Gift of Exile Chapter 23
Sorry about the long wait for this chapter! This and Chapter 24 center around the progress of Ennis' and David's relationship. Ennis will move into still more uncharted territory after that, and hopefully these chapters won't take as long as this one.
This and Chapter 24 center around the progress of Ennis' and David's relationship. Ennis will move into still more uncharted territory after that, and hopefully these chapters won't take as long as this one.
For pictures of the Park Point trail, see http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php?topic=3507.msg370041#msg370041More pictures can be found at http://www.duluthbudgeteer.com/photography/includes/gallery.cfm?id=29&forumcomm_check_return
Source: Fanfiction based on Brokeback Mountain, slightly more influenced by the film than the short story.
Rating: mostly NC 17, some slash; a metaphysical subplot, which may bother some readers.
Synopsis: At Alma Junior’s wedding, Ennis discovers that while Jack may be dead, he isn’t gone or even very far away. Over the next year Jack stays in contact with Ennis and encourages him to rebuild his life, with the two of them even sharing a wedding night when Ennis returns to Brokeback to carry out Jack’s wishes. After some drastic changes in his circumstances Ennis accepts and offer of employment far from Wyoming and with Jack still close by, takes one step at a time to adjust to a completely new world. This is an "Ennis moves on" story but with Jack as a living presence in Ennis' life.
Disclaimer: Ennis, Jack, all the other characters appearing in Brokeback Mountain and its storyline are the creations and property of Annie Proulx, and of Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana who authored the screenplay. I am deriving no income from this work.
Author’s Notes: I have made no effort to imitate Annie Proulx's style; her style is her own. "Dialect" passages are not intended to be dialect as such, but standard American colloquial pronunciation. Some Southern idioms are also used. This is a very first fiction attempt so is more than a little autobiographical.
The weather turned still warmer over the next few weeks, and the days got even longer. At work, Ennis was spending more time driving to and from the rented storage building and, occasionally, delivering larger items to customers, and for awhile, the reading glasses were helpful in identifying the spidery lines and miniature print on a city map. But he’d always had a good sense of direction, and learned the layout of the city quickly.
Duluth was unlike any city he had imagined, or could have imagined. Instead of radiating out from a central, oldest point it meandered along the Lake for miles, venturing inland and up a 600-foot slope that was steep enough for that part of the city to look, from a distance, like the city was fastened to the hillside by invisible hooks. Being long accustomed to driving on mountain roads served him well in this place, with no mountains but with startlingly steep grades and many of the city streets laid out on a rough grid, marching up the slope with true Lutheran determination.
Nature was not pushed flat to the ground and built over, as it seemed to be in all the towns Ennis had seen; but rather the city was stitched and woven into it. Most of the buildings he saw had the spare look as the houses in David’s neighborhood but some of the older buildings, many built from the gray-black basalt that lay under the city, had high narrow walls with windows to match, spires that reminded him of church steeples and parapets that looked like the ramparts of fortresses. At this time of year, the severity of the man-made buildings threw Nature’s local enthusiasm for color into sharp relief, like brilliant jewels and delicately colored flowers displayed against a black wall.
One morning he’d been surprised to discover David working at his desk instead of walking up the road and back as was his usual routine. "Got to thinking, you’ve only been here not quite a month and I hadn’t seen much more of what’s around here than you have," he’d explained. "Useta love gettin out in the woods when I was young, now you got me interested in doin that again." Since that morning, Ennis’ sunrise trips down to the beach had been bookended by short walks with David after work.
It had rained later that day so they started on one of David’s days off, with the park at the end of the sandspit that Ennis had visited the day he’d driven far down the spit in Maggie’s car. It was a sunny day with the Lake tinted dark turquoise and the shoreline of the city clearly visible across the water, but much further away than it was at the beach house.
