Gift of Exile -- Chapter 11
Try as he might, sleep wouldn’t take no for an answer forever. It hadn’t crept up on him or drifted over him but had clubbed him over the head. Or maybe, he thought as Sincie carefully picked her way down the slopes, it was like Curt had mentioned once about surgery he’d had years ago: no drowsiness, just looking up at the doctor one minute and waking up the next. As he had known, he had been alone again when he woke up, with morning daylight pouring through the tent’s little screen window and the sound of the stream and the busy voices of the birds outside. He lay motionless for a long time, wondering again if the night had been an unusually vivid dream.
Finally he unzipped the tent’s fly opening, crawled outside and started to stand up. Before he was even fully on his feet, he staggered and sat back down again for a few moments. He could feel every muscle in his legs, all of them aching; and his lower back and shoulders and arms felt like he had been lifting weights. The skin on his chin and neck and groin had the familiar abrasive, raw feeling that Jack’s beard stubble had often left and now he could also feel a latticework of stinging scratches here and there on his back.
When he felt steady enough on his feet to roll up the tent and pack his gear, he noticed telltale stiff spots here and there in the bedding. Getting Sincie saddled up was a minor ordeal, as his arms didn’t seem to want to lift anything higher than his chest but he finally managed it, the mare twisting her head around and looking at him quizzically. As always when camping, he went to pour dirt on the embers of the campfire to ensure that no fugitive sparks could blow into the trees or onto the dry duff, and was surprised to find the ashes completely cold; not even a warm spot at the bottom. But he scattered a few handfuls of soil onto the ashes anyway.
Before packing the last of his gear, he drank a little of the water left over from last night, but did not wash himself. Although he was long accustomed to bathing in cold water, he’d detected the scents of sweat and semen and earth on his body and wanted to keep them a little longer. After managing to get up in the saddle by leading Sincie next to a stump at the edge of the campsite, he sat looking for awhile at the bluff and at the view of the meadow, again recalling standing ankle-deep in the stream and watching Jack as a tiny figure, shrunken as much by the landscape as by the distance.
Just as he had at Junior’s wedding after Jack had unexpectedly joined him, Ennis tried to puzzle out the events of the night before within the closely-spaced brackets of the world he lived in. There were probably people who could Scotch-tape together some logical explanations of the scratches on his back and the other evidences of how he’d spent the night. But he couldn’t think of any that were more believable than it simply happening in the way Jack had said it did. Oddly, he felt a shadow of the sensation he’d had after that long vigil with the shirts over a year ago: the feeling of having been condensed down to a soul and naked bones. This time, however, there was a warmth at the center that he mentally hugged to himself as he took out some of the recollections of the night before and turned them over and over.
They’d made love several more times, but had also talked for long intervals between. At one point, limp and temporarily sated, he lay on the bedding next to Jack with his head still resting on Jack’s knees. "I don’t know," he’d said tentatively, "you’re gonna wait for me for years? Just driftin’ around in wherever all that time, all alone?" He knew that what he should say: don’t do that for me, go on with whatever happens after but couldn’t bring himself to say it.
"I ain’t alone here, bud," Jack had unexpectedly answered. "Oh, I ain’t tellin’ you I’m doin’ any socializin’, but I’m not the only one who’s stuck around just inside the door. There’s other people here and there, people with little kids mostly. And it might be years ta you, but time don’t work the same way here. For you, on your side, it’s like a shotgun house, one room right behind the other. But here it’s more like a bunch of hallways goin’ off in all directions with lots of doors along all of ‘em. Maybe they all double back on each other, but I ain’t sure of that yet, maybe I’m just not far enough on the other side. I understand some things and remember some things, but I ain’t all that much smarter than I ever was."
By the time he got back to the trailhead and his truck that afternoon, Ennis was feeling surprisingly hungry, even a little dizzy. Stopping at the same diner on the highway, he ordered a hamburger, fries and coffee and discovered that he was not just satisfying his hunger but truly relishing a meal for the first time in years. He could taste the rendered blood and muscles in the meat, the smooth sweetness of the ketchup and the contrasting bite of the mustard and onion; and could smell the fragrances of wheat and yeast in the bread. He held the hot ceramic coffee cup between his hands and inhaled fresh coffee and milk as he sipped it.
