up with Alma was the right thing to do. She was so pretty and soft and kind that Ennis was swept off his feet just as much as she was. He wanted to do the right thing, the honorable thing. His own folks never talked much about how they met or got married. They never did much of anything, except work on the ranch all day and half the night. They were dead and gone before Ennis could have thought to ask them what it was like, to fall in love, to want to spend the rest of your life with someone.
He figured it was more like a rite of passage, like learning how to jerk off, how to shave, or how to drive a truck. Getting married? That was the sissy stuff that girls all wanted to do, so when he found the first girl who wanted to marry him, he took his chances and popped the question.
He never gave it much thought, beyond that.
How could he have known that it would have gotten so fucked up from there?
How could he have known when he took a job with Farm and Ranch Employment, that all his feelings about life and love and sex would have gotten so mixed up?
He blamed it on the blue-eyed rodeo fool who took every chance he got to peel away Ennis’s tough exterior. Things were good for them on the mountain. Too good.
Ennis never understood how his transformation began, how a quick drunken fuck in a cold tent turned into something that changed his life. When he thought back to their time on the mountain, he figured it all started the night he sat all alone by the fire. The knotted wood of the gnarled log pressed uncomfortably into the back of his thighs. No matter how he shifted in his seat, the dull ache of loneliness seeped up his body and into his heart. It was what he was used to every day of his life. This was no different than any day on a ranch, trying to make ends meet, worried about having spending money for beer or a second-hand shotgun. Only, it was different this time... Jack made it different.
With his hat pulled down tight, he clenched his jaw like he had done the whole time he had been on the mountain. He clamped down on his words to keep them from escaping into the night air. The fire crackled, the last of the dampness hissing out of the green wood Jack had chopped early in the morning.
Jack.
Ennis’s head stayed low, amber eyes watching the glow of the diminishing flames. He wished Jack could forget about what happened the night before.
At only nineteen years of age, Ennis had been worn down by life, but the loneliness was something that he had accepted for so long that it required none of his attention. He couldn’t wait until he got off this mountain and back to Alma. He hadn’t realized how lonely his life was until Jack came into the picture. It was as if the promise of something he couldn’t have made him crave it all the more.
Ennis watched Jack take the pot of boiling water from the fire. It was his turn to clean their mess after a silent dinner. He scraped the pots with the rusty spatula that they’d used to flip their eggs in the morning. Ennis remembered his Mama doing the same thing when they’d lived in a two-bedroom cabin in Sage with no indoor plumbing. She’d rinse the dishes and dry them with a ratty green dishtowel or she’d set them on the wooden rack for the water to drip from their chipped edges. He wondered how she’d decided the proper technique for drying each object or dish. He would have asked her how, if he could. But since his Pa missed the only curve in the road, orphaning him and his older brother and sister on a rainy night, he never got the chance. So many things he would have asked them both now, had they been here to listen.
Ennis’s callused hands encircled the dented tin coffee cup. His nicked fingers hung on for dear life as a shot of whiskey loosened his tongue. His brother and sister did right by him, he was able to say with the liquor unfurling in his belly. The smoothness crept up his throat to set his words free. Both siblings had gone off and gotten married, started families of their own, abandoning Ennis. K.E with his wife Laurie, and Ellen with Chet-there was no room in their lives for a third-wheel younger brother. It was time for him to support himself, to stand on his own two feet. Besides, Ennis didn’t want to be a bother to either of them.
On the mountain, he had no cares or worries. As he and Jack sat by the fire at the campsite on Brokeback, Ennis had no responsibilities except to ride up to the pasture to bed down the sheep. Once their nightly camp tasks were completed, he could stretch out on the bedroll next to Jack for forty winks, dozing under the waning moon.
He’d watched Jack move, gracefully pulling the rope hand over hand, raising their food bag to keep the vermin out of their stores. Jack had tied the knot and caught Ennis’s eyes from across the firelight. Ennis had hidden his smile behind thin lips pressed tight for so long that he almost forgot how to curl them into a grin.
