Gift of Exile (a Brokeback Mountain fanfic), Chapter 5

excerpt from Chapter 5: Ennis and his new friend David go horseback riding. David tells Ennis about how his deceased best friend, stepbrother and lover Nathan came to live with his family, and Ennis and David discover an attraction to each other. 

“Damn, I’m sorry,” David said suddenly.  “We’re out ridin’ on a beautiful day, and here I am talkin’ about plane crashes.  I guess it’s been on my mind lately, it was exactly 22 years ago last week.”

Ennis thought for a moment.  “Hey, you really ride bareback sometimes, like ya said last night?”

“Sure, when I was growin’ up anyway.  Why, you thought I made it up?”

Ennis gave him a sidelong glance.  “Well, they were kinda givin’ you a hard time about your ridin’ last night,” he said a little archly. 

David took the bait, as he had guessed.  “Well, they’re your horses but I can prove it if you don’t believe me.”  Ennis gestured toward David’s horse, and David immediately started undoing the saddle, struggling with the unfamiliar straps and buckles.

“Here…” Ennis walked up next to him and quickly unfastened the saddle.  Standing on slightly sloping ground their feet touched and their arms and shoulders brushed against each other; and Ennis glanced over to find David already looking closely at him.

When they’d met two nights before they had both been wearing suits, with the conventional dark heavy fabric serving its intended function of smoothing out the slopes and angles of male bodies.  Now they were both wearing jeans, Ennis in the type of snapped cotton shirt he’d worn since his teens and David in a sweatshirt, a garment Ennis had never worn but which suddenly seemed improbably sensual to him.  The sleeves were pushed up slightly, enough to show the light growth of fine dark hair on the wrists above the squarish but fine-boned hands with their short spatulate fingers.  Ennis did not look down, but during their side-by-side rides he had already noticed, with awareness of it only half-surfacing, the compact legs and slightly rounded buttocks.  He suddenly wanted more than anything to slide his hand under the soft fabric and up David’s back and then down again.  His thoughts would have progressed further than that, but the realization in the same moment of his stiffening cock and of David frozen with one hand on the saddle, looking back at him, stopped them in their tracks.

“I’ll do it.”  David’s voice sounded somewhat shaky despite the casual words, but he turned and pulled the saddle off the horse’s back.  There was no anger nor fear nor hostility in his manner, just a hand put out to stop a slowly swinging door from opening any further.

Ennis untethered his own horse, the familiar action dispelling the momentary sense of the world having shifted subtly and of his suddenly being in some alien realm with all signs written in unreadable languages.  He swung himself up into the saddle and David stepped on the high end of the log to vault onto his horse’s back.  “Over t’ that fence and back?” he suggested as they rode back out in the sunlight, pointing to a single tree a hundred yards or so away.  Ennis nodded wordlessly, not trusting himself to answer at that moment, and they urged their horses into a canter.

Shaken as he was, he couldn’t resist glancing over.  David’s legs were clinging to his horse’s flanks as if he were shinnying up a fleshy tree, leaning back very slightly, his pelvis rocking rhythmically back and forth with the horse’s three-time gait.  He glanced over at Ennis and smiled triumphantly: “told ya!”   Ennis nodded, but did not look over at him again until they reached the tree.

read the rest of Chapter 5 at http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1704.html

Gift of Exile (a Brokeback Mountain fanfic), Chapter 4

excerpt: Ennis and his new friend David escape the wedding reception to have a drink, and make plans to go horseback riding the next day.

It was still early but Ennis had known the Black and Blue Eagle would be busy. Riverton had grown a little since he and Alma had gotten married but it was a hard time to start a new business there right now, with the economy the way it was and more ranches folding, some bought up by absentee owners. Good times had come and gone, and there were still few other places to go on Saturday night. As he got out of his truck and watched David close the door of his anonymous-looking rental car, Ennis wondered how the hell he’d gotten into this: two men walking into the bar together and wearing suits at that. And one of “them….”

