Call Down Thunder (26 page)

‘No but—’

‘Who goin keep us safe? You got answer to that, Reve? Cos tha’s what I want – I want safe.’ She pulled the sleeves of her man’s shirt down over her hands and then
crossed her arms tight as if she was cold, even though the bus was hot and airless.

He wanted to say that he would keep her safe, that that was what he had always tried to do, but now he realized that it wasn’t something you could promise. ‘I don’ know,’
he admitted.

They sat without talking for a while, and the bus rumbled on, stopping every thirty minutes or so, letting people get off. They looked like they were going home from the city. Hardly anyone
boarded the bus.

The view from the window was beginning to be familiar now. The long shore, sandy fields, dunes and the wide sea. From time to time they spotted clusters of houses and shacks down by the shore,
little villages, some bigger. They weren’t so far from Rinconda now. Sometimes he saw the triangular print of a sail out on the ocean and he wished he was out there, free, nothing and no one
pressing in on him.

Mi broke in on his daydreaming. ‘Why he want me?’ she asked.

‘Who?’ He thought she meant the boy with the phone, but he can’t have wanted her so much because he had got down at the last stop, and sure he had given her a friendly wave,
but that was all.

‘Who you think?

‘Two-Boat?’

‘His given name’s Enrico. Did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘He ask me to marry him.’

‘You just a girl, Mi. What you know about marryin?’

‘Know some things. Having a mother would’ve helped. Thought she might have told me all I need to know.’ She gave a half-laugh. ‘Didn’t turn out that way.’

‘She had nothing to tell you, Mi; she lost whatever mothering feeling she had when she ran with the policeman.’

‘Maybe. She look sad when we saw her in the rain. Did you think that, that she looked sorry?’

‘Yeah, maybe she did, but tha’s all gone. ‘

‘You think I’m too young for marrying?’

Reve didn’t know how to answer. What was a right age? How could he know that?

‘There’s no hurry on you marryin anyone, Mi. Maybe we go see him, you an’ me, like family, you know . . .’

‘Tha’s San Jerro there!’ she said interrupting him, pointing out of the window. A cluster of houses, it was like Rinconda but bigger, a wide sprawl of huts and houses down by
the ocean, but it seemed so different because the shacks were painted blue and pink, and there were white houses made of stone. Solid. Then it was gone. Mi sat back and closed her eyes. ‘You
know what I really keep wantin to know, Reve? That woman you seen, down in the water – what was the meaning in that? What was the meaning in you seeing her and not me? That bother me all the
time.’

‘You said it was our gone-away mother.’

‘I know tha’s what I said, but that’s because that what I
wanted
it to mean.’

They lapsed into silence, lost in their own thoughts, until, out of the blue, she said, ‘I’m coming back with you now Reve, but don’t think I’m stayin in that
place.’ She sounded almost matter of fact.

‘What you sayin?’

‘It’s got too much bad. You got Calde. You got Moro. You got that police captain. They all goin be buzzin at me like dirt flies.’ She flapped her hand as if she was swatting
them away. ‘But you know what I want? I want you with me when I go.’

‘Rinconda’s my place, Mi.’

‘I think you come with me.’ It was as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘But I want to see Tomas before we go.’ He remembered the way she had ignored him, face tight as a clam
when he had tried to talk to her. ‘I always been thinkin,’ she said, ‘that it’s Tomas makin our mother go away; thought Tomas the one kill our father, tangle him up in that
net.’ She rubbed the fug from the window with the sleeve of her shirt, then frowned. ‘But I was wrong, wasn’t I? That woman, our mother, did those things. Maybe she had her
reasons, but we never goin know what she was thinkin. She did her choosing long time ago. She choose that policeman. She choose that place in the city.’ She put her forehead against the
steamy window. ‘You know what I feel like after my meetings when all the voices are gone away. I feel like I’m an empty place.’ She closed her eyes. ‘The voices seem all
gone from me. I hear nothin tellin me what I want to know . . . You think me an’ Tomas can be friends?’

‘Bein friends isn’ so hard, Mi.’

‘No?’

Three days in the city and it was strange how things felt different between Mi and him. He wasn’t sure what it was. She was always changing, her mood flitting back and forward, but this
was different. There was something more settled in her. He looked at her but she had her head back against the headrest and her cap tilted over her eyes.

