Call Down Thunder (29 page)

Theon nodded. ‘An’ would that have been a good thing?’

‘Yes,’ said Reve quietly. ‘An’ when it didn’t work, you tried something else . . . an’ all the time, until things fall the way you want, you do business . .
.’

‘You’re learnin,’ said Theon.

One of the women tending Tomas, straightened up and Reve saw that it was Maria Scatta, the woman who’d always gone out to Mi’s meetings. The other figure beside him was Arella,
wiping his forehead with a cloth and with such tenderness that Reve realized something he hadn’t ever really recognized before; this old blind woman loved Tomas; the rum she might have liked
but that wasn’t the reason she picked her way across the track to his shack every evening. She’d be lost without him.

‘Is he dead?’ Reve asked Maria.

‘He’s livin,’ she said, pushing a strand of hair away from her eyes. ‘Take more than that animal Calde to put him down.’ Maria sounded weary. ‘Oh, that you,
Theon . . .’ She hesitated. ‘Come see for yourself. Only thing going kill this man is his rum.’ She took a step back and wiped her hands down her skirt. ‘We need to put him
inside.’

‘Take him up to Pelo’s,’ said Theon. ‘Ciele be happy to have him stay there.’

‘A’right.’

Tomas was laid out on a blanket, his head tipped up a little, resting on a wad of the net that he’d been snagged up in. His eyes were closed and the colour of his skin was grey as rock. He
looked dead to Reve; but she’d said he was living. So it was all right. It was all right.

Maria startled him by patting his cheek. ‘You don’t look so good, Reve, you and him both. You some pair, eh. What you think, Theon?’

‘Looks like they been hit by a hurricane,’ he said.

Then Maria bent down and spoke quietly to Arella. She picked up the bowl she and Arella had been using to wash clean Tomas’s hurt, tossed away the water, tucked the bowl under her arm and
went off with Theon to get some help, Theon saying he would tell Mi where Reve was. ‘She’ll be looking for you,’ he said.

Reve wasn’t sure; Two-Boat had hold on her now, arms wrapped round her for all the world to see. Reve let himself buckle down beside Arella. ‘Let me do that, Rella,’ he
said.

‘Who that? That you, Reve?’ A skinny hand on his wrist. ‘Knew you’d be back.’ She smiled her blind smile, released her grip on his wrist and went back to dabbing at
Tomas’s forehead. ‘You know who come see you,’ she murmured to the unconscious man. ‘Your boy, back from the city. How about that, Tomas?’

Reve looked down at the new bandage Maria had wrapped around Tomas’s middle; it was staining orange. The knife wound had opened up again. His face was messed too: a puffed eye and a split
lip. ‘He’s not so handsome now,’ Reve said.

‘Handsome enough,’ Arella said.

A few moments later Maria was back with helpers who gently rolled Tomas on to a makeshift stretcher and carried him up the track to Ciele’s and, though she protested, Arella was led back
into her own place. Reve was left sitting outside with his back to the fire, his arms wrapped round his left knee, his right leg which throbbed all the way down to the ankle stretched out in front
of him, hoping for Mi to come down but trying to tell himself that it was all right if she didn’t because that was the way she was. He missed Sultan settling down beside him, and he worried
about what he would have to say to LoJo and to Ciele when he caught up with them. From up the track he could hear shouting and celebrating. Some of those San Jerro men must have pressured Theon
into opening the bar. Reve felt as alone as if he had been set adrift in the dark.

Mi found him like that, holding his good knee, his head down, eyes closed. ‘What you doin dreamin all the time?’ Her voice was bright and rippling with excitement.
Everything bad washed away.

‘Where’s your man?’

‘Why callin him that? He got a name, Reve. Phoof! You burnin up sittin so close to that fire.’ She glanced over her shoulder and then turned back to him. ‘You comin with us,
Reve.’

‘Us?’

‘Enrico’s waitin on me.’ He saw Two-Boat up the track a little way, talking to one of the men that had come with him. Mi shrugged, tilting her head to one side, trying to be
casual but not quite managing it. ‘Come on. He got a place we can stay. We be gone out of here and we won’t get trouble. No more trouble, Reve. None of that. And our own place,’
she rattled on, repeating herself, her words skittering like shingle when you walk on it.

‘Mi.’ He stopped her. ‘It’s a’right. You go on.’

She stepped forward and touched the side of his head where he’d cracked it against a stone and looked at her fingertips and frowned. ‘You got blood on you,’ she said, and then,
‘You think you got to stay for Tomas? He got half this place lookin’ out for him now. He don’t need you, Reve. You come with me.’ She kicked her toe into the sand.

‘I can’t.’

‘Why?’

He hugged his knee tight. ‘It’s not just Tomas; I don’t know what to say to Ciele ’bout what happen.’

She frowned.

‘How Pelo saved us, Mi. Are you goin be the one to tell her? One of us got to tell her – how they shot him down.’

The firelight flickered, made her face waver in and out of shadow, tinged her hair with flame. ‘The whole thing one bad dream. I don’ want nothin of that time now. I want it all
gone, Reve.’