Queer. Say it. David’s cousin Charlene might not be anyone he’d want to spend even a few hours with but she’d made it clear in just two sentences. And he’d never been that, never had anything goin’ with any man but Jack. But Jack had…. You been to Mexico, Jack? … another one’s goin a come up here … some ranch neighbor a his from down in Texas. He walked through the bar making an effort to not look at anyone but threw a longing glance at a table in the corner, wondering if they’d attract less attention there or just look like they wanted to be alone with each other. David slid onto a barstool before he had a chance to find out, too late. Sitting at the bar, Ennis felt like a car dealership spotlight was only ten feet away and shining directly on them.

“Hey Ennis, lookit you – almost didn’t know ya wearin’ a suit. Who’s your friend?” it was Vickie, owner of the place since her husband had died, she’d been here more than one Saturday night lately; sometimes out here talking to employees and customers and sometimes going through the tiny office in back, drawer by drawer. “Not friends, ma’am, cousins, as of a couple a’ hours ago anyway.” David answered before Ennis could even react, and it seemed like his Southern accent was suddenly stronger. “Ennis’ daughter got married this afternoon, prettiest bride I’ve seen in awhile. Things were startin’ to wind down, and we just needed somethin’ stronger ta drink than punch with lime sherbet.”

Vickie laughed and called to Roy, washing glasses at the other end of the bar, for two beers. “First ones on the house, nobody’s daughter gets married every day” she said. The searchlight had at least dimmed, more quickly than Ennis had thought it could. “So you’re from out of state?” she asked David.

“Yes ma’am, I live in Minnesota now but I’m a good ol’ boy from Georgia. Macon,” David answered. “Never been this far west before.” He pulled a few dollar bills out of his pocket. “Would you have some change? I’d like some music with the beer, don’t seem to have any quarters.”

His drawling voice sounded affable and a little coaxing, but not blatant or aggressively salesman-friendly. He was leaning a little toward her, smiling slowly, eyes narrowed a little and focused on her face, but not getting too close, staying a respectful enough distance so that the impression was more of sociable interest than a conscious attempt to charm. Ennis found it oddly familiar, remembering his short conversation with David’s grandmother earlier. She’d had the same trick in conversation of seeming to pull the other person closer to her, by briefly seeming to draw an invisible and private circle around both of them. Pocketing the change Vickie gave him, David nodded to Roy as he put their drinks on the counter, went over to study the selections on the jukebox.

read the rest of Chapter 4 at http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1485.html

Gift of Exile (a Brokeback Mountain fanfic), Chapter 3

Excerpt from Chapter 3:  at his daughter's wedding reception, Ennis meets some guests from Georgia and Minnesota and makes an unexpected friend.

They were suddenly joined by a blonde woman of about 30, dressed in a bright pink suit. She smiled briefly at Ennis, a smile that was a notable achievement of both practice and dentistry although he thought immediately of his horses’ teeth coated in white paint. The fruity aroma of the cologne she was wearing was neither too strong nor cloying but it seemed to fit her nevertheless: a piece of delectable fruit still sweet and juicy but a little soft here and there, recently overripe.

“Oh here you are, Gramma,” sitting down on the other side of Alexandria, the younger woman didn’t appear to even notice Ennis. “Well, this has been an interestin’ wedding, thank God I wasn’t one of the bridesmaids, what with those dresses, I mean, why in the world would she pick that shade of green? Made Luanne’s skin look like a piece of cheese somebody forgot in the refrigerator –“

“Charlene,” Alexandria’s voice a little louder now, “I don’t believe you and Mr. del Mar had met. The bride’s father, Mr. del Mar, this is my granddaughter Charlene.” Suddenly wanting to find yet another escape route, Ennis nodded to her. She looked searchingly at him and he was conscious of his older suit, his weathered skin, the age that he knew had crept closer in the last year. “Well, your daughter is just beautiful, Mr. del Mar, I was tellin’ Curt just a few minutes ago.” She gave him another carefully orchestrated smile to match her voice and apparently dismissing him, turned to Alexandria again. “Can you believe the climate here, all that wind? Just two days and my skin feels like old newspaper.”

