Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue - Chapter 16
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 follow the spire of that soul-stirring light ‘til I reach that one valley at last
Ennis burst forward on his snowshoes, despite his bone-deep exhaustion. When he reached the top of the cliff, he bent to the snow and picked up the green Forest Service hat, juggling it between his mittened hands.
“Jack,” he whispered.
His eyes widened when they rested on the base of the cliff, where a body lay.
“Oh, Jesus,” Ennis said, his breath condensing in the wintry air. In the distance, the sun dipped behind the west wall of the ravine. He dropped the hat to the snow.
“Jack,” Ennis yelled, the sound of his voice echoing down the valley.
It was no use. The body at the base of the cliff wasn’t going to move anytime soon.
“Please, don’t let it be Jack,” Ennis prayed to the mountain winds.
Ennis could see where the body had obviously gone over the edge of the cliff. Another track led down the incline to the left, where the slope wasn’t as steep. The track of postholes leading further down the valley proved that, of the two men who left the chopper, one was still alive when they reached this point in their descent. Neither man would have left the other if there was a chance that they both could have gotten out of the woods alive. Now, one of them was likely dead. Ennis hoped with all his might that it wasn’t Jack.
Ennis wrenched the walkie-talkie from its clip and switched it on. As the radio searched for a signal, Ennis fought the urge to plunge mindlessly down the cliff, to confirm his worst fear as quickly as possible. He might be able to trust the poles to slow his fall, but he quickly recognized that he needed to stay level-headed for a little while longer.
The walkie-talkie crackled with static. Ennis punched a button and held the device over his head, hoping it would make a difference. He wanted to tell Jeff what he had found, and advise him of the situation.
The static frustrated Ennis to no end. His legs were shaking with nervousness over which rescue team member he might find at the base of the cliff.
He all but gave up getting a signal on the walkie-talkie, tossing it onto the mittens that he had stripped off and set on the tip of one snowshoe to keep dry. Jeff would be along soon anyway. He was a half-hour away at most. Ennis thought about waiting for him, but while his mind raced, his fingers worked to unfasten the straps on his snowshoes before upending his pack into the snow to look for his crampons. He dragged the clanging metal contraptions across the snow and lashed them to his boots. His fingers ached with cold from the time they were exposed, bare to the elements.
Once he had managed to fasten the buckles on his crampons, he jettisoned his snowshoes over the edge, and watched them skitter to the base of the cliff. He stuffed his gear back into his pack, draining the last few drops of coffee from his Thermos.
One more time, he listened to the static on the walkie-talkie before he switched it off and clipped it back into its holder. With a ski pole in each hand, he turned to face the slope he had just descended and lowered his gaze to watch his feet as his crampon’s front points bit into the icy face of the cliff.
Step by step, he lowered himself down. “Please don’t let it be Jack,” he breathed, repeating his mantra with every kick of his toes into the ice.
The cold and hunger had begun to take their toll on Ennis. He fought to stay vertical as he descended, his feet cramped from the strain. It was difficult enough for Ennis to climb down using crampons and poles, he couldn’t imagine what a hell it was for a climber without any gear.
Right pole, left pole, kick right, kick left.
“Please don’t let it be Jack.”
He lost another foot of elevation.
Right pole, left pole, kick right, kick left.
The sequence repeated so many times that Ennis lost count, until finally he stood on the level snow at the base of the cliff.
Ennis followed in the steps of the survivor who had descended before him, plodding through the deep snow to the body that lay motionless. He knelt in the tamped down snow near the head of the body, feeling guilty for gasping with relief when he discovered Brian, the paramedic from Twin Lakes who had been in Jack’s chopper for Davis Wentworth’s rescue.
A… airway…
B… breathing…
C… circulation…
He was a good kid, and Ennis would have taken time to mourn him, if he hadn’t needed to find Jack.
He snuffled back a drip of snot and unbuckled his crampons.
The ravine was completely in shadow now. It would be getting colder soon and his window of time to find Jack alive was running out. He turned the walkie-talkie on and listened to the static while he lashed his snowshoes back onto his boots.
Ennis recognized the fact that now he’d be following Jack’s footprints as they led away from Brian’s body. He rubbed his hands together, thankful that he had the mittens to keep them warm.
“Jeff? Come in. This is Ennis,” Ennis gave the walkie-talkie another try. He knew his chances of reaching Jeff were slim from his sheltered position. Still, he would have liked to have warned him that there was a body to recover, but only infernal static came through the device.
Ennis watched the horizon. How far was he from the road? A mile? Two miles?
He clipped the walkie-talkie back into place. It wouldn’t be long now before he found Jack, dead or alive. He made his way down the slope as fast as he could, following in Jack’s footsteps. His mind raced faster than his feet.
How far could Jack possibly have gotten? He couldn’t have made it to the road yet. He had to be somewhere close, maybe just beyond the next tree Ennis used when he dead reckoned his way down the ravine. He could feel it.
And what was he going to say to the man when he found him? Ennis took deep breaths through his mouth as he negotiated the postholes Jack’s feet had made in the snow.
He’d have to tell Jack that it didn’t work out between him and Alma.
Ennis still wasn’t sure whether he could bring himself to tell Jack why.
There was no easy way of putting it.
His wedding night with Alma was disastrous. He would never have guessed that their first night together was going to turn out the way it did, not in a million years. Although, in hindsight, he should have known. No matter how many times he tried to drive his cock into Alma that night, he wouldn’t stay hard. As soon as his cock touched her skin, his erection withered down to nothing. If someone had told him that Alma was going to be so soft and slippery that it would be impossible to get the same kind of friction that he got while driving into Jack’s tight hot ass, he might have guessed that he had a problem.
To Ennis, having sex with Alma felt like ramming his cock against the innards of a gutted sheep.
He felt bad for her, at first. She tried to be encouraging, in her own way. She held still. She didn’t complain. There was no way she would have known how to do any different, not with the way her folks raised her. Ennis doubted she had even kissed a boy before she met him. He could hardly blame her from becoming hysterical when things didn’t go as planned.
She spent most of the night in tears.
And it only got worse from there.
It took a few months of trying before it became obvious to Ennis that it wasn’t going to work. They simply couldn’t have sex, no matter how many times they tried. He’d be aroused and hard, but as soon as the head of his cock touched Alma, he’d go soft again. One hungover morning, while laying asphalt with a road crew, he listened while one of his buddies described a similar problem that happened to his brother. The brother went to see some kind of shrink that handled sex problems. He wasn’t sure if it worked.
When Ennis brought it up to Alma that night, she raged at him through a veil of tears. How dare he suggest that they discuss such a personal thing with a stranger? Her tears turned to fury as she launched at him the only thing she could get her hands on-a porcelain cup from the set of dishes her parents had given them as a wedding gift. He could only watch and wait for Alma to calm down, the sobs wracking her body long after suppertime had passed, the bits of shattered white ceramic tossed into the wastebasket.
He wasn’t sure when he finally figured it all out. Hell, he still wasn’t sure if he had figured anything out. He could only guess why he preferred the slide of his cock into a warm wet mouth with some stubble to scrape at his thighs, the feel of a man beneath his hands as he drove into him, or the burn of a cock pounding into him while he wept for joy, arms folded beneath his sobbing mouth.
