Call Down Thunder Read online

  For Patrick, a poet in the sun

  The grace and shadow of a single tree in bloom settled in me like gentleness

  From ‘Shade’ by P. Daly

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was like this.

  Reve’s skiff, a small open-decked fishing boat, was in close to a ragged cliff that butted like a boxer’s nose out into the sea. In hard weather this was a bad bit of coastline. There were rocks and shallows and eddies that would pull and twist a small boat about and smash it up against that cliff when a sea was running. It happened. But today the sea was glass, and anyway Reve reckoned it was worth the risk coming in this close; you could net good jackfish here, if you were patient.

  The sea barely moved, just a faint sigh as it breathed against the cliff, and Reve was patient.

  He could see every twist of weed and strip of white sand tucked up between the rocky gulleys; he could see sunlight flashing as shoals of sprat twisted in and out of shadow. Six metres down right here, but everything looked so close he could almost reach out and touch it.

  The sun scored down the back of his neck; he wiped the sweat from his eyes, squinted against the glare. Concentrate.

  The rest of the fishing boats were far out, nailed to the horizon. It was usually the way, him fishing on his own like this. It was Tomas’s boat, and not every fisherman was Tomas’s friend. Reve didn’t mind one way or the other. In fact he liked to fish alone.

  There!

  Maybe five metres away, on the ocean side of the skiff.

  And again.

  The sea boiled as a big fish turned rapidly, just beneath the surface. Reve shifted his grip on the coil of net. One end was fixed to the stern, the other he gripped in his left hand, the belly of the net he held in his right, ready to throw.

  Up in the bows, tucked into the shade under the folded sail, a scruff mat of a dog opened one eye and murmured a growl. Best fishing dog in the village – only fishing dog in the village – lazy as hell, but he loved it up there in the bow, keeping an eye on Reve. Like he was the boss.

  There it was again, a little closer. A twist and slash on the surface. Big! Feeding on sprat, must be. He hoped it was a jackfish, something bigger than Tomas had ever caught, a giant fish, deep and strong, a fish to put dollar in their pockets.

  Come on, a little closer. A little closer.

  Tiny white fish shrapnelled out of the water, instantly followed by a wide splash of silver. He flung out the net. Perfect. It uncoiled in the air and then sank fast. He counted: one and two. And then his hands blurred they were hauling so fast, sweeping in the net. Any second he would feel it, that weight, and then the bang and tug of the tangled fish.

  But there was no weight, nothing. The net slithered in around his feet and Sultan didn’t even bother to raise his head, just yawned and pushed his nose down into his paws.

  Reve grimaced. He had been so sure.

  He splashed seawater over his face and head, then shook the wet from him just like Sultan did when he came out of the sea and up on to the beach. Then he leaned out over the side, willing that jackfish to swim right up to him. ‘Come on,’ he urged. ‘I know you there, you fat old fish. Come on an’ I snatch you up in my hand.’ He leaned over further, pushing his face down into the cool surface, squeezing his eyes tight and then opening them slowly . . .

  Hair like flame burning around her face, lips a little apart, like she was about to say something. A smile that had no happiness in it and a hand held up to beckon . . . or maybe to wave goodbye.

  So close he could almost touch her, except he couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. It wasn’t possible. It was his sister, it was Mi. And it wasn’t her at all. Long dark strands of weed reached up and stroked across her face, criss-crossed, as if tightening like a net . . . He stared so hard his eyes felt as if they were about to tear out of their sockets and every tendon on his neck was bunched up tight. His heart was hammering in his chest. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing and yet there she was.

  He jerked back, spluttering.

  Sultan, suddenly alert, was up, paws on the side, barking and barking. Reve didn’t even hear his dog. He took a big breath and dived overboard and swam fast, straight down, eyes wide, staring this way and that.

  He reached the bed, lungs bursting, grabbed a fistful of thick weed and twisted round on himself, half expecting her face to be right there, her cold hand reaching for him. A black crab the size of a human skull waved his claws at him and then backed down into a crevice.

  Where was she?

  Like the cursed fish. Nothing.

  His head pounded, a mallet banging his chest. He let go and kicked hard, bursting through the surface with such force that his head, shoulders and chest came right up out of the water. He gasped for breath and clutched at the side of the boat, barely aware of Sultan whining and scratching and licking at his hand.

  He let go and dived again, steadier this time, looking this way and that. Maybe a freak current had pulled the body down into a rock gulley, maybe . . . He surfaced again. The tide was slack. There was no current.

  He dived again and again and then, exhausted, hauled himself back on board and slumped down in the stern.

  He must have imagined her.

  Mi never went in the sea. Never. Never stepped in a boat. No one get drowned if they don’t go in the water, she used to say.

  So it couldn’t have been her. Maybe someone else who looked like her? No. No one look like Mi. No one got that red hair. No one got her looks.

  The sun could make you see things . . . give you waking dreams. He knew that all right, but it’d never happened to him. He didn’t even dream in the night-time. Never had. Mi was the dreamer – half lived in a different world from the rest of them. But not Reve. He worked. He fished. He cooked. He minded Tomas. He minded Arella. He minded Mi. What time did he have for dreaming?

