BrokenBack Mountain
Ennis Del Mar wakes before five, wind rocking the trailer, hissing
in around the aluminum door and window frames. The shirts hanging on
a nail shudder slightly in the draft. He gets up, scratching the grey
wedge of belly and pubic hair, shuffles to the gas burner, pours leftover
coffee in a chipped enamel pan; the flame swathes it in blue. He turns
on the tap and urinates in the sink, pulls on his shirt and jeans, his
worn boots, stamping the heels against the floor to get them full on.
The wind booms down the curved length of the trailer and under its roaring
passage he can hear the scratching of fine gravel and sand. It could
be bad on the highway with the horse trailer. He has to be packed and
away from the place that morning. Again the ranch is on the market and
they've shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day
before, the owner saying, "Give em to the real estate shark, I'm out
a here," dropping the keys in Ennis's hand. He might have to stay with
his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused
with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.
The stale coffee is boiling up but he catches it before it goes over
the side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid,
lets a panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention
on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain
when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong. The wind strikes
the trailer like a load of dirt coming off a dump truck, eases, dies,
leaves a temporary silence.
They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the
state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat up on the Montana border, Ennis
del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high school dropout
country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation,
both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life. Ennis,
reared by his older brother and sister after their parents drove off
the only curve on Dead Horse Road leaving them twenty-four dollars in
cash and a two-mortgage ranch, applied at age fourteen for a hardship
license that let him make the hour-long trip from the ranch to the high
school. The pickup was old, no heater, one windshield wiper and bad
tires; when the transmission went there was no money to fix it. He had
wanted to be a sophomore, felt the word carried a kind of distinction,
but the truck broke down short of it, pitching him directly into ranch
work.
In 1963 when he met Jack Twist, Ennis was engaged to Alma Beers.
Both Jack and Ennis claimed to be saving money for a small spread; in
Ennis's case that meant a tobacco can with two five-dollar bills inside.
That spring, hungry for any job, each had signed up with Farm and Ranch
Employment -- they came together on paper as herder and camp tender
for the same sheep operation north of Signal. The summer range lay above
the tree line on Forest Service land on Brokeback Mountain. It would
be Jack Twist's second summer on the mountain, Ennis's first. Neither
of them was twenty.
They shook hands in the choky little trailer office in front of a
table littered with scribbled papers, a Bakelite ashtray brimming with
stubs. The venetian blinds hung askew and admitted a triangle of white
light, the shadow of the foreman's hand moving into it. Joe Aguirre,
wavy hair the color of cigarette ash and parted down the middle, gave
them his point of view.
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