“I know, dear,” Alexandria said evenly. “It was good of you and your Mama to come with me. I hadn’t seen Curt and Luanne in years, and I’m so glad David decided to come. I haven’t seen him since he moved North.”

“Just as well he’s here, if you want to see him. I mean, we won’t be seeing David at his wedding anytime soon, not unless they change the laws and Nathan comes back to life.”

“That’s none of your business, Charlene,” Alexandria said in a low, warning voice but Ennis scarcely heard. He looked down at the table, his face feeling too warm and his stomach slightly queasy.

“Mama, I need you and Charlene to come with me,” a brisk woman’s voice said. She looked like an older version of Charlene but had an aura of authority about her. Ennis would have been reminded of some of the ladies he’d met at the few church events Alma had talked him into years ago, but all he could see was the man who was with her, the same man he’d half-mistaken for Jack a few minutes ago. “David was telling me the photographer is still here,” the woman continued to Alexandria, “and he suggested we have our pictures taken with Curt and the bride. Three generations.”

“Not unless they change the laws and Nathan comes back to life”…. For a terrible moment, the old terror and nausea started to overcome him. One hand gripped the seat of the chair he was sitting on hard enough that his fingers ached; the old slapdown voice, struggling to override his pledges to Jack, started to work its way up: he knows in a minute everybody will know get it away from you now or you’ll catch it, queer faggot it was just Jack… Mechanically, he pushed himself up out of the chair, heard only a few words of the introduction, “my daughter Carol,” a quick handshake and then there was no avoiding it, David with his hand politely extended. Ennis took it briefly and for a moment he could feel every cell of his own right hand, clasping a man’s hand that was so different from Jack’s, a little darker and with short, blunt fingers, oddly like a surgeon’s hands.

Read Chapter 3 at http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1066.html

Brokeback in Exile (a Brokeback Mountain fanfic), Chapter 2

Excerpt from Chapter 2 of my fanfic tribute to Brokeback Mountain: During Alma Junior's wedding ceremony, Ennis discovers that although Jack is physically dead he isn't gone or even very far away.  They silently exchange vows.  The entire chapter can be found at the link.

The minister asked Alma and Curt to join hands for reciting the marriage vows.

Jack and I should have said our vows to each other, he thought, momentarily forgetting whoever it was who apparently found him so interesting. That summer 21 years ago, with the crows and coyotes as witnesses…. After that second night together, with the firelight on his face, when he said ‘it’s alright’ and pulled me into his arms. Alma and Curt faced each other and the minister started reciting the standard words that everyone was already familiar with.

"I, Curt, take you, Alma…"

I, Ennis, take you Jack…

"to be my wedded wife…"

to be my beloved partner…

"to have and to hold from this day forward…."

to have and to hold, from the very beginning….

"for better, for worse…."

for better, for worse….

"for richer, for poorer…"

for richer, for poorer…

Ennis gasped and jumped as he suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder; causing both Alma and Monroe to give him puzzled looks. Without thinking, he shifted his weight in the pew and looked around quickly; but Alma’s mother and sister, in the pew behind him, were looking at Alma and Curt. Even before the unseen hand slipped down his left arm and clasped his left hand he knew, against all logic and common sense, whose it was. He shifted his left arm slightly so that his forearm was lying flat against Jack’s invisible one.

Chapter 2:  http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/523.html

Interior of the church used as the setting for Ennis' wedding in the film

Brokeback in Exile (Chapter 1)

Every once in awhile, a masterwork of creative art comes along that has a far-reaching effect beyond appreciation or entertainment.  For many of us, it was the gay tragic romance Brokeback Mountain. The film version of Annie Proulx's short story not only attracted a loyal following; it had a very real impact on the lives of its fans, especially gays but straights as well.  Some of these stories can be found in the book Beyond Brokeback, produced by members of the Dave Cullen Ultimate Brokeback Forum.

For some of us, expressing what the story and film meant has taken the form of fanfiction.  My own effort, Gift of Exile, has been in one-and-off progress since 2006.

The following is an excerpt; the entire chapter can be found at the link.


