Annie Proulx
Brokeback Mountain
Copyright © 1999 by Dead Line, Ltd.
Ennis Del Mar wakes before five, wind rocking the trailer, hissing in
around the aluminum door and window frames. The shirts hanging
on a nail shudder slightly in the draft. He gets up, scratching the grey
wedge of belly and pubic hair, shuffles to the gas burner, pours
leftover coffee in a chipped enamel pan; the flame swathes it in blue.
He turns on the tap and urinates in the sink, pulls on his shirt and
jeans, his worn boots, stamping the heels against the floor to get
them full on. The wind booms down the curved length of the trailer
and under its roaring passage he can hear the scratching of fine
gravel and sand. It could be bad on the highway with the horse
trailer. He has to be packed and away from the place that morning.
Again the ranch is on the market and they've shipped out the last of
the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying,
"Give em to the real estate shark, I'm out a here," dropping the keys
in Ennis's hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter
until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of
pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.
The stale coffee is boiling up but he catches it before it goes over the
side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid, lets a
panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention
on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the
mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong.
The wind strikes the trailer like a load of dirt coming off a dump
truck, eases, dies, leaves a temporary silence.
They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the
state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat up on the Montana border, Ennis
del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high school
dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work
and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the
stoic life. Ennis, reared by his older brother and sister after their
parents drove off the only curve on Dead Horse Road leaving them
twenty-four dollars in cash and a two-mortgage ranch, applied at age
fourteen for a hardship license that let him make the hour-long trip
from the ranch to the high school. The pickup was old, no heater,
one windshield wiper and bad tires; when the transmission went
there was no money to fix it. He had wanted to be a sophomore, felt
the word carried a kind of distinction, but the truck broke down
short of it, pitching him directly into ranch work.
In 1963 when he met Jack Twist, Ennis was engaged to Alma Beers.
Both Jack and Ennis claimed to be saving money for a small spread;
in Ennis's case that meant a tobacco can with two five-dollar bills
inside. That spring, hungry for any job, each had signed up with
Farm and Ranch Employment -- they came together on paper as
herder and camp tender for the same sheep operation north of Signal.
The summer range lay above the tree line on Forest Service land on
Brokeback Mountain. It would be Jack Twist's second summer on
the mountain, Ennis's first. Neither of them was twenty.
They shook hands in the choky little trailer office in front of a table
littered with scribbled papers, a Bakelite ashtray brimming with
stubs. The venetian blinds hung askew and admitted a triangle of
white light, the shadow of the foreman's hand moving into it. Joe
Aguirre, wavy hair the color of cigarette ash and parted down the
middle, gave them his point of view.
"Forest Service got designated campsites on the allotments. Them
camps can be a couple a miles from where we pasture the sheep. Bad
predator loss, nobody near lookin after em at night. What I want,
camp tender in the main camp where the Forest Service says, but the
HERDER" -- pointing at Jack with a chop of his hand -- "pitch a pup
tent on the q.t. with the sheep, out a sight, and he's goin a SLEEP
there. Eat supper, breakfast in camp, but SLEEP WITH THE
SHEEP, hundred percent, NO FIRE, don't leave NO SIGN. Roll up
that tent every mornin case Forest Service snoops around. Got the
dogs, your .30-.30, sleep there. Last summer had goddamn near
twenty-five percent loss. I don't want that again. YOU," he said to
Ennis, taking in the ragged hair, the big nicked hands, the jeans torn,
button-gaping shirt, "Fridays twelve noon be down at the bridge
with your next week list and mules. Somebody with supplies'll be
there in a pickup." He didn't ask if Ennis had a watch but took a
cheap round ticker on a braided cord from a box on a high shelf,
wound and set it, tossed it to him as if he weren't worth the reach.
"TOMORROW MORNIN we'll truck you up the jump-off." Pair of
deuces going nowhere.
They found a bar and drank beer through the afternoon, Jack telling
Ennis about a lightning storm on the mountain the year before that
killed forty-two sheep, the peculiar stink of them and the way they
bloated, the need for plenty of whiskey up there. He had shot an
eagle, he said, turned his head to show the tail feather in his hatband.
At first glance Jack seemed fair enough with his curly hair and quick
laugh, but for a small man he carried some weight in the haunch and
his smile disclosed buckteeth, not pronounced enough to let him eat
popcorn out of the neck of a jug, but noticeable. He was infatuated
with the rodeo life and fastened his belt with a minor bull-riding
buckle, but his boots were worn to the quick, holed beyond repair
and he was crazy to be somewhere, anywhere else than Lightning
Flat.
Ennis, high-arched nose and narrow face, was scruffy and a little
cave-chested, balanced a small torso on long, caliper legs, possessed
a muscular and supple body made for the horse and for fighting. His
reflexes were uncommonly quick and he was farsighted enough to
dislike reading anything except Hamley's saddle catalog.
The sheep trucks and horse trailers unloaded at the trailhead and a
bandy-legged Basque showed Ennis how to pack the mules, two
packs and a riding load on each animal ring-lashed with double
diamonds and secured with half hitches, telling him, "Don't never
order soup. Them boxes a soup are real bad to pack." Three puppies
belonging to one of the blue heelers went in a pack basket, the runt
inside Jack's coat, for he loved a little dog. Ennis picked out a big
chestnut called Cigar Butt to ride, Jack a bay mare who turned out to
have a low startle point. The string of spare horses included a
mouse-colored grullo whose looks Ennis liked. Ennis and Jack, the
dogs, horses and mules, a thousand ewes and their lambs flowed up
the trail like dirty water through the timber and out above the tree
line into the great flowery Meadows and the coursing, endless wind.
They got the big tent up on the Forest Service's platform, the kitchen
and grub boxes secured. Both slept in camp that first night, Jack