Slowly over these days the way they played checkers changed, as Dave learnt to attend to what Giovanni wanted, not pushing him for an answer or rushing in with his own ideas, but waiting, listening, the way the silence which was Giovanni listened. At first he could only do it with speed games, and then not all the time, but after a while he developed a system of reaching for each piece in turn, keeping arm and hand relaxed, not expecting anything, and he’d find he was picking up a piece and moving it almost without noticing what he was doing. It didn’t always work, because his Dave-mind couldn’t help interfering sometimes—or if not actually interfering at least watching what was happening and thinking about it—and that spoilt things. But when it did work they had some interesting games, because Giovanni seemed to think of moves which Dave mightn’t have. They were well matched and often had close finishes, winning, losing, or drawing about equally.
When they weren’t playing Dave thought about it quite a bit, and talked to Giovanni about it sometimes.
“It’s really interesting,” he said. “Most of the time, as far as I’m concerned, you’re pretty well as real as I am, and you’re different from me—somebody else. But if I had to bet my life on it—if the goons came in and pointed a gun at me and said, ‘We’re going to shoot you unless you tell us whether Giovanni’s real or not, and you’ve got to get it right’—then I’d have to say I’ve made you up. I’m hallucinating you. You’re a trick of my mind. Those lines on the stone, for instance—I don’t think I’m hallucinating them. They’re there all right, but somebody else made them, and I just worked them into my Giovanni hallucination.
“But if you’re a trick of my mind, you’re some trick. You realize I can play a game of checkers against myself with part of my mind thinking for me, and knowing all about it, and another part of my mind thinking just as hard for you and I just don’t know that’s happening? Weird.”
On the fourteenth morning of his captivity Dave woke with violent diarrhea. It was before dawn but he just got to the bucket in time, groping across the cell in the dark. Almost before he had finished he was on his knees vomiting into the reeking mess. He cleaned himself up as best he could and crawled back to the bed, where he lay sweating and shivering. He needed to get up twice more before he heard the voice call from the door. The hood was ready with the clothes by his bed. He groped for it, dragged it on, and turned his face to the wall.
The man must have realized what was up from the stench. Dave heard him pause inside the door. He came and crouched by the bed.
“Senti male?” said the voice. “Sick?”
Dave groaned. A hand slid under the hood and felt his forehead, then tried his pulse.
“OK. No food. Drink plenty water,” said the voice.
The man left, taking the bucket. When he brought it back some while later he placed it by the bed and left again without a word.
By evening Dave was delirious. From then on it was sometimes night and sometimes day but mostly dreams. There were people in the room sometimes. Somebody, a woman, he thought, washed him carefully in tepid water. Another time somebody took his temperature and pulse and laid him on his back, and hands that knew what they were doing felt inquiringly over his stomach. In his dream the hands belonged to someone who was deadly afraid. Later there was medicine, bitter and shriveling in the mouth but causing a comfortable glow once swallowed. After that, sleep. And through the nights and days and wakings and sleepings, in dreams, in the times when he was aware of the shrill of the cicadas and almost knew where he was and why, a feathery cool touch on his forehead, a something in his hand too vague to be another hand, but patiently holding his, hour after endless, restless hour.
On the morning after they had given him the medicine he woke and saw Giovanni standing by his bed.
Dave knew at once it was him. He was a dark-haired boy with a rather square face and a deep dimple in his chin. He had eyebrows with an upward tuft at the outer ends, soft brown eyes, and a large mouth with smile marks at the corners. He looked very sure of himself, almost grown up, though Dave guessed he was probably about fifteen. He was wearing a white shirt, open at the collar, a brown cardigan, slacks—not jeans—and absurd pale brown suede shoes with laces and pointy toes. It was as if he’d been dressed for a play set about forty years back, Dave reckoned. Something like that.
