Free The Giant-Slayer by Iain Lawrence Page B

guess there was no way to know,” said Chip.
    “That’s what Fingal thought,” said Laurie. “At that moment, Jimmy was about this tall.” She held her hand above the floor, a little lower than her waist. Chip and Dickie and Carolyn turned their heads to see for themselves, and their faces tilted in the mirrors.
    Dickie smiled, then closed his eyes. “Boy, I wish there was a Wishman,” he said.
    “What would you wish for?” asked Laurie.
    “Gee, I wonder,” said Carolyn. “What on earth could he want? A kid in an iron lung.”
    Laurie blushed. She’d known right away it was a silly question. What else would he wish for, but to be healthy and happy again?
    But Dickie was always surprising.
    “Disneyland,” said Dickie. “Boy, I’d wish I could get to Disneyland.”

CHAPTER
FIVE

T HE S ADDEST W ISH OF A LL
    T he sun was as high now as it would get that day. On the grass below the window, the shadow of the hospital was a dark slab on the green. The radio antenna on the roof cast a thin arrow pointing straight at Piper’s Pond.
    Laurie stared out, saddened that another argument was under way behind her.
    “Dickie, you’re a dope,” said Carolyn.
    “I am not,” he said. “Quit saying that.”
    “You are if that’s your wish,” she said.
    “Oh, yeah? What would you wish for, Carolyn?”
    “That I never had to come here.”
    “Why?” asked Dickie. “It’s not so bad.”
    “What’s to like?”
    “I got to meet Chip. And you,” he said. “And Miss Freeman. And all the others. Boy, we have fun sometimes. It’s like being at camp. But you never have to go home. Like we’re lying in bunk beds talking.”
    “Aw, shut up, Dumbo.”
    “Don’t call me that.”
    He was nearly crying now, and Laurie hated to hear that. If he had to spend his days in an iron lung, it didn’t seem right that he had be sad. “I guess it
is
a bit like camp,” she said. “If you think about it. Isn’t it, Chip?”
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    “But you’ve been to camp.”
    He shook his head. “No, I haven’t.”
    “But there’s a picture.” She pointed at his iron lung, and then went up beside it. She ran her hand across the crazy mat of photographs. “I saw it here.”
    It had shown the boy holding a little tomahawk like Dickie’s, trying to look fierce in a headdress made of paper feathers and a cardboard band. Above him was a wooden arch that said
Camp Hiawatha
in letters made from nailed-together sticks. Laurie was certain that she’d seen it, but there were so many pictures half covered by others that she couldn’t find it again.
    Chip seemed annoyed that she was looking. If he could have reached out of the iron lung and pushed her away, he would have done it—she was sure of that. She pretended not to notice, but soon took her hand from the pictures and wandered off.
    Dickie had a funny half smile now. He was looking up athis comic but not reading it. “What would
you
wish for, Chip?” he asked. “If there were Wishmen.”
    “I dunno,” said Chip. “I guess maybe to be somebody else.”
    “Oh, who?” asked Laurie, pleased to change the subject.
    “I dunno,” he said again.
    “Like someone famous, you mean?” She was already back at the window, a sentry at her post. “Like Elvis Presley?”
    Chip shook his head. “Just anybody else. It doesn’t matter who.”
    That seemed the saddest wish of all to Laurie. The boy in the pictures was so happy, so busy. When he went into hospital he must have left a dozen things unfinished, like that strange car in the garage. Laurie could imagine skeletons of balsa airplanes waiting for their skin, roofless wooden bird-houses, go-carts without wheels. Didn’t he ache to get home and finish those things? Why didn’t he wish, like Carolyn, just to be the child he’d been before?
    “Let’s forget it,” he said now. “What about the Wishman? Was he real? Or was he fake?”

    Fingal wasn’t certain at first if the Wishman had kept his promise.