He couldn’t let Alma live like they had for the first months of their marriage, so he cut her loose. He let her go so she could find someone new.
Only, it didn’t quite work out that way.
He found a lawyer and filled out the papers, saying that he would take the blame. That only made Alma cry more. He never meant for her to feel so bad. Christ, it wasn’t her fault.
Naturally, he blamed Jack for his problem. But he couldn’t tell Alma that.
If not for Jack, he wouldn’t be queer, Ennis was sure of it. He drove all the way to Lightning Flat to tell Jack just that, after he signed the last of the divorce paperwork in the lawyer’s office. He wavered between wanting to punch Jack’s lights out or wanting to throw him down in the nearest hay-filled stall at his daddy’s so he could have his way with him. That was up until Jack’s daddy told him Jack was killed in Vietnam.
Since that day, Ennis had lived in regret. Now, as he snowshoed his way down a Colorado mountain, he had to adjust to the idea that there wasn’t a lick of truth in Jack’s daddy’s story. It was easy to figure out why he lied to Ennis. His daddy couldn’t care less about Jack. Ennis knew why. It was because he was queer. Folks didn’t react well to that particular idea, least of all fathers.
Ennis’s Pa sure made his thoughts about queers known. Jack’s daddy wasn’t much different.
Thinking Jack was dead, Ennis took one job after the other, amounting to nothing, going nowhere, until the one day he went south from the Tetons to the Rockies for some work with the Forest Service. He dug ditches and felled trees on a fire suppression line outside of Denver. Ennis took to it like a fish to water.
The work was easy, compared to what he’d done on a farm or a ranch. He got to be alone most of the time. The alone time made him think a lot about things. And the not-alone time put him in the company of some like-minded fellas. Denver was a long way from Riverton, that was for sure. The city boys didn’t think twice about rolling around in the grass behind the cabin, or trading blow jobs on a cold winter night in the backcountry.
In ’64, he spent the whole summer training with a young intern, Billy Reed, before the Forest Service shipped him off to Crater Lake. Billy’s idea of training included fooling around with Ennis behind his wife’s back.
Ennis’s divorce hadn’t come through final yet. Ennis felt guilty every time Billy and he went out on patrol and one thing led to another. In the fields of blooming columbine, he couldn’t help think that his marriage to Alma would have worked, if not for meeting Jack in the summer of ’63. He cared for Alma, he truly did. No matter how many times he tried to think of a way that he could make things better for Alma, either by introducing her to an eligible bachelor or finding her a job at the Riverton Laundromat, he was met with her unfettered rage.
She’d break down and wail inconsolably, or she’d throw things, or scream at him until she was hoarse.
After the divorce was final, he had to stop caring about Alma. It hurt too much. He hoped she had found happiness back in Riverton, maybe she found someone else to marry.
Ennis was making steady progress through the ravine. He’d pause every so often and turn around, looking for Jeff to catch up. It would be easier for Jeff to follow Ennis’s tracks than it was for Ennis to follow Jack’s postholes. The sunlight was fading from the sky, the ravine growing darker as it plunged to lower elevations. Ennis was starting to have trouble seeing what was ahead of him, although the slope was covered in newly-fallen snow that was marred only by Jack’s footprints.
He had been so engrossed in putting one foot in front of the other that he barely noticed the discarded parka until his snowshoe had trampled it.
“Jack!” Ennis yelled, his throat dry from not drinking enough fluids in the dry mountain environment.
He stooped to pull the parka out from beneath his snowshoe. It was Jack’s. It was the Forest Service parka Ennis had seen him wearing during the rescue high up on the mountain.
“Jack!” Ennis yelled again.
Fear overtook him. If Jack had been stripping off his clothes, it might be too late to save him.
“Jack!”
Ennis took a dozen steps forward, and then another dozen, and there he was… Jack, sitting at the base of a Bristlecone Pine. In an instant, the choice flashed through Ennis’s mind. He could blame Jack, and all they shared together on that other distant mountain where they herded sheep. He could blame him for Alma and for Billy and all the others that came in between. In the past, it had been so easy to blame Jack. It was even easier to blame him when Ennis thought Jack was dead.
But when he approached the man who sat at the base of the tree and looked into those blue eyes again, he found that his urge to lay blame had been replaced with an uneasy acceptance.
~~~
Jack felt like he was burning up.
He had been walking since first light, descending through the heavy snow. The exertion had taken its toll, using up whatever he had in his reserves. He could barely feel the ache in his ribs anymore as he plunged forward through the drifts that had accumulated in the ravine.
He had foolishly taken off most of his outerwear, trying to cool off. No matter that he knew exactly how wrong it was, what his body was doing in reaction to the conditions he faced, he was powerless to behave otherwise. If he sat in the snow, maybe the chill would seep into his bones and rid him of the feeling that he was on fire. He had already stripped down to his T-shirt somewhere along the way. If he could just get his boots off, he could get his pants to slide off over his feet. It was never an issue to spend the day in boxer shorts and boots alone when he was in Vietnam, so he sincerely hoped that the good people of Colorado wouldn’t mind. Not that he had seen any citizens wandering around in the woods since he left Brian at the base of the cliff.
He sure the fuck wished that he’d run into Ennis Del Mar right about now. He turned his head from side to side, looking for a sign of human encroachment in this wild ravine. There was nothing to save him. Ennis would help him out, wouldn’t he? He was a friend, after all. Just so long as he didn’t sucker punch him again, pissed off at something for which Jack had no answer.
It had taken four long years for Jack to figure out why Ennis had such an attitude that last morning on Brokeback. Being in the Army had exposed Jack to all different kinds of guys from all different walks of life. You had fellas like him, who wore their emotions on the outside, and then you had fellas like Ennis who kept everything packed away like napalm in a flamethrower, just waiting to be released so it could destroy everything in sight. Ennis’s violent outburst had taken Jack by surprise, since he was only nineteen years old and had just spent the best summer of his life roaming the mountainside with Ennis. Like he had been the previous summer, he was excited to get away from his folks, especially his overbearing daddy who seemed to find fault with everything Jack did.
It was one thing to be working outdoors, keeping the sheep together, and managing to eat three square meals each day. That was what he expected when he signed on for his second year at Joe Aguirre’s. He didn’t expect that he’d be assigned to work with Ennis.
What started as a regular working relationship soon evolved into something very different one night after reducing the contents of a bottle of Old Rose to a particularly low level. Jack was still half-drunk and passed out on the bedroll when he reached for Ennis’s hand and shoved it down his pants. Ennis got the message. From there on out, Jack’s memories of that summer were filled with everything that happened next. Memories of being torn into by someone who couldn’t wait to slide his hard cock into him. Memories of sweat-slicked skin and grunts that matched the stutter of Ennis’s hips. Memories of a finger dipped between Ennis’s pale cheeks while Jack whispered words of encouragement. Ennis was one bull who needed a type of taming that Jack discovered he was adept at giving.
It seemed so long ago.
Jack sank into the snow and worked on the laces to his boots.
