Call Down Thunder Page 3

  ‘What you thinkin ’bout this, Sultan?’

  Sultan had busily trotted round to the stern, but at the sound of Reve’s voice he stopped and looked back up at him. He was a smart dog, smarter than the skinny mutts that nosed the back of the shacks, but not smart enough to answer any of the questions Reve had buzzing in his mind. Sultan cocked his head, waiting, but when Reve didn’t say anything else he put his paws up on the stern, sniffed the air and barked. He could smell the fish Reve had bundled under the stern thwart, and he knew they had to be taken up to the cold store.

  Reve wasn’t thinking about the fish. It was Mi; she was harder to read than the sea. That’s what he was thinking. The breeze was just strong enough to put a light ruffle on the sea and keep the heavy air moving. It would die away and then it would be a still night. Nothing heavy, no yellow in the sky: a perfect time for the Night Man to make a run across the border. If they came, it would be a good chance to earn a dollar; there was no way he was going to tuck his head down if there was money to be made.

  Then he grimaced. But if there was a spit chance of a storm blowing up out of nowhere, he couldn’t risk losing the skiff. Lose the skiff and that would be the end of everything. Maybe he would get LoJo to help him bring it high up above the tideline, just in case.

  He lifted out the catch and checked it. The fish smelt all right though the skin had started to dry up a little bit, but everyone said that if you catch and ice a fish on the same day it’s going to last fine till market. So that’s what he would do; take them straight to the fish store, ice five and keep two for the stove.

  He cut up to the right behind the first line of shacks and yards, avoiding the start of the main track which would have taken him by Tomas the Boxer, who would be sitting or lying outside his shack, just staring at the ocean. That was the most thing he did now that Reve was skilled enough to take the skiff out on his own. His shack was at the end of the track, the nearest to the harbour wall and the furthest from the highway. Anyone leaving Rinconda took that road; it was the road he and Mi would have to take if they went off looking like Mi wanted.

  After fifty metres he left the path that led behind the village, crossed a wire and skirted a mess of rubbish where pigs were rooting. Then he slipped through a narrow gap between two wooden buildings and came out right by LoJo’s place, and on to the main track again.

  LoJo’s mother, Ciele, was sitting up on the porch of her home, her baby girl on her knee. He stopped and asked her to tell LoJo he wanted help with the skiff.

  ‘When you goin get some muscle in your arm, Reve?’ She was easy and liked to tease the boys. Reve always felt this was a different family because of her, different to most families in Rinconda. ‘When you goin to get like Tomas the Boxer? He could carry that boat up from the shore on his own back. That’s what my Pelo say.’

  Mostly people grew old quickly in Rinconda, but Reve thought Ciele looked young, pretty too. Pelo was a lucky man to catch her, Tomas said. Like most people in Rinconda though, they struggled to get by; the shack was storm-battered, the porch warped and in need of replacing. Pelo wasn’t the luckiest fisherman, and word was that he struggled to pay his debts to Calde.

  ‘I can lift most anything,’ said Reve, ‘but I savin my strength for hauling fish.’

  She laughed. ‘That right? How many you got today?’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘Seven’s good. ’

  ‘You tell Lo my message.’

  ‘I’ll tell him.’ He was just about to move on when she said, ‘I saw Hevez pass. He been giving your sister trouble?’

  Reve nodded. ‘Some.’

  ‘He looked hurt.’ Reve didn’t answer. The baby girl, Mayash, wriggled out of her arms and Ciele let her down on to the ground. The baby straight away crawled along to the end of the porch where Reve was standing.‘You watch yourself, Reve,’ said Ciele, ‘and you get Mi move in from that place she got out there; she’s not safe.’

  ‘Have you tried telling my sister what to do?’ He touched Mayash’s nose.

  Ciele smiled. ‘I got trouble minding my own family without minding yours, Reve. You tell her. She hears more than she pretends to hear, if you know what I’m saying.’

