【断背山】12

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At the north end of the closet a tiny jog in the wall made a slight hiding place and here, stiff with long suspension from a nail, hung a shirt. He lifted it off the nail. Jack¹’s old shirt from Brokeback days. The dried blood on the sleeve was his own blood, a gushing² nosebleed on the last afternoon on the mountain when Jack, in their contortionistic grappling and wrestling, had slammed Ennis’s nose hard with his knee. He had staunched the blood which was everywhere, all over both of them, with his shirtsleeve, but the staunching hadn’t held because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering angel out in the wild columbine, wings folded.

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 fabric³ and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage⁴ and salty sweet stink⁵ of Jack but there was no real scent⁶, 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 cemetery⁷ fenced with sagging⁸ 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 pickup⁹ 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 sopping¹⁰ 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, brass¹¹ headed tack¹² in each corner. Below it he drove a nail and on the nail he hung the wire hanger¹³ and the two old shirts suspended from it. He stepped back and looked at the ensemble¹⁴ 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 jutting¹⁵ out and balanced on the log was there as well, in a cartoon shape and lurid¹⁶ 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.

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