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The Gypsy Game

Page 17

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder


  It was just about then, while Toby was right in the middle of explaining why he’d had to run away, when he became aware that someone else was in the basement. Someone besides himself and Garbo. And when he whirled around, there they were, a soggy Vince and Mickey, standing just inside the door, dripping rainwater into a big puddle at their feet. Like, maybe they’d been there for a long time, quietly dripping and listening to everything he’d said. Toby got to his feet, nodded coolly to the two wet cellar rats, and went back to his own corner. It wasn’t until he was under the blankets that he really began to lose it.

  He stayed there under the covers for maybe half an hour. Maybe longer. Now and then he could hear voices: Mickey’s squeaky and high-pitched one and Vince’s deep, slurred rumble. But he couldn’t hear what they were saying. No one tried to bother him while he was under the blankets, but when he finally did come out, he was surprised to find Mickey squatting just a few feet away, holding something in his hands and smiling his gargoyle grin.

  “Hi,” Mickey said. “For you. Vince got them for you.” He was holding out a little packet of soda crackers. Just two crackers in a plastic wrapper, the kind you get in restaurants to eat with your soup.

  “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” Toby took the crackers and tore open the top of the package. Across the room candles were burning in the corner where Vince was writing in a notebook. In her alcove, Garbo seemed to be asleep. Toby ate the crackers slowly, while Mickey went on staring and grinning. The dry, crumbly crackers went down hard and scratchy around the lump in Toby’s throat. When he’d finished eating, he thanked Mickey again and tried to grin back at him, without much luck.

  “Mickey,” Vince said. “Give it a break. Go to bed.”

  “Okay. Okay, Vince,” Mickey said. Getting clumsily to his feet, he stared down at Toby. When he put out his big, stubby-fingered hand, Toby couldn’t help pulling away, but all the poor guy did was pat him on the head. As if he were a dog or something. Then Mickey went off to his pile of blankets and, after a lot of flopping around, got into a beat-up old sleeping bag and went to sleep. Toby went back to bed, too. He was still lying there wide awake when he heard a sound and opened his eyes. It was Vince, standing right there beside his bed. In the flickering light of a candle his dark face was almost invisible.

  “Look kid.” His voice was so soft Toby had to strain to hear. “Go on home. What can they do to him that would be as bad as not knowing where you are?”

  He went away then, back to his corner. The candle went out, and Toby was left in the dark, trying not to think about what Vince had said.

  But I’m going to call him tomorrow, he told himself. That is, I will if I can find a pay telephone. And if I can get enough money for the call. I’ll just call, and when he answers, I’ll say I’m all right, and then I’ll hang up before he has time to ask me where I am.

  He thought about what he would say for a long time. Then he must have slept for a while and dreamed about it. In the dream his dad answered the phone, but all he said was that everything was fine, the way he always did when you asked him what was the matter. What he’d always said, even when things were the worst.

  When Toby woke up, he could tell it was already late morning. Saturday morning. He listened for a minute to be sure the other cellar rats were still sleeping, and then he got up and put all his stuff into his backpack. All except for what was left of the bag of cookies, which he left on the floor beside Mickey’s sleeping bag. Then he tiptoed to the door, climbed out, and started down Arbor Street on his way to University Avenue and Maple.

  It wasn’t so much that he’d changed his mind, because he really hadn’t. His mind didn’t seem to have had anything to do with it. It was as though some other part of him had made the decision. He was still on Arbor Street, walking faster and faster, when he heard someone shout his name, and there was his father, running toward him.

  Grabbing him by the shoulders, his dad shook him fiercely, laughing and yelling stuff like, “You crazy kid. You crazy, idiotic, courageous kid!”

  Toby grinned back at him and said, “Yeah, I’m glad to see you too.”

  Thirty

  “ALL RIGHT, YOU JERKS,” April practically shouted. “Come to order so we can get started, or else get out of here.”

  What April was trying to get started at that particular moment was the first Gypsy meeting since the return of Toby, which was already almost two weeks ago. The meeting was being held in April’s living room, and everybody was there. April and Melanie were sitting on the floor. Elizabeth was curled up in Caroline’s recliner chair, and Ken and Toby had taken over the couch, not to mention the coffee table, where Ken was doing something with a deck of cards. Marshall was curled up with Bear in front of the fireplace.

  That’s right, Bear. And it wasn’t the first time he’d been in the Casa Rosada, either. He’d been spending quite a lot of time at the Halls’ and the Rosses’ ever since the adults found out about him and heard how he’d helped to solve the mystery of Toby’s disappearance. And then it had turned out that although dogs (or bears) were not permitted as permanent residents in the Casa Rosada, there were no rules against having one as an occasional visitor. So now that Bear, officially speaking, belonged to Toby and lived at the Alvillars’, he could make fairly lengthy visits to the Halls or the Rosses without anyone complaining. Especially since he’d been to the vet’s for a couple of antiflea treatments. Today just happened to be one of Bear’s days to visit April and Caroline, so there he was right in the middle of the big, important meeting to decide the future of the Gypsy Game.