The long trail, meandering along the shoreline here and through a remnant of an ancient forest there, was in sharp contrast to the allotted strips of beach that the houses in David’s neighborhood shared; with the only signs of human activity being a few long-abandoned shacks and cabins and a crumbling stone tower that turned out to be the ruins of a lighthouse. The trail was far longer than they’d expected and they lost track of time as they explored, climbing over rocks at the water’s edge as they headed back toward the car. Ennis was in better shape than David but they were both sweating when they finally took a break after following the track over a sand dune, heading for a small copse of trees that offered a windbreak.
"They must be tryin to kill ya," David announced, half out of breath. "why else ‘d they route a trail over a sand dune? It’s like climbin up a mountain with old tires tied to your ankles." "You’re outta shape, Doc," Ennis answered, though he was a little winded too. "I didn’t see that much a this trail when I came down here before."
"You swim here the other day?" David asked. They were relaxing on a slight rise facing the water, leaning back and stretching out their legs to loosen muscles that were tense after climbing over the sand; and Ennis watched a gust of wind blowing a strand of hair across David’s face. It was the best distraction at the moment from what he was feeling as a result of their ankles and feet touching. "Nope, just looked around," he answered, having decided previously not to mention an odd moment on his brief exploration of the grassland area behind the beach.
It had been a seconds-long glimpse after a slight movement in the brush attracted his attention. He’d caught a glimpse of the prehensile-like tail and the small, triangular ears typical of cats, though from what little he could see he’d guessed it was much larger than an ordinary house cat but definitely smaller than the few mountain lions he’d seen. The animal vanished back through the brush toward the Lake and he might not even have remembered it later, if he hadn’t also seen a brief glimmer of a gold-brown metallic color from a stray shaft of sunlight that brushed against the animal for a few seconds. It had been overcast that day, with the Lake a brooding dark gray at the moment; but hardly dark enough to see a nighttime reflection from the animal’s eyes, so he’d guessed that the other beach visitor had been an oversized neighborhood cat with some kind of copper tag. He wasn’t sure why, but it had been a little disturbing and he’d left right after that.
Only a few days later, at Maggie’s request, he’d spent an hour turning over the recently thawed soil and pulling up winter-shriveled plants from the small garden space near the lower deck. It was somewhat hotter work than he’d anticipated and when the task was done he’d walked down to the beach, pulled off the lace-up shoes he’d already discovered were easier for walking on sand than boots, and plunged into the water. Its iciness had immediately assaulted him, knocking his breath out for a moment; but that wasn’t enough to deter a man who’d spent his life working outdoors in a harsh climate and he was soon able to ignore it enough to dive underwater again and again, fascinated by the water’s utter clarity. In the underwater silence it was like being suspended in another world whose atmosphere consisted of liquid, frozen diamonds.
By the time he’d reached the back door of the house, his soaked cotton shirt and jeans seemed permanently stuck to his skin and he couldn’t get upstairs to his bathroom and a hot shower fast enough. At about the time that the steam from the hot water had filled up the shower stall David came home and Ennis heard his voice, clearly annoyed, asking "what’s all this water an’ sand on the floor?" He brought down a few towels in addition to his wet clothes, mopping up the floor after hanging the shirt and jeans over the deck. "Sorry about that, Doc," he told David. "I just got real cold swimmin, had ta take a hot shower."
"You went swimmin in that? No wonder you were freezing. All those wet clothes stuck to ya."
Ennis shrugged as he draped the now wet towel next to the clothes. "Didn’t have nothin else ta swim in, never have. My and my brother, there was a creek we useta try an get to in summer. And then later, me and Jack’d swim on some’ve our trips. This one lake we camped at, it had a cliff you could jump off of, musta been 20, 30 feet up. But we never wore nothin in the water, never needed to. An here…."