His fingers were tingling with the burn, so he shoved them into the snow to cool for a minute, before taking a stab at the laces again, knowing damn well it wasn’t something he should be doing. Inside his boots, he flexed his toes. He took it as a good sign that he was still able to move them. He wished he wasn’t so unbearably hot. He felt like he was burning from the inside out.
His fingers stopped moving over the tongue of his boots. An image he had etched into his mind flashed before his eyes. It had been a hot week up on Brokeback, sometime after they had switched up the roles of herder and tender, but long before the unexpected snowfall that drove them off the mountain.
He closed his eyes and basked in the warmth of the memory.
After that first night, Ennis had spent nearly every night in camp with Jack, instead of heading back up to the sheep. What Aguirre didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Jack could not have imagined the summer would have turned out so different from the previous year or from the time he spent sleeping in a bunkroom full of rodeo cowboys. This summer was so much better. In no time at all, Jack could have Ennis hard and ready, shaking from the sensations that skittered through his body. He’d relish the feel of Ennis’s sweat soaked body as he draped himself over Jack’s back, his hard cock punching into him, his breath hot and filthy in his ear.
When he finally coaxed Ennis into letting him explore with his fingers and his mouth, their roles reversed again with the same dizzying result. As Jack’s cock slid deep, he watched Ennis’s eyes grow dark with desire, his lips kissed raw in the moonlight that played over the tent walls. Jack hooked an arm under Ennis’s knee and pressed forward until it rested at his elbow. He leaned down to kiss Ennis’s mouth again, panting into it as he thrusted, assuring Ennis with his words, “I’ve got you, Ennis. S’alright, you can let go.”
And Ennis did let go, coming apart piece by piece under Jack’s body, with Jack’s lips moving across his skin, Jack breathing wordlessly into his hair.
If only things could be like that again. Jack craved the feeling of what he and Ennis had, the connection that existed before Ennis ended it with that one punch. And now, for the first time in years, Jack felt like he could regain what they had lost, if only he could find Ennis again.
But Ennis was somewhere on this mountain, somewhere in the middle of the Colorado nowhere, and nothing was going to help Jack to reconnect with him if he couldn’t stop the unbearable heat that threatened to burn him alive.
“Ennis!” he screamed, but the word only came out like a rough whisper from a throat that was dry and hoarse.
Ennis.
If Ennis could find him.
Just this. If Ennis could find him now. Jack balled his hands into the snow.
If he could have this, he’d be able to put this whole situation behind him. He’d be able to put everything out of his head, his daddy, Vietnam, Davis Wentworth, the trouble with the chopper, Brian, the shit he was going to be in with Wayne, everything… everything would be all right if only Ennis could find him.
He touched his icy fingertips to his cheeks, hoping to cool his face.
He heard Ennis’s voice before he saw him.
“Jack?” Ennis asked, stepping closer on his snowshoes until he could squat in front of him.
“Ennis?” Jack looked up, afraid that he was seeing some kind of mountain mirage.
“Jack,” Ennis’s voice held the smile that was once so familiar to Jack.
“Oh, fuck,” Jack said with a laugh, clenching the snow with his bare hands. “Am I in heaven?”
Jack watched Ennis’s brown eyes shifting, playing over his face as if he was making some kind of important decision. And then it was done. Ennis didn’t make a sound. He moved closer and Jack closed his eyes as he felt the warmth of Ennis’s mouth on his cold chapped lips. His hands left the snow and wrapped around Ennis’s neck. He parted his lips ever so slightly to inhale, to breathe in Ennis’s almost-forgotten scent.
“Not quite,” Ennis said, sounding relieved when he pulled away. He reached behind his back to grab at something. Jack recognized it as his parka that he had dropped on his way down the ravine. Ennis yanked it from his pack and wrapped it around Jack’s shoulders.
“You’re hot ‘cause you’re freezing to death, dumbass,” Ennis said, as if Jack should have known better.
“I reckon so. You’d think I woulda known that by now,” Jack said.
“Well, just knowin’ something ain’t always enough to change the way you react to it,” Ennis said.
Jack nodded.
And then, Ennis was kissing him again. Jack wanted to tell him that he appreciated how therapeutic the kisses were, but he didn’t get the chance.
“He told me you was dead,” Ennis spoke against Jack’s lips. Ennis looked like he was squinting to fight back tears.
“Who did?” Jack asked, gathering his breath, forgetting the ache in his ribs.
“Your daddy,” Ennis said, wiping his eyes. “I went to see him in Lightning Flat, after you had gone.”
“Fuck,” Jack said.
“It’s alright,” Ennis said. “I know why he did it. It’s all gonna be alright now. You hang in there. Fuck, you’re cold.”
Ennis leaned back and took his pack off. He tugged off his mittens and unzipped his jacket.
“What’re you doin?” Jack asked as Ennis started unbuttoning his shirt. “You lost your mind to hypothermia too?”
“Naw,” Ennis said, helping Jack to shove his arms through the sleeves of his shirt. “I’m warmer than you are. Take my shirt and parka. They’re already warmed up. I’ll just wear yours the rest of the way down.”
Jack tried to suppress a grin, remembering another one of Ennis’s shirts that he had stowed away at his daddy’s house. Maybe it was time he got that piece of missing clothing back to its rightful owner. “Alma?” he asked, changing the direction his mind was taking him. “What happened?”
“Divorced,” Ennis said. He had buttoned his shirt over Jack’s chest and had zipped the parka into place.
Jack felt warmer already. Not the kind of warmth that burned him from the inside out, but the kind of warmth that began on skin level and sunk deeper with every minute.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said.
“Ain’t your fault,” Ennis said. But Jack noticed that Ennis kept his eyes locked with his for a very long time. He had to wonder whether Ennis was telling the whole truth about it. He supposed he’d find out what really happened later, when they weren’t both standing on a mountain slope freezing half to death.
“Ennis,” Jack said, shaking his head.
Ennis got to his feet and offered Jack a hand.
Jack groaned as Ennis pulled him upright. The ache in his ribs was starting to kick in again.
Ennis ran his hands down Jack’s arms from his shoulders to his wrists, catching Jack’s icy fingers in his warm ones. Jack leaned forward and pressed his forehead to Ennis’s, but their moment was interrupted by the sound of Jeff hollering as he made his way down the slope to them.
They quickly exchanged their greetings and regrets about Brian and the passing of David Wentworth when the rescue went awry. But they were burning daylight, so they talked as they walked, three men breaking a trail downhill. Before long, Wayne’s team arrived from below, having tramped a path for nearly a mile from the road. Jack was never so happy to see a boss, as he was to see Wayne at that moment. Their team had carried a rescue toboggan up the mountain and Ennis seemed to think that Jack was going to allow himself to be strapped in and carried to the road.
“Fuck no,” Jack said. He wasn’t going to let them strap him into that thing. Something hot to drink and a couple of painkillers were all he’d need to hike the rest of the way out, busted ribs be damned.
~~~
Dating again. The mere notion of it seemed ridiculous to Alma.
The girls had been settled in their bedrooms upstairs, and K.E. and Laurie had turned out their light for the evening. The house was silent, except for the gentle ticking of the clock that hung on the kitchen wall. Alma went to the bathroom and washed her face, drying her hands on a guest towel. She favored routine above all things and so she descended to the rumpus room for the night, uncertain of how her stay at the Del Mars would play into the remaining chapters of her life, especially if Laurie was so bold as to suggest that she date again.
