Part 1, Chapter 5
(Note: Extended flashback and fantasy sequences that are set apart in paragraphs will be in italics from here on)
Ennis spotted a line of trees that he knew meant a watercourse, and shade. "Over there, looks like a good place for a break," he said; adding "reins, David." "Uh, sorry." David shifted the reins that he had absently taken in both hands to his left as the horses broke from a fast trot to a leisurely canter. That had been hard for him to remember yesterday, and he’d also occasionally just pulled back with his left hand instead pulling them shorter with his right.
Though Ennis had spent much of his life on horseback, yesterday afternoon had been as much an education for him as his student. David had almost fallen off once before Ennis had found out he was used to holding onto the horse with his lower legs rather than the knees. And though he’d watched some Olympic horse events on television a few years back, he’d listened with disbelief to David’s description of "posting": standing up and sitting down in the saddle when the horse moved at a trot. "It’s easy when you get used to it," David had assured him. "You move to the horse’s rhythm, and you get to where you just do it without thinking."
But by the end of Sunday afternoon, David was accustomed enough to the unfamiliar saddle that Ennis could tell that he was a horseman, all right. He shifted his weight and posture subtly but constantly as the horse moved; adjusting to the animal’s gait, the terrain and whether they were going uphill or downhill. The movement was more than adjustment: it was a part of that mutual horse-rider space, something that could not be taught. Someone who could not develop it unconsciously could take riding lessons for years and never be a true rider.
A little further downstream a bank sloped down sharply, and trees were a little thicker and the dappled shade a little deeper. After watering and tethering the horses, Ennis sat down on an old log and David on the bank, feet resting on the level ground. Ennis produced a flask of whiskey and somewhat to his surprise David pulled a joint out of the top of his right sock. He lit it after taking a swallow of the flask that Ennis offered, and held it toward him with a questioning lift of his hand.
As they passed the flask and joint between them, Ennis breathed in the burning-sage aroma and recalled the last evening with Jack when they had done exactly the same thing. Except on that night, he and Jack had laid out their half-truths for each others’ inspection: Ennis’ half-hearted affair with the waitress in Riverton and Jack’s risky trysts with the ranch foreman’s "wife". When Jack had suddenly said "truth is, sometimes I miss you so much I can hardly stand it", Ennis had looked away, not taken the chance, one of the last choices of that kind he would have.
"Don’t Bogart that joint, Ennis." David was leaning toward, him, light gray eyes suddenly arresting in the dimmed light. "Sorry," Ennis handed it to him and they sat in silence for a few minutes.
In only two days they were already at ease with each other, talking unselfconsciously about horses, camping, each others’ work lives. David had told Ennis about his camping and wilderness supply business and Ennis had described the seasonal rhythms of ranch work. And David did not seem at all bothered by Ennis’ sparseness in conversation. The silences that occasionally fell between them were companionable ones, like those between friends who had a long history behind them and didn’t need to fill in every gap with talk.
David was looking at the mountain peaks in the distance. "Those are the Wind River mountains, you said? We’ve got mountains in Minnesota, Georgia too; nothing like those, though." "S’right," Ennis answered, adding, "you said you were gonna do some sightseein’ those extra days. Guess my takin’ you ridin’ means you won’t be able ta see any of the mountains here."
"I’m not complaining" David answered. "I hadn’t been on a horse in years, and I’d rather be ridin’ around outdoors than lookin’ at scenery from a car window. When I was growin’ up, my daddy took me and my brother on camping trips, fishing trips. Up in the north Georgia mountains mostly, though we went to the Okefenokee a few times, camped out with the ‘gators. Of course," he added with somewhat studied casualness, "Nathan went too after he came to live with us, but I don’t think he liked it as much. Even though he was better ‘n me at fishing, tyin’ knots, settin’ up tents."
"He was family? Thought you said he was your best friend," Ennis asked. It was David’s first mention of Nathan. In one part of his mind, Ennis didn’t want to hear about it but the part that was curious about this man who might have more in common with him than anyone else he knew had subtly gotten the upper hand.
"He was, but he was my parents’ godson too," David answered. "That’s usually just a ceremonial thing, but Nathan’s daddy had all the paperwork and all the lawyers to make it legal. Me and Nathan -- I got a younger brother, two years younger -- we were born in the same hospital on the same day, that’s how they all met. Every summer when I was a kid I spent a lot of time in Atlanta and Nathan visited us in Macon, and then there were holidays. Used to ride up at their country place, it’s pretty built up now but in those days there were still even some covered bridges around. The horses were all sold after his parents were killed, and we’d rent horses once in awhile after that, but it wasn’t as regular as before. I don’t remember us ever riding after we started college."
