by Annie Proulx
“Freeze your ass off when that fire dies down. Better off sleepin in the tent.”
“Doubt I’ll feel nothin.” But he staggered under canvas, pulled his boots off, snored on the ground cloth for a while, woke Jack with the clacking of his jaw.
“Jesus Christ, quit hammerin and get over here. Bedroll’s big enough,” said Jack in an irritable sleep-clogged voice. It was big enough, warm enough, and in a little while they deepened their intimacy considerably. Ennis ran full-throttle on all roads whether fence mending or money spending, and he wanted none of it when Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect cock. Ennis jerked his hand away as though he’d touched fire, got to his knees, unbuckled his belt, shoved his pants down, hauled Jack onto all fours and, with the help of the clear slick and a little spit, entered him, nothing he’d done before but no instruction manual needed. They went at it in silence except for a few sharp intakes of breath and Jack’s choked “gun’s goin off” then out, down, and asleep.
Ennis woke in red dawn with his pants around his knees, a top-grade headache, and Jack butted against him; without saying anything about it both knew how it would go for the rest of the summer, sheep be damned.
As it did go. They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word except once Ennis said, “I’m not no queer,” and Jack jumped in with “Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours.” There were only the two of them on the mountain flying in the euphoric, bitter air, looking down on the hawk’s back and the crawling lights of vehicles on the plain below, suspended above ordinary affairs and distant from tame ranch dogs barking in the dark hours. They believed themselves invisible, not knowing Joe Aguirre had watched them through his 10x42 binoculars for ten minutes one day, waiting until they’d buttoned up their jeans, waiting until Ennis rode back to the sheep, before bringing up the message that Jack’s people had sent word that his uncle Harold was in the hospital with pneumonia and expected not to make it. Though he did, and Aguirre came up again to say so, fixing Jack with his bold stare, not bothering to dismount.
In August Ennis spent the whole night with Jack in the main camp and in a blowy hailstorm the sheep took off west and got among a herd in another allotment. There was a damn miserable time for five days, Ennis and a Chilean herder with no English trying to sort them out, the task almost impossible as the paint brands were worn and faint at this late season. Even when the numbers were right Ennis knew the sheep were mixed. In a disquieting way everything seemed mixed.
The first snow came early, on August thirteenth, piling up a foot, but was followed by a quick melt. The next week Joe Aguirre sent word to bring them down—another, bigger storm was moving in from the Pacific—and they packed in the game and moved off the mountain with the sheep, stones rolling at their heels, purple cloud crowding in from the west and the metal smell of coming snow pressing them on. The mountain boiled with demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken-cloud light, the wind combed the grass and drew from the damaged krummholz and slit rock a bestial drone. As they descended the slope Ennis felt he was in a slow-motion, but headlong, irreversible fall.
Joe Aguirre paid them, said little. He had looked at the milling sheep with a sour expression, said, “Some a these never went up there with you.” The count was not what he’d hoped for either. Ranch stiffs never did much of a job.
“You goin a do this next summer?” said Jack to Ennis in the street, one leg already up in his green pickup. The wind was gusting hard and cold.
“Maybe not.” A dust plume rose and hazed the air with fine grit and he squinted against it. “Like I said, Alma and me’s gettin married in December. Try to get somethin on a ranch. You?” He looked away from Jack’s jaw, bruised blue from the hard punch Ennis had thrown him on the last day.
“If nothin better comes along. Thought some about going back up to my daddy’s place, give him a hand over the winter, then maybe head out for Texas in the spring. If the draft don’t get me.”
“Well, see you around, I guess.” The wind tumbled an empty feed bag down the street until it fetched up under his truck.
“Right,” said Jack, and they shook hands, hit each other on the shoulder, then there was forty feet of distance between them and nothing to do but drive away in opposite directions. Within a mile Ennis felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand a yard at a time. He stopped at the side of the road and, in the whirling new snow, tried to puke but nothing came up. He felt about as bad as he ever had and it took a long time for the feeling to wear off.
In December Ennis married Alma Beers and had her pregnant by mid-January. He picked up a few short-lived ranch jobs, then settled in as a wrangler on the old Elwood Hi-Top place north of Lost Cabin in Washakie County. He was still working there in September when Alma Jr., as he called his daughter, was born and their bedroom was full of the smell of old blood and milk and baby shit, and the sounds were of squalling and sucking and Alma’s sleepy groans, all reassuring of fecundity and life’s continuance to one who worked with livestock.
When the Hi-Top folded they moved to a small apartment in Riverton up over a laundry. Ennis got on the highway crew, tolerating it but working weekends at the Rafter B in exchange for keeping his horses out there. The second girl was born and Alma wanted to stay in town near the clinic because the child had an asthmatic wheeze.
“Ennis, please, no more damn lonesome ranches for us,” she said, sitting on his lap, wrapping her thin, freckled arms around him. “Let’s get a place here in town?”
