Close Range

by Annie Proulx

  The night silence rang hard, Wade Wall’s breathing magnified. He was exultant, charged with the rush of destruction, the hidden self emerged, Wade Walasiewicz, avenging son of an assembly line butcher, his father the head boner inserting his knife in the mouth cavity, trimming ropy veins and bruises from the stiff tongue, cleaving the skull to remove brain and pituitary, shearing the horns away and dead at forty-two from some malignant infection.

  Shy squeezed the wire cutters, feeling the resistance and then the give with a faint jangle of free wire. They’d been at it for hours. They were working up a steep slope. It would have been a chore, putting this fence in. The sky paled in the east.

  “Half hour,” panted Walls. He could cut for days, weeks.

  There was enough light to see the landforms though lodgepole and tumbled rock were black. The arid cold proved the inexorable shortening of days, the weight of it pulling under the false heat of afternoon.

  Shy straightened, put a hand in the small of his back and leaned into the ache. The horizon seemed to be filling with bright water, the level rising as he watched. There was the dull cry of some bird, coyote calls chipped out of distance. His senses sharpened in the fresh stirring of air. To the north a cliff snouted out of the darkness. He could make out the black holes of caves. The click of blades, stiff scrape of sagebrush against his boots made him listen uneasily for something. It seemed he might have ridden through this country a long time ago.

  When the shot came he heard it with a kind of satisfaction that his sense of disturbed air had been true. The bullet hit the cliff and ricocheted. Two sounds seemed simultaneous, the flat whine and his own falsetto gasp, like that of a man dropped overboard into Arctic water. There was a huge incandescence in his hip, a numb fire. He was on the ground, his good foot kicking against a steel post, the end of the cut wire rattling.

  Someone below them was shouting, “You son of a bitch, you get down on the road with your hands up. Right now. And bring them fuckin wire cutters with you. We been watchin you an hour. Hurry up or I’ll make it a little closer.” The tinny voice was hysterical with rage.

  Wade Walls crouched beside him, said, “You’re shot. You’re shot.”

  The voice came again, “Son of a bitch, I have to come up there you’ll come down wearin a bobwire necktie.”

  Another voice said, hold it.

  Shy felt the wire cutters still in his hand. Below, flashlight beams bobbed, weakened by the remorseless dawn. His leg might have been made from cardboard. He let the wire cutters fall, touched his hip, the gluey warmth of blood and a sharp, rough thing that was in him, wedged deep into the hip joint. Touching it set off mean ridges of pain. The climbers below were in a gully, hidden from view. Wade Walls moved away from him.

  The sun’s orange light arrived, transformed a moth on a stem in front of him into glowing parts.

  “Wade,” he said. “I think it’s a splinter of rock. I’m not shot.” But Wade was scrambling away toward the opening into the National Forest. He was gone.

  “Wade,” he said.

  The sun flooded up, immediate and strong. His eyes watered. He was slumped against a mass of rabbitbrush, seemed almost to be in the backseat of a sedan, light coming from all sides. He could see through the roof, and there was Governor Emerson up in the air, past his apogee and falling, sidewise and awkward. It was wonderful to him how clear it was: you were tossed up and out of the blanket, you rose, you hung in the air, faces grinned or scowled at you, you fell, you hit the blanket and that was it.

  He got ready to smile at the voters.

  55 Miles to the Gas Pump

  RANCHERCROOM IN HANDMADE BOOTS AND FILTHYhat, that walleyed cattleman, stray hairs like curling fiddle string ends, that warm-handed, quick-foot dancer on splintery boards or down the cellar stairs to a rack of bottles of his own strange beer, yeasty, cloudy, bursting out in garlands of foam, Rancher Croom at night galloping drunk over the dark plain, turning off at a place he knows to arrive at a canyon brink where he dismounts and looks down on tumbled rock, waits, then steps out, parting the air with his last roar, sleeves surging up windmill arms, jeans riding over boot tops, but before he hits he rises again to the top of the cliff like a cork in a bucket of milk.

