Work Text:
It had been the best night of Jack’s life. It was surpassed only by the nights that followed, and then never again for the rest of his days.
The vehicles wending over the distant plain had appeared as abstract points of light. From their vantage just below the treeline on Brokeback Mountain, overlooking the highway north of the town of Signal, Wyoming, two young men perched high above ordinary affairs.
Jack lay up against a log with his feet pointed toward the campfire, boots hanging over the embers. Ennis lay near him, a little closer than he had lain the night before. They smoked half a pack of cigarettes each and slugged whisky from a bottle they shared. It was nearly nine o’clock in the evening. High summer sun skimmed the tips of the pines and the hulking granite boulders. The plain below was blanketed in deep purple twilight.
They had talked about anything and everything, and finally they landed on rodeo. Ennis, biting the inside of his lip—he hadn’t smiled, not yet, but he had wanted to— said,
What’s a point of ridin’ some piece a stock for eight seconds?
Money’s a good point, Jack had said. True enough, if you don’t get stomped winnin’ it, Ennis had said. Ennis laughed, which Jack had never heard him do before, which was what made that night the best of Jack’s life. Then Ennis smiled, and Jack felt hotter than hot, belly full of smoke, like he could breathe fire.
That was a long time ago.
-
He was weightless. Then it was over, he hit the ground and skid, left track marks in the dust, rolled over once, twice, and a third time before slamming into the fence head-first. Above him, Jack heard a cry. Git on up boy! He might’ve, had he known which way up was, but he didn’t, and before he could figure it out the bull was on him. Jack heard a whip crack. He howled.
Later, the doctors told him there was no whip. It was the sound his leg made, busted in three places by sixteen hundred pounds of stock. He called his ma from the hospital. When she told him his draft card had come in the mail, he laughed and laughed.
The year was 1965, and Jack reckoned it was the worst one yet. He was twenty-one years old. He had no friends to speak of and no clean underwear. He had fifteen dollars to his name— all coins save for two wrinkled one-dollar bills—which he kept in a gallon jug on the passenger-side floor of his truck cab. The truck was almost as old as Jack. The shocks were worn clean out, and Jack had been optimistic when he selected the gallon instead of the quart. The coins juddered inside the mostly-empty jug as though electrified whenever the truck exceeded 25 miles per hour. On top of it all, there was a war going on.
He reported to the draft office with his left leg in a cast up to his thigh. The army doctor, gesturing to the busted leg, asked Jack how he’d done it. Rodeo, he said. The doctor sent him away without touching his stethoscope.
Jack stayed with his folks in Lightning Flat until the cast came off. He could do nothing but smoke, drink, and breathe. His mind wandered. He thought of Ennis. He wondered whether Ennis had married that girl he’d talked about, or whether his number had come up like Jack’s had.
Jack’s ma cried when the cast came off and Jack said he was getting back on the bulls.
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” she said. “ If the doc says you’re too busted up to go fight the VC, ain’t you too busted to tangle with a bull? Ain’t no Vietnamese weighs sixteen hundred pounds with horns on his head. I know that if I know anything.”
Jack stood at the foot of the dining room table. Both of his parents were seated. His ma clasped her hands tightly on the tabletop.
“Why, baby? Why do you have to do this?”
He didn’t answer
“If you’re stupid enough to get back in that ring,” his old man said in a hard little voice, “you deserve whatever happens to you.” He spat a wad of chewing tobacco into a tin cup for punctuation. But he didn’t ask Jack why. He had been a bull rider in his day and had some sense of the thing.
Thing was, Jack needed the bull. Thing was, when Jack was on the bull there was nothing but the bull. For eight seconds, God willing, there was no money trouble, no car trouble, no draft, no thought, no tomorrow, no yesterday. No Ennis. Just sweat and dirt and meat and blood. Heave and thrust and hang on.
“You know I never been smart,” Jack said.
-
That period of Jack’s life was dusty and sere. Jack had told Ennis money was the point to rodeo, but he’d come to find there wasn’t much money in it. You only earned if you won, and Jack barely won enough to keep his truck running. He skipped meals to buy car parts.
Any chance he could, which was not too often, Jack found a likeminded fellow to bring back to his broken-down cunt truck. Most of them were in it for a quick tug, something to do while they were on the outs with their women. A few were like him, not as interested in their women as they should be. He tried to stay away from those. He saw in their eyes something too close to what he felt and didn’t want to feel.
