Part 1, Chapter 6
The next few months were among the most confusing and conflicted of Ennis’ life.
He knew what would have happened if David hadn’t turned away when he had, recognized the gathering storm in him and the point when lightning was going to strike, no two ways about it. They’d have been on the ground together next to that stream, doing another kind of riding, in another few seconds. David had not acted any differently for the rest of their ride; but Ennis had been relieved that it was already late in the afternoon. And it was nothing to be so unsettled about anyway, he told himself: David had left the next morning without their seeing each other again and it wasn’t likely they ever would.
His affair with Jack had balanced on such fragile, shaky scaffolding built around his determination that he wasn’t queer, no way. His father, the first man he’d ever known, would have killed him for that, there was no better evidence of it being something to fear, to loathe and avoid no matter what. But only two weeks with Jack on Brokeback Mountain so many years ago had seemed to change that. Couldn’t be, it wasn’t an attraction to any other men in the world, just that one thing with Jack, all he had ever wanted anyway. Even with women, Alma was the only girl he’d ever kept company with. The times he’d spent with Jack on their camping trips over those 20 years happened in their own carefully constructed world, something apart where they made their own rules with no one to see them: a world with its own customs, language, even diet. Ennis had heard the word "ghetto" only when it was misused on television to mean "slum", so he could not have seen this evidence of how insidiously attractive ghettos can be as a fortress against a hostile world where the ghetto dwellers are always outsiders.
He hadn’t heard nor felt Jack again since that day he and David had gone riding. Not surprising, he’d thought with wry glumness, just two days since he and Jack had said vows to each other at that wedding and he’d had a hard-on for another man. But Ennis still had that odd feeling of Jack’s presence, still the sensation that just a little more vigilance on his part, or carelessness on Jack’s, and he would catch him out. The occasional erotic dreams about Jack had returned, and one morning he’d wakened to a realization that he’d even been dreaming about David though the memory of the dream had faded as soon as he’d started thinking about it. It was that phone call, he thought, though there was nothing in the conversation even his father couldn’t hear.
He’d forgotten giving David his phone number; was expecting to hear Junior’s voice on the phone when it rang. It had been a short, routine-sounding exchange, David asking if Junior and Curt were getting settled. "She’s still fixin’ up their place," Ennis had told him. "Curt’s job, it takes him away from home a lot." He was seeing more of Junior nowadays, had dinner at her house at least once a week. She and Curt seemed very affectionate when Curt was there, but Junior had some adjusting to do with his being away so much, her plans for married life hadn’t included that. "He calls at least every other day, Daddy, but you know phone calls aren’t the same," she’d said one evening when they’d had dinner in town together.
He knew he could hang up and David would not likely call him again. But David was almost a thousand miles away, he thought afterward, no worry about his losing control during a phone call. Besides, his reaction had been all his own doing, and David hadn’t tried to take the advantage of that moment like he could have. And a long-distance call after all, that no one else could hear, wouldn’t even show up on his bill if anyone cared to look at it….
But his waking fantasies about Jack were the most unsettling new development. These were nothing new in a sense; Ennis had spent many an evening and Sunday morning in the last year reliving their more passionate encounters, even adding to and editing some of them. But these had all been in the same settings where they’d always met: out in the middle of nowhere with a tent for a shelter, campfire for warmth and sleeping bags on the ground as their conjugal bed. Now, the setting had drastically changed and the events were far more varied, if sometimes more commonplace.
He’d had only fleeting impressions of the run-down ranch in Lightning Flat on his way in. The house, he’d noticed, had needed painting and other repairs badly, although it looked solid and Jack’s mother had kept it scrupulously clean and freshly whitewashed inside. But Jack’s father’s words, though some of them had bled him out inside and forced tears to his eyes - the first he’d shown in front of strangers since childhood - had also made him notice details of the land and the house’s surroundings on the way out: "had some half-baked notion the two o’ you was gonna move up here, build a cabin, help run the place." He’d looked at the barns, the cattle scattered about, the four mature cherry trees in back, and a flat spot with an ancient grove on a rise above a stream, about 100 feet from the house. He wouldn’t have noticed more than the rutted, pebbly road he was driving on if it hadn’t been for the Old Bastard’s words.
At least once a week, they had dinner with Jack’s mother and the Old Bastard, come what may. Her cooking, Jack was quick to admit, was light-years better than his and the Old Bastard had even become marginally more friendly since the efforts of two younger men working on the rundown ranch were starting to bear fruit. But Ennis was amazed at how skillfully Jack turned these prosaic occasions into opportunities to tease him. Even the shirt he usually wore to dinner in The House, as both of them referred to it.
Ennis had made a trip to Riverton a few months ago to see Jenny in her senior high school play, in which an actor had appeared wearing a ripped-up shirt damaged in an offstage brawl. He’d asked Jenny afterward if the costume people had made a different shirt for every performance, and she’d hooted. "Daddy, you must be the last person in the world to hear about Velcro!"
