by Vince Vogel
Plucking off the lid of the pot, she used a string that dangled from the side and lifted out two gray, steaming rabbits without their coats on, the string bound around their hind feet. Then she plonked the top back on and walked out of the caravan with the dripping rabbits dangling at her side.
Having passed Dorring on the threshold, she turned to him and said, “Nice to meet you, Dorring. Welcome to our little community.”
“Thank you,” he said back.
She left after that and he watched her waddle off to a group of women standing at the corner of the nearest caravan. Words were exchanged and they walked off together with the old woman, glancing over their shoulders at Dorring as he stood in the caravan doorway. They were clearly asking about him.
3
It was two in the morning when Dorring awoke with a start.
He’d not heard the old man enter, but there he was sitting on the opposite bed, stroking a black and white sheepdog. It had been the sound of the dog’s heavy breathing that had awoken Dorring. Had he really been sleeping that heavily? It would be the first time since he was a carefree child that he’d been unable to hear a man enter the room he slept in. Usually, he was awoken by the mere squeak of a man’s sole on a thick carpet as he stalked up a corridor on his way to assassinate Dorring. The sound would instantly wake him and prompt him to quickly arrange an ambush. The would-be assassin bursts in and sends a stream of bullets into the lump on the bed. He smiles as he gazes at the holes in the duvet. But alas, he has shot nothing more than a mound of pillows. This he realizes the moment he feels the cold steel on the back of his neck. The smile drops from his face and he drops out of the world as a bullet passes through his spine.
“I take it you ain’t the real Goldilocks?” the old man asked.
Though it was dark, a bright moon shone in through the window and he was cast in its silver glare. He was around sixty. His tanned, cracked-leather face resembled the knots of an old oak. It looked bruised too, as though it had recently received some blows and they were fading slowly into lumps. The flesh above the right eye was puffy and hung over like a hood. Dorring wondered who had fought this old man. Wisps of white hair stuck out from a wide-rimmed hat with a long pheasant’s feather stuck in the brim, and a white beard flowed from his chin like smoke.
As for the black and white sheepdog that sat in his lap, it was old. Close to the end. Probably a teenager in human years. Its eyes were milky. The fur was patchy in parts, especially around its hips and underside. Around its mouth, the hair was almost completely white where it had once been black, and gray hairs peppered the blackest parts of it. It sat with its head tipped to the side with its tongue hanging from its mouth, as though—just like its master—it were weighing Dorring up.
“My name’s Alex Dorring,” he said, offering his hand to the old man. “I was put here by a man named Lloyd.”
Otis looked down at the hand. “I been guttin’ a pig today,” the old man said. “Ain’t really washed up.”
With that, he leaned to the side and switched the light on. It was so dull, and not much more than the moonlight, that it hardly affected Dorring’s eyes and he only squinted slightly. The old man’s hand moved from the light switch to the top of the sideboard and he took a piece of cloth-wrapped pie that stood next to the hob. Maria had brought it earlier, along with a piece for Dorring.
With his dirty hands, Otis crammed the pie into his mouth all at once. It was as though he had no time for the act of eating and simply wanted the exercise over as quickly as possible. Within a few chews, he gulped the mass down and wiped his mouth, the crumbs falling onto the floor. The dog instantly jumped down from his lap and went to work on the fallen pieces as though it was a pigeon.
“She’s like a vacuum cleaner,” the old man remarked of the dog once he’d swallowed.
“Pretty handy,” Dorring said.
“Oh, she is.” When he said this, the old man gazed down at the dog with a kind of melancholic reverie, his eyes narrowing and the face contorting into an expression of grief. He looked up sharply and the sad look dissolved. The beard widened and a smile sat underneath the thick white hairs. “So,” he said, clapping a hand on his knee, “you’re the new boy?”
“Yes. And you’re Otis.”
“They warned you about me, did they?” he said, his eyes piercing and a blankness taking over his features.
“Not at all.”
“It’s okay if they did,” the old man said with a grin. “I don’t make any apologies for being a miserable bastard at times. But I don’t mind company every so often. You hunt?”
“I’ve been known to hunt.”
Men, mostly, Dorring remarked in his head.
“Good. ’Cause I love it and there’s not many days I ain’t walking in this caravan with something dead hanging from me hand. I can’t abide them fairies what think me an animal myself, all ’cause I kill me dinner. I don’t do it for fun. I do it to live. Some folks don’t wanna rely on the world to feed them. Rely on frozen dinners. A man should be free to live life how he wanna live it so long as he don’t hurt no one.”
“I agree,” Dorring felt the need to say, the old man having taken on a rather aggrieved persona while ranting.
“Good. ’Cause you look a big man an’ I reckon me and you rollin’ ’round this here caravan over a disagreement might cause a bit a bother.”
He was grinning when he said this. Like Dorring, he was a large man. Over six feet and wide shouldered. The nose that stood out above his beard was crooked both ways; bending right at the top and then left at the bottom. A thick scar like a worm laid across the bridge, sat on it halfway, and the flesh above his eyes was bloated. In other words, it was a face that had seen wear and tear of a violent manner—and not just recently either. It looked like a face that had regularly cushioned his brain from flying fists.
