Excerpt: The Adopted Outlaw

I was sitting, shirtless, on the side of Raúl and Elvira’s bathtub when the call came. They were still technically checking cars at the border, but, as she had anticipated, Elvira’s buddy had waved her through with nothing more than a wave and a small salute. Anayansi was in El Salvador, the boyfriend apparently lived in some kind of villa, and she planned to pass the afternoon on his hillside patio, sipping sangria and watching the clock. She said hello to Antonio, who summarily threw the phone on the floor, and with that, Raúl and I returned to the project at hand.
Elvira apparently took steps to keep her gray covered, and she had what struck me as a wide selection of black hair colors to choose from. We selected the blackest on offer and set Antonio on the bathroom floor with the rejected boxes to play with, Raúl shutting the bathroom door to create a makeshift playpen. He rolled on the included plastic gloves, parked me once again on the side of the tub, snipped the top off the tube of color and, after flinging wide the bathroom window at the first chemical whiff of the hair dye, set about turning me into his raven-haired cousin.
Using “I don’t want to get black shit all over it” as an excuse, he had removed his own shirt, and the feel of his soft, dark front against my bony, narrow back while he massaged my scalp with color sent rich, hot chocolate⎯warm, sweet, sultry⎯through my veins. I opened my mouth to say something along the lines of Gee, that feels good, but when I felt through his jeans that he was getting hard, my throat was too thick to let anything out but a moan.
The color had to sit, and while it bonded to my hair, I set about feeding Antonio. He wolfed down some black beans and we shared a papaya and I gave him to Raúl to burp when he protested vehemently at being close to my fuming head. There was a dresser in the closet of the room in which Anayansi had slept, and she had pulled a drawer from it and placed it on top, lining it with blankets to replicate a crib. Antonio was still wide awake when Raúl set him in it, but, while he did fuss and fidget, he didn’t howl a protest at the sudden suggestion of a nap, so when twenty minutes were up and it was time for me to rinse my hair, in the drawer he stayed.
While I was in the shower rinsing my hair⎯”I’m getting black stuff everywhere!” “Don’t worry about it, I’ll scrub the tub tomorrow.”⎯I gave my pits and my privates a quick soapy onceover, for the first time in days, in case I was reading Raúl correctly, which, when I turned off the water and opened the shower curtain to reveal his naked, brown body, I saw that I was. He toweled me dry, starting at my feet, and by the time he was wringing my wet hair into the towel, my lips were humming with the need to kiss him. He sensed this and, first raising a teasing eyebrow, led me into his bedroom before allowing me access. At first I nibbled at him as at a delicious and delicate fruit, but soon he grabbed a fistful of my newly night-hued hair and wrapped his tongue around my tonsils.
We were entwined, vine and branch, on the bed in scandalously short order, moaning and murmuring each the other’s name with delight every time we explored a new body part. He licked up and down my long, taffy-pulled legs, taking me briefly in his mouth for tantalizingly torturous moments; I teased the fullness of his belly and kneaded the yeast-plumped dough on his golden brown behind, eliciting rapturous whimpers of pleasure at will with my long fingers. We wriggled, we rhapsodized, we wrestled, and eventually I rolled him over and pinned him, tickling him with my tongue. I wet one, then two, then three of my fingers in my mouth and slid them between his two fuzzy mounds, drawing a long, desperate moan while I prepared to enter him. He was begging me for it, quivering, bleating Por Fa Vor, when I took one over-round cheek in one hand, another in the other, and…
…the thick, warm quiet of the afternoon exploded with the din of hollering male voices, none of them Raúl’s. Cries of “Police!” suddenly seemed to emanate from every corner of the house, and there was such a racket of pounding at the door that I knew we would hear the splinter of wood at any second. I flew off of Raúl like I was yanked on a wire, and he scrambled out from under me and off of the bed. He didn’t look at me, didn’t even turn around; he just yelled “RUN!” as he bolted for the front door.
The very air was shouting and banging and smashing and yelling, and Antonio was hysterical when I snatched him from his drawer crib. I could hear Raúl screaming, desperately trying to buy me time, “You can’t come in here! ¿Que es eso?” I tucked Antonio under my arm like a rugby ball and barreled through the back door, into the trees. Later I would wonder, How did they find us? Who ratted us out?, but at the moment all I could do was run headlong through the trees to keep Antonio free. I heard voices shouting and I heard leaves shaking and branches breaking behind us, but I was stupid with fear and could do nothing but run. I was barefoot and buck naked, stumbling every couple of steps and scraping my arms, face, and legs to shreds, but I clutched Antonio to my chest and shielded him the best I could. Near a crest in the hill, I hit a wayward root and went down, rolling onto my shoulder to keep from landing on Antonio. I was shishkebabed in the ass by a branch and gasped at the blinding pain. I tried to shake it off, and scrambled back to my feet, but I heard the clicks of half a dozen handguns even before the stars stopped dancing in my eyes. My heart was lassoed with frozen barbed wire; Antonio was crying and I pressed him to my chest so hard it hurt my biceps. Whoever commanded me, “Don’t. Move.” meant business, and I discovered that I had never known real fear until this very minute. Had I been wearing any, I would have wet my pants. Instead, unfettered by fabric, I peed on someone else’s pants, presumably a cop’s, and didn’t recover from the gun butt to the face until hours⎯it might have been days⎯later, coming to, alone, in a jail cell the size of an airplane bathroom, feeling like nothing so much as a dog in a pound.