The Giant-Slayer Read online

  Carolyn started gulping. Her mouth opened and closed like that of a fish. Her tongue moved forward and back, trapping air that she forced down her throat and into her paralyzed lungs. She made a ticking, smacking noise.

  “Good for you, Carolyn. You’ll be an expert at frog-breathing soon,” said Miss Freeman. She and Mrs. Glass slid the girl from the respirator, drawing her backward on the moving cot, as though pulling a drawer from a filing cabinet. The whole front of the machine came away, a huge metal collar fixed to the cot. Carolyn kept forcing air down her throat.

  Mrs. Glass wrinkled her nose and held her breath for a moment. But Miss Freeman pretended not to notice the stench that came out of the machine, the reek of waste and urine. Sometimes it was nearly more than she could bear, but she never let on. She didn’t even grimace at the awful sores on Carolyn’s hips or at the pathetic sight of limbs as skinny as pipe cleaners. She worked quickly and steadily, talking happily all the time.

  “I used to wish I could ride away on a unicorn,” she said. “Other girls wanted ponies, but I wanted my own unicorn. I wanted to ride it bareback.”

  “See?” said Dickie. “Boy, they have to be bigger than lambs.”

  “I was just a little girl,” said Miss Freeman.

  One on each side, the nurses pulled away the soiled sheets, cleaned and scrubbed the girl, then stretched new bedding into place. On top of the stench came the new tickling smells of soap and antiseptic.

  “I dreamed about him,” said Dickie.

  “Who?” asked Miss Freeman.

  “Oh, the hunter. In the story.” Dickie gazed straight up at his mirror, through it to the window. He wouldn’t look at Carolyn, hoping she wouldn’t look at him when his turn came around. “He hunts unicorns, Miss Freeman.”

  “Really? Is that what Laurie’s telling you about?”

  “Yes. And you know what else?” said Dickie. “In my dream I was him. I was the hunter.”

  Carolyn forced her lungs full of air. “You’re just saying that,” she said. Her tongue started ticking again.

  “It’s true,” said Dickie. “I was Khan the hunter. I had a white horse. And a bow and arrow. I killed unicorns.”

  “My goodness!” said Miss Freeman.

  “It’s like I rode into the story.” said Dickie. “I don’t know. But boy, it was neat.” The coonskin cap dangled in front of him, like a pelt that Khan had collected. “I was in the mountains, in the snow. I killed a unicorn with an arrow.”

  “Oh, that’s sad,” said Miss Freeman.

  “It sure was,” said Dickie. “I hit it in the heart. It fell in the snow and I ran to get it. I kept falling down. ’Cause the snow was so deep.”

  He closed his eyes as he remembered the dream, the soft, tumbling way that he’d fallen. He could feel the coldness as his hands had plunged into the snow.

  “The unicorn was dying,” he said. “It was kind of singing when it breathed. It kept trying to lift its head. But its big horn was so heavy. Then it looked at me and died. Boy, it was so beautiful. I felt kind of sick.”

  “No wonder. Poor Dickie.” Miss Freeman was helping Mrs. Glass arrange the new sheet over Carolyn’s withered legs. “There, you’re done,” she said. “Good work, Carolyn.” They returned the girl to the iron lung, fastened the seals at the front, and started the bellows again.

  Chip was next. He began breathing on his own before Miss Freeman had even opened the iron lung. He was proud of his frog-breathing, eager to show it off.

  The nurses threw off the catches and pulled out the bed, and the mirror shimmied and jiggled as the front of the machine rolled along. The smell was awful, but again they said nothing.

  Carolyn was watching. “You’d better hurry, Miss Freeman,” she said. “I think he’s turning blue.”

  He wasn’t turning blue at all. “I think he’s doing just fine,” said Miss Freeman.

  But Chip didn’t talk, as Carolyn had. He was so intent on breathing that he did it almost frantically, and a shine of sweat appeared on his face. It was obvious that he was frightened. He looked all around, like a rabbit caught out of its hole. Miss Freeman hurried to finish, clattering bedpans and bottles. Dickie kept talking about his dream, but no one was listening.

