The Gypsy Game (14 page)

A moment later she sighed deeply, and then went on, “I didn’t mean … That is, what I meant was … I know the Gypsy thing hasn’t exactly happened yet. Not like Egypt did anyway. But it would have if all that other stuff
hadn’t come up. You know, like Bear showing up and then Toby disappearing and …” She threw up her hands.

Melanie nodded. “I know,” she said. “That’s part of it. Bear and Toby and everything are part of it. But that’s not all.” She was twisting her hands together the way she sometimes did when she was upset. “And you know it’s not fair saying that I didn’t want to be a Gypsy because it was your idea.”

April grinned sarcastically. “There you go again. Old Melanie ‘That’s-Not-Fair’ Ross.”

Melanie’s answering smile was almost real, but then she shrugged and went on. “Well, it’s not. You know I really liked the Gypsy idea at first. And when we were finding out all those things about caravans and costumes and traveling around telling fortunes and training animals and that kind of stuff. I really liked that part. It’s just that …” She was wringing her hands again. “Well, some of it’s in there.” She pointed at the book April was holding. “There. In that book.”

April looked down at the big fat book in her hands. Turning it over, she looked at the title.
The Eternal Outcasts
by someone with a strange, unpronounceable name. “What do you mean, it’s in this book?”

“Why the game didn’t work very well. At least for me,” Melanie said. “I mean, what happens to Gypsies is too … I don’t know.” She shrugged and made her face say something like, “I know what you’re going to say, and I don’t care,” before she went on. “It’s just not—
fair
.”

April couldn’t believe it. “Look, Ross,” she said, tight-lipped and boiling-over angry. “Would you please knock
off that ‘not fair’ business for a minute or two. I’m getting so sick of all that goody-goody stuff that I could—”

But at that moment Melanie’s mom came into the living room and said, “Okay, girls. Time’s up. School day tomorrow.”

Giving Melanie a final disgusted glare, April slammed the door behind her before she dashed up the stairs.

At one o’clock the next morning she was still reading
The Eternal Outcasts
. She had read about how Gypsies were, for hundreds of years, an outcast people who were never allowed to settle in one place and then were punished for being wanderers. And who were not allowed to own land or work at ordinary jobs and then were persecuted because they lived by their wits. She read about places where the laws had said it wasn’t a crime to kill a Gypsy and about countries where Gypsies had been arrested on sight to be beaten or even killed and where Gypsies had even been slaves to be bought and sold. And then, more recently, how Hitler and the Nazis had sent half a million Gypsies to die in the gas chambers. It was almost one-thirty when she finally threw the book down, turned out the light, and lay staring wide-eyed into the darkness.

There was no use shutting her eyes because she wasn’t going to sleep. She probably wasn’t going to sleep all night long. She sighed and thumped her pillow with her fist. Here she’d gone down to talk to Melanie, who was supposed to be her friend, because she was feeling really rotten and needed to be cheered up, and look what happened.
Thanks a lot, Melanie
.

And besides, she really didn’t believe that reading that
stupid book was why Melanie stopped wanting to be a Gypsy. Sure there were a lot of unfair things in it, but so what? There were probably a lot of unfair things that happened to ancient Egyptians, too. There were a lot of unfair things everywhere. Everywhere! Like having a mother who didn’t want you around, so you got sent off to live with your grandmother. What was so fair about that? She punched the pillow again, harder. Then she punched it with both fists and began to cry.

Somehow the crying helped. The pillow had just started to get wet when she began to feel sleepy.

IT WAS BAD enough to fall, almost headfirst, into a mysterious hole under an old abandoned church, but that was just the beginning. Toby had no more than caught his balance and staggered to a stop when a match flared in the darkness and a strange, creaky voice said something about an ugly monster. That did it. His heart immediately began to thunder somewhere near the roof of his mouth. He tried to swallow it back down to where it belonged, but it stayed put, and when he turned around to run, he found that his legs seemed to be out of control too. Except for one or two wobbly steps, nothing much happened.

Meanwhile a candle flamed in the darkness, and then another. The match was shaken out, and the creaky voice spoke again. “Well, well. And another visitor. Who have we here, Bruno? Who’s your handsome young friend?”

