The Giant-Slayer (5 page)

“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?”

M
ore 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.”