In spite of his being so obviously there, so obviously himself, Dave could see he wasn’t solid. Not that he was transparent or misty or anything like that. He was more like a really good 3-D TV image might be—you could tell that if you put your hand out it would go right through it. Even if he’d been feeling less feeble Dave wouldn’t have wanted to try that. It wouldn’t have felt right—it would have been an intrusion.
None of this surprised him. He hadn’t expected it, but somehow he was ready for it to happen.
“Hi,” he said. “Good to see you.”
Giovanni smiled and said something but Dave heard nothing, or if he did it was only the faintest whisper of a whisper. When Giovanni sat down the straw beneath him did not stir, but when he patted the back of Dave’s hand Dave felt the faint touch and recognized it from his delirium. He didn’t feel like talking. He felt emptied, wasted away, barely real—just like Giovanni, in fact. He wondered how many days he’d been ill—three or four, he thought, but there was no way of telling.
After a while Giovanni cocked his head, said something, and rose. He smiled down at Dave, raised a hand, and walked away into the niche in the corner, out of sight. A couple of minutes later Dave heard the man’s shoes on the stairs. He felt too feeble to rise and he couldn’t see what they’d done with the hood, so he rolled over to face the wall and covered his face with his hands. The man didn’t call out, but simply unlocked the door and came in. The footsteps came to the bed. After a pause Dave felt the rough hand on his forehead.
“You hearing me?” said the voice.
“Yes. I think I’m a bit better …”
“OK. No talk. Shut eyes.”
Dave heard slight movements and the chink of metal on glass.
“OK. Now sit. Medicina,” said the voice.
An arm slid under his shoulders and helped him to raise himself onto his elbows. A spoon nudged at his lips. He sucked carefully at the bitter stuff, and barely prevented himself from coughing it out, but as it trickled down toward his stomach the glow of warmth began to spread through him. He sighed and lay back. That’s good stuff, he thought, whatever it is. He wondered if it had opium in it, or something. He wasn’t into drugs, though he’d tried pot a couple of times. This wasn’t the same, but the effect was sort of like. Perhaps that was why he could see Giovanni now. Opium was supposed to make you see funny things.
“OK,” said the voice. “I bring little food. Drink plenty water.”
He left. Dave lay where he was, feeling weak and stupid but strangely happy. Things weren’t really any better. He was still being held for ransom by these ruthless bastards, and he was still certain that Dad wasn’t going to play ball and he’d be stuck in this hole for months and probably never get out alive, but it didn’t matter. He realized that even when the man had been in the room with him he hadn’t been afraid. It would have been too much effort. He was wondering vaguely about this when he fell asleep.
He was woken by the feet on the stair, but he still didn’t have the energy to be afraid. The man didn’t come in at once. Instead there were noises of metal on metal, followed by a low, vague roaring which it took Dave a couple of minutes to recognize as the sound of a camping stove. It stopped, the lock rattled, and the voice called, “Shut eyes.”
Dave did so. The man came in, told him to sit, and tied a blindfold round his head. Dave could already smell the meaty steam of some kind of broth. The man supported his shoulders and with no apparent impatience held a mug to his lips while he slowly sipped. The soup was pretty good, with herbs and garlic in it. It was probably what the man was having for his own lunch. Dave finished and lay back.
“Thank y
ou,” he said without thinking. The man didn’t answer.
He slept again, and when he woke Giovanni was there, sitting patiently by the bed.
“Hi,” said Dave. “How does it feel to be an opium dream?”
Giovanni smiled but said nothing.
“I’m pretty feeble,” said Dave. “Not up to checkers, anyway. Sorry about that.”
Giovanni shook his head and made a forget-it gesture with his hands.
“I hope there’s more of that soup,” said Dave. “One thing about these goons—they’re not slobs. They do the job right. I wonder if I couldn’t persuade them to give up kidnapping and open a restaurant, and we’d get Dad to put up the capital. He wouldn’t mind … Hey! You mean you can hear me?”
Giovanni nodded.
“And you understand English?”
Giovanni gave a little shrug, tilted his head, and fluttered his right hand, palm down. A little bit. He could talk with his hands better than some English people can talk with their mouths.