  He saw Ramon and Sali hanging around outside his uncle Theon’s cantina when he went to drop the fish off at the cold store. Sali slapped his arm like a tough guy, made a fist at Reve then spat. He wouldn’t have dared do that if he’d been on his own. Ramon just looked at him, said nothing.

  Reve ignored them both. He shooed a sleeping dog away from the door so that he could get inside and then tagged five of the fish and shovelled ice over them. The truck would collect them in the morning, and money from the sales would be distributed at the end of the week. The system was fair, though there was little enough money out of it; all the fisherman grumbled that they had to pay Calde too much for the transport. But that was the way it was in Rinconda.

  He gutted and cleaned the two jackfish he was keeping and put them back in the box, scooping a little ice over them. He glanced out of the door; the boys were still there. Ramon called out something to Theon, who came out and handed him a pack of cigarettes. The boys sauntered off towards Calde’s place.

  The villagers called him Clever Theon because he wore glasses and read books. He had helped set up the cooperative that built the cold store. He helped manage it too. He had a truck and did a little business up in the city. He was younger than Tomas the Boxer, though one time it was Theon who really ran the village, along with Tomas and Calde. Theon didn’t look like a hard man but he must have been. He knew how things worked, but that was all a long time back, about the time Reve and Mi’s father was killed and their mother, Theon’s younger sister, disappeared. A smuggling deal with the Night Men went bad. Reve didn’t know exactly what happened; Tomas wouldn’t ever talk about it, but it was after that that Calde took over most of everything in Rinconda.

  Reve asked Theon once why he had let Calde take over. ‘In business,’ Theon said to him, ‘things happen, sometimes good, because you make a careful plan, but always there is risk and then things can go bad. Very bad. And people can go bad too. Tomas will tell you the same.’

  Reve was ten when Theon told him that. He thought that ‘people gone bad’ just referred to Calde, but since then he had wondered if Theon had also been thinking about his sister, Reve and Mi’s mother, because the police had taken her away. Theon never talked about his sister’s arrest. ‘That’s over,’ was all he said and Reve knew better than to pester him, but Theon’s relationship with Calde wasn’t quite over. Reve had seen Calde and Theon talking, and Calde often drank in the cantina, ordered Theon to bring him this, bring him that. It was hard to imagine that it had once been the other way round. When he mentioned this to Tomas the Boxer, Tomas just said, ‘Theon, he like to keep his options open.’

  Reve felt his uncle really was smart, a lot more clever than Calde anyway, and he liked his uncle and Theon gave him work: cleaning up in the cantina, paying him a few cents for the bottles that Reve collected from the shoreline.

  Theon saw Reve coming out of the cold store and raised his hand in greeting. ‘You do good?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Your sister was in the village today.’

  ‘I know.’

  He took off his little round glasses and polished them on his loose shirt tail. ‘She’s looking more like her mother every day,’ he said. ‘About time she gave up all that crazy business, living in a car.’

  ‘Everyone sayin that to me,’ said Reve.

  ‘Maybe everyone got a point.’

  ‘She sayin our mother’s alive. Wants to go lookin for her.’

  He gave a dismissive grunt. ‘She do better lookin for a husband. She say anythin else.’

  ‘Said there was a storm comin.’

  That made him smile. ‘Not tonight, I reckon. Come by tomorrow, Reve. You can help me clean up the place.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Reve crossed the main track a
nd climbed the path up to the top of the hill, found the spot where Tomas the Boxer had buried their father. He put down the fish box and sat on it. There were eight white stones on the grave. Tomas had laid the first one, scratched an X on it so that they could find the place again; the hill had graves all over it, most unmarked. Reve had been five. Every year, he had come back, first with Mi and then on his own, to place another stone.

  Eight years.

  After the burying, Tomas the Boxer had taken Reve and Mi to live with him. He had tried to be a father, but he just wasn’t very good at it, wasn’t patient with children, didn’t know how to talk to them. He was strict; told them life was hard, that you had to fight for what you wanted and he was a hard man himself. People left him alone, even Calde stepped around him, but unlike some parents in the village he never raised a fist against the children, and he’d listen to what they said, though he didn’t answer every question they asked, especially when they kept wanting to know when their mother was coming home, which they did all the time in those first weeks they lived with him.