Then, suddenly, he recognized the speaker. The strange crackly voice first, and then, even in the faint candlelight, the puckered old face and masses of dirty white hair. It was Garbo, the ragged old beggar woman who had been hanging out in doorways on University Avenue ever since last spring. Everyone who lived in the area had seen her, but no one seemed to know who she was or what her real name was or where she disappeared to every night. Not even the
people like Toby’s dad, who always put money in her cup whenever he had any to spare, and sometimes even when he didn’t. Toby had seen him drop what was just about his last dollar bill in her cup. Always the same big tin cup with a chipped and faded picture of Greta Garbo on it.

“Hi, G-G-Garbo,” Toby stammered as soon as he could get the words out over the lump of throbbing terror that still seemed to be stuck in the back of his throat.

She nodded, her eyes narrowing suspiciously. “Who are you, boy? What’s your name?”

“Tob—” he started to say before he changed his mind and, fishing around desperately, came up with Tony. “Tony,” he said. “My name’s Tony J-J-Johnson.”

Garbo smiled slyly, showing a scattering of teeth in mostly empty gums. Toby could see now that she was sitting in a pile of blankets and mattresses in a kind of alcove beside a bulky metallic shape that looked as if it had once been a furnace. “Well, well, so it’s Tony J-J-Johnson,” she chuckled. “What brings you to my private abode at this hour of the night?”

“What b-brings m-me …” Toby paused, gulped, and then stumbled on, making stuff up as he went along. Making up what he thought at first was a pretty good story, considering the fact that he had absolutely no time to work on it. “Well, see, it’s l-l-like this. I’m k-k-kind of an escapee from an orphan home.” He thought that was a nice touch. He had a feeling Garbo could relate to orphans.

“An escapee orphan?” Garbo asked. “They got an orphanage in this town?”

He wasn’t too sure about that, so just to be on the safe side, he changed his plot a little. “Well, I haven’t been an
orphan very long.” He was pleased to find that his voice had stopped shaking. “I just lost my parents recently. Just last week, in fact.”

“That recently.” Garbo nodded seriously.

He went on then, telling about how his parents had mysteriously disappeared and he had to run away because the police were going to put him in a terrible orphanage where kids were whipped and tortured and fed on bread and water. Before he’d finished, he began to realize that the story had some major holes in it, but it didn’t seem to matter, since by then Garbo seemed to have lost interest. While he was talking, she was either fiddling with her fingerless gloves or pawing among the blankets as if she were looking for something. He was just getting to an especially good part when she interrupted.

“Bruno,” she said. “Come here and say hello.”

“Bruno” was definitely what she said, but it was Bear who trotted over. Up until that moment he’d been sniffing around in a dark corner of the basement and whining softly to himself, but when Garbo called him, he came immediately. But gently. Very gently, for Bear. Instead of bouncing all over her as he did when he greeted other people, he crept over quietly, lay down beside her, and put his head in her lap.

“So, Bruno,” she said, scratching his head. “So you’ve gone out and found yourself another big-time phony to take up with. And poor old Jeb not cold in his grave.” She looked up at Toby, a slicing sideways glance. “So you followed Bruno here?”

But Toby’s throat was tightening again. Garbo went back to petting Bear, who, it seemed, was also known as Bruno.
But who was poor old Jeb, and what had happened to him? Toby gulped and asked, “Who is—was Jeb?”

Garbo chuckled. “Yes, who
was
Jeb is right, I’m afraid. Dead now. Old friend of mine. Died in his sleep, right over there in that corner where he and Bruno used to hang out. Happened just a few days ago. And right after they took Jeb away, Bruno here just up and disappears. Thought they’d taken him away to the doggy gas chambers, I did.” Bending over Bear, she picked up his ear and whispered, “Glad to see you gave ’em the slip, sweetie.” She petted and crooned for a little longer before she suddenly looked up at Toby.

“Well, well, Tony J-J-Johnson,” she said. “Make yourself at home, dearie. Gets pretty cold in here nights. Hope you’ve got some blankets in that pack of yours.” She looked toward the area where Bear had been sniffing. “I’d offer you some of Jeb’s, but it looks like the other boys already latched on to them.”

