Free The Blood Oranges by John Hawkes

I laughed at Hugh’s ingenuity, energy, determination to win the lone figure in the field for the probing unblushing gaze of his high-powered cameras.
    I changed hands, squinted at Hugh’s distant, persuasive, perhaps even poetic use of sign language. The heat was intense, I realized, and yet my skin was dry.
    And then all the glazed ceramic substance of that colorful and nearly lifeless panorama trembled, shivered, cracked and splintered into new and suddenly moving fragments of light, color, shards of earth, and side by side Hugh and his new photographic subject turned, began to walk together in the direction of the crumbling barn. Hugh’s one long powerful arm was in the air and waving.
    We stood in the earthen darkness of that barn, the three of us, and I saw immediately that two urine-colored sheepwere trembling together in one heavily cobwebbed corner.
    “My latest model is going to pose. These sullen types always end up compliant.”
    “We’re in luck,” I said. “She looks beautifully indifferent. Anything I can do to help?”
    Unleashing one of his small black cameras, Hugh frowned at the setting of its highly polished and unmerciful lens.
    “In a minute. Right now just smile at her. Make her feel at ease.”
    I had only to glance at the girl to see that she was in fact quite unafraid of Hugh, of me, of even the cold and completely foreign complexity of the cameras hanging in their black cases around Hugh’s neck. At once I saw that she was young, untutored, uninterested in anything except the clumsy mattock and challenge of the ceramic field. The dull rubber boots cut off at her bare knees, the dry knees that appeared to have been scoured with sand, the colorless apron tied around a long burlap skirt sewn no doubt by an old woman, and the leather coat—at once I saw that so many unappealing articles of dress might well conceal a body that would prove to be in absolute contrast to the clothes themselves. But would this girl actually pose for Hugh without her rubber boots and burlap skirt and stocky leather coat? I was unconvinced. Her mouth was small, her eyebrows were gently drawn. And yet her face was the color of green olives and made me suspect that the composition of her blood might have been determined at least in part by one of the barbaric strains. Perhaps she was strong. Perhaps her indifference was not at all the same as compliance. Perhaps the old woman who had sewn the skirt had also taught her some outlandish and hence all the morecrippling version of a moral code—though the girl’s small eyes were dark, and I had faith in Hugh.
    I smiled at Hugh’s latest model. She did not smile back. But her eyes remained on mine and I began to wonder if she was aware of my large and closely shaven face, my slice of pure gold hair. And the barn was filled with a warm aura of suspension. There were the shadows, the dust, the floor that was a soft black pebbled carpet of sheep droppings, the smells and light that made me think of the inside of a dying rose. Hugh was squatting while the girl waited and the sheep peered over their shoulders at the three of us.
    “Peasant Nudes,”
Hugh whispered, and simultaneously the girl and I glanced down at his camera which was now clicking. “That’s what I’m going to call my collection.
Peasant Nudes.”
    He was taking photographs, for some time now had been taking photographs. Oddly squatting with one knee sharply bent and one long leg stretched out in a nearly horizontal position, eyes and nose buried inside the back of his camera, in this way he was crouching, inching to and fro at the girl’s feet, aiming up at us the enormous wide-open lens of that clicking camera.
    “That’s it. That’s perfect. Now let’s just shove her over against the beam.”
    Coming between us, pushing and inching with his dark blue contorted legs, suddenly rising to both knees so that the girl drew back, and clicking the shutter release and rewind lever and hissing eagerly