She shuddered at the memory of their conversation. Laurie had made it sound like dating was something Alma could easily choose to do, as if she would pursue a boy who just fell out of the sky.
There was no such choice for Alma. Why couldn’t Laurie understand that?
Alma had made her decision years ago when she chose Ennis Del Mar for a spouse ‘til death did them part. Beyond that assertion, there was nothing.
Alma dug a nightgown out of a cardboard box and tossed it onto the daybed. She unzipped her skirt and slid it to her feet.
She could no more begin to look for another man to marry than she could have hope of receiving a pardon for her sin from the pope himself. Unbuttoning her blouse, her chest tightened with the memories of the life she had hoped to build with Ennis. Her marriage had held so much promise for her. She and Ennis had their whole future ahead of them, until he divorced her after he defiled her by touching their parts together. Now she was ruined, used. No other man would want her, and if he did, it would be with the understanding that she had already engaged in the pleasures of the flesh, the acts that Alma had considered to be a sin for so long that it was inconceivable for her to believe otherwise. Any man she could attract now would be interested in getting one thing, and one thing only, from her. She’d be considered a heathen in the eyes of anyone with a decent set of morals. A sinner to anyone who abided by the word of God. A transgressor in the eyes of her mother, a miscreant condemned to hell at the tip of Archangel Michael’s spear.
Alma bit down on her lower lip. She removed her stockings and slid her feet into the pair of slippers she had left beneath the daybed.
She gave up everything of herself for Ennis, all that she believed. She let him touch her in that way, but then he wanted nothing to do with her.
She cringed when she remembered that Ennis had suggested that they visit some kind of head doctor to discuss what happened in the privacy of their bedroom. As if she could ever bring herself to discuss that forbidden area down below with anyone. Despite their attempts to copulate, something that would get Alma pregnant with a child and delight Alma’s mother to no end, Alma still felt dirty and squeamish when she thought about that sinful part of her body.
She’d never think about it again. She took her chance and look where it got her-shedding tears of fury over every belief she abandoned so that Ennis could have his way with her.
She let him touch her. She allowed his naked flesh to make contact with the forbidden part of her. The part that she’d go to hell for touching.
Alma gave a little sigh when she remembered how frustrated Ennis had become. He tried to insert his penis into her, but he failed every time. Who knew if further action needed to be taken beyond the insertion, but the insertion itself was paramount to the sperm being deposited. What happened before, after, or during that, she’d never know.
Still, she missed Ennis, even now, after so many years had passed. He was her savior, her ticket out of her parents’ house, her validation. Her husband. Even during the days and weeks and months that Alma and Ennis had tried to consummate their marriage, Alma still considered herself lucky to have found Ennis. Lucky that she had found someone who would agree to marry her on the promise of a fumbled kiss and assurance of fidelity. She’d not get that chance again.
Alma slipped off the blouse, her bra, and pulled the nightgown over her head. She tossed her dirty clothes into the corner of the room and in the dim light, a shiny object caught her eye. She leaned to peer into the box that contained the item.
“Oh,” she mumbled as she reached for it. It was Ennis’s lighter, the one that he left behind when he moved out of the apartment Alma and he had rented when they were newlyweds, the apartment where their struggle to join their bodies had taken place.
Alma spun the wheel with her thumb and the flame flared up. She was surprised that it still worked.
She watched the flame as it made her thumb burn hot. It saddened her that no matter what she did, no one would ever want her, not after what she had done with Ennis.
No matter how she longed for the iconic Prince Charming of Riverton to sweep her off her feet, he was unattainable, and always would be. No worthwhile prince would ever want her now. To Alma, it was as if she had been raped. Certainly she had given her consent to be defiled through marriage, but Ennis had failed to meet her expectations. He not only failed, but in doing so, he had forced her to violate her steadfast beliefs, and it was all for nothing. She had sworn to remain chaste, until she found someone to marry her and engage in the very act that had been forbidden for so long. The act would ensure the approval of her mother, her father, it would seal her worth in the eyes and minds of society. But something went wrong. There was no way of turning back time now.
Alma knew what she needed to do.
She rummaged through the same box that had held her nightgown and pulled out a light bathrobe, blue flowers on a cream background, still smelling faintly of the smoke damage that had ravaged her apartment above the Laundromat. Shoving her arms through the sleeves, she donned the robe and slid the lighter into the pocket.
Quietly, so she wouldn’t disturb anyone’s sleep, she ascended the stairs and emerged into the kitchen. The glow from the LCD display illuminated the stovetop in a wash of red.
She went to the doorway that led to the garage. Looking around the kitchen, to make sure her movements were not detected, she slipped out the door.
In the garage, she found what she was looking for. She lifted the red can with one hand while she slowly turned the knob of the door with her other hand, careful to not make a sound. Certain that no one had heard her make her escape, she listened for the door to latch shut again. The click of the lock seemed to echo through the neighborhood in the night air.
In her slippers, she walked along the sidewalk, passing K.E. and Laurie’s house, the next door neighbor’s house, and the houses beyond. The neighborhood was quiet at this hour of the night. No lights illuminated the rooms within the houses, where during the day children fussed and families gathered. They only dreamed now, asleep until morning. Alma regretted that so many of her dreams had been unfulfilled. She had no pretty house to call her home, no loving parents to visit, no baby at her breast.
There had been choices to make.
Ennis had made his, and now it was her turn.
Her footsteps moved quietly on the concrete sidewalk, scuffing a stray pebble every now and then. She passed the houses and the trees and the dim city lights until she reached the park at the end of the street.
The swings hung motionless on this windless night. The slide shone when it caught a glint of the streetlamp’s glare.
Alma slipped onto the seat of a swing, the splintered wood hard and rough against her thin nightgown and robe. She unscrewed the cap on the metallic can, removed it, and let it drop to the ground. It rolled a few inches away from her feet before it stopped.
Alma raised the can over her head and tilted it, letting the pungent liquid wash over her, soaking her robe and nightgown, chilling her skin, saturating her hair.
Alma had accepted her fate, although it stung to think that nobody would know the value of her lost innocence when she was gone. Just as no one would know the weight of Ennis’s decision to strip himself of the protective shield he had set between himself and others. No one would recognize its absence or the steep price he paid when he made amends with Jack.
The community that had accepted the responsibility for nurturing both Ennis and Alma so they lived fulfilling lives had failed. Their benign intentions to support Ennis in becoming a man, a husband, a father, had seemed noble. Alma’s mother’s well-meaning efforts to teach Alma how to be a good wife, hadn’t been deemed misguided or damaging by her peers. Yet these societal conventions worked like a glacier moving across the land, devastating Ennis and Alma’s innocent souls, smoothing and scouring the features that made them remarkable and different.
Alma took Ennis’s lighter from her pocket and spun the wheel.
They say your whole life flashes before your eyes when you are confronted with imminent death.
As the flames consumed her, Alma’s shoulders relaxed, finally releasing the tension from her chest and slowing the beat of her heart. She felt the heat melt her spirit. It seemed to seep out from between her ribs while Archangel Michael’s spear stabbed into her skin until she was finally set free.
