Them camps can be a couple a miles from where we pasture the sheep. “Forest Service got designated campsites on the allotments. Joe Aguirre, wavy hair the color of cigarette ash and parted down the middle, gave them his point of view. The venetian blinds hung askew and admitted a triangle of white light, the shadow of the foreman’s hand moving into it. They shook hands in the choky little trailer office in front of a table littered with scribbled papers, a Bakelite ashtray brimming with stubs. It would be Jack Twist’s second summer on the mountain, Ennis’s first. The summer range lay above the tree line on Forest Service land on Brokeback Mountain. 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. 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. In 1963, when he met Jack Twist, Ennis was engaged to Alma Beers. 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. The pickup was old, no heater, one windshield wiper, and bad tires when the transmission went, there was no money to fix it. 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. 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 drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.

Sterling by Emily June Street