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When they passed Signal, Ennis said, “I been drivin the same truck since me and Alma was married.”
“I know that. You think I don’t know that?”
Both of Jack’s hands left the wheel of the red-and-chrome F-150. He gesticulated wildly, steering with his elbows. He splayed all ten fingers wide. The truck swerved a little, sunlight flashing a warning against its sleek white side panels. Ennis looked on from the passenger seat. His hands hovered alert above his lap, ready to take the steering wheel before the right tires hit the rumble strip.
“I’m just sayin maybe it’s time for a change,” he said.
They had set out from the ranch before first light. Two hours into their journey, patchy snow shone with the blush reflection of dawn. The early February hour painted the world pink from its head to its foot. Jack drove a consistent fifteen miles an hour above the speed limit, racing the sun westward across the Bighorn Basin.
It was their last chance to get away before their work would begin in earnest. Next week, fifty head of Hereford cattle would be delivered to their new spread. Jack and Ennis had spent the past three months readying the barns, the pens, and the fences—especially the fences, as the property was riddled with treacherous gulches and gullies, hoodoos and badlands, and bordered on three sides by off-limits public land— for their arrival. Fencing, Jack had complained, was practically a full time job all on its own. But the undertaking was made sweeter by Ennis’ company, and Jack knew that he had never loved a job so well as this one, save once.
He had convinced Ennis to use one of their last free days to return to Brokeback Mountain. Both knew that it was not the season for it; Brokeback was the northernmost peak crowning a range plagued by famously inhospitable winters. Even a fine day on its lower slopes could become treacherous nearer to the summit. Dark, malicious storms materialized in mere minutes when polar gales collided with the westerly prevailing wind. Thick drifts of snow disguised air pockets that spelled disaster for horses’ ankles. The trail would likely be impassable. Nevertheless, Ennis had agreed to the four-hour drive easily.
Since that first summer, neither had set eyes on the place, and the spell of unsullied memory had elevated the mountain above the plain of everyday existence. For Jack especially, Brokeback had taken on mythological status. It had become for him the beginning and end, the everything and the only thing which bound him and Ennis together. He felt that he needed to face the mountain now, with the past behind them and the rest of their lives ahead, and allow Brokeback to relinquish its stranglehold on his psyche.
They had both been looking forward to today. But the trip had begun with an argument over the truck, and it seemed that it would end that way, too, and that all the spaces in between would likewise be filled with nothing but the truck and the question of who would drive it.
“Well, if you want a trade it in,” Jack said, “don’t know how much you goin a get for it but hey, you want a trade it in, we could get you a new one.”
“Jack fuckin Twist. A new truck, he says.”
“Fine, a used truck. A different truck is all I mean.”
“You crazy? Old one still runs fine.”
“Ain’t you the one complainin just now? I didn’t hear no complaints out a my mouth, goin on about ‘time for a change’ and Alma and all. That was all you, friend, if I ain’t mistaken. And I ain’t.”
“Let me drive yours.”
“Hell no.”
“You don’t like how I drive?”
“It don’t matter how you drive, it’s my truck.”
Out the window, scrubby plains cut with veiny creeks gradually gave way to a towering mountain pass. Jack drove on, wheels put to a steady upwards incline, trading the plateau’s gaunt cottonwood stands and powdered snow drifts furred with half-buried sagebrush for proud pines and white-cloaked granite peaks. A cloud passed in front of the sharp winter sun and threw the looming mountainside into full, heavy shadow. Jack’s expression soured. “You can’t fool me, Ennis,” he said. “You don’t want a sit passenger side, huh?”
Like a girl, he could have added, or worse, like you was my wife. Jack didn’t add it, but they both heard it anyway. The truck rumbled heedlessly forward into the cloud-shadow. They had two hours left of driving to do. Ennis folded his mouth up as small as it would go. Jack exhaled long and hot through his nose.
Ennis had come a long way since the fateful August day of his unexpected appearance in Lightning Flat. Faced with the possibility of losing Jack forever, he had taken his first steps out of out of the lonesome darkness that had consumed all the days of his life between the ages of nine and thirty-nine, having at last discovered that the only thing he feared more than his love for Jack was losing it for good. In the months since, Ennis and Jack had ranched up together. They lived openly within the confines of the home which they shared with Jack’s mother, who had embraced Ennis as a second son. The word ‘love’ had passed between them, more than once. Most nights, they slept in the same bed.
Jack had naively hoped that Ennis’ old fears had at last been banished, buried in Lightning Flat and left there to rot along with Jack’s father, but as their fortieth birthdays came and went, the immediacy of Jack’s near death experience receded, and Ennis’ long-held prejudices and nightmarish visions seeped into the gaps it left behind. Not infrequently, these manifested themselves as an ill defined yet all-consuming need to feel that he was the man of their relationship. It was a compulsion that reared itself up at unexpected and strange moments, exacerbated by Jack’s surplus of money and Ennis’ comparative lack of it, and which seemed so ingrained in Ennis as to be immutable.