"…. yeah, wouldn’t go over too big with the neighbors," David finished. "Or maybe they’d like it too much, and there’d be just as much trouble. Come back here." After seemingly moving half the contents of the closet, David brought out a wooden crate with a huge label reading PEACHES RECORDS on the side, and set it at the end of the hall by the door. "Just dry off here when you’ve been in the water," he advised, dropping a pile of towels onto the crate, "and use the shower in my bathroom." Later that evening, he gave Ennis an old tee shirt and a well-worn pair of jeans with the legs cut off just above the knee. "They’re kinda beat up, had holes worn in the knees so I hadn’t worn ‘em in awhile," he said. "But they’ll keep ya from gettin arrested and they won’t stick to your legs when they’re wet." At first Ennis put the cutoffs and tee shirt away and didn’t use them, as the unfamiliar exposure of both his arms and lower legs, even when he was alone on the beach, made him feel like he’d wandered outdoors in his underwear, but the Lake and its crystalline water had hooked an attraction into him that became steadily more enticing as the weather got milder.
"You live right here on the Lake - don’t you ever go in the water?" he asked David now. Having leisure time had been as unsettling a change for him as anything he’d encountered so far but he understood that in some way, this was part of the task of rebuilding Jack had urged him to embrace. He found himself looking forward to whatever small discoveries the next day would bring, something he’d previously known only during the times he’d secretly carved out of his life for his and Jack’s fishless fishing trips. Curiosity about the new and unfamiliar was something that had disappeared from his life with the end of his childhood, replaced by the alertness of one always watchful for predators. Now his growing curiosity about David surprised him, though his steadily growing attraction to the other man did not. The automatic, breath-catching sense of danger and the inner urge to stamp such feelings down out of view was still there; but it had somehow shrunk from an inner gut-punch to a less disabling, though joltingly painful, poke in the ribs.
"Too cold for me most places," David answered. "This climate, it isn’t as big a change for you as it was for me. My first winter here, good God, I thought I’d died and gone to Antarctica. But when I was growin’ up - yeah, summers we spent a lot of time in the water. Anything you c’d do to cool off. Once or twice we went down to Panama City in Florida, people useta call that whole stretch ‘o coast the Redneck Riviera, still do I guess." He paused and a wry, half-amused smile crossed his face. "And then there was Sun Valley."
He rummaged in one of his pockets and pulled out a joint, an occasional indulgence that had survived his giving up smoking a few years before. Ennis had already adjusted to taking cigarettes and lighter to the deck or sitting near an open window: "we’ll figure out something else in the winter", David had told him, and Ennis hadn’t replied to that. He still had a return ticket to Casper in late August, although his mind moved uneasily away from imagining another winter like the last two. Accustomed to David’s often rambling speech by this time, he now handed him a lighter and waited.
David sent a long plume of smoke toward the Lake. "For a few weeks a couple of summers - I was about 12, 13 - my folks’d send me and Dean up near Augusta to visit our aunt and uncle and cousin, that was my aunt Carol, and Charlene, you met them at the wedding. Not the most excitin’ place in the world to visit, but there was a place called Sun Valley where we all useta go at least a few days a week. Sounds like the kinda place travel magazines write about but it wasn’t really anything you’d go outa your way for -- just a dredged-out lake, beach they’d built with sand they’d trucked in from someplace, concession stand, arcade with plenty of pinball machines. It was a good place to spend a day doin’ nothing in particular if that’s what you wanted to do.
"I’d hang out with a group of guys about my age. It was better ‘n’ hangin’ out with Dean or Charlene, but those summers, right about that time, I started feelin’ like I was different from ‘em some way. It was the same way with the other guys in school. I wasn’t quite one ‘o the class nerds, didn’t get picked on, but that mighta been because I wasn’t around much after school or weekends, worked at my Dad’s store a lot. Anyway, one day at Sun Valley, one of ‘em came up all excited, told us he’d found a little knothole in the wall behind the girls’ dressing room."
"You spied on ‘em gettin nekkid?" Ennis laughed a little. "Did ya get caught?"
