(no subject)
TITLE: The Message
AUTHOR: Wild Columbine
PAIRING: Ennis/Jack but only if you’re quick
RATING: NC-17
FEEDBACK: Yes please
DISCLAIMERS: I try not to violate the spirit of Annie Proulx’s brilliant original. The characters and their lives are hers, but this is my cheap form of therapy
SUMMARY: Ennis’s life takes some strange turns.
NOTES: This one is a little off-centre for me and I couldn’t work out where the idea originated from. I know now but I’ll keep it to myself.
THE MESSAGE
The sharp knock on the door of his trailer roused Ennis from a half-sleep, and he cursed softly, just wanting to drift back into day-dreams of Jack, the only benefit of his enforced stint of unemployment. His leg was paining him mightily. Perhaps if he lay quiet the intruder would go away and he wouldn’t have to haul himself out of bed. The knock was repeated then the door swung open and in stepped a woman, a total stranger, who looked straight at him as he hastily pulled the blankets about his chest.
“Mr del Mar? I’m Minna Gabriel from the Home Care department at the hospital.” She tapped an I.D. badge pinned to her blue shirt then extended her hand. Ennis shook it automatically. Her grip was sure and firm and she held on just a little longer than was quite proper.
“Home Care?” Ennis frowned. “Thought the doctors was finished with me. Don’t recall no home care spoken about.”
“Typical. Bet you don’t recall being told about your outpatients appointment either.” The woman shook her head as she began unpacking a large bag onto the easy chair near his bed. He watched her with mild curiosity. She was about his age, quick and sure in her movements, dark hair framing a friendly, alert face. “I’ll have to check that dressing. Let me take a look.”
With a sudden flush of embarrassment, Ennis realised the dangers of sleeping naked in an unlocked trailer. He held the blankets even closer then carefully lifted one edge to reveal a large dressing stretching from one side of his right thigh to the other. It was grubby and ragged. As the nurse leaned in to look closer he remembered that the bedsheets hadn’t been changed in three weeks. The woman’s nose twitched slightly but it was the faint odour of a suppurating wound which concerned her.
“I think a good scrub might be in order. Got hot water? Off you go and I’ll get some clean clothes out.” She made a move to the closet beyond his bed but Ennis moved quicker, dragging bedclothes with him.
“I’ll get them.”
As he washed, she checked the contents of his old fridge. They were uninspiring - a couple of soft, sprouting potatoes, half a rust-spotted can of peaches, something furry on a plate hidden behind a block of cheese, and an unopened packet of hospital-dispensed antibiotics. The cupboards weren’t any better, holding just a few packets and tins, coffee, beans, preserved meat. There was plenty of beer and whiskey, however; her patient had decided to self-medicate.
Clean and dressed, Ennis sat meekly on the bed again, jeans round his ankles, a towel wrapped modestly about his hips. Minna Gabriel said she’d seen it all before. Not mine you haven’t, thought Ennis, and as if she’d read his mind, she slipped him a quick sideways glance. The newly-revealed wound was a nine-inch strip of unhappy red flesh scarred by the traces of dozens of stitches. The end of the wound in his inner thigh was weeping and inflamed. “Work accident, right? That boss of yours still paying you? You were very lucky from what I know.”
Ennis didn’t want to discuss the incident, didn’t even want to think about the few terrifying minutes of blinding pain when his boss had overstretched a makeshift tow-rope and its broken end had snaked out and wrapped itself around Ennis’s thigh, metal fibers ripping his leg open. He vaguely remembered blood spurting everywhere, lots of screaming and yelling, and the world rapidly contracting into a small grey bubble in a sea of black. Later they’d told him he had the quick actions of another hand to thank for his survival, the man pressing down hard on his torn flesh, stemming the bleeding until the ambulance arrived.
