The Gypsy Game (6 page)

April eyed him suspiciously. “You’re the one with a Gypsy grandmother. What kind of tricks did your grandmother teach you?”

For the next ten minutes or so, April and Toby argued about what kind of tricks Gypsy bears usually did and whether they could teach them to Marshall’s bear. And while they were arguing, Marshall coaxed the big shaggy—whatever—into the yard and shut the gate behind him.

“Come on, Bear,” Marshall kept saying, and the “bear’s” ears would go up and he would go where Marshall wanted him to.

The dog-bear did seem to like Marshall best, but the weird thing was that he seemed to react whenever anyone called him Bear. Whenever anyone said, “Here, Bear,” he would bounce over to that kid and try to lick him or her in the face. Before long everyone was getting into the act, particularly Toby, who started trying to teach Bear to dance
on his hind legs, something that, according to Toby, all Gypsy bears were supposed to do.

“Here, watch this,” he said. Holding up Bear’s front paws, he made him walk around on his hind legs. Bear didn’t seem to mind. With his tongue lolling out of one corner of his mouth and his head cocked to one side, he shuffled happily around on his hind feet. “Look, he’s dancing!” Toby yelled. He waltzed Bear around two or three times before he turned him loose. “He’s a bear all right,” he told Marshall. “Dances just like one.” Then he sniffed his hands and added, “Whee-oo. Smells like one too.”

Everybody laughed. All except Melanie. While everyone else seemed to be having a great time, Melanie was looking more and more worried.

“What’s the matter?” April whispered, pulling her aside, but almost before she finished asking, she began to guess.

“Marshall thinks that dog is really his,” Melanie whispered back, which was almost exactly what April was guessing she would say.

April nodded. “Yeah, I was thinking of that. But you know what? The good news is he doesn’t have any identification or even a license. I checked. He has a collar but no license tag. So maybe he is just a stray that doesn’t belong to anybody.”

“I know.” Melanie’s eyebrows had their worried tilt. “But we’ll have to find out. We’ll have to find out if some family in the neighborhood is missing a big black”—she smiled ruefully—“you know what.”

“You know what—what?” Ken had obviously been eavesdropping. “What’re you guys talking about? The end of the world or something?”

“No,” April whispered, “she’s just worried about how Marshall’s going to take it if we find out that his ‘bear’ really belongs to someone else.”

“Yeah, I thought of that.” Ken actually seemed concerned. “Tough, huh?”

April and Melanie looked at Ken in surprise and then gave each other a look that said something like, “Well, what do you know. Ken Kamata being a nice guy? Big
surprise
!”

It wasn’t so much of a surprise, though, when you thought about the fact that it was Marshall he was being nice about. Marshall seemed to have that kind of effect on people.

“Hey,” Ken said suddenly, “we could check the bulletin board at Peterson’s. If anybody in the neighborhood loses a pet, they usually put up a ‘lost’ notice there. We could look to see if anyone’s advertising for a lost …” He stopped and grinned. “A lost—whatever. And then if there’s no notice, we can just, you know, stop worrying about it.”

Melanie sighed. “But I suppose we ought to put up our own ‘found’ notice, too. You know, the kind people put up when they’ve found somebody else’s lost pet.”

“Yeah, I suppose so,” April said quickly. “I can do that. I’ll be the one to do that, Melanie.”

When Melanie looked at her sharply, April tried to look innocent. That was one of the problems about having such a close friend. The kind who guessed what you were thinking even when you didn’t particularly want them to. Like when you were thinking that bulletin-board signs could be written in extremely small handwriting so that you’d practically have to have a microscope to read it. Or else it could
be kind of crowded in underneath some of the other notices.

Melanie was still looking suspicious. “Anyway, even if nobody claims him, that still won’t solve the whole problem. The rest of the problem is, Where is he going to live? It’s against the rules at the Casa Rosada.” She looked at Ken. “So I guess that kind of leaves it up to you or Toby.”

“ ’Fraid I can’t help,” Ken said. “My mom’s allergic.” He grinned. “She’s allergic to dogs anyway, and I have a feeling that a bear would be just as bad. But maybe Toby could take him in. I’ll bet he could. I know he and his dad used to have a dog a few years ago. Hey, Tobe. Come over here.”

Toby stopped playing with Marshall and Bear and came over to the shed. “Yeah? What’s up, Kamata?”