“The—the other boys?” Toby looked around nervously. “Who …”

“My other roomers,” Garbo said. “Out working at the moment. Vince and Mickey. Nice boys, both of them. Have a few problems, of course.” She chuckled again, a laugh that somehow managed to sound like what people do when someone tells a very unfunny joke. “A few little problems fate dealt them, like a slipped cog or two. And killer headaches. Not a bit dangerous, though …” Her sly smile came back as she added, “At least not very often.”

Toby found himself backing away.

“You aren’t thinking of leaving me, are you, dearie?” Garbo asked. “Seems to me you’d be better off to stay here
at least for tonight. Streets aren’t a good place for a young fellow like you, nowadays. ’Specially at night.”

“I know,” Toby said, “but I think I’d better go anyway. At least for now. Maybe I’ll come back later.” He turned to go, but when Bear came bouncing after him, he stopped to look back.

“That’s right,” Garbo said. “If you must go, take the dog. Great ugly beast like that might discourage some of the other beasts out there. Go on now, but do come back if you find you have to. Remember that, dearie. You can come back if you have to.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot. Maybe I will,” Toby said again, but he certainly didn’t mean it. No way he’d ever go back down into that disgusting dark hole where poor old crazy Garbo, and who knew how many other weirdos, hung out. “Fat chance,” he muttered as he started off down Arbor Street.

Hanging on to Bear’s fur almost all the way, and fighting off several major panic attacks, he made it as far as the After Hours Club without meeting anyone who showed any interest in him. But, sure enough, not far from that run-down bar he had to pass another bunch of mean-looking guys, who started following along behind him and kept on following for the next couple of blocks. Maybe it was the sight of Bear that discouraged them as Garbo had predicted, but for whatever reason they eventually turned off into a parking lot. Afterward, Toby told himself that the good news was that he didn’t have to worry that those creeps had recognized him and would tell the police about seeing the missing Alvillar kid, because they obviously weren’t the
type who talked to police officers. Not unless they had to, anyway.

That trip back down Arbor was pretty bad, but there was one change for the better, which was that this time Bear stayed right beside him without even once trying to pull away. It was as if he’d been so stubborn before because he was just so determined to find out whether or not his old friend had come back. He hadn’t, of course, and according to Garbo, he wasn’t about to. Maybe Bear knew that now and maybe he didn’t, but for whatever reason he seemed willing to follow wherever his new friend wanted to go. So that left only one problem. The new friend didn’t have the faintest idea where he was going.

So even though he really couldn’t say that it had been Bear’s decision this time, it really hadn’t been his, either. At least not as far as he could remember. Not the kind that you make with your brain anyway. But some part of him, his feet probably, had automatically turned onto Norwich and then into the alley that led toward Orchard Avenue. And a little later, probably pretty close to ten o’clock, Toby and Bear turned into the passageway between the Gypsy Camp and the Casa Rosada, squeezed in through the loose plank, and curled up together on the crib mattress, behind the caravan mural.

TOBY DIDN’T SLEEP much that night. Although he was pretty comfortable, curled up with Bear on the old crib mattress, things kept waking him up. It wasn’t just the fleas, either. Actually, he was getting kind of used to them. Once it was the scream of a police siren, and another time it was a faint ghostly noise that seemed to be coming from the alley beyond the high board fence. And now and then it was just Bear, having a lively paw-twitching dream. Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, Toby gave up on sleeping and began to do some serious thinking. That turned out to be a big mistake. Serious thinking at that time of night usually is.

As soon as he gave his brain the green light, it turned traitor and began to torment him with a long parade of scary facts. Facts like how likely it was that the police, or whoever it was who had been right outside the gate with Ken yesterday, would be coming back again today. And how, even if they didn’t, the other Gypsies undoubtedly would. And how there just wasn’t any way that one of them, or all of them, for that matter, would be able to keep their mouths shut for very long. And, the most tormenting possibility of all, the things that would probably happen if he got caught and forced to go back home.

And all the facts led to just one conclusion: he was going to have to leave the old storage-yard hideout and go somewhere else. But where? And also, how soon? He’d had about all he could take of late-night streets, so it would have to be in the morning, in spite of the danger of being seen by people who might recognize him. Being around people was dangerous when you were a fugitive, but after considerable thought, Toby decided that a lot of hurrying people might not be as dangerous as a few curious passersby. During the rush hour, then, might be best, when the streets and sidewalks were crowded and most people were in too much of a hurry to notice who might be scurrying along beside them. That, he decided, would have to be it.