Call Down Thunder

by Daniel Finn

  ‘Don’t think he like that fancy dress they put you in at Moro’s,’ said Reve as they moved on.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t care what he think. Priests. Only good at shouting at poor people.’

  ‘How you know that?’

  ‘People tell me thing,’ she said, ‘when they come to my meetings. They tell me I got more right words coming out of me than any priest they ever heard.’

  They headed up to the main road and bought bread, sausage and a big bottle of water. Reve also bought a man’s shirt for Mi to wear, knotting it at the waist so that it covered up the outfit Moro’s girl had squeezed her into. She looked a bit strange, but Reve reckoned that now the city was up and busy no one was going to notice them, tell them apart from any other children out on the street, so long as Mi covered up her hair. He found a cap on a street stall, and Mi, after a bit of a struggle, piled her hair into it, leaving a tangled-up ponytail sticking out of the back.

  No police were going to be stopping trams now, so they used up the last of their money to buy a ticket to the end of the line.

  They were getting near to the last stop, just about where streets gave way to stores that weren’t anything more than shacks with awnings pulled out over their fronts, shading cheap goods. Reve was looking at Mi.

  ‘You look different,’ he said.

  ‘Course I look different. This what they wear in the city. Don’t you got eyes?’

  ‘I don’t mean that cap,’ he said, wondering what it was that seemed changed. She had her head half turned away from him, gazing out of the window, the sunlight flickering across her face just the way light flickers through clear water, down on to rock and sand and shifting weed.

  ‘Maybe you lookin more old.’

  ‘Old? You sayin I getting wrinkled up like a witch woman?’

  He smiled. ‘People pay you good money if they think you got witch power.’

  ‘Don’t need witch power; got my own.’ A moment later she said, ‘You think I lookin old?’ She turned away, looking out of the window again. ‘Don’t feel so old. How old you think our mother was when she give birth to me?’

  He thought of Fay in her smoky den, red hair, pale face, the black cigar. It was hard to imagine her as she might have been fifteen years younger, but she could have been about the same age Mi was now. He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Why you worryin?’

  She didn’t answer.

  He closed his eyes, but now, having conjured up an image of Fay as a young mother, his mind wouldn’t let go of the idea and one picture tumbled into another: Fay holding a baby, Fay with Mi at her knees, Fay with a smile like Mi’s, but smiling not at her children but at a man in a uniform . . . that policeman, that Captain. Was that man really his birth father? The thought was sickly, like a stain.

  Reve opened his eyes and stared out of the window. People going about their business, ordinary people, ordinary people with families. How many of them, he thought bitterly, walked away from their children? If a mother doesn’t want her child, then the child doesn’t owe that mother anything. Not one thing.

  He put his hand on Mi’s arm. She turned her head and smiled and then looked away again.

  They got out at the end of the line and then argued as to what they should do.

  Not having any money to pay for a bus ride down along the coast, their only choices were walking or hitching a ride. ‘I ain’t walkin any more,’ Mi said flatly. ‘Anyhow, die of hunger before we get halfway to anywhere. And I’m not hitching a ride with nobody.’

  ‘Well, what idea you got? If we don’t catch a ride, we got to go back into the city and wait five more days till Theon come back. You wanna do that?’

  ‘Steal,’ she said, as if it was the obvious thing to do. ‘That Demi make a living out of it, picking pockets. Can’t be so hard.’

  ‘Steal! What you thinkin’? That one way to get snap up by police. You wait here.’

  He left her sitting by the roadside while he went into the stores along the road asking if there were any jobs he could do, earn himself and her a bus ride back home. But they were hard-faced the people who lived on the edge of the city and didn’t have any interest in helping out a boy who talked with a country voice and who’d spent the last couple of days and nights out on the streets and was all grimed up and sour.

  Then with a squeal and a cloud of dust and diesel, the bus came. They tried talking the driver into letting them ride for free but that didn’t get them anywhere and when it pulled away, churning up more dust, Mi shouted and threw down her cap, releasing her wild halo of hair. She was so angry she started to shake, and before Reve could step in and calm her down she had the juddering so bad that people from around the stalls started to gather round. Just idle curiosity, but then somehow Mi wasn’t quite so lost in her juddering as Reve had thought; she started waving her hands and drawing up that rough voice that came from somewhere down in her belly, and she was pronouncing this and pronouncing that and her eyes were rolling and she was running on the spot, her skinny knees pumping up and down, and she was jerking her head this way and that, her eyes rolled up in that way Reve hated.

  People clapped in time to her calling out. ‘She got the spirit! She got the spirit in her,’ they said. One woman threw her a question about the little store she had right there, and Mi’s other voice told the woman to move her store back from the road cos a storm was coming that would tear up the road and if she didn’t move she’d get torn up along with everything else. Then someone said, ‘How this girl know they goin be widenin this road? How she know that?’