"Yeah, but not before we got a good look. ‘You c’n see everything,’ the guy that found the peephole kept telling us. Somebody else said ‘don’t worry, I c’n handle whatever comes up.’ A few of the guys got a hard-on just thinkin’ about it before we even got there - we called it a ‘woody’ back then.
"Not that it was any kinda peep show, really. What I kept thinkin’ about when it came my turn was that some o’ these girls, their mamas musta taught ‘em to get undressed without anybody seein’ em naked. Pullin’ off and puttin’ on stuff underneath their skirts, towels draped around em, things like that, I wondered if some of em ever even saw themselves with no clothes on. There was still plenty to see, sure, a few were even bare-assed naked, didn’t do much for me, but the other guys, they were goin crazy. By that time, all of us were standin’ up straight, and o’ course, all of us were wearin swimming trunks so there wasn’t much to guess at, and that got me hotter ‘n’ I’d ever been. I got damn close to shootin’ off right there. Can’t say it was a complete surprise….
"We were all laughin’, shovin’ and punchin’ each other, so we didn’t see my Uncle Steve come around the side o’ the building till he was right there. ‘Havin’ a good time, boys?’ was all he said but that was enough to make the lot of ‘em disappear like somebody’d vaporized ‘em. And of course, I had to stay - what else was I gonna do, put my jeans ‘n’ shirt back on and hitchhike outta town? I remember thinkin aw shit, am I gonna catch it but it wasn’t anything like I’d of thought.
"My Uncle Steve - well, I’ll put it this way, he wasn’t the kind of uncle who dresses up as Santa Claus at Christmastime. He was a military man, with two capital M’s. Went to school at The Citadel in Charleston - that’s a very big deal in Southern families -- saw a lot of action in World War II and went back as an officer during Korea, I c’n remember him coming home when I was about five or so. He didn’t exactly make us stand at attention when he talked to us, but you pretty much got the message that you’d better listen and you’d better not slouch.
" ‘So Dave,’ he said, ‘you boys were gettin a sneak preview were you?’ "Yes sir, I guess we were,’ I said, what else could I say?
" ‘Didja like what you were lookin at, Dave?’ I didn’t know what he was gettin at but I figured he’d already seen us, best to just bring it right out. So I said was ‘yes sir, I did. One o’ the guys found that knothole an’ we just thought we’d have a look at the girls.’
"He just kept starin' at me, musta been just ten seconds or so but it felt like forever. ‘Yeah, I stood ‘n’ watched awhile too,’ he said finally. ‘And those other boys were havin’ a good time peekin’ at the girls. But you were havin’ a good time watchin’ them. Weren’t you?’ Even if I hadn’t been scared shitless, I couldnta said a word, I was that bowled over."
Ennis was stunned. "Damn. What’d he do to ya?"
"Didn’t do anything, but I got an earful. ‘You’re lucky those other boys didn’t notice where you were lookin,’ he said. ‘Most other people -- they’re not gonna understand and you gotta learn to be careful. You c’n get hurt real bad if you don’t. So get useta scopin’ out other people, figure out as quick as you can whether they’re gonna mind their own business or not. Most o’ the time, they’re not.’ "
He sighed and shook his head. "Uncle Steve never mentioned it again, and I know damn well he never told anybody. One of the other guys asked me what happened, all I told him was my uncle gave me hell but I wasn’t sorry we did it. And I was just 13, no way to ever bring it up with my uncle, but since then…. I’ve wondered a lot how things were with him. Right before he let me go, he said something I never forgot - ‘men like us,’ he said, ‘we gotta be tough and we gotta be smart.’ That was the first time anybody ever called me a man…. He woulda known all about bein tough in that way, I can’t imagine bein gay and in the military in those days…. Anything like that happen to you growin up?"
