The Giant-Slayer (2 page)

Laurie grew up to be quiet and shy.

She grew up wearing glasses as big as windows. They kept sliding down her nose, and she spent all day poking them into place with her middle finger.

She grew up afraid of daffodils.

To her, the yellow flowers were the beginning of summer, the start of polio season.

Because her father worked for the Foundation, he knew all about polio. But because he didn’t have time for little things like Laurie, it was Mrs. Strawberry who made the rules: “Don’t share food with others. For heaven’s sake stay away from the drinking fountain. And never, ever use a public toilet.” From spring until autumn, Laurie’s world shrank to the size of an atom. She was banned from the movies and the bowling alley, from the swimming pool and the playground. Anywhere that children gathered, Laurie Valentine was not allowed.

“I know you think I’m a horrible old woman,” said Mrs. Strawberry every year. “But it’s for your own good because you can’t take chances with polio. I’ve probably told you a hundred times, it was polio that took my little sister.”

Laurie had heard the same story every year, nearly word for word.

“One day she used the public toilet, and that was it. The next week, she was gone. Infantile paralysis. It was a dreadful, awful way for her to die, and I’m not going to let it happen to you.”

Laurie sometimes argued, but she always obeyed her nanna. She stayed away from the pool and the playground and everywhere else, and her summers were sad and lonely. But so were the winters, the springs, and the autumns. Laurie Valentine didn’t have a friend in the world until 1955.

His name was Dickie Espinosa. On the first day of March he moved into the house at the end of the block, the smallest in the neighborhood.

He appeared on the street that day with a buffalo gun, a coonskin cap, and a buckskin jacket with fringes down the sleeves. He looked just like every other boy in the city in that spring of 1955; the only unusual thing about Dickie Espinosa was that he didn’t go to school with the other Davy Crocketts. A tutor called at his home four days a week, a woman as skinny as a stick.

Dickie Espinosa was eight years old, three years younger than Laurie. She met him on a Saturday, in the little Rotary park on the corner. A creek came tumbling out of a culvert there, dashed across the park, and slipped into another culvert, as though afraid of open spaces. Laurie was launching twigs two at a time into the stream, pretending they were rowing boats racing. She looked up and saw him in his Davy Crockett clothes, skulking along the creek. He had a wooden tomahawk stuck in his belt and the big popgun in his hands. He said, “Howdy, stranger.”

From that moment, it seemed, they were friends. If Laurie wasn’t in school or asleep, she was playing with Dickie Espinosa. He spent time at her house, but she spent more at his. Down in his basement, Dickie had a little world of his own, four feet wide and eight feet long.

The tracks of toy trains ran through towns and fields, into tunnels through the mountains, over spindly bridges across deep canyons. Tiny people seemed frozen at everyday tasks: a boy fishing at a pond, a woman hanging laundry on a line. There were cars on the roads, cows in the fields. There were ducks on the painted glass of the pond, and even decoy ducks among them, and a hunter—nearly invisible—lying with a gun in the grass nearby.

“Keen!” said Laurie the first time she saw it.

That day, Dickie scurried in between the sawhorses that held up the little world. He plugged electrical cords into sockets, scurried out again, and started flicking switches.

Lights came on in the buildings. A windmill’s vanes went slowly round, and a watermill began to turn on a spillway at the pond. There was a hum that grew louder, and Laurie had a funny feeling that the people would suddenly start to move, to go about their business in the town. But of course they didn’t. Dickie worked the controls, and the trains went whirring through the mountains, through the forests, through the fields. Crossing gates flashed as they opened and closed in a ringing of bells.

Dickie dashed back and forth, adjusting things. Then he waved Laurie over to stand beside him, and he gave her the controls of one of the trains. He showed her how to slow it down and speed it up, how to set the switches that would steer it where she wanted.

It was a passenger train that he’d given her, and Laurie guided it from station to station. At first she didn’t stop anywhere near the platforms, and she and Dickie laughed at the idea of all the passengers getting angry. They acted out the people shouting at the train, shaking their fists at the stupid engineer. But soon she got the hang of it, and as her train went round and round she made up stories about the plastic people who never really moved to get on and off. She said one was a farmer on his way to town for the very first time in his life. And she followed him along, past simple things that were—to him—as strange as rocket ships and time machines.

Laurie led Dickie all over the neighborhood, through every park and vacant lot. He called it “scouting,” and he did it in his coonskin cap and the jacket with the fringes. He said the hollow that the creek ran through—from culvert to culvert—was “like the valley of the Shenandoah.” When the weather was cold or rainy, they stayed inside, inventing long stories about the train-set people.

“Why don’t you go to school?” she asked him once. “How come you got a tutor?”

“My mom was worried,” he said, “’cause I missed so many days at my old school.”

“From getting sick?”

Dickie shook his head. “From getting beat up.”

In March, just after St. Patrick’s Day, they played at the Shenandoah until it was nearly dark. Laurie saw the first daffodils showing yellow on the banks of the creek and stomped up and down the slope, trying to stamp them out. She squashed them into the ground.

When she got home, Mrs. Strawberry’s white gloves were arranged on the sideboard as always, ready—like a fireman’s boots—to be slipped on in a jiffy. Nanna’s voice called out from the kitchen, “Is that you, Mr. Valentine?”