  Mrs. Croom on the roof with a saw cutting a hole into the attic where she has not been for twelve years thanks to old Croom’s padlocks and warnings, whets to her desire, and the sweat flies as she exchanges the saw for a chisel and hammer until a ragged slab of peak is free and she can see inside: just as she thought: the corpses of Mr. Croom’s paramours—she recognizes them from their photographs in the paper:MISSING WOMAN —some desiccated as jerky and much the same color, some moldy from lying beneath roof leaks, and all of them used hard, covered with tarry handprints, the marks of boot heels, some bright blue with the remnants of paint used on the shutters years ago, one wrapped in newspaper nipple to knee.

  When you live a long way out you make your own fun.

  Brokeback Mountain

  ENNIS DELMAR WAKES BEFORE FIVE, WIND ROCKING THEtrailer, hissing in around the aluminum door and window frames. The shirts hanging on a nail shudder slightly in the draft. He gets up, scratching the grey wedge of belly and pubic hair, shuffles to the gas burner, pours leftover coffee in a chipped enamel pan; the flame swathes it in blue. He turns on the tap and urinates in the sink, pulls on his shirt and jeans, his worn boots, stamping the heels against thefioor to get them full on. The wind booms down the curved length of the trailer and under its roaring passage he can hear the scratching of fine gravel and sand. It could be bad on the highway with the horse trailer. He has to be packed and away from the place that morning. Again the ranch is on the market and they’ve shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, “Give em to the real estate shark, I’m out a here,” dropping the keys in Ennis’s hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.

  The stale coffee is boiling up but he catches it before it goes over the side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid, lets a panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong. The wind strikes the trailer like a load of din coming off a dump truck, eases, dies, leaves a temporary silence.

  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 dropout 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 1963 when he met Jack Twist, Ennis was engaged to Alma Beers. Both Jack and Ennis claimed to be saving money for a small spread; in Ennis’s case that meant a tobacco can with two five-dollar bills inside. That spring, hungry for any job, each had signed up with Farm and Ranch Employment—they came together on paper as herder and camp tender for the same sheep operation north of Signal. The summer range lay above the tree line on Forest Service land on Brokeback Mountain. It would be Jack Twist’s second summer on the mountain, Ennis’s first. 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 lig
ht, the shadow of the foreman’s hand moving into it. Joe Aguirre, wavy hair the color of cigarette ash and parted down the middle, gave them his point of view.

  “Forest Service got designated campsites on the allotments. Them camps can be a couple a miles from where we pasture the sheep. Bad predator loss, nobody near lookin after em at night. What I want, camp tender in the main camp where the Forest Service says, but theHERDER ”—pointing at Jack with a chop of his hand—“pitch a pup tent on the q.t. with the sheep, out a sight, and he’s goin aSLEEP there. Eat supper, breakfast in camp, butSLEEP WITH THE SHEEP , hunderd percent,NO FIRE , don’t leaveNO SIGN . Roll up that tent every mornin case Forest Service snoops around. Got the dogs, your .30-.3O, sleep there. Last summer had goddamn near twenty-five percent loss. I don’t want that again. YOU,” he said to Ennis, taking in the ragged hair, the big nicked hands, the jeans torn, button-gaping shirt, “Fridays twelve noon be down at the bridge with your next week list and mules. Somebody with supplies’ll be there in a pickup.” He didn’t ask if Ennis had a watch but took a cheap round ticker on a braided cord from a box on a high shelf, wound and set it, tossed it to him as if he weren’t worth the reach, “TOMORROW MORNINwe’ll truck you up the jump-off.” Pair of deuces going nowhere.

  They found a bar and drank beer through the afternoon, Jack telling Ennis about a lightning storm on the mountain the year before that killed forty-two sheep, the peculiar stink of them and the way they bloated, the need for plenty of whiskey up there. He had shot an eagle, he said, turned his head to show the tail feather in his hatband. 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, 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’s saddle catalog.