“We were talking about who should take Bear home with them.” Ken grinned at Toby as he went on, “I guess the thing is the Casa Rosada has a strict rule about no bears, so that’s out. And I can’t because of my mom’s allergies. So I guess that kind of leaves you.”

At first Toby was smiling. “Yeah,” he said, “I probably could. My dad doesn’t mind having a …” But then, all of a sudden, his voice trailed off to nothing. “My dad doesn’t …,” he repeated, and then for several seconds he didn’t say anything at all. And when he did begin to talk, it was only to say, “No. I couldn’t. Not right now. Not until … Well, probably not for a pretty long time.”

When Toby said he couldn’t take Bear home, it seemed to Melanie that he had a very un-Toby-like expression on his face. And even stranger was what he did when April and Ken started pestering him to tell them why he’d
changed his mind. And what was strangest of all was what he
didn’t
do. Like not getting angry or even wising off. Instead, he just got a faraway look in his eyes, as if he was thinking about something so important he almost didn’t hear them. And whatever he was thinking about wasn’t making him feel very good.

Afterward April and Melanie remembered that the afternoon when Bear arrived was the first time they began to realize that Toby Alvillar was in some kind of trouble.

THE WAY IT actually turned out, Bear stayed all alone in the Gypsy Camp that night. Nobody liked the idea very much, particularly Marshall and Bear. But after Toby backed out of taking him home, there just wasn’t any other solution. Everyone agreed that it had to be the Gypsy Camp or nothing. Everyone except Marshall, that is. Marshall kept insisting that they should at least ask Mr. Bodler.

“Maybe he’d say yes,” Marshall kept saying. Mr. Bodler was the janitor at the Casa Rosada, as well as being the landlord’s spy who tattled on anyone who broke the apartment-house rules. Rules like not having a dog. Marshall knew about the no dogs rule, but since he’d never heard of a no bears rule, he kept thinking Mr. Bodler just might say okay.

“I’m sure there must be a no bears rule too,” Melanie told him, but that didn’t convince Marshall. It wasn’t until April said that she definitely remembered reading a no bears clause in Caroline’s rental contract that Marshall gave up on asking the janitor and agreed to help make the old shed into a temporary bear shelter.

“Just till we figure out something better,” Melanie told
him. “It’s the only way. And you mustn’t tell Mr. Bodler or anyone about him. If you do, they’ll just come and take him away and put him in the pound.”

“What’s a pound?”

“It’s a place where they put animals that nobody wants, and after a while if nobody comes for them, they have to kill them.”

Marshall looked horrified. “I won’t tell,” he agreed. “Not ever.” He patted Bear’s shaggy head. “But what will he eat?”

“Good question, kid,” April said. “Big question! Enough food for a bear that size is going to be a very big question.” Then she looked around and added, “And the only answer has got to be—money!”

Immediately everyone looked at Ken. When money was the question, Ken was usually the answer. Sure enough, reaching into his pocket, Ken pulled out a whole fistful of coins and even a dollar bill or two. “Okay. I get the message,” he said. “What should I get, Toby? What did you feed that dog you used to have? Hey, Tobe. I’m talking to you.” Toby seemed to be spacing out again.

“Dog?” Marshall asked, frowning.

While Melanie explained to Marshall that bears and dogs eat pretty much the same kinds of things, Ken kept on trying to get Toby’s attention. When he finally did, Toby said his dad used to feed their dog kibble.

Then, after Ken offered to go buy a bag of kibble, Toby kind of came back to earth and said he’d go along to help. And while they were at it, they could pick up an old baby-crib mattress that was part of his father’s junk collection. A mattress that would be just the right size for a bear’s bed.

“Won’t your dad care if you take it?” Melanie asked.

“Naw, he probably won’t even notice. Besides …” Toby stopped talking, and his eyes went unfocused again.

“Besides …?” April prompted.

Toby shrugged. “Oh, nothing. I was just going to say that he’s been trying to get rid of some of his junk lately. Taking stuff to the dump, and like that.”

Melanie was puzzled. There wasn’t anything scary about taking stuff to the dump. Particularly when you had as much of it as Toby’s dad did. But there was definitely something about it that seemed to make Toby look—well, almost frightened.