“I can’t hear you, you know.”
A different shrug. A different gesture. Doesn’t matter.
“The question is, are you going to stay around when they stop giving me the medicine. I suppose I could go on being ill, but the runs are going to be tricky to fake.”
Sorry, you’ve lost me.
“Forget it, I was just talking.”
And even that much talk had been an effort. He closed his eyes and lay still, enjoying the feel of his own body slowly righting itself, of the goodness in the soup starting to seep its way through his digestion toward his bloodstream.
Giovanni stayed with him all afternoon while he dozed and woke and chatted for a minute or two at random and lay silent until he dropped off to sleep again. Finally he woke and found Giovanni gone, and a minute later heard the footsteps, followed by the roaring of the stove. This time, though, the man fed him a new kind of medicine, a sweet yucky cream, and left him with two soft-boiled eggs and some bread and a bottle of some sort of commercial drink, fizzy and sweet. Peering at the tiny print on the label, barely legible in the dim light, Dave worked out that it must be something like Gatorade, with glucose in it. They were looking after their sick animal pretty well, he thought. They’d got the vet in, and now they were following instructions, so it had better be worth their while. He peeled the eggs, put them in the bowl, and mopped them up with the bread, enjoying every mouthful. Giovanni did not return, and in an hour or so it was dark. He slept all night as peacefully as if he had been in his own bed.
Next morning Dave was already dressed by the time he heard the footsteps, so he rose and stood facing the wall and wearing the hood as he had done before his illness. He had debated whether to do this or to go on being an invalid, and had decided that he would rather choose himself to do it than wait to be told to. The man didn’t call out, and grunted to himself when he came in and saw Dave standing there, but this gave Dave no satisfaction because by then the old dread had descended. The man removed the hood and blindfolded him so as to feed him more of the new medicine. When he’d gone Dave found that as well as breakfast—bread and cold chicken—he’d left a plastic bag with clean clothes, used but fresh-smelling and about the right size.
Dave changed, folding the old clothes into the bag, and ate his breakfast. Next, falling back without thought into the old routine, he prized his nail from the crack and knelt by the calendar stone to record a fresh day. He’d decided to leave a gap for his illness, but as he started to scratch the first mark he was aware of Giovanni standing by his shoulder, though he had neither heard nor seen him come. He looked up.
“Hi,” he said. “How many days is it, do you know? I lost count.”
Giovanni held his hand up with fingers and thumb spread.
“Thanks,” said Dave, and carefully scratched the five marks in, and then dimmed them with dirt. After the first two, which had overlapped with what he thought of as Giovanni’s old calendar, he had allowed his line to dip so that it ran along the gap between Giovanni’s first and second lines, matching the one above it day for day. It was part of the whole business of keeping himself human, deciding on the right way to do the few small things he could do of his own will, and then doing them right. That was how Giovanni had kept himself human too. It was important not to cover up his older record, so that both of them would still be there to find long after Dave, too, was gone.
When he had finished he went back and lightly touched in Giovanni’s first nineteen marks, just enough so that they shouldn’t be lost.
“OK?” he said.
Giovanni smiled and raised a thumb.
“Right,” said Dave. “I don’t know whether I’m up to checkers, but shall we give it a go? I sort of remember someone mucking around with the straw when I was ill. Let’s hope they didn’t find them.”
In fact the checkers were where he had left them, under the bedding close in against the wall, but by the time he had drawn the board and laid them out he was exhausted and had to lie down. Giovanni settled cross-legged by the bed and waited patiently. It didn’t seem to make any difference to him whether he sat on the hard flagstones or the straw. Of course if your body’s not really there, Dave thought, it probably can’t feel things. It doesn’t ache or get cramp or pins and needles from staying too long in one position. But to look at, Giovanni seemed just as “there” as he had yesterday—still somehow not quite solid, but opaque and definite. The change of medicine didn’t seem to have made any difference. That was something.