Ennis always wondered if other young men felt the same way he did, like running away and hiding when they discovered what they really desired.
Jack had shoved his leather work gloves into his back pocket, and stepped across the campsite toward him.
Ennis reminded himself that Jack was spared the lesson taught in blood and violence by Ennis’s father. No, Jack’s easy ways made Ennis decide that not all other boys shared Ennis’s fears. Other boys weren’t forced to condemn themselves because of a parent who brought them to see the effects of their immoral thoughts on what was once living flesh. Other parents might have done worse.
Jack slumped down onto the log, squeezing between Ennis and a rough spot. Ennis wondered if Jack had his share of trouble back home or in school. He thought maybe he did, even if his father hadn’t instilled in him the fear of the tire iron and the threat of a redneck lynching. Jack must have known the same misery of being different, knowing he wasn’t like the other boys. He must have known the same daily struggles that Ennis faced. Keep your head down. Become a sophomore. Stay out of trouble. Get through this year and the next and the next. Get married, raise some kids. Don’t let no one find out about you.
At the edge of the clearing, their tent was pitched for the night. The warmth rose off Jack’s skin. He’d drop his head to Ennis’s shoulder, telling him wordlessly that things didn’t have to be the way Ennis’s Pa taught him. No matter that Ennis had known no other way, with no place for him except the darkness of being alone, one eye open watching to see from which direction the next blow would come.
With Jack there, Ennis dared to wade through the brambles of longing, pushing aside their prickly barbs to stand free of their stabs at his skin and their tugs at his clothing. With Jack, there was someone to understand Ennis, someone to tell him it was all right to stop pretending he was something he wasn’t. It was okay to stop the fear. It was okay to have the need, and the hope.
Jack had let out a long breath. With his hands on his knees he pushed himself off the log and stood by the fire.
“Ennis?” Jack asked, taking one of Ennis’s work-rough hands in his own.
Ennis let Jack pull him into the canvas tent. He let him flick open the buttons of his shirt one by one before he collapsed to the dirt floor, his head cradled in Jack’s arms.
Ennis sighed, belonging for a moment in the place where he could finally breathe for the first time in ten years, where he could exhale slack-jawed and relaxed in the middle of nowhere, where no one could judge him. He could finally be as his maker made him.
The relief felt undeserved, but it overwhelmed him anyway. Ennis knew it could be stripped away by the sound of a stranger’s voice, by a plane overhead, or the barking of a tame ranch dog, but he thrived on it, wallowed in it, lived it for the first time, unencumbered by the weight of what society would think… until the day the snows came. Snow like the interminable snow beneath Ennis’s feet right now. It ruined his plans back in ’63, and it ruined his plans today when he wanted nothing more than to catch that man again and ask him why it had to be this way? Why had it turned out the way it did with Alma? Why couldn’t it be different for them? Could it be different for them now? He needed answers, and the only man who could give them to him was somewhere in the wilderness.
“Jaaaack!”
Ennis’s footsteps were slow now. He could barely catch his breath if he stopped to rest between every few steps. The thin air and the exertion, fueled only by a half Thermos of coffee wasn’t enough to push him through. Just a few more steps and he’d be to the top of the ridge with the world laid out below him, an eagle’s view of the land where Jack was somehow found and then lost again.
Ennis topped out on the ridge and fell onto his ass, his chest heaving for an unhindered breath. He didn’t know how long he would sit in the snow, waiting for his heartbeat to return to normal.
~~~
“Are we ready to do this?” Jack asked as Brian stood in the opening they had made to the outside of the ruined chopper. It hurt to breathe, but sitting in the stagnant air of the cockpit was maddening. He felt like he had eaten enough ice chips that he shouldn’t be dehydrated, even though his piss was the color of a ripe lemon when he took a leak in the snow.