  In his dream, Dickie could walk; that was the thing. Boy, he could run, though the snow was up to his knees. He could see his feet, in their boots of dragon skin, kicking the snow as they sank into it. He could hear his charms of bone and shell rattling together as they swayed inside his shirt. It was a dream so real that he lived it.

  Dickie had never been up in the mountains. But in the dream he saw the trees shrunken by the altitude, spaced wider apart the higher they were on the slope. He saw the pine boughs bent with snow, and heard the whoosh and thud as great clods fell to the ground. He saw the sun in a million sparkles all around him, and the clouds of blown snow, like spray on the ocean, where the wind tore at the drifts along ridges and crests.

  He heard the snort of the unicorn, and turned to see it stepping from the trees with its breath like smoke, its fur all frost and shimmer.

  He felt the numbness in his hands as he pulled an arrow from the quiver and notched it on his string. When he drew the bow it hurt, the string cutting into his frozen fingers. He knew just how to aim and just how to shoot, because he’d done it countless times. He heard the shush of the arrow flying and the twang of the string, and saw the red blur of phoenix feathers ripping past his wrist.

  The arrow bedded in the unicorn’s chest. The animal fell to its knees. It tried to get up again but stumbled forward. Then it crumpled into the snow in a puff of white crystals, slowly somersaulting until it sprawled out in a heap.

  He didn’t like to think of the unicorn dying, of the trickle of red that came from the wound and the scarlet drips on the snow. He could hear the little song of its breath, and saw the scared whiteness of its eyes.

  In the dream he put his hand on its cheek to calm it. The sleeve of his coat pushed up, and he saw on his skin a tattoo, the sun and the moon on the back of his wrist. He could feel the coarse hair of the unicorn, and the pulse of its heart slowly stopping.

  He didn’t like to think of the skinning either, of the sound of the knife going in, or the pelt tearing away, or the rasp of his saw at the base of the horn. But he was comforted by the offering he made. He liked the smell of the dried leaves and twigs that he shook from a pouch and tucked into the mouth of the unicorn. He felt the spirit of the animal around him, made happy by the taste of its favorite food.

  He stood up then, as Khan. He stood up in his long coat, in his hat of a hydra head, and looked far across the valley, across a river half frozen, to a line of peaks as sharp and cold as icicles. He was heading there, down to the river and up to the pass, over the mountains to the Great North Road.

  Already there was a gryphon above him, circling so high that it was just a dot of dirty yellow on the clouds. Soon there would be two, then three, and they would fall in a fury onto the corpse of the unicorn.

  The hide was still warm on the inside. It made a bundle that steamed in the cold. He lashed it among the others on the back of his horse, took the reins in his fist, and started down through the forest.

  Dickie thought about the dream as the nurses finished with Chip. When they had the machine sealed and locked, its bellows breathing, they came over to him.

  “I think I can frog-breathe now,” he said.

  “No, you can’t,” said Miss Freeman. “You’re too young for that, Dickie.”

  She didn’t open the front of his iron lung. She never pulled him out as she did with the others. She stood on the left side of his machine, while Mrs. Glass stood on the right. They opened the hatches and pulled out his bedpan. They pulled out his sheets and slipped new ones inside. Then they closed the hatches and opened the access ports, round as a ship’s portholes. They thrust their arms through those, into gloves attached to the machine. They did their work leaning forward, peering through the little windows.

>   Dickie hated to watch them working, to feel their hands prodding, to see their eyes staring at his body. They cleaned him like a baby.

  But he wasn’t really there. He was in the mountains in the winter, watching bighorn sheep pawing through the snow to reach the grass. He could hear the huffs of their breaths, so sharp in the cold that it sounded like hammering.

  Then Miss Freeman jarred him back, though she didn’t mean to. She took away the comic book of the Two-Gun Kid, because he wasn’t reading it anyway, and she swung the mirror round so that he could see out the window instead. But it turned too far, and suddenly he was looking up at himself, at a white face and weird, spiky hair.

  He wasn’t Khan. He wasn’t hunting unicorns. That was just a stupid idea, the whole thing.

  The face in the mirror looked down at him as though it was somebody else’s. Dickie could hardly believe that he was seeing himself. And just then, he could hardly believe that he would ever get better.

