The Giant-Slayer (20 page)

Mr. Valentine was sleeping when Laurie came home. Flat on his back on the sofa, he had a book in his hands. He did
this every now and then, but always denied it. He would wake embarrassed and tell anyone who’d seen him, “I wasn’t asleep. I was resting my eyes.”

Mrs. Strawberry was still there, though dinner was set out on the table. She was sitting at a chair in her coat and gloves, as though chilled by her own frosty glare.

“Where have you been?” she asked as Laurie came into the room. “You’re very late.”

“I was at school,” said Laurie.

“Oh, really. Until this time of day?” Mrs. Strawberry tapped her watch three times. “Your father was very upset when he came home and you weren’t here.”

In the living room, Mr. Valentine shifted on the sofa. He spluttered and coughed, half awake.

“He went looking for you.” Mrs. Strawberry stood up. “He looked
everywhere.”

Laurie was surprised to find that Nanna could still put a fright inside her. A little tingle ran up her back like a slithering snake.

“He waited dinner for you too,” said Mrs. Strawberry, heading for the hall. “Of course it’s stone cold now.” She shouted goodbye to Mr. Valentine, then slipped out the door.

If Mr. Valentine knew where Laurie had been, he didn’t say so. He greeted his daughter with only half a smile and told her that he was glad she was home. But he didn’t ask why she was late or where she had been. He didn’t even look at her as he tucked his tie into his trousers and sat at his place for dinner. He opened the paper and started reading, and didn’t say another word.

He didn’t mention Bishop’s that evening, nor any day for the rest of the week.

On Saturday morning the sky was gray and bleak. “Feels like thunder,” said Mr. Valentine as he poured his morning coffee.

He was right. An hour later it had rained and stopped, and a hot wind was gusting through the trees. From far away came the rumbling tremor of a thunderclap. Laurie put on her green coat, though she hated wearing it. It had a big hood that she thought made her look like an enormous newt when she had it pulled up, with her glasses on. She didn’t say where was off to, but just shouted from the door, “Dad, I’m going out!”

She could feel the thunder coming closer as she walked to Bishop’s and in through the gate. The sky was darker. The wind pushed against her. At Piper’s Pond it made the branches of the willows rustle. A duck floated in the middle of the pond, thrusting its head into the water again and again.

Laurie rode the elevator to the fourth floor. As she passed the big room with the television and the building blocks, James Miner called for her to wait. He came trundling out on his treatment board, his hands paddling madly, like an alligator running.

He went ahead of her along the hall, now sideways, now backward. Outside, the thunder rolled more loudly.

The lightning started as they reached the respirator room. Dickie and Chip and Carolyn were all watching the storm in their mirrors. Great clouds were building in the sky, toppling over each other. The lightning made bright flashes that filled the window. The glass rattled with the thunderclaps.

“Boy, it’s real close,” said Dickie. He seemed weaker than he had before. He sounded nervous too.

But Chip and Carolyn both were smiling. “It’s kinda neat,” said Chip. “Isn’t it, Laurie?”

It
was
kinda neat. It was keen, she said. “But what if the power goes out?”

She imagined the iron lungs shutting down, the thick silence that would fill the room when the bellows stopped wheezing and huffing.

“It’s okay,” said Chip. “There’s a generator.”

Then Carolyn spoke. And for once she sounded friendly. “That gave out too,” she said. “One time.”

“What happened?” asked Laurie.

“It was the middle of the night,” said Carolyn. “In the middle of winter.” A snowstorm had knocked out the power. “There were eight people in iron lungs that year,” she said. In the respirator room they were listening to the rumble of the generator down in the basement.

The sound was a steady, comforting hum—until someone made a mistake while transferring fuel. Then the generator suddenly faltered.

“We heard it sputter,” said Carolyn. “The lights went dim.” In that moment, she said, the respirators stalled, as though catching their breath. But in the next instant the lights were bright again, and the sound was surging. “I turned to the girl beside me, and just as we grinned at each other, the power went off.”

Carolyn described how the bellows on the respirators wheezed to a stop. The silence, she said, was eerie, almost frightening. “Then the alarms on the tops of the respirators
started ringing. From all through the hospital we heard chimes and buzzers and people shouting.”

Just telling the story made her seem frightened all over again. Her face turned more pale than ever; her eyes grew wider. “I wasn’t very good at frog-breathing then,” she said. “I thought I was going to suffocate.” In the dark, she had struggled for every breath, her muscles almost useless. The girl beside her could still move her arms, though she was paralyzed from the waist down. She started tapping her knuckles on the iron lung—
tap, tap, tap
. “It was ghostly,” said Carolyn, “in the dark like that. It made me think of a story I’d read, about a deep-sea diver and a haunted shipwreck.” From the other respirators had come a frantic ticking and clucking of tongues, the sound that riders made to hurry their horses, but that polios made to call for help.

The beams of flashlights had swished through the corridors. Into the room had come nurses, invisible in the dark, nearly as frightened as the polios themselves. They’d shone their lights here and there, so that the beams swung through the room, glaring now and then in the tilted mirrors.

“It was getting cold,” said Carolyn. There had been frost on the windows. The nurses had tried to calm the polios as they struggled with the iron lungs, and at last they started pumping with the hand bellows, grunting as they heaved on the handles. When Carolyn had felt air being drawn through her throat, her lungs filling, she thought it couldn’t possibly come hard enough or fast enough.