“Maybe we should piss an S.O.S. out on the slope,” Brian said with a chuckle.
“Maybe I ought to check your head again, make sure you’re not concussed,” Jack said.
It was hard to try to crack a joke when his chest was on fire, but Jack made the best of it.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Brian said, running his hands through his curly hair.
“Checking your head?” Jack asked.
“No,” Brian said, agitated. “Writing a message in the snow. A big S.O.S. for when the rescuers come. We can make an arrow pointing downhill, so they’ll know which way we went.”
Jack would have laughed, if he could. Brian’s idea was a good one, but they had nothing to mark out the slope with. It would have been different if they had some spray paint or charcoal with them to use as a marker, but no, they couldn’t find a damn thing in the cockpit that they could use to help get themselves off the mountain. They’d have to head downhill and hope for the best.
Outside the cockpit, Jack gazed at the bottom of the avalanche runout where the chopper lay in a heap of wreckage. He looked through the pine trees that surrounded them. There was a chance that a plane or another chopper wouldn’t even be able to see the debris from the sky, let alone follow his and Brian’s footprints as they descended the mountain.
The avalanche had carried them to the floor of a ravine. It was doubtful that a spotter in an aircraft would be able to tell that they slid down into the ravine with an avalanche on their heels after they had crashed. There would be such little hope that there would be survivors, he doubted they’d deploy a ground crew until all the snow melted. They’d be lucky to be found by the end of August.
“Okay, we can make an arrow,” Jack said, catching his breath.
They had already cannibalized all they could from the hypothermia-wrap that had protected Davis’s body. They donned the clothing, without paying any attention to which layer belonged next to their skin and which should be worn as a protection over their dry clothes in case rain should fall during their hike out.
Jack leaned against the chopper’s remains while Brian stamped out an arrow pointing downhill.
He watched Brian stand back to admire his work, his useless arm in a make-shift sling, his head still leaking an occasional trickle of blood that stained the snow crimson.
“Ready?” Jack asked.
“Ready,” Brian said.
They left the chopper behind, and began to trudge down the snowy slope. In five miles or more, they might reach the highway. If they were lucky, they’d be intercepted by a search and rescue team first.
“Stay with me,” Jack said. “We can take turns breaking trail.”
Jack picked his way through the frozen mess that littered the area downhill from the wreckage. Boulder-sized chunks of snow had firmed up in the night and made a formidable obstacle course. They soon reached the end of the runout, where the snowy surface turned smooth again, unaffected by the avalanche’s path.
Although his ribs ached, Jack plunged through the thigh-deep snow heading south, downhill. Each step he took had him wishing that he had snowshoes to ease his way across the drifted snow that had gathered in the ravine. His lungs ached for lack of oxygen. He had only been in Colorado for a couple weeks and hadn’t fully acclimatized to the change in elevation or the terrain. The snow-covered slopes were about as far as you could get from the jungles of Vietnam.
He doubted they’d make enough progress to reach the road, even if they traveled downhill all day. The snow was so deep in the sheltered ravine that not much of it had yet begun to melt in the spring weather. Winter clung to the Rocky peaks and valleys for much longer than it did the prairie and plains below.
With every fourth step, Jack paused to catch his breath and make sure that Brian was right behind him. He knew he could only keep up this trailbreaking for fifteen minutes or so, at most, before he’d need to let Brian take a turn at breaking through the snowy barrier. At least they were heading downhill.
“Jack,” Brian shouted, “do you hear that?”
“What?” Jack asked, turning to check on Brian’s progress.
Both men remained silent for ten seconds or more. Jack heard nothing.
“I could have sworn I heard a plane,” Brian said.
Jack shook his head as he watched Brian hugging his broken arm to his chest. He supposed that it wasn’t uncommon for Brian to have imagined that he heard the sound of a plane’s engine. When a soldier was as lost and as desperate as Brian and Jack were now, his mind could play tricks on him, presenting an image of what he wanted most, right in front of him.
