She saw the gurney hurtle into the room with white-coated figures crowded all around a small body below a sheet—a girl with dark hair. They were holding an oxygen mask over her face.
They whisked her down the row of iron lungs, past Carolyn, past Chip and Dickie. Then they opened the last one—the fourth machine—and slid the girl inside it. They started the motor; the bellows filled and emptied. The bellows whirred and hummed and whooshed.
When the girl was breathing, the doctors moved away. And Dickie, beside them, saw that the girl was Laurie Valentine.
They were all still there: Peter and Ruth in their wheelchairs, James Miner on his treatment board. They had all seen other children arrive, always in a little herd of people, always with a feel of fright and panic.
They had thought it was over now, that polio was beaten. The newspaper headline was still on the wall, saying that it was so. But now Laurie lay in the iron lung, with a tube sticking out of her throat. It was hard to say that she was asleep, but she was certainly not awake. She lay sealed in the metal, with just her head sticking out. And it seemed that that huge machine had been waiting for her all along, sitting silently and still, just waiting for its chance.
On that day, and in the ones to follow, other children were being rushed into other hospitals. There was a problem at the Cutter lab.
A batch of vaccine that was supposed to be dead was really alive. It had been injected into the blood of those children who were first for the vaccination. And it multiplied there, doubling once, doubling again, attacking nerves and muscles.
For Laurie there was nothing. She floated in a void as complete as the one at the edge of her imagined world. She was not aware of darkness nor of light, not of sound, and not of time.
The air whistled through the tube in her neck, in and out, as the machine did her breathing. A nurse had to remove the foam that sometimes filled it.
For the first hour, Miss Freeman sat there, watching over Laurie.
“Where’s her dad?” asked Chip.
“The police are looking for him now,” said the nurse. “I guess he’s a little hard to find today, but I sure wish they’d hurry.”
“Is she going to die?” asked Dickie.
“Let’s not think of that,” said Miss Freeman. “It’s far too early to tell.”
“I don’t want her to die,” said Dickie.
“Of course you don’t. Nobody does,” said Miss Freeman. “And we’re going to do our very best to see that she doesn’t. But for now, Dickie, please think about something else.”
He thought of the story, of Jimmy the giant-slayer, of Khan. It seemed they had been abandoned on the Great North Road, that they would remain forever there. “Carolyn, you have to finish it,” he said.
“Finish what?” she asked.
“The story.”
“Oh, Dickie, not now,” she said. And Chip, between them, said it wouldn’t be right to go on with the story.
“But you have to,” said Dickie. “You have to.”
He sounded so worried, and looked so frightened, that Miss Freeman couldn’t ignore him. “Dickie?” she said. “Why is that story so important to you?”
“Because it’s for real,” he said. “I’m Khan. I really am. And James is the giant-slayer.”
He had tried to explain it all before, and still couldn’t find the words to do it. How could he explain something he couldn’t really understand himself? He said, rather desperately, “If we don’t finish the story, Laurie’s going to die.”
“That’s dumb,” said Carolyn.
“No, it’s not,” said Dickie. “Everything’s real. Like James was born in a lightning storm. And his dad was a miser. Just like Fingal. What about Jessamine? You’re her for sure. And the way Finnegan Flanders knows about wagons. Like Chip knows about cars. He was going to rebuild it, I think.”
“But he’s a phony,” said Carolyn. “If it’s true, why’s he a fake?”
“I don’t know,” said Dickie. He started to list again all the ways that the story had crossed into their lives. He told about his dreams, about the times when he’d known how the story would turn. He said, “She heard the piper.”
Carolyn called him a stupe. But Chip said, “I think he’s maybe right.”
“Aw, you’re nuts,” said Carolyn. “You’re both nuts. If Flanders is phony, so are you.”
“Well, that’s the weird thing,” said Chip. “I—”
Miss Freeman interrupted, speaking quickly over top of him. “Chip, you don’t have to tell them that.”
