Brokeback Mountain - The New Yorker. Credit Illustration by Rebekka Dunlap. 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 drop- out 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 1. 96. 3, when he met Jack Twist, Ennis was engaged to Alma Beers. Brokeback Mountain from Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx Ennis Del Mar wakes before Pulitzer-winning writer Annie Proulx opened up to the Paris Review about why she wishes she’d never written Brokeback Mountain, the short story that turned into the. Brokeback Mountain is an opera with music composed by Charles Wuorinen and libretto by Annie Proulx, based on the short story. Brokeback Mountain DVD 2-Disc Collector's Edition Synopsis. Brokeback Mountain is a sweeping epic that explores the lives of two young men, a ranch hand and a rodeo.
Both Jack and Ennis claimed to be saving money for a small spread; in Ennis. That spring, hungry for any job, each had signed up with Farm and Ranch Employment. Brokeback Mountain Proulx Pdf ViewerThe summer range lay above the tree line on Forest Service land on Brokeback Mountain. It would be Jack Twist. 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. Joe Aguirre, wavy hair the color of cigarette ash and parted down the middle, gave them his point of view. Them camps can be a couple a miles from where we pasture the sheep. Bad predator loss, nobody near lookin after em at night. Eat supper, breakfast in camp, but sleep with the sheep, hundred percent, no fire, don. Roll up that tent every mornin case Forest Service snoops around. Got the dogs, your . Last summer had goddam near twenty- five- percent loss. Somebody with supplies. 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, and 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. Them boxes a soup are real bad to pack. Ennis picked out a big chestnut called Cigar Butt to ride, Jack a bay mare that 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, the 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. Both slept in camp that first night, Jack already bitching about Joe Aguirre. Dawn came glassy- orange, stained from below by a gelatinous band of pale green. The sooty bulk of the mountain paled slowly until it was the same color as the smoke from Ennis. The cold air sweetened, banded pebbles and crumbs of soil cast sudden pencil- long shadows, and the rearing lodgepole pines below them massed in slabs of somber malachite. During the day Ennis looked across a great gulf and sometimes saw Jack, a small dot moving across a high meadow, as an insect moves across a tablecloth; Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain. Jack came lagging in late one afternoon, drank his two bottles of beer cooled in a wet sack on the shady side of the tent, ate two bowls of stew, four of Ennis. By rights I should be spendin the night here. Aguirre got no right a make me do this. Point is, we both should be in this camp. And that goddam pup tent smells like cat piss or worse. Happy to switch but give you warnin I can. Pretty good with a can opener. Balls on him size a apples. Looked like he could a eat a camel. You want some a this hot water? Jack said his father had been a pretty well- known bull rider years back but kept his secrets to himself, never gave Jack a word of advice, never came once to see Jack ride, though he had put him on the woollies when he was a little kid. Ennis said the kind of riding that interested him lasted longer than eight seconds and had some point to it. They were respectful of each other. Ennis, riding against the wind back to the sheep in the treacherous, drunken light, thought he. Ennis rode easy, sleeping with his eyes open, but the hours he was away from the sheep stretched out and out. Jack pulled a squalling burr out of the harmonica, flattened a little from a fall off the skittish bay mare, and Ennis had a good raspy voice; a few nights they mangled their way through some songs. Ennis knew the salty words to . The meadow stones glowed white- green and a flinty wind worked over the meadow, scraped the fire low, then ruffled it into yellow silk sashes. Better off sleepin in the tent. It was big enough, warm enough, and in a little while they deepened their intimacy considerably. Ennis ran full throttle on all roads whether fence mending or money spending, and he wanted none of it when Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect cock. Ennis jerked his hand away as though he. They went at it in silence except for a few sharp intakes of breath and Jack. They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddam word except once Ennis said, . They believed themselves invisible, not knowing Joe Aguirre had watched them through his 1. Though he did, and Aguirre came up again to say so, fixing Jack with his bold stare, not bothering to dismount. In August Ennis spent the whole night with Jack in the main camp, and in a blowy hailstorm the sheep took off west and got among a herd in another allotment. There was a damn miserable time for five days, Ennis and a Chilean herder with no English trying to sort them out, the task almost impossible as the paint brands were worn and faint at this late season. Even when the numbers were right Ennis knew the sheep were mixed. In a disquieting way everything seemed mixed. The first snow came early, on August 1. The next week Joe Aguirre sent word to bring them down, another, bigger storm was moving in from the Pacific, and they packed in the game and moved off the mountain with the sheep, stones rolling at their heels, purple cloud crowding in from the west and the metal smell of coming snow pressing them on. The mountain boiled with demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken- cloud light; the wind combed the grass and drew from the damaged krummholz and slit rock a bestial drone. As they descended the slope Ennis felt he was in a slow- motion, but headlong, irreversible fall. Joe Aguirre paid them, said little. He had looked at the milling sheep with a sour expression, said, . Ranch stiffs never did much of a job. The wind was gusting hard and cold. Try to get somethin on a ranch. Thought some about going back up to my daddy. Within a mile Ennis felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand a yard at a time. He stopped at the side of the road and, in the whirling new snow, tried to puke but nothing came up. He felt about as bad as he ever had and it took a long time for the feeling to wear off. In December Ennis married Alma Beers and had her pregnant by mid- January. He picked up a few short- lived ranch jobs, then settled in as a wrangler on the old Elwood Hi- Top place, north of Lost Cabin, in Washakie County. He was still working there in September when Alma, Jr., as he called his daughter, was born and their bedroom was full of the smell of old blood and milk and baby shit, and the sounds were of squalling and sucking and Alma. Ennis got on the highway crew, tolerating it but working weekends at the Rafter B in exchange for keeping his horses out there. A second girl was born and Alma wanted to stay in town near the clinic because the child had an asthmatic wheeze. They stayed in the little apartment, which he favored because it could be left at any time. The fourth summer since Brokeback Mountain came on and in June Ennis had a general- delivery letter from Jack Twist, the first sign of life in all that time. Friend this letter is a long time over due. Heard you was in Riverton. Drop me a line if you can, say if your there. The return address was Childress, Texas. Ennis, wearing his best shirt, white with wide black stripes, didn. Alma was saying something about taking his friend to the Knife & Fork for supper instead of cooking it was so hot, if they could get a babysitter, but Ennis said more likely he. Jack was not a restaurant type, he said, thinking of the dirty spoons sticking out of the cans of cold beans balanced on the log. Late in the afternoon, thunder growling, that same old green pickup rolled in and he saw Jack get out of the truck, beat- up Resistol tilted back. A hot jolt scalded Ennis and he was out on the landing pulling the door closed behind him. Jack took the stairs two and two.
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