 

All that anyone at the ranch apparently noticed was that he’d taken no time off in the last year, volunteered for extra work more often, worked extended hours whenever he could.  And while Alma, Jr. had called, and stopped by occasionally, she was too consumed with planning her wedding to much notice his loss of weight or the traces of his regular restless nights.  But ever since Alma Junior's visit he’d increasingly felt like Jack was right at his elbow; like he’d be able to catch a glimpse of him if he just turned his head fast enough.  He didn’t believe in ghosts, never would, he told himself.  The erotic dreams he regularly had about Jack, the only sex life he’d had or wanted in the last year, sometimes ended with waking up to sticky sheets but never with Jack in the bed beside him.  No; it was just one of the drafts in the trailer that would brush against his hair in a way that reminded him of the way Jack used to nuzzle it.  Or the harder wind hitting the trailer at night, sounding like the moaning noises Jack used to make during their lovemaking that still made him hard just to think about.

But there were also the dreams that he didn’t look forward to: the soul-crushing, slow-motion nightmares of watching Jack being mercilessly clubbed to death.  Listening to the screams and muted crunching of broken bones, even smelling the blood, and finding that his feet seemed to be set in concrete blocks.  And his very throat frozen, unable even to yell at the evil men who would later play with their children, lie with their wives, sit serenely in church on Sunday.  With no one in the trailer to wake him up, the dream always had to run its course until he woke sobbing in grief and torment.  But in the past few months, he knew he could feel something brush across his face and the top of his head just before full wakefulness released him from the nightmare.

He wasn’t going to think of that today, he told himself as he shut the trailer door and walked toward his battered truck.  One appearance at a wedding wasn’t going to make up for the distance he’d kept between himself and his daughters when they were growing up, but Alma Junior had wanted him to walk her down the aisle, despite all that, not the stepfather who had been there every day since she was 12 years old.  She wasn’t going to regret that.

Chapter 1 at http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/392.html

Epiphany on Brokeback Mountain

This is a sermon preached in 2005 by Dr. David Jenkins, who taught at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, in Atlanta.


Epiphany on Brokeback Mountain

Quick on the heels of Christmas, Epiphany takes its seat between the Slaughter of the Innocents and Ash Wednesday. It’s a skinny season of immensely hopeful proportion. During these brief winter days of Epiphany we celebrate the surprise - no, the shock, like the first lightening bolt from an unexpected storm - of the manifestation of God’s good news to the gentiles.

It is doubtful that Annie Proulx, author of the 1997 short story, Brokeback Mountain, ever imagined her story could be an apt sermon illustration for an Epiphany homily, let alone provide the narrative for the triumphant movie, but I’d like to make a case for it. For those who have yet to read the story or see the film, here is a brief summary.

In 1963, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, teenage cowboys in Wyoming, get jobs herding sheep for the summer. Ennis is desperate for a job and Jack is scratching his itch to be “somewhere, anywhere else than Lightening Flat,”, his remote hometown. Sheep herders have always been despised by cattle ranchers, a history not lost on the author who casts these discarded “pair of deuces going nowhere” as shepherds. We worry from the opening scene that nothing good will come of them.

The two boys on horseback and their sheep dogs drive the thousand ewes high into the Rockies where the dense beauty, isolation, and raw power of Nature propel the action. As Ennis and Jack guard the sheep, they are hailed on, snowed on, rained on, and struck by the kind of lightening that charges companionship with love and sex. There they discovered Brokeback Mountain, a harsh place of belonging, “a place both empowering and inimical,” claims the author, a landscape of surprise.

Over the next twenty years, Ennis and Jack married strong women, raised children, worked rodeos and ranches, sold farm machinery, and after two decades of occasional ‘fishing trips’ near Brokeback to rekindle their fire, the story comes to a tragic halt. The scene shifts from the verdant mountains to the desolate flatlands. The years of emotional and physical isolation, the internalized homophobia, the denial of self, and the denial of love, converge like rivers flooding the grief-stricken plains. All that we see and feel is desolation.

