The bedroom, at the top of a steep stair that had its own climbing
rhythm, was tiny and hot, afternoon sun pounding through the west window,
hitting the narrow boy's bed against the wall, an ink stained desk and
wooden chair, a B.B. gun in a hand whittled rack over the bed. The window
looked down on the gravel road stretching south and it occurred to him that
for Jack's growing up years that was the only road he knew. An ancient
magazine photograph of some dark haired movie star was taped to the wall
beside the bed, the skin tone gone magenta. He could hear Jack's mother
downstairs running water, filling the kettle and setting it back on the stove,
asking the old man a muffled question.
The closet was a shallow cavity with a wooden rod braced across, a
faded cretonne curtain on a string closing it off from the rest of the room.
In the closet hung two pairs of jeans crease ironed and folded neatly over
wire hangers, on the floor a pair of worn packer boots he thought he
remembered. 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. Jack's old shirt from Brokeback days.
The dried blood on the sleeve was his own blood, a gushing 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 stanched
the blood, which was everywhere, all over both of them, with his
shirtsleeve, but the stanching 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 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.
SOURCE: "Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night" - "Brokeback Mountain" October 13, 1997 issue of "The New Yorker" (Annie Proulx)
"It was his own
plaid shirt ... stolen by Jack and hidden here
inside Jack's own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two
in one." (Annie Proulx)