BrokenBack Mountain
"You f*ckin go right ahead. Go on and f*ckin yell. I'll make him
eat the f*ckin floor and you too." He gave another wrench that left
her with a burning bracelet, shoved his hat on backwards and slammed
out. He went to the Black and Blue Eagle bar that night, got drunk,
had a short dirty fight and left. He didn't try to see his girls for
a long time, figuring they would look him up when they got the sense
and years to move out from Alma.
They were no longer young men with all of it before them. Jack had
filled out through the shoulders and hams, Ennis stayed as lean as a
clothes-pole, stepped around in worn boots, jeans and shirts summer
and winter, added a canvas coat in cold weather. A benign growth appeared
on his eyelid and gave it a drooping appearance, a broken nose healed
crooked.
Years on years they worked 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 and the Shirleys, Ferrises and the Rattlesnakes,
Salt River Range, into the Wind Rivers over and again, the Sierra Madres,
Gros Ventres, the Washakies, Laramies, but never returning to Brokeback.
Down in Texas Jack's father-in-law died and Lureen, who inherited
the farm equipment business, showed a skill for management and hard
deals. Jack found himself with a vague managerial title, traveling to
stock and agricultural machinery shows. He had some money now and found
ways to spend it on his buying trips. A little Texas accent flavored
his sentences, "cow" twisted into "kyow" and "wife" coming out as "waf."
He'd had his front teeth filed down and capped, said he'd felt no pain,
and to finish the job grew a heavy mustache.
In May of 1983 they spent a few cold days at a series of little icebound,
no-name high lakes, then worked across into the Hail Strew River drainage.
Going up, the day was fine but the trail deep-drifted and slopping
wet at the margins. They left it to wind through a slashy cut, leading
the horses through brittle branchwood, Jack, the same eagle feather
in his old hat, lifting his head in the heated noon to take the air
scented with resinous lodgepole, the dry needle duff and hot rock, bitter
juniper crushed beneath the horses' hooves. Ennis, weather-eyed, looked
west for the heated cumulus that might come up on such a day but the
boneless blue was so deep, said Jack, that he might drown looking up.
Around three they swung through a narrow pass to a southeast slope
where the strong spring sun had had a chance to work, dropped down to
the trail again which lay snowless below them. They could hear the river
muttering and making a distant train sound a long way off. Twenty minutes
on they surprised a black bear on the bank above them rolling a log
over for grubs and Jack's horse shied and reared, Jack saying "Wo! Wo!"
and Ennis's bay dancing and snorting but holding. Jack reached for the
.30-.06 but there was no need; the startled bear galloped into the trees
with the lumpish gait that made it seem it was falling apart.
The tea-colored river ran fast with snowmelt, a scarf of bubbles
at every high rock, pools and setbacks streaming. The ochre-branched
willows swayed stiffly, pollened catkins like yellow thumbprints. The
horses drank and Jack dismounted, scooped icy water up in his hand,
crystalline drops falling from his fingers, his mouth and chin glistening
with wet.
"Get beaver fever doin that," said Ennis, then, "Good enough place,"
looking at the level bench above the river, two or three fire-rings
from old hunting camps. A sloping meadow rose behind the bench, protected
by a stand of lodgepole. There was plenty of dry wood. They set up camp
without saying much, picketed the horses in the meadow. Jack broke the
seal on a bottle of whiskey, took a long, hot swallow, exhaled forcefully,
said, "That's one a the two things I need right now," capped and tossed
it to Ennis.
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