(no subject)
THE OUTLAND
Genre: AU
Rating: NC-17 if you wait long enough
Feedback: Any and all is welcome
Disclaimer: These are Annie Proulx's brilliant original characters and her story, and I have treated it and them (and her) with as much respect as I can muster.
This story is for Canstandit.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: In this chapter, the fact that Jack is short and stocky becomes more important, so any fantasies about Jake might have to be rearranged a little.
THE OUTLAND, CHAPTER 5
John C. Twist had an old man's prostate. He called it waterworks troubles and refused to see a doctor about it, figuring that interrupted sleep and frustrating dribbles at the toilet were acceptable prices to pay in order to avoid having a pair of gloved fingers shoved up his backside. As a consequence, this midwinter night he found himself once again standing in his pyjamas in a freezing cold bathroom, uncooperative dick in hand. He leaned sideways a little and peered through the window; across the back yard, the new trailer's roof was just visible beyond a double row of stunted fruit trees. He hadn't been inside, hadn't been invited, but had worked out which windows went with which rooms. The big window at the south end was the main bedroom, and on many evenings it spilled light over the adjacent field long after the Twists had retired to bed.
One morning, with malice aforethought, he'd hammered on the trailer door and even thought of trying the handle, but had heard the sound of a lock being released and there had been Ennis, tucking shirt into jeans then scratching his head and yawning. Ennis had artlessly shifted to one side as Twist delivered his inconsequential message, so the old bastard got a clear view down the short hallway into the single bedroom where a rumpled-sheet bed stood empty. If he'd left his bathroom observation point and gone down there this very minute, the bed would still be as he had seen it, unoccupied since Day One.
~~~
Two figures made a single curve in the bed. They had lain, tall curled around short, for a quarter hour or more, one dropping sated and content into sleep, the other tormented by a whirl of unresolved doubts.
"Jack?"
"Mmmmm?"
"You awake?"
"Uh-huh."
"Tell me ... tell me about them, about the others, the other men."
A slight stiffening in the bed. "You don't want a know."
"No, but I need to know."
"Do we have ta do it now? Like this?"
"Yes, like this."
Jack sighed. "You won't like it." No response. "Okay, what d'ya want a know?"
"All of it. From Brokeback."
"Not before?" Jack's voice softened; he didn't want to cause any more pain than he knew he was bound to. 'You wasn't my first."
Ennis's low grumble reverberated in the back of Jack's head. He tried to squirm around but Ennis held him tight. "Talk."
So Jack began, trying not to feel any guilt as he recounted a string of episodes that might have appeared pathetically meagre if they had not been set beside those of the man who held him captive. He told of the high school fumblings, the locker-room uncertainties, the girls who were willing to try a few things down by the creek, the time he got over-heated when Dave Henshaw fucked that Ostler slut in front of his very eyes, how he couldn't tear his gaze from that slick, shiny cock, and knew in his guts it was that he wanted and not the dark place into which it was thrust.
He recalled the rodeos fading into velvet evening, when occasional out-of-towners would be happy enough to share their whiskey and smokes, and maybe even a little cash, for the pleasure of having a cute local boy stick his hand in their flies and jerk them off. And how one or two of them went down on their knees for him, and he told himself, as their heads bobbed at his crotch, that it was okay, that this was just what boys did, that he'd grow up and get married and the fun would be finished.
Then the first year on Brokeback, with the hungry-looking man who said how his wife had left him, and called Jack a good boy as they lay in the tent, and petted and caressed him, and got on all fours one night, begging to be fucked. And Jack had obliged him.
"You mean you ---?" A tightened throat pushed Ennis's voice high.
"Yeah, that's right. Me. I fucked him." Jack stroked the arm that lay snug across his chest. "And the next year, well, I knew it was all over for me. But when I didn't see you again ... fuck, Ennis, if you'd a come back that next year, no Alma, no kids, I'd a never touched another man my whole life. Yeah, but you didn't and I did. Fucked my way through a whole year and more in Texas, anyone that would have me. You're goin a be starvin and broke and lonely, may as well enjoy yourself whatever way you can." He sniggered a little but it was a humorless sound. "Not just men, neither. If they think you're a winner, girls are round you like flies round shit. Happened once or twice but not enough to stop me bein known, you know what I'm sayin? Got beaten up a coupla times. Met Lureen, got married ---"
"Why? Why her?"