Trouble was, when he’d woken up in that hospital bed several hours later, oxygen mask on his face, IV drip in one arm, he’d wanted only to slip back into the darkness, because there in the void between life and death he’d touched the one thing his body and soul had hungered for every day of the past four years - the warm, loving presence of Jack Twist. For an immeasurable time the pain and struggle of his day-to-day existence had fallen away and been replaced with an ineffable peace which he had tried in vain to cling to. Instead they’d pulled him, despairing, back to this world. After that, the fragile balance he’d maintained in those four years had come crashing down, back to where he had started, and he couldn’t find the strength to build it again. Days now stretched out in numbing inactivity ,filled with memories of Jack, but it was the nights he dreaded. His dreams, once his only release, had become nightmares, always unfulfilling, leaving him yearning and distraught. He didn’t care about his life, didn’t want this damned woman ordering him about.
“Mr del… No, Ennis. And you can call me Minna. I can see we’re going to spend a while together. Ennis, your file described you as lean but healthy. That’s not what I’m seeing now. Have you not been eating properly?” He shrugged. Food had become an irrelevance, a distraction he could live - or maybe die - without. “You need to eat decent food to help that wound heal. Can’t your family help you? Two daughters, isn’t it?”
“Youngest one’s at secretarial college, oldest expecting her first in a few months, over in Casper. Don’t want to bother them.” He was wishing she’d just go away and leave him be. Instead she cleaned and redressed the wound, stood over him as he swallowed the first antibiotic then said she’d return later that day. And on the stroke of five, she did, carrying a large container of beef and vegetable stew and a bag of assorted groceries.
As the stew heated she changed his bed, gathered up the dirty laundry and fussed over him like a mother hen, making him wonder to himself if she did this for all her patients.
“I don’t do this for all my patients, only the ones who need it, and you, Ennis, sure look like you need it.” He muttered that he didn’t need nothin, but the stew did smell good. “Don’t talk much, do you? Tell you what, I’ll be back tomorrow so you can have all night to think up a topic of conversation.” Despite himself, Ennis smiled a little at this and she warned him sternly to be careful lest he laugh so much he burst his wound open again.
Minna returned every day after that, gently bossing Ennis around until he was well enough to get back to work. Light duties - she had arranged it with his employer, reminding him firmly of his obligations to his workers. After that she would drop in after work two or three times a week. Ennis’s initial annoyance at the disruptions had slowly shifted to an appreciation of her company. The leg was healing well enough although it would never be as strong as it had been, and there were days when a deep muscle ache set in and wouldn’t shift. On those days his usual lazy shuffle developed a slight list, reminding him of Jack’s own lop-sided, busted-leg, rodeo-rider’s gait. He thought of them as his Jack Twist days and gained a small melancholy pleasure from the thought that a little part of his dark contact with Jack had lived on in such an impractical fashion. But the nightmares persisted, and most mornings he still woke up drained and despondent.
Never-the-less, a slow warmth began creeping back into Ennis’s life. As the weeks went by Minna’s visits became less frequent, just the occasional evening or weekend, but it seemed she had a knack of knowing when he might be in need of a little quiet company. If she dropped by on a Saturday night, they might sometimes drift into town, have a few drinks and play a game of pool. Once she even got him up for a dance - his injured leg hadn’t diminished his dancing ability at all. Mostly, though, they just sat around and chatted about nothing much, their talk punctuated by long, comfortable silences.
One Saturday morning when he hadn’t seen Minna for a week or two, Ennis was pleased to hear the familiar sound of her car pulling up. He hobbled to the door and flung it open, looking like a big kid at Christmas.
“I’m a grandfather!” he announced, stepping gingerly down to the ground. She hugged him hard, patted his back, murmured congratulations then held him at arm’s length.
“Details?”
“Uh…boy, little boy, a grandson! Four days ago. Uh…eight pounds eight. Everthin fine. Used a want a boy for a kid, and now…” His face was alight with rare happiness and Minna laughed delightedly.
“And the leg?”
“Twisted the other knee.”
“Favoring the weak one, I suppose. No point in telling you to stay off it, Grandad. Been to see the baby yet?”
“Was hopin to go this afternoon, that is if the knee…”
“Tell you what, Ennis del Mar, this is your lucky day. I’ll drive you over to Casper and if you behave I’ll even bring you home.”
