by Annie Proulx
ENNIS presses his face into the fabric and breathes in slowly through his mouth, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of JACK.
But there is no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain, of which nothing is left but what he now holds in his trembling hands.
INT: OUTSIDE LIGHTNING FLAT, WYOMING: TWIST HOMESTEAD: HOUSE: KITCHEN: DAY: 1982:
ENNIS is back downstairs, his hat in his hand, standing in the kitchen.
JACK’S MOTHER places the two shirts in a paper sack for ENNIS.
JOHN TWIST still sits at the table, stiff and angry as ever.
JOHN TWIST
Tell you what, we got a family plot and he’s goin’ in it.
ENNIS, resigned to this fact, nods at the old man as if he understands.
ENNIS
Yes sir.
JACK’S MOTHER hands him the sack with the two shirts.
JACK’S MOTHER
(sympathetic)
You come back and see us again.
ENNIS
(nods )
Ma’am. Thank you for this. ENNIS puts his hat on.
Leaves.
EXT: OUTSIDE LIGHTNING FLAT, WYOMING: TWIST HOMESTEAD: YARD: DAY: 1982:
ENNIS looks back at the house, up at the window to JACK’S room.
Turns, stands in the little yard a moment looking off, nothing between the lonely house and the far horizon.
EXT: OUTSIDE LIGHTNING FLAT, WYOMING: TWIST HOMESTEAD: DIRT DRIVEWAY: DAY: 1982:
ENNIS is in his pickup, bumping down the washboard road.
EXT: RIVERTON, WYOMING: DEL MAR TRAILER HOUSE: AFTERNOON: 1984:
The wind, as ever, blows.
ENNIS’S modest little trailer house, his battered pickup parked in front.
A new mailbox on the trailer house just to the right of the front door. ENNIS has a set of stick-on numbers in his hand. Peels the 1 off and precisely applies it, then the 7: 17.
Steps back, admires his work.
WE SEE a 1982 Chevy Camaro pull into his driveway behind his truck.
Engine cuts. ALMA JR. steps out of the Camaro and closes the door.
ENNIS smiles.
ALMA JR. walks up to her father.
ENNIS
Hey there, Junior.…
ALMA JR.
Hey Daddy.…
An awkward ENNIS gives his oldest daughter a hug. ALMA JR. returns her daddy’s embrace—she clearly loves him.
ALMA JR. (CONT’D)
Like the car?
ENNIS nods.
ENNIS
Is it yours?
ALMA JR.
It’s Kurt’s.
ENNIS
(confused)
Thought you was seein’ Troy.
ALMA JR.
Troy?
(rolls her eyes)
Daddy, that was two years ago,
A beat.
ENNIS
Troy still playin’ baseball?
ALMA JR.
Don’t know what he’s doin’. I’m seein’ Kurt now.
ENNIS
What’s this Kurt fella do?
ALMA JR.
Works out in the oil fields.
ENNIS
(nods) Roughneck.
(beat)
You’re nineteen, guess you can do whatever you want.
ENNIS opens the door to his trailer and holds it for ALMA JR. They enter the trailer. The door slams loudly.
INT: RIVERTON, WYOMING: DEL MAR TRAILER HOUSE: AFTERNOON: CONTINUOUS: 1984:
ALMA JR. sits on a ragged couch.
ENNIS stands and pours her a cup of coffee from a stained Mr. Coffee. WE HEAR wind blowing, rattling the trailer house.
ALMA JR. looks around the nearly empty trailer, an homage to plains-life minimalism: a TV sits on a plastic milk crate in front of a battered recliner, the only other furniture besides the chipped Formica table, two wobbly chairs, and a fridge and tiny stove.
ALMA JR.
(makes her sad)
Daddy, you need more furniture.
ENNIS fits the coffeepot back into the Mr. Coffee machine.
ENNIS
(looking around the empty trailer)
(MORE)
ENNIS (CONT’D)
If you don’t got nothin’, then you don’t need nothin’.
ENNIS sits down across from her.