"She was safe, she was loaded." Jack sucked in air, felt his bottom lip quiver, his jaw tighten. "She wanted me." He sensed more than heard the tiny gasp that escaped Ennis's mouth. That had been a low blow, but he'd only spoken the truth. "Tried to be good, tried to be a proper husband and father, tried to be faithful, but I couldn't do it for Lureen. Did it for you though. Believe me, I swore off men from the moment we got back together. Until ... until ... you got divorced. Got that phone call, I thought, hell, you know what I thought. Drove a thousand miles to tell you. After that ..."
He stopped talking, praying Ennis would let him off the hook, but instead got a nudge and a rough, "Go on."
"Okay, but hold on tight, darlin, this is goin a hurt."
So finally it came out, the trips to Mexico, the narrow-hipped boys whose raven hair never felt like Ennis's when he clutched it in his fingers, whose bodies never moved in perfect rhythm with his own as Ennis's did, whose scent didn't fill his head with dizzying desire. And later the business trips where strangers would look at each other a certain way and end up in a motel somewhere, or if that failed, Jack'd take a stroll down some recommended street, or to some recommended bar, or just sit around some recommended hotel lobby; the end was always the same. And the friends he gathered around Childress, just a handful of local men whose addresses he kept in his head.
And some of these tales he actually told, and others were as phantasms in his mind, and maybe Ennis heard the words and maybe he missed some, and maybe he already knew them heart to heart, the things he'd always known and hadn't wanted to know.
With a slow inevitability Jack's confession reached the final painful detail. "Then I met him."
"You can say his name." Ennis's voice was soft, level, unreadable.
"Nothin to say, really, only that the more I was with him, the more I knew I couldn't go on with you the way we were. He was givin me what you were, a few days' fuckin and friendship here and there, 'cept with him it was just down the road whenever I needed it and it didn't tear me up to say goodbye each time, and I didn't spend ever wakin hour in between feelin like total shit for not bein with him." Jack let out a long sigh. "And that's it, the story of my nuts in a nutshell."
He waited for a response but all he heard was the pounding of his own blood in his ears and the soughing of the wind around the trailer. After an eternity of waiting, Ennis broke the silence.
"You still awake?"
"Nope, I'm talkin in my sleep."
"This ... this Randall feller, was he good to you?"
"Yeah, I guess so. He kept me goin."
"And was he ... did he have a wife?"
"Yep. Lively little gal. Don't think she knew a thing."
"Mmmmm." Ennis grumbled, stirred the words around in his chest, then had another go at the question he was hedging around. "So was he, uh, like you?"
"Yes, Ennis," said Jack in the patient voice of a father explaining something to a child, "he was a queer. He is a queer, just like me, although he'd probably say he was gay, big city boy and all that." Jack smiled to himself; Ennis thought Casper was too big.
"So it wasn't just you ... he had others? Before you?"
"Ah, darlin, it's what you want that matters, not what you do."
"It ain't right, Jack. Ain't supposed to be that way."
Abruptly he released Jack, leaned over and turned on a light, its gas igniting with a gentle pop. Pulling back the bedding, he crouched over Jack. The chill air hit Jack's skin like ice water; he lay unmoving, afraid of where this was all headed. Ennis eased Jack over onto his belly then slowly began touching him. Jack couldn't see his face but knew from his hands that this wasn't about sex. Those rough hands smoothed over his shoulders, down his flanks to the girlish waist, followed the flare of his hips and flowed across his sturdy thighs. They cupped and stroked his buttocks, thumbs sliding down the crack, parting it, pausing. Jack felt a finger trace the circle of his hole again and again, move away then return, wet with spit, to dip just a little inside, to stroke, and to sense each ridge, the flicker of muscle, the familiar heat.
Then he felt himself rolled carefully onto his back. He raised his head and watch fascinated as Ennis, kneeling between his thighs, continued the slow examination, stubbled chin, Adam's apple, the strong line of thick, dark hair that flowed like a river down chest and belly and on to join the wild foam between his legs. Ennis cupped Jack's balls, held them as if weighing them, caressed the delicate folds, the perfect little seam that sealed off for ever the unfathomable emptiness of women. He lifted and cradled the quiescent cock, ran his hand up and back, over every part, his expression studied and awed.