The End
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 follow the spire of that soul-stirring light ‘til I reach that one valley at last
Ennis burst forward on his snowshoes, despite his bone-deep exhaustion. When he reached the top of the cliff, he bent to the snow and picked up the green Forest Service hat, juggling it between his mittened hands.
“Jack,” he whispered.
His eyes widened when they rested on the base of the cliff, where a body lay.
“Oh, Jesus,” Ennis said, his breath condensing in the wintry air. In the distance, the sun dipped behind the west wall of the ravine. He dropped the hat to the snow.
“Jack,” Ennis yelled, the sound of his voice echoing down the valley.
It was no use. The body at the base of the cliff wasn’t going to move anytime soon.
“Please, don’t let it be Jack,” Ennis prayed to the mountain winds.
Ennis could see where the body had obviously gone over the edge of the cliff. Another track led down the incline to the left, where the slope wasn’t as steep. The track of postholes leading further down the valley proved that, of the two men who left the chopper, one was still alive when they reached this point in their descent. Neither man would have left the other if there was a chance that they both could have gotten out of the woods alive. Now, one of them was likely dead. Ennis hoped with all his might that it wasn’t Jack.
Ennis wrenched the walkie-talkie from its clip and switched it on. As the radio searched for a signal, Ennis fought the urge to plunge mindlessly down the cliff, to confirm his worst fear as quickly as possible. He might be able to trust the poles to slow his fall, but he quickly recognized that he needed to stay level-headed for a little while longer.
The walkie-talkie crackled with static. Ennis punched a button and held the device over his head, hoping it would make a difference. He wanted to tell Jeff what he had found, and advise him of the situation.
The static frustrated Ennis to no end. His legs were shaking with nervousness over which rescue team member he might find at the base of the cliff.
He all but gave up getting a signal on the walkie-talkie, tossing it onto the mittens that he had stripped off and set on the tip of one snowshoe to keep dry. Jeff would be along soon anyway. He was a half-hour away at most. Ennis thought about waiting for him, but while his mind raced, his fingers worked to unfasten the straps on his snowshoes before upending his pack into the snow to look for his crampons. He dragged the clanging metal contraptions across the snow and lashed them to his boots. His fingers ached with cold from the time they were exposed, bare to the elements.
Once he had managed to fasten the buckles on his crampons, he jettisoned his snowshoes over the edge, and watched them skitter to the base of the cliff. He stuffed his gear back into his pack, draining the last few drops of coffee from his Thermos.
One more time, he listened to the static on the walkie-talkie before he switched it off and clipped it back into its holder. With a ski pole in each hand, he turned to face the slope he had just descended and lowered his gaze to watch his feet as his crampon’s front points bit into the icy face of the cliff.
Step by step, he lowered himself down. “Please don’t let it be Jack,” he breathed, repeating his mantra with every kick of his toes into the ice.
The cold and hunger had begun to take their toll on Ennis. He fought to stay vertical as he descended, his feet cramped from the strain. It was difficult enough for Ennis to climb down using crampons and poles, he couldn’t imagine what a hell it was for a climber without any gear.
Right pole, left pole, kick right, kick left.
“Please don’t let it be Jack.”
He lost another foot of elevation.
Right pole, left pole, kick right, kick left.
The sequence repeated so many times that Ennis lost count, until finally he stood on the level snow at the base of the cliff.
Ennis followed in the steps of the survivor who had descended before him, plodding through the deep snow to the body that lay motionless. He knelt in the tamped down snow near the head of the body, feeling guilty for gasping with relief when he discovered Brian, the paramedic from Twin Lakes who had been in Jack’s chopper for Davis Wentworth’s rescue.
A… airway…
B… breathing…
C… circulation…
He was a good kid, and Ennis would have taken time to mourn him, if he hadn’t needed to find Jack.
He snuffled back a drip of snot and unbuckled his crampons.
The ravine was completely in shadow now. It would be getting colder soon and his window of time to find Jack alive was running out. He turned the walkie-talkie on and listened to the static while he lashed his snowshoes back onto his boots.
Ennis recognized the fact that now he’d be following Jack’s footprints as they led away from Brian’s body. He rubbed his hands together, thankful that he had the mittens to keep them warm.
“Jeff? Come in. This is Ennis,” Ennis gave the walkie-talkie another try. He knew his chances of reaching Jeff were slim from his sheltered position. Still, he would have liked to have warned him that there was a body to recover, but only infernal static came through the device.
Ennis watched the horizon. How far was he from the road? A mile? Two miles?
He clipped the walkie-talkie back into place. It wouldn’t be long now before he found Jack, dead or alive. He made his way down the slope as fast as he could, following in Jack’s footsteps. His mind raced faster than his feet.
How far could Jack possibly have gotten? He couldn’t have made it to the road yet. He had to be somewhere close, maybe just beyond the next tree Ennis used when he dead reckoned his way down the ravine. He could feel it.
And what was he going to say to the man when he found him? Ennis took deep breaths through his mouth as he negotiated the postholes Jack’s feet had made in the snow.
He’d have to tell Jack that it didn’t work out between him and Alma.
Ennis still wasn’t sure whether he could bring himself to tell Jack why.
There was no easy way of putting it.
His wedding night with Alma was disastrous. He would never have guessed that their first night together was going to turn out the way it did, not in a million years. Although, in hindsight, he should have known. No matter how many times he tried to drive his cock into Alma that night, he wouldn’t stay hard. As soon as his cock touched her skin, his erection withered down to nothing. If someone had told him that Alma was going to be so soft and slippery that it would be impossible to get the same kind of friction that he got while driving into Jack’s tight hot ass, he might have guessed that he had a problem.
To Ennis, having sex with Alma felt like ramming his cock against the innards of a gutted sheep.
He felt bad for her, at first. She tried to be encouraging, in her own way. She held still. She didn’t complain. There was no way she would have known how to do any different, not with the way her folks raised her. Ennis doubted she had even kissed a boy before she met him. He could hardly blame her from becoming hysterical when things didn’t go as planned.
She spent most of the night in tears.
And it only got worse from there.
It took a few months of trying before it became obvious to Ennis that it wasn’t going to work. They simply couldn’t have sex, no matter how many times they tried. He’d be aroused and hard, but as soon as the head of his cock touched Alma, he’d go soft again. One hungover morning, while laying asphalt with a road crew, he listened while one of his buddies described a similar problem that happened to his brother. The brother went to see some kind of shrink that handled sex problems. He wasn’t sure if it worked.
When Ennis brought it up to Alma that night, she raged at him through a veil of tears. How dare he suggest that they discuss such a personal thing with a stranger? Her tears turned to fury as she launched at him the only thing she could get her hands on-a porcelain cup from the set of dishes her parents had given them as a wedding gift. He could only watch and wait for Alma to calm down, the sobs wracking her body long after suppertime had passed, the bits of shattered white ceramic tossed into the wastebasket.
He wasn’t sure when he finally figured it all out. Hell, he still wasn’t sure if he had figured anything out. He could only guess why he preferred the slide of his cock into a warm wet mouth with some stubble to scrape at his thighs, the feel of a man beneath his hands as he drove into him, or the burn of a cock pounding into him while he wept for joy, arms folded beneath his sobbing mouth.
