Ennis wakes in the morning after having his lights punched out at the bar. His pillow is wet. He is in anguish from the awful aching nightmare. Jack, Jack...
He remembers the argument with Alma last night after Thanksgiving dinner. "Sometimes I'm a real asshole," he thinks aloud. What was it she had said? "Me an the girls worry about you bein alone Ennis. Why don't you settle down with somebody? You still go fishin with that Jack Twist?" She's right, and finally he knows it.
He calls Texas. Only the second time he's done that. He tells Jack about the dream, that he realizes now the life he's been wasting. He wants to move together up to Lightning Flats whenever Jack is ready. "We can have a good life together, Jack, a fuckin real good life."
When Jack tells Lureen that Ennis has finally called, she squeals with delight and hugging him says "Jack I'm so happy for you I love you I love you I love you so much!" They work out the financials and he and Ennis settle in at Jack's family ranch before first thaw.
Bobby spends the summers with Dad and Uncle Ennis, and every Thanksgiving Ennis and Jack visit with Lureen and Bobby in Childress. Bobby's the spittin image of his dad.
Years on years they work their way through the high meadows and mountain drainages, horse-packing into the Big Horns, Medicine Bows, south end of the Gallatins, Absarokas, Granites, Owl Creeks, the Bridger-Teton Range, the Freezeouts, Ferrises and the Rattlesnakes, Salt River Range, into the Wind Rivers over and again, the Sierra Madres, Gros Ventres, the Washakies, the Laramies. They shoot themselves a nice elk in the Shirleys. But they never return to Brokeback.
Right after high school, Francine comes to visit with Daddy and Uncle Jack for a few weeks. One summer afternoon, Jack and Ennis are fixing up Jack's boyhood room for her. "Them ol shirts been hangin there 20 years! Toss em in the laundry an we can wear em when we milk the cow," Jack says.
But Ennis doesn't hear - he's looking out the window. A green Ford has just driven up by the only road Jack knew as a boy. Bobby climbs out of the sputtering truck, and he and Francine embrace and fall to the grass, chest and groin and thigh and leg together. They haven't seen each other in a year. Ennis turns and chuckles out "Jack I swear--"