One cold November in Kansas, on a night that frosted the short prairie grass, Jack had it on with a calf roper. An older fellow (or so he seemed to Jack, who still had baby fat hanging around his chin) and well-off. He had not one but two roping horses and paid for a motel room every night. He also had that look, the one Jack tried to stay away from. Jack followed him back to the motel room anyway, which he wouldn’t have done except that it was cold and Jack was hungry.
The calf roper bought Jack a burger, then bent him over the flimsy motel desk even though the room had two beds and cried when he finished. Jack felt tears hit his spine. The calf roper insisted on blowing him for the sake of fairness. Jack tried to tell him he didn’t have to but was unsuccessful. He endured an uncomfortable, sniffling blowjob by turning his head to the side, closing his eyes, and thinking of Ennis–something else he tried to stay away from. He was relieved when it was over. Jack only went for guys around his age after that.
Still, it never occurred to him to quit the bulls and go home to Lightning Flat. The worse he felt, the more he wanted them. When he was hungry, he craved the swoop in his stomach, the electric weightlessness of a bull with a lot of drop. When he was lonely, he yearned for the heat and stink of titanic shoulders and muscled flanks. His appetite for punishment became tangled with his desire for men. Sometimes he came off a bull and was half hard when he hit the dirt. Sometimes he stuck his hand down the front of his jeans at night in the cab of his truck, or in a motel when he could afford it, and he dreamed up the way it felt to get the wind knocked out of him. When he brought men back to his truck, he urged them faster, harder, meaner. It was almost enough, but the bulls couldn’t hold him like the men could, and men couldn’t knock the wind out of him like the bulls could, nor free him, nor make him forget.
-
The day Jack met Lureen, he lasted a whole eight seconds on a feisty young bull called Sleepy, scored in the high eighties, and earned a hefty cash prize for the trouble. He rode the victory high like he rode the bull—one-handed, spurs out, with no way to steer. Before he knew it, he had landed in the back seat of Lureen’s daddy’s car with Lureen on his lap.
He’d had girls before. Not many, but enough to know his heart wasn’t in it and never would be. Still, she was fun. She was beautiful and she thought he was beautiful, and he liked that. They’d had a good time. Nine months later, they’d had a baby.
Lureen Newsome was the only daughter of a former high school football star turned big-time distributor of heavy farm machinery in Childress, Texas. Her mother was a former cheerleader and DAR chapter president. Lureen was a rising senior at TCU, a pageant queen, a member of Kappa Phi in good standing, the treasurer of the TCU ladies’ rodeo club, and a total knockout. She had long legs, perfect tits, and a head full of thick, dark hair. She had broken up with her college boyfriend a few months before the night she straddled Jack’s lap in the backseat of her daddy’s car. The boyfriend had asked her to marry him, to drop out and follow him to law school in Abilene. She had said no thanks, said she wasn’t serious about him that way. In the end, she dropped out to marry Jack and have his baby, instead. It had been an easy decision to make when she made it. It was a harder one to live with.
For his part, Jack elected to do the right thing mostly for lack of a better idea. He had a vague notion that he could be a better father than his old man, even if he couldn’t be a better bull rider. And in the deepest unexplored recesses of his mind, Jack knew that it was the easiest time he’d ever have marrying a woman, and he might not be able to force himself if the opportunity ever came around again.
-
Lureen’s daddy approached Jack in the Childress fairgrounds parking lot a couple weeks before the courthouse wedding.
He knocked loudly on the driver’s side window of Jack’s truck, startling Jack from sleep. It was eleven o'clock at night. “Say, Rodeo.” L. D. addressed him with a nickname, “You ever seen a thousand dollars?”
L. D. Newsome—it was unclear to Jack whether the letters stood for anything or not—hated Jack nearly as much as he doted on his daughter. He had barred Jack from the house until after the wedding. Jack, who was used to sleeping in his truck, did not mind nearly so much as Lureen did.
Jack blinked hard a few times. He rubbed his eyes. When he opened them and saw L. D. was still there, he shook his head once. “Can’t say I have,” he said finally.
“You want to?”
“No sir.” Jack shook his head again. He tried to smile but fell short of good humor by a few yards. “I got a good imagination.”
