Call Down Thunder

by Daniel Finn

  ‘I just done what you asked, Fay,’ said Demi. ‘S’all I done. You said bring them in. You said the señor was lookin for them and we’d make money, Fay . . .’ The words tumbled out of him. Baz remained silent, looking at him.

  Mi’s moaning was like the sound a person makes when they have all the air sucked out of them after a belly punch.

  ‘She’s not sick,’ said Reve. ‘She just get this way when—’

  ‘I know how she gets!’ shouted Fay.

  How did she know?

  ‘I know what you both are; and I don’t care. You hear me? This is my place! You don’t belong here!’ Her words rasped like nails across the thick air, and her eyes were wet stone, cold, hard and blind. Like she saw them but not them, not him and Mi but some other children that she didn’t want, didn’t want at all. ‘I am not the person you looking for. She long gone. She don’t exist any more. You understand? She walked out of your life and you better off without her!’

  Her face was a tight white mask; she looked like some bad-dream woman; nothing, nothing like the woman in the ocean. He wanted to move, but he couldn’t. Mi was trembling worse, her legs locked straight, her head tight as a snap-line quivering in a gale. ‘I’m giving you one chance, you hear me? You leave this place; you go. You find your way out of here. Go on back to your village. Go!’

  ‘Fay!’ said Demi. ‘You can’t let them go! The man said he wanted them here. He said—’

  The back of Fay’s hand caught Demi with a hard smack that sent him staggering back, one hand clutching the side of his face, the other out to stop himself falling. Baz’s eyes widened but she never said a word. ‘Out!’ Fay said again, glaring at Mi, as if Mi was the horror. ‘I got no place for you here! You hear me?’

  Reve could see a vein on her neck thick as a worm. He pulled Mi, pulled her back through the door. ‘Come on, Mi, down the stairs. Please. Come on! We got trouble here.’ He begged and urged and guided her down the ladder, half expecting this Fay to burst out of the door and come raging after them, or call up people even worse than her, people like he had seen staring at them in the Barrio, young men who would tear into them like dogs.

  But there was nobody waiting for them outside and no sound of her gang scrambling down after them.

  Reve took a deep breath of Barrio air – anything was better than that sour den. He felt shamed and his eyes were hot. But they were out now and away from this woman, this one-time mother. This runaway mother. This woman bitter as smoke, who’d shouted them away like they were stray dogs. They were wrong to have gone looking for her. He took another breath.

  ‘Are you a’right, Mi?’

  She didn’t respond so he put his arm round her. He could feel her still trembling badly so, gently, he guided her to the sleepers where they could cross the ditch. The sooner they could put distance between them and this place the better they would both feel. But when he tried to lead her over the little makeshift bridge, she twisted out of his grip and stood facing the old blistered warehouse, her arms tight at her sides, as if to clamp herself together.

  ‘You got nothing!’ she screamed up at the building, at the woman she had thought would embrace them, her voice all ripped and raw. ‘You got nothing!’ Then she began sobbing and her eyes were squeezed shut, but in between the sobs she still shouted: ‘I see you! I see you! I see what you are! You devil woman! You tangle up with so much bad thing . . . You got a devil eatin you. An’ you try burnin us out of your heart, but all you got now is nothin, nothin . . .’ The stream of words became choked by her miserable sobbing, and then she retched into the ditch, gasping and coughing up spit and tears.

  Reve put his arms round her again and held her tight until the weeping died away and her eyes were no longer rolled up white and frightening, and the trembling had eased. He held her like that even though he still half expected Fay or her gang to come skidding and sliding down that ladder from her lair. ‘You a’right?’ he said gently. ‘Can you move? We got to go, a’right?’

  She was breathing hard, gulping in the sticky air.

  ‘Mi, you a’right now?’

  She nodded and he felt a wave of relief. His deepest fear was that one time she’d have such a storm inside her it would take her right away and he would never get her back.

  ‘We goin now,’ he said.

  ‘A’right.’