"My folks was killed in an accident," Ennis ventured. "Car accident. They went off the road, the only curve in 43 miles and not far from home. Never did find out exactly how it happened. I was 13."
"Bad age for that to happen," David said sympathetically.
"There ain’t no good age for it ta happen."
"That’s a fact. So what happened, you went to live with relatives?"
"No, I had a brother two years older’n me, sister 3 years older. The bank got the ranch, we spent the next few years in a cramped little place in town. That’s why I started workin’ when I was 14, never stopped."
David took a cautious sip of the whiskey and looked at him speculatively. "You musta had to grow up fast."
"Yep, sure did," Ennis answered but he wanted to hear more of what sounded to him like a story from another world. "So was that what happened to Nathan’s folks? They in a car accident too?"
"No, but it ended the same way, I can tell you that," David answered grimly. "Nathan and me were both 14. I remember wakin’ up that morning, hearing my mama cryin’ in the next room and Daddy saying get up, get dressed, we’ve gotta get up to Atlanta right away." He inhaled from the joint again and then drank from the flask, a long swallow rather than a sip this time. Then he told Ennis about Nathan’s family and its abrupt destruction on a sunny June morning in Paris.
Tom Howell was a disappointed man. In high school he had been a football and track star, but in his freshman year at Georgia Tech a knee injury ended his football career before it began. His and Sheila’s disappointments with their marriage had resulted in only one child and in separate bedrooms, but he had no disappointments about his lifestyle or what his marriage had done for his insurance business.
Before her marriage, Sheila Dorman Howell had spent only two years as an art major at Emory University, during which she’d discovered that she had no ability to create great art but an unerring eye for its quality. Her failure to graduate did not disturb her family: it was the era when jokes about girls attending college to get an "M.R.S." degree were commonplace. As Alexandria later enjoyed telling relatives, Sheila’s mother had been a Candler, which in Atlanta meant Coca-Cola and old money. She opened a small art gallery, one of the places to go if one’s income and taste in decorating ran to expensive art; but entertaining was her great talent. "There’s people all over Atlanta who know each other just from meeting up at Sheila’s parties," David’s mother had often said. Through these occasions Tom quickly assembled a comfortable number of well-off clients; people who had the money and need for, and interest in, something beyond basic coverage for car accidents and visitors slipping on their porch steps.
For Tom and Sheila Howell, as for the other Atlantans on the cultural tour of Europe in spring of 1962, it had been a memorable two weeks. They had hiked through the Louvre and other destinations for artistic pilgrims and had enjoyed the cuisine of both France and Italy, at a time when most Americans’ knowledge of either was limited to French toast and canned spaghetti. Over breakfast the morning they were to return to Atlanta, they had compared notes on artworks they’d all bought: some intended as gifts and others for personal collections and artistic booty to be shown off in galleries like Sheila’s.
The Boeing 707 chartered jet waited on the tarmac at Orly Field airport, right across the Seine River. In an era when propeller-driven planes were the standard for most commercial air travel it stood out on the field, a sleek heron in the company of plump laying hens.
Taking off in a jet, with the feeling of being pulled backward as the plane picked up speed, was still a novelty to air travelers. They heard the characteristic high-pitched whine from the 707’s Pratt and Whitney engines as it steadily accelerated down the runway, and could see the floor tilting upward as the plane’s nose lifted, expecting to feel the slight bump and then a smooth glide as the wheels left the runway pavement. A second later, they were thrown violently forward against their seat belts as the front of the plane abruptly flopped down. Something had gone terribly wrong.
Because of a motor failure, only the nose of the jet had left the ground, dragging the rest behind it; and the pilot realized he would have to abort the takeoff, with only one-third of the runway length in front of him. Immediately he both braked and raised the flaps, and as the plane fishtailed back and forth like a car making a too-quick turn on an icy road, the friction turned the plane’s tires into odorous smoke almost instantly. Throwing a shower of sparks, the plane rolled on the bare rims for a few moments but these collapsed just as the plane left the runway. It skidded and belly-flopped across a greenbelt area, the impact jolting spines and necks in the passenger cabin and ripping off pieces of the plane with every blow.
With engines still going full tilt, it sounded now to people on the tarmac like the disintegrating aircraft was shrieking in agony. The tail section came loose and hit the ground, with three flight attendants inside, and the left undercarriage tore off. At the field’s boundary, only one engine left now, the plane had still not stopped: its momentum yanked it across the access road at the airport’s edge and slammed it hard into the landing lights. The impact tore off the left engine and the remnants of the landing gear, with little left intact now other than the battered wings and the fuselage.