The tiny baby lay quiet and secure in his granddaddy’s arms, lulled by the beat of a strong, loving heart. His unfocused dark eyes gazed here and there, sometimes resting a while on the face of the man who held him, who stroked the fuzzy halo of honey-colored hair and murmured softly, little darlin. Alma’s first-born was swaddled in an exquisite blanket, the finest that Riverton’s Little Treasures Babywear had to offer, and the look on her face when Ennis had almost shyly handed it to her had been worth every dollar.
“You girls never had much…”
“Oh, Daddy, we had parents who loved us, even if….well, you know.” Then Alma had hugged and kissed him, picked her son up out of his cradle and handed him, now wrapped in the precious gift, to her beloved daddy. And there he’d stayed for an hour and a half, slipping in and out of sleep, wrapping his tiny fist around Ennis’s little finger, snuffling and squawking now and then when Ennis kissed him and whispered into his sweet, chubby neck, until finally a soaking nappy and an empty tummy caused him to be reluctantly handed back to his mother.
The phone rang. Kurt answered it. “Your lift. Says she’ll be here in fifteen.” Alma looked up from her suckling baby and raised an eyebrow.
“Does your…friend want to come in for a while?”
“She’s not that sort of friend. She’s…” He paused, frowned. “She’s just a good friend. Uh, your momma and Jennie coming?”
“This evening. They’re all coming over, bringing dinner. You could stay if you want?”
Ennis shook his head. “No, no, I…uh. Just give Jennie a big hug from me and tell your momma….tell her thank you…tell her I’m proud.”
Minna’s car barely made the last five miles to Ennis’s trailer. The lights flickered, the engine wavered uncertainly, and as they turned in through the gate, everything came to an abrupt and decisive halt.
“Electrics,” declared Ennis, “too late to do nothin now.” He offered her his bed for the night but she declined, saying he was her patient and his knee wasn’t going to be helped by curling up in the easy chair. They’d already bought some less-than-healthy food on the way home so spun the evening out with beer and talk until Minna declared she’d had enough and asked for something to wrap herself up in.
“Blanket, top a the closet.” He moved to stand up but she waved him down and opened the little closet behind the bed. The spare blanket had been a warm, colourful present from the girls a couple of cold Christmases previously, and Minna hugged it to her as she turned to close the door. Ennis swirled the dregs of his beer then drained the bottle; there was nothing to see beyond an old jacket on a nail and an innocuous postcard.
“Beautiful photo. Brokeback Mountain, isn’t it? I went there once. Felt like I owned the world, way above everything. You must have been there, I guess.”
He nodded, felt a small glow of relief that his heart hadn’t hammered against his ribs at the sound of the name. “Yeah, I been there. Been right through the mountains over the years. Well, I’m ready to hit the hay too.” After Minna had wrapped herself in the blanket and wished him Goodnight Grandad, Ennis turned off the lamp near the bed and they settled down. Within a few minutes the sound of soft steady breathing drifted across to him but he lay awake for a long time, gazing up through the darkness, his mind a whirl of joy and memories, thoughts of a sweet baby and a sweet man.
* * *
And he is with Jack again, the pair of them wrestling on green velvet grass, the mountain rising up before them into endless blue heavens, their guardian and judge. Jack laughs up at him, pulls his head down so their hot, eager mouths come together in a fierce kiss. Then he twists in Ennis’s arms, his tousled hair dark against the long pale arch of his back. Ennis strokes him hard, runs his hands over the tight familiar muscles of his bull-rider’s arse, feels Jack’s sudden quiver as he thrusts forward, hears the gasp of pleasure, the rhythmic groans as their bodies join in a rough, rapturous dance. He moans, gasps, feeling the start of his climactic rush, but instead of longed-for fulfilment, suddenly he is being dragged away, his moans becoming those of an animal in pain as he tries desperately to hold on...
…but now a hand is softly stroking his hair, lips brush his cheek, a gentle voice whispers, “Shh, my darling, shh, it’s alright, go back to sleep, back to your Jack. He’s waiting, darling, Jack is waiting for you.” And he sighs, relaxes, and is once again falling, sinking back into the arms of his beloved, if only in dreams.
