“You still go fishin with that Jack Twist?”

    “Some.” He thought she’d take the pattern off the plate with the scraping.

    “You know,” she said, and from her tone he knew something was coming, “I used to wonder how come you never brought any trouts home. Always said you caught plenty. So one time I got your creel case open the night before you went on one a your little trips—price tag still on it after five years—and I tied a note on the end of the line. It said, hello Ennis, bring some fish Home, love, Alma. And then you come back and said you’d caught a bunch a browns and ate them up. Remember? I looked in the case when I got a chance and there was my note still tied there and that line hadn’t touched water in its life.” As though the word “water” had called out its domestic cousin she twisted the faucet, sluiced the plates.  “That don’t mean nothin.”

    “Don’t lie, don’t try to fool me, Ennis. I know what it means. Jack Twist? Jack Nasty. You and him—“ She’d overstepped his line. He seized her wrist; tears sprang and rolled, a dish clattered.

    “Shut up,” he said. “Mind your own Business. You don’t know nothin about it.”

    “I’m goin a yell for Bill.”

    “You f*ckin go right ahead. Go on and f*ckin yell. I’ll make him eat the f*ckin floor and you too.” He gave another wrench that left her with a burning bracelet, shoved his hat on backwards and slammed out. He went to the Black and Blue Eagle bar that night, got drunk, had a short dirty fight and left. He didn’t try to see his girls for a long time, figuring they would look him up when they got the sense and years to move out from Alma.

    They were no longer young men with all of it before them. Jack had filled out through the shoulders and hams, Ennis stayed as lean as a clothes-pole, stepped around in worn boots, jeans and shirts summer and winter, added a canvas coat in cold weather. A benign growth appeared on his eyelid and gave it a drooping appearance, a broken nose healed crooked.

    Years on years they worked their way through the high meadows and mountain drainages, horse-packing into the Big Horns, Medicine Bows, south end of the Gallatins, Absarokas, Granites, Owl Creeks, the Bridger-Teton Range, the Freezeouts and the Shirleys, Ferrises and the Rattlesnakes, Salt River Range, into the Wind Rivers over and again, the Sierra Madres, Gros Ventres, the Washakies, Laramies, but never returning to Brokeback.  Down in Texas Jack’s father-in-law died and Lureen, who inherited the farm equipment Business, showed a skill for management and hard deals. Jack found himself with a vague managerial title, traveling to stock and agricultural machinery shows. He had some money now and found ways to spend it on his buying trips. A little Texas accent flavored his sentences, “cow” twisted into “kyow” and “wife” coming out as “waf.” He’d had his front teeth filed down and capped, said he’d felt no pain, and to finish the job grew a heavy mustache.

    In May of 1983 they spent a few cold days at a series of little icebound, no-name high lakes, then worked across into the Hail Strew River drainage.

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