“That’s one way to put it.” L. D. huffed. He put his hands in his back pockets, drawing back his shoulders and displaying his ex-linebacker belly. He was bizarrely well dressed for the time of night. The leather cords of his bolo tie shivered in the breeze. “I don’t believe you understand what I’m asking you, son.”
“I understand fine.”
Lureen had told him, had whispered it in his ear late at night as they lay side by side on a blanket in the grass. Her daddy had offered to drive her to the clinic, said there was no need to get married if she didn’t want to, said no one had to know. But Lureen loved the child, she said.
Jack held his gaze steadily. He knew L.D.’s type. He had endured his fair share of bullies, not least of all his own father. L. D. had nothing on Jack’s daddy when it came to mulishness, pigheadedness, cruelty, or spite. About the only thing he did have on old John Twist was six inches and a whole lot of cash. So Jack held his gaze for a long time, and L.D. looked away first.
He spat on the ground. “Come find me if you change your mind,” he said. He walked away.
Jack did not relay the incident to Lureen. Lureen, who had been listing gradually towards love, heard the story second-hand from her mother, and finally slipped and toppled. United against her father, each found an ally where none had been expected. Out of solidarity emerged a sincere mutual affection, no less real for being short-lived, which Lureen would remember and crave for all her days
-
Eight months into Lureen’s pregnancy, Jack came up against a nasty piece of work called Little Kisses. Three seconds in, he’d flown over the handlebars and landed flat on his ass. He came away from the encounter with a bruised tailbone and two crushed vertebrae in his lower back. He crawled back to Childress in that old cunt truck with no shocks, spine catching every pothole like a lightning rod.
He and Lureen had been married for five months. They lived with her parents and slept in her childhood bedroom. L. D. was still holding out for Jack to up and leave. He found fault with every house available in town and wouldn’t fork over the down payment he’d promised to Lureen until the right one came along. If he had his way, it never would.
It hurt to sit because of the tailbone and to stand because of the vertebrae, but Jack Twist would lick his own rodeo boots before he’d spend all day in L.D. Newsome’s house lying in bed, so Jack and Lureen stood in the bedroom. A monument to Lureen’s innocent girlhood, it was pink and frilly, bedecked with barrel racing ribbons and pageant queen tiaras. There was no trace of Jack anywhere save for his hat on the dresser and one drawer, half full, containing all the clothes he owned.
“Please, Jack.” Lureen said. “Don’t you know how I worry about you?” She wore a gauzy blue maternity dress. The fabric shimmered when she moved. Jack watched the fabric, avoiding her gaze.
It was already an old conversation. Lureen wanted him to quit bull riding, stay in Childress, work for her daddy at Newsome Farm Equipment. He’d get a real salary, she said. Your daddy don’t like me, Jack would say, and Lureen would make a face like she agreed with him but wouldn’t admit it. The conversation usually ended there. This time, Lureen had the edge.
“Please,” she whispered. Jack made the mistake of looking at her. Her big brown eyes welled with tears. One hand rested lightly on her round belly. And what could he say to that?
“Alright. Alright, baby, don’t cry. You talk to your daddy, see if I can’t help out over there like you wanted.”
She sniffled demurely. Even her snot was demure. “He says he’s got a spot for you in sales.”
Then Jack understood. Lureen had it all figured. He had no say in the matter. Jack stood with hands on his hips, fingernails dug in his belt loops. His face was hot. He bit the inside of his cheek. He looked at the gauzy blue fabric again. He didn’t have to look at Lureen to know that her big brown eyes were sparkling, her perfect lower lip was trembling, and her shoulders were pulled back into impeccable pageant-queen posture. He’d bet anything it was the same trick she’d used on her daddy when she’d got Jack hired behind his own back.
“Alright,” he said. It was the first time he really hated her. “Sales it is.”
That night, Ennis Del Mar was in his dream for the first time in a long time. Jack dreamed of Ennis as a free man, captain of a ship sailing over the prairie and under the North Star. Jack wished he could believe it.
-
After a soul-sucking first day on the sales floor, Jack almost rescinded his promise to Lureen entirely. Instead, he walked back their agreement a few steps, now saying he would try out the sales job part-time, but that he would go back to the bulls once he was fit for it. Jack hadn’t expected that day to be so long in coming. He had been brought up in the school of ‘rub some dirt in it and get moving,’ but the months came and went, and moving still gave him trouble. Pinched nerves caught in his mangled L3 and L4 vertebrae sent numbness shooting to his toes. He stood on the sales floor all day, endured L.D.’s overzealous backslapping with gritted teeth, came home to the ranch-style house he and Lureen had finally managed to wrangle out from under her daddy, and lay face-down on the bed, groaning. He took to heavy drinking.
