“Christ, he licked the stuffin out a me, knocked me down on the bathroom floor, whipped me with his belt. I thought he was killin me. Then he says, ‘You want a know what it’s like with piss all over the place? I’ll learn you,’ and he pulls it out and lets go all over me, soaked me, then he throws a towel at me and makes me mop up the floor, take my clothes off and warsh them in the bathtub, warsh out the towel, I’m bawlin and blubberin. But while he was hosin me down I seen he had some extra material that I was missin. I seen they’d cut me different like you’d crop a ear or scorch1 a brand. No way to get it right with him after that.”
The bedroom, at the top of a steep stair that had its own climbing rhythm, was tiny and hot, afternoon sun pounding through the west window, hitting the narrow boy’s bed against the wall, an ink-stained desk and wooden chair, a b.b. gun in a hand-whittled rack over the bed. The window looked down on the gravel2 road stretching south and it occurred to him that for his growing-up years that was the only road Jack3 knew. An ancient magazine photograph of some dark-haired movie star was taped to the wall beside the bed, the skin tone gone magenta4. He could hear Jack’s mother downstairs running water, filling the kettle and setting it back on the stove, asking the old man a muffled5 question.
The closet was a shallow cavity with a wooden rod braced6 across, a faded cretonne curtain on a string closing it off from the rest of the room. In the closet hung two pairs of jeans crease-ironed and folded neatly7 over wire hangers8, on the floor a pair of worn packer boots he thought he remembered. At the north end of the closet a tiny jog in the wall made a slight hiding place and here, stiff with long suspension from a nail, hung a shirt. He lifted it off the nail. Jack’s old shirt from Brokeback days. The dried blood on the sleeve was his own blood, a gushing9 nosebleed on the last afternoon on the mountain when Jack, in their contortionistic grappling and wrestling, had slammed Ennis’s nose hard with his knee. He had staunched the blood which was everywhere, all over both of them, with his shirtsleeve, but the staunching hadn’t held because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering angel out in the 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 his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into the fabric10 and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage11 and salty sweet stink12 of Jack but there was no real scent13, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.
In the end the stud duck refused to let Jack’s ashes go. “Tell you what, we got a family plot and he’s goin in it.” Jack’s mother stood at the table coring apples with a sharp, serrated instrument. “You come again,” she said.
Bumping down the washboard road Ennis passed the country cemetery14 fenced with sagging15 sheep wire, a tiny fenced square on the welling prairie, a few graves bright with plastic flowers, and didn’t want to know Jack was going in there, to be buried on the grieving plain.
A few weeks later on the Saturday he threw all Stoutamire’s dirty horse blankets into the back of his pickup16 and took them down to the Quik Stop Car Wash to turn the high-pressure spray on them. When the wet clean blankets were stowed in the truck bed he stepped into Higgins’s gift shop and busied himself with the postcard rack. “Ennis, what are you lookin for rootin through them postcards?” said Linda Higgins, throwing a sopping17 brown coffee filter into the garbage can.
1 scorch | |
v.烧焦,烤焦;高速疾驶;n.烧焦处,焦痕 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
2 gravel | |
n.砂跞;砂砾层;结石 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
3 jack | |
n.插座,千斤顶,男人;v.抬起,提醒,扛举;n.(Jake)杰克 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
4 magenta | |
n..紫红色(的染料);adj.紫红色的 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
5 muffled | |
adj.(声音)被隔的;听不太清的;(衣服)裹严的;蒙住的v.压抑,捂住( muffle的过去式和过去分词 );用厚厚的衣帽包着(自己) | |
参考例句: |
|
|
6 braced | |
adj.拉牢的v.支住( brace的过去式和过去分词 );撑牢;使自己站稳;振作起来 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
7 neatly | |
adv.整洁地,干净地,灵巧地,熟练地 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
8 hangers | |
n.衣架( hanger的名词复数 );挂耳 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
9 gushing | |
adj.迸出的;涌出的;喷出的;过分热情的v.喷,涌( gush的现在分词 );滔滔不绝地说话 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
10 fabric | |
n.织物,织品,布;构造,结构,组织 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
11 sage | |
n.圣人,哲人;adj.贤明的,明智的 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
12 stink | |
vi.发出恶臭;糟透,招人厌恶;n.恶臭 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
13 scent | |
n.气味,香味,香水,线索,嗅觉;v.嗅,发觉 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
14 cemetery | |
n.坟墓,墓地,坟场 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
15 sagging | |
下垂[沉,陷],松垂,垂度 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
16 pickup | |
n.拾起,获得 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
17 sopping | |
adj. 浑身湿透的 动词sop的现在分词形式 | |
参考例句: |
|
|
欢迎访问英文小说网 |