Baldhead Hill: Prologue by TheBaldestOfThemAll

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Author’s Note: This is something of an homage to one of our favorite gay classics, Brokeback Mountain. I’ve committed some blatant theft here and there, but have overall tried to have an original take on it for lovers of cowboys and hot headshaves between two manly men alike. Enjoy!

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Colt McMullen and Carlos Castro were both bonafide, country-boy Texans, born and bred. They’d been brought up on opposite ends of the state’s expanses, but the experiences they had in common from their humble upbringings bridged the hundreds of miles between them. Colt came from a ranch out of Nacogdoches in the Piney Woods to the northeast, and Carlos from another north of Laredo in the Plains to the southwest.

Colt was no stranger to hard work and hardship, owing to family misfortune. When he was seventeen going on eighteen, Colt lost his parents to a car accident. They’d left him two hundred dollars in a lockbox, a piss-poor ranch that had burdened their family for generations, and two young boys to bring up all on his own as the oldest of three brothers. On his eighteenth, he petitioned for guardianship over his brothers. Being saddled as young as he was, he shouldn’t have been able to make it work, but somehow, he did. He’d never finished high school on account of having to step up for his family, but it just was what it was. He didn’t like book learning all that much anyway.

At twenty-four, when the youngest of the McMullen boys had become a man, Colt sold off the ranch and what little livestock they had, split the money they’d gotten from the bank, and finally lived lives of their own. Colt got a mortgage on a two-bed, one-and-a-half-bath bungalow for himself in Waxahachie and figured that’s where he wanted to try to settle down. Maybe. At twenty-five, he met Jessa Johnston at a steakhouse in Fort Worth after a rodeo in which he’d won fifty bucks. She was this beautiful thing, blonde as a Barbie doll with a wildness in her free-spirited eyes. He was the hottest man she’d ever laid eyes on, with ruggedly good looks that could’ve made him the leading man in a western and hazel-blue eyes as wild as a stallion’s. He also had the build of a bodybuilder from all his hard work as an outdoorsman. A bulking, off-season bodybuilder, but a bodybuilder nevertheless. Colt and Jessa hit it off and liked each other well enough that a few months later, they thought, why the hell not? Why shouldn’t we get married? Things moved quickly from there. Too quickly for Colt’s liking. At twenty-six, he’d become a father to a son they named David after his daddy. A year and a half later, they had their second. Another son they named Isaac after a singer Jessa liked.

Carlos hardly ever had it easy either. His mamá passed away when he was just a boy of about six, so he’d never known her all that well. The few memories he did have of her were nice though. He remembered her smelling like vanilla and laundry drying in the September sun. He kept a photo of her and half his father in his wallet. He’d torn away the other half. His father left him to fend for himself over a woman less than a year later. The bastard wasn’t much of a man. Carlos never had a father for that matter, but his tío took him into his ranch and raised him as a son. Brought the boy up into a man. A real man. And Carlos, he owed everything to his tío for that.

At eighteen, Carlos moved out of his tío’s ranch to be out and about as a man on his own. He’d dropped out of high school, but being good with his hands, he was pretty good with other tools too. He’d made enough money from work in the trades to get his own place outside of San Antonio. Enough to help his tío when times on the ranch were tough. When he was twenty-four, he met Valentina Acosta. Valentina was a bartendress at the dive bar he’d been doing renovations on. She was this bombshell of a beauty with the beguilingest brown eyes and long black-brown hair she always had high in a ponytail. Had a hell of a way with words and knew how to make a man feel real special. Turns out, she’d been watching him work all day. Liked the way he handled his caulk, she said when he confronted her about it. Liked him too, she supposed. It was hard not to with his almost ridiculously good looks. He looked like he’d come straight out of a novela with his perfect face chiseled from granite and perfectly-built bodybuilder body. After their first date went all too well, Carlos and Valentina had another. Then another. Then another. He proposed after a year of seeing her because society said he’d’ve been a hell of a fool not to. They weren’t even married when they had their first son, Antonio.

Eventually, Colt and Carlos found themselves at a crossroads. They’d done odd jobs here and there to get by for their families for a while, but there wasn’t much opportunity out there for men like them anymore. For high school dropouts with no real prospects in life. When they were looking for work almost half a year ago, they found themselves in the heart of Hill Country at a ranch called Baldhead Hill. Ranching was something that was in their red blood. It was what they’d been brought up to do all their lives. Hell, it was one of the only things they could do for decent money as the rugged men they were. They were ruggedly-mannered with temperaments as coarse as the countryside itself, unfit for civilization. Now, for four months, Colt and Carlos have called this ranch and its endless acres of blue, green, and gold home. It wasn’t easy work, and the man they worked for, Mr. Worthington, didn’t make it any easier, but it was honest and got their families by well enough. As tough as life on Baldhead Hill was, they wouldn’t have wanted to live their lives any other way again. For the first time in their lives, they felt free.

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