Much to his dismay, and to his father-in-law’s, Jack turned out to be a decent employee. After a few false starts that the left ranch foremen of Childress snickering, he learned how to close a deal. He re-fashioned rodeo cowboy showmanship into a sales strategy. He discovered he had the ability to gab endlessly in a way customers found charming, so long as he never really said anything.
His son was born shortly thereafter. Jack held Bobby in his arms and breathed in that new baby smell, all milk and powder and softness, but couldn’t get him to fit right. He shifted the baby from arm to arm, jostling him, convinced he was uncomfortable. Lureen said he wouldn’t be if Jack would just hold still. Jack thought he might love Bobby but it was hard for him to tell, not having had much experience in that area. He decided his back felt better and signed up for another rodeo.
-
When Bobby was four and a half months old, Jack got reacquainted with Sleepy at the Grady County Fair in Chickasha, Oklahoma. He snuck off while Lureen took the baby to his grandparents’ house. He had been saving a couple quarters each week since Christmas, telling himself it was for a gift for Lureen but knowing otherwise. The entry fee was heavy and hot in his pocket. He drove north and watched the new moon rise over the flatland, a bare black gap amid moth-eaten stars.
He arrived in Chickasha closer to dawn than to midnight. He slept all through the day, curtains drawn over the motel window. He awoke at 4:03 pm to the sickly light of a storm that hadn’t struck yet but was thinking about it. He was due at the fairgrounds before the end of the hour. Jack splashed water on his face and hair, pulled on his boots, and arrived in time for the drawing wearing yesterday’s clothes.
He drew Sleepy for the second time in just over a year. He whooped when the name was called. Last time he’d ridden Sleepy, Jack boasted, he’d won the pot. He was ready for the bastard. He ordered a round of beer for the clowns from concessions, then had one himself, then two. With every swallow, he tried to drive away the strange sense of foreboding that had come over him.
The storm-light grew thicker to the west, and the sky was a great pile of clouds. The crowd was thick in the stands. Jack slugged a few shots from a hip flask, then drained a third beer—which the middle-aged woman at the register, eyeing the number pinned to his shirt, almost had not given him—when a saddle bronc rider came off the bronc, just shy of seven seconds with his foot still caught in the stirrup. The animal dragged him end to end through the dust. The man screamed, and the crowd roared. Jack watched with his arms hooked over the fence. His mouth was dry.
When it was his turn, Jack hopped in the chute. He kept his feet on the rails. Sleepy rumbled underneath him, pawing at the dirt. Still behind the gate, the beast rolled his haunches. Jack nearly came unglued. His hand was sweaty. He wrapped and re-wrapped the bull-rope but couldn’t grip it.
“Somebody oil this thing or what?” He muttered.
“Huh?”
The men holding shut the bucking chute gave him a funny look. Jack didn’t answer, just re-wrapped the rope, and wrapped it again. The ring was empty. The crowd was waiting.
“You alright there boy?”
Jack nodded.
Several things happened at once. Jack had nodded to say, Yes, I’m alright. The men in charge of the gate took the nod to mean, Yes, I’m ready. The gate swung open. Sleepy launched forward. A baby cried in the stands. A woman shrieked. The rope slipped in his palm. It was over in five seconds.
One. When he had climbed over the fence onto the bull’s back, Jack had been halfway to drunk. When the gate swung open and the bull took off and the baby cried and the woman shrieked and the rope slipped, fear seized him and sobered him.
Two. It was worse to be sober.
Three. He was afraid every time he sat on a bull, but he’d never been afraid like this. This was not adrenaline, not the instinctive animal fear that made a body sharper and tighter and fiercer, that kept a body on the bull. This fear was the human kind. It saw the future and cowered. Jack had been walking on a tightrope with his eyes on the horizon. Now, he peered into the abyss.
Four. Used to be, when Jack was on the bull there was nothing but the bull. This was everything and the bull. By God, he had a wife and child at home.
Five. He lost the hold of his legs. Jack slid down Sleepy’s right flank. He landed on his right side, catching a love tap to the ribs from Sleepy’s right hind hoof on the way down.
His body thumped to the dirt.