“OK,” he said after a while, “let’s give it a go.”
He scooped a couple of armfuls of straw nearer the board, spread one of the blankets onto it, and lay down on his side, propping himself on his elbow. Giovanni settled opposite him.
“This is great,” said Dave. “You can just point to me what you want. You start.”
They played a slow game. Dave needed to rest a couple of times more but he kept his end up and they finished in a draw. His next rest drifted into a doze, and when he woke he realized that several hours must have passed. What’s more, he was now actually hungry. He didn’t feel like another game, so he simply lay and talked, or else just lay, barely thinking.
“Another thing about my dad,” he said at one point, “he’s got a pretty good voice. He says he wanted to be a professional singer—folk, like Pete Seeger or someone—but his dad made him go into Doggony Ribs instead. I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s just one of the things he tells himself. He just loves being rich, you see, and having his own airplane and stuff, but that doesn’t mean he can’t sing really nicely. He’s got a banjo he takes camping, and he likes to sit on a rock by the fire and sing when we’ve finished eating. Songs like ‘El Paso’ and ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ and ‘Tom Dooley.’ I mean, how phoney can you get? Here’s this fifty-year-old guy who makes his living selling junk food, and he’s sitting out on a piece of prairie which he owns far as you can see, every direction, and he’s got his over-the-top cowboy outfit and his forty-thousand-dollar horse and he’s singing these corny old songs … and it’s great! There’s stars and night smells and stuff, and the fire dying, and maybe a moon getting up so you can see a bit of snow along the tops of the mountains, and you sing your heart out. Me too. I can’t sing like Dad, but that doesn’t matter—I can follow. And they’re terrific to sing, whatever anyone says. You know ‘Tom Dooley’?”
Giovanni shook his head.
“I don’t suppose you would,” said Dave. “It’s very American. I’d never heard it till Dad sang it. The story’s a bit hard to get, but I think it’s about this guy called Tom Dooley who killed some woman and went on the run. And he was hiding out in Tennessee when another guy called Grayson tracked him down and brought him back to face trial. And now he’s been tried and he’s waiting to be executed. Right? It starts straight in on the chorus:
“Hang down your head, Tom Dooley.
Hang down your head and cry.
Hang down your head, Tom Dooley.
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Poor boy, you’re going to die.
“Give it a go?
“Hang down your head …
“What’s up?”
Giovanni wasn’t singing. Or smiling. Instead he was looking at Dave, who was lying half propped on the straw. He shook his head and gave one of his small shrugs, not getting it, bothered.
“Oh, come on, Giovanni. It’s only a song! It doesn’t mean anything. Anyway, I’m not. Not yet. If your calendar’s anything to go by—supposing it was yours—it’ll be three months, minimum, before they decide to cut their losses and pack it in. Anything can happen in three months. And I’m not going to stop singing my favorite songs because of these bastards!
“Hang down your head, Tom Dooley.
Hang down your head and cry …”
He watched Giovanni’s lips start to move, and they sang all four lines together.
“I met her on the mountain …”
sang Dave, and at the end of the verse conducted Giovanni into the chorus again. He sang with more than enjoyment, with a kind of exhilaration, discovering as he did so that what he’d just said without thinking was in fact true. He was not going to stop singing his favorite songs because of these bastards. That was another thing they couldn’t take away from him, even if he had to sing them under his breath.
This mood was still on him when, a little later, Giovanni got up and slipped off into his corner. Dave heard the sound of a hard shoe on the stair, so he knew it was the man with the voice, but as he stood by the wall with the hood over his head and his arms above his shoulders and listened to the man moving about, he realized that for the first time he wasn’t being crushed and made stupid by fear. Not that he had any impulse to demonstrate this by rebelling in some small way. He would go on being the model prisoner, but because he chose to—it was the only sensible thing—and not because he was paralyzed into obedience by fear. Right to the end he never lost that certainty.
The Lion Tamer’s Daughter Page 11