He couldn’t let Alma live like they had for the first months of their marriage, so he cut her loose. He let her go so she could find someone new.
Only, it didn’t quite work out that way.
He found a lawyer and filled out the papers, saying that he would take the blame. That only made Alma cry more. He never meant for her to feel so bad. Christ, it wasn’t her fault.
Naturally, he blamed Jack for his problem. But he couldn’t tell Alma that.
If not for Jack, he wouldn’t be queer, Ennis was sure of it. He drove all the way to Lightning Flat to tell Jack just that, after he signed the last of the divorce paperwork in the lawyer’s office. He wavered between wanting to punch Jack’s lights out or wanting to throw him down in the nearest hay-filled stall at his daddy’s so he could have his way with him. That was up until Jack’s daddy told him Jack was killed in Vietnam.
Since that day, Ennis had lived in regret. Now, as he snowshoed his way down a Colorado mountain, he had to adjust to the idea that there wasn’t a lick of truth in Jack’s daddy’s story. It was easy to figure out why he lied to Ennis. His daddy couldn’t care less about Jack. Ennis knew why. It was because he was queer. Folks didn’t react well to that particular idea, least of all fathers.
Ennis’s Pa sure made his thoughts about queers known. Jack’s daddy wasn’t much different.
Thinking Jack was dead, Ennis took one job after the other, amounting to nothing, going nowhere, until the one day he went south from the Tetons to the Rockies for some work with the Forest Service. He dug ditches and felled trees on a fire suppression line outside of Denver. Ennis took to it like a fish to water.
The work was easy, compared to what he’d done on a farm or a ranch. He got to be alone most of the time. The alone time made him think a lot about things. And the not-alone time put him in the company of some like-minded fellas. Denver was a long way from Riverton, that was for sure. The city boys didn’t think twice about rolling around in the grass behind the cabin, or trading blow jobs on a cold winter night in the backcountry.
In ’64, he spent the whole summer training with a young intern, Billy Reed, before the Forest Service shipped him off to Crater Lake. Billy’s idea of training included fooling around with Ennis behind his wife’s back.
Ennis’s divorce hadn’t come through final yet. Ennis felt guilty every time Billy and he went out on patrol and one thing led to another. In the fields of blooming columbine, he couldn’t help think that his marriage to Alma would have worked, if not for meeting Jack in the summer of ’63. He cared for Alma, he truly did. No matter how many times he tried to think of a way that he could make things better for Alma, either by introducing her to an eligible bachelor or finding her a job at the Riverton Laundromat, he was met with her unfettered rage.
She’d break down and wail inconsolably, or she’d throw things, or scream at him until she was hoarse.
After the divorce was final, he had to stop caring about Alma. It hurt too much. He hoped she had found happiness back in Riverton, maybe she found someone else to marry.
Ennis was making steady progress through the ravine. He’d pause every so often and turn around, looking for Jeff to catch up. It would be easier for Jeff to follow Ennis’s tracks than it was for Ennis to follow Jack’s postholes. The sunlight was fading from the sky, the ravine growing darker as it plunged to lower elevations. Ennis was starting to have trouble seeing what was ahead of him, although the slope was covered in newly-fallen snow that was marred only by Jack’s footprints.
He had been so engrossed in putting one foot in front of the other that he barely noticed the discarded parka until his snowshoe had trampled it.
“Jack!” Ennis yelled, his throat dry from not drinking enough fluids in the dry mountain environment.
He stooped to pull the parka out from beneath his snowshoe. It was Jack’s. It was the Forest Service parka Ennis had seen him wearing during the rescue high up on the mountain.
“Jack!” Ennis yelled again.
Fear overtook him. If Jack had been stripping off his clothes, it might be too late to save him.
“Jack!”
Ennis took a dozen steps forward, and then another dozen, and there he was… Jack, sitting at the base of a Bristlecone Pine. In an instant, the choice flashed through Ennis’s mind. He could blame Jack, and all they shared together on that other distant mountain where they herded sheep. He could blame him for Alma and for Billy and all the others that came in between. In the past, it had been so easy to blame Jack. It was even easier to blame him when Ennis thought Jack was dead.
But when he approached the man who sat at the base of the tree and looked into those blue eyes again, he found that his urge to lay blame had been replaced with an uneasy acceptance.
~~~
Jack felt like he was burning up.
He had been walking since first light, descending through the heavy snow. The exertion had taken its toll, using up whatever he had in his reserves. He could barely feel the ache in his ribs anymore as he plunged forward through the drifts that had accumulated in the ravine.
He had foolishly taken off most of his outerwear, trying to cool off. No matter that he knew exactly how wrong it was, what his body was doing in reaction to the conditions he faced, he was powerless to behave otherwise. If he sat in the snow, maybe the chill would seep into his bones and rid him of the feeling that he was on fire. He had already stripped down to his T-shirt somewhere along the way. If he could just get his boots off, he could get his pants to slide off over his feet. It was never an issue to spend the day in boxer shorts and boots alone when he was in Vietnam, so he sincerely hoped that the good people of Colorado wouldn’t mind. Not that he had seen any citizens wandering around in the woods since he left Brian at the base of the cliff.
He sure the fuck wished that he’d run into Ennis Del Mar right about now. He turned his head from side to side, looking for a sign of human encroachment in this wild ravine. There was nothing to save him. Ennis would help him out, wouldn’t he? He was a friend, after all. Just so long as he didn’t sucker punch him again, pissed off at something for which Jack had no answer.
It had taken four long years for Jack to figure out why Ennis had such an attitude that last morning on Brokeback. Being in the Army had exposed Jack to all different kinds of guys from all different walks of life. You had fellas like him, who wore their emotions on the outside, and then you had fellas like Ennis who kept everything packed away like napalm in a flamethrower, just waiting to be released so it could destroy everything in sight. Ennis’s violent outburst had taken Jack by surprise, since he was only nineteen years old and had just spent the best summer of his life roaming the mountainside with Ennis. Like he had been the previous summer, he was excited to get away from his folks, especially his overbearing daddy who seemed to find fault with everything Jack did.
It was one thing to be working outdoors, keeping the sheep together, and managing to eat three square meals each day. That was what he expected when he signed on for his second year at Joe Aguirre’s. He didn’t expect that he’d be assigned to work with Ennis.
What started as a regular working relationship soon evolved into something very different one night after reducing the contents of a bottle of Old Rose to a particularly low level. Jack was still half-drunk and passed out on the bedroll when he reached for Ennis’s hand and shoved it down his pants. Ennis got the message. From there on out, Jack’s memories of that summer were filled with everything that happened next. Memories of being torn into by someone who couldn’t wait to slide his hard cock into him. Memories of sweat-slicked skin and grunts that matched the stutter of Ennis’s hips. Memories of a finger dipped between Ennis’s pale cheeks while Jack whispered words of encouragement. Ennis was one bull who needed a type of taming that Jack discovered he was adept at giving.
It seemed so long ago.
Jack sank into the snow and worked on the laces to his boots.
His fingers were tingling with the burn, so he shoved them into the snow to cool for a minute, before taking a stab at the laces again, knowing damn well it wasn’t something he should be doing. Inside his boots, he flexed his toes. He took it as a good sign that he was still able to move them. He wished he wasn’t so unbearably hot. He felt like he was burning from the inside out.