  How many doctors had come to see him? He couldn’t remember. One after the other, they had come and bent his legs like a rubber doll’s, and said in loud jolly voices that he would be up and around in no time. Even when his lungs had stopped working and he was put into the respirator, they’d said that it wouldn’t be for long.

  He believed that doctors never lied. There had always been that day in the future when he would get out of the iron lung and breathe on his own again. And on that day he would march right out of the hospital, strutting along like the boy he had seen in a poster somewhere.

  It was thinking of that day that had kept him happy. He had thought of it often, especially at night as he fell asleep. It would be a wonderful day, but a terrible day—happy and sad together. He would say goodbye to Chip and Carolyn, and promise to come and visit. Then he would pick up his box of comic books and stuff, put on his coonskin cap, and walk out with Miss Freeman. At the door he would look back and see the bellows moving, Chip and Carolyn watching. “See ya soon,” he’d say, and wave. He and Miss Freeman would stop at the other rooms, and he would say goodbye to all the others he’d met: Jennifer and Ruth and Peter and Steve, Mark and Kathy and the three Susans. And then he would ride down on the elevator with Miss Freeman and walk toward the big glass doors. He would see his parents on the other side, waiting in the sunshine. They would be holding each other and smiling at him. Miss Freeman would shake their hands, then get down on her knees, in her white skirt and white stockings, and give him a hug. She would smell a bit of perfume. “Oh, Dickie, I’ll miss you,” she’d say. “I’ll miss you so very much.”

  But now, for the first time, Dickie wondered if that day would come at all. It was hard to believe the boy in the mirror could ever get up and walk away.

  He thought of all this in a moment. Then Miss Freeman raised the mirror again, to aim it at the window, and the boy vanished as it tilted. She went to work on his withered body, changing his sheet.

  Dickie closed his eyes and counted days. In his mind he used his fingers, and he decided that it was four nights until his parents came again. He wished it weren’t quite that long, but he didn’t doubt they would come—no matter what Carolyn said. In the beginning they had visited every day, and on the first day they missed, Carolyn had laughed about it. She could be so mean sometimes.

  “You know, they’ll never be back,” she’d said.

  “Don’t say that!” Dickie had told her. “It’s just one day. They promised.”

  But Carolyn had laughed again. “That’s always how it starts,” she’d said, “with ‘just one day.’”

  Dickie counted the days again. His parents would bring him candy or cookies, because they always did that, and they would have enough for Carolyn and Chip as well. They would bring a new comic book, and maybe something about Davy Crockett, but probably not the bowie knife that he always hoped they’d bring. They would have a funny story of something that had happened, and his father would tell it in a way that would make everybody laugh—even Carolyn. But after that they would both get very sad, and Dickie would have to cheer them up.

  They would leave slowly, saying goodbye a dozen times before they reached the door, and then a couple more as they moved down the hall. They would keep waving until the last moment. Then the whole room would be sad. The bellows of the respirators would hum and puff, and through the doorway would come the muffled chime of the elevator. Then maybe Chip would laugh again at Mr. Espinosa’s story. “You sure got swell folks,” he’d say. He said it every time. “You sure got swell folks, Dickie; you’re pretty lucky.” And Dickie would lie there with his head turned aside, feeling the tickly itch of a tear that he couldn’t even hope to wipe away.

  In his mind, he was counting on his fingers.

  When Laurie arrived that Sunday, Miss Freeman had gone. The room smelled of Lysol and soap, and even the faces of the polios seemed freshly scrubbed.

  Dickie cried out, “What kept ya?” But he didn’t sound so cheerful now, as if his happiness had been sponged away too. “Hurry, I want to hear about Khan,” he said.

  So Laurie settled at her place by the window and started the story again. Jimmy the giant-slayer was watching the hunter arrive.

  “He had never seen a man so wild,” she said. Khan was covered in furs and skin, as much an animal as the horse that he led. The two of them walked the same way, looking warily around them, alert to every sound, snorting cloudy breaths together.

  Then the horse stopped in its tracks. It lifted its head, and its ears twitched nervously. Khan stopped too. He looked up, just as the horse had done, and stared straight through the window at Jimmy.

  “Boy. Was Jimmy scared?” asked Dickie.

