The Giant-Slayer (29 page)

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.