* * *
“Okay, give her some gas.” The car purred into obliging life and Ennis carefully dropped down the hood. “That should get you where you’re going.”
Minna slid out of the driver’s seat. There was an unfamiliar awkwardness between them. “Actually, I came yesterday to tell you I’m moving on. Other people to look after. I should get you to write me a reference. I reckon you’re one of my success stories.” She patted his ribs, ran her hands over the satisfying new layer of healthy flesh and muscle, didn’t pull back. There was a brief moment when their eyes met then they both stepped forward into the embrace, squeezing hard, both clinging briefly to something they knew had reached its end. He tipped up her chin and kissed her, a sweet, gentle kiss that had warmth but not passion, love but not desire. Tears mingled on their cheeks.
As they moved apart, Minna spoke, her voice barely a whisper. “You still have so much love to give and get, Ennis. Don’t throw it away. And remember this - whenever you need help, you’ll always find it.” She got back in the car, rubbed her hand across her eyes and smiled. “And put those shirts back where they belong.”
It took Ennis a fortnight to find the wallet down the back of his easy chair, thin, good leather, tooled with symbols he thought might be Indian. Inside was about $50 in small notes and Minna’s ID badge. The next time he was in town he called the Riverton Memorial Hospital and asked for the extension number on the badge. It didn’t exist. He asked for the Home Care department. The what? said the switchboard woman. He gave Minna’s name and explained the situation. She advised him to check for missing valuables and contact the police. He didn’t bother, but sat for a long while in his pickup, turning the wallet over and over, occasionally touching it to his mouth. Searching further to see if there was an address written anywhere - and knowing somehow that there wouldn’t be - he noticed a deep, narrow slit cut into the leather and inside it the shafts of two feathers. When he pulled them out, a shock of recognition hit him - one was the tail feather of an eagle, but the other was unknown to him, soft and white, gracefully curved, from no bird he remembered.
Back at home Ennis placed the wallet up in his closet but the two feathers, for reasons he couldn’t quite understand, he tucked for safekeeping deep into the pocket of Jack’s old blue shirt.
AUTHOR: Wild Columbine
PAIRING: Ennis/Jack but only if you’re quick
RATING: NC-17
FEEDBACK: Yes please
DISCLAIMERS: I try not to violate the spirit of Annie Proulx’s brilliant original. The characters and their lives are hers, but this is my cheap form of therapy
SUMMARY: Ennis’s life takes some strange turns.
NOTES: This one is a little off-centre for me and I couldn’t work out where the idea originated from. I know now but I’ll keep it to myself.
THE MESSAGE
The sharp knock on the door of his trailer roused Ennis from a half-sleep, and he cursed softly, just wanting to drift back into day-dreams of Jack, the only benefit of his enforced stint of unemployment. His leg was paining him mightily. Perhaps if he lay quiet the intruder would go away and he wouldn’t have to haul himself out of bed. The knock was repeated then the door swung open and in stepped a woman, a total stranger, who looked straight at him as he hastily pulled the blankets about his chest.
“Mr del Mar? I’m Minna Gabriel from the Home Care department at the hospital.” She tapped an I.D. badge pinned to her blue shirt then extended her hand. Ennis shook it automatically. Her grip was sure and firm and she held on just a little longer than was quite proper.
“Home Care?” Ennis frowned. “Thought the doctors was finished with me. Don’t recall no home care spoken about.”
“Typical. Bet you don’t recall being told about your outpatients appointment either.” The woman shook her head as she began unpacking a large bag onto the easy chair near his bed. He watched her with mild curiosity. She was about his age, quick and sure in her movements, dark hair framing a friendly, alert face. “I’ll have to check that dressing. Let me take a look.”
With a sudden flush of embarrassment, Ennis realised the dangers of sleeping naked in an unlocked trailer. He held the blankets even closer then carefully lifted one edge to reveal a large dressing stretching from one side of his right thigh to the other. It was grubby and ragged. As the nurse leaned in to look closer he remembered that the bedsheets hadn’t been changed in three weeks. The woman’s nose twitched slightly but it was the faint odour of a suppurating wound which concerned her.