“No, it’s all right,” he said. He paused for a moment, then started.
The pictures were real, Chip said. But they were not of him. He was not the boy building cars with his father, nor the one with a fishing pole, nor the one flying a kite. He didn’t know who they were, the boys in those pictures. He had never met any of them.
The postcards were real, but they hadn’t come from his parents. It was Miss Freeman who’d sent them, because he had asked her to.
“I felt sorry for myself,” he said. “Everyone got mail except for me.”
Miss Freeman had found the photographs. She had bought them at flea markets and secondhand stores, picking them out from the albums of strangers. With the scraps of people’s worlds, she had put together a fanciful life for the boy.
He had never built a car. All he knew of hot rods had come from his magazines. He had never been to summer camp.
“There’s one thing was true,” said Chip. “I was born on a farm.”
When he was three years old his big farmer father had sat him up on a wagon and let him drive the team of oxen.
That was the only memory he had of his father—of sitting there beside him with big green flies buzzing around them, smelling manure and sun-baked mud, seeing the wind brush the tops of long yellow grass.
He would have been three as well when his mother took him away to the city, and maybe six when she died and he went into foster homes. He could remember that, but not very clearly.
When he finished, there didn’t seem very much to say. Miss Freeman fiddled with the tube in Laurie’s throat, and air whistled through it. And the iron lungs kept breathing. And outside, beyond the grass and the pond, a car honked its horn.
Someone came tapping down the hall. Miss Freeman went to see who was there. She looked out and then down. “Oh, hi, James,” she said, and stepped aside.
It was James Miner. He had come in braces, wearing short trousers under the metal straps. He leaned on crutches that didn’t reach as high as his armpits. They had pegs for his hands to hold on to, and leather hoops that circled his arms. His face was red from the effort of walking down the hall. But still he smiled at the nurse. Then he came into the room, leaning forward on his crutches, swinging his hips to drag one foot after the other. He lurched right down the row of iron lungs and settled on the floor, leaning against one of the legs of Laurie’s machine.
When he’d got his crutches beside him, his legs out stiffly, Carolyn took up the story.
Jimmy, Khan, and Finnegan Flanders built a wagon from the old one, a strange-looking thing. The wheels were enormous, of course, but the wagon itself was like a battered old bucket hung between them. That didn’t matter to Jimmy; he said it was a fine-looking wagon. It didn’t have to haul giants, after all. It needed only to carry a witch.
Khan stayed behind to watch over the castle while Jimmy and Flanders went back along the old hauling road. They traveled for days before they reached the bottomless swamp. And then Jimmy put his fingers in his mouth and whistled for the witch, and she came riding out on an alligator.
“You’re telling it too fast,” said Dickie.
“Tough luck,” said Carolyn.
He was whining. “But it’s all wrong. They were supposed to go after Collosso.”
“They changed their minds,” said Carolyn.
“But why do they want the witch?”
“Wait and you’ll see.”
“Okay.
But you better end it right,” said Dickie.
The witch straddled the alligator like a jockey on a strange and ugly horse. She came at great speed, thrashing through the water, smashing through the reeds. Coated in mud, her throat ballooning, she stopped right beside the wagon.
She looked way up at little Jimmy, just as she had prophesied. “So you return,” she said. “Did you kill the giant?”
“No, he nearly killed us,” said Jimmy.
Her throat puffed out as she breathed. “Is he in his castle?”
“We don’t know,” said Jimmy.
She looked fearfully around, as if the giant might have been hiding right there in the bulrushes. “You must go back,” she said. “Go back and finish the task.”
“I don’t know that we can do it,” said the little giant-slayer.
“You must,” she said. “You were born for this.”
“Then come and help us,” said Jimmy.
“Would that I could,” she said, “but I cannot leave the swamp.”
Her huge round eyes blinked slowly. She sat looking at him from the alligator’s back.