  The sheep trucks and horse trailers unloaded at the trailhead and a bandy-legged Basque showed Ennis how to pack the mules, two packs and a riding load on each animal ring-lashed with double diamonds and secured with half hitches, telling him, “Don’t never order soup. Them boxes a soup are real bad to pack.” Three puppies belonging to one of the blue heelers went in a pack basket, the runt inside Jack’s coat, for he loved a little dog. Ennis picked out a big chestnut called Cigar Butt to ride, Jack a bay mare who 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, 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’s platform, the kitchen and grub boxes secured. Both slept in camp that first night, Jack already bitching about Joe Aguirre’s sleep-with-the-sheep-and-no-fire order, though he saddled the bay mare in the dark morning without saying much. 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’s breakfast fire. 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’s stone biscuits, a can of peaches, rolled a smoke, watched the sun drop.

  “I’m commutin four hours a day,” he said morosely. “Come in for breakfast, go back to the sheep, evenin get em bedded down, come in for supper, go back to the sheep, spend half the night jumpin up and checkin for coyotes. By rights I should be spendin the night here. Aguirre got no right a make me do this.”

  “You want a switch?” said Ennis. “I wouldn’t mind herdin. I wouldn’t mind sleepin out there.”

  “That ain’t the point. Point is, we both should be in this camp. And that goddamn pup tent smells like cat piss or worse.”

  “Wouldn’t mind bein out there.”

  “Tell you what, you got a get up a dozen times in the night out there over them coyotes. Happy to switch but give you warnin I can’t cook worth a shit. Pretty good with a can opener.”

  “Can’t be no worse than me, then. Sure, I wouldn’t mind a do it.”

  They fended off the night for an hour with the yellow kerosene lamp and around ten Ennis rode Cigar Butt, a good night horse, through the glimmering frost back to the sheep, carrying leftover biscuits, ajar of jam and ajar of coffee with him for the next day saying he’d save a trip, stay out until supper.

  “Shot a coyote just first light,” he told Jack the next evening, sloshing his face with hot water, lathering up soap and hoping his razor had some cut left in it, while Jack peeled potatoes. “Big son of a bitch. Balls on him size a apples. I bet he’d took a few lambs. Looked like he could a eat a camel. You want some a this hot water? There’s plenty.”

  “It’s all yours.”

  “Well, I’m goin a warsh everthing I can reach,” he said, pulling off his boots and jeans (no drawers, no socks, Jack noticed), slopping the green washcloth around until the fire spat.

  They had a high-time supper by the fire, a can of beans each, fried potatoes and a quart of whiskey on shares, sat with their backs against a log, boot soles and copper jeans rivets hot, swapping the bottle while the lavender sky emptied of color and the chill air drained down, drinking, smoking cigarettes, getting up every now and then to piss, firelight throwing a sparkle in the arched stream, tossing sticks on the fire to keep the talk going, talking horses and rodeo, roughstock events, wrecks and injuries sustained, the submarineThresher lost two months earlier with all hands and how it must have been in the last doomed minutes, dogs each had owned and known, the draft, Jack’s home ranch where his father and mother held on, Ennis’s family place folded years ago after his folks died, the older brother in Signal and a married sister in Casper. Jack said his father had been a pretty well known bullrider 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 woolies 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. Money’s a good point, said Jack, and Ennis had to agree. They were respectful of each other’s opinions, each glad to have a companion where none had been expected. Ennis, riding against the wind back to the sheep in the treacherous, drunken light, thought he’d never had such a good time, felt he could paw the white out of the moon.

  The summer went on and they moved the herd to new pasture, shifted the camp; the distance between the sheep and the new camp was greater and the night ride longer. 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 “Strawberry Roan.” Jack tried a Carl Perkins song, bawling “what I say-ay-ay” but he favored a sad hymn, “Water-Walking Jesus,” learned from his mother who believed in the Pentecost, that he sang at dirge slowness, setting off distant coyote yips.

  “Too late to go out
to them damn sheep,” said Ennis, dizzy drunk on all fours one cold hour when the moon had notched past two. 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. “Got you a extra blanket I’ll roll up out here and grab forty winks, ride out at first light.”