“I guess,” said Ennis, slipping his hand up her blouse sleeve and stirring the silky armpit hair, then easing her down, fingers moving up her ribs to the jelly breast, over the round belly and knee and up into the wet gap all the way to the north pole or the equator depending which way you thought you were sailing, working at it until she shuddered and bucked against his hand and he rolled her over, did quickly what she hated. They stayed in the little apartment which he favored because it could be left at any time.
The fourth summer since Brokeback Mountain came on and in June Ennis had a general delivery letter from Jack Twist, the first sign of life in all that time.
Friend this letter is a long time over due. Hope you get it. Heard you was in Riverton. Im coming thru on the 24th, thought Id stop and buy you a beer. Drop me a line if you can, say if your there.
The return address was Childress, Texas. Ennis wrote back,you bet, gave the Riverton address.
The day was hot and clear in the morning, but by noon the clouds had pushed up out of the west rolling a little sultry air before them. Ennis, wearing his best shirt, white with wide black stripes, didn’t know what time Jack would get there and so had taken the day off, paced back and forth, looking down into a street pale with dust. Alma was saying something about taking his friend to the Knife & Fork for supper instead of cooking it was so hot, if they could get a baby-sitter, but Ennis said more likely he’d just go out with Jack and get drunk. Jack was not a restaurant type, he said, thinking of the dirty spoons sticking out of the cans of cold beans balanced on the log.
Late in the afternoon, thunder growling, that same old green pickup rolled in and he saw Jack get out of the truck, beat-up Resistol tilted back. A hot jolt scalded Ennis and he was out on the landing pulling the door closed behind him. Jack took the stairs two and two. They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard, Jack’s big teeth bringing blood, his hat falling to the floor, stubble rasping, wet saliva welling, and the door opening and Alma looking out for a few seconds at Ennis’s straining shoulders and shutting the door again and still they clinched, pressing chest and groin and thigh and leg toge
ther, treading on each other’s toes until they pulled apart to breathe and Ennis, not big on endearments, said what he said to his horses and daughters, little darlin.
The door opened again a few inches and Alma stood in the narrow light.
What could he say? “Alma, this is Jack Twist, Jack, my wife Alma.” His chest was heaving. He could smell Jack—the intensely familiar odor of cigarettes, musky sweat and a faint sweetness like grass, and with it the rushing cold of the mountain. “Alma,” he said, “Jack and me ain’t seen each other in four years.” As if it were a reason. He was glad the light was dim on the landing but did not turn away from her.
“Sure enough,” said Alma in a low voice. She had seen what she had seen. Behind her in the room lightning lit the window like a white sheet waving and the baby cried.
’You got a kid?” said Jack. His shaking hand grazed Ennis’s hand, electrical current snapped between them.
“Two little girls,” Ennis said. “Alma Jr. and Francine. Love them to pieces.” Alma’s mouth twitched.
“I got a boy,” said Jack. “Eight months old. Tell you what, I married a cute little old Texas girl down in Childress—Lureen.” From the vibration of the floorboard on which they both stood Ennis could feel how hard Jack was shaking.
“Alma,” he said. “Jack and me is goin out and get a drink. Might not get back tonight, we get drinkin and talkin.”
“Sure enough,” Alma said, taking a dollar bill from her pocket. Ennis guessed she was going to ask him to get her a pack of cigarettes, bring him back sooner.
“Please to meet you,” said Jack, trembling like a run-out horse.
“Ennis—” said Alma in her misery voice, but that didn’t slow him down on the stairs and he called back, “Alma, you want smokes there’s some in the pocket a my blue shirt in the bedroom.”
They went off in Jack’s truck, bought a bottle of whiskey and within twenty minutes were in the Motel Siesta jouncing a bed. A few handfuls of hail rattled against the window followed by rain and slippery wind banging the unsecured door of the next room then and through the night.
The room stank of semen and smoke and sweat and whiskey, of old carpet and sour hay, saddle leather, shit and cheap soap. Ennis lay spread-eagled, spent and wet, breathing deep, still half tumescent, Jack blowing forceful cigarette clouds like whale spouts, and Jack said, “Christ, it got a be all that time a yours ahorseback makes it so goddamn good. We got to talk about this. Swear to god I didn’t know we was goin a get into this again—yeah, I did. Why I’m here. I fuckin knew it. Redlined all the way, couldn’t get here fast enough.”
“I didn’t know where in thehell you was,” said Ennis. “Four years. I about give up on you. I figured you was sore about that punch.”
“Friend,” said Jack, “I was in Texas rodeoin. How I met Lureen. Look over on that chair.”
On the back of the soiled orange chair he saw the shine of a buckle. “Bullridin?”
