Summary: Jack looks forward to his next visit to Lightning Flat.
Rating: M (adult but non-explicit sexual descriptions; language)
Disclaimer: These are Annie Proulx's characters, even the mean one.
"Kin"Jack ran toward Ennis, quickly raised his denim sleeve to help him stanch the blood coming from his nose. The right sleeve of Ennis's light plaid shirt was already soaked a dark red. Jack hadn't meant to knee him like that!
Ennis responded by decking him, and Jack fell backwards. Ennis stumbled away, leaving Jack on the ground amidst the tall prairie grass, made moist by that morning's snow melt.
Jack lay still, squinting up at the swiftly moving pillows of clouds and tenderly rubbing his left cheek below the eye. Ecstatic that Ennis had punched him. "Thanks, friend," he whispered. And he meant it. In his nineteen years he had always found pain to be more memorable than … whatever its opposite was. Pain helped him remember pleasure. And how he wanted, no, needed memories to take down off the mountain on their last day!
---
The unexpected punch made him fondly recall the pain of that first night in the tent. Whoa! Would he ever forget that? He didn't think so. He'd never had it like that before, and he could not believe how delirious his orgasm had been.
Even after that first night, Ennis was rough with Jack when he fucked him. And each time it was the initial pain of Ennis entering him that made the final pleasure almost unbearable for Jack, for both of them actually.
Ennis had not been sure what would happen on that second night. He had shyly entered the tent where Jack sat cross-legged, naked but for his shirt placed across his lap. It was a different situation from the night before, when Ennis had violently taken control of their first sex.
Jack had extended his hands to cradle Ennis's face, encouraging him to move in for a tentative kiss. Jack took the initiative in thrusting his tongue deeper and deeper, and they traded the flavors of whiskey and tobacco. The wet, hungry kiss got both of them hard in a minute. But the second time there was more warmth in their lovemaking, still passionate but with more kissing, stroking, caressing. So much more touching.
---
For a few days the bruise would give Jack a reminder of how physical his and Ennis's relationship had been. But the bruise would go away, and then what? How long before his memories of their passionate love this summer would be erased?
"Goddamn it, Ennis, just make me feel something," he had been thinking when he looped Ennis with the lariat just a few minutes before the nosebleed. Ennis had been sitting off by himself, moping about their imminent departure from Brokeback Mountain while Jack busied himself at the campsite with packing up. Jack snared Ennis again, tripping him. Ennis lunged at Jack, only half playfully, and they both went tumbling down the hill. Clinging tight to one another—tumbling as one down the hill.
Typically that would just have been foreplay: they would have wrestled each other out of their clothes, wrestled a while longer maybe, worked in some deep, thrusting kisses and fucked. The outdoor sex was always like that, more like a sport. Each man had a few missing buttons here and there thanks to their roughhousing.
But this time they had a thousand sheep to get down the mountain. Jack hoped that Ennis was enjoying the wrestling as much as he was, because it was the last time they would be touching one another, really touching, he thought. He couldn't help but qualify that thought: this summer, anyway.
Then he accidentally slammed his knee into Ennis's face.
---
Like Ennis, Jack too was devastated by the thought of leaving Brokeback Mountain. He didn't know what he was going to do … and he was so much in love! He was not sure he could do it. He had never felt so irreversibly attracted, so attached to another person. He had risked so much, made himself so vulnerable, to gain the love of this man, and now he would have to live without that. How? he wondered.
He hoped Ennis would have a hard time of it, too. Jack was certain it would be tough for Ennis, losing not only his lover, but his only friend as well. But the damn guy was determined to go through with that wedding, wasn't he? Jack's only hope was to try to get Ennis back to Brokeback Mountain next summer, remind him how good it would be up there in their own little world. Once they touched each other again … well Jack knew where that would lead. And Ennis would be his again, at least for another summer.
But the situation was what it was, and Jack was trying to be a man about their separation. He kept swallowing hard and biting his lower lip, tried not to show how tense he was. He had learned through his little bit of rodeoing that a man doesn't cry when he hits the ground, no matter how hard. And he was about to be slammed hard, he reckoned, knowing deep down that in fact he might never see Ennis Del Mar again.