  Reve settled well enough. He followed Tomas around like a dog, was happy to copy him when he did his chores, fixed the skiff, mended the net, but Tomas never learned how to handle Mi. She was always strange, collecting bits of plastic and glass and making little sand gardens wherever the fancy took her. And she wandered, day and night. She wouldn’t be disciplined, not by Tomas, nor by the occasional woman Tomas brought back into the shack, not that any of them ever stayed long. Mi would stick her chin out and glare at them, unsettle them, and then they’d leave. She hardly talked to anyone other than Reve, and he didn’t always understand what she was saying with such intensity, but he would nod as if he did understand because he liked her talking to him.

  When she was nine, a year after Tomas had taken them in, she declared to Reve in a whisper that Tomas had a bit of the devil caught up inside him. She said she had seen it peering out of Tomas’s eye. Reve looked at Tomas differently after this. He never could see any sign of the devil though. Even so, he started to have bad dreams and found he felt safer sleeping in the little space under the shack.

  Her wandering made Reve anxious. He spent half his time looking for her. He usually found her hunkered down some place, mostly Uncle Theon’s cement-block pig house or up on the hill, by their father’s grave. Once she told Reve that she heard a voice calling her and that was why she went off wandering. He never quite knew how much to believe Mi because she said such strange things, mainly about what she saw in people, like seeing the devil creature in Tomas.

  It was about this time that Mi admitted to Reve that sometimes she couldn’t remember where she’d been. At first he didn’t believe her, but then he understood that those blank periods frightened her. She called it walking in darkness. They were, he now realized, her first fits, little ones. The first serious one didn’t happen until she was eleven. Reve remembered it well: just before she got that attack of juddering she accused Tomas the Boxer of killing their father. Just like that, out of nowhere, hard and cold; he remembered how her eyelids had flickered and her voice hadn’t sounded like her at all. Tomas had looked like he’d been struck by lightning. He’d lifted a hand to slap her – and then she was gone, twisting and falling and kicking her legs like she had electricity running up and down her spine.

  She was sick for a whole day after that attack, and bruised too. When she was recovered she said she wouldn’t sleep in Tomas’s any more. She said that Tomas looked at her all the time. This divided her and Reve for a while; he didn’t believe she meant that about him killing their father. He thought she was just stirring trouble. But she’d said there were things he didn’t know; he was too young, and that if he wanted to be Tomas’s runaround, that was his choice.

  As for Tomas looking at her, the truth was everybody looked at her; they couldn’t help it. She was so different: red hair, long legs, sleepy eyes and her strange ways. She didn’t care what she wore, sometimes an old threadbare woman’s dress that hung from her shoulders and trailed down to her bare feet, sometimes a man’s T-shirt knotted round her waist to make a skirt. As she grew older, she became more striking and the way she dressed became more provocative. Ciele took to making patched up skirts and shirts and insisted she wear them; Mi took them, but would only wear clothes with blue in them.

  Theon offered to let her stay up at the cantina, do a little work for him. That’s when she told him that he had a little devil tucked away in him; ‘a devil crab in its hole’ was what she said. Theon didn’t get angry – he never did, Theon – but he never made that offer again.

  She took to walking the shore, going further and further and spending more and more time down on the beach where the old Beetle VW stood on the sand. Reve came in for rough talk too, mainly because of her, and when this turned to throwing punches, Tomas taught him how to box. Hevez and his friends didn’t bother him so much after that.

  By the time she was thirteen she was living all the time down at the car.

  Word about her stretched along the coast and people came from miles to hear the girl who spoke with spirit voices, because that is what she did now, and that’s when her meetings started. Now she even had a man who played the drum; the drumming would whip up the crowd, get them excited; maybe it helped them believe in Mi’s spirit voices.

  Tomas didn’t approve of her meetings and wouldn’t have anything to do with them. He tried to stop Reve going to them too, but of course he did go, snuck down the beach and crept into the edge of the crowd, always keeping at the back, and then watched how she became this other person, who danced like she was being jerked on strings and who spoke in different voices, harsh and croaky like an old woman, but sometimes the words slipped from her lips like splinters of ice. It frightened him but he still went.