  He led her back over the makeshift bridge, trying to remember the way they had come, hoping to find somewhere they could hole up and hide before someone come looking for them. He imagined Fay, calling the señor on her cellphone, shouting at him, shouting at the children in her den.

  How had it happened like this? One thing after another: the woman in the sea and then nothing but one storm rolling into another, the one Mi had seen coming.

  They ran.

  Had he been able to see back in the den, he would have been surprised. The woman, Fay, wasn’t shouting and raving; she wasn’t on her cellphone. She was sitting right back where she had been when they had gone in, her face pale and drawn, and though her eyes were dry, they were stretched and full of hurt. Baz was beside her, touching her arm. ‘You got one of your bad spiky feelings, Fay?’ she was saying. ‘That what you got?’

  Demi was over by the window, sitting up on a ledge, hugging his knees, not looking at anything, just hugging his knees tight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  They ran.

  For more than ten minutes they ran, cutting across the ditches, the patches of scrub, before threading back into the twisted and steaming alleyways of the Barrio. Then when Reve sensed Mi couldn’t run any further they took a break, leaning up against a wall.

  Where would they go? Reve wondered.

  There were people all round them now, eyeing them and passing them by. But Reve reckoned it better to ask no one, not in this place. He tugged Mi’s hand and they moved on, turning left, turning right, winding their way back into the heart of the maze.

  ‘You got any feeling which way?’ he said to Mi.

  She shook her head and looked down at her feet. A moment later she said, ‘You the one, Reve, out in the sea. No road signs there an’ you manage.’

  ‘An’ you the one who pull sign out of the air, tell people what goin happen. You pick the way, Mi.’

  He was trying to tease her a little, but she looked utterly beaten. He’d not seen her like this ever before. ‘I got nothin right,’ she said. ‘Didn’t know she goin blind us away, pretend not to see who we are. Didn’ know that goin happen. I read your dream woman wrong, Reve. That bit you say about her waving her hand? She just waving us away, even though she know who we are.’ Her voice was flat.

  ‘A’right,’ he said. ‘We go this way.’

  They came to a corner kitchen with a large fat woman standing in the doorway, her arms folded. They had passed through this place before, he was sure of it. The smell of frying clawed up his belly, telling him he hadn’t eaten all day. He stopped and Mi stopped beside him. The woman looked down at them. ‘This a payin place,’ she said.

  Reve rummaged in his pockets and pulled out a few coins. Fifty . . . sixty cents. He didn’t want to spend more. He didn’t know how long they would have to survive on what little money he had. The woman looked dismissively at what he was offering.

  ‘Where you from? You want a charity kitchen,’ said the woman, ‘you go find a church.’

  ‘Where that?’

  She looked at him as if he was some poor dog with only three legs. Then abruptly she turned and went back into her tiny place; it looked so small as if she would hardly fit inside, she was so big herself.

  He turned away, giving Mi a tug, but they had only taken a couple of steps when the woman called them. ‘Here.’ She held out a corner of bread and piece of cold sausage.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Reve.

  The woman shook her head. ‘Don’t come back this way, and you take that girl of yours out of here.’

  ‘Which way we go?’

  The woman looked at him with
incredulity. ‘You want me act like some tour guide! What you think this place is?’ She waved her hand, ‘You go on out of here. Give my kitchen bad name having beggar children crawling on my step.’

  Reve ducked his head. ‘A’right,’ he said turning away. ‘We’re goin.’

  They set off again. It was a narrow alley, a slip of dark with wire overhead, and it seemed like he had been down it before. They pressed on and then came to the courtyard with the outside stairway, the place that Demi had said was safe. Reve led Mi up to the domed roof with its little flat edge, like the turned-up rim of a priest’s hat. From the top they could see lanes and alleys twisting around away from where they were like dark veins running through the body of the Barrio. To the east were the backs of the tall buildings that lined the square where he and Mi had spent the previous night. There was no traffic in the Barrio, and though he could hear people, voices, sometimes shouting, sometimes at their work, it seemed strangely quiet after the constant blur of traffic out on the streets.