His fingers stopped moving over the tongue of his boots. An image he had etched into his mind flashed before his eyes. It had been a hot week up on Brokeback, sometime after they had switched up the roles of herder and tender, but long before the unexpected snowfall that drove them off the mountain.
He closed his eyes and basked in the warmth of the memory.
After that first night, Ennis had spent nearly every night in camp with Jack, instead of heading back up to the sheep. What Aguirre didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Jack could not have imagined the summer would have turned out so different from the previous year or from the time he spent sleeping in a bunkroom full of rodeo cowboys. This summer was so much better. In no time at all, Jack could have Ennis hard and ready, shaking from the sensations that skittered through his body. He’d relish the feel of Ennis’s sweat soaked body as he draped himself over Jack’s back, his hard cock punching into him, his breath hot and filthy in his ear.
When he finally coaxed Ennis into letting him explore with his fingers and his mouth, their roles reversed again with the same dizzying result. As Jack’s cock slid deep, he watched Ennis’s eyes grow dark with desire, his lips kissed raw in the moonlight that played over the tent walls. Jack hooked an arm under Ennis’s knee and pressed forward until it rested at his elbow. He leaned down to kiss Ennis’s mouth again, panting into it as he thrusted, assuring Ennis with his words, “I’ve got you, Ennis. S’alright, you can let go.”
And Ennis did let go, coming apart piece by piece under Jack’s body, with Jack’s lips moving across his skin, Jack breathing wordlessly into his hair.
If only things could be like that again. Jack craved the feeling of what he and Ennis had, the connection that existed before Ennis ended it with that one punch. And now, for the first time in years, Jack felt like he could regain what they had lost, if only he could find Ennis again.
But Ennis was somewhere on this mountain, somewhere in the middle of the Colorado nowhere, and nothing was going to help Jack to reconnect with him if he couldn’t stop the unbearable heat that threatened to burn him alive.
“Ennis!” he screamed, but the word only came out like a rough whisper from a throat that was dry and hoarse.
Ennis.
If Ennis could find him.
Just this. If Ennis could find him now. Jack balled his hands into the snow.
If he could have this, he’d be able to put this whole situation behind him. He’d be able to put everything out of his head, his daddy, Vietnam, Davis Wentworth, the trouble with the chopper, Brian, the shit he was going to be in with Wayne, everything… everything would be all right if only Ennis could find him.
He touched his icy fingertips to his cheeks, hoping to cool his face.
He heard Ennis’s voice before he saw him.
“Jack?” Ennis asked, stepping closer on his snowshoes until he could squat in front of him.
“Ennis?” Jack looked up, afraid that he was seeing some kind of mountain mirage.
“Jack,” Ennis’s voice held the smile that was once so familiar to Jack.
“Oh, fuck,” Jack said with a laugh, clenching the snow with his bare hands. “Am I in heaven?”
Jack watched Ennis’s brown eyes shifting, playing over his face as if he was making some kind of important decision. And then it was done. Ennis didn’t make a sound. He moved closer and Jack closed his eyes as he felt the warmth of Ennis’s mouth on his cold chapped lips. His hands left the snow and wrapped around Ennis’s neck. He parted his lips ever so slightly to inhale, to breathe in Ennis’s almost-forgotten scent.
“Not quite,” Ennis said, sounding relieved when he pulled away. He reached behind his back to grab at something. Jack recognized it as his parka that he had dropped on his way down the ravine. Ennis yanked it from his pack and wrapped it around Jack’s shoulders.
“You’re hot ‘cause you’re freezing to death, dumbass,” Ennis said, as if Jack should have known better.
“I reckon so. You’d think I woulda known that by now,” Jack said.
“Well, just knowin’ something ain’t always enough to change the way you react to it,” Ennis said.
Jack nodded.
And then, Ennis was kissing him again. Jack wanted to tell him that he appreciated how therapeutic the kisses were, but he didn’t get the chance.
“He told me you was dead,” Ennis spoke against Jack’s lips. Ennis looked like he was squinting to fight back tears.
“Who did?” Jack asked, gathering his breath, forgetting the ache in his ribs.
“Your daddy,” Ennis said, wiping his eyes. “I went to see him in Lightning Flat, after you had gone.”
“Fuck,” Jack said.
“It’s alright,” Ennis said. “I know why he did it. It’s all gonna be alright now. You hang in there. Fuck, you’re cold.”
Ennis leaned back and took his pack off. He tugged off his mittens and unzipped his jacket.
“What’re you doin?” Jack asked as Ennis started unbuttoning his shirt. “You lost your mind to hypothermia too?”
“Naw,” Ennis said, helping Jack to shove his arms through the sleeves of his shirt. “I’m warmer than you are. Take my shirt and parka. They’re already warmed up. I’ll just wear yours the rest of the way down.”
Jack tried to suppress a grin, remembering another one of Ennis’s shirts that he had stowed away at his daddy’s house. Maybe it was time he got that piece of missing clothing back to its rightful owner. “Alma?” he asked, changing the direction his mind was taking him. “What happened?”
“Divorced,” Ennis said. He had buttoned his shirt over Jack’s chest and had zipped the parka into place.
Jack felt warmer already. Not the kind of warmth that burned him from the inside out, but the kind of warmth that began on skin level and sunk deeper with every minute.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said.
“Ain’t your fault,” Ennis said. But Jack noticed that Ennis kept his eyes locked with his for a very long time. He had to wonder whether Ennis was telling the whole truth about it. He supposed he’d find out what really happened later, when they weren’t both standing on a mountain slope freezing half to death.
“Ennis,” Jack said, shaking his head.
Ennis got to his feet and offered Jack a hand.
Jack groaned as Ennis pulled him upright. The ache in his ribs was starting to kick in again.
Ennis ran his hands down Jack’s arms from his shoulders to his wrists, catching Jack’s icy fingers in his warm ones. Jack leaned forward and pressed his forehead to Ennis’s, but their moment was interrupted by the sound of Jeff hollering as he made his way down the slope to them.
They quickly exchanged their greetings and regrets about Brian and the passing of David Wentworth when the rescue went awry. But they were burning daylight, so they talked as they walked, three men breaking a trail downhill. Before long, Wayne’s team arrived from below, having tramped a path for nearly a mile from the road. Jack was never so happy to see a boss, as he was to see Wayne at that moment. Their team had carried a rescue toboggan up the mountain and Ennis seemed to think that Jack was going to allow himself to be strapped in and carried to the road.
“Fuck no,” Jack said. He wasn’t going to let them strap him into that thing. Something hot to drink and a couple of painkillers were all he’d need to hike the rest of the way out, busted ribs be damned.
~~~
Dating again. The mere notion of it seemed ridiculous to Alma.
The girls had been settled in their bedrooms upstairs, and K.E. and Laurie had turned out their light for the evening. The house was silent, except for the gentle ticking of the clock that hung on the kitchen wall. Alma went to the bathroom and washed her face, drying her hands on a guest towel. She favored routine above all things and so she descended to the rumpus room for the night, uncertain of how her stay at the Del Mars would play into the remaining chapters of her life, especially if Laurie was so bold as to suggest that she date again.
