It's quite a long passage...
The closet was a shallow cavity with a wooden rod braced 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 neatly over wire hangers, 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 gushing 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 fabric and
breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and
mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent,
only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which
nothing was left but what he held in his hands.