“We’ll take the swamp with us,” said Jimmy. “A bit of it, anyway. We’ll fill the wagon with mud, and you can slosh along inside it.”
The witch looked at the wagon. Her throat swelled up, and shrank, and swelled again. “When it’s finished, will you do something for me?” she said.
“Of course. Whatever you want.”
“You promise?”
He did.
“Very well,” said the witch. “Then I will come.”
She didn’t help fill the wagon. She left that job to Jimmy and Flanders as she dashed to her house on the alligator. When she came back it was mostly full, and she was carrying a little basket with a lid.
“What’s in there?” asked Jimmy.
“None of your beeswax,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” cried Dickie. “I don’t think the Swamp Witch would say that. She wouldn’t say ‘beeswax.’”
“Why not?”
“It doesn’t sound right.”
“Who’s telling the story?” said Carolyn.
So the witch said “beeswax.” And she held on to her basket as Flanders lifted her up and set her into the wagon full of mud. She wriggled her way to the bottom, until only her eyes were showing above the surface. There she blinked and croaked as Jimmy took his seat and started the wagon moving.
It rocked over the huge stones of the hauling road, sloshing mud over the wheels. Inside, the witch tumbled and slid through the mud. “There’s nothing to hold on to,” she said. “Drive more carefully.”
“Oh, don’t make a fuss,” said Jimmy.
With Finnegan Flanders in the lead on his prancing horse and Jimmy driving the wagon, the three companions traveled toward the mountains. From fields and orchards, the farmers, wives, and children came out to cheer again. They cheered for the small wagon as loudly as they had for the big one, and they cried out to the Swamp Witch, “Hex the giant! Hex the giant!”
Jimmy drove the wagon through the valley and through the foothills, through the blackened forests to the edge of the world.
Again they hugged the mountain there, not daring to look over the edge and into that enormous nothing. And again the clouds swirled around them, black and evil, with the great-winged dragons soaring, belching fire.
At the castle, the drawbridge was closed once more. The huge wagon lay crumpled on the road, and a great many gryphons were pecking away at the flattened remains of the oxen. It was plain that Khan, in turn, had been pecking away at the gryphons, for a dozen hides were hanging in the sun to keep away the tigers and the dragons. The hides swung in the wind, the feathers tossing, fluttering. The hunter himself was resting in the shade of a broken wheel. But he came out now as the wagon stopped, and greeted Jimmy with a raised hand.
The witch poked her head from the mud and examined every thing, from the giant’s castle to the frayed ends of broken harnesses. When she saw Khan she made a croaking, ribbiting sound in her throat. “Why is the hunter here?” she asked.
“Hey, wait,” said Dickie again.
“Now what?” said Carolyn.
“If she lives in a swamp,” he said, “how come she knows Khan?”
“Beats me,” said Carolyn, looking sideways from her pillow.
“Besides, Khan said he never met her. Remember that? How does that work?”
“I don’t know,” said Carolyn. “It’s a mystery, all right.”
At the end of the row, Miss Freeman sat watching over Laurie, with James on the floor beside her. Dickie looked toward them, then back to Carolyn. He was frowning. “What are they going to do to Collosso?”
“What do you think?” said Carolyn. “One’s a giant-slayer, isn’t he?”
“But what if she’s Collosso?”
“Who?” asked Carolyn. “The witch?”
“Laurie!” he said, frustrated. “Like I’m Khan, and you’re the witch. What if Laurie’s Collosso?”
“I thought she was supposed to be the Woman,” said Carolyn. “Why would she be Collosso?”
“I don’t know. But what if she is?” said Dickie. “Boy, don’t you see? If they kill Collosso, she might die. She might really die.”
He was quite upset now, so distraught that Miss Freeman turned away from Laurie and tried to soothe him. “Honey, no one’s going to die,” she said.
“In the story, Miss Freeman,” said Dickie. “She might be part of the story.”