The road curved a little and then he saw the village. The straggling line of black-clad shacks winding down to the shore, and the harbour wall like a lobster claw hooked out
into the sea. Rinconda. They were home. He should have felt happy or relieved, but instead he felt anxious. What if Tomas wasn’t any stronger? What if the village hadn’t quietened down?
What if Calde pushed his way up on to Theon’s roof and found the Boxer lying there . . .

He should have borrowed that boy’s cellphone. He should have called Theon. He should have checked that it was safe.

The sun was a blood-red ball in the sky behind them; their shadows stretched out spidery thin down the bank from the highway and towards the long torn ribbon of houses and
shacks.

‘Can you see my place?’ said Mi.

Reve shook his head. ‘No.’ He couldn’t see any boats out on the ocean either, nor anyone down on the harbour wall, which was unusual. But there was a crowd down below the
cantina ten people, maybe more. There was no sign of a car anywhere so Señor Moro hadn’t tracked them yet. He couldn’t see anyone else at all, no one in their backyard or at the
fish store. ‘You think it’s safe to go down, Mi?’

‘Got no feelin’ one way or another, Reve. Got no feelin’ for this place at all – never have.’ She started down the track and he followed after her.

Faces peered at them as they passed by, but no one offered a greeting, even people that Reve knew, men he had fished with. They just watched them from their doorways and let
them pass by in silence. It unsettled him, but he didn’t want to say anything to Mi.

They would go straight to Theon’s cantina, he decided. They would find Tomas and then, if there was still trouble in the village, they would slip away when it was dark and walk down the
coast to San Jerro; if Two-Boat was serious about Mi, then he would help them out.

A dog stood at the corner of one shack and barked as they walked down the middle of the track. Crickets buzzed and sawed the thick afternoon air. A black-bellied pig trotted across the track,
right in front of them, head low, snout forward, busy going some place.

‘Not even the pigs are bothering with us, Reve.’

They rounded a bend in the track and there was the cantina. The crowd he’d seen from the roadside had moved off, though he could hear someone shouting further down
towards the shore. They slipped in through the door and Reve called out, ‘Hey! Theon! We come back!’

Silence.

The tables were cleared, chairs tucked in and out of the way. The floor was swept but there was a pot of water boiling on the hob. Reve took a cloth and lifted it off. ‘Making himself
coffee. Must have just stepped out.’

‘Thought you said Tomas was here. Where is he?’ Mi asked.

‘Unless he learn to fly, he’s up on the roof. Come and see him.’

‘There’s no one here, Reve. Can’t you feel it? They all gone.’

‘No!’ They had to be there. He took the stairs two at a time and Mi followed behind. She was right: there was no one there. No Tomas, no Theon, no Ciele and no baby. Just like below,
it looked as though they had just stepped away this minute. Tomas’s sheet was scrumpled up at the foot of his pallet, a jug of water beside the bed, half full and tepid from standing out in
the sun; and his Bible was lying open. ‘Maybe he’s all right,’ he said, even though nothing looked right. ‘You know Tomas is strong. Maybe the cut he got wasn’t so
bad. What you think? Maybe Theon took him and Ciele. Down the coast . . .’ His voice trailed into silence.

‘Maybe.’ Mi didn’t sound convinced. She was over by the corner of the roof, looking back the way they had come, up to the highway.

‘You see anything there?’

She shook her head and then bent down and rummaged in a deep basket over in the corner where she was standing and started pulling out long torn strips of cotton. ‘This look fresh.’
She held up a cloth that must have been used as a bandage; the dark stain was blood. A gull floated above them, looking down, and then tilted its wings and drifted off to the coast. ‘You
think Tomas strong enough to walk out of here, and him bleeding still?’

Reve stood staring at the pallet as if it could tell him what had happened, but all he could think about was how Tomas had lain there, his face grey, his voice a hoarse whisper and Ciele’s
white bandage tight round his middle, and the dark stain of his blood seeping through. Three days to recover? No. No hope of that at all. There was only one thing that could have happened.

This was why no one they had passed had spoken to them. The villagers knew and they wanted no part of it. He should have seen it straight away.