  “For a moment, yes,” said Laurie. “Then Khan held up a hand. He just held it in the air with his fingers spread apart like this, as flakes of snow fell from his arm. And he smiled, and his teeth were as white as a wolf’s.

  “In the parlor, Jimmy called out to Fingal. ‘Come and see!’ he said. ‘Father, look!’

  “Well, Fingal looked. He thought it was the Woman coming home, and he ran to the window. When all he saw was a man and a horse, he got angry. ‘Why did you call me?’ he asked. ‘Do you think I’ve never seen a hunter before?’

  “‘Not like him,’ said Jimmy. ‘Isn’t he wonderful, Father? That’s what I want to be when I grow up.’

  “Fingal laughed. ‘When you grow up? You’re not growing up, you little fool,’ he said. ‘Jimmy, you’ll never grow up.’”

  “Gee, that was a mean thing to say,” said Dickie. “I hope he’s sorry.”

  “Oh, he’ll be sorry,” Laurie said. “Later on he’ll be very sorry.”

  In a whirl of white, the hunter came into the parlor. He stomped his feet on the floor and pulled off his hat, and the snow fell away in clumps.

  Fingal was adding wood to the fire. “Come sit by the hearth, sir. You’ll want a hot meal inside you.”

  “That I surely do,” said the hunter.

  But he would neither sit nor eat until his horse was taken care of. And because the snow was nearly as deep as Jimmy was tall, Fingal had to go himself. “The boy will look after you,” he said.

  Khan beat his arms against his sides, shedding snow from his coat. “What’s that?” he asked, tilting his chin toward the ceiling.

  Jimmy looked up. “That’s the dragon’s tooth, sir.” It was right above them, shining with its fresh coat of polish.

  “I heard tell of this,” said Khan. “A tooth the size of a man. Never believed it myself.” He set down his bow and quiver. The feathers on his arrows were orange, yellow, and red. “They say you ought to touch it for luck. Put a coin in the box.” He made another motion with his head. “In that box there, I reckon. Is that so?”

  Jimmy nodded. He had shown countless travelers exactly where to put the coins, but for some reason he couldn’t do it for Khan.

  The hunter loosened his coat. He was wearing deerskins underneath, and a dozen necklaces of different lengths: a jumble of shells a
nd bones, claws and teeth, skeins of hair like woven scalps. He dug through his pockets until he found a coin, an eight-sided silver Marcus. “Is this enough?” he asked.

  Anyone else, Jimmy would have plied for more. A Marcus? he would have said, looking doubtful. Well, if it’s all you’ve got … Now he watched the hunter reaching out toward the money box, and he found no pleasure at all in the glint of light on the silver coin. It made him queasy inside to think he was robbing Khan for the touch of a wooden tooth, that he was making a fool of the man.

  “Wait!” Jimmy leapt up and grabbed the hunter’s arm. “There’s no luck in this,” he said. “It’s a wooden tooth.”

  The hunter looked at him, then slowly smiled. “Reckon any fool could see that, once he’s gone hand to claw with a dragon,” he said. “But I’m tickled you told me.” He pressed the coin into the boy’s small palm.

  “Thank you,” said Jimmy.

  Khan took up his arrows and his bow and chose a seat near the fire. Jimmy hovered round him, as close as he could be. He couldn’t look anywhere except at the hunter’s face. The wrinkles round the man’s eyes fascinated him. He could picture Khan always squinting into sun and snow and ice.

  Khan put up his feet on the fire grate, inches from the flames.

  “Sir?” said Jimmy. “Have you ever been to the swamp?”

  “The bottomless swamp? Never seen it, but I know of it,” said the hunter.

  “Do you know the witch who lives there?”

  “Not personally. Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.” Khan hooked his long bow onto an empty chair to draw it closer. “But take a seat and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  Story followed story. The other travelers came down from their rooms and joined the pair at the fire. Jimmy sat with his tiny legs jutting straight out from the chair until Fingal came in and set him to work.

  Warmed by the flames, Khan took off his necklaces. He called Jimmy to his side and put around the boy’s neck one of his own charms—a delicate sphere of tiny bones, enclosing the claw of a dragon. “Now, that will bring you luck,” he said. “It’s an old Gypsy charm. I got it myself from an old Gypsy.”