  Sultan sniffed his hand and then put a paw on Reve’s leg.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said, more to himself than to the dog.

  Sultan tilted his head, as if he understood perfectly well what the boy’s words meant, and then retreated to his shelter in the bows.

  Reve didn’t move. Maybe this was one of those things that had meaning, like with Mi and the way she could tell when a storm was coming; the way her spirit voices told her things, like when she stopped in front of old Baufice and told him he needed to take two nets because he was going to catch more fish than one net could swallow. And that’s what happened. No one else caught a thing that time, not even Tomas.

  Or the time she stopped i
n front of Elena’s and told her she was going to birth two babies and that her sow would birth piglets on that same day. She hadn’t been joking. Mi didn’t joke. It happened like she said.

  Maybe he had caught this from her somehow, the seeing of something that carried meaning. Maybe Mi was in trouble again. Maybe worse this time.

  The village, Rinconda, was more than five miles up the coast, and a long hard row, but maybe he could pick up a scrap of breeze away from the shelter of the shore. Quickly he poured seawater into the battered plastic box where he had the jackfish he had caught earlier, covered them up again, pulled out the oars, set them into the pins, then sat on the centre thwart and rowed. He dug the blades in and pulled, heaving the skiff out from the cliff. He dug, and pulled and feathered the blade and tried not to imagine the trouble she was in. He rowed steady but hard, putting his back into it, trying to keep the worry down in its hole, but every time he pulled on the oars that face floated into his mind.

  The sweat poured down his back and his hands burned against the wood but he pulled hard and ignored the pain. He had seen a drowned body one time, all snagged up in a net. He’d got that memory sharp and clear. He saw it all again right now as he rowed: the skin gone grey and puffy, the eyes dead like the eyes of a shark-fish, the fingers poking through the net, and when the body was laid out they’d all seen the little hole in his chest, all puckered up like a belly button. The whole village had seen that, been made to see it.

  He had been five and Mi had been eight years old the day their father was dragged up out of the water and on to the harbour wall; the day their mother had stepped out of their lives; the day Tomas the Boxer took them into his home.

  He rowed hard but steady, and as soon as he felt the touch of wind on his cheek he shipped the oars and scrabbled up the sail and sat back in the stern, his eyes fixed on the hazy blur that was Rinconda, willing the skiff to cut through the water and bring him home quick.

  CHAPTER TWO

  LoJo was on the beach when Reve sailed the skiff in. There was a little harbour at the foot of the village that they all called ‘the wall’ because that’s about all it was: a wide stone wall that hooked out into the sea and gave some shelter in the stormy season. The real reason it was there was because it was for unloading the fast boats when they slipped in at night, and it was all sweat and fear and hurry in case the coastguard or police came poking their nose. Most fishermen, like Reve, kept their skiffs up on the sand and used the harbour wall for mending nets, passing time. The village itself stretched back from the harbour almost as far as the north–south coast highway. It was not much more than a straggle of shacks, mostly clad in black plastic, with patchwork roofs, rickety porches and sandy yards pegged out with driftwood and wire fences. A few men with money had more substantial places: Theon, Reve’s uncle, had the cantina and Calde had a block-stone house, workshops and a builders’ yard and a factory where some of the Rinconda women were lucky enough to work.

  As soon as LoJo spotted Reve he ran down the beach and waded in. ‘Seen you comin in,’ he called, grabbing hold of the bow. ‘You ahead of everyone, Reve. Done any good?’

  ‘Some,’ said Reve, letting the sail go and jumping over the side. ‘You seen Mi?’ He was anxious to hear she was all right; the whole strange business of the young woman in the water nagged at him worse than a salt sore. But then the truth was he worried about Mi all the time anyhow.

  ‘That’s what I come tell you,’ said LoJo, taking the other side of the skiff and helping Reve to drag it inshore. ‘I seen her coming back from Theon’s, walking fast, like she get bee-stung.’

  Sultan had his front paws up on the bow and was barking, as he always did, wanting the boys to hurry and pull the skiff on to the sand, so he could jump down without getting wet.

  ‘Go on!’ said Reve impatiently. ‘You nothin but noise. Get down!’

  Sultan barked again and jumped, skipped ahead of a little wave and then, without a backwards glance, trotted off along the beach, away from the harbour and the village, heading for Mi’s place.

  ‘What happen with Mi?’ asked Reve. ‘She start shakin, falling down . . . ? Someone throw bad talk at her?’

  ‘Maybe. I seen Hevez and Ramon try to stop her on her way out from Theon’s, but she just push by, came down the track half running she was going so fast, and she was talking to herself, real angry, and she pass me an’ my mother like we wasn’t there. My mother call to her but she just kept on, smoke lightning. Bet she was haulin a curse on Hevez, bet that was what she was at. Everybody know she can call down a curse bette’n anyone on the coast, shrivel up the devil and push him down in the hole – that’s what I hear.’