And he’d had to mention that to Jack. On his next trip to Gillette for supplies, Jack had taken a sky-blue cotton shirt with him and had the buttonholes replaced with Velcro, leaving the buttons for public view to hide how easy it was to rip the shirt off. He’d taken to wearing it to The House on these dinner occasions and would smile at Ennis innocently across the narrow table, fingers artlessly brushing the plackets and cuffs in between bites of Helen Twist’s macaroni and beef casserole. Once Ennis tried kicking him under the table but the only result was "ouch! Watch it, Ennis", after which Jack’s foot had stealthily crept forward to wedge against his own.
Finally, to avoid looking at Jack, Ennis had complimented Mrs. Twist on the casserole - ‘ma’am’, he still called her, unable to say ‘Mother’ as yet - relieved that the uncomfortable pressure in his jeans wasn’t anything visible under the carefully patched tablecloth she brought out for these weekly dinners.
Another thunderstorm was moving slowly in as they walked back to the cabin later, the lightning that was as much a fixture here as wind throwing the clouds into sharp relief. But the walk was a short one, Jack purposely not hurrying, The door had hardly closed behind them before Ennis had pulled Jack to him, one hand on the back of Jack’s head as he kissed him and the other hand struggling with the snaps on his jeans; wondering why Jack didn’t have Velcro put on them as well. Then he yanked Jack’s modified shirt open, still turned on by the ripping sound it made; and pulling it off his shoulders fast enough that Jack had to pull apart the cuffs to keep them from ripping in earnest: "think you’re somethin’ doncha, Jack Twist?" "I’d say you think so," Jack answered as he down at the edge of their bed, pulling off his boots and jeans and still looking at Ennis with that exaggerated innocence. Ennis sat down behind him, running his hands up Jack’s sides, deliberately bypassing the nipples he knew were so sensitive. Instead, both his hands traveled down Jack’s unresisting arms, pulled them out slightly, moved back up the tender skin underneath from the wrist up to the elbow and then back down. As they did, Jack crossed his arms just under his shoulders as if hugging himself, which laid Ennis’ hands over his nipples. Ennis fingered them lightly with his left hand but only briefly, just long enough to feel Jack’s muscles tense. He was going to pay him back for that teasing at dinner. They had world enough now, and time.
His right hand moved down to Jack’s knee and languidly up the inside of the thigh, right hand cupping his balls and right thumb caressing them lightly and then moving forward a bit to trace up and down the now-throbbing vein in his cock. Jack was gasping now, head arched back and to one side, giving Ennis plenty of room for leisurely nibbles down the side of his neck before sinking his teeth lightly into Jack’s shoulder and sucking hard for a moment.
Jack’s body jerked forward as if Ennis’ mouth had been a hot piece of charcoal but Ennis had anticipated that and held his prey in place. "Tease me willya, Rodeo?" he whispered, but his own breath was getting ragged and the pressure on his own jeans more insistent. He released Jack and started to unzip his own Wranglers but Jack, less intent on teasing him now, turned around and speeded up the process by several seconds.
Afterward, the storm moved in closer and the lightning, which Ennis was accustomed to by now, illuminated the room in momentary sheets of light. The window with its protective awning outside was open and he watched the night breeze riffle Jack’s dark hair for a few minutes before he too dozed off.
But oddly, he was beginning to find these invented erotic memories no more compelling than the minutiae of their imagined daily life; which he reviewed, fine-tuned and added to in his mind over and over again. In his imagination, he and Jack built their three-room cabin, pitching a tent in the windbreak of the half-empty barn while they were working on it; and rode or walked over every inch of the ranch’s acreage, deciding what to work on first. His new epic fantasies about Jack were beginning to focus as much on these details as on the passion that would no longer be bottled and sealed up within a few weeks a year.
During Curt’s absences, Alma Jr. was using her time alone painting and decorating their tiny apartment, and Ennis drove with her to Casper on his next day off. He watched as she went through stack after stack of paint color samples on tiny cards, surprised that there could be so many shades and tints of white alone, let alone every other color; and thinking of what a long arduous job it would have been repainting the old Twist house in addition to the cabin.
"I guess I’ll get used to it," Junior said later, when they stopped for lunch. "But when Curt’s home, I feel like we have to make the most of it, be together all the time, and then when he’s gone back to work it’s just me in the house and I’ve got so much time to fill. It isn’t ever just, I don’t know, ordinary. A regular married life, you know?"
"Yes," Ennis answered, "I do."
She dozed off in the truck on the way home and his eyes watched the road, but his mind was back in Lightning Flat, carefully scraping the peeling paint off the house and wondering if Mrs. Twist would like the dark green paint he’d bought in Gillette to use as trim and break up the expanse of white - or rather "eggshell", as the label on the white paint he’d bought indicated.
Where for years he hadn’t even allowed himself to think of living with Jack, now he went through detail after detail. As the daydreams became more frequent, and started to invade his dreams at night, they became just as painful as they were compelling. He never would have thought that imagining activities like repairing fences, moving stock or expeditions to hardware and grocery stores could cause such longing and regret; and he understood now that this was what Jack had so desired, without which their stolen times together had soured; this mundane holiness. He felt like a starving man marooned in a rocky wasteland where nothing edible would grow, recalling a luscious feast he’d declined even to taste over and over again.
