I was staying with my sister and her husband for a few days in a cabin on Loon Lake. We were fishing all day and drinking half the fucking night. The third night we were there my sister Martina drank too much tequila and went limp on the sofa. Ramon, my brother-in-law, picked her up and carried her to their room. Fifteen minutes later he came back tucking in his shirt and buttoning his fly, he sat on the sofa next to me and said, “That’s no fun.”

“What?”

“Fucking a totally drunk woman. She’s so out of it, she didn’t even realize what was going on.”

“You screwed Martina while she was unconscious?”

“Sure did, I pumped her up but still have a load, want to go to the Rotten Log and see if we can score?”

“You want to pick up some girls?”

“Yeah, your sister isn’t very enjoyable right now and she won’t miss me if I leave. I wanna get a lively piece of ass, wanna go?”

I was shocked, my sister’s husband was proposing that he find some sideline pussy; he would be cheating on my sister and didn’t even seem to care that I knew, “Ah, no Ramon, maybe we should just stay here, want another shot?”

“Yeah, I could use another shot, but not of booze, of pussy.” He got off the sofa, loaded up with his wallet and car keys then asked again, “Ready?”

“Nah man, go ahead, I’m gonna sit here and vegetate.”

“Okay, maybe I’ll find two bitches and screw one as your proxy.” The next thing I heard was his truck driving off.

I sat on the couch for ten minutes thinking about what I had just discovered about my brother-in-law. He was cheating on my sister? They’d been married five years and had a little girl; my niece Sofía was asleep down the hall. He was getting screwed outside the home? Maybe he was kidding; I decided to find out. Before I took off to the bar to see what the hell Ramon was up to, I needed to piss so I went to empty my bladder. As I passed my sister’s bedroom the door was open and I glanced in. Martina was lying on her stomach, bent at the waist over the edge of the mattress. Her skirt was pushed to her back, her panties around her knees; her ass bare and exposed. She was completely out; passed out. I’d never seen any woman in such an unflattering condition or position. The first thought that came to my mind was concern for Sofía. What if she got up and found her mother like that? Doing my best not to look at her bare butt, I stepped into the room and lifted my sister’s legs then turned her so she was lying on the bed with her head on a pillow. I pulled the panties off her legs and her skirt into place. Martina moaned lightly and shifted to get more comfortable. When I stepped back, I put my foot into a puddle of cum clotting on the floor next to the bed. In those few moments, I lost all respect for my brother-in-law, that he could use my sister and then leave her like a Latina puta; adding to what he had said earlier I had to wonder about the state of their marriage.

When I stepped into the dim light of the saloon, I looked around the crowd. The bar front was full of men and women watching whatever delayed game was on the four screens; two college basketball, one Mexican League soccer, and a bunch of ex-football players quarterbacking a rerun of the 1990 Superbowl from a studio. I spotted Ramon in a booth with another guy and three women. They were drinking, loud, and engaging in a lot of close personal contact.

Ramon was focused on the girl sitting with him, she looked like a reject from any form of society. Her hair, if you could call it that, was shaved close on the left side but hung over her shoulder in pink and green plaits on the right. She had pins in her nose, ears, and cheeks, and another in the right corner of her lower lip. She wore a short-sleeved black t-shirt with the logo, ‘Don’t like me? Fuck You! Do like me? Fuck me!’ blazoned across the front.

Her left arm was tattooed in several colors from the elbow to under the shirt, it was too dark to make out the design. I couldn’t tell how tall she might be, but her weight was definitely out of proportion with her height. Out of proportion on the negative side, she was anorexic thin. She wore heavy dark eye shadow that made her eyes look huge, her mouth was painted dark too; she looked like she was a hangover from Día de los Muertos. I sat on a bar stool, ordered a beer, and watched my brother-in-law chase after the nasty-looking skank. My sister is a damn fine-looking woman, what the hell was Ramon doing?

As I drank the beer Ramon was making progress with the girl. I don’t know if he knew her, or if they had just met, but that didn’t seem to matter to either. He was laughing and teasing while she was stroking his leg then they began to trade kisses. A short introductory kiss quickly became a spit-swapping entanglement. After a few minutes of necking and feeling each other up, they left the booth and the bar. He didn’t see me sitting in the gloom, so after they passed, I stepped outside to watch; she mounted a scooter then Ramon followed her out of the parking lot. I knew I wouldn’t see him until the morning.

