Thursday, April 26, 2012

Gift of Exile (a Brokeback Mountain fanfic) Chapter 7

excerpt from Chapter 7:  In the course of getting more involved with his daughters' lives, Ennis reaches a cautious truce with Alma.  In the meantime, David begins calling him regularly.



In early September, he listened to the now-familiar voice telling about his first visit back to Georgia since moving to Duluth. Gramma Alex had died unexpectedly. “The way she’d have wanted it,” David said, his voice sounding fatigued. “She had a stroke, lingered in the hospital for a few days. I thanked Aunt Carol for bringing her to the wedding, that was the last time I saw her. Saw a lot of her when I was growing up, and I’d missed her since I moved North.”

I’m sorry to hear ‘bout that,” Ennis answered. “I just met her at the wedding but she was a nice lady.”

Yeah, she was my favorite relative, I wish I could’ve got there in time to say goodbye. But it might not’ve made any difference. The last day, they thought she was conscious but she just kept talking to herself, thought her son Kevin was there. I never met him, he died a long time ago.”

Ennis recalled the sweet, artless voice, telling him about her family. “She mentioned him when we were talkin’ at the wedding,” he ventured. “He was killed in Korea. She said she still thought of him as a young man.”

That so?” David was silent a few moments. “You think maybe she was talkin’ to him? Lotta my relatives at the funeral, they thought she just wasn’t in her right mind but I’d like to think she was. You believe in somethin’ more after you die?”

Ennis thought of Jack’s hand in his at the wedding. “Yeah I do, but who knows how it works. Not much way for us ta tell. Huh?”

I was raised Presbyterian,” David said, “they were all about Heaven ‘n Hell and who was going there and who wasn’t.”

Yeah I was taught that too.”

But it doesn’t make any sense. You could be the most mean, evil bastard in the world and you win the big prize after you go ‘cause you believed the right stuff about somethin’ that happened back in the Roman Empire? And what would you do in Heaven all day anyway?”

Ennis tried to recall his unmemorable Sunday School mornings. “Well, yer supposed ta be spendin’ all your time praisin’ God. That’s what they said anyway.”

Yeah, that’s what they taught us, too. But what sorta afterlife is that? Sounds to me like spendin’ eternity going to church. Would ya really want to spend eternity going to church?”

Don’t sound like much ta look forward to.”

I have an old school friend, Maggie – she believes in reincarnation,” David ventured. “Pretty convinced of it. Never have figured out if I believe that or not, but I gotta say it makes more sense than what we were taught.”

Isn’t that where you come back as a bird, or a cow or somethin’?”

No, that’s somethin’ else. It’s when you keep gettin’ reborn in another body. People talk about coming back as other people, having a bunch of different lives, but Maggie says it’s all one life, just different times ‘n’ places. I never have decided whether she’s right, but I’d sure rather think of meetin’ Gramma Alex again lookin’ like somebody else than her spending eternity sittin’ around kissin’ some god’s butt and listening to harp music. She’d hate that.”

It had been awhile since Ennis had been curious about anyone else’s life. He wondered about the woman David had just mentioned, if David liked both women and men but instead he just asked, “David, uh, how’d ya move to Minnesota? Didn’t like Georgia any more?”

David’s voice suddenly sounded cautious and strained. “Well, I went through a bad time, someone died… Maggie came down to visit me in Atlanta during that time, she lived there a few years but then moved back to Minnesota. Not her hometown though, she’s from a little place in the farm country, Madelia. I told her I was thinking of moving but hadn’t made any decision yet. And she offered me a place to stay in Duluth while I looked around, decided what I wanted to do. I slept on her couch for a month or so, finally wound up buying a share of a house she found that had got turned into two apartments. So she’s still a close neighbor.”

Nathan died, but without trying to understand it, Ennis knew not to ask about that at the moment. Even just listening to a voice over the phone he could feel a kinship with what he heard in David’s voice, something like a partially-healed wound just liberated from bandages. 

read the rest of Chapter 7 at Chapter 7: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2358.html
 

Gift of Exile (a Brokeback Mountain fanfic) Chapter 6


excerpt from Chapter 6: Ennis spends more time with his daughters but is tormented by fantasies of what his life with Jack might have been.


