The Giant-Slayer Page 3

  Laurie hurried past her, and past the boy, to stand beside Dickie. Just as the nurse had warned, it was a shock to see him lying on his back, trapped in the iron lung. Around his neck, sealing the opening, was a rubber collar that pulsed with the breathing of the machine—in and out, like the throat of a frog. He was so small that he moved a little distance with every mechanical breath—drawn in, pushed out—as though the machine were a short, fat snake that was forever trying to eat him. But he seemed as happy as ever, a big grin on his face.

  “Boy, it’s neat you came,” he said.

  They looked at each other as the respirator hummed and puffed. Dickie had his coonskin cap and his wooden tomahawk hanging on the front of his iron lung. Struts and brackets held a mirror above his head, tilted so that he could look back at the big window in the wall. Along the brackets were cream-colored envelopes stuffed with checklists and medical charts. Between them someone had put up a little picture of Fess Parker, cut from TV Guide.

  It made Laurie sad to see the cap and the tomahawk, and to think that Dickie couldn’t even reach up and touch them, with his arms sealed inside the respirator. It seemed mean to Laurie to dangle those things in front of him—but always out of reach—like a carrot in front of a mule.

  His grin, she saw, was fading away. He looked worried now as he stared at her. She forced herself to smile again, but it was too late. Dickie turned his head aside.

  Already, Laurie wished that she hadn’t come to Bishop’s. She didn’t know what to say, and neither did he. They just looked at each other, and then at everything else except each other.

  “Wow. Some friend,” said the girl in the iron lung.

  Miss Freeman came up beside Laurie. “Dickie’s not planning to stay around very long,” she said, smiling down at him. “He wants to be at Disneyland on opening day, and you know, I think he’s going to make it. When the first steamboat heads off to Frontierland, Dickie’s going to be right at the front. Aren’t you, Dickie?”

  “You bet!” His grin was back already. “I can move my fingers, Laurie. Want to see me move my fingers?”

  “Of course she does,” said Miss Freeman. She guided Laurie to the side of the iron lung, where narrow windows were spaced along the metal. Inside, Dickie was covered by a white sheet. His naked feet and ankles poked out at the bottom, his bare shoulders at the top. His right hand rested at his side.

  “You watching?” he asked.

  Muscles strained in his neck. His face flushed red with the effort he was making. But his hand lay perfectly still.

  His mouth stretched into a grimace. His eyes closed; a straining sort of grunt came from his throat. Then the tips of his fingers twitched.

  They rose a quarter of an inch from the mattress. They straightened just a tiny bit. Then they fell back into place, and Dickie seemed exhausted. He was immensely proud, but utterly worn out.

  To Laurie, it was the most pathetic little effort she had ever seen. Just weeks before, Dickie had been running down the Shenandoah, bounding from bank to bank with the fringes leaping on his jacket, the raccoon tail flapping from his cap. And now all he could do was twitch the tips of his fingers? She couldn’t understand why it made him so proud.

  But Miss Freeman squealed with delight. “Oh, Dickie!” she said with a clap of her hands. “That’s wonderful. You’re on your way to Disneyland for sure.”

  Dickie looked at Laurie with such a grin that he might have just hit a home run in a stadium full of fans. “Did you see it?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Laurie. “That was great.” She paused a moment. “But, you know, I think—”

  She was going to say I think I should leave now, but again Miss Freeman stepped in. “I think you should meet the others.” And she started with the girl.

  Her name was Carolyn Jewels.

  She was maybe fourteen, and though her face was very thin and very pale, she looked as pretty as a movie star. Her hair was like Rapunzel’s, a golden braid that tumbled from the pillow nearly to the floor. She looked not at Laurie but up at her tilted mirror.

  “Carolyn’s been with us for almost eight years,” said Miss Freeman. “We’re going to have a heck of a party next month, aren’t we, Carolyn? A real blowout.”

  “Sure.” The girl could talk only when the iron lung was breathing out, when the bellows were shrinking below her. “We’ll all do the cha-cha.”