  They would be safe enough there, could rest a little and eat the bread. He pulled Mi down and then leaned against the dome and he broke the bread in half and gave her her portion. It was dry but not too bad and the sausage was good. He gnawed at it and then realized she wasn’t touching hers.

  ‘Come on. You got to eat.’

  She turned her head and spat – blood.

  ‘You bite the inside of your mouth again?’

  She shrugged. ‘We ever goin get out of this place?’

  This place.

  ‘It make you want the ocean, Mi. Make you think Rinconda something better ’n this,’ he said.

  When she didn’t answer he turned and saw tears running down her face, streaking through the grime; he didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Hey, we make a mistake, got taken in by a couple of slither-back thieves, and that woman nothin to us, Mi. Nothing. I tell you, she not even a dirt shadow of the woman I seen.’

  He didn’t know what else to say. They were alone in the city. Theon wasn’t due back for another six days, and the only place they knew was the Slow Bar. And they had to keep well away from there; away from Moro with his smile and his hand on Reve’s shoulder while all the time what he wanted was Mi. Reve was sure of that now. Maybe he wanted to give her to that strip of grease from the bar, the one he called Zavvy.

  ‘We’ll find some place safe. Don’t you think about her,’ he said. ‘She never anything to us—’

  ‘No. You wrong, Reve. She the one. That woman birth me, birth you too, and I don’ know why but she don’t want none of us.’

  The way Mi remembered their mother all those times she talked about her, she was like light shining in through a door, a voice laughing and singing. She wasn’t that any more; she was hard, cold and dark. That’s what Reve felt.

  Mi pulled a face. ‘Something make her ugly inside.’ She sniffed and wiped her forearm across her face. ‘Hope it don’t happen to us.’ Then she looked around. ‘I see nothin, now. Nothin. Got no feeling about which way to go . . . no feeling what to do ’bout anything.’ She sounded exhausted.

  He felt like he had a rope knot tied up in his belly.

  ‘An’ the people in the village, comin out more an’ more, askin question ’bout this, ’bout that, like I got the answer to everything. I’m runnin dry, Reve. Sometime words come in my head, sometimes the well dry as bone. Tha’s what it feel like. An’ I got more comin at me . . . the boys in the village. All the time . . .’

  She was so slight, skin, bone and air, like a bird, shadow bird. ‘Hevez.’

  ‘Him,’ she agreed. ‘He’s a whole streak of nothin. Dog in the dirt.’ She frowned at the food Reve had put on her lap and absently started to eat it. Tearing at the sausage, little bits and then hungrily, till it was all gone. ‘A girl should have a mother tell her about what comin round the corner; tha’s what a mother does.’

  ‘Other people you can ask, tell you thing.’

  She didn’t respond, just sat hunched up; skinny arms hugging her skinny self, chin resting on her bony knees.

  He felt she had turned so small he could almost lift her up, rest her on the palm of his hand. He sat back down beside her. ‘We find our way back, Mi. We find a way round these things, nothing so bad we can’t find a way round it.’

  She leaned her head against his shoulder. ‘I feel I taken us a wrong way, Reve. Got a bad feeling . . .’

  ‘Shh,’ he said. ‘We stay here for a little. We safe here. Wait for the sun go down. Then we can move, find our way to the market, find a truck goin our way, ask for a ride. We can do that . . . or I find a little work in the market, earn some dollar before we go back . . .’

  They slept there on the roof, leaning against each other. When he opened his eyes, the sun was low. Down over that half-dried-out river long shadows were creeping across the Barrio; heavy purple clouds were piling up on the horizon. He frowned. Storm cloud. He wondered if it would just sit out there on the coast or move inland. His neck was stiff, and Mi, light as she was, felt a dead weight on his shoulder. She was muttering in her sleep, frowning.

  ‘We been lookin for you.’ Baz was standing at the top of the steps. ‘Fay told us we got to find you.’

  Reve didn’t move for a moment. ‘Why?’