I went back to the cabin wondering what the hell was going on and if I should say anything to my sister about her husband. I looked in on her and my niece, they were both asleep, and neither suspected what Ramon was doing. I went to bed with my mind seething with dislike for my sister’s husband. The bastard was fucking around on Martina which pissed me off and killed any form of good relationship I had with my brother-in-law.

I heard Ramon come in, a quick check of my watch showed 6:12, it was just getting light. I figured Martina was still asleep because I didn’t hear any conversation or fuss when he went to bed. I got up, fixed a pot of coffee then sat on the front porch of the cabin and pondered my next move. What the hell should I do? Did she know her husband was getting unauthorized pussy? If I told Martina, would I be blamed for jeopardizing their marriage? If I didn’t tell Martina, would she hate me if she found out I knew what the hell her philandering husband was up to? I was still deliberating when Sofía brightened my outlook by bounding into the morning sun and welcoming the day with high-spirited giggles and three-year-old enthusiasm. Martina joined me and her daughter an hour later, her eyes were bleeding and her hair looked like her Chihuahua had fluffed it up to sleep in. She greeted me with a lot less exuberance than her daughter, “Shit, I think I had too many margaritas last night.”

“Yeah, pretty much. You were stone-cold out when Ramon carried you to bed.”

My sister smiled ruefully, “My head hurts, would you make Sofía breakfast, I need a shower.”

Ramon came out of bed around 11. He didn’t know I had watched him at the bar so he told me that he was just mouthing off, he only had a couple of beers and played pool with some friends. The fucker not only was lying to his wife but to me too. I didn’t let on that I knew different and left for my place, I had to think about the whole sordid affair and what the hell to do with what I knew.

I sat on the secret for ten days then one afternoon Martina called me, “I have to talk to you, right now, can I come over?”

“What’s the matter, you sound stressed?”

“Not on the phone, I can’t talk about it on the phone but I have to talk to somebody, I’m coming over,” she clicked off the call.

Martina had a key to my condo so she didn’t bother to knock or ring, she threw open the door and announced angrily, “I have the fucking crabs!”

“What?”

“Crabs! Body Lice! I itched like hell and went to the doctor. After a quick look, her nurse shaved me clean, then gave me some lotion to kill off the fucking little bugs! Do you know how goddamn embarrassing that was? I got the motherfucking crabs and it had to be from my son-of-a-bitch husband! There was no other way to get them.”

Martina’s profane-laden outburst unsettled me, I rarely heard her swearing, and never like that. I looked into her stressed eyes, “Maybe you picked them up from another bed, have you been to a hotel or someplace like that lately?”

“No. That bastard got the crabs from someone and gave them to me.” She said with conviction, ‘someone’, not ‘somewhere’, she didn’t doubt the source. She paused then added, “I got scared about how I got them and asked the doctor to do a blood test for STDs. I mean, if he brought home lice, what else might he give me? She didn’t find anything else to worry about.”

My first thought was that the skinny little piece he picked up must have been just as dirty as she looked. My brother-in-law became a host to lice by fucking her then he passed the vermin on to my sister. What the fuck could I say? “What does Ramon say about this?”

“He says some asshole used his jockstrap at the gym, as a joke or something.”

Well, maybe not believable, but different, “He’s kidding, right?”

“No, he says there is a guy there that would do anything to screw with him, he says this guy had lice and put on his jockstrap to get it infected. He thinks I stupid enough to believe him.”

“You want some coffee?”

“Yeah, and give it a kick.”

I poured two mugs of coffee and added a liberal shot of blue agave to each. Martina and I settled back to sip the enhanced caffeine while I thought. I was pretty sure I knew how she got the crabs, but I was still on the fence about telling her. My sister sipped her brew and then asked, “Luis, do you think Ramon is cheating on me? You’ve been around him when I’m not, how does he act with other women? Is there anything you know that I don’t?” There it was, my moment of truth. Should I lie to my sister, or complete the demolition of her marriage? I pondered the question long enough she noticed my hesitance, “He is, isn’t he, Ramon is fucking other women. You can tell me Luis; I won’t be mad at you if he is and you know.”