‘Calde got him,’ he said abruptly. ‘Calde got him right now! Come on!’ He turned and ran down the stairs. He’d been dreaming to think for one moment that Calde
would let it all blow over. Calde would have kept looking and sniffing and rooting, and someone would have heard or seen something up on the cantina roof. Maybe the baby had cried . . . and then
Calde’s men would have hauled Tomas down, and Theon and Ciele, dragged them out so that everyone could see what he was doin to his one-time partner. Calde would want the whole village to know
that if you stood against him something bad would happen. The crowd he’d seen from the road – had that been them bundling Tomas and the others down towards the harbour?

‘Wait!’ said Mi, pulling at his arm. ‘You don’t know what’s happening, Reve! You don’t know what they doing down there.’

He stopped and turned round. Fear made him angry. ‘What you think, Mi? You think we do nothing? You think we jus’ keep out the way, keep our eyes squeeze tight so we don’ see
what happen? Tha’ what you want?’

She frowned, then glanced back up at the highway, the same as she had done up on the roof.

‘What is it? You see something?’

‘No.’

So he ran; she followed, and people stared at them from their shacks as they went by. They passed the cold store and then Ciele’s place and then they were almost down at the end of the
track: the remains of Tomas’s hut on the right; Arella’s hut on the left. Arella was standing on her porch, her blank eyes staring straight ahead at the gathering right there in the
middle of the track, her face worn down with grief.

There were at least ten men, all Calde’s people, and Calde was in the middle. Reve didn’t see Tomas or Ciele or Theon, but he wasn’t going to stand there looking. He yanked Mi
off the track and they made their way through the backyards of the last few shacks, stopping when they got to Arella’s. Cautiously Reve peered from the corner. No one had spotted them. He
closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the salty planking.

He needed to think, to be clever, clever as Theon. But how do you suddenly get to be clever? What would Theon do in their place? Make a call, that’s what you do. But who? Who do you call?
The police? The police would just bring the Captain and kiss Calde on the cheek, and let him kick Tomas to death. Then he would snatch Mi and take her back in the trunk of his car, lock her in his
house some place. He felt like banging his head against the shack’s back wall. Clever? When had he ever been clever? They had run from one nightmare, and he had led them smack into
another.

‘Wha’s happening?’ whispered Mi. ‘What they doing?’

He puffed out his cheeks and peered round the edge of the shack again. He saw the brothers Cesar and Escal standing over a body they had down on the ground. Escal had a rolled-up fishing net on
his shoulders, and Reve saw Cesar say something to him. Escal swung the bundle down and the two of them strung it out between them and then there was grunting and a muffled cry as whoever was down
on the ground was trussed in the net.

Reve watched in horror. It was Tomas. Was this how it had been with their father, snagged up in a net and then what? Thrown off the harbour wall to drown?

He scanned the crowd.

He saw fishermen who owed Calde favour one way or another, or who reckoned it was safer being on the inside of the ring. He knew them all. And Hevez and his pals, Sali and Ramon. No one who
might help. There was no sign of Ciele . . .

He spotted Theon though.

He was right beside Calde, and Calde had his hairy hand on Theon’s shoulder, gripping it tight, like they were pals, like they were partners! And Theon was pulling off his glasses and
rubbing them on the edge of his shirt and looking round the crowd, not looking at Tomas but back round at the village, and then he was looking their way. He blinked. A moment of recognition.

Instantly Reve pulled himself back out of sight. He looked at Mi. Her face was tight and her eyes screwed up. Her hands were trembling.

‘Do something, Mi! Do some of your magic thing. Do your voice! Call down a storm like you done before.’

Her lips were moving and her eyelids flickering. Maybe she was trying. She was starting to tremble. But he couldn’t help her. He realized with a feeling of despair that he couldn’t
help anyone. ‘Oh please, Mi, do something . . .’

Calde raised his voice. He was speaking so loud all the people cowering in their shacks and hiding their heads away would hear him. ‘You all about to see what happen when someone do a bad
thing in my village.’ He sounded hard. ‘This man here is the squeal-pig. A’right? You all heard that. You know what it mean: he brought the police burning down homes in this
place.’ The men around him were silent, waiting for Calde to finish. ‘And,’ added Calde, ‘he’s a runaround after another man’s wife. This is not a man we want in
Rinconda . . .’ He paused. ‘If no one goin to speak for him, I take it you all are easy about the punishment I’m goin to put on this man.’