Jack was wary about believing his own ears, distrusting them when he thought he heard a recon plane flying overhead. It seemed just as ludicrous as thinking he saw a search party trudging up the ravine to meet them, or Ennis Del Mar riding down the hill on Cigar Butt with saddlebags bursting with food.
Some things were too good to be true.
~~~
While Alma waited for Laurie to return from dropping Lisa off at school, she climbed the stairs and helped herself to a cup of coffee in the kitchen. Laurie had made the coffee in a real percolating coffee pot-there was none of that instant coffee shit like her parents used at their house. In fact, K.E. and Laurie’s house had some appliances and gadgets that made it surge miles ahead of the Beers’ household when it came to luxury.
K.E. must have taken after some distant Del Mar relative who was both ambitious and hardworking. Ennis was more hardworking than ambitious. He seemed to truly care about the responsibilities of his role as a new husband, but when it came to fulfilling those responsibilities, he fell short.
He seemed to have had so much promise when they first met.
Alma couldn’t believe it when Ennis asked her to go to the movies.
She hadn’t been on a date since the time Colin Woods nearly raped her in the front seat of his Cadillac.
She wished she could forget about Colin. Standing at Laurie’s kitchen counter, she said a Hail Mary to remind herself that she had the Holy Mother to protect her. It was hard for Alma to remember that night. She crossed herself and went to the living room to look out the window to see if Laurie was walking up the street with Linda, hoping their return would interrupt her bad memories. Unfortunately, the street was empty.
Alma had just finished her junior year of high school, the same school year that had begun with Dan Donovan’s attempt to kiss her. She was excited about her senior year. It had seemed like such a long wait until she got to be a senior, but those days were finally here, and with them came many privileges. There was a dance scheduled in June to coincide with graduation and to celebrate the juniors moving up. Alma didn’t think she stood a chance for a boy from her class to ask her to the dance. She sullenly resigned herself to spending the night alone.
Her mother had been right, after all. Margaret Quinn had found a new boy to date, confirming Alma’s suspicion that she would never be as popular or as desired as the girl who could sing like an angel and get all the boys to knock on her door, while none knocked on Alma’s. So imagine Alma’s surprise when Janet offered to set her up with a boy she knew from Hiland-Colin Woods.
Alma was hesitant to go to the dance with a boy who she had never met. And to be honest, she was more than a little wary about Janet as a matchmaker. Janet seemed to know so much more about the workings of the world than Alma did. It was daunting for Alma to try to keep up.
In the end, she gave Janet’s friend a chance.
Alma saw Colin for the first time when he came to pick her up for the dance. He was tall and lanky with a head of black hair that had been slicked back with Brylcreem. He looked much older than any high school boy she had ever seen, with fine crinkles framing his eyes and a trace of stubble on his chin.
Alma’s parents, especially her mother, were thrilled at the prospect of a date for their daughter. Alma could tell by the way Ann admired Colin’s Cadillac in the driveway of their Riverton home that her reaction was more about the car than the boy himself. The late model Cadillac was a sign of prestige that the Beers family didn’t often encounter. Alma was certain that her father asked Colin how he had acquired the vehicle, something Alma didn’t dare to ask about, although she had secretly wondered.
After a time, Colin must have satisfactorily answered all of George’s questions about his intentions, because the next thing Alma knew, she was being whisked off to the Riverton Country Club for the Junior Frolic. She had been assured that they were going to pick up Janet and her date along the way.
But Alma never made it to the dance.
Colin took her to the parking lot of the Wind River Mercantile, where they met up with Janet and her date, Robert Tinkham. Robert had driven his own car and had picked Janet up. She had undoubtedly arranged the meeting ahead of time with Colin. Alma should have known better. Janet didn’t want to go to a silly old dance. She had probably never planned to go to it in the first place.