“I think a good scrub might be in order. Got hot water? Off you go and I’ll get some clean clothes out.” She made a move to the closet beyond his bed but Ennis moved quicker, dragging bedclothes with him.
“I’ll get them.”
As he washed, she checked the contents of his old fridge. They were uninspiring - a couple of soft, sprouting potatoes, half a rust-spotted can of peaches, something furry on a plate hidden behind a block of cheese, and an unopened packet of hospital-dispensed antibiotics. The cupboards weren’t any better, holding just a few packets and tins, coffee, beans, preserved meat. There was plenty of beer and whiskey, however; her patient had decided to self-medicate.
Clean and dressed, Ennis sat meekly on the bed again, jeans round his ankles, a towel wrapped modestly about his hips. Minna Gabriel said she’d seen it all before. Not mine you haven’t, thought Ennis, and as if she’d read his mind, she slipped him a quick sideways glance. The newly-revealed wound was a nine-inch strip of unhappy red flesh scarred by the traces of dozens of stitches. The end of the wound in his inner thigh was weeping and inflamed. “Work accident, right? That boss of yours still paying you? You were very lucky from what I know.”
Ennis didn’t want to discuss the incident, didn’t even want to think about the few terrifying minutes of blinding pain when his boss had overstretched a makeshift tow-rope and its broken end had snaked out and wrapped itself around Ennis’s thigh, metal fibers ripping his leg open. He vaguely remembered blood spurting everywhere, lots of screaming and yelling, and the world rapidly contracting into a small grey bubble in a sea of black. Later they’d told him he had the quick actions of another hand to thank for his survival, the man pressing down hard on his torn flesh, stemming the bleeding until the ambulance arrived.
Trouble was, when he’d woken up in that hospital bed several hours later, oxygen mask on his face, IV drip in one arm, he’d wanted only to slip back into the darkness, because there in the void between life and death he’d touched the one thing his body and soul had hungered for every day of the past four years - the warm, loving presence of Jack Twist. For an immeasurable time the pain and struggle of his day-to-day existence had fallen away and been replaced with an ineffable peace which he had tried in vain to cling to. Instead they’d pulled him, despairing, back to this world. After that, the fragile balance he’d maintained in those four years had come crashing down, back to where he had started, and he couldn’t find the strength to build it again. Days now stretched out in numbing inactivity ,filled with memories of Jack, but it was the nights he dreaded. His dreams, once his only release, had become nightmares, always unfulfilling, leaving him yearning and distraught. He didn’t care about his life, didn’t want this damned woman ordering him about.
“Mr del… No, Ennis. And you can call me Minna. I can see we’re going to spend a while together. Ennis, your file described you as lean but healthy. That’s not what I’m seeing now. Have you not been eating properly?” He shrugged. Food had become an irrelevance, a distraction he could live - or maybe die - without. “You need to eat decent food to help that wound heal. Can’t your family help you? Two daughters, isn’t it?”
“Youngest one’s at secretarial college, oldest expecting her first in a few months, over in Casper. Don’t want to bother them.” He was wishing she’d just go away and leave him be. Instead she cleaned and redressed the wound, stood over him as he swallowed the first antibiotic then said she’d return later that day. And on the stroke of five, she did, carrying a large container of beef and vegetable stew and a bag of assorted groceries.
As the stew heated she changed his bed, gathered up the dirty laundry and fussed over him like a mother hen, making him wonder to himself if she did this for all her patients.
“I don’t do this for all my patients, only the ones who need it, and you, Ennis, sure look like you need it.” He muttered that he didn’t need nothin, but the stew did smell good. “Don’t talk much, do you? Tell you what, I’ll be back tomorrow so you can have all night to think up a topic of conversation.” Despite himself, Ennis smiled a little at this and she warned him sternly to be careful lest he laugh so much he burst his wound open again.