“It was really scary,” she said.

“I bet,” said Laurie.

Carolyn’s face was drawn and weary. She lay looking straight up, blinking her eyes.

“That girl beside you: was she Penny Nolan?” asked Chip.

“No. Way before her.”

“Who?”

“I forget her name.” The bellows wheezed on the iron lungs. “She died the next week.”

Laurie whispered. “She
died?”

“Sure,” said Carolyn.

“How old was she?”

“Nine?” said Carolyn, unsure. “It wasn’t because of the power failure. She was dying already. We knew she was going, ’cause the nurses closed a curtain around her.”

“That must have been horrible,” said Laurie. “You were right next to her?”

“I heard her kind of gurgling,” said Carolyn. “It went on for ages. Then they turned off her machine. Everyone came out from behind the curtain. A nurse walked by and tilted my mirror. She tilted all the mirrors so we couldn’t see behind us. But we heard the iron lung rolling through the room. I can still hear that. At night sometimes. That poor girl rolling out.”

There was a rumble of thunder just then. It wasn’t horribly loud, but it went on for a long time, almost stopping then starting again. It made everyone look at each other and laugh in a nervous way.

Down on the floor, little James Miner hadn’t spoken for a long time. Laurie leaned down and asked him, “You okay?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, nodding happily. He was even reading his magazine; the storm meant nothing to him.

“You’re not scared of thunder?” asked Laurie.

“No way,” said James. “I was born in a thunderstorm.”

The window brightened with a flash of lightning. The thunder followed soon after, booming through the sky.

“That’s weird you were born in a thunderstorm,” said Dickie. And Carolyn, at the end of the row, added, “It’s unlucky, you know.”

“No fooling,” said James. “My dad says it blew a big hole in the roof and burnt up the wires like crazy. He says it pushed all the nails out of the walls, and the pictures fell down in every room. He says being born in a storm means you can see the future.”

The window glared with lightning; it shook with thunder. And the rain started then, so heavy that it seemed they were looking out through a waterfall, at a world as dark as night. Water swept down the glass in waves and ripples, and the wind made a howling noise round the drain spouts and the eaves. And the ivy clung on as it rustled and heaved, shedding leaves that whirled away on the wind.

B
ehind the storm, the sky was clear and bright. A white swan came down on whistling wings and landed on Piper’s Pond. All around, the grass was strewn with twigs and leaves.

Laurie watched the rain steaming away from the ledge and the windowpane. She heard the sound of someone coming, and turned to see a boy in a wheelchair. He looked like a hillbilly farmer, with big ears and a missing tooth, his hair like a snarl of copper wires. Behind him, a girl appeared, peeking shyly into the room.

“We’ve heard about the story,” said the boy. “Can we listen?”

“Sure, I guess,” said Laurie.

They came trundling in and wheeled their chairs behind the iron lungs. The boy was Peter; the girl was Ruth. Peter wore leg braces under his trousers, and his black shoes were built right into them. Ruth had a gray blanket over her lap, covering her legs and feet. Her face was spotted with pimples, and she looked everywhere except at people’s faces.

“We sort of know what’s going on,” said the boy, “’cause everybody’s talking about it. But where’s Jimmy now? He’s the giant-slayer, right?”

It was Carolyn who answered, turning her head on the pillow to look. “He’s come out of the stupid swamp, and now he’s heading for the mountains.”

“He’s crossing a field of heather,” said Chip. And Laurie took it up from there.

The heather was as high as Jimmy’s knees. It was tough and springy, so that he felt as though he was walking across an enormous hairbrush, snagging his feet in the bristles. Creepy little bugs shaped like triangles kept leaping around him, pinching his legs.

At first he staggered and struggled, every step such an effort that he thought he would never get out of the fields and into the woods again. He stumbled many times.

At dusk Jimmy could still see the witch’s burned-out tree behind him. He spent a night in the heather, hiding as well as he could from the bugs. With his shirt pulled over his head, his hands turtled inside it, he slept in a curled-up ball, a tiny thing all by himself in an endless stretch of heather. In
the dark a herd of deer went bounding past him, their white tails bobbing among the stars. Then a flight of gryphons flapped overhead, and soon the deer were shrieking.

Jimmy forged on. It was late in the morning when he reached the forest again and found a trail beside a tumbling river. He trudged upstream, round rapids and waterfalls, until he looked up and saw a bridge ahead, and the ramshackle home of a troll underneath it.

Jimmy had been taught to never trust a troll, so he took to the woods and struggled on. An hour later he came to a road that cleaved through the forest. He turned to his left, walking up the middle of the road toward the mountains of the giants.

At a beaver pond that afternoon, he came across an old cart pulled up on a strip of grass, and an old gray donkey in the harness. The cart was nothing more than a big box with a tiny door and window in the back and another window in the front, meshed with iron bars. It was the sort of cart that was driven by beaver hunters, but lashed to the side was an enormous bundle of pipes and rope, and a leather ball that looked like the head of a snake.

Jimmy looked up and down the road, then out across the pond in the hope of seeing a fellow traveler. Instead, he saw two.

They were swimming in the pond. One was fat and round, the other as skinny as an eel. They floated on their backs, the fat one blowing water from his mouth like a fountain. Jimmy sat down in the shade of the wagon and watched the old donkey graze in the grass.