Past the landing lights was a steep, grassy hill ending at the Seine, with a long-abandoned stone cottage halfway down. Tumbling and bouncing down the hill, the dismembered plane and its fragile human cargo collided with the building and shattered like a hollow eggshell, jet fuel igniting in a massive fireball that incinerated everyone inside within seconds.
Two of the flight attendants in the tail section were the only survivors and of the 130 people who died, all but a dozen or so were from Atlanta. Across the ocean in Georgia, over 30 children had lost both parents and Nathan was among them.
"Damn," Ennis was picturing the tumbling and exploding plane, and the terror of the people inside in their last seconds. "All them details - Nathan knew ‘em too?" "Every one," David answered. "Some of the newspaper stories even talked outright about the people being ‘incinerated’. That was one of the worse plane crashes in history at the time, got lots of publicity all over, and of course in Atlanta it was something you couldn’t escape at all for awhile. Reporters callin’ at all hours, knockin’ on the door at his aunt and uncle’s house, stories on the news about the Mayor goin’ to Paris to identify bodies…. We were stayin’ nearby, drove up to Atlanta right away.
"But there wasn’t anything we could do about that. You know how when somebody dies, it seems kinda strange that people you see on the street, at work, in stores, are just goin’ about their business like nothin’ happened? Feels heartless at the time but in a way it helps, reminds ya that everything’s still there, still in place. But with this, there wasn’t any getting’ away from it. Nathan said, a long time later, it was like you’re freezin’ all of a sudden and somebody’s un-invented fire."
Ennis wondered how many years Nathan had lived after that, and the thought flickered through his head, the barest and most tentative hope, that this might be the one person who would understand about Jack. He had no intention of mentioning Jack to this near-stranger, but just that recognition was like taking a long deep breath after spending hours in a windowless room with stagnant air.
"Damn, I’m sorry," David said suddenly. "We’re out ridin’ on a beautiful day, and here I am talkin’ about plane crashes. I guess it’s been on my mind lately, it was exactly 22 years ago last week."
Ennis thought for a moment. "Hey, you really ride bareback sometimes, like ya said last night?"
"Sure, when I was growin’ up anyway. Why, you thought I made it up?"
Ennis gave him a sidelong glance. "Well, they were kinda givin’ you a hard time about your ridin’ last night," he said a little archly.
David took the bait, as he had guessed. "Well, they’re your horses but I can prove it if you don’t believe me." Ennis gestured toward David’s horse, and David immediately started undoing the saddle, struggling with the unfamiliar straps and buckles.
"Here…" Ennis walked up next to him and quickly unfastened the saddle. Standing on slightly sloping ground their feet touched and their arms and shoulders brushed against each other; and Ennis glanced over to find David already looking closely at him.
When they’d met two nights before they had both been wearing suits, with the conventional dark heavy fabric serving its intended function of smoothing out the slopes and angles of male bodies. Now they were both wearing jeans, Ennis in the type of snapped cotton shirt he’d worn since his teens and David in a sweatshirt, a garment Ennis had never worn but which suddenly seemed improbably sensual to him. The sleeves were pushed up slightly, enough to show the light growth of fine dark hair on the wrists above the squarish but fine-boned hands with their short spatulate fingers. Ennis did not look down, but during their side-by-side rides he had already noticed, with awareness of it only half-surfacing, the compact legs and slightly rounded buttocks. He suddenly wanted more than anything to slide his hand under the soft fabric and up David’s back and then down again. His thoughts would have progressed further than that, but the realization in the same moment of his stiffening cock and of David frozen with one hand on the saddle, looking back at him, stopped them in their tracks.
"I’ll do it." David’s voice sounded somewhat shaky despite the casual words, but he turned and pulled the saddle off the horse’s back. There was no anger nor fear nor hostility in his manner, just a hand put out to stop a slowly swinging door from opening any further.
Ennis untethered his own horse, the familiar action dispelling the momentary sense of the world having shifted subtly and of his suddenly being in some alien realm with all signs written in unreadable languages. He swung himself up into the saddle and David stepped on the high end of the log to vault onto his horse’s back. "Over t’ that fence and back?" he suggested as they rode back out in the sunlight, pointing to a single tree a hundred yards or so away. Ennis nodded wordlessly, not trusting himself to answer at that moment, and they urged their horses into a canter.
Shaken as he was, he couldn’t resist glancing over. David’s legs were clinging to his horse’s flanks as if he were shinnying up a fleshy tree, leaning back very slightly, his pelvis rocking rhythmically back and forth with the horse’s three-time gait. He glanced over at Ennis and smiled triumphantly: "told ya!" Ennis nodded, but did not look over at him again until they reached the tree.