  “Oh, Carolyn!” Miss Freeman rolled her eyes. She let out a little sigh, but never stopped smiling. “You don’t want Laurie to think you’re a sourpuss, do you?”

  The bellows filled, then began to shrink again. “I couldn’t care less,” said Carolyn.

  The boy in the middle was older than Dickie but younger than Carolyn. His skin had shrunk around his bones, and his scalp showed white as snow through the short hairs of his flattop haircut. It was obvious that he had a huge crush on Miss Freeman. He gazed at her with the dumb look of a sheep.

  “Hi, Miss Freeman,” he said.

  “Hello, Chip.” The nurse took a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed the boy’s chin. There was a line of spittle there, dried and crusty. “Chip came in last summer. He’s learning to breathe on his own. And his legs are fine; no trouble there. So it shouldn’t be long till he’s walking out.”

  The front of his iron lung was covered with so many pictures that they overlapped like crazy shingles. Most were postcards from different places, and magazine pictures of automobiles, mostly woodies and pickups and slim little sports cars. But set among them were family photographs—some in color, some in black-and-white—of people doing simple, everyday things. Right in the middle of the bunch, a man and a boy stood in front of an open garage, with a strange sort of car in the shadows behind them. The man was wearing a T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. He was resting a hand on the boy’s shoulder and he had his head back, laughing. The boy was about eight years old, strong and tanned. But his face was so smeared with black grease that he looked like a war-painted Indian.

  “Chip gets heaps of mail,” said Miss Freeman. “His dad’s always sending him a picture or a postcard or something.”

  Laurie was fascinated by the photograph. It was hard for her to see how that greasy kid had grown up to be the thin rake of a boy in front of her. The kid looked so healthy, so strong, that he might have been a different person altogether.

  “Chip’s a mechanic,” said Miss Freeman.

  Again, Carolyn interrupted. “Not a real one.”

  “Well, real enough for me,” said Miss Freeman. “Chip and his dad are building a car together. Can you imagine that, Laurie? Actually building a car?” She made it sound like the eighth wonder of the world. “It’s a hot rod, isn’t it, Chip?”

  “Stripped-out Model B,” he said. “Flathead Ford.”

  “Wow,” said Miss Freeman.

  “Ten-inch cam.”

  “My goodness!” She put her hands on her cheeks. “One day you’ll take me for a ride, now, won’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “I know—you can take me to Disneyland.” She smiled, and that made him blush. “We can all go. You and me and Dickie …”

  “Oh, boy!” cried Dickie. “Can Laurie come?”

  “I’m sure there’s room for everyone. What about you, Carolyn? You want to go to Disneyland?”

  The girl could talk only in short sentences, in bursts of words with the bellows wheezing between them. “You’ll need long … extension cords.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Freeman. The happy conversation had fizzled, like a fire doused with water. The bright little sparks in Dickie’s eyes were gone. “Thank you, Carolyn.”

  Miss Freeman lifted the watch from the front of her blouse. “My, look at the time,” she said. “I’m supposed to be downstairs.”

  Laurie turned to go with her, afraid of being abandoned in the room of iron lungs.

  “Oh, Laurie, there’s no need for you to leave just yet,” said Miss Freeman. “You can stay and visit with Dickie
if you want. I’ll check in every once in a while and make sure no one gangs up on you.”

  Well, she couldn’t say no. But she took the nurse’s advice and went quickly to the window. She looked down at the pond and the grass, at the distant gate in the wall. A black Cadillac with stubby fins was just pulling out onto the street, and she wished she were in it.

  “What do you see?” asked Carolyn Jewels, behind her.

  “Nothing,” said Laurie.

  “Clean your glasses, four-eyes.”

  There was a laugh from Chip. Laurie blushed. “Well, it’s kind of raining,” she said. “There’s a car going out—”

  “What kind of car?” asked Chip.

  “A Cadillac. A Park Avenue, I think.”

  “That’s boss!” he said. “They’re keen.”