Ennis thought of that morning when he’d been nine and his father’s glittering-eyed look and oddly flushed face: you an’ K.E. start on the chores later, got somethin’ you need ta see… "No way," he said finally. My dad, he had a hard hand on him - me ‘n’ my brother ‘n’ sister, my mom too, we always knew there was trouble comin’ when he’d say something like ‘I don’t think you heard too good.’ If he’d caught me peekin’ at girls, let alone boys…" The memory of Earl’s mutilated body flickered through his mind, along with a near-recollection about something else in the house that morning that was whisked away before it could even take form. "Well, there was two guys had a ranch together near Sage," he finally blurted out, "one of ‘em got murdered one night. It was pretty bad."
David looked troubled but not, Ennis noticed, unbelieving. "Damn…. They ever catch who did it?"
"I don’t think so. Fact is, I don’t think anybody tried too hard. A couple a the kids at school, they was jokin about it, laughin about it like my Dad did."
David shifted his weight slightly to sit a little closer. "Guess I’ve been luckier ‘n’ you, but that’s one of the things my uncle was warnin me about. Didn’t take me long to learn that. I useta hear jokes about beatin up fags when I was growin up and it was like they were talkin about getting rid of a rat they’d found in the pantry. Plenty o’ good ole boys around where I grew up that woulda done something like that."
"Yeah, on Saturday afternoon and sat in church on Sunday," Ennis said bitterly, remembering Mrs. Twist’s guesses at Jack’s killers’ activities and their very ordinariness that made the odor of corruption all the more intense.
"And just knew they were in good standin with the Lord," David rejoined. "So long as nobody’d seen ‘em buyin beer at a store in the next county the week before."
"With the girlfriend the wife don’t know about waitin in the car." Ennis jumped as the last of the joint, burned down to the size of a pencil eraser, scorched his fingers and he flicked it away into the sand. "So you kept bein - queer - a secret. Huh?"
"Had to for a long time. Comin' out in Macon, Georgia in the 1960s -- no way could ya do that. And in college, things changed a lot around the time I was there, but mostly the last year or so. But later I spent a lotta time in Atlanta and I was out there, gay neighborhoods were startin up in cities by that time, even Southern cities. And I let my family know too, though my Daddy'd died by that time. Other people, I pretty much let 'em know whenever it was it came up. A couple of folks here -" he leaned toward Ennis with a just-between-us smile that reminded Ennis for a moment of their first conversation at Alma Junior's wedding - "they found out the first year or so, when they tried to fix me up with blind dates."
The conversation had Ennis feeling increasingly jumpy, as if he'd drunk too much coffee or was watching someone walk along the edge of a very high cliff. He brushed the sand off his shoes and stood up, and they headed back toward the car. A thin cloud layer had moved in and the wind had picked up slightly. The Lake, now dark grey, glimmered wetly here and there where a few stray strands of sunlight reached it.
Ennis was too curious to not ask. "Aren't you ever afraid of getting -- beat up, or worse? Don’t that ever worry ya?"
"Sure bro," David answered. "But when it comes to bein' scared, there's a lot more'n that to choose from."
"Bro?" Though Ennis had taken to calling David "Doc" occasionally, David had never yet called him by anything but his given name.
David looked a little self-conscious but a little expectant at the same time. "Short for ‘brother’, ", he answered. "Doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘Bubba’, now. That’d never suit you."
Ennis gave him what David was coming to know as his smile look. "Hm. Sorta like ‘bud.’ "
"Something like that."
PREVIOUS CHAPTERS:
Chapter 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/392.html
Chapter 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/523.html
Chapter 3: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1066.html
Chapter 4: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1485.html
Chapter 5: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1704.html
Chapter 6: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2038.html
Chapter 7: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2358.html
Chapter 8: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2635.html
Chapter 9: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2947.html
Chapter 10: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3130.html
Chapter 11: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3356.html
Chapter 12: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3655.html
Chapter 13: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3934.html
Chapter 14: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4154.html
Chapter 15: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4591.html
Chapter 16: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4685.html
Chapter 17: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5094.html
Chapter 18: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5140.html
Chapter 19: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5546.html
Chapter 20: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6249.html
Chapter 21: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6434.html
Chapter 22: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6843.html