“It’s me!” shouted Laurie. She kicked off her muddy shoes. But her socks made damp splotches up the hall and into the kitchen.

“Where have you been?” asked Mrs. Strawberry. She was bending over the table, setting out the silverware. When
she looked up, her mouth gaped open. “Why, look at you! You’re soaking wet,” she said.

Laurie saw that the ends of her sleeves were dark with water. Her knees were wet as well. “We were playing in the creek,” she said.

“You were
what?”
Mrs. Strawberry pointed through the doorway. “Go wash your hands.”

“I just washed them in the creek,” said Laurie.

“That’s not a creek; it’s a sewer. Now go,” said Mrs. Strawberry.

Laurie didn’t move. She was older now, not so easily scared by a nanny. As though Mrs. Strawberry suddenly saw the change herself, she grew quiet and serious. “Look,” she said, “it’s nice you’ve got a friend; I’m pleased for you. But summer’s coming on, and you know what that means. I’ve probably told you this a hundred times, but—”

“Oh, brother.” With a big sigh, Laurie looked up at the ceiling.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me, young lady,” said Mrs. Strawberry.

“I know all about your sister and her stupid toilet seat,” said Laurie. “I know all about polio too, ’cause we studied it in school. And guess what? You can’t get it from a toilet seat.”

“What’s the matter with you, Laurie?” Mrs. Strawberry looked horribly sad, as though she’d been slapped in the face and was trying not to cry. “It’s
my
sister we’re talking about. I think I know better.”

The front door opened, and into the house came Mr. Valentine. Laurie looked tauntingly at Mrs. Strawberry. “Ask Dad.”

“No,” said Mrs. Strawberry. “Don’t bother your poor father the moment he comes through the door. Let him get settled at least.”

But Laurie was already out of the room, marching down the hall. She reached her father as he was sliding his hat onto the shelf in the closet. She poked her glasses. “Dad, can you get polio from a toilet seat?”

He looked puzzled, frowning at Laurie’s wet clothes. Then he glanced up as Mrs. Strawberry came into the hall, and he suddenly understood. He’d heard the story himself nearly as many times as Laurie. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I don’t think anybody knows exactly how polio is passed, but—”

“Dad, you know it’s impossible.”

Of course he knew, but he didn’t want to say so with Mrs. Strawberry standing there. “The important thing,” he said, “is not how you get polio. It’s how you
don’t
get it.”

“Well, you don’t get it in March,” she said. “Tell her, Dad. You can’t get polio playing in the creek in the last half of March.”

“Now, you must know better than that.” Mr. Valentine sat down in the chair to take off his shoes. “It’s unlikely, but not impossible. It’s never too early for polio.”

“Oh, Dad!”

Mr. Valentine seemed old and small as he looked up from the chair. “Do you realize how well the war is going? How close we are to victory?” he asked. “There’s no doubt the vaccine will work. Nearly two million Polio Pioneers are proving that, and the results of the trials are better than expected. I know it’s hard sometimes to stay away from pools
and creeks and things. But if you just hold out for a few more months we’ll have unconditional surrender.”

Laurie suddenly saw her father as a little man trying to sound like General Patton. She felt embarrassed for him, even sad. But she laughed in a cruel way.

Mr. Valentine turned red in the face. “The rules are for your own sake,” he said flatly. “You’re still a child, though you may not think so. As long as you live in this house, you’ll live by the rules.”

Laurie glared back at him. “So you’re both against me now? You’re ganging up to wreck my life.”

Mr. Valentine sighed. “Honey, nobody’s against you. And nobody’s ganging up.”

But that was how she felt. So she turned and bolted from the room. She ran up the stairs, slammed her door as loudly as she could, and threw herself facedown on the bed.

It was half an hour before Mr. Valentine went up and knocked on the door. He sat at the edge of the bed, as stiff and straight as a toy man.

“We’ve been fighting polio for a hundred years,” he said. “In another month we’ll have the silver bullet. You’ll get a vaccination and never have to worry about polio again. And that will happen before summer.” He ran his fingers down his tie, smoothing it out. “You’ve waited so long already, can’t you hold on for a few more weeks?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Well, you can. And you will.” He’d never been so firm as he was just then. There were even hard lines on his face, wrinkles on his forehead. “Polio scares me to death, Laurie. I see all the children with braces and crutches.
You
see them
too: the ones who’ll never run again, the ones who’ll never walk, the children in wheelchairs. Well,
I
see the ones in rocking beds, on treatment boards, in iron lungs. So many of them, and another thirty thousand every year. Can you imagine how it haunts them that they got polio just because they went to a
swimming pool
, or something as frivolous as that?”

“I dunno.” Laurie had seen plenty of children on crutches, but of course she had never talked to them.

“Well, I’m sure it does. How could an hour of play be worth years in braces or a lifetime in an iron lung?” He shook his head in bewilderment. “I can’t tie a string to you, Laurie, and keep you in sight. All I can do is ask that you follow the rules.”

She shrugged and mumbled. She wanted to remind him, purely for spite, that he was only a fund-raiser, an organizer, that just because he worked for the Foundation didn’t mean he was an expert on polio. Laurie didn’t think her father really knew what he was talking about at all.

But he did.

It was never too early for polio.