Gift of Exile - Part 3
Source: Fanfiction based on Brokeback Mountain, slightly more influenced by the film than the short story.
Rating: mostly NC 17, some slash; a metaphysical subplot.
Summary: Faced with several unattractive choices, Ennis chooses self-imposed exile and discovers that exile can sometimes lead you to the people you belong to.
Disclaimer: Ennis, Jack, all the other characters appearing in Brokeback Mountain and its storyline are the creations and property of Annie Proulx, and of Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana who authored the screenplay. I am deriving no income from this work.
Author’s Notes: I have made no effort to imitate Annie Proulx's style; her style is her own. "Dialect" passages are not intended to be dialect as such, but standard American colloquial pronunciation. Some Southern idioms are also used. This is a very first fiction attempt and as such is more than a little autobiographical.
Synopsis: Attending his daughter's wedding as promised, Ennis discovers that Jack might be physically dead but isn't very far away and is able to contact him. At the reception he meets a guest from Minnesota, Curt's second cousin David, and discovers that David is gay and has also lost a partner. Ennis and David go horseback riding together over the next few days, and forge a tentative connection that continues to develop when David starts calling Ennis regularly.
Ennis sees more of both his daughters in the next months, and gets a letter from Mrs. Twist telling him that Jack's father has died and asking him to carry out Jack's wishes to have his ashes scattered on Brokeback Mountain. Ennis spends an afternoon with Mrs. Twist, learning a few important details about Jack's life, and then heads up to one of their old campsites on Brokeback where he and Jack enjoy a brief reunion. A few months later, Ennis helps Jenny to move to Denver, discovering that big cities don't agree with him; and then faces his second winter without Jack.
Music: Song For a Winter's Night (Gordon Lightfoot/Sarah McLachlan) video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60bNzi9dA9U
Chapter 14
Early Winter, 1984
Winter arrived by the end of November, and out came the kerosene heater that Ennis used to keep the trailer liveably warm. Before long the trailer had taken on its usual winter smells of kerosene, coffee constantly hot on the stove and the mingled odors of manure, diesel fuel and mud in the wet work clothing he hung up every night. By December the ground outside had its cold, shiny marble cover: an unbroken expanse in the field across the road, but broken up nearer to the trailer by tire tracks, rectangle-shaped bare spots where vehicles were parked and occasional ruts that would be muddy in the spring.
Last winter was a time that to the end of his life, Ennis tried not to remember. For so long it had been the slow countdown to the year’s first reunion with Jack. Well before the flurry of postcards over where to meet started up in February, he’d have thoroughly catalogued the last meeting in his mind: every touch, every moan and movement, the layout of the campsite, what days it had been cold and how the clouds had looked, animals they saw from horseback. Last winter there was no Jack, no meeting to plan, but his worst bouts of drinking came after he caught himself thinking of likely dates and campsites, anticipating their first frantic coupling, before never again hit him. And this winter-
he felt restless and scattered, impatient for something that eluded him though just barely. He thought again of the winters at the cabin he and Jack should have built in Lightning Flat, sharing late breakfasts and enjoying a wood stove’s warmth while looking out at the icy landscape; but thoughts of Lightning Flat now brought the fresher and more substantial memories of the impossible reunion on Brokeback.
Anticipation and memory had bracketed his life for over two decades. In both he had felt safe from detection but now, neither satisfied. It was present experience, that twilight country in between that he and Jack had been able to visit so infrequently, that he was beginning to crave now and it soon invaded his sleep with a fugitive erotic dream. It took place in darkness but not a silent or still one: he was embracing a man’s body and feeling the solidity and unyielding contours of a man’s body stretched out against his own, feeling a man’s cock quiver and expand against his belly, hearing a man’s voice whisper in his ear. And he knew on waking, with the memory of Jack’s body forever embedded in the very nerve endings of his hands and mouth and loins, that it was not Jack he’d been dreaming about. Normally he slept a lot in winter, the constant wind with the season’s additional hollow whistle as potent as any sedative; but the new restlessness now kept him awake until very late most nights.