They’d bought two young North Star cherry trees in big pots and planted them near the four mature ones. The trees in the tiny orchard looked fragile, with substantial enough trunks but tapering branches becoming almost twig-like where the bunches of cherries ripened. But they were among the toughest and most self-sufficient of any fruit tree; more than a match for winter ice, summer heat, droughts, windstorms and weeds.
Ennis was balancing on a rickety ladder, the handle of a plastic gallon ice cream carton dangling from one wrist while he reached with the other for the handfuls of ripe cherries that grew in bunches like grapes. "Ya missed a good bunch o’ ripe ones!" Jack called from the ground were he was picking the fruit lower down. "They look ripe from where you are," Ennis answered, "still orange from up here." Later, they would sit with Mrs. Twist on the stoop of the freshly-painted house, pitting the cherries with ‘poor man’s cherry pitters’: old plastic drinking straws thriftily cut in half that could poke out the cyanide-bearing pit and leave the fruit whole and round. The kitchen had grown sultry and humid with the steam from the canning pot that had been boiling over an hour. "You’re eatin’ as many as you’re pittin’ ", he said to Jack, but he was snacking on them too: they were often called "sour" pie cherries but when fully ripe had a refreshing tartness that undercut the sugar in them and kept it from being cloying. The cherry juice, drying on their skin, had stained their hands black.
The daydream assailed him one day at work, riding in the passenger seat of the truck while Javier, one of the seasonal ranch hands, drove. In his imagination the orchard and house, humble as they were, were so vivid and so tantalizingly out of reach that he felt suddenly gut-punched and doubled over slightly. "You all right?" he was brought back to the present by the alarm in Javier’s voice and muttered something about breakfast not setting well with him. But he resolved to get these fantasies under control. For the next week, he watched inwardly for them to start taking form as he would watch for ruts in a gravel road, forcing other thoughts into his head to crowd them out and finding things to do that would demand his full attention. The strain and his troubled sleep showed in his face, and he grew even thinner than he normally was; and his attempt at control was suddenly derailed one night while he was sleeping and Jack finally managed to speak to him directly for the first time.
It was a very brief encounter but he knew immediately on waking that this had not been one of his occasional dreams about Jack. It lacked both that flat, cartoonish look of dreams as well as a dream’s matter-of-fact surrealism; where the dreamer can absent-mindedly leave the house stark naked and notice it only too late; or in which dinner plates sprout merrily in flower garden borders. The light was dim and bluish and he could see Jack’s features clearly. Not like he’d seen him in life; but rather like seeing someone’s reflection in a window with a night sky behind it; visible but with no physical substance and a certain lack of detail.
"Don’t be doin’ that, bud," Jack said, his voice sounding like he was speaking from the other side of a door but his words clear enough. "You’re changin’ horses, don’t fall off now." Ennis had asked what he meant and Jack had just smiled knowingly. But his parting words, as Ennis recalled them the next morning, left no doubt as to what he was referring to: "nice idea about the Velcro."
Curt had managed to make it home last week and Junior had left her painting project half-done for the time being, the living room cluttered with drop cloths and smelling of latex paint. But she’d finally finished it, she told him on the phone and asked him to dinner. "I’m kinda worried about you, Daddy, you don’t look like you’re eatin’ more than every other day."
The living room looked brighter; still smelled of paint but the better aroma in the kitchen where Junior was putting out plates and silverware for two on the kitchen table. "Taste the stew and see if there’s anything you wanta add to it, Daddy," she urged. He lifted the lid, dipped a spoon into the thick beef stew and reached for the salt shaker. "Wha’s that?" She was spooning something that looked to him like lavender pudding into glass dishes. "Blueberry yogurt, Daddy, try it just once. I eat it for lunch a lot, it’s cheap and convenient, no cooking."
He added a few pinches of salt to the stew and then opened the oven to make sure the brown-and-serve rolls weren’t getting too brown. But he was already imaging a late winter morning in Lightning Flat, Jack out in the barn and Ennis starting a bacon and egg breakfast. He was checking the toast browning under the broiler, and savoring the aroma of the bacon as it cooked.
(End of Part 1)
Acknowledgements, Part 1:
“God Bless Our Love”, Mary Chapin Carpenter
“Sweet Home Alabama”, “Ballad of Curtis Loewe”, Lynyrd Skynyrd
“Melissa”, Allman Brothers Band
Thanks to Monica and Grace at the Dave Cullen forum, for information about Western riding and for general coaching.
The Paris plane crash that David describes was an historic aviation disaster that devastated Atlanta’s arts community, on June 3, 1962. Special thanks to Georgia blogger/historian Randy Golden, whose article “The Day Atlanta Died” refreshed my fuzzy memories of it. The article is at http://ngeorgia.com/feature/orly.html