In Annie Proulx's book Ennis asks to Jack "Have you everbeen with other guys?" and Jack says "no, never", but Proulx comments he didn't stay steady...so I think he had a relation with Randal...into the movie it is clear on my opinion...Jack needs it
The only problem I have with this is that Randall isn't even in the book (nor does Ms. Proulx make any reference to a steady "date" for Jack, and he's only in the film for the Dinner/Dance where Jack seems to go out of his way to ignore him and even get away from him. Look at it like this: Jack's a high-school dropout, Randall has graduated from Texas A&M (current enrolment over 45,000) - Jack goin' to the croppie house with a ranch foreman? IMO Jack would be rightly suspicious of someone so far out of his class making a pass at him with both their wives present. And there's another thing about Randall that set my gay nerves atwitchin' - he's a ranch foreman who has a four-year degree from Texas Agriculture and
Mechanics University - if he couldn't fix his own pickup, he'd have someone working for him who could. To break down by the side of the road on the way to an important social event of the Childress social calendar would very definitely cause Randall to lose face and to be in for some serious cojones-as-pinata action the following day. Now of course this could be just a little homo-paranoia creepin' up, but it doesn't make sense. Besides, on a farm there'd be all kinds of vehicles available to a ranch foreman if his truck wasn't operating up to snuff. The potentially darker side of Randall, the one I left the theater with the first time I saw the film was that he was part of the Good Ole Boy Network - right out of college he gets a foreman's job on a ranch, that doesn't happen to each of the several thousand Aggie grads every year. (I did live in Houston for a year and a half as a banquet manager for a national hotel chain - these moneyed "ranch" folks are very much into status, and would expect their foreman, as a representative of their business, to keep up appearances. The broken down pick up by the side of the road isn't really believable.) A ranch has to have more than a few employees to have a foreman, which means there's money in that ranch, which means that Roy Taylor, Randall's boss, is friendly with the other money in town, LD Newsome. Now if you were one of the richest men in town and some poor to middlin' bull-rider knocked your daughter up, you would be looking for ways to get rid of him...and everybody knows what a lonely rodeo cowboy will do with a few beers alone with any other lonely male... Well, I
have been wrong before, but my first viewing it seemed logical that LD wanted jack gone - hell Jack even says he practically offered to by him off, and agreeing to meet clandestinely with Randall would be a good way to get killed. I'm just sayin'.
