Jack Fuckin' Twist

Jack stalks a good distance out of the bar, fuming and silent, before he tosses his still burning cigarette viciously to one side and rounds on Ennis angrily.

"And just what in the hell was that, Ennis? Huh?"

It turns out you can get just about anything from Bar.

For a small price.

"I tell you," Jack gripes, dumping an armful of tent and equipment on the ground by the stable door, "I've had a borrow a lot a things in the past, and most always no one wanted to give 'em to me, but tryin' to get a Bar to lend me a tent just 'bout takes the cake for 'strangest thing I ever had a do.' Had a pay up my tab 'fore it'd let me." A pause. "And promise not to lose any a it."

He wipes his hands on the thighs of his jeans, looks up, pushing the brim of his hat up on his forehead.

It's much later now, and the light slants over the two sleeping figures in warped gold rectangles. Jack, sound asleep, has pulled Ennis' hand over his waist, but his grip has slackened in sleep and the two are curled together, breathing easy.

"You know, friend, this is one goddam bitch of a unsatisfactory situation."

Jack Twist has a talent for understatement.

Just another good old boy raised in Lightning Flat, Wyoming, on hard knocks and ranch work, he managed somehow to hang onto dreams of a better life: making it big in the rodeos, having a ranch all his own, getting the hell out of Lightning Flat. Jack rolls with the punches, getting back up again and again with that same shit-eating grin on his face, observing life's realities and hardships with a philosphical cigarrette in his mouth, bitching and moaning without any real malice. Jack clings to some wordless impossible hope, and it keeps him going when sometimes it seems like nothing else will. And though that has always been part of his character, none of it really seemed to make much difference until after Brokeback Mountain and Ennis Del Mar.

Jack, at the time of his entrance, is not yet twenty-four, freshly married and with a few loose ideas of what he's doing, where he's going, and what his general purpose in life seems to be. He is a flirt and a charmer, but behind almost everything he says and does is a barely tangible disdain, a smirk lying just behind his ready smile. There's a core of steel in Jack, and it shows sometimes in the way he raises his head to meet a steady gaze, or in the carelessly graceful way he sprawls against the side of his beat-up old truck. As Stephen King writes about Larry Underwood, there's something in Jack that is like biting on tinfoil. Not that he's the strong silent type--hell no, Jack has a temper and he uses it, lightning-fast and mean. He's mercurial, is Jack, a quicksilver soul bottled up inside holey boots, broken-in old jeans and cowboy mentalities.

Generally, he isn't much of a talker, but when the mood comes on him he can go for hours on ranching, horses, rodeoing or whatever topic strikes his fancy. At times of particular abandon, he might burst into song in a cigarette-roughened voice, or pull out a battered old harmonica, which he plays with minimal skill and much enjoyment. He drinks only beer and neat whiskey, and the one thing you ain't never gonna get him to talk about is what really happened that summer up on Brokeback.

I suppose a relevant question here would be why, exactly, it is that I want to play Jack. The most general reason is, of course, that I want to. Within that sweeping generalization though, are these reasons:

1. Jack is complicated. Unlike Ennis, he doesn't truly try to push away his attraction to other men. He flirts with them, goes down to Mexico to pick up a prostitute now and again, and attempts a relationship of sorts with another rancher. He's torn between the ideal of the cowboy--getting married and having a child because that's what cowboys do--and the things he truly longs for. Some security that he can't find with his wife Lureen, with his life in the rodeo circuit (although that seems to come closer than anything else), or in his stable career and good fortune later in life. He craves the kind of tenderness and understanding that he is not allowed to have. He does not live from day to day, or paycheck to paycheck--or he wouldn't, if he wasn't forced too. He has his dreams--they aren't much, maybe, but they're his and he cherishes them. This conflict of interest is what makes Jack such a force of nature.

2. These complications, therefore, raise questions that can't be answered without getting as deeply into Jack's mind as possible. Why does he get in touch with Ennis, after four years apart? Why wait until they're both married, settled down? There must have been some catalyst, something to make him think of trying again, even after four years.

Which is where Milliways comes in. Those four years in canon are not kind to Jack, and in an environment like Milliways, he might start to relax, see how things might work out for the best. And just the possibility of seeing Ennis again...well. That's the kind a thing gives a man a certain amount of hope, ain't it?