  Suddenly there were more questions and more questions until Mi began to stagger and Reve stepped in and held her up and told people to back off as he pushed through them till he could find a place to set her down.

  ‘Tell them the spirits leavin me,’ whispered Mi, barely moving her lips and speaking so quiet that no one could hear her.

  He tried not to act surprised. ‘You called down a storm again,’ he murmured.

  ‘Just a small one.’

  He tried not to smile and laid her down beside a stall selling clay pots, plastic bowls and tins of white beans; three years older than him, but she still weighed hardly anything at all. There were people pressing around, but he told them that those spirits were all gone away now and she needed sleep. They could see she was all worn down and with a fair bit of muttering and nodding they backed off. He wondered what spirits had been visiting her this time, coming just when she needed them, and keeping better time than the bus service too.

  Some of the people threw down coins as they were leaving, and Reve quickly scooped them up. One old man stopped by and said he had only heard that voice coming out of the dancing girl, heard it one time before when he was a young man, living down on the coast. He pulled a ten-dollar bill from his pocket and ceremoniously handed it to Reve. ‘You give it her when she come out of wherever that spirit taken her, and you tell her to remember Joseph when she do her pray-dancing again. You tell her that.’ Reve promised he would and the man went away, leaving Reve counting up the money in his hand.

  That ten plus the small coins people had thrown down was enough for the fare, and for some food too. They were almost home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Reve used some of the money to buy two raffia mats and they bedded down beside one of the stalls near the road and then waited the best part of the next day for the bus that would take them down the highway to home. When it hauled up it had Paraloca written on its destination plate, and that made Reve think of LoJo’s father, Pelo.

  He could tell Mi’s mind was on something else. She didn’t respond at first when he wanted to talk about Pelo, and then, after a moment, said, ‘Everyone got their chances. Tha’s what happen. Happen to him, happen to our mother. Happen to us too, and we got to be ready when it come.’ She sounded different, thoughtful.

  She was frowning. He could see she was not really thinking about Pelo at all. She kept looking at a neatlooking boy with pointy sideburns
who was sitting across the aisle talking into his cellphone. He was about her age and he wondered whether she had taken a sudden fancy to him, in the way she’d sometimes take a sudden fancy to a pretty shell or a piece of coloured glass on the beach.

  He looked out of the window and watched the road streaming by. Poor, quiet Pelo. The way Reve remembered it, Pelo had had little choice; it was like something put a twist in his life, pulled him away from his family and stood him in the door of the Slow Bar. That was it. Except at the end. He’d made a choice then. Pelo was a hero. That’s what he would tell Ciele.

  It was a long journey, the bus stopping here and there, men smelling of salt and cigars shuffling up and down the aisle, women with baskets and cotton-wrapped parcels of food. He fell asleep and dreamed of Calde, broad as a mountain and holding a long knife in his hand, looming up over the village, one foot on the harbour wall and the other on the burying hill, and in his dream Reve saw Sultan dancing about the strand, hackles up, barking at the giant and darting at his feet as if to bite them. He woke up anxious, his heart beating and sweat running down his back.

  Mi’s seat beside him was empty, and the bus was just pulling away from a stop on the highway.

  He panicked, sure she was gone, had suddenly changed her mind about coming back. It was his fault: the burning car – he should never have told her about that. Hevez. Calde. Everyone hating her or fearing her. Poor Mi! He scrambled out into the aisle. ‘Hey!’ he yelled at the driver. ‘Stop the bus!’

  The driver slammed on the brakes, and Reve staggered, gripping the back of a seat to steady himself. Heads turned . . . and there she was, just two rows down the bus, talking to the boy with the cellphone.

  ‘Mi!’

  ‘Hey,’ the driver shouted at him, ‘you want to get off this bus or what you want to do?’

  Reve muttered an apology, while Mi turned and gave him a puzzled look. ‘What you playin at, Reve? Go back to your seat. I don’t need no protecting, you hear.’

  An older woman sitting across the aisle from Mi cackled and looked at Reve and shook her head.

  ‘You the man in the family?’ she said. ‘How ’bout you come protecting me and I give you sweet cake!’

  Some people around laughed and he felt embarrassed and stupid and cross. He went quickly back to his seat. They didn’t know Mi, didn’t know how she could get in trouble.

  ‘Who was that?’ he asked when she came back to her seat.

  ‘Just a boy. He done me favour, that’s all.’

  ‘What favour?’

  She shrugged and looked out of the window. ‘Why you care so much ’bout everything?’ she said after a moment. ‘You all the time running this way and that: Tomas, Arella, Theon –’ she pulled a face – ‘an’ me too, eh. But you don’ see what maybe comin roun’ the corner.’

  ‘An’ you do?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Well, how ’bout tellin me then.’

  ‘You think everythin’ go an’ fall easy when we get back? You think Uncle Theon know all the answer.’

  ‘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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  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.’