by Annie Proulx
No, he thought, they got him with the tire iron.
“Jack used to mention you,” she said. “You’re the fishing buddy or the hunting buddy, I know that. Would have let you know,” she said, “but I wasn’t sure about your name and address. Jack kept most a his friends’ addresses in his head. It was a terrible thing. He was only thirty-nine years old.”
The huge sadness of the northern plains rolled down on him. He didn’t know which way it was, the tire iron or a real accident, blood choking down Jack’s throat and nobody to turn him over. Under the wind drone he heard steel slamming off bone, the hollow chatter of a settling tire rim.
“He buried down there?” He wanted to curse her for letting Jack die on the dirt road.
The little Texas voice came slip-sliding down the wire. “We put a stone up. He use to say he wanted to be cremated, ashes scattered on Brokeback Mountain. I didn’t know where that was. So he was cremated, like he wanted, and like I say, half his ashes was interred here, and the rest I sent up to his folks. I thought Brokeback Mountain was around where he grew up. But knowing Jack, it might be some pretend place where the bluebirds sing and there’s a whiskey spring.”
“We herded sheep on Brokeback one summer,” said Ennis. He could hardly speak.
“Well, he said it was his place. I thought he meant to get drunk. Drink whiskey up there. He drank a lot.”
“His folks still up in Lightnin Flat?”
“Oh yeah. They’ll be there until they die. I never met them. They didn’t come down for the funeral. You get in touch with them. I suppose they’d appreciate it if his wishes was carried out.”
No doubt about it, she was polite but the little voice was cold as snow.
The road to Lightning Flat went through desolate country past a dozen abandoned ranches distributed over the plain at eightand ten-mile intervals, houses sitting blank-eyed in the weeds, corral fences down. The mailbox read John C. Twist. The ranch was a meagre little place, leafy spurge taking over. The stock was too far distant for him to see their condition, only that they were black baldies. A porch stretched across the front of the tiny brown stucco house, four rooms, two down, two up.
Ennis sat at the kitchen table with Jack’s father. Jack’s mother, stout and careful in her movements as though recovering from an operation, said, “Want some coffee, don’t you? Piece a cherry cake?”
“Thank you, ma’am, I’ll take a cup a coffee but I can’t eat no cake just now.”
The old man sat silent, his hands folded on the plastic table-cloth, staring at Ennis with an angry, knowing expression. Ennis recognized in him a not uncommon type with the hard need to be the stud duck in the pond. He couldn’t see much of Jack in either one of them, took a breath.
“I feel awful bad about Jack. Can’t begin to say how bad I feel. I knew him a long time. I come by to tell you that if you want me to take his ashes up there on Brokeback like his wife says he wanted I’d be proud to.”
There was a silence. Ennis cleared his throat but said nothing more.
The old man said, “Tell you what, I know where Brokeback Mountain is. He thought he was too goddamn special to be buried in the family plot.”
Jack’s mother ignored this, said, “He used a come home every year, even after he was married and down in Texas, and help his daddy on the ranch for a week, fix the gates and mow and all. I kept his room like it was when he was a boy and I think he appreciated that. You are welcome to go up in his room if you want.”
The old man spoke angrily. “I can’t get no help out here. Jack used a say, ‘Ennis del Mar,’ he used a say, ‘I’m goin a bring him up here one a these days and we’ll lick this damn ranch into shape.’ He had some half-baked idea the two a you was goin a move up here, build a log cabin and help me run this ranch and bring it up. Then, this spring he’s got another one’s goin a come up here with him and build a place and help run the ranch, some ranch neighbor a his from down in Texas. He’s goin a split up with his wife and come back here. So he says. But like most a Jack’s ideas it never come to pass.”
So now he knew it had been the tire iron. He stood up, said, you bet he’d like to see Jack’s room, recalled one of Jack’s stories about this old man. Jack was dick-clipped and the old man was not; it bothered the son who had discovered the anatomical disconformity during a hard scene. He had been about three or four, he said, always late getting to the toilet, struggling with buttons, the seat, the height of the thing and often as not left the surroundings sprinkled down. The old man blew up about it and this one time worked into a crazy rage. “Christ, he licked the stuffin out a me, knocked me down on the bathroom floor, whipped me with his belt. I thought he was killin me. Then he says, You want a know what it’s like with piss all over the place? I’ll learn you,’ and he pulls it out and lets go all over me, soaked me, then he throws a towel at me and makes me mop up the floor, take my clothes off and warsh them in the bathtub, warsh out the towel, I’m bawlin and blubberin. But while he was hosin me down I seen he had some extra material that I was missin. I seen they’d cut me different like you’d crop a ear or scorch a brand. No way to get it right with him after that.”