---
Ennis had staggered back to where the horses waited for the trip down the mountain. He offered no apologies to Jack, and the latter was glad for that. "Friend," Jack said, "here's your other shirt, all clean and everthin'. Just washed it yesterday." He handed the fresh shirt to Ennis.
He looked on approvingly as Ennis hurriedly stripped off the bloody shirt in trade for the clean one. He wasn't wearing an undershirt today. Jack tried to take in all those muscles, contours, skin that he had grown to love so over the summer. Those sensitive nipples. Who would have thought that Ennis had sensitive nipples? Jack had really surprised Ennis by demonstrating that with his tongue one night.
Ennis threw the soiled shirt to the ground and slid his muscular arms into the sleeves of the clean one. If Ennis knew he was being watched, he didn't let on, didn't look at Jack the whole time.
As Ennis occupied himself with the buttons, Jack kicked over a bucket, the clang of which, not to his surprise, spooked the mare with the low startle point. All saddled up but untethered, she trotted off. Ennis instinctively ran after her, shirt flying open where he hadn't yet buttoned it.
Jack smiled to himself. Hurriedly picked up the cast-off shirt and stuffed it in his own bag.
By the time Ennis came back on the mare, Jack had everything ready to go. Ennis obviously had a lot on his mind. He looked glum and didn't speak.
Jack thought Ennis wanted to cry, and he wanted to hug him and tell him it was okay to do that. But it wasn't okay, was it? Jack wanted to do anything to stretch out that moment, but he had passed up his own chance to cry. So what could he expect from Ennis?
When all was said and done, during their painful farewell that August in the parking lot, both men kept their hats pulled low. If Jack's or Ennis's eyes betrayed tears or even emotion, the other did not know about it, and in any case cheeks remained dry as dust.
Ennis was going to marry Alma, and Jack was going to help his father on the ranch over the winter, maybe come back to the mountain next summer.
---
Upstairs in his old bedroom, Jack set his bag on the sagging mattress of the metal bed, dark green enamel chipped on the rounded tops at each end. It was a boy's bed, but Jack had to grudgingly admit that even as an adult he wasn't too tall for it.
As the late afternoon sun streamed in the one dusty window, he sat on the bed next to the bag. He felt good here, amidst the rodeo scenes that highlighted the slightly frayed patchwork quilt. He caressed the fabric, fingertips expressing his love of the rodeo, his love for his mother, the only other person who understood the depth of his boyish enthusiasm for bucking broncs. She had made the quilt before he even started school, and this very quilt encouraged his dreams.
As a young boy Jack had tried to get his father to talk about his own rodeo days, long gone yet accomplished. But the old man shared nothing but bitterness with his son. Jack wondered how he had emerged so hopeful from a household like this? A fuck of a father and a trapped mother?
Even Ennis didn't get the rodeo life, was just too much a part of the land, of the world of slow-moving cattle and sheep, horses that were predictable, Jack realized. But Ennis … well, he could forgive Ennis pretty much anything.
Jack was never good at rodeoing, but that fact never hit home with him. Sure, he eventually realized that he could not make a living at it, but his optimism kept him from associating lack of money with losing. He always had some sort of belt buckle to prove that he had done something right out there. And he felt that pain—nearly unbearable when some limb was broken—every time he got thrown, so he kept trying. The pain that helped him remember each episode with fondness. He felt so goddamned alive, so energetic, so challenged when he was out there, with a purpose in life.
There was only one thing that he missed during those few years on the rodeo circuit in Texas: Ennis Del Mar. Jack was crushed when that bastard Aguirre had not rehired him, had said something obscene when Jack asked him about Ennis. As soon as Jack knew there would not be a second summer on Brokeback Mountain, he fled to Texas. Got married. Got a real job. Had a kid.
---
As he sat on the edge of the bed, he reached for his bag. He tossed a few toiletries, underwear, a washcloth aside to reveal the two crumpled shirts. He removed the unwashed garments as though they were relics. One sleeve of each was stained with Ennis's blood.
