Free The Blood Oranges by John Hawkes Page A

between his lips which had become little more than a tight shadow, slowly Hugh approached us on his knees and then, with little more than his own intensity and the aim of the camera, moved her,repositioned the small dark head against the dark worm-eaten flank of an upright beam.
    “Easy. Easy. That’s perfect. See how she’s holding her head jammed against that old beam? Perfect. Most of the faces of these peasant nudes are just fat and happy. They’re all mothers, with or without children. But this one,” inching his knees across the carpet of sheep droppings, doing his one-handed sleight-of-hand tricks with two cameras and what I supposed was a light meter, “this face is skintight with the beauty of illiteracy. That’s what will show up in the pictures. Wait and see. The sullen face of an illiterate virgin.”
    I waited, then heard my own low whisper: “I’ve been thinking the same thing. That she’s a virgin.”
    “She’s got a few little brown hairs on her chin. She couldn’t be better.”
    Yet now I was watching not the girl but Hugh. And Hugh remained on his knees, continued to walk about on his knees. His shoulders were struggling against the sudden unreasonable dictates of his dream, were working against impossible odds to maintain his balance. He was sweating. His thin cotton shirt had come free at the waist. But his arms, or rather that lurid combination of arm and partial arm, most held my attention. And in passing I noticed that the girl’s small dark expressionless eyes were fixed, like mine, on the excited and suddenly gesticulating remnant of his ruined arm.
    “Make her smile! Come on, do something. Make her smile. Quick.”
    While I was still contemplating the odd magic that Hugh somehow extracted from his injured arm, Hugh himselfunaccountably changed position, bolted upright from his knees to his feet and thrust the camera into the girl’s face so that for one instant the poor lips parted in what might have been a silent laugh. I caught a glimpse of her tongue and the small overlapping front teeth, and heard the click of the camera, felt Hugh wheeling in my direction. He let go of the camera, expelled his breath in a single relieved heave of his expanded chest, ducked his head and, with the flat lower side of his twitching stump, wiped the perspiration from his forehead and thin gray face.
    “Time to change tactics,” he said, and with one brutal thrust of his hand ripped a small flesh-colored wineskin from the alpine pack, held the wineskin at an angle of shocking self-confidence before his upturned face and shot a steady thin dark jet into his waiting mouth.
    “Want some, boy? It’s hot work.”
    I declined and hoisted myself to a seat on the ancient cart and crossed my knees, braced myself with both arms and hands. Again Hugh thrust up the bag and squeezed it, prolonged his exhibitionistic drinking as if he were an indelicate disheveled god in the act of forcing some invisible monster to send down its urine.
    “Now, boy. To business.”
    And suddenly the wineskin lay in the rancid hay, the third camera was in his claw, he was close to the girl. Once again his stone cheeks and little pointed beard were wet with the perspiration of his art photographer’s single-minded desire. He did not move. Yet his stump, though held tightly to the side of his body, was impatient to wag, to flex, to rise into action, and his eyes were sly but also vacant. He seemed to be listening to the girl’s silent liferather than staring at the visible shape of it. The girl continued to stare up at Hugh. The thin sheep had managed to turn and now were facing us and once more were rubbing together their crusted woolly coats. The girl was alert.
    Then Hugh sprang back a step, let go of the camera, smiled with absurdly pretended helplessness, with his hand made sweeping motions from the girl’s head against the beam to her booted feet on the dung. Did she understand, he seemed to be asking, could she share his