ENNIS (CONT’D)
So what’s the occasion?
ALMA JR. blows on her coffee, something on her mind. This is hard for her.“
ALMA JR.
(apprehensive)
Me and Kurt…we’re getting married.
Looks at his oldest daughter.
ENNIS
How long you known this Kurt fella?
ALMA JR.
(relieved, talks faster)
About a year. Wedding’ll be June fifth at the Methodist Church. Jenny’s singing, and Monroe’s gonna cater the reception.
A beat.
ENNIS
This Kurt fella…does he love you?
ALMA JR. is startled—and touched—by the question.
ALMA JR.
Yes, Daddy. He loves me.
ENNIS nods, almost as if to himself.
ALMA JR. (CONT’D)
(pause)
Was hoping you’d be there, Daddy.
ENNIS
Supposed to be on a roundup over near the Tetons.…
Something sags a little in ALMA JR. Nods her head. Understands.
ENNIS looks across at his daughter. Sees her disappointment.
He stands. Goes to the fridge, opens it. Takes out a half-empty bottle of cheap white wine, a legacy of CASSIE.
ENNIS (CONT’D))
(smiles at his daughter)
You know what? I reckon they can find themselves another cowboy.
Takes two jelly glasses from the dry rack next to the sink, unscrews the bottle top, fills both.
ENNIS
(CONT’D) My little girl—is gettin’ married.
Hands her a glass of wine. Sits.
ENNIS (CONT’D)
(raising his glass) To Alma and Kurt.
ALMA JR. smiles, and clinks her glass with her daddy’s.
ENNIS smiles back at his luminous daughter. But his smile can’t hide his regret and longing, for the one thing that he can’t have. That he will never have.
EXT: RIVERTON, WYOMING: DEL MAR TRAILER HOUSE: AFTERNOON: FEW MINUTES LATER: 1984:
ENNIS stands outside.
ALMA JR., in Kurt’s Camaro, backs out and drives off, waving to her father as she goes.
ENNIS waves back, until she’s well down the road.
Turns.
Goes back inside his crumpled little trailer house.
INT: RIVERTON, WYOMING: DEL MAR TRAILER HOUSE: DAY: CONTINUOUS: 1984:
ENNIS, back inside now, notices that ALMA JR. has left her sweater hanging over her chair.
He picks it up, hurries back to the door, opens it.
Sees she’s long gone.
Folds the sweater. Goes to a little closet, opens the door. He places ALMA JR.’s sweater on the top shelf of the closet.
And there, on the back of the closet door, WE SEE THE SHIRTS, on a wire hangar suspended from a nail, and next to them, a postcard of Brokeback Mountain, tacked onto the door.
He has taken his shirt from inside of JACK’S, and has carefully tucked JACK’S shirt down inside his own.
He snaps the top button of one of the shirts.
Looks at the ensemble through a few stinging tears.
ENNIS
Jack, I swear.…
Stands there for a moment.
Then closes the closet door.
He looks out the window, at the great bleakness of the vast northern plains.…
THE END
Getting Movied
Annie Proulx
AS A STUDENT OF HISTORY AND A WRITER OF FICTION MY INTEREST HAS focused on social and economic change in rural communities—
Vermont, Newfoundland, Texas, Wyoming. I am something of a geographic determinist, believing that regional landscapes, climate and topography dictate local cultural traditions and kinds of work, and thereby the events on which my stories are built. Landscape is central to this rural fiction. I have been interested in the disappearance of dairy hill farms in New England, the collapsing fishing industry in Atlantic Canada and the slow fade of cattle ranching in the west.
Close Range contains nine stories, including “Brokeback Mountain,” ostensibly concerned with Wyoming landscape and making a living in hard, isolated livestock-raising communities dominated by white masculine values, but also holding subliminal fantasies. Most of the stories are loosely based on historical events, as the botched castration in “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water.” “Brokeback” was not connected to any one incident, but based on a coalescence of observations over many years, small things here and there.