Jack could not disguise that Ennis’ behavior hurt him, and after they had at last moved in together following twenty years of painful separation, he had stopped trying. Ennis, for his part, had developed enough sense to feel guilty, though he hadn’t yet managed to change his behavior. Still, he found roundabout ways to apologize.
“It’s the cruise control,” Ennis said.
Jack laughed in a way that made it clear that he was not amused. “What,” he said, “your own truck don’t got cruise control?”
“Nope. Bit the dust back in ‘79.”
“Thought you said it runs fine.”
“Engine runs fine. Cruise control don’t.”
Jack was quiet for a moment. Then his eyes widened, equal parts horrified and delighted. “So all those times comin and goin from Lightnin Flat…”
“I had a sore ankle the rest of the week,” Ennis admitted. Truthfully, the soreness had only lasted a day or two, and only when Ennis had driven to Lightning Flat and back inside of one day, but he thought it would make Jack smile for him to say so. It did.
“And then you came right on back,” Jack said.
“Sure did.”
Jack met his gaze, attention leaving the road perhaps for longer than it ought to have. The rosy morning light was magnified by Ennis’ dark eyes even as the F-150 slipped into the shade of the pines.
“Alright,” he said. Ennis was forgiven.
The rest of the drive passed more comfortably. They made their way deep into the mountains. Jack convinced himself that each valley, boulder, and shrub was familiar to him and then tried to convince Ennis of the same. A few miles before the old trailhead, he pointed to a rocky overhang where a pair of falcons nested hidden from view and said, “It was there, it must have been.” He felt along his jaw for a twenty year-old bruise. “I knew right there.”
“Knew what?” Ennis asked, though he could guess the answer.
Jack shook his head fondly. “We’re getting close,” he said.
In 1963, the only way to access Brokeback Mountain had been on foot or on horseback. The truck tottered over roughened asphalt into a luminous clearing ringed with stalwart trees, and Ennis and Jack idled at the trailhead where they had unloaded the sheep that long-ago summer. They peered up at the mountain face. A slender ribbon of road cut its way through juniper and lodgepole pines, winding through a series of treacherous switchbacks before reaching its terminus fifteen hundred feet below the summit of the lowest of the mountain’s three peaks. Above the treeline, higher even than the old Forest Service platform where they had pitched their tent twenty years ago. The mountain was swaddled from head to foot in a blanket of snow, yet its silhouette was unchanged. It leapt and plunged with ancient vigor as if to do battle with the sky, ever pressing the inexorable charge which had begun long before Jack and Ennis had bound themselves to Brokeback Mountain, and which would continue long after either was but a speck in the Earth’s memory.
Silently, Jack started his truck up the road past the jump-off, mindful of the icy slick. They had made it barely one mile when they came upon a padlocked gate.
“What do you know? Closed for the winter.”
“Huh.”
Jack stared at the gate for a moment, then executed a slippery three-point turn. He brought the truck a hundred yards downhill to a wide section of the road where the asphalt ran over into the gravely shoulder and parked with the bed of the truck facing the snowy summit.
By wordless agreement, they climbed down from the cab. Ennis lowered the tailgate and unpacked their camp chairs, setting them alongside one another in the bed of the truck and opposite the mountain. Jack fired up the Coleman portable propane heater which had become indispensable to him since he had first hauled it up to the Wind Rivers in ‘81. Ennis had teased him mercilessly that November. Jack was no Wyoming man, he had laughed, but a Texas boy through and through. When they were caught out by a whip-fast gusting sleet storm on the third day, Ennis gave over his teasing for a spot next to the heater.
Today was crisp and bright, and Ennis placed himself in the chair furthest from the heater. Jack retrieved two thermoses and a pack of sandwiches from the front seat then hauled himself into the other chair. He passed one thermos to Ennis. They sipped the hot coffee which Jack had that morning supplemented with a few generous glugs of whiskey, neither feeling inclined to rupture the sacred silence that had taken hold of them since their arrival. The cry of a red-tailed hawk bounced off the granite peaks. It echoed until they could not be sure whether the cry came from one bird or two, or whether from before or behind them.
When conversation resumed, Jack, as usual, was the first to speak. “My mama told me somethin funny this mornin,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“You know how she’s been tryin a get me to go to that new church a hers?”
Ennis hummed, understanding. Mrs. Twist’s open acceptance of Jack and Ennis’ love for one another had coincided with an uptick in her already considerable religious fervor. Perhaps to compensate for her somewhat transgressive new approach to loving her neighbor, she had recently made a project of her son’s immortal soul. Just as she industriously tilled the languishing garden, rearranged the root cellar and fixed up the dingy old chicken coop, she set herself to matchmaking. At least once a week, through machinations both subtle and decidedly not, she sought to bring her son together with Jesus Christ. As far as Jack was concerned, he already had himself a man whom he liked just fine, and he had no need for another one. Ennis, though not usually present when Mrs. Twist undertook her good works, had heard Jack bitch about them enough to be passing familiar with Mrs. Twist’s efforts on behalf of the Lord.