"Beautiful." The word was no more than a faint rearrangement of air.
Jack couldn't hold out any longer; a violent shudder hit him.
"I'm fuckin freezin, Ennis!"
Ennis glanced up at him, bent forward and placed a solemn and sacred kiss on Jack's cock, then lay back down, pulled up the duvet and rubbed Jack's cold flesh until his shivering ceased.
"I don't understand it," he murmured into Jack's hair.
"What is there to understand? Most men love women. Some men love men. That's all there is. It ain't wrong, it ain't right, it just is." Jack's lips brushed gently against Ennis's. "Ennis, I ---"
"Jack."
"Yeah?"
"I ... I ... shit, I dunno."
"It's alright, darlin, it's alright. That's enough talkin for one night, hey?" Jack reached up, switched off the light and snuggled back down into Ennis's arms. Enough talking for one night. Yes, this man of his was never any good with words. He didn't need to be.
~~~
The sliver of pale light had caught old Twist's eye as he returned to the bathroom once more. No time to be awake if you didn't need to be. No wonder that useless son of his took so many naps during the day. Never got anything right. Didn't know the meaning of hard work. Thank God this Ennis had turned out to be a halfway decent hand.
Goddamn waterworks! Oh for the days when he could just pull it out and let forth a hot, hosing stream! As if in response, urine began to flow. His face slid into a smirk but a flash of memory suddenly froze his thoughts and dried up his piss; not an old memory, just from a month or two back, when he'd walked out of the bathroom, still buttoning up, and had nearly collided with Ennis carrying a jug of Jack's urine. Ennis had looked at Twist's hands, at the jug, then into his eyes with an expression of such murderous intent that Twist would have fired him on the spot if he hadn't been such a good, cheap worker. Never-the-less, his card was marked; no friend of Jack's could ever really be trusted.
Frustrated and unrelieved, he stomped back to bed, not caring if his grumbling woke up his wife. Within minutes he was asleep, snoring loudly, then a little while later the light blinked out in the trailer, and the dark night claimed Lightning Flat once more.
tbc
Genre: AU
Rating: NC-17 if you wait long enough
Feedback: Any and all is welcome
Disclaimer: These are Annie Proulx's brilliant original characters and her story, and I have treated it and them (and her) with as much respect as I can muster.
This story is for Canstandit.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: In this chapter, the fact that Jack is short and stocky becomes more important, so any fantasies about Jake might have to be rearranged a little.
THE OUTLAND, CHAPTER 5
John C. Twist had an old man's prostate. He called it waterworks troubles and refused to see a doctor about it, figuring that interrupted sleep and frustrating dribbles at the toilet were acceptable prices to pay in order to avoid having a pair of gloved fingers shoved up his backside. As a consequence, this midwinter night he found himself once again standing in his pyjamas in a freezing cold bathroom, uncooperative dick in hand. He leaned sideways a little and peered through the window; across the back yard, the new trailer's roof was just visible beyond a double row of stunted fruit trees. He hadn't been inside, hadn't been invited, but had worked out which windows went with which rooms. The big window at the south end was the main bedroom, and on many evenings it spilled light over the adjacent field long after the Twists had retired to bed.
One morning, with malice aforethought, he'd hammered on the trailer door and even thought of trying the handle, but had heard the sound of a lock being released and there had been Ennis, tucking shirt into jeans then scratching his head and yawning. Ennis had artlessly shifted to one side as Twist delivered his inconsequential message, so the old bastard got a clear view down the short hallway into the single bedroom where a rumpled-sheet bed stood empty. If he'd left his bathroom observation point and gone down there this very minute, the bed would still be as he had seen it, unoccupied since Day One.
~~~
Two figures made a single curve in the bed. They had lain, tall curled around short, for a quarter hour or more, one dropping sated and content into sleep, the other tormented by a whirl of unresolved doubts.
"Jack?"
"Mmmmm?"
"You awake?"
"Uh-huh."
"Tell me ... tell me about them, about the others, the other men."
A slight stiffening in the bed. "You don't want a know."
"No, but I need to know."
"Do we have ta do it now? Like this?"
"Yes, like this."