Sometime in early 1997 the story took shape. One night in a bar upstate I had noticed an older ranch hand, maybe in his late sixties, obviously short on the world’s luxury goods. Although spruced up for Friday night his clothes were a little ragged, boots stained and worn. I had seen him around, working cows, helping with sheep, taking orders from a ranch manager. He was thin and lean, muscular in a stringy kind of way. He leaned against the back wall and his eyes were fastened not on the dozens of handsome and flashing women in the room but on the young cowboys playing pool. Maybe he was following the game, maybe he knew the players, maybe one was his son or nephew, but there was something in his expression, a kind of bitter longing, that made me wonder if he was country gay. Then I began to consider what it might have been like for him—not the real person against the wall, but for any ill-informed, confused, not-sure-of-what-he-was-feeling youth growing up in homophobic rural Wyoming. A few weeks later I listened to the vicious rant of an elderly bar-cafè owner who was incensed that two “homos” had come in the night before and ordered dinner. She said that if her bar regulars had been there (it was darts tournament night) things would have gone badly for them. “Brokeback” was constructed on the small but tight idea of a couple of home-grown country kids, opinions and self-knowledge shaped by the world around them, finding themselves in emotional waters of increasing depth. I wanted to develop the story through a kind of literary sostenente.
The early sixties seemed the right time period. The two characters had to have grown up on isolated hardscrabble ranches and were clearly homophobic themselves, especially the Ennis character. Both wanted to be cowboys, be part of the Great Western Myth, but it didn’t work out that way; Ennis never got to be more than a rough-cut ranch hand and Jack Twist chose rodeo as an expression of cowboy. Neither of them was ever a top hand, and they met herding sheep, animals most real cowpokes despise. Although they were not really cowboys (the word “cowboy” is often used derisively in the west by those who do ranch work), the urban critics dubbed it a tale of two gay cowboys. No. It is a story of destructive rural homophobia. Although there are many places in Wyoming where gay men did and do live together in harmony with the community, it should not be forgotten that a year after this story was published Matthew Shepard was tied to a buck fence outside the most enlightened town in the state, Laramie, home of the University of Wyoming. Note, too, the fact thatWyoming has the highest suicide rate in the country, and that the preponderance of those people who kill themselves are elderly single men.
In my mind isolation and altitude—the fictional Brokeback Mountain, a place both empowering and inimical—began to shape the story. The mountain had to force everything that happened to these two young men. I have many times heard Wyomingites who have gone east for one reason or another talk about how badly they missed their natural terrain, the long sight lines, the clear thin air, how claustrophobic were trees and how dead the atmosphere without the constant flow of wind, and I find it so myself It seemed to me that the story could only balance on love, something all humans need and give, whether to one’s children, parents, or a lover of the opposite or same sex. I wanted to explore both long-lasting love and its possible steep price tag, both homophobic antipathy and denial. I knew this was a story loaded with taboos but I was driven to write it. These characters did something that, as a writer, I had never experienced before—they began to get very damn real. Usually I deal in obedient characters who do what they are told, but Jack and Ennis soon seemed more vivid than many of the flesh-and-blood people around me and there emerged an antiphonal back-and-forth relationship between writer and character. I’ve heard other writers mention this experience but it was the first time for me.
As I worked on the story over the next months scenes appeared and disappeared. (The story went through more than sixty revisions.) The mountain encounter had to be—shall we say?——seminal—and brief One spring, years before, I had been in the Big Horns and noticed distant flocks of sheep on great empty slopes. From the heights I had been able to see a hundred miles and more to the plains. In such isolated high country, away from opprobrious comment and watchful eyes, I thought it would be plausible for the characters to get into a sexual situation. That’s nothing new or out of the ordinary; livestock workers have a blunt and full understanding of the sexual behaviors of man and beast. High lonesome situation, a couple of guys—expediency sometimes rules and nobody needs to talk about it and that’s how it is. One old sheep rancher, dead now, used to say he always sent up two men to tend the sheep “so’s if they get lonesome they can poke each other.” From that perspective Aguirre, the hiring man, would have winked and said nothing, and Ennis’s remark to Jack that this was a one-shot deal would have been accurate. The complicating factor was that they both fell into once-in-a-lifetime love. I strove to give Jack and Ennis depth and complexity and to mirror real life by rasping that love against the societal norms that both men obeyed, both of them marrying and begetting children, both loving their children, and, in a way, their wives.