“You seen the people livin’ here?” the old man asked.
“I saw some. Met Maria.”
Otis’ eyes glazed over at the sound of her name.
“Ah, Maria!” he said softly, almost to himself. “The soul of an angel, but the fight of an alley cat.”
“She made me dinner.”
“She would. Wanted to mother you like she mothers the rest, I s’pose. Well, she have to. Someone’s gotta look after them. The poor buggers here don’t have much. Earn a pittance for a couple o’ months and then move on to another pittance somewhere else. I like providing them food. Catch rabbits and pheasants for their suppers. Makes the crummy wages Lloyd and the rest pay them last longer.”
“It’s kind,” Dorring remarked.
“It’s fair,” the old man said as though correcting him. “I ain’t no saint, but I do believe in fairness. There’s not much of it on this Earth of ours. So the least I can do is correct whatever ills I can.”
Dorring couldn’t help glancing up at the photographs. He wondered if that wasn’t also an ill that needed correcting.
“Well,” the old man pronounced, rubbing his hands together, “we better get some shut eye.” Looking at a clock that hung below the stuffed stoat on the far wall, he added, “It’s just after two now and we’re due in at five. I guess old Lloyd didn’t tell you much.”
“He didn’t. But what is there to tell?”
“Nothin’, really. Just that the work is backbreaking. You gotta be quick. You quick?”
“At picking apples?”
“Yeah. You’d be surprised how quick they expect you to be.”
“I can move fast.”
“That’ll do.”
And as though that signalled the end of things, the old man leaned over to the kitchen once more and opened the door of a cabinet underneath the tiny sink. He pulled out some blankets, and, while the dog waited patiently at the other end, he laid them down on the floor between the beds so that they formed a cushion.
“You’re in her bed,” Otis said gruffly. “She usually sleep up there.”
“I’ll move if she wants,” Dorring
replied.
Otis grinned. “Nah. You’re alright. She don’t mind givin’ it up. Do ya, girl?”
He finished with the dog’s bed, sat back down and began taking his boots off. This appeared to be the signal for the dog to climb on top of its makeshift bed and spend the next minute fussing over the spot to find the most comfortable position, constantly turning around and clawing at the blankets to position them right. When she had finally settled and curled up, Otis, who was lying on his back by now, reached down and patted her head. Then he turned the light off and the two men gradually drifted into sleep.
4
Otis wasn’t wrong. The work was hard.
At the crack of dawn with the first of the light, the workers crept out of their hovels and walked listlessly like the dead along a dirt track until they reached the road. There, they loaded themselves like cattle into waiting pickups and were driven to the orchard a few miles away.
When they reached the apple trees, they fanned out into the rows like ants upon a hill. Dorring went with Otis. With wicker baskets strapped to their backs, they used orchard ladders to reach the branches and collect the fruit.
After an hour, the old man was a tree ahead. After two, there was at least ten yards between their ladders. Dorring may have had age and superior physique on his side, but what he didn’t have—and the old man had in abundance—was dexterity for this type of work. It appeared that Otis—as well as the others there—had developed exceptional muscle memory. They were like perfect machines. Every so often, Dorring would pause and gaze up the aisle at Otis or through the trees at the person working in the next row. The way they scooped the apples from the branches and handed them into the baskets in one perfect motion was almost mesmerizing to watch.
At times, Otis would stop, get down from his ladder and approach Dorring. He would then give him advice.
“Work the branch from the end,” he said. “Then your hand has the shortest distance to go from each apple.”
He had the patience of a father and was more than willing to pass on the experience he himself had at the job. As the day progressed, Dorring got quicker, but nowhere near as quick as Otis. By lunchtime, Dorring was at least a hundred yards behind and some twenty-odd trees away. The others had slowly moved away from him too and when he came to weigh his load at the end of the first six hours of work, one-eyed Lloyd sighed as he marked it down on a clipboard.
“Mind you go a bit faster tomorrow,” he muttered. “I would’ve thought you was a bit better—what with you sayin’ you was in France and Seville.”
“Sure thing,” Dorring replied. It looked like the lie was already found out.
That was the first part. The second six hours wasn’t so much picking. There were other jobs to do. An irrigation ditch needed digging on the other side of the farm. Lloyd’s single eye settled on Dorring as he sat underneath the shade of a chestnut tree with Otis eating a ham sandwich that Maria had brought him.
“That back o’ yours as strong as it looks?” he asked as he squinted in the sunlight.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Dorring was glad. It appeared that not many of the workers liked to stand under the blazing sun picking and cutting earth so dry it’s like concrete. It was a job that you were appreciated for, because it meant someone else didn’t have to do it. And, unlike with the trees, it was a job that Dorring understood and knew. In the forces, he had dug many a latrine trench under the blazing sun.
So with four other men, he was taken in the back of a pickup to the other end of the sprawling property. It went on for miles and they passed other fruits along the way, all the rows coated in migrant laborers the way an anthill is covered in ants.
At the trench, one man sidled up to Dorring early on as they began picking the dry topsoil and breaking it up. He spoke English and appeared to want to use it.
“You are English?” was his first question.