He had to explain for the nurse, in his short little bursts, why he was scared of a story. He had to show her that made-up things might kill a girl. He didn’t think she’d understand, but he tried his best. The machines hummed, and the bellows filled and emptied, and Dickie talked on and on until Miss Freeman made him stop.
“It’s okay. I get it,” she said.
“Really?” asked Dickie.
“Yes. And you know something? The doctors might say that I’m nuts,” said Miss Freeman. “But I think Laurie can hear every word you’re saying. I think she knows exactly what’s going on here.”
“You do?”
“I do,” she said, smiling. “And I think she’s tickled pink that you want to finish the story she started. It doesn’t matter if the ending’s different. It will please her a whole lot, I’m sure, if you end it any way you like.”
“But if Collosso dies, it might kill her,” said Dickie, nearly in tears.
“Oh, honey, I don’t think so.” Miss Freeman wiped his forehead with a cloth and cool water. She rubbed his cheeks and his neck, all around the rubber collar. “It’s only a story.”
Dickie saw that she didn’t really understand at all. She probably thought she did, but she couldn’t.
“Why don’t you have a little nap, Dickie?” asked Miss Freeman. “You can rest a bit, and maybe Carolyn can go on with the story.”
“No!” said Dickie. “I don’t want her to tell it now.”
Carolyn said, “I don’t care.” But she obviously did. Her long braid trembled as she shook her head. “You go ahead and tell it, Dickie.”
“Well, nobody has to tell it just now,” said Miss Freeman. “I think all of you should rest because it’s therapy in the morning.”
The idea of therapy in the morning made the children quiet. Even James felt a shiver inside, and he had his therapy on a different day. Just the thought of the hot packs sent cold twinges through his crippled legs.
It took the police nearly two hours to find Mr. Valentine. He came into the ward at a run, coins jingling in his pocket, his gray hat crushed in his hands. At the doorway he paused for an instant, looking all around, then rushed to Laurie’s side.
He stood above her, his face as gray as his hat. His lips started quivering, then his eyes filled up with tears that rolled down his cheeks and splashed onto Laurie’s pillow. It seemed that he was trying to talk but couldn’t, for the only sounds he made were pathetic whines and splutters.
Th
e hat fell from his hand as he reached out and put his palm flat on the iron lung. He rubbed it over the metal, back and forth and round and round, as though he could reach right through and hold on to his daughter.
“Oh, Laurie,” he said at last. “Oh, Laurie.”
She lay just as she had all along: eyes closed, perfectly still, while the tube in her throat swayed with the breathing of the machine. It looked like a pale sort of worm reaching this way and that, with little bubbles of foam at its head.
Miss Freeman had come in behind him, and now moved up to his side. She seemed to hold him up as his whole body began to sag. She tried to lead him away, to guide him from the room. “There’s papers you have to fill out,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve got phone calls to make.”
In his old brown suit, Mr. Valentine looked weary and ancient. He stooped down and got his hat. He brushed the crown to knock away a bit of dust. For a long time, with Miss Freeman’s hand on his back, he just stood and looked at Laurie, knowing that Dickie and Chip and Carolyn were watching. As though it would give him any privacy, they turned their faces aside, so that all three looked toward the door, and none of them said a word.
Mr. Valentine bent over to speak to his daughter. He talked in whispers, with many sibilant sounds: “Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry; so sorry,” he said. “I did my best. I tried to do the right thing. I never dreamed that this would happen.”
She lay perfectly still, not asleep and not awake, not even breathing on her own.
It was more than ten minutes before Mr. Valentine straightened up again, and then a minute more until he’d gathered himself enough to turn around. He put his hand on Dickie’s pillow. “Hello, Richard,” he said.
Dickie turned to look up at him.
“This won’t sound right at all,” said Mr. Valentine. “But I’m glad you’re here with Laurie. When she comes around, it will be a great comfort to find you beside her. Do you know that you’re the only friend she’s ever had?”
The Giant-Slayer Page 18