Many gay men marry and have children and are good fathers. Because this is a rural story, family and children are important. Most stories (and many films) I have seen about gay relationships take place in urban settings and never have children in them. The rural gay men I know like kids, and if they don’t have their own, they usually have nephews and nieces who claim a big place in their hearts. For both characters to marry women enlarges the story and introduces two young wives who move from innocence and happy trust to some pretty hard lessons about real life. Alma and Lureen give the story a universal connection, for men and women need each other, sometimes in unusual ways.
It was a hard story to write. Sometimes it took weeks to get the right phrase or descriptor for particular characters. I remember vividly that, driving on Owl Canyon Road in Colorado down over the state line one afternoon and thinking about Jack Twist’s father, the expression “stud duck,” which I had heard somewhere, came to me as the right way to succinctly describe that hard little man, and a curve in the road became the curve that killed Ennis’s parents. The scene for the kiss when Jack and Ennis reunite after four years occurred in its entirety as I drove past the Laramie cement plant—so much for scenery. In fact I did most of the “writing” while I was driving. The most difficult scene was the paragraph where, on the mountain, Ennis holds Jack and rocks back and forth, humming, the moment mixed with childhood loss and his refusal to admit he was holding a man. This paragraph took forever to get right and I played Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny’s “Spiritual” from their album Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories) uncountable times trying to get the words. I was trying to write the inchoate feelings of Jack and Ennis, the sad impossibility of their liaison, which for me was expressed in that music. To this day I cannot hear that track without Jack and Ennis appearing before me. The scraps that feed a story come from many cupboards.
I was an aging female writer, married too many times, and though I have a few gay friends, there were things I was not sure about. I talked with a sheep rancher to be sure that it was
historically accurate to use a couple of white ranch kids as flock tenders in the early sixties, for I knew that in previous decades it had been mostly Basques who did this job, and today it is often men from the South American countries. But jobs were scarce in Wyoming in that period and even married couples with children got hired to herd sheep. One of my oldest friends, Tom Watkin, with whom I once published a rural newspaper, read and commented on the story as it developed. I thought too much about this story. It was supposed to be Ennis who had dreams about Jack but I had dreams about both of them. I still had little distance from it when it was published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997. I expected letters from outraged religio-moral types, but instead got them from men, quite a few of them Wyoming ranch hands and cowboys and the fathers of men, who said “you told my story” or “I now understand what my son went through.” I still, eight years later, get those heart-wrenching letters.
When I got Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry’s request to option the story for a film with money from their own pockets—unusual for screenwriters—I was immediately beset with doubts. I simply did not think this story could be a film: it was too sexually explicit for presumed mainstream tastes, the general topic of homophobia was a hot potato unless gingerly skirted, and, given Hollywood actors’ reluctance to play gay men (though many gay men have brilliantly played straight guys) it would likely be difficult to find a good cast, not to say a director. It was only because I trusted Larry’s and Diana’s writing skills, film experience and, especially, Larry’s incomparable knowledge of the west’s mores and language that I signed the contract.
It didn’t take them long. Within a few months I was reading their powerful screenplay constructed from the story, but richly augmenting it, adding new flesh to its long bones, filling out the personalities, introducing a little humor and new characters who moved the story along its close-set rails. Yes, the screenplay was beautiful, but my worries continued. What producers would be interested in a story about homophobic gay Wyoming ranch hands? What actors would have the guts to do this? What director would take the risk? How severely would the screenplay be clawed to pieces? The freedom-granting yet hostile landscape, of course, would be utterly lost, and with it, the literal grounding of the story. I thought the screenplay was as far as the movie would go, and I wasn’t sorry.