“She said,” Jack continued, affecting a high-pitched quaver that in truth bore little resemblance to his mother’s voice, “‘ Me and Ennis do enough prayin for you as is, baby, so you might as well get on in there and do some a the work yourself. Way I see it, it’s goin a get done anyhow .’ What do you say to that?” Speaking normally now, he turned to Ennis, eyes sparkling with mirth.
Ennis grimaced. “She told you that?”
“Sure did.” Jack chuckled. He took another sip from his thermos. He waited expectantly for the joke he was sure was coming, but Ennis didn’t seem to find much to laugh at.
“Ennis?”
Ennis tugged his jacket collar up against the cold. It was twenty-five degrees and sunny—cold enough to freeze Jack’s balls off, but Ennis was fond of wintertime. Jack squinted past his head into the bright-clear blue and watched Ennis out of the corner of his eye. Ennis shifted awkwardly in his camp chair.
“Hang on,” Jack said. The words fell slowly out of his mouth, one by one. “She was serious? You pray for me?”
Ennis grunted.
“Come on now, don’t be embarrassed. Just…” Kind of assumed you’d rather shoot your own foot off. “Didn’t know you was the type, is all,” he finished lamely.
“I wasn’t,” Ennis muttered.
“You are now?”
“Maybe.”
Ennis burrowed further into his jacket collar. His eyes peered furtively from underneath the broad felt brim of his hat. Most of Ennis’ face was hidden inside his jacket, but Jack knew that his jaw was clenched tight, his chin pressed down towards his chest.
“Ennis, don’t be like that,” said Jack, feeling a bit guilty. But not guilty enough to resist a little wheedling, curiosity drawing him onward. “I want you to tell me about it. Please.” When Ennis didn’t respond, Jack pouted a little. The chapping winter air obligingly reddened his lower lip. “Come on, I’m askin real nice.”
Ennis, though irritated and a little self conscious, could not resist a small smile. Jack, sensing impending victory, intensified his pout.
“Jesus, fine,” Ennis said finally.
“And now you’re takin the Lord’s name in vain, how bout that.”
Ennis reached a hand out and jostled Jack’s shoulder roughly. His bare palm was warm even through Jack’s down coat. “You want me to talk or not?” He said.
“Fine, fine, I’ll be good.”
Jack finished off his thermos in silence and kept his eyes on the mountain as Ennis, the proverbial watched pot that never boiled, searched for the right words. The warm whiskey tingle of summertime spread through Jack’s fingertips. There had been a time in his life when the memories of Brokeback Mountain had hurt too much to touch, beautiful but shattered-glass sharp. The taste of the whiskey raised them up again, and with Ennis beside him, Jack allowed the memories to filter through as dappled light through green leaves. The ghost of sweet summer laid itself over Ennis’ shape, and Jack, fascinated by the double silhouette, turned the spectral memory over in his hand and found that it was no longer sharp, but cool and smooth as river rock.
At last, Ennis said, “I don’t know if there’s a God up there or not.” He leaned back in his chair, lifting his face to the sparse, downy clouds. He exhaled. “Used to be, I figured that even if there was a God, he wasn’t listenin to nothin I had to say. But then I thought maybe I’d just been askin for all the wrong things.”
“Like what?”
Again, Jack waited patiently for Ennis’ answer. “If there is a God,” Ennis said finally, “and he made you and me, I reckon he’s the one that made us the way we are. No take backs, see what I mean? And lately—well, lately I got some things I been wantin. So maybe God ain’t so bad after all.”
Ennis spoke with forced casualness but his eyes, flicked to meet Jack’s sidelong, betrayed earnest vulnerability. Jack was warmed down to his soul. “Oh, Ennis,” he sighed.
Ennis looked down at his toes and before Jack had the chance to get another word in, he added, “The chance to drive a truck with workin cruise control, for example.”
Jack laughed. “You’re an asshole, you know that?” Ennis laughed too, and their eyes danced with snow-refracted light.
Jack laid a hand on Ennis’ knee. Ennis glanced only briefly at the public road before covering Jack’s hand with his own, twining their fingers together. Quiet settled over the clearing. A nipping breeze rustled the pines. Both men were seized by powerful contentment.
The sun inched higher overhead. Jack said, “You think God made this mountain, too?”
Ennis nodded sagely. “I reckon he did.”
“You’ll make a believer out a me, yet.” A wry expression teased at the corners of Jack’s full mouth. “Got a warn you, though, it might take a while.”
“Oh yeah? How long, you think?
“Rest of our lives, maybe.”
Jack thought that no mountain wrought by God’s hand could be more magnificent to him than Ennis’ quiet smile.
“Yeah,” Ennis said. “Okay.”
They stayed at the trailhead until they could delay their departure no longer. After some lighthearted bickering, Jack allowed Ennis to drive his truck home. Ennis allowed Jack to join their hands together over the gearshift. Jack’s calloused palm draped softly over Ennis’ knuckles and remained there as night descended upon the distant Bighorns, and for some time thereafter.