In her no-nonsense style, Annie Proulx said of Brokeback Mountain, “It is a story of destructive rural homophobia.” Throughout the film we are witnesses to the panoramic views of homophobia ruining lives - physically, emotionally, economically, and socially. This drives the drama and pathos of Brokeback Mountain. Ennis and Jack store it in their bodies like ammunition ready for battle or self-destruction. Their internalized self-hatred stifles hope, feeds their fears, blurs the lines between intimacy and violence, isolates them from each other, from the world, and from themselves. In a poignant conversation on Brokeback, Ennis says to Jack, “Bottom line, we’re around each other and this thing grabs on to us again in the wrong place, wrong time, and we’ll be dead.” In the midst of an unsafe time and culture, Brokeback Mountain was their only place of refuge, a mountainous theme looming over every scene.

A reasonable hope of belonging to a safe place and to safe people is often an anxious prayer for many people. Who doesn’t desire to be safe in our own home, at work, at school, in our church, in our own skin? Yet this is not the real or perceived reality for most lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people in our communities and congregations, even when Will and Grace airs on prime-time. Two-thirds of out LGBT youth in the U.S. were threatened or injured with a weapon at school last year. Matthew Shepherd’s crucifixion on a Wyoming stock fence, less than a year after the publication of Brokeback Mountain, still serves as a compelling symbol of the coercive, violent force of homophobia, and not only in the rural West. Wyoming is merely a metaphor.

In a New York Times article on Brokeback Mountain and gay Wyoming cowboys, journalist Guy Trebay wrote, “What is most emotionally corrosive about Brokeback Mountain, some say, is the film’s placid portrayal of the violence that has always been part of gay experience.” One gay cowboy interviewed for the story said, “The Shepherd thing goes through my mind all the time. People think that could never happen again. It could happen. It will happen.” (New York Times, 12/18/05).

I believe that the official rulings and language of our churches about something we call “homosexuality” only serves to strengthen homophobia’s hateful grip on our world. The recent United Methodist and Vatican rulings do not simply function as ecclesial decisions guarding ordination and church membership. Like judgments from the Inquisition, they are as lethal as a tire iron in the hands of violent men, for these rulings continue to isolate human beings from communities which are called upon to be life-giving. Couple this isolation with language that dehumanizes men and women as ”innately disordered” or worse, and the self-hate and desperation often lead to death. Gay and lesbian teenagers in the U.S. attempt suicide at more than five times the national average.

Annie Proulx noted the “fact that Wyoming has the highest suicide rate in the [U.S.], and that the preponderance of those people who kill themselves are elderly single men.” Ennis and Jack managed to stay alive for each other as long as they could, the way soldiers do in war, not fighting for great causes or honor, but for those particular soldiers with whom they had become inextricably bound.

Brokeback Mountain, in addition to magnifying the destructive power of homophobia, also shatters a compelling myth in our divisive discourse about sexuality, the myth that we freely choose our “sexual orientation.” When Jack and Ennis were raised to despise “queers” and when they knew first-hand the life-threatening risks of getting caught, they would have been insane to make such a choice - in 1963 or in 2006. They chose this love like they chose to be wet when it rained or cold when it snowed. “Without a single polemical speech, [Brokeback Mountain] dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective “agenda” concocted by conspiratorial “elites” (Frank Rich, N.Y.Times, 12/18/05). Hopefully the church can let this myth die.

Before the movie was made, Annie Proulx said to the newly-hired director, Ang Lee, “I was very afraid about this story, that making stories sometimes took me into off-limits places.” “Off-limits places” is what we celebrate in Epiphany. Off-limits is how the Pharisees and Temple wardens would have regarded the gentiles. The sacred places, sacred people, and sacred scriptures, the hope for the messiah and the light of the world were surely off-limits to those gentiles. But then Epiphany.

I wonder as I wander at the foot of Brokeback Mountain if the church has the capacity and courage to declare a Jubilee or an Epiphany? - a time and space in which it would listen to the sacred love stories of Jack and Ennis or any of its members, setting aside worn-out labels such as “homosexual” for words we understand: son, daughter, friend, neighbor, sister, brother, partner. Could we listen well to the flesh-and-blood stories of fear and desolation, joy, discovery, liberation, belonging, and love? Like the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in South Africa, could we bear to hear our own stories of crucifixion? Could we go to those places which have been off-limits to pulpits and pot-luck-suppers?