So Toby and Ken went off together to get Bear a bed and something to eat, and Melanie went home to get a bunch of old raggedy blankets her mother was getting ready to throw away. Meanwhile April stayed in the storage yard with Marshall and Bear, but she didn’t waste her time. While they waited, she cleaned out the sacred fire pit and made it into a bear-sized drinking bowl.

After Ken and Toby came staggering back carrying a baby-crib mattress and a huge sack of dog kibble, they all pitched in to help make the one-time Egyptian temple into a kind of international Bear hideout—Egyptian, Greek, American, and Gypsy. The secret hiding place for Egyptian hieroglyphic scrolls under the statue of the Greek goddess Diana became a storage place for a bag of American dog kibble, and the Gypsy caravan mural served as a great extra wall to make the bed more private and shield it from the wind. When they had finished, they stood around and watched Bear eat an amazing amount of kibble, drink from the sacred fire pit, tromp around in a circle on the crib
mattress, and then lie down with his big black head resting on his paws. He looked pretty happy and contented right then, but when they all went out and locked the gate, he did whimper a little. And so did Marshall.

After the gate was locked, they all stood around for a moment and listened to the whimpering. “I sure hope he doesn’t bark and bother the Professor,” Melanie said, and when Marshall asked, “Do bears bark?” everyone kind of sighed and ignored him. It was late by then and getting dark, and nobody had the energy to deal with any more bear versus dog debates.

They’d started down the alley next to the Casa Rosada when Ken looked at his watch and said, “
Sheesh
. I didn’t know it was so late. I got to get home. So long, everybody. So long …” He looked around. “Hey, where’s Alvillar?”

It wasn’t until then that they noticed that Toby was gone. He’d apparently taken off for home as soon as they left the Gypsy Camp without waiting to say good-bye to anybody. Not even Ken. Which was another definitely un-Toby-like action. On the way up the stairs at the Casa Rosada, April wanted to bring up the subject, but Melanie was busy reminding Marshall that he wasn’t to tell anybody about Bear.

“Not anybody!” she said again pointedly. “At least not yet.”

Marshall got the message. “Not even Mom and Dad,” he said. “Not yet. Or the pound will get him.…”

“Right!” Melanie said. They’d reached the door to the Rosses’ apartment by then, and as soon as Marshall disappeared inside, Melanie turned to April and said just what
April had been thinking of saying, “What do you suppose is wrong with Toby? He was acting kind of weird today, don’t you think?”

“That’s just what I was going to ask you,” April said.

They made a couple of guesses then, like maybe he and his father really were starving, or maybe his father was sick. But neither one seemed too likely.

“He’d have told us if it was anything like that,” Melanie said. “Or told Ken, anyway. It must be something else.”

“Yeah,” April agreed. “Something more …”

“
Mysterious
,” they said in unison.

The next morning April got up early and made her own breakfast. Then, still sitting at the kitchen table, she began to work on the “found” notice for Peterson’s bulletin board. Written on a torn piece of notebook paper, in tiny, almost unreadable handwriting, the notice said: F
OUND
:
One large black shaggy-haired dog. Please call 555-6790
. Not that her handwriting was ever the greatest, but this time she had taken special pains to make it illegible. Just as she finished checking to see if it needed any more smears or scribbles, the kitchen door opened and her grandmother came in.

Caroline was dressed for work in one of her boring business suits, and her gray hair was pinned back in its usual neat bun. The way she dressed had been one of the reasons April had been sure her grandmother was going to be a real drag. At least she’d thought that at first, before they’d had a chance to get better acquainted.

“Hey,” April said, quickly putting the “found” notice in her pocket. “I thought you weren’t working today.”

“I thought so too,” Caroline said. “But I’m having to fill in on short notice. And I’m running late.” As she hurriedly started the coffee and put some bread in the toaster, she told April that she’d already checked with Mrs. Ross and it would be the usual arrangement for workdays when school was out. The usual arrangement was that April had lunch with the Rosses and during the rest of the day at least checked in with Mrs. Ross from time to time. Which turned out to be pretty automatic anyway, since she and Melanie Ross were generally together.

“Some toast?” Caroline asked April as she poured the coffee.

April shook her head. “No thanks. I got up early and fixed my own breakfast.”

“Oh, did you?” Caroline stopped bustling around long enough to give her a surprised look. “Something special going on in Egypt today?” she asked.