BrokenBack Mountain
Ennis woke in red dawn with his pants around his knees, a top-grade
headache, and Jack butted against him; without saying anything about
it both knew how it would go for the rest of the summer, sheep be damned.
As it did go. They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at
first only in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the
hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough,
laughing and snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word
except once Ennis said, "I'm not no queer," and Jack jumped in with
"Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody's business but ours." There were
only the two of them on the mountain flying in the euphoric, bitter
air, looking down on the hawk's back and the crawling lights of vehicles
on the plain below, suspended above ordinary affairs and distant from
tame ranch dogs barking in the dark hours. They believed themselves
invisible, not knowing Joe Aguirre had watched them through his 10x42
binoculars for ten minutes one day, waiting until they'd buttoned up
their jeans, waiting until Ennis rode back to the sheep, before bringing
up the message that Jack's people had sent word that his uncle Harold
was in the hospital with pneumonia and expected not to make it. Though
he did, and Aguirre came up again to say so, fixing Jack with his bold
stare, not bothering to dismount.
In August Ennis spent the whole night with Jack in the main camp
and in a blowy hailstorm the sheep took off west and got among a herd
in another allotment. There was a damn miserable time for five days,
Ennis and a Chilean herder with no English trying to sort them out,
the task almost impossible as the paint brands were worn and faint at
this late season. Even when the numbers were right Ennis knew the sheep
were mixed. In a disquieting way everything seemed mixed.
The first snow came early, on August thirteenth, piling up a foot,
but was followed by a quick melt. The next week Joe Aguirre sent word
to bring them down -- another, bigger storm was moving in from the Pacific
-- and they packed in the game and moved off the mountain with the sheep,
stones rolling at their heels, purple cloud crowding in from the west
and the metal smell of coming snow pressing them on. The mountain boiled
with demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken-cloud light, the
wind combed the grass and drew from the damaged krummholz and slit rock
a bestial drone. As they descended the slope Ennis felt he was in a
slow-motion, but headlong, irreversible fall.
Joe Aguirre paid them, said little. He had looked at the milling
sheep with a sour expression, said,
"Some a these never went up there with you." The count was not what
he'd hoped for either. Ranch stiffs never did much of a job.
"You goin a do this next summer?" said Jack to Ennis in the street,
one leg already up in his green pickup. The wind was gusting hard and
cold.
"Maybe not." A dust plume rose and hazed the air with fine grit and
he squinted against it. "Like I said, Alma and me's gettin married in
December. Try to get somethin on a ranch. You?" He looked away from
Jack's jaw, bruised blue from the hard punch Ennis had thrown him on
the last day.
"If nothin better comes along. Thought some about going back up to
my daddy's place, give him a hand over the winter, then maybe head out
for Texas in the spring. If the draft don't get me."
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18 嶄猟井