Jack sighed. "You won't like it." No response. "Okay, what d'ya want a know?"
"All of it. From Brokeback."
"Not before?" Jack's voice softened; he didn't want to cause any more pain than he knew he was bound to. 'You wasn't my first."
Ennis's low grumble reverberated in the back of Jack's head. He tried to squirm around but Ennis held him tight. "Talk."
So Jack began, trying not to feel any guilt as he recounted a string of episodes that might have appeared pathetically meagre if they had not been set beside those of the man who held him captive. He told of the high school fumblings, the locker-room uncertainties, the girls who were willing to try a few things down by the creek, the time he got over-heated when Dave Henshaw fucked that Ostler slut in front of his very eyes, how he couldn't tear his gaze from that slick, shiny cock, and knew in his guts it was that he wanted and not the dark place into which it was thrust.
He recalled the rodeos fading into velvet evening, when occasional out-of-towners would be happy enough to share their whiskey and smokes, and maybe even a little cash, for the pleasure of having a cute local boy stick his hand in their flies and jerk them off. And how one or two of them went down on their knees for him, and he told himself, as their heads bobbed at his crotch, that it was okay, that this was just what boys did, that he'd grow up and get married and the fun would be finished.
Then the first year on Brokeback, with the hungry-looking man who said how his wife had left him, and called Jack a good boy as they lay in the tent, and petted and caressed him, and got on all fours one night, begging to be fucked. And Jack had obliged him.
"You mean you ---?" A tightened throat pushed Ennis's voice high.
"Yeah, that's right. Me. I fucked him." Jack stroked the arm that lay snug across his chest. "And the next year, well, I knew it was all over for me. But when I didn't see you again ... fuck, Ennis, if you'd a come back that next year, no Alma, no kids, I'd a never touched another man my whole life. Yeah, but you didn't and I did. Fucked my way through a whole year and more in Texas, anyone that would have me. You're goin a be starvin and broke and lonely, may as well enjoy yourself whatever way you can." He sniggered a little but it was a humorless sound. "Not just men, neither. If they think you're a winner, girls are round you like flies round shit. Happened once or twice but not enough to stop me bein known, you know what I'm sayin? Got beaten up a coupla times. Met Lureen, got married ---"
"Why? Why her?"
"She was safe, she was loaded." Jack sucked in air, felt his bottom lip quiver, his jaw tighten. "She wanted me." He sensed more than heard the tiny gasp that escaped Ennis's mouth. That had been a low blow, but he'd only spoken the truth. "Tried to be good, tried to be a proper husband and father, tried to be faithful, but I couldn't do it for Lureen. Did it for you though. Believe me, I swore off men from the moment we got back together. Until ... until ... you got divorced. Got that phone call, I thought, hell, you know what I thought. Drove a thousand miles to tell you. After that ..."
He stopped talking, praying Ennis would let him off the hook, but instead got a nudge and a rough, "Go on."
"Okay, but hold on tight, darlin, this is goin a hurt."
So finally it came out, the trips to Mexico, the narrow-hipped boys whose raven hair never felt like Ennis's when he clutched it in his fingers, whose bodies never moved in perfect rhythm with his own as Ennis's did, whose scent didn't fill his head with dizzying desire. And later the business trips where strangers would look at each other a certain way and end up in a motel somewhere, or if that failed, Jack'd take a stroll down some recommended street, or to some recommended bar, or just sit around some recommended hotel lobby; the end was always the same. And the friends he gathered around Childress, just a handful of local men whose addresses he kept in his head.
And some of these tales he actually told, and others were as phantasms in his mind, and maybe Ennis heard the words and maybe he missed some, and maybe he already knew them heart to heart, the things he'd always known and hadn't wanted to know.
With a slow inevitability Jack's confession reached the final painful detail. "Then I met him."
"You can say his name." Ennis's voice was soft, level, unreadable.
"Nothin to say, really, only that the more I was with him, the more I knew I couldn't go on with you the way we were. He was givin me what you were, a few days' fuckin and friendship here and there, 'cept with him it was just down the road whenever I needed it and it didn't tear me up to say goodbye each time, and I didn't spend ever wakin hour in between feelin like total shit for not bein with him." Jack let out a long sigh. "And that's it, the story of my nuts in a nutshell."