  As far as April was concerned, having Bear as an occasional visitor had some good results and some not so good. One of the good surprises was that it turned out that Caroline had always been a dog lover, and she liked having a part-time dog almost as much as April did.

  But then there was the Toby thing. Since Toby usually was the one who brought Bear over for his Casa Rosada visits, it meant that he was around quite a bit, too. April wasn’t too sure just how she felt about that. A couple of times when he was delivering Bear, he came on in and sat at the kitchen table long enough to have a Pepsi and talk to Caroline for a while.

  All kinds of people liked to talk to Caroline. That’s what April told Melanie and Elizabeth when they teased her about Toby’s visits. Anyway, she told them, they were just jealous because everyone was dying of curiosity to know why Toby had run away and how everything was going now that he was back with his dad. And having Toby around so much meant that April and her grandmother were the first ones to find out things like the kinds of threats the Mayfields actually had made, and how they turned out to be not all that dangerous.

  “Yeah,” Toby had admitted—to Caroline, of course, “I was kind of exaggerating when I said they were threatening to …” He made the throat-cutting motion. But then he went on and told about what the Mayfields had really threatened to do if his dad didn’t cooperate. All about the lies they were going to tell about his dad and how they were going to reopen the investigation into Toby’s mother’s death.

  “How awful,” Caroline said. “What a cruel thing to do.”

  Toby nodded, and for a moment there was a strangely serious expression on his face. Then he laughed and said, “But I guess they backed down right away when my dad sicced Roger on them. Roger Wallace the lawyer, that is. See, my dad and Roger have been friends since way back when they were kids, and Roger said the Mayfields didn’t have a leg to stand on and that my dad had all kinds of proof that he hadn’t had anything to do with what happened to my mother. And that he’s been a good father too. Well, not your usual neighborhood Boy Scout leader, Little League coach type, maybe, but not all that bad either.” Toby grinned. “Except for the canned tuna, that is. That’s what I told Roger. That, except for the canned-tuna diet, my dad never tortured me at all. And then the caseworker turned out to be sort of on our side, and after she and Roger talked to the Mayfields’ lawyer they decided to drop the whole adoption thing. And the way
it wound up, everybody cooled off some, and I might even visit them once in a while, as long as they let me decide when I want to leave.” Then he grinned again and said, “End of story.”

  End of that story anyway. But there was something else that had to be settled right away. Something April and Melanie had been working on for about a week. And that was what was going to happen to the Gypsy Game now that Toby was back home. The two girls had talked a lot about having a meeting and how they thought the other kids would vote, but the strange thing was they never really discussed what they, themselves, wanted to do. Not since the night that they’d had the big argument when Melanie said she thought having a game about Gypsies just wasn’t going to work. April wasn’t sure why they hadn’t discussed it, unless it was just that they didn’t want to risk having another fight. And having the meeting would be a good way to let the other kids do the arguing.

  It hadn’t been easy to arrange. As a matter of fact it had taken an awful lot of phone calls. Elizabeth agreed to come right away, of course, but Ken and Toby weren’t all that enthusiastic.

  “What’s the rush?” Ken said the first time they called him. “Nobody’s going to be doing anything in that muddy old storage yard until the rain stops. Besides, I couldn’t be there very often. Not for a while anyway. I just signed up for after-school basketball.”

  Toby seemed a little more interested. “Oh yeah,” he said. “You mean that game where I was going to get to be the VIP king of the Gypsies and tell everybody what to do?” But even after April set him straight on that one, he still said he might show up if they had a meeting.

  But after everyone finally arrived on a rainy Saturday morning and goofed around a lot and ate up all the cookies, Ken and Toby kept on wasting time with a deck of trick playing cards that Ken had brought to the meeting. Even after April got out her notebook and got ready to take notes, Ken and Toby just went on with what they were doing. Even after she asked them nicely to knock it off two or three times, and finally not so nicely. Like yelling, “All right, you jerks. Come to order so we can get started, or else get out of here.”

  “Sheesh. Listen to old February,” Ken said. “Who elected you president?”

  April gave him one of her icy stares. “Nobody did. But whose house is this, and whose grandmother made the cookies? And besides, I thought we were here on important business.”

  Ken went on shuffling. “Like what?”

  “You know like what. I told you on the phone. I told you that—”

  “Yeah, I know,” Ken interrupted, “but what’s the hurry? Like I said, we’re not going to be able to do anything out there for a long time. It’ll be too cold and muddy—”

  “We know that,” Melanie broke in. “But we, I mean I, think that maybe we need to decide whether or not to go on with the Gypsy Game. Because if we are going to, we could do a bunch of stuff at home right now, like making costumes and collecting stuff and”—she looked at April—“and reading books. You know, about Gypsies, like we did about Egypt, even when we couldn’t go outside. And if we’re not …”

  That seemed to get Ken’s attention, at last, and Toby’s too. “What do you mean if we’re not?” Toby asked. He stared at Melanie and then at April. “Oh, I get it,” he said, doing one of his most aggravating grins. “Like, no more playing games where a certain person isn’t the natural-born leader. Let’s see. You look kind of Irish, February. What are we going to do next? The Irish Game?”

