gwyllion | Standing in an Empty Parking Lot with a Box of Ashes in Guilty Hands

Title: Standing in an Empty Parking Lot with a Box of Ashes in Guilty Hands
Author: gwylliondream
Genre: canon
Pairing: Ennis/Jack
Rating: PG-13
Words: 907
A/N: This piece earned me a three-way tie for first place in the Movie Last Author Standing challenge. The prompt this time was extremely difficult to tailor to BBM: “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde. The title of the fic is modeled after the song Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hands by the Primitive Radio Gods from which the line “If I die before I learn to speak, can money pay for all the days I lived awake but half asleep?” helped to effectively set the mood for this piece.
Disclaimer: I did not create these characters. No disrespect intended. No profit desired, only muses.
Comments: Comments are welcome anytime, thanks so much for reading!

Ennis knew he’d never see her again.

He raised his hand in a tentative wave before the rental car disappeared around the bend, a swirl of dust spinning from beneath the tires, gravel crackling like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

He hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans, closed his eyes and breathed, contemplating his next action.

A minute passed, the sun ratcheting up an imperceptible notch higher in the sky.

Gracie let out a snort and swished her tail, impatient to carry her rider to his destination. Ennis huffed out a choked sigh and petted the horse’s neck. His wrinkled hand moved over the sleek coat, in an attempt to calm the ache in his gut more than to quell the animal’s desire to get going.

The tire dust didn’t hang in the air for long. The wind rushed by like a blast furnace, bending the wheatgrass and scouring the plain where the foothills began to angle toward the horizon. Their smooth granite summits, scraped clean of life, rose from the earth at odd angles, like sunken gravestones above the green meadow.

It was good of Lureen to come, even if she wouldn’t stay, he told himself.

Ennis scuffled across the parking lot where his journey up the mountain first began. He and Jack had stood at the edge of the wind-whipped fields on a day not much different than this one. The sun ignited the heat waves from the morning dew, turning the meadow into a mirage. If he set his mind to it, he could almost picture nineteen year-old Jack nearly getting thrown by the ornery grullo he insisted on choosing for his mount.

Ennis reached into his truck through the driver’s side window for the box.

He had been surprised to get the call from Lureen. He figured he’d never meet the woman with whom he shared an uncomfortable bond. He remembered the first time he spoke to her from a phone booth, dialing the number he had engraved onto his heart, a returned postcard clutched between his shaking fingers.

The calculated sentences, her cultured Texan accent demonstrating a life of privilege, made him question the truth, although she’d have no reason to lie to him then. Jack had told her that he wanted to be cremated, his ashes scattered on Brokeback Mountain. She didn’t know where that was until Ennis filled in the blanks, explaining that they herded sheep there, back in ’63. He remembered the catch in her throat when, in his grief, he inadvertently told her more than she needed to know about her husband.

“He always said it was his favorite place,” she chiseled the words from her memory.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why the request was so important to Jack. All those enthusiastic drives from Texas to the Tetons couldn’t have been for fishing trips, when he had never so much as bought their son a simple rod. Lureen was no fool.

Yet she forgave Ennis for his role in her husband’s life. The second phone call proved that. At first, he wondered how she had found him, but in a town like Riverton, a quick call to the local farrier had yielded her the information.

Ennis’s fingers touched the box, cursing his daughters for insisting he have a telephone line installed at his trailer.

If Lureen hadn’t called, it would have been easier for him to hate her. Until then, he’d been able to let her take the blame for Jack’s death, for letting him die alone on a dirt road, accident or not.

Her offer made it more difficult for him to maintain the belief in his own innocence that he had etched into the stone of his memory. When she found her husband’s remains among the few important possessions at her deceased in-law’s home, she could have taken the box of ashes back to Texas and left Ennis out of the equation.

Instead, she signed the papers in the realty office, liquidating the dilapidated ranch where the Twists raised their only child. She’d put the money away. If she was lucky, she might get enough out of it to help pay for her grandkids to go to college when they were old enough, she had told Ennis.

She decided to let Ennis be the keeper of the ashes that had never made it into the family plot. Their first phone call had been tinged with pain, but remembered for its revelation, nonetheless.

Ennis turned the box, light as a feather, over in his hands. She had met him at the trailhead on her way back to the airport to catch her flight home to Childress, her family’s affairs put in order. The final connection to Wyoming broke like a slab of cliffside, crumbling to the sea, never to stand solidly underfoot again.

He had taken the box from her, accepting the blame, warm from the magnified sun that streamed through her car’s windshield.

He told her he’d take care of it today. She nodded, telling him she was pleased that Jack’s final wish would be carried out after all this time. She wiped a tear before leaving Ennis to make his last journey up the mountain alone.

He slid a foot into the stirrup and swung onto Gracie’s back. The box may have been lighter than air, but to Ennis it weighed more than molten lead.