She shuddered at the memory of their conversation. Laurie had made it sound like dating was something Alma could easily choose to do, as if she would pursue a boy who just fell out of the sky.
There was no such choice for Alma. Why couldn’t Laurie understand that?
Alma had made her decision years ago when she chose Ennis Del Mar for a spouse ‘til death did them part. Beyond that assertion, there was nothing.
Alma dug a nightgown out of a cardboard box and tossed it onto the daybed. She unzipped her skirt and slid it to her feet.
She could no more begin to look for another man to marry than she could have hope of receiving a pardon for her sin from the pope himself. Unbuttoning her blouse, her chest tightened with the memories of the life she had hoped to build with Ennis. Her marriage had held so much promise for her. She and Ennis had their whole future ahead of them, until he divorced her after he defiled her by touching their parts together. Now she was ruined, used. No other man would want her, and if he did, it would be with the understanding that she had already engaged in the pleasures of the flesh, the acts that Alma had considered to be a sin for so long that it was inconceivable for her to believe otherwise. Any man she could attract now would be interested in getting one thing, and one thing only, from her. She’d be considered a heathen in the eyes of anyone with a decent set of morals. A sinner to anyone who abided by the word of God. A transgressor in the eyes of her mother, a miscreant condemned to hell at the tip of Archangel Michael’s spear.
Alma bit down on her lower lip. She removed her stockings and slid her feet into the pair of slippers she had left beneath the daybed.
She gave up everything of herself for Ennis, all that she believed. She let him touch her in that way, but then he wanted nothing to do with her.
She cringed when she remembered that Ennis had suggested that they visit some kind of head doctor to discuss what happened in the privacy of their bedroom. As if she could ever bring herself to discuss that forbidden area down below with anyone. Despite their attempts to copulate, something that would get Alma pregnant with a child and delight Alma’s mother to no end, Alma still felt dirty and squeamish when she thought about that sinful part of her body.
She’d never think about it again. She took her chance and look where it got her-shedding tears of fury over every belief she abandoned so that Ennis could have his way with her.
She let him touch her. She allowed his naked flesh to make contact with the forbidden part of her. The part that she’d go to hell for touching.
Alma gave a little sigh when she remembered how frustrated Ennis had become. He tried to insert his penis into her, but he failed every time. Who knew if further action needed to be taken beyond the insertion, but the insertion itself was paramount to the sperm being deposited. What happened before, after, or during that, she’d never know.
Still, she missed Ennis, even now, after so many years had passed. He was her savior, her ticket out of her parents’ house, her validation. Her husband. Even during the days and weeks and months that Alma and Ennis had tried to consummate their marriage, Alma still considered herself lucky to have found Ennis. Lucky that she had found someone who would agree to marry her on the promise of a fumbled kiss and assurance of fidelity. She’d not get that chance again.
Alma slipped off the blouse, her bra, and pulled the nightgown over her head. She tossed her dirty clothes into the corner of the room and in the dim light, a shiny object caught her eye. She leaned to peer into the box that contained the item.
“Oh,” she mumbled as she reached for it. It was Ennis’s lighter, the one that he left behind when he moved out of the apartment Alma and he had rented when they were newlyweds, the apartment where their struggle to join their bodies had taken place.
Alma spun the wheel with her thumb and the flame flared up. She was surprised that it still worked.
She watched the flame as it made her thumb burn hot. It saddened her that no matter what she did, no one would ever want her, not after what she had done with Ennis.
No matter how she longed for the iconic Prince Charming of Riverton to sweep her off her feet, he was unattainable, and always would be. No worthwhile prince would ever want her now. To Alma, it was as if she had been raped. Certainly she had given her consent to be defiled through marriage, but Ennis had failed to meet her expectations. He not only failed, but in doing so, he had forced her to violate her steadfast beliefs, and it was all for nothing. She had sworn to remain chaste, until she found someone to marry her and engage in the very act that had been forbidden for so long. The act would ensure the approval of her mother, her father, it would seal her worth in the eyes and minds of society. But something went wrong. There was no way of turning back time now.
Alma knew what she needed to do.
She rummaged through the same box that had held her nightgown and pulled out a light bathrobe, blue flowers on a cream background, still smelling faintly of the smoke damage that had ravaged her apartment above the Laundromat. Shoving her arms through the sleeves, she donned the robe and slid the lighter into the pocket.
Quietly, so she wouldn’t disturb anyone’s sleep, she ascended the stairs and emerged into the kitchen. The glow from the LCD display illuminated the stovetop in a wash of red.
She went to the doorway that led to the garage. Looking around the kitchen, to make sure her movements were not detected, she slipped out the door.
In the garage, she found what she was looking for. She lifted the red can with one hand while she slowly turned the knob of the door with her other hand, careful to not make a sound. Certain that no one had heard her make her escape, she listened for the door to latch shut again. The click of the lock seemed to echo through the neighborhood in the night air.
In her slippers, she walked along the sidewalk, passing K.E. and Laurie’s house, the next door neighbor’s house, and the houses beyond. The neighborhood was quiet at this hour of the night. No lights illuminated the rooms within the houses, where during the day children fussed and families gathered. They only dreamed now, asleep until morning. Alma regretted that so many of her dreams had been unfulfilled. She had no pretty house to call her home, no loving parents to visit, no baby at her breast.
There had been choices to make.
Ennis had made his, and now it was her turn.
Her footsteps moved quietly on the concrete sidewalk, scuffing a stray pebble every now and then. She passed the houses and the trees and the dim city lights until she reached the park at the end of the street.
The swings hung motionless on this windless night. The slide shone when it caught a glint of the streetlamp’s glare.
Alma slipped onto the seat of a swing, the splintered wood hard and rough against her thin nightgown and robe. She unscrewed the cap on the metallic can, removed it, and let it drop to the ground. It rolled a few inches away from her feet before it stopped.
Alma raised the can over her head and tilted it, letting the pungent liquid wash over her, soaking her robe and nightgown, chilling her skin, saturating her hair.
Alma had accepted her fate, although it stung to think that nobody would know the value of her lost innocence when she was gone. Just as no one would know the weight of Ennis’s decision to strip himself of the protective shield he had set between himself and others. No one would recognize its absence or the steep price he paid when he made amends with Jack.
The community that had accepted the responsibility for nurturing both Ennis and Alma so they lived fulfilling lives had failed. Their benign intentions to support Ennis in becoming a man, a husband, a father, had seemed noble. Alma’s mother’s well-meaning efforts to teach Alma how to be a good wife, hadn’t been deemed misguided or damaging by her peers. Yet these societal conventions worked like a glacier moving across the land, devastating Ennis and Alma’s innocent souls, smoothing and scouring the features that made them remarkable and different.
Alma took Ennis’s lighter from her pocket and spun the wheel.
They say your whole life flashes before your eyes when you are confronted with imminent death.
As the flames consumed her, Alma’s shoulders relaxed, finally releasing the tension from her chest and slowing the beat of her heart. She felt the heat melt her spirit. It seemed to seep out from between her ribs while Archangel Michael’s spear stabbed into her skin until she was finally set free.
The End