Colin leaned out the car window and spoke to Robert, trying to figure out where to get some food and find a place to go afterwards, but Alma couldn’t hear many of the details. She simply sat in the passenger’s seat and fidgeted with the strap on her purse while the boys discussed where they were going to go.
Alma was fuming mad at Janet for arranging such a thing. Before she had a chance to voice her displeasure, Colin peeled out of the parking lot, following Robert’s car down Main Street.
Alma was too scared to ask Colin where they were going. Besides, a boy was supposed to be in charge of their activities when he asked a girl on a date. It would be impolite of Alma to think poorly of Colin just because he had a change of heart about going to the dance. Alma had been taught to be demure and poised if she wanted to have any chance of getting a boy to knock on her door. So far, it had worked. She was a perfect lady in every way, and Colin came along. She should have known it was too good to be true, but the fear of disappointing her mother was too great for her to think clearly.
If Colin wanted to take her somewhere, she would go along with it. She took a deep breath and watched the farmers’ fields go by as they sped down the highway. Her mother would have been proud of how ladylike she was behaving, even though she was a little afraid of where Colin was taking her. She tried to breathe slower, remembering that Janet and Robert were part of this plan too. Janet wouldn’t let anything dangerous happen to Alma.
It didn’t cross Alma’s mind that her definition and Janet’s definition of dangerous might be two entirely different things.
They pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald’s. Alma wasn’t sure exactly where they were, but it was somewhere outside of Riverton. Thermopolis, maybe. They had driven for nearly an hour.
Colin got out of the car, and without bothering to go to Alma’s door to open it for her, he asked, “Are you coming in?”
Alma was shocked by his ungentlemanly behavior, but since he was her date, she had no choice but to tolerate it. She tugged at the handle of the car door and accompanied him inside the restaurant, with Janet and Robert following close behind.
While the boys waited in line to order food, Alma got Janet’s attention and all but dragged her into the ladies’ room. Janet laughed the whole way there, her high-heels skittering across the ceramic tile floor.
“Janet!” Alma gritted out through clenched teeth. “What are we doing here?”
Janet’s eyes looked glassy bright. She twirled Alma around, stumbling over her own feet.
“Colin is so adorable,” Janet said. “You two make such a cute couple.”
Alma cringed.
“What’s wrong with you? I thought we were going to the dance?” Alma asked. She checked her pale lipstick in the mirror above the sink while Janet peed.
Colin was cute, but whether she was willing to be coupled up with him was an entirely different matter.
“Oh, come on, Alma,” Janet said. “We’re just having a little fun before the dance. The guys are still going with us.”
“I’m not so sure,” Alma said. She watched Janet warily for a moment before she ducked into a stall to pee.
She heard the door slam and when she came out to wash her hands, Janet was gone. Alma hurried out of the restaurant to see Robert and Colin sitting on the bumper of Colin’s car while they each ate a Big Mac.
“Here, I got you some fries,” Colin said, handing the greasy little bag of French fries to Alma.
“Thanks,” Alma said, unsure of whether she really should be thanking Colin for taking her so far from home without her parents’ knowledge.
She supposed it was okay. Her parents seemed awfully fond of Colin, although they had only spent about fifteen minutes with him.
“Can we go to the dance now?” Alma asked sheepishly, as she popped a French fry into her mouth.
“Sure,” Colin said, crumpling the Styrofoam package from his sandwich. As he walked to the front of his car to toss it into the trash bin, he nudged Robert on the arm.
At least he had the decency to open the car door for Alma this time. She slid onto the passenger’s side seat and waited for Colin to start the car. It must have been nearly eight o’clock. If she were lucky, she’d get to spend an hour at the dance before having to return home for her ten o’clock curfew.
She watched as Robert and Janet pulled out of their parking space and drove away.
Colin fidgeted with the cover to the steering wheel.
“So, Alma,” he said. “What do you want to do now?”
Alma snorted a stream of breath out through her nose. It was the most ridiculous question ever.
“Well, go to the dance, of course,” she said, glancing at him sideways.
