Chapter Thirty-Four #2
“I’m just taking a piss,” he says. “Just like you.” He’s not wearing a shirt, only boxer shorts with a stretchy elastic waistband.
He tugs them down right in front of her and pulls out his engorged penis.
Rebeca does not want to see it. She looks at the path behind him, the path she took around the side of the cave, and knows she cannot return that way, not without walking toward him, without passing directly by him with his disgusting erect penis.
She’s already crying as she turns and ducks beneath the branch of the tree behind her, ripping out a strand of her hair as she goes.
Lorenzo is quick, much quicker than she thought he’d be without shoes on, and before she’s managed to get very far at all, he’s already on her, first with a violent yank of her wrist in his grip, and then the hot wetness of his mouth all over her, her cheek, her neck, her ear.
Rebeca fights, swinging with her free arm, but then he grabs that one, too, so now he has her pinned, her two wrists encircled by the fetters of his strong hands, and he presses all his weight on top of her.
He pins her back against the rugged rock face and she can feel the hard club of his anatomy pushing against her stomach.
She knows there are tears coming down her face, but she feels entirely powerless to change anything.
She tries anyway, swinging her knee up to find that her legs, too, are now pinned beneath his weight.
So then she strikes with the only thing she has left—her head.
And she manages to connect, once, twice, she headbutts him, but he only laughs and tells her he likes it rough.
She fights and cries, and tries to get her hands loose, tries to use her teeth, her elbows, tries to get her arms between their bodies, to push him off, but she doesn’t scream, she holds in her scream, because they’re in the United States now, and if she screams and she’s lucky, it will be Slim or David who answers that cry, but if she’s unlucky it will be la migra.
When has she ever been lucky? Her head goes limp.
Her neck, limp. Rebeca stares up past the contorted menace of Lorenzo’s strained face.
She stares up at the blank blue sky above him and waits for the worst part to happen. She wants it to be over with.
But then it doesn’t. It doesn’t happen. Because just as she feels the brutality of his hands traveling down the length of her rigid body, just as he pulls at the fabric of her underwear, there’s another voice.
“Oye naco, get the fuck up off her this instant or I will blow your pinche brains out.”
All at once, the violence recedes. The pressure recedes. The cruel weight of his body is lifted off her, and Rebeca slides down the rock face, trembling.
Lorenzo stands, stuffing himself back into his shorts. “Chingada, güey, we were just having some fun, right? Relájate, hermano.”
Rebeca is trembling and shaking, and she uncurls herself from his shadow and moves away from him as quickly as she can.
The quaking of her limbs is a tremendous, rackety throb.
She feels skeletal, juddery. She jerks and shudders and feels as though her legs might not hold her, but soon she’s away from him and standing next to El Chacal, who has his pistol stretched out toward Lorenzo.
Soledad is here, too, now, and Rebeca is crying as she reaches for her sister, but Sole moves past her.
Soledad’s eyes are hard and black in the ruthless light of the desert.
They glitter as she stares at Lorenzo in his droopy boxer shorts.
She looks at his tall, muscular frame, the slight smirk that twists across his mouth, his bare feet.
She sees the sickle tattoo with its three drops of blood, just visible as he stands in profile, with one hand still leaning against the rock.
She can see the shape of his erection beneath the fabric of his shorts, and she reaches out very deliberately to the coyote beside her.
El Chacal has never read academic theories of trauma psychology, but he has seen a thousand different varieties of it here in the desert.
He is, in every practical sense, an expert in the field.
He knows better than to give Soledad the gun.
But on the other hand, the coyote feels nothing but disgust for Lorenzo.
After seventeen years of ferrying people through the desert, he’s learned to tell the good from the bad, even in difficult circumstances.
He understands that once in a while, a person is not worth saving.
So perhaps it’s not entirely accidental, what happens; maybe El Chacal willfully mistakes Soledad’s gesture for something else.
When she reaches out and puts her hand on the pistol, he allows it, he lowers the weapon.
He tells himself it’s a tactical feminine intervention, a de-escalation.
The coyote barely reacts when she disarms him.
And then it happens so quickly. She steps forward abruptly, swings the pistol up, and points it at her sister’s would-be rapist. Carajo. This is not what El Chacal expected, not really. He steps after her, reaches toward her outstretched hands. “Soledad.”
She swings it toward him for only a split second, but it’s enough to convince him to freeze. She settles it swiftly back on Lorenzo, who’s no longer smirking. He raises his hands in front of him.
“Yo,” he says, and perhaps it was going to be I’m sorry.