Listening to sacred stories is what we Christians are called to do. Perhaps if we listen well, we will be transformed both by the stories and by the Epiphany hope that with unexpected people God continues to surprise us - shock us - and continues to call us to off-limits places, continues to do A NEW THING in the world.

So how do I know when this new thing is of God? When the story is true. When the news is good. When the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it. At the moment we call Epiphany, while Herod’s death-dealing decree echoed through the land, the magis - excluded from the promise - arrived at the stable in the hills near Bethlehem and took their place beside the shepherds.


http://www.covenantnetwork.org/sermon%26papers/jenkins.htm

Another "Brokie" passes away

Today the Courier-Post reported that Robert Baxter, a critic and reporter who covered the arts scene in south New Jersey for the Courier-Post from 1979 until his retirement in 2008. Mr. Baxter was 69 and died of pancreatic cancer.


To many online friends in the "Dave Cullen Ultimate Brokeback Forum,", Mr. Baxter was known by the name "Tacitus." Like many people who saw Brokeback, many gays and some straights, Mr. Baxter was inspired by the film to re-think his life and many of the fears and conflicts over his sexuality that had cast shadows over his life. He had already survived a violent gay-bashing and had seen friends take their own lives due to the rejection of those closest to them. In remembrance of Mr. Baxter's many contributions, the Courier-Post ran a 2006 column in which Mr. Baxter told readers about his struggles and gradual self-acceptance as a gay man. In 2007, the Ultimate Brokeback Forum published an anthology of posts, "Beyond Brokeback: The Impact of a Film." Much of the Courier-Post's memorial reprint was taken from on of "Tacitus'" entry in the book.

His earlier experiences did include a same-sex couple in Wyoming, the setting of Brokeback Mountain:

You can imagine, I'm sure, the thrill I felt when I met Bud and Manuel. I was 5, maybe 6, holding onto my grandmother's hand when she introduced her cowboy pals to me at the county fair. When Bud leaned down and shook my little hand, I caught the pungent smell of fresh sweat and stale tobacco.


From their scuffed leather boots to their weathered Stetsons, they looked like real men. Lean, muscular, with big, calloused hands and strong faces, tanned by the sun. The kind of cowboys Marlboro later glorified.
Bud owned a cattle ranch. Manuel was his foreman. They built barbed-wire fences and rode the range together on horseback. They also shared a bed.

Bud and Manuel were gay cowboys even though neither man would have known what that term meant 60 years ago. In those days, gay folk were called queers and homos.

Nobody who knew Bud and Manuel would have dared to ask if they were gay, but everyone sensed Bud belonged to Manuel. They formed an inseparable pair, just like my grandmother's married friends. Somehow, the names of the two men fit together as comfortably as Charlie and Mary or Harry and Alice.

I've thought a lot about Bud and Manuel since I saw Brokeback Mountain. They are long gone, but I wish they were here to share their story with me. How did they forge a relationship in rural California when society -- from our families and churches to our government -- shrieked "No!" or shouted "Don't you dare!"

Baxter noted that despite the often mortal dangers faced by gays in that setting and era, the intrepid couple managed to have "the ranch -- and they shared the love -- Jack and Ennis could never find."


The Courier-Post reported that "Mr. Baxter, 69, was a critic and reporter whose work reflected a high degree of talent and expertise. But many people on Thursday remembered his passion, describing a quiet and reserved man with a lifelong love for the fine arts, particularly opera.

" 'He was such a wonderful gentleman, and so dedicated to the arts in South Jersey,' said Cynthia Lambert, executive director of the South Jersey Cultural Alliance.

" 'I'm not sure there are words to express what Robert was to the South Jersey arts community,' said Bruce Curless, artistic producing director of the Ritz Theatre Co. in Haddon Township. 'As a patron of the arts, they come no better.' "


for more information about "Beyond Brokeback", see the Dave Cullen Ultimate Brokeback Forum.