He’d grown used to Jack’s sporadic presence, the occasional whispers and feather-light touches, but Jack sometimes reached him during sleep too, in what Ennis now called "Jack dreams." Two Jack dreams in a row they were riding side-by-side on horseback, as they’d spent so much time doing in life. Brokeback Mountain was always up ahead of them but tantalizingly elusive; first directly ahead and barely visible on the far horizon; then closer by but off to one side and half-hidden in mists. Neither he nor Jack spoke, apparently not feeling the need for it. But in the dream after that they were back in the same bluish void as when Jack had told him he was changing horses, and his comments were as brief and as puzzling. "It ain’t such a bad thing right now, your livin in that trailer," he remarked. "Some people, they go off in the desert for 40 days or 40 years but you, you’re holed up in a trailer in Riverton. Better for a Wyoming boy from Sage, I guess, less showy." He looked at Ennis closely for a moment, then smiled and shook his head. "Friend, it’s just as hard ta make you laugh as it ever was. Took me three weeks that first summer, remember?"
He was eating dinner with Junior at least once a week, arriving with shovels and rock salt and kitty litter to keep the steps free from ice, and getting regular bulletins about Curt’s job search. He was looking around Casper, but had made phone calls to other states as well; "a guy he works with, his dad has a business in Texas somewhere." Junior felt unexpectedly guilty about it. "I know I’ve nagged him a lot but he’d wanted us to live in Casper," she said ruefully. "I was the one who wanted ta stay here - all our friends from high school were here, guess I just didn’t want things ta change that much."
"Well, we’re alike that way," Ennis answered wryly.
He didn’t burden her with his own work-related worries, but he’d spotted the warning signs that Carl Scrope’s ranch might be on borrowed time. Scrope had been in and out of the hospital for several months now, and the bookkeeper who came in once of twice a month had heard rumors that he was talking with prospective buyers. They were investors, she’d heard, who might just re-sell the ranch to other buyers but more likely would hold the land for future development. "And you can bet it won’t be a working ranch," she warned. "This close to a town, they might carve it up for houses to sell when the time’s right." Riverton had grown over the years, slowly at first, but now the businesses near the old laundromat apartment were getting serious competition from a strip shopping center or two on the highway.
Jenny planned to be home for Christmas for sure, but was staying in Denver for Thanksgiving. She now had a part time receptionist job at a nearby Lutheran church where she’d been singing, and they were having a free Thanksgiving dinner for needy families. "Jenny’s stayin in Denver over Thanksgiving ta do volunteer work?" Alma asked Junior with experienced skepticism, and Junior had snorted at that. "She isn’t stayin in Denver ta do good deeds. There’s a guy she met at that church, name a Larry. About 21, 22, wants to be a minister, he says." Ennis had already arranged to be working on Thanksgiving, knowing that neither of his daughters would ever ask why he wanted to avoid Alma’s and Monroe’s house on that day.
But he couldn’t avoid it at Christmas, and arrived feeling the same kind of resolve as he had at the wedding reception. Alma greeted him stiffly, though this time they smiled at each other for a fleeting second or two. But he’d not figured on Alma’s two boys, Todd and Carey, being six and four years old -- the prime Santa Claus years -- and much of the morning he sat next to Alma Junior, all of them enjoying December’s celebration of childhood appetite. They marveled at Santa’s reindeer having devoured the dish of uncooked Quaker Oats left out for them, hunted for batteries that always seemed to be missing when a present needing them was unwrapped, took picture after picture and mediated the occasional febrile quarrels between the two children. It was even mild enough weather for Ennis to escape the house briefly and pull the two boys up and down the street in the coaster wagon that had been next to the Christmas tree.
As always, Ennis felt like an outsider or visitor, awkwardly taped onto the edge of the group, but still he wondered how this uneventful, if not yet completely peaceful, co-existence with Alma had come about. Jenny was wearing a small gold cross necklace, more tasteful than Luanne’s. "Larry’s Christmas present," she told him; and she offered to say a rather long-winded grace at dinner. But she was cheerful, happy with her new life; and he put his vague anxieties aside. His own Christmas shopping was simple and quickly done, and his daughters were not surprised by the gifts they unwrapped from him as he always gave them either sweaters or gloves. But "I use those sweaters you give me for years, Daddy," Junior told him while they watched Todd and Scott playing tug-of-war over yet another toy. "They’re always the perfect color for me, Jenny’s are too. You’ve got such a good eye for color, guess that’s where I got it from."
Alma and Monroe had bought an artificial Christmas tree the year before, but a few days before Christmas Monroe had brought home an evergreen wreath and hung it on the front door. As he left the house that night, Ennis broke off a few tiny sprigs at the back of the wreath and put them in a small jar of water on the windowsill of his tiny kitchen. He wasn’t sure why, but he liked looking at it.