Jack lay on the ground catching his breath for longer than he had sat on the bull.
The diagnosis was three cracked ribs. Jack returned to the motel room. He had turned down painkillers, having inherited his father’s suspicion of pills and doctors. He finished off his hip flask instead and downed another half bottle of whiskey for good measure. He drank until his stomach felt worse than his ribs. He lay in the dark, stared up at the ceiling, and wished it were stars. Half-drowned in whiskey, Jack did not hear, but felt, a voice calling to him from a distant time and place. From the rightest he’d ever felt in a whole life of wrong.
What’s a point of ridin’ some piece a stock for eight seconds?
It hurt too much to sob, so he let the tears run down his face silently.
-
Against all odds, the season of 1967 was Jack’s best yet, at least on paper. He won more than ever—still not much—and hurt more than ever, too. Jack knew he ought to stop. Knowing and doing were different things. He still worked at Newsome Farm Equipment. He sat behind a desk or in the cab of a combine making circles around the parking lot, jiggling his leg, smalltalking and daydreaming, until the itch was too painful to bear, and he left to find a bull to ride or a man to ride or both. He was already sick of giving it to his wife and running out of excuses. He became grateful for the injuries so long as they kept Lureen away from him in bed. He tried to remind himself he had a wife and a child, and he owed them a duty. It frightened him how easy it was to forget.
In May, he made an honest attempt to quit. He cracked in August and entered his name in the draw at a dusty joint east of El Paso.
He stopped for gas in Carlsbad on the way there. He waited in line behind two truckers and a family of tourists. He figured them for roadtrippers from the Midwest. The daughter held a glossy informational booklet about the wildlife in Carlsbad Caverns. Jack tapped his boot on the linoleum and idly spun a rack of postcards next to the counter while one of the truckers small-talked at the pretty attendant behind the counter. His eye stuttered over a red-brown mountain foregrounding electric blue sky, and a word that plucked a forgotten chord in his heart.
EL CAPITAN AND SIGNAL MOUNTAIN
Jack stopped his spinning. He picked the postcard off the rack and flipped it over.
View from Highway 62 between Carlsbad, N.M. and El Paso, Texas. The Guadalupe Mountains end in the promontory of El Capitan, called locally the Point of the Mountain, from which the Apaches sent up smoke signals…
“Sir?”
He looked up at the pretty attendant. By her expression, Jack guessed it wasn’t the first time she’d tried to get his attention.
“Five dollars on six,” he said. “Thanks.” Impulsively, he tossed the postcard onto the counter alongside a pack of Marlboros.
At the rodeo, Jack drew an ok bull and won third place and thirty dollars. He came away without a scratch and felt emptier than before. He told himself he was done. After, he followed the crowds to a local spot, a dive with sawdust and peanut shells on the floor. The music, when it was distinguishable above the din, was in Spanish. A few couples two-stepped by the jukebox, brushing shoulders with the men at the bar, crunching the peanut shells underfoot. Jack waved down the barman and called for a beer.
His eyes flicked to the right. By chance, Jack had stood next to the handsomest man in the place. He was broad and tan with a strong nose. When he moved, his t-shirt stretched taut across his powerful chest. Unable to resist, Jack snuck another glance. This time, the man saw him. He turned to his buddies and said something in Spanish. They all looked at Jack and snickered. That answered that question, Jack thought.
Jack finished his beer. He rapped his fingers against the bar top to the beat of the music and slunk bit by bit into trancelike solitude. He stood, contemplating the distorted neon reflections in the condensation rings deposited by ladies’ cocktail glasses while the crowd vibrated at increasingly high frequencies around him. He drew his index finger through the condensation. Just as his finger bisected the glowing red ring, he was struck in the back by a dancing couple and lost his balance.
Without thinking, Jack flung his hands out to catch himself. Instead, he caught the handsome man at the bar, who had just turned to face the dance floor. Jack collided with his broad chest. His knee grazed the inside of the man’s thigh.
“Sorry, sorry,” he tried to say.
The jukebox wailed, accordion wheezing, a male voice whooping with a sound halfway between a holler and a sob. Jack moved to pull away, but the man wouldn’t let him go. He had stepped forward, boxing Jack in up against the bar.
“You’re in the wrong place,” the man said, punctuating the words with a shove. His voice was slightly accented. “We don’t do that cocksucker shit here.”