  LoJo spat on the sand. For a boy a year younger and almost a head shorter than Reve he sometimes seemed like one of the old fishermen. Only difference maybe was that he had more talk in him than a radio station.

  ‘Hevez getting worse all the time, Reve. Reckons no one touch him for anything.’

  Of all the bad things in Rinconda, Reve thought, Hevez and his friends, or maybe Hevez and his uncle Calde, were the worst. Hevez was a swagger boy with a dirt mouth, who liked to pick fights and give hurt, but only when he had his friends at his back, and only when the boy he was picking on was half his size. LoJo got knocked around a fair bit.

  Hevez’s uncle, Calde, ran the village and owned most of the skiffs in the fleet. Tomas was quite unusual having his own boat. LoJo’s father, Pelo, a quiet, hardworking fisherman, owed Calde all the time. Most of anything a body wanted in Rinconda, then it was Calde that got paid. If he got his fat fingers in you, he’d squeeze your gut tight till you paid whatever dollar you owed him: fishermen like Pelo paying off loans on their boats, boats that Calde’s yard fixed and built; families who had to go burying up on the hill and wanted a coffin, that got made in the yard as well.

  And he had other business: he was hooked up, smuggling for the Night Man. That was business that no one breathed a word about, not unless they wanted to end up beaten, maybe get an accident happen to them, maybe get tangled in a net.

  That was why Hevez felt he could do just what he wanted. He never did a spit of work, just showed off his new jeans and thought any girl in the village lucky if he let her bend down and kiss his foot. Some did, but Mi never gave him the time of day, looked right through him every time he stepped in her path.

  Reve said, ‘They didn’t follow Mi out of the village, did they?’

  LoJo shook his head. ‘They up on the wall.’

  Reve put his hand up to shade his eyes. He could make out one or two figures working on their nets, which meant it wasn’t Hevez and his friends. ‘They’re not there now, Lo. You sure they didn’t cut along the beach?’

  LoJo looked worried. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so, Reve. I didn’t see them go that way. They never gone out there, have they? That’s her place. Everybody know, you don’t go out to Mi’s place unless she hold a meeting . . .’

  ‘They touch my sister, I swear I do some bad thing.’ Reve hurriedly finished wrapping the sail, yanking the cord tight so the canvas wouldn’t come loose. And then checked his catch. He should take the jackfish straight up to the cold store, but they would be fine for a little while. He’d see Mi was all right first. He scooped fresh seawater over them and covered them again.

  ‘What you goin do, Reve? My daddy says your Tomas the only man who can face down Calde. But I reckon you need me if you goin pick a fight with Hevez.’

  Even though he was anxious to get going, Reve couldn’t help smiling. LoJo had more talk than muscle; a strong wind would blow him over. ‘Your daddy won’t want you getting in fights with anyone, LoJo, not with a baby coming.’

  ‘I can throw a punch good as anyone. I got whipcord and steel in my right arm, Reve.’

  ‘You got so much muscle, maybe you carry up the sail for me?’

  ‘Sure I carry it for you, but you goin teach me to box, the way Tomas teach you?’ He stabbed his skinny fist into the air, once, twice, and p
uffed out his cheeks, like he was doing some real hurt. ‘Then we pull down anyone who push their weight. See!’ He snapped an upper cut and almost hit himself on the nose. ‘Like that, eh! Land one in Calde’s belly.’

  ‘Then you’d be the king of Rinconda. Here –’ he passed him the boom and sail – ‘you take this now.’

  ‘I’m serious, Reve, hey, you teach me some moves. Hevez don’t push you like he do me – him an’ Ramon an’ Sali.’

  ‘I’ll teach you, Lo, but not now. You try keepin out of their way.

  ‘My daddy say everybody in this place got their head tuck in the sand. You tellin me that’s what I got to do?’

  ‘No. Just take this up for me. I’ll see you later.’

  ‘OK Reve.’

  So they split: LoJo shouldering the long boom and sail, hurrying up the beach towards the little harbour, while Reve started to run along the hard sand to the right, heading the same way as his dog had gone. The real burning heat had gone out of the day, but the breeze was warm and sticky in his lungs and his body ached from the hard rowing, but he was used to that. He ran grimly. He didn’t have his head in the sand. He reckoned he could see what was happening.

  Mi was getting a name that stretched out beyond Rinconda. People brought her things so she would make a prayer or go step in the spirit world for them. But there were others who didn’t like having her anywhere near the village, a few sour-faced women mainly. She didn’t care ’bout them. Didn’t care what people said. Never had, but maybe that was because she was the one who had her head ‘tuck in the sand’.

  Part of the trouble was that with her flame-red hair there wasn’t anybody looked like her in Rinconda, not even Reve; and then she took herself off to live on her own in a busted-up old car. Asking for trouble, Tomas said.

  Hevez was trouble, him and his pack, dogs always sniffing round her. Only way to stop a dog sniffing was to give it a hard lesson. Reve bunched his fist as he ran.

  A third of a mile along the strand he could see the acacia tree that gave a bit of shade to her car. But he couldn’t see her sitting in her usual place, crosslegged up on the roof of the Beetle, staring out to sea.