The bedroom, at the top of a steep stair that had its own climbing rhythm, was tiny and hot, afternoon sun pounding through the west window, hitting the narrow boy’s bed against the wall, an ink-stained desk and wooden chair, a b.b. gun in a hand-whittled rack over the bed. The window looked down on the gravel road stretching south and it occurred to him that for his growing-up years that was the only road Jack knew. An ancient magazine photograph of some dark-haired movie star was taped to the wall beside the bed, the skin tone gone magenta. He could hear Jack’s mother downstairs running water, filling the kettle and setting it back on the stove, asking the old man a muffled question.
The closet was a shallow cavity with a wooden rod braced across, a faded cretonne curtain on a string closing it off from the rest of the room. In the closet hung two pairs of jeans crease-ironed and folded neatly over wire hangers, on the floor a pair of worn packer boots he thought he remembered. At the north end of the closet a tiny jog in the wall made a slight hiding place and here, stiff with long suspension from a nail, hung a shirt. He lifted it off the nail. Jack’s old shirt from Brokeback days. The dried blood on the sleeve was his own blood, a gushing nosebleed on the last afternoon on the mountain when Jack, in their contortionistic grappling and wrestling, had slammed Ennis’s nose hard with his knee. He had staunched the blood which was everywhere, all over both of them, with his shirtsleeve, but the staunching hadn’t held because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering angel out in the wild columbine, wings folded.
The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.
In the end the stud duck refused to let Jack’s ashes go. “Tell you what, we got a family plot and he’s goin in it.” Jack’s mother stood at the table coring apples with a sharp, serrated instrument. “You come again,” she said.
Bumping down the washboard road Ennis passed the country cemetery fenced with sagging sheep wire, a tiny fenced square on the welling prairie, a few graves bright with plastic flowers, and didn’t want to know Jack was going in there, to be buried on the grieving plain.
A few weeks later on the Saturday he threw all Stoutamire’s dirty horse blankets into the back of his pickup and took them down to the Quik Stop Car Wash to turn the high-pressure spray on them. When t
he wet clean blankets were stowed in the truck bed he stepped into Higgins’s gift shop and busied himself with the postcard rack.
“Ennis, what are you lookin for rootin through them postcards?” said Linda Higgins, throwing a sopping brown coffee filter into the garbage can.
“Scene a Brokeback Mountain.”
“Over in Fremont County?”
“No, north a here.”
“I didn’t order none a them. Let me get the order list. They got it I can get you a hunderd. I got a order some more cards anyway.”
“One’s enough,” said Ennis.
When it came—thirty cents—he pinned it up in his trailer, brass-headed tack in each corner. Below it he drove a nail and on the nail he hung the wire hanger and the two old shirts suspended from it. He stepped back and looked at the ensemble through a few stinging tears.
“Jack, I swear—” he said, though Jack had never asked him to swear anything and was himself not the swearing kind.
Around that time Jack began to appear in his dreams, Jack as he had first seen him, curly-headed and smiling and bucktoothed, talking about getting up off his pockets and into the control zone, but the can of beans with the spoon handle jutting out and balanced on the log was there as well, in a cartoon shape and lurid colors that gave the dreams a flavor of comic obscenity. The spoon handle was the kind that could be used as a tire iron. And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.
There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.
ABOUT ANNIE PROULX
ANNIEPROULXhas held NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships and residences at Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. Her first short story collection,Heart Songs and Other Stories, appeared in 1988, followed in 1992 byPostcards, which won the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The 1993 novelThe Shipping News won theChicago Tribune ’s Heartland Award, theIrish Times International Fiction Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.Accordion Crimes, Proulx’s most recent novel, was published in June 1996.
She began working on the stories collected in Close Range in 1997. “The Half-Skinned Steer” was selected by Garrison Keillor for inclusion inThe Best American Short Stories 1998 and by John Updike forThe Best American Short Stories of the Century . “Brokeback Mountain” won a 1998 O. Henry Short Story Award and a National Magazine Award through its publication inThe New Yorker .
Annie Proulx lives in Wyoming, but spends much of the year traveling North America.
Contents
The Half Skinned Steer
The Mud Below
Job History
The Blood Bay
People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water
The Bunchgrass Edge of the World
Pair a Spurs
A Lonely Coast
The Governors of Wyoming
55 Miles to the Gas Pump
Brokeback Mountain