The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it,
the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack's sleeves. It was his
own plaid shirt, lost, he'd thought, long ago in some damn laundry,
his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and
hidden here inside Jack's own shirt, the pair like two skins, one
inside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into the fabric and
breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the
faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but
there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power
of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held
in his hands.
In the end the stud duck refused to let Jack's ashes go. "Tell you
what, we got a family plot and he's goin in it." Jack's mother stood at
the table coring apples with a sharp, serrated instrument. "You come
again," she said.
Bumping down the washboard road Ennis passed the country
cemetery fenced with sagging sheep wire, a tiny fenced square on
the welling prairie, a few graves bright with plastic flowers, and
didn't want to know Jack was going in there, to be buried on the
grieving plain.
A few weeks later on the Saturday he threw all Stoutamire's dirty
horse blankets into the back of his pickup and took them down to the
Quik Stop Car Wash to turn the high-pressure spray on them. When
the wet clean blankets were stowed in the truck bed he stepped into
Higgins's gift shop and busied himself with the postcard rack.
"Ennis, what are you lookin for rootin through them postcards?" said
Linda Higgins, throwing a sopping brown coffee filter into the
garbage can.
"Scene a Brokeback Mountain."
"Over in Fremont County?"
"No, north a here."
"I didn't order none a them. Let me get the order list. They got it I
can get you a hunderd. I got a order some more cards anyway."
"One's enough," said Ennis.
When it came -- thirty cents -- he pinned it up in his trailer, brass-
headed tack in each corner. Below it he drove a nail and on the nail
he hung the wire hanger and the two old shirts suspended from it. He
stepped back and looked at the ensemble through a few stinging
tears.
"Jack, I swear -- " he said, though Jack had never asked him to swear
anything and was himself not the swearing kind.
Around that time Jack began to appear in his dreams, Jack as he had
first seen him, curly-headed and smiling and bucktoothed, talking
about getting up off his pockets and into the control zone, but the
can of beans with the spoon handle jutting out and balanced on the
log was there as well, in a cartoon shape and lurid colors that gave
the dreams a flavor of comic obscenity. The spoon handle was the
kind that could be used as a tire iron. And he would wake sometimes
in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow
sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.
There was some open space between what he knew and what he
tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't
fix it you've got to stand it.