"No, Crawford, no, please," she said, in a husky voice, and put her palms against his cheeks and pulled his head to one side. Her position gave weight to the leverage of her hands, and he found himself lying with his back on the ground, with his knees twisted beneath him and Merida bending over from her sitting position.
He had thought about it, before, enough times. A man did, with such a woman. But none of it had equaled this. All the shame was swept away. The sounds of the storm were blotted out. His whole consciousness was of the straining tension of her body against him and the moist resilience of her lips meeting his. Finally she lifted her head, and he could see that her eyes were closed. She sat that way a moment, without opening them, her blouse caught wetly across the curving rise and fall of her breast. He lay staring up at her, and it was not the fear or the pain or the shame any longer in him, or even the passion which had swept him in that brief, violent moment. Opening her eyes, she must have seen it in his twisted, wet face.
"Crawford," she said in a strained voice. "Crawford, what is it? What do you want?"
[Chapter Eleven]
Old Friends Reunited
The Mexicans constructed the roofs of their jacals by laying willow shoots in a herringbone pattern across the bare vigas which formed the rafters, and then piling a foot or so of earth atop the shoots. It was this pattern Crawford saw when he first opened his eyes. Then it was the estufa, built of adobe, in one corner of the room, with a raised hearth and a cone-shaped opening in front, the hood rounding from the center to each wall with two mantels terraced back toward the chimney. It was over this oven that the old man stood.
"Delcazar!"
Crawford's voice turned the aged Mexican, a rusty black frying pan still held in one gnarled fist. His face was seamed like an ancient satchel, and he squinted with the effort of focusing his rheumy eyes on Crawford. His soiled white cotton shirt hung slack from stooped, bony shoulders, and the inevitable chivarras were on his skinny legs, glistening with daubs of grease. They gazed at each other in an uncomfortable silence, and finally Delcazar made a vague movement with the frying pan.
"Hard to know what to say," he mumbled. "After such a long time, and all that's happened."