"Everythin’ okay?" It was the same waitress who had warned him about the snow on the upper slopes before. "Sure is, ma’am," he told her. "Better ‘n okay. I was real hungry when I got here."
She laughed a little. "I’m glad you like your dinner but actually I meant ta ask you if you were okay. When you didn’t show up yesterday I was a little worried, thought maybe you’d tried to go too far up anyway and somethin’ happened to you. The cook said I was just bein’ silly, you’d probably just decided not to stop but I was glad ta see your truck pull up anyway."
His heart seemed to pause and then jerk forward, and his head throbbed briefly. "Uh, no ma’am," he managed to get out. "Just decided to stay over some, uh, found a real nice campsite." She nodded and refilled his coffee cup from the glass carafe in her hand, and moved off, and he sat for several moments wondering how long his wedding night had actually been.
On the counter nearby was a jumbled pile of newspaper sections, left by various customers during the day and kept out for other customers to read. Forcing himself not to hurry, Ennis picked up a few sections and made himself go back to his table before turning one over and looking at the date at the top of the page. Tuesday.
Tuesday. He’d arrived at Lightning Flat on Saturday, got to the trailhead early Sunday afternoon after a long steady drive and had planned to start back for Riverton on Monday. His and Jack’s wedding night had not been a night at all, but two nights and a full day. He sat sipping his coffee for a long time, recalling again Jack’s description of how time passed for him, and wondering how many of those corridors he and Jack had wandered through during those hours. A song came on the jukebox that he remembered hearing just a few years ago, probably remembered it for its rather horsy lyrics:
All the long, lazy mornings in pastures of
Green, the sun on your withers, the wind in
Your mane, could never prepare you for what
Lies ahead. The run for the roses so red.
From sire to sire, it's born in the blood. The
Fire of a mare and the strength of a stud. It's
Breeding and it's training and it's something un-
Known that drives you and carries you home.
Chorus:
And it's run for the roses as fast as you can.
Your fate is delivered. Your moment's at hand.
It's the chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of
Chance. And it's high time you joined in the dance.
It's high time you joined in the dance.
"I dunno about somebody else," he’d told Jack doubtfully. "I’d feel like I was dancin’ on your grave."
"Pretty strange thing for you ta say, I’ve seen ya try to dance, cowboy," Jack said with the same cocky smile of both his memory and the photo Mrs. Twist had given him. "But I don’t care if you’re dancin’ on my grave or anyplace else so long as you’re dancin’. Whether you wanna dance by yourself or with somebody else, that’s up ta you, just don’t go makin’ some kinda shrine outta me, like some old church guy in a stained glass window. Next time you think about me, try an’ remember somethin’ ta laugh about." Ennis listened idly to the rest of the song and didn’t laugh, but he found himself smiling a little.
On the drive back to Riverton, Ennis stopped at the crest of the hill where, approaching the mountain on the drive from Riverton, he could first get a clear look at it. Pulling the truck over into a turnout, he sat for almost an hour, looking at the mountain’s twin peaks for what he knew was the last time. He would never again go to Brokeback in this life, not until someone took his own ashes to scatter.
When he got back, he resolved to put that in writing, so that when his time came no one would wonder whether it was a real place.
End of Part 2
Acknowledgements:
"Run For the Roses", by Dan Fogelberg. From The Innocent Age, 1981.
Thanks to "shakestheground" on the Bettermost forum for both photos and descriptions of the Lightning Flat area.
The Internet has several sites with information about both crows and coyotes as totem animals. Two with fairly detailed descriptions are http://wolfs_moon.tripod.com/CoyoteTotem.html
http://wolfs_moon.tripod.com/crowtotem.html and
http://www.43things.com/things/view/938386
The Jewish holiday that Mrs. Twist mentions in her explanation of Pentecost is the "day of first fruits" holiday of Shavuot. A brief history of Shavuot can be found at http://www.myjewishlearning.com/holidays/Shavuot/TO_Shavuot_History.htm
Index to previous chapters:
Chapter 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/392.html
Chapter 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/523.html
Chapter 3: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1066.html
Chapter 4: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1485.html
Chapter 5: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1704.html
Chapter 6: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2038.html
Chapter 7: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2358.html
Chapter 8: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2635.html
Chapter 9: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2947.html
Chapter 10: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3130.html