  In the mornings he would always go down the beach to see that she was still Mi and hadn’t somehow lost herself and become that other person, to see that she was all right.

  But she wasn’t all right. She wasn’t happy. And now, despite all the spirit power people believed she carried around inside her, she wasn’t even safe.

  Reve brushed the sand from the eight stones so they sat in a line, clear and white, and then he stood up.

  He never liked saying goodbye, though it wasn’t that which made his heart feel heavy when he hefted up that red box and balanced it on his shoulder. It was looking out over Rinconda and seeing the shacks and the yards, some fires being set for cooking, and knowing that Mi was way out on her own; and that thought brought the dream woman back into his mind, so sharp and real it made the hairs on his neck prickle.

  He started down the hill, heading for home. What had it meant really and why did it make him think of Mi and her saying a goodbye to him? He wondered if maybe his mother had looked like that when she’d said goodbye to his father.

  Tomas was on the stoop when he got back, rolling a cigarette, the white paper like a slip of nothing in his wide hands. His black hair had dabs of grey round his temples. Other than that he looked as fit and strong as he ever had, even though he had taken to spending the best part of the day lying up in his hammock, holding that Bible on his chest and looking out to sea.

  ‘How many you got, Reve?’ The old man’s voice was soft, a little whispery, like he got too much salty wind tucked in his throat. But LoJo reckoned it was because Tomas had been in a fight one time and got himself hurt, buckled his voice somehow.

  ‘Seven. Left the best up at the store,’ Reve said.

  Arella was sitting on a three-legged stool Tomas had put out for her. She stepped across the track most days to pass the time, share Tomas’s drink. She was blind as night but sharp, until the rum took a hold, and then it was usually Reve who had to take her back home.

  ‘Seven’s a good-luck number, Reve.’ She laughed and patted her knee. ‘I could have done with catching seven, hey, Tomas? Catch me seven husband. How ’bout that!’

  ‘If you catched seven, maybe one would have turned out go
od.’

  ‘In this place?’ She laughed again. She was always laughing when she was with Tomas.

  Tomas reached behind him and tipped a splash of rum in a small coloured glass and leaned forward, folding Arella’s hand round the glass. ‘Saw you come in little while back,’ he said to Reve. ‘You go see your sister?’

  It seemed as if everyone was asking about Mi. He nodded. ‘Hevez was out there. Bein ugly. Him an’ another two.’

  Tomas lit a match and tipped his roll-up with flame. ‘She’s spiking folk up like she’s always done, tha’s wha’s happenin.’ He shook the match and flipped it on to the ground.

  ‘Why?’ Reve said. ‘She don’t do harm to anyone round here or any place else.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Arella. ‘When you goin teach Calde’s boy a lesson? I hear he nothin but sour fruit, that boy. I hear him drinkin and callin out, him and his friend . . .’

  Tomas grunted. ‘She get hurt?’

  Reve shook his head.

  Tomas studied him. ‘You make him back away?’

  ‘He left hurt. I just push him a little and he fell.’ He shrugged. ‘Got hurt that way.’

  Tomas face softened into a smile. ‘You turning quite the man, Reve. One against three. You keep cool in your head and you can manage trouble like that. Taught you well, eh?’

  Reve hadn’t kept cool at all, just butted in like an angry hog because Hevez had a knife.

  ‘She give you thanks for steppin in for her?’

  Reve didn’t answer.

  Tomas nodded. ‘She’s not got the habit of giving thanks to anyone. In my remembrance, that is. She say anythin else your sister? Any prophet talk coming out of her?’

  ‘She think something bad goin happen.’

  ‘Oh?’ Tomas let out a stream of smoke. ‘Sky goin fall down?’

  ‘She say that a storm comin.’

  ‘Don’t look like storm to me.’

  ‘Don’t think she mean that kind of storm.’ Reve hesitated, then told them the rest of what she had said.