BrokenBack Mountain
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 the
wet clean blankets were stowed in the truck bed he stepped into Higgins's
gift shop and busied himself with the postcard rack.
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18 嶄猟井