  “The gardener’s picking up all his bits of ivy; he doesn’t look very happy. There’s a brown duck in the pond, but no one’s sitting—”

  “What pond?” asked Chip.

  “The one right there.” Laurie pointed. “With the benches around it.”

  “He can’t see it, you stupe,” said Carolyn.

  Laurie turned toward the respirators. She could see three faces hovering in the slanted mirrors, reflected from the pillows. They seemed to float there, just above the round machines, like the disembodied head of the Wizard of Oz.

  “I came in the dark,” said Chip. “In an ambulance.”

  “Well, it’s not much of a pond,” said Laurie. “It’s got willow trees around it, and benches for people.” She looked again through the window, trying to see what Dickie and the others would see in their mirrors: the sky and the clouds; maybe the very tops of the highest buildings, the peaks of the hills in the distance. They could never look down at the grass, never watch the squirrels or the ducks or the mothers with their babies. The shadows slid across the grass unseen by them, shrinking in the mornings, growing in the afternoons. The sun was always hidden.

  “My nanna used to take me to the pond in a stroller,” said Laurie. “That’s my first memory: throwing bread for the ducks when I couldn’t even throw as far as the water. I remember how they waddled out, like they were angry. We called it Piper’s Pond.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” She had never thought about the name. “Maybe there was a man who played the bagpipes there. Way before the war.”

  “What did he look like?” asked Dickie.

  “No one ever saw his face.”

  This was how she and Dickie had told their stories of the train people: one asking questions, the other inventing answers. It made Laurie feel more comfortable to be doing it again, and now she put her forehead on the glass, her palms on the windowsill. In her mind she could see the piper down below her, with long tassels streaming from the horns of his bagpipes. It wasn’t daylight anymore. She was looking out at a chewed-away moon that turned the water to silver, the piper to a dark silhouette. “He wore a white mask that made him look like a ghost,” she said. “It covered his eyes and his cheeks, just a white mask with one black teardrop painted on the cheek. And he played the same song all the time. He played ‘Danny Boy,’ slowly, under the weeping willows.”

  “Why?” asked Dickie.

  “He was mourning,” she said. “For a girl that he loved, who drowned in the pond.”

  “That’s bull,” said Carolyn.

  “Oh, it’s just a story!” Laurie heard the angry snap in her voice, and regretted it right away. She could hear the machines wheezing behind her, and imagined herself in Carolyn’s place, lying for eight years on her back, seeing the world upside down in a mirror. Wouldn’t she too find it hard to be nice to people?

  “I’m sorry,” said Laurie.

  Carolyn didn’t answer. The motors whirred on the iron lungs, the bellows groaned and filled.

  When it seemed that no one might ever speak again, it was Dickie who started talking.

  “Laurie makes up stories all the time,” he said. “She used to tell about the train people. About Davy Crockett. Boy, she told good stories.”

  His voice was high and happy. He beamed at Laurie in his mirror. “Could you tell us one now?”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  A GIANT-SLAYER IS BORN

  More than anything Laurie wanted to please Dickie. But when he asked her to tell a story, she didn’t think that she could do it.

  “Please?” he said. “Tell about a dragon. And a guy like Davy Crockett.”

  Laurie Valentine had made up stories all her life. She lived in stories that she narrated constantly in her head. But it was completely different to tell a story to people she didn’t know. “How would it start?” she asked, with an odd-sounding laugh.

  “Once upon a time,” said Dickie. “Like that.” He breathed with the machine. “Once upon a time. There was a man named Fingal.”

  “Why Fingal?” asked Laurie.

  “I dunno.” Dickie grinned wider than ever. “I like that name.”

  “Well, you’re right. There was a man named Fingal,” she said. “He kept an inn called the Dragon’s Tooth, at the foot of the Great North Road.”

  The inn was made of black timber and white plaster. It was two stories high, and the chimney at the top had a slab of stone set into it, as a resting place for any passing witch.

