The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine (7 page)

In a warm breeze that was not a breeze, a soiled-looking scrap of paper flipped toward Sandrine over the concrete, at the last lifting off the ground to adhere to her leg. She bent down to peel it off and release it, and caught a strong, bitter whiff, unmistakably excremental, of the Amazon. The piece of paper wished to cling to her leg, and there it hung until the second tug of Sandrine’s dirty fingers, when she observed that she was gripping not a scrap of paper but a Polaroid, now a little besmudged by contact with her leg. When she raised it to her face, runnels of dirt obscured portions of the image. She brushed away much of the dirt, but could still make no sense of the photograph, which appeared to depict some piglike animal.

In consternation, she glanced to one side and found there, lounging against bollards and aping the idleness of degenerates and river louts, two of the men in shabby suits and worn-out hats who had pursued her into the slum. She straightened up in rage and terror, and, to confirm what she already knew to be the case, looked to her other side and saw their companions. One of them waved to her. Sandrine’s terror cooled before her perception that these guys had changed in some basic way. Maybe they weren’t idle, exactly, but these men were more relaxed, less predatory than they had been on the avenue into Manaus.

They had their eyes on her, though; they were interested in what she was going to do. Then she finally got it: they were different because now she was where they had wanted her to be all along. They didn’t think she would try to escape again, but they wanted to make sure. Sandrine’s whole long adventure, from the moment she noticed she was being followed to the present, had been designed to funnel her back to the dock and the yacht. The four men, who were now smiling at her and nodding their behatted heads, had pushed her toward the witch-hag, for they were all in it together! Sandrine dropped her arms, took a step backward, and in amazement looked from side to side, taking in all of them. It had all been a trick; herded like a cow, she had been played. Falsity again, more stagecraft.

One of the nodding, smiling men held his palm up before his face, and the man beside him leaned forward and laughed into his fist, as if shielding a sneeze. Grinning at her, the first man went through his meaningless mime act once again, lifting his left hand and staring into its palm. Grinning even more widely, he pointed at Sandrine and shouted, “
Munna!
”

The man beside him cracked up—
Munna!
What a wit—then whistled an odd little four-note melody that might have been a birdcall.

Experimentally, Sandrine raised her left hand, regarded it, and realized that she was still gripping the dirty little Polaroid photograph of a pig. Those two idiots off to her left waved their hands in ecstasy. She was doing the right thing, so
Munna!
right back atcha, buddy. She looked more closely at the Polaroid and saw that what it pictured was not actually a pig. The creature in the photo had a head and a torso, but little else. The eyes, nose, and ears were gone. A congeries of scars like punctuation marks, like snakes, like words in an unknown language, decorated the torso.

I know what
munna
means, and
num, thought Sandrine, and for a moment experienced a spasm of stunning, utterly sexual warmth before she fully understood what had been given her: that she recognized the man in the photo. The roar of oceans, of storm-battered leaves, filled her ears and caused her head to spin and wobble. Her fingers parted, and the Polaroid floated off in an artificial, wind-machine breeze that spun it around a couple of times before lifting it high above the port and winking it out of sight, lost in the bright hard blue above the
Sweet Delight
.

Sandrine found herself moving down the yellow length of the long dock.

Tough love
, Ballard had said. To be given and received, at the end perfectly repaid by that which she had perhaps glimpsed but never witnessed, the brutal, exalted, slow-moving force that had sometimes rustled a curtain, sometimes moved through this woman, her hair and body now dark with mud, had touched her between her legs, Sandrine, poor profane lost deluded most marvelously fated Sandrine.

From the galley they come, from behind the little dun-colored curtain in the dining room, from behind the bookcases in the handsome sitting room, from beneath the bed and the bloodstained metal table, through wood and fabric and the weight of years,
We
come, the Old Ones and Real People, the Cloud Huggers,
We
process slowly toward the center of the mystery
We
understand only by giving it unquestioning service. What remains of the clients and patrons lies, still breathing though without depth or force, upon the metal worktable. It was always going to end this way; it always does; it can no other. Speaking in the high-pitched, musical language of birds that
We
taught the Pirahã at the beginning of time,
We
gather at the site of these ruined bodies;
We
worship their devotion to each other and the Great Task that grew and will grow on them;
We
treat them with grave tenderness as we separate what can and must be separated. Notes of the utmost liquid purity float upward from the mouths of
We
and print themselves upon the air.
We
know what they mean, though they have long since passed through the realm of words and gained again the transparency of music.
We
love and accept the weight and the weightlessness of music. When the process of separation is complete, through the old sacred inner channels
We
transport what the dear, still-living man and woman have each taken from the other’s body down, down, down to the galley and the ravening hunger that burns ever within it.

Then. Then. With the utmost tenderness, singing the deep tuneless music at the heart of the ancient world,
We
gather up what remains of Ballard and Sandrine, armless and legless trunks, faces without features, their breath clinging to their mouths like wisps, carry them (in our arms, in baskets, in once-pristine sheets) across the deck, and permit them to roll from our care, as they had always longed to do, and into that of the flashing, furious little river monarchs.
We
watch the water boil in a magnificence of ecstasy, and
We
sing for as long as it lasts.

Peter Straub is the
New York Times
bestselling author of more than a dozen novels. Two of his most recent,
Lost Boy Lost Girl
and
In the Night Room
, are winners of the Bram Stoker Award, as is his recent collection,
5 Stories
. Straub was the editor of the two-volume Library of America anthology
American Fantastic Tales
. He lives in New York City.

www.peterstraub.net

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