He put Ennis's shirt to his face and inhaled deeply. Jack wasn't religious, but he prayed there would be some scent of Ennis there. Probably not that musky scent that he had grown so fond of during their lovemaking, because except for that first night, they never had their shirts on anyway. But the bruise from Ennis's punch had disappeared, and he would settle for anything! It had been only a week since they had come down from Brokeback Mountain, and he sighed with relief when he picked up whiffs of prairie, horse, sheep. Tobacco, whiskey, sweat and dirt. Earth. Ennis.
Jack was alone, yet Ennis was with him. And this time Jack did cry, softly.
He carefully dried his tears with the sleeve of Ennis's shirt that hadn't gotten bloody. He stood up and laid his own denim shirt from that day out on the bed. Two dirty, bloody shirts against patchwork scenes of his beloved rodeo life.
He heard footsteps on the creaking stairs, and thought he should hide the shirts. But it was just his mother, and she knocked softly at the door. He opened it and let her in.
"Jack, I've made your favorite … oh my!" She had spied the shirts. "Oh dear," she said with concern, looking anxiously at her son for signs of injury.
"It's okay, mama. It happened … um, a while back. I'm fine."
Jack's mother was relieved that he wasn't standing there bleeding. "Well Jack," she said helpfully, "let me just take those downstairs and wash them, they're perfectly fine shirts, aren't they? Oh, I see a couple of buttons missing, but I can take care of that."
Jack got a panicked look on his face that she had never seen before. "No!" he commanded. "No. I … um, they're special, mama. Just take my word for it. Please?" He realized how ridiculous his plea must seem to her, yet he knew that she would respect his wishes, just like she kept that room for him.
His mother nodded dumbly, taken aback that the shirts would remain in the carefully maintained room with the clean, pressed jeans. That boy, she thought, why does he want to hang bloody clothes in the closet? She didn't recognize the one shirt, but figured Jack had bought it on the road. Well, he was no doubt embarrassed about the rodeo accidents that had resulted in these bloody sleeves, she thought. But still ….
"Don't worry, mama," Jack said, flushed but a little more composed. "I'm just gonna hang 'em back there in the corner." He pointed to a niche at the back of the closet.
She guessed that maybe that wasn't so bad. And it wasn't like anyone ever saw Jack's room anyway. Even his father never went in there, in fact had never once set foot in there. No one would ever see these shirts, she reminded herself.
Once his mother had gone back downstairs, Jack just stood there looking at the shirts for a few minutes, emotional and unsure what to do. Why had he stolen Ennis's shirt? What was he supposed to do with two bloody shirts? He placed Ennis's shirt on top of his own.
He carefully tucked one plaid sleeve, still stiff with Ennis's dried blood, into one of his own denim sleeves. Then repeated. Pulled Ennis's shirt into his own, pressing with his fingers until the one shirt fit snugly inside the other. Lovingly hung the ensemble on a nail in that closet niche.
---
Jack's mother was the only other person who knew about those shirts, and even she did not know what they meant to him. She was especially perplexed to find that one of them had disappeared after Jack's visit. There had been a light plaid one, and now there was just Jack's denim shirt.
"That boy," she thought. She wondered if all those dreams of rodeoing and Texas had made him a little crazy. She never touched the denim shirt; she would have found out that it was a very heavy shirt indeed.
---
Jack dreaded seeing his father every time he went home, partly because Jack kept promising to get some friend to move up there and help whip that ranch into shape, and never did. He had been doing that for nearly twenty years now.
Year after year it was supposed to have been a guy named Ennis, so much so that Jack's mother began to think of this Ennis as some sort of long-lost kin who would eventually come to visit. She was disappointed when Jack had recently begun to talk about a rancher instead.
Regardless, visit after visit Jack's father treated him like a liar. Jack had to admit that he was lying to his father, but fuck the old man, he deserved no better.
But despite the inevitable scolding—jeez, and here he was, almost forty years old!—Jack so looked forward to seeing those shirts, holding that light plaid shirt to his cheek. Especially now that Ennis couldn't get away in August and Jack would have to wait until November to see him again.