He waited for a response but all he heard was the pounding of his own blood in his ears and the soughing of the wind around the trailer. After an eternity of waiting, Ennis broke the silence.
"You still awake?"
"Nope, I'm talkin in my sleep."
"This ... this Randall feller, was he good to you?"
"Yeah, I guess so. He kept me goin."
"And was he ... did he have a wife?"
"Yep. Lively little gal. Don't think she knew a thing."
"Mmmmm." Ennis grumbled, stirred the words around in his chest, then had another go at the question he was hedging around. "So was he, uh, like you?"
"Yes, Ennis," said Jack in the patient voice of a father explaining something to a child, "he was a queer. He is a queer, just like me, although he'd probably say he was gay, big city boy and all that." Jack smiled to himself; Ennis thought Casper was too big.
"So it wasn't just you ... he had others? Before you?"
"Ah, darlin, it's what you want that matters, not what you do."
"It ain't right, Jack. Ain't supposed to be that way."
Abruptly he released Jack, leaned over and turned on a light, its gas igniting with a gentle pop. Pulling back the bedding, he crouched over Jack. The chill air hit Jack's skin like ice water; he lay unmoving, afraid of where this was all headed. Ennis eased Jack over onto his belly then slowly began touching him. Jack couldn't see his face but knew from his hands that this wasn't about sex. Those rough hands smoothed over his shoulders, down his flanks to the girlish waist, followed the flare of his hips and flowed across his sturdy thighs. They cupped and stroked his buttocks, thumbs sliding down the crack, parting it, pausing. Jack felt a finger trace the circle of his hole again and again, move away then return, wet with spit, to dip just a little inside, to stroke, and to sense each ridge, the flicker of muscle, the familiar heat.
Then he felt himself rolled carefully onto his back. He raised his head and watch fascinated as Ennis, kneeling between his thighs, continued the slow examination, stubbled chin, Adam's apple, the strong line of thick, dark hair that flowed like a river down chest and belly and on to join the wild foam between his legs. Ennis cupped Jack's balls, held them as if weighing them, caressed the delicate folds, the perfect little seam that sealed off for ever the unfathomable emptiness of women. He lifted and cradled the quiescent cock, ran his hand up and back, over every part, his expression studied and awed.
"Beautiful." The word was no more than a faint rearrangement of air.
Jack couldn't hold out any longer; a violent shudder hit him.
"I'm fuckin freezin, Ennis!"
Ennis glanced up at him, bent forward and placed a solemn and sacred kiss on Jack's cock, then lay back down, pulled up the duvet and rubbed Jack's cold flesh until his shivering ceased.
"I don't understand it," he murmured into Jack's hair.
"What is there to understand? Most men love women. Some men love men. That's all there is. It ain't wrong, it ain't right, it just is." Jack's lips brushed gently against Ennis's. "Ennis, I ---"
"Jack."
"Yeah?"
"I ... I ... shit, I dunno."
"It's alright, darlin, it's alright. That's enough talkin for one night, hey?" Jack reached up, switched off the light and snuggled back down into Ennis's arms. Enough talking for one night. Yes, this man of his was never any good with words. He didn't need to be.
~~~
The sliver of pale light had caught old Twist's eye as he returned to the bathroom once more. No time to be awake if you didn't need to be. No wonder that useless son of his took so many naps during the day. Never got anything right. Didn't know the meaning of hard work. Thank God this Ennis had turned out to be a halfway decent hand.
Goddamn waterworks! Oh for the days when he could just pull it out and let forth a hot, hosing stream! As if in response, urine began to flow. His face slid into a smirk but a flash of memory suddenly froze his thoughts and dried up his piss; not an old memory, just from a month or two back, when he'd walked out of the bathroom, still buttoning up, and had nearly collided with Ennis carrying a jug of Jack's urine. Ennis had looked at Twist's hands, at the jug, then into his eyes with an expression of such murderous intent that Twist would have fired him on the spot if he hadn't been such a good, cheap worker. Never-the-less, his card was marked; no friend of Jack's could ever really be trusted.
Frustrated and unrelieved, he stomped back to bed, not caring if his grumbling woke up his wife. Within minutes he was asleep, snoring loudly, then a little while later the light blinked out in the trailer, and the dark night claimed Lightning Flat once more.
tbc