His buddies jeered. One cried, “Naw but I bet they’d know what to do with a boy like you down in Juárez, huh?”
Jack had heard what went down in Juárez. He knew what the talk was, anyway, about the men there who would do anything for money. His gut churned. “I think there’s been a misunderstandin,” he said.
The man seized Jack by the collar. Jack tried to free himself but succeeded only in wrenching open his own shirt snaps, one half of his collar still bunched in the man’s fist, revealing the pulsing red hollow of his throat.
“It was a mistake,” he panted. “I’m sorry.”
The man wet his lips. His thick, pink tongue was heavy with spit. Jack thrashed. The buddies laughed. The two-steppers whirled. At last, the man released him. Jack fell backwards into the bar. He felt something crack between his shoulder blades. One elbow collided with a bottle of Corona and toppled it. Beer soaked his shirt and dribbled down the backside of his jeans.
“Maricón.”
A word Jack didn’t know but understood just fine. He ran out the door.
He did not stop running until he reached his truck and didn’t stop even then, floored it twenty miles an hour over the speed limit heading east into the Guadalupe Mountains. Half an hour later, he swerved abruptly into the parking lot of a scenic overlook. He threw on the emergency brake before the wheels had stopped rolling. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, and inertia nearly slammed his forehead into the windshield.
The truck was new, red with white side panels edged in chrome, bought with L.D. Newsome’s money. Jack jumped out with both feet at once, kicked the door shut, hard, and swore. He swore again and kicked again, hard enough to leave a dent this time. He stamped an impression of his right big toe above the wheel well. The unbearable heat of the day had vanished. The sun had set, the desert plunged into deep blue chill. Jack leaned against the cab, breathing hard. He peered over the steep ledge of the overlook. The stark face of Signal Mountain surged over a horizon limned with full moon. It was the image from his postcard.
Jack could not reconcile this Signal with the Signal of his distant dreams. Signal, Wyoming was green. In the permanent summer twilight of his memory, it was purple. It was rich with life and promise. In Jack’s Signal, far-away headlights receded and became indifferent stars, and two men could be alone in the universe, and at peace. The dry, desolate rock in front of him was alien. It may as well have been the moon.
-
Jack kept the postcard in his glovebox for a month. He swore off bulls and men in bars. He played the part of the dutiful husband as well as he could. He massaged Lureen’s feet, he worked overtime, he spoonfed Bobby his first bites of solid food and pretended the spoon was an airplane, he smoked more but hardly drank. Meanwhile, the memory of Ennis, once manageable, swelled like a blister at his heel. Jack felt him with every step. Every once in a while, he would take the postcard out of the glovebox just to look at it.
Jack realized he missed Ennis. He had never stopped missing Ennis, maybe. Most of all, he missed knowing someone and being known. Most of all, Jack missed himself.
He made some calls. He learned that Ennis had in all likelihood settled in Riverton. The discovery sent a thrill down to his toes. Jack wondered why he hadn’t looked him up sooner, if just the knowing could feel like this.
He took the postcard out of the glovebox for the last time. He fished around until he found a blue ballpoint pen. He uncapped it with his teeth and wrote in a careful looping script:
Friend this letter is a long time over due. Hope you get it. Heard you was in Riverton. Im coming thru on the 24th, thought Id stop and buy you a beer Drop me a line if you can, say if your there.
He put the postcard in the mail, and he waited.
-
Sixteen years later
Ennis’ truck was old and slow. Jack waited at the trailhead for an hour after Ennis left, just to be sure he wouldn’t catch up. Jack didn’t want to see the back of him again. As usual, his scheme backfired.
The gravel forest service road was near washed out with snowmelt. Ennis’ tires had left deep grooves in the mud. Jack knew it had been Ennis’ tires because no one else ever came up this way, and because it was clear from the tracks that something was wrong with the suspension. The forest service road was the only way down the mountain. Jack had no choice but to put his tires to Ennis’ grooves and drive. To watch him go, for miles and miles and miles.
The year was 1983, and Jack reckoned it was the worst one yet. He was older, fatter, richer, and bitterer than he had been. For sixteen years, he had been in love with a man who could love him back, but who would not. There were no more bulls, no more rodeos. No more broken legs and busted vertebrae, no more bull ropes and hang-ups and chaps. Yet, Jack thought, some things would never change.
When his heart broke, he rubbed some dirt in it and got moving. He always came back for more.