  There was a parlor with a big fireplace, seven rooms upstairs, and a stable around the back. Just to the south, the Great North Road split off from the High Road. It headed past the Dragon’s Tooth and into the wilderness, into a forest as thick as the hair on a dog’s back, as black as night even at noon. When the Great North Road curved to the right and went into that forest, it didn’t come out again for a hundred miles. Many of the people who went along it never came out again. So every traveler—no matter where he was heading—stopped at Fingal’s inn. He found others there, sitting in front of the fire, and the ones going north asked the ones going south for news about thieves and trolls. On their way in, and on their way out, the travelers touched the dragon’s tooth.

  “Why?” asked Dickie.

  “For luck,” said Laurie.

  “What did it look like?”

  “It was five feet long,” she said. “A bit bigger than me. It was like a thick saber, hung sideways from chains above the door, just inside the parlor. Where it curved down in the middle, it was worn to a shine by the fingers of the travelers.”

  “Like who?” asked Chip.

  “Oh, the woodsmen,” said Laurie. “And the wandering knights, and the ones who went searching for gold. And the unicorn hunters, and the minstrels, and the dragon slayers. The only ones who never stopped at the inn were the Gypsies and the gnome runners. They passed right by, up the Great North Road.”

  “Where did it go to?” asked Chip.

  “No one really knew,” she said. “It was a mystery.”

  “How come?”

  “Because no one ever returned from the end of it.”

  “That’s so dumb!” Carolyn Jewels was glaring at Laurie in her mirror. Her beautiful face seemed hard as marble. “If no one got to the end,” she asked, “how did anyone build it?”

  Laurie liked little puzzles like that. She smiled as an answer came right away. “That was a mystery too,” she said. “The road was so old that no one remembered who made it, or when. The people believed that it went up into the land of the giants, but nobody knew for sure.”

  “Who were the giants?” asked Dickie.

  “Well, one of them was called Collosso, and he was the worst of all. He was the tallest, and the meanest, and the cruelest. He ate babies for breakfast, tossing them into his mouth like peanuts.”

  “I like that.” Dickie grinned ghoulishly in the mirror. “Start over with the giant. Okay?”

  “Start over?” asked Laurie.

  “Yes, please. With Collosso.”

  Once upon a time, there was a giant named Collosso. He lived at the edge of the earth, in a castle made of white stone. He kept a thousand s
laves to do his work, and a thousand more for dreadful entertainments.

  On most mornings Collosso went out of his castle with a basket on his arm. He strode across the land at a hundred feet for every step, filling his basket with food. He plucked sheep from the fields, and cows from the pastures; he took the farmers too, scooping them up as they ran for their lives. He chased them hunched over, his arms reaching out, like a monstrous boy hunting beetles. He uprooted whole trees of apples and figs and pears, shaking them into his basket. Along the way he snacked on dogs and cats, on chickens and gryphons and gnomes.

  Every person and every animal lived in fear of Collosso. Even the birds kept glancing around, watching the far horizon, for at any moment the giant might appear. He could stride across a hill, or come sweeping through a forest like a farmer through a field of wheat, crushing the trees to make a path. The people set out offerings of fruit and bread and butchered sheep, hoping to keep Collosso away from their homes and farms. But it never worked. So every three or four years, someone would stand up in a village square and announce that he was setting out to kill the giant. He would hold a pitchfork in the air and ask, “Who will come along?” But always he would end up going alone, never to return.

  Collosso laughed at those men who came to kill him. He never squashed the giant-slayers, but took them alive and kept them in his toy box, to amuse himself with at night. He was so big and powerful that nothing could scare him. Thirty years he lived without a twinge of fright, without a single thought of danger.

  Then, one night in midsummer, a black storm rose in the mountains.

  It began at midnight, with a rumble of thunder no louder than the purring of a cat. But an hour later it was shaking people from their beds with a terrible din and a roar of wind.

  From end to end, the sky flashed silver. Bolts of lightning cracked the clouds apart, shot toward the ground, and set the forests aflame. Sparks flew half a mile high, and the colors of the fire shone in the clouds, until it looked as though the air was burning. Animals ran in shrieking herds, deer and wolves together, rabbits and foxes side by side.