“Yeah. I made three fuckin thousand dollars that year. Fuckin starved. Had to borrow everthing but a toothbrush from other guys. Drove grooves across Texas. Half the time under that cunt truck fixin it. Anyway, I didn’t never think about losin. Lureen? There’s some serious money there. Her old man’s got it. Got this farm machinery business. Course he don’t let her have none a the money, and he hates my fuckin guts, so it’s a hard go now but one a these days—”
“Well, you’re goin a go where you look. Army didn’t get you?” The thunder sounded far to the east, moving from them in its red wreaths of light.
“They can’t get no use out a me. Got some crushed vertebrates. And a stress fracture, the arm bone here, you know how bullridin you’re always leverin it off your thigh?—she gives a little ever time you do it. Even if you tape it good you break it a little goddamn bit at a time. Tell you what, hurts like a bitch afterwards. Had a busted leg. Busted in three places. Come off the bull and it was a big bull with a lot a drop, he got rid a me in about three flat and he come after me and he was sure faster. Lucky enough. Friend a mine got his oil checked with a horn dipstick and that was all she wrote. Bunch a other things, fuckin busted ribs, sprains and pains, torn ligaments. See, it ain’t like it was in my daddy’s time. It’s guys with money go to college, trained athaletes. You got a have some money to rodeo now. Lureen’s old man wouldn’t give me a dime if I dropped it, except one way. And I know enough about the game now so I see that I ain’t never goin a be on the bubble. Other reasons. I’m gettin out while I still can walk.”
Ennis pulled Jack’s hand to his mouth, took a hit from the cigarette, exhaled. “Sure as hell seem in one piece to me. You know, I was sittin up here all that time tryin to figure out if I was—? I know I ain’t. I mean here we both got wives and kids, right? I like doin it with women, yeah, but Jesus H., ain’t nothin like this. I never had no thoughts a doin it with another guy except I sure wrang it out a hunderd times thinkin about you. You do it with other guys? Jack?”
“Shit no,” said Jack, who had been riding more than bulls, not rolling his own. “You know that. Old Brokeback got us good and it sure ain’t over. We got a work out what the fuck we’re goin a do now.”
“That summer,” said Ennis. “When we split up after we got paid out I had gut cramps so bad I pulled over and tried to puke, thought I ate somethin bad at that place in Dubois. Took me about a year a figure out it was that I shouldn’t a let you out a my sights. Too late then by a long, long while.”
“Friend,” said Jack. “We got us a fuckin situation here. Got a figure out what to do.”
“I doubt there’s nothin now we can do,” said Ennis. “What I’m sayin, Jack, I built a life up in them years. Love my little girls. Alma? It ain’t her fault. You got your baby and wife, that place in Texas. You and me can’t hardly be decent together if what happened back there“—he jerked his head in the direction of the apartment—“grabs on us like that. We do that in the wrong place we’ll be dead. There’s no reins on this one. It scares the piss out a me.”
“Got to tell you, friend, maybe somebody seen us that summer. I was back there the next June, thinkin about goin back—I didn’t, lit out for Texas instead—and Joe Aguirre’s in the office and he says to me, he says, You boys found a way to make the time pass up there, didn’t you,’ and I give him a look but when I went out I seen he had a big-ass pair a binoculars hangin off his rearview.” He neglected to add that the foreman had leaned back in his squeaky wooden tilt chair, said, Twist, you guys wasn’t gettin paid to leave the dogs baby-sit the sheep while you stemmed the rose, and declined to rehire him. He went on, “Yeah, that little punch a yours surprised me. I never figured you to throw a dirty punch.”
“I come up under my brother K.E., three years older’n me, slugged me silly ever day. Dad got tired a me come bawlin in the house and when I was about six he set me down and says, Ennis, you got a problem and you got a fix it or it’s gonna be with you until you’re ninety and K.E.’s ninety-three. Well, I says, he’s bigger’n me. Dad says, you got a take him unawares, don’t say nothin to him, make him feel some pain, get out fast and keep doin it until he takes the message. Nothin like hurtin somebody to make him hear good. So I did. I got him in the outhouse, jumped him on the stairs, come over to his pillow in the night while he was sleepin and pasted him damn good. Took about two days. Never had trouble with K.E. since. The lesson was, don’t say nothin and get it over with quick.” A telephone rang in the next room, rang on and on, stopped abruptly in mid-peal.
“You won’t catch me again,” said Jack. “Listen. I’m thinkin, tell you what, if you and me had a little ranch together, little cow and calf operation, your horses, it’d be some sweet life. Like I said, I’m gettin out a rodeo. I ain’t no broke-dick rider but I don’t got the bucks a ride out this slump I’m in and I don’t got the bones a keep gettin wrecked. I got it figured, got this plan, Ennis, how we can do it, you and me. Lureen’s old man, you bet he’d give me a bunch if I’d get lost. Already more or less said it—”