Chapter Text
If he was someone else, he might’ve called that number a lot sooner than he did. A month goes by before he can even face the phone box, and then another flies past before he manages to pick up that old chrome phone and pop the nickel in the slot. He slides the slip of paper, creased and written in his own hand, out on the top of the machine, eyes reading the small scrawl just beneath it.
(Jack?)
Time has always had a tendency to tick by in clumps, pelting down on him fast and all at once like a hailstorm, but never has he ever felt all as trapped by it as he does now. He could hardly track what day of the week it was, and had no luck either knowing when to sleep and when to wake. He was consumed by his interior, his thoughts and hopes and fears, and finding the energy to exist further than his body would have involved more strength than he knew he had left in him.
The telephone number and the countless copies he’s made has sat in a chipped plastic fruit bowl by his bed, one that had never seen a fresh piece of anything, bar fresh-dropped cigarette ash, in it’s life. He’d stared at it everyday, minutes at a time, sometimes nearing an hour, until the hot scorch of anxiety inside him quelled into dead smoke. It was a cruel joke, gotta be a sick foolin’ by someone who knew too much. He wondered who that could be, cycled through a list of strangers’ faces as well as ones he knew and knew well. People who had merely looked at Jack and he, hands brushing between their hips as they strolled down the road, looking just a little too hard and little too long. Then people they knew, family members and friends Jack had mentioned having, his big mouth and he, and what was he like when he was drunk, hey? A grain-sack full to bursting, always wanting to tell someone, to talk about it and let the world know. He never could just eat it up and swallow like Ennis could. That was his problem, that was Ennis’ problem now too. Who had he told?
Damn you, Jack.
The phone is cold on Ennis’ cheek, and it goes from cold to numb as he stands unmoving. There’s a chill in the night and it finds the poof of untucked shirt on his hip, yet he hardly even shivers and still makes for no movement. Cars go by outside, few and far between, each one the reflection of a pair of searching headlights that echo around the cloudy glass walls of the phone booth. They act as a gradual and shuddering catalyst, herding Ennis closer and closer to the number pad of the machine, till a rigid, bitten finger is thrusting key-pad buttons in an unfamiliar pattern.
The bordon hum of the dial tone drops off, and the line rings.
Once.
Twice.
Three—
“Hello?”
There was a time, long time ago now, right after the divorce, when Ennis had stood in a phone booth, nothing like this one, out in Signal. Crickets singing in the grass outside and a splash of sick cooking round in his stomach, he’d rung Jack’s number. He had been a croaking stew of uncertainties and anxieties and in a general need of a bit of comfort he wouldn’t quite rightly be able to describe if asked to. It was dark then, too, probably he couldn’t sleep or something. The phone had rung three times and on the other end had come Jack, his raspy and sleep clogged yep? Twist? sounding so young now in memory. The sound of his voice quiet like that, how Ennis was so used to hearing it whispered in his ear, had dropped his stomach and inundated his heart so quick and wild that he could hardly breath on account of his lungs being carried away in the flood waters.
Being the boy he was back then, he had hung up as quick as he had heard Jack speak, knowing it would only make things worse. He’d headed off back to his trailer to drain away the sadness solo that night, comforted enough just by Jack picking up the line. For years on he’d wondered what he might have said in that dark, isolated moment of vulnerability and tenderness, and how it might’ve changed the way things turned out.
“Jack?” Ennis whispers, his throat turned to cement.
“Ennis…”
“Jack, that really…”
“It’s me, old friend. It’s me.”
“It’s me too, Jack. It’s…shit… I thought… I thought you were…”
Jack shushes him soft and repetitive on the other side of the line, says ‘I’m sorry’ as Ennis cries in the silent yellow fluorescence of the lone phone box. To a passerby in the dark night outside, he must look like the head of a lit match. The receiver slips down his tears like mud kicks up in the rain, face collecting the wet and dripping it onto his shuddering chest.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d call,” Jacks says, hesitant. “Glad you did.”
“Jack— I’m so— I’m, I’m so—-“
“Y’are?”
“It really you?”
“Tell you whut…thought, maybe Mexico had been on your mind. All these years… Maybe he won’t have nothing to do with me no more, I thought.”
Ennis breathes, sobs. It occurs to him that Jack is on a whole other page. They’d split chapters back. Completely different endings.
“They buried you.” Ennis says, voice quite alone and stone hard.
“They did? Well… with my buckles?”
“Where you been all this time?”
“Not buried. Tell you that.”
“I can’t believe…”
“Ennis, listen, say… say I get you a train ticket and all, would you use it?” Jack interrupts, voice concise but not sharp, words a little stiff and short yet not without their familiar, clumsy friendliness. So sickeningly familiar. Ennis wipes his face, the initial but quelling shock starting to fade into a prickly, nauseatingly powerful euphoria.
“Jack…” Ennis says, so fast that the fade into silence feels like a snap.
There’s things he’s hesitated on in the past, things he’s tiptoed around and drowned out. Things he’s never thought worth the trying on account of the slim possibility they’re any more than a dream. There’s things he’s lost out on because of that, smiles he ain’t never smiled and laughter he’s never heard, futures he ain’t bothered to plan and love he ain’t been able to give. All because of that one part of him so set on shutting down all together. Now, hearing Jack again, alive, alive and alive and alive and here talking to him, he knows he doesn’t want that to be how it is anymore. He knows he don’t want to tiptoe no more, no sir. Hit the ground running as hard as he used to let himself fall, that’s the only way now. He grabs a jolting wad of anxiety in his stomach, controls it, clears his throat till his voice sounds like someone else altogether.
“Yeah, buddy,” it comes quiet but solid, “yeah I would.”