Minna returned every day after that, gently bossing Ennis around until he was well enough to get back to work. Light duties - she had arranged it with his employer, reminding him firmly of his obligations to his workers. After that she would drop in after work two or three times a week. Ennis’s initial annoyance at the disruptions had slowly shifted to an appreciation of her company. The leg was healing well enough although it would never be as strong as it had been, and there were days when a deep muscle ache set in and wouldn’t shift. On those days his usual lazy shuffle developed a slight list, reminding him of Jack’s own lop-sided, busted-leg, rodeo-rider’s gait. He thought of them as his Jack Twist days and gained a small melancholy pleasure from the thought that a little part of his dark contact with Jack had lived on in such an impractical fashion. But the nightmares persisted, and most mornings he still woke up drained and despondent.
Never-the-less, a slow warmth began creeping back into Ennis’s life. As the weeks went by Minna’s visits became less frequent, just the occasional evening or weekend, but it seemed she had a knack of knowing when he might be in need of a little quiet company. If she dropped by on a Saturday night, they might sometimes drift into town, have a few drinks and play a game of pool. Once she even got him up for a dance - his injured leg hadn’t diminished his dancing ability at all. Mostly, though, they just sat around and chatted about nothing much, their talk punctuated by long, comfortable silences.
One Saturday morning when he hadn’t seen Minna for a week or two, Ennis was pleased to hear the familiar sound of her car pulling up. He hobbled to the door and flung it open, looking like a big kid at Christmas.
“I’m a grandfather!” he announced, stepping gingerly down to the ground. She hugged him hard, patted his back, murmured congratulations then held him at arm’s length.
“Details?”
“Uh…boy, little boy, a grandson! Four days ago. Uh…eight pounds eight. Everthin fine. Used a want a boy for a kid, and now…” His face was alight with rare happiness and Minna laughed delightedly.
“And the leg?”
“Twisted the other knee.”
“Favoring the weak one, I suppose. No point in telling you to stay off it, Grandad. Been to see the baby yet?”
“Was hopin to go this afternoon, that is if the knee…”
“Tell you what, Ennis del Mar, this is your lucky day. I’ll drive you over to Casper and if you behave I’ll even bring you home.”
The tiny baby lay quiet and secure in his granddaddy’s arms, lulled by the beat of a strong, loving heart. His unfocused dark eyes gazed here and there, sometimes resting a while on the face of the man who held him, who stroked the fuzzy halo of honey-colored hair and murmured softly, little darlin. Alma’s first-born was swaddled in an exquisite blanket, the finest that Riverton’s Little Treasures Babywear had to offer, and the look on her face when Ennis had almost shyly handed it to her had been worth every dollar.
“You girls never had much…”
“Oh, Daddy, we had parents who loved us, even if….well, you know.” Then Alma had hugged and kissed him, picked her son up out of his cradle and handed him, now wrapped in the precious gift, to her beloved daddy. And there he’d stayed for an hour and a half, slipping in and out of sleep, wrapping his tiny fist around Ennis’s little finger, snuffling and squawking now and then when Ennis kissed him and whispered into his sweet, chubby neck, until finally a soaking nappy and an empty tummy caused him to be reluctantly handed back to his mother.
The phone rang. Kurt answered it. “Your lift. Says she’ll be here in fifteen.” Alma looked up from her suckling baby and raised an eyebrow.
“Does your…friend want to come in for a while?”
“She’s not that sort of friend. She’s…” He paused, frowned. “She’s just a good friend. Uh, your momma and Jennie coming?”
“This evening. They’re all coming over, bringing dinner. You could stay if you want?”
Ennis shook his head. “No, no, I…uh. Just give Jennie a big hug from me and tell your momma….tell her thank you…tell her I’m proud.”
Minna’s car barely made the last five miles to Ennis’s trailer. The lights flickered, the engine wavered uncertainly, and as they turned in through the gate, everything came to an abrupt and decisive halt.
“Electrics,” declared Ennis, “too late to do nothin now.” He offered her his bed for the night but she declined, saying he was her patient and his knee wasn’t going to be helped by curling up in the easy chair. They’d already bought some less-than-healthy food on the way home so spun the evening out with beer and talk until Minna declared she’d had enough and asked for something to wrap herself up in.
