The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine Read Online Free PDF Page B

pushed himself upright and peeled off his suit jacket before standing up. The jacket fell to the floor with a squishy thump. With blood-dappled fingers, he unbuttoned his shirt and let that, too, fall to the floor.
    “Just leave those things there,” Sandrine said. “The invisible crew will take care of them.”
    “I imagine you’re right.” Ballard managed to get to his feet without staggering. Slow-moving blood continued to ooze down his left side.
    “We have to get you on the table,” Sandrine said. “Hold this over the wound for right now, okay?”
    She handed him a folded white napkin, and he clamped it over his side. “Sorry. I’m not as good at stitches as you are.”
    “I’ll be fine,” Ballard said, and began moving, a bit haltingly, toward the next room.
    “Oh, sure. You always are. But you know what I like about what we just did?”
    For once he had no idea what she might say. He waited for it.
    “That amazing food we loved so much was toucan! Who would’ve guessed? You’d think toucan would taste sort of like chicken, only a lot worse.”
    “Life is full of surprises.”
    In the bedroom, Ballard kicked off his shoes, pulled his trousers down over his hips, and stepped out of them.
    “You can leave your socks on,” said Sandrine, “but let’s get your undies off, all right?”
    “I need your help.”
    Sandrine grasped the waistband of his boxers and pulled them down, but they snagged on his penis. “Ballard is aroused, surprise number two.” She unhooked his shorts, let them drop to the floor, batted his erection down, and watched it bounce back up. “Barkis is willin’, all right.”
    “Let’s get into the workroom,” he said.
    “Aye, aye,
mon capitaine
.” Sandrine closed her hand on his erection and said, “Want to go there on deck, give the natives a look at your magnificent manliness? Shall we increase the index of penis envy among the river tribes by a really big factor?”
    “Let’s just get in there, okay?”
    She pulled him into the workroom and only then released his erection.
    A wheeled aluminum tray had been rolled up beside the worktable. Sometimes it was not given to them, and they were forced to do their work with their hands and whatever implements they had brought with them. Today, next to the array of knives of many kinds and sizes, cleavers, wrenches, and hammers, lay a pack of surgical thread and a stainless-steel needle still warm from the autoclave.
    Ballard sat down on the worktable, pushed himself along until his heels had cleared the edge, and lay back. Sandrine threaded the needle and, bending over to get close to the wound, began to do her patient stitching.

1982
    “Oh, here you are,” said Sandrine, walking into the sitting room of their suite to find Ballard lying on one of the sofas, reading a book whose title she could not quite make out. Because both of his hands were heavily bandaged, he was having some difficulty turning the pages. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
    He glanced up, frowning. “All over? Does that mean you went down the stairs?”
    “No, of course not. I wouldn’t do anything like that alone, anyhow.”
    “And just to make sure … You didn’t go up the stairs, either, did you?”
    Sandrine came toward him, shaking her head. “No, I’d never do that, either. But I want to tell you something. I thought
you
might have decided to take a look upstairs. By yourself, to sort of protect me in a way I never want to be protected.”
    “Of course,” Ballard said, closing his book on an index finger that protruded from the bulky white swath of bandage. “You’d hate me if I ever tried to protect you, especially by doing something sneaky. I knew that about you when you were fifteen years old.”
    “When I was fifteen, you did protect me.”
    He smiled at her. “I exercised an atypical amount of restraint.”
    His troublesome client, Sandrine’s father, had told him one summer day that a business venture required him