“What if I can think of something better to do?” Colin asked, his voice deep and sultry.
As soon as the words left his lips, he reached across the seat and squeezed Alma’s thigh.
Alma tried to get away. She pressed her back against the vinyl of the car seat and kicked with her legs against the floorboards until she was wedged into the corner between the seat and the car door, the metal handle digging into her arm.
“What’s the matter, Alma?” Colin asked, pulling away. “I thought you liked me.”
Alma could scarcely breathe. She panted heavily, her nostrils flaring.
Colin leaned forward and cupped his palm to Alma’s breast.
Alma’s body went completely stiff and she couldn’t take another breath.
“Jeez, Alma, you act like no one has ever touched you before,” Colin whispered.
She didn’t know what to do next. Colin had passed all the tests that Alma’s father had for him, and her mother had become so fond of him in the short time that she had known him. She had to question why this was happening. Maybe Colin was the one? Maybe it was her destiny to marry Colin Woods?
He groped her breast even more forcefully. She wanted to slap his hand away, to run screaming from his fancy car. But she was conflicted. Touching her breast was something that only a married person would be permitted. If Colin wanted to touch her breast, did it not mean that he wanted to commit to a lifelong relationship with Alma? Wasn’t touching her breast as good a sign as any for expressing his desire to marry her?
What else could she possibly think?
Alma screamed when the policeman rapped on the window with his nightstick, the bright beam of his flashlight illuminating the interior of the front seat.
“Roll down the window,” the policeman barked out.
Alma nervously complied, her hand shaking as she fought to turn the crank.
“Is everything all right in here?” the policeman asked as he shined his flashlight in Colin’s face.
Alma was horrified to see the hazy look of lust on his face, the instant before his pupils dilated in the flashlight’s beam.
“Sure, officer,” Colin said. “Everything is fine. I was just looking for something in the glove box.”
Alma nodded to the policeman, noticing the layer of condensation that had steamed the interior of the windows.
“You’d best be on your way,” the policeman said.
Colin never said another word. He drove back to Riverton like the devil was on his tail, dropped Alma off at her house, and took off into the night.
Alma later learned that Colin was twenty-one years old. She never forgave Janet for fixing her up with a boy that was so much older than the boys from her high school. More than a year would pass before she met Ennis Del Mar.
Just then, in the K.E. Del Mar’s kitchen, Alma caught a glimpse of Laurie pushing Linda in her stroller as they turned the corner onto their street. She finished the last of her coffee and put the cup into the dishwasher.
Near the end of her senior year in high school, Alma had gotten a part-time job at the Riverton Drug Store, working the soda fountain and making root beer floats two days each week after school. That was where she met Laurie Hobbs, her co-worker who was soon to be married to K.E. Del Mar.
Laurie was friendly to Alma in the way that suggested they had been the best of friends for much longer than the short months that they had known each other. At the soda fountain, Laurie often talked about setting Alma up with her boyfriend’s brother, Ennis. The boys, along with their older sister, Ellen, had been orphaned a few years earlier when their parents died in a car accident. Fortunately, the Del Mar children were in their teens and able to care for themselves.
Eventually, Ennis began to make deliveries to the Riverton Drug Store from Richardson’s Dairy Farm where he worked as a hand. He ran errands and delivered milk and cream in the old box truck that old man Richardson kept around just for that purpose. Alma always suspected that Laurie had pulled some strings to arrange a meeting between Alma and Ennis.
While Alma supposed that Ennis lived in a bunkhouse with the other roughneck hands who worked on the dairy farm, he was much quieter than the other boys she knew.
Alma was older now and she knew the difference between a respectable boy and a boy who only had one thing on his mind. With his tattered jeans and his quiet manner, Ennis was different. Alma took a shine to him right away.
Ennis Del Mar was nothing at all like Colin Woods.
That’s why when he asked Alma to go to the movies with him right before her graduation, Alma jumped at the chance.
~~~