“Blanket, top a the closet.” He moved to stand up but she waved him down and opened the little closet behind the bed. The spare blanket had been a warm, colourful present from the girls a couple of cold Christmases previously, and Minna hugged it to her as she turned to close the door. Ennis swirled the dregs of his beer then drained the bottle; there was nothing to see beyond an old jacket on a nail and an innocuous postcard.
“Beautiful photo. Brokeback Mountain, isn’t it? I went there once. Felt like I owned the world, way above everything. You must have been there, I guess.”
He nodded, felt a small glow of relief that his heart hadn’t hammered against his ribs at the sound of the name. “Yeah, I been there. Been right through the mountains over the years. Well, I’m ready to hit the hay too.” After Minna had wrapped herself in the blanket and wished him Goodnight Grandad, Ennis turned off the lamp near the bed and they settled down. Within a few minutes the sound of soft steady breathing drifted across to him but he lay awake for a long time, gazing up through the darkness, his mind a whirl of joy and memories, thoughts of a sweet baby and a sweet man.
* * *
And he is with Jack again, the pair of them wrestling on green velvet grass, the mountain rising up before them into endless blue heavens, their guardian and judge. Jack laughs up at him, pulls his head down so their hot, eager mouths come together in a fierce kiss. Then he twists in Ennis’s arms, his tousled hair dark against the long pale arch of his back. Ennis strokes him hard, runs his hands over the tight familiar muscles of his bull-rider’s arse, feels Jack’s sudden quiver as he thrusts forward, hears the gasp of pleasure, the rhythmic groans as their bodies join in a rough, rapturous dance. He moans, gasps, feeling the start of his climactic rush, but instead of longed-for fulfilment, suddenly he is being dragged away, his moans becoming those of an animal in pain as he tries desperately to hold on...
…but now a hand is softly stroking his hair, lips brush his cheek, a gentle voice whispers, “Shh, my darling, shh, it’s alright, go back to sleep, back to your Jack. He’s waiting, darling, Jack is waiting for you.” And he sighs, relaxes, and is once again falling, sinking back into the arms of his beloved, if only in dreams.
* * *
“Okay, give her some gas.” The car purred into obliging life and Ennis carefully dropped down the hood. “That should get you where you’re going.”
Minna slid out of the driver’s seat. There was an unfamiliar awkwardness between them. “Actually, I came yesterday to tell you I’m moving on. Other people to look after. I should get you to write me a reference. I reckon you’re one of my success stories.” She patted his ribs, ran her hands over the satisfying new layer of healthy flesh and muscle, didn’t pull back. There was a brief moment when their eyes met then they both stepped forward into the embrace, squeezing hard, both clinging briefly to something they knew had reached its end. He tipped up her chin and kissed her, a sweet, gentle kiss that had warmth but not passion, love but not desire. Tears mingled on their cheeks.
As they moved apart, Minna spoke, her voice barely a whisper. “You still have so much love to give and get, Ennis. Don’t throw it away. And remember this - whenever you need help, you’ll always find it.” She got back in the car, rubbed her hand across her eyes and smiled. “And put those shirts back where they belong.”
It took Ennis a fortnight to find the wallet down the back of his easy chair, thin, good leather, tooled with symbols he thought might be Indian. Inside was about $50 in small notes and Minna’s ID badge. The next time he was in town he called the Riverton Memorial Hospital and asked for the extension number on the badge. It didn’t exist. He asked for the Home Care department. The what? said the switchboard woman. He gave Minna’s name and explained the situation. She advised him to check for missing valuables and contact the police. He didn’t bother, but sat for a long while in his pickup, turning the wallet over and over, occasionally touching it to his mouth. Searching further to see if there was an address written anywhere - and knowing somehow that there wouldn’t be - he noticed a deep, narrow slit cut into the leather and inside it the shafts of two feathers. When he pulled them out, a shock of recognition hit him - one was the tail feather of an eagle, but the other was unknown to him, soft and white, gracefully curved, from no bird he remembered.
Back at home Ennis placed the wallet up in his closet but the two feathers, for reasons he couldn’t quite understand, he tucked for safekeeping deep into the pocket of Jack’s old blue shirt.