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window, hitting the narrow boy's bed against the wall, an ink-staineddesk and wooden chair, a b.b. gun in a hand-whittled rack over thebed. The window looked down on the gravel road stretching southand it occurred to him that for his growing-up years that was theonly road Jack knew. An ancient magazine photograph of somedark-haired movie star was taped to the wall beside the bed, the skintone gone magenta. He could hear Jack's mother downstairs runningwater, filling the kettle and setting it back on the stove, asking theold man a muffled question.
The closet was a shallow cavity with a wooden rod braced across, afaded cretonne curtain on a string closing it off from the rest of theroom. In the closet hung two pairs of jeans crease-ironed and foldedneatly over wire hangers, on the floor a pair of worn packer boots hethought he remembered. At the north end of the closet a tiny jog inthe wall made a slight hiding place and here, stiff with longsuspension from a nail, hung a shirt. He lifted it off the nail. Jack'sold shirt from Brokeback days. The dried blood on the sleeve washis own blood, a gushing nosebleed on the last afternoon on themountain when Jack, in their contortionistic grappling and wrestling,had slammed Ennis's nose hard with his knee. He had staunched theblood which was everywhere, all over both of them, with hisshirtsleeve, but the staunching hadn't held because Ennis hadsuddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering angel out inthe 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 hisown plaid shirt, lost, he'd thought, long ago in some damn laundry,his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack andhidden here inside Jack's own shirt, the pair like two skins, oneinside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into the fabric andbreathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for thefaintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack butthere was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined powerof Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he heldin his hands.
In the end the stud duck refused to let Jack's ashes go. "Tell youwhat, we got a family plot and he's goin in it." Jack's mother stood atthe table coring apples with a sharp, serrated instrument. "You comeagain," she said.
Bumping down the washboard road Ennis passed the countrycemetery fenced with sagging sheep wire, a tiny fenced square onthe welling prairie, a few graves bright with plastic flowers, anddidn't want to know Jack was going in there, to be buried on thegrieving plain.
A few weeks later on the Saturday he threw all Stoutamire's dirtyhorse blankets into the back of his pickup and took them down to theQuik Stop Car Wash to turn the high-pressure spray on them. Whenthe wet clean blankets were stowed in the truck bed he stepped intoHiggins's gift shop and busied himself with the postcard rack."Ennis, what are you lookin for rootin through them postcards?" said