He’d had only fleeting impressions of the run-down ranch in Lightning Flat on his way in. The house, he’d noticed, had needed painting and other repairs badly, although it looked solid and Jack’s mother had kept it scrupulously clean and freshly whitewashed inside. But Jack’s father’s words, though some of them had bled him out inside and forced tears to his eyes – the first he’d shown in front of strangers since childhood – had also made him notice details of the land and the house’s surroundings on the way out: “had some half-baked notion the two o’ you was gonna move up here, build a cabin, help run the place.” He’d looked at the barns, the cattle scattered about, the four mature cherry trees in back, and a flat spot with an ancient grove on a rise above a stream, about 100 feet from the house. He wouldn’t have noticed more than the rutted, pebbly road he was driving on if it hadn’t been for the Old Bastard’s words.


At least once a week, they had dinner with Jack’s mother and the Old Bastard, come what may. Her cooking, Jack was quick to admit, was light-years better than his and the Old Bastard had even become marginally more friendly since the efforts of two younger men working on the rundown ranch were starting to bear fruit. But Ennis was amazed at how skillfully Jack turned these prosaic occasions into opportunities to tease him. Even the shirt he usually wore to dinner in The House, as both of them referred to it.

Ennis had made a trip to Riverton a few months ago to see Jenny in her senior high school play, in which an actor had appeared wearing a ripped-up shirt damaged in an offstage brawl. He’d asked Jenny afterward if the costume people had made a different shirt for every performance, and she’d hooted. “Daddy, you must be the last person in the world to hear about Velcro!”

And he’d had to mention that to Jack. On his next trip to Gillette for supplies, Jack had taken a sky-blue cotton shirt with him and had the buttonholes replaced with Velcro, leaving the buttons for public view to hide how easy it was to rip the shirt off. He’d taken to wearing it to The House on these dinner occasions and would smile at Ennis innocently across the narrow table, fingers artlessly brushing the plackets and cuffs in between bites of Dorothy Twist’s macaroni and beef casserole. . Once Ennis tried kicking him under the table but the only result was “ouch! Watch it, Ennis”, after which Jack’s foot had stealthily crept forward to wedge against his own. Finally, to avoid looking at Jack, Ennis had complimented Mrs. Twist on the casserole – ‘ma’am’, he still called her, unable to say ‘Mother’ as yet – relieved that the uncomfortable pressure in his jeans wasn’t anything visible under the carefully patched tablecloth she brought out for these weekly dinners.

Another thunderstorm was moving slowly in as they walked back to the cabin later, the lightning that was as much a fixture here as wind throwing the clouds into sharp relief. But the walk was a short one, Jack purposely not hurrying, The door had hardly closed behind them before Ennis had pulled Jack to him, one hand on the back of Jack’s head as he kissed him and the other hand struggling with the snaps on his jeans; wondering why Jack didn’t have Velcro put on them as well. Then he yanked Jack’s modified shirt open, still turned on by the ripping sound it made; and pulling it off his shoulders fast enough that Jack had to pull apart the cuffs to keep them from ripping in earnest: “think you’re somethin’ doncha, Jack Twist?” “I’d say you think so,” Jack answered as he down at the edge of their bed, pulling off his boots and jeans and still looking at Ennis with that exaggerated innocence.

Ennis sat down behind him, running his hands up Jack’s sides, deliberately bypassing the nipples he knew were so sensitive. Instead, both his hands traveled down Jack’s unresisting arms, pulled them out slightly, moved back up the tender skin underneath from the wrist up to the elbow and then back down. As they did, Jack crossed his arms just under his shoulders as if hugging himself, which laid Ennis’ hands over his nipples. Ennis fingered them lightly with his left hand but only briefly, just long enough to feel Jack’s muscles tense. He was going to pay him back for that teasing at dinner. They had world enough now, and time.

His right hand moved down to Jack’s knee and languidly up the inside of the thigh, right hand cupping his balls and right thumb caressing them lightly and then moving forward a bit to trace up and down the now-throbbing vein in his cock. Jack was gasping now, head arched back and to one side, giving Ennis plenty of room for leisurely nibbles down the side of his neck before sinking his teeth lightly into Jack’s shoulder and sucking hard for a moment.

Jack’s body jerked forward as if Ennis’ mouth had been a hot piece of charcoal but Ennis had anticipated that and held his prey in place. “Tease me willya, Rodeo?” he whispered, but his own breath was getting ragged and the pressure on his own jeans more insistent. He released Jack and started to unzip his own Wranglers but Jack, less intent on teasing him now, turned around and speeded up the process by several seconds.

read the rest of Chapter 6 at http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2038.html