  ‘Señor Moro looking for you and your sister. Got his men in the Barrio and out in the streets. Fay want you out the city to where you come from. She don’t want you go with Señor Moro. You know she shout sometimes, but she don’t mean what she say to be so bad.’

  He eased his arm out from behind Mi, wiped her damp forehead with the tip of his T-shirt and then stiffly got to his feet. He leaned over the parapet, looking down into the shadowy courtyard.

  ‘I’m on my own,’ the girl said.

  ‘A’right.’

  ‘Where is Demi?’

  ‘Looking for you.’

  ‘But you found us.’

  ‘Yes. I’m good.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  She shrugged.

  Mi woke and sat up. When she saw Baz she looked puzzled. ‘You come to take us back? Fay change her mind, want to give us to the señor?’ she said, sounding like she’d chewed on something sour.

  Baz shook her head.

  ‘Why that man Moro bother with us?’ Mi said. ‘We nothing to him.’

  ‘Fay don’t tell us thing like that, but . . .’ Baz hesitated as if she was about to say something else about Fay, but then this solemn little girl just said, ‘I’m goin show you the way out of the city. You coming?’

  They followed her down from the roof. Outside the courtyard she put her fingers to her lips and whistled, high and piercing. She stood for a moment, listening. A half-moment later they heard another whistle, answering hers. She made them wait in the shelter of a doorway, and then a couple of minutes later, Demi came running up to them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  There was a short exchange between the two children. Demi clearly saw himself as the boss and didn’t like Baz making the decisions, even when she was right. He blustered and bounced on his toes while she stood quiet. ‘Why go that long way?’ he said. ‘Fay say take ’em out quick; nothing quicker than Agua, skip a tram out to the quarter. Take no time. Your way we goin be duckin and hidin all night. You want that?’

  ‘Safer. Señor got shady men looking a’ready.’

  ‘Baz, you so full of worry you fill a worry bucket. Come on – we go this way.’

  He set off, and after a moment’s hesitation, first Baz, then Mi and Reve followed him. They wound their way quickly through the alleys.

  Ten minutes later they were at the foot of the cut that led up to Agua. ‘See?’ Demi grinned. ‘Nothin hard when you follow Demi. Tram we want is up on the west side; if we run I bet we catch one right now . . .’

  ‘Check no one waiting on us up there, Demi. Go on.’

  ‘Me? I’m not—’

  ‘Go on.’

  He pulled a face and went. They watched him run up to the
corner, stop, look left and right and then beckon them.

  They were on their way home. These two could take them to the edge of the city; then they would catch a bus back along the coast. Theon would figure a way of dealing with Calde. Tomas would be stronger . . . That was it. A day at a time and let the storm blow itself out.

  He took Mi’s hand. ‘You all right?’ The air seemed even heavier and stickier, if that was possible, and the brightness had gone out of the day. The light felt yellow and a black cloud that only a little while ago was hanging on the horizon was now sweeping inland.

  Mi didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, ‘I think we should be runnin, Reve.’ They were just up at the corner and she suddenly took off along the edge of the square, moving fast, Demi sprinting to catch up. Reve cursed. Why did she do these things?

  And then he saw the car.

  It came squealing across to the cut where Baz and Reve were standing and slammed up on to the pavement right in front of Mi and Demi. Three men piled out. One grabbed Mi, and though Demi was fast, spinning around and taking off back down the pavement, the men were fast too. One of them caught his arm and swung him off his feet. Demi skidded across the pavement, managing to break the man’s grip, tumbling in a ball. Then he was up again, jinking round the second man and flying past Baz and Reve. ‘Go!’ he shouted at them. ‘They comin on my heel.’

  Baz was already running, but Reve was rooted to the spot. He saw Mi tumbled into the back of the car. The man that had started after Demi pulled back. ‘Get you next time!’ he shouted, and snapped his fingers. His companion laughed and they swung back into the car, which bumped off the pavement, its tyres squealing on the hot tarmac as it accelerated away, screeching around the fountain roundabout, then down the east side of the square, and pulling up with a jolt outside the Slow Bar no more than three hundred metres from where Reve was standing.