“Yes,” Dorring replied.
The man smiled, stopped hitting the ground with the pick and offered a hand.
“Milan,” he said.
“Dorring,” the other replied, taking the hand and shaking it.
“You are sharing with Otis, no?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think of the old man?”
“I’ve only known him half a day. But he seems good.”
“Yes.” Milan was nodding. “He’s a crazy bastard, though.”
Dorring stopped his work and turned to Milan. He had an expression that told Dorring he was being warned.
“I guess life can make people that way,” the Englishman said before going back to the work.
“Yes. I have sympathy with him, but he can be very violent. I had an argument with him a week ago. I thought he would kill me for it.”
“What happened?”
“An accident.”
“What like?” Dorring asked as he broke into the ground and wedged the earth apart.
“I left the bones of a rabbit outside my caravan. His dog got ahold of them. It choked and he had to pull a piece of bone out.”
“But the dog’s okay?”
“Sure. She cut the inside of her throat a little, but nothing that would kill her.”
“Well, it doesn’t sound so crazy to me. His dog got hurt and he argued with you.”
“Huh!” Milan huffed. “An argument is two men raising their voices. What he did wasn’t like that.”
“What did he do?”
Milan didn’t answer straight away. Instead, he glanced off towards the orchard. Dorring got the impression that he expected to see the old man standing there on the peak of a hill, watching them.
Turning his eyes back to Dorring, Milan said, “I was sleeping. I woke up with the door to the caravan smashing in. Then I see a shadow move quickly at me. Before I know what is happening, he is on me, pressing me into the bed. I think it is a joke. I go to raise myself and it is then that I see the blade at my throat. ‘Leave rabbit bones out for my dog to choke on again,’ he says to me from the darkness, ‘and I’ll cut a hole in your throat and see how you like it.’ I didn’t say anything. I thought he would kill me. Slowly, he takes the blade away and I watch him walk off to his own home.”
“I’ll agree,” Dorring said, the pick frozen in his hands. “That is going too far.”
“I want to tell the bosses, but the others, they stop me. They like the old man. Feel sorry for him. But I warn you, Dorring. Be careful around him. I wouldn’t want to sleep so close as you do.”
5
A week into Dorring’s time there, Otis returned home one night having been away for three days. This time, he woke Dorring as he came through the door of the caravan at one in the morning. He was at pains to be as quiet as possible and he hushed the dog as it began whining at one stage. Yet, as much as he tried, the old man couldn’t help himself from letting out the occasional groan. It appeared he was in pain as he tried unsuccessfully to rid his aching body of his coat, his shoulder too stiff to maneuver the arm enough to slip it off.
After several minutes of listening to him struggle in the dark, Dorring sat up in bed and switched the light on.
“Darn it!” the old man gently grunted. “I didn’t wanna wake ya.”
“It’s okay,” Dorring said, getting out of bed.
He came over to the old man and went to take his coat, help him out of it. But Otis flinched back from his touch and the dog began growling. Dorring froze, wondering what exactly he’d done wrong.
The old man looked almost terrified. It was then that Dorring noticed for the first time the battered face under the brim of the wide hat. His left eye was closed over, resembling a boil. Above it was a two-inch cut stitched together with thin wire. His bottom lip looked five times larger than it should and resembled a bloated worm hanging from his face. As for his nose, it was swollen and looked even more crooked than usual.
“I’m sorry,” Dorring felt the need to say.
Otis softened and glanced
down at the dog. “Stop that,” he said sharply and the dog immediately settled. “Go to ya bed.”
It was already out, the blankets stacked against the end of the caravan, and the dog skulked off to it, grumbling as it curled up and settled its head on its flank so that it could gaze up at them.
“I’m not one for bein’ touched,” the old man said as he lowered his shoulder so Dorring could help, his voice distorted by the swollen lip and some missing teeth.
Dorring gently shuffled the arm of the coat off the arm of the man, Otis groaning softly as he did.
“You’ve dislocated the shoulder,” Dorring said.
“I know. I know. Done it before. Not a bother. I set it back, but it’s havin’ trouble.”
The arm was tender and Dorring felt the need to check it out once he’d gotten the coat off. But as he felt it around the joint, the old man pulled the arm back and gave him a sore look. Dorring gave in after that and simply sat the old man down so he could help take his boots off.
“I apologize for Bess,” Otis said. “She’s very protective of me.”
“She’s a good dog protecting her master is all.”
Dorring was right about the dog. She was a good dog and he was her master. She followed the old man everywhere like a shadow, except to work, when she would be left behind at the camp. When they would return, she’d be waiting beside the road where they were dropped off from the pickups. The moment they’d pull up, she’d be on her hind legs with her front paws on the side of the pickup’s back. Then she’d jump down and go crazy as Otis got out. Without fail, the dog would greet the old man and without fail, the old man would smile for the first—and possibly only—time that day.
Once Otis was out of his things and sitting up in bed, Dorring decided to ask about the wounds.
“A bit o’ bother at the pub the day before yesterday,” the old man replied. “That’s why I been stayin’ at a mate’s place. Didn’t want you worryin’ about the state o’ me.”
“Who did it?”