  April had to work at it, but she managed to stay cool. “As a matter of fact,” she said in an icy tone of voice, “I’m not the one who wanted to stop. Am I, Melanie? Tell them about it, Melanie. Okay? Tell them why you didn’t want to do the Gypsy thing anymore.”

  Melanie looked embarrassed. “I didn’t say for sure I didn’t want to. I only said that finding out all those horrible things that happened to Gypsies was too … well, it was too depressing, I guess.”

  “Oh yeah? Horrible?” Ken finally looked interested. “What kind of horrible things?”

  So Melanie began to tell about the things she’d read in The Eternal Outcasts. All about how Gypsies had been beaten and killed and sold into slavery, all over the world, for hundreds and hundreds of years. And then how Hitler and the Nazis had killed so many thousands more.

  By the time Melanie finished, Elizabeth’s eyes were full of tears, which was pretty much what you’d expect of a sensitive fourth grader. But Ken was more of a surprise. He’d quit kidding around, and the questions he asked were pretty serious. Toby’s reaction had changed too.

  “Yeah,” he said when Melanie finally ran down, “I know all that stuff. My dad told me a long time ago. I just didn’t think you guys would be interested.”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t think we’d be interested?” April asked. “Don’t you think we want to know the truth about things, even if some of it is too horrible to play games about? What I think is …” Noticing the surprised look on Melanie’s face, April lost her train of thought, but after a moment she went on. “What I think is—it’s just too depressing.”

  After that it got quiet and stayed that way for an incredibly long time. As if nobody could come to a decision or even think of anything to say. For several minutes the only sound was the rain spattering against the windows and a soft snoring noise from across the room, where both Marshall and Bear were sound asleep.

  Toby spoke first, but what he started discussing wasn’t The Eternal Outcasts or the Gypsy Game or even real Gypsies. What Toby started telling was about Garbo and Vince and Mickey.

  Of course they’d all heard about the three of them before, the old beggar lady and the two guys who’d been living in the church basement. Toby had told how his three temporary roommates hadn’t tried to rob or hurt him or anything, and how Vince, actually, had been the one who’d persuaded him to go back to his father. But this time Toby told them quite a lot more.

  This time he told them more about Vince’s headaches, which made him almost blind and crazy with pain, and how Mickey was like a huge overgrown two-year-old. And that Garbo had told him that both Mickey and Vince had been in hospitals for a while until there wasn’t any money for them anymore, and they got sent out to learn to be responsible and self-sufficient.

  And how Garbo, herself, had no place to live because she didn’t have any family and was too much of an oddball to fit into the kinds of institutions they wanted to put her in. And so she’d been on the streets for a long time, begging for money for food and living wherever she could.

  “Garbo told me all sorts of stuff about them and what it was like to be what she called throwaway human beings,” Toby said. “That’s what she called them. All three of them, and me too while I was there.” Toby’s grin was one-sided and brief. “And cellar rats. She called us cellar rats. And outcasts, too.” He looked at Melanie. “Just like in that book you were talking about.”

  “Outcasts,” Toby said. And then he was quiet again for a while before he sighed and grinned in a strange way and said, “It’s not a whole lot of fun, being an outcast. Eternal or otherwise.”

  There was another long quiet spell before Ken said, “Hey, I got it. How about if we kind of try to help those dudes out a little? I mean, Garbo and those other dudes.” He looked around the group and then nodded. “You know, like getting some kind of project started for—”

  “Hold it. Hold everything, Kamata,” Toby said. “My dad already thought of that. He’s already been over to see Garbo a bunch of times. And he’s been talking to some of his friends about finding a place for people like them to live and—”

  Ken interrupted back, “Hey, I’ll bet my dad could help with that kind of real estate thing. I’ll ask him. I’ll ask my dad.”

  Then they all started having ideas, about bake sales and car washes and other ways to raise money. April was just saying that Melanie ought to be treasurer because she was good at math and keeping track of money, when Marshall woke up.

  Getting up from where he’d been lying with hi
s head on Bear’s neck, he wobbled over sleepily, rubbing his eyes. “Hi,” he said. “What are we talking about?” He looked at Melanie. “Are we talking about the Gypsy Game?”

  Melanie started to say, “No. Not about the—” when April interrupted.

  “That’s right,” she said. “A game about a different kind of Gypsies. I guess we’re talking about a different kind of Gypsy Game.”

  Marshall looked worried. “With bears?” he asked anxiously.

  “Sure, Marshamosis,” Toby said. “With bears. Couldn’t have a Gypsy Game without a bear, could we?”

  Everybody laughed and went back to making plans about ways to raise money, and maybe for another type of meeting to which parents and other adults might be invited.

  Everybody seemed pretty enthusiastic, at least for the moment. But later, when Ken and Toby and Elizabeth had gone home and Marshall had gone back to playing with Bear, April and Melanie talked about some of the problems that might arise and how much harder it would be this time because of having to get adults to agree on what ought to be done and how to do it and especially on who was going to get to run things and make all the important decisions.

 

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