She took one step back as if she was about to turn and go, then a step forward. Then she looked over her shoulder and back at him; she gripped her hands together and she began to tremble.
‘I don’ care if I got no voices in my head tellin me things, if people don’ want me for meetings; I don’ need any advising ’bout what I got to do with my life; I
don’ ever need think about our goneaway mother ever again . . . but I don’ want leave you, Reve . . .’

‘Mi,’ he said, all the old anxiety for her flooding back, ‘don’t!’ He struggled up on to his good foot. ‘Don’t fret. You got no need. You go on.
Two-Boat’ll keep you safe. Maybe you stay with Ciele. You’ll be a’right. I’ll come an’ see you when my leg mends.’

Her eyes were streaming. ‘Come with me, Reve!’ She flung her arms round his neck and held him tight.

Two-Boat came and told her gently that it was time they were going. She nodded. ‘I know that,’ she said. Then she gripped Reve’s hand and looked at him so
hard he almost had to turn away. ‘Where you get so strong?’ she said. ‘You the one who’s rock steady all the time.’

He didn’t know what she meant. He felt like a rag, that if the breeze picked up it would blow him down along the shore and out to sea.

‘You got a place with us, Reve,’ said Two-Boat, ‘when the time’s right for you, eh.’

‘A’right.’

Reve watched them walk up the track towards the lights of the cantina.

He was wondering how he could make his way to Ciele’s place with his bad leg when he sensed someone standing close to him. He turned quickly, almost losing his balance, and a hand steadied
him. ‘Ramon!’ Reve instinctively tensed when he saw it was the hard-faced boy.

‘I saw you with the gun,’ said Ramon. ‘I saw what happen.’ His voice was level but there was a hint of something else. Reve wondered whether there was almost something he
found funny in what Reve had done, or maybe respect. ‘Here,’ he said, and took Reve’s arm. ‘You want go up to where they put Tomas?’

‘Yeah. What Hevez goin think, you helpin me?’

‘He got nothin on me. I step where I want.’

There was a light at Pelo’s old place and, without another word, Ramon left him there. Reve frowned. He couldn’t make him out; he had always lumped him with Hevez; bitter and hard as
a whip, no family, just the little brother.

Reve pulled himself up on to the porch and found Theon talking to Maria, and in the corner of the room Tomas lying stretched like a corpse. Even his lips were grey, and his breathing was
shallow.

‘You stay with him?’ Maria asked.

Reve nodded.

She made him sit, and looked at his swollen ankle. She wrapped it tight in a damp cloth and made him as comfortable as she could, and then she and Theon left.

Reve stayed awake a long time, thinking and listening to Tomas’s breathing. It sounded sharp and thin, like he was pulling the air in through a tear in his chest. He wondered whether Moro
would ever return to the village. Finally, when the moon was low in the sky and the door frame looked as if it had been dipped in silver, he fell asleep.

The days that followed were long and slow. Tomas drifted in and out of consciousness, seemed feverish most of the time. He didn’t recognize Reve at all on the first day,
seemed frightened of him and turned his head away when Reve tried to feed him clear soup. And Reve, with no skiff, no chance of working and with his leg too sore to do more than hobble down to the
harbour wall and back again, spent a lot of time on his own. They had little money either, but Theon made sure they didn’t go short. ‘You’re good, Reve. You got credit.’

Credit? It wasn’t so long ago that he had thought saving up dollars was the answer to everything.

People helped, Maria mostly, but though she meant well she had spiky ways so that Reve tried to keep out of the place while she was there. Arella came up to Tomas every day and
Ramon called by now and then, cut wood for the fire and carried supplies down from the cantina. He did it without being asked and didn’t like thanks. He still had few words, though he asked
about Mi. He wanted to know if she was going to marry Two-Boat because that was the talk in the village. When Reve said he thought that given a little bit of time she would, he had nodded.
‘Tha’s a good thing.’ That surprised Reve. It also surprised him how he was soft with Arella too, always seemed to be there to walk her back to her place at the end of the
evening.

By the end of the first week Reve was healed enough to walk the strand and he found himself by the burned wreck of Mi’s car; there was little of it left: the scarred and scrapped shell,
springs, a melted steering wheel and scorched sand all around, like a dirt shadow. But he’d sat there all the same and looked out to sea, watched the skiffs setting out and running home at
the end of the day. Life seemed to go on much as it always had, much as if nothing had happened. He wondered if that’s how it had been after the murder of his father and his mother running
away; the village shuffling on, doing its business, surviving: Calde, the Night Man, police. One thing after another.

As soon as Tomas could sit up Reve moved his bed over to the door so that he could look out to the track and see the harbour wall and the blue of the sea. He asked Reve to read to him, old
newspapers when Theon brought them down and from the Bible – always the Old Testament, that’s what he liked. Old hard-time Job, he liked him, and Jonah too. All that running away, and
where’d he go? Right in the belly of the whale. It was about the only thing that made him smile. The story stayed with Reve and he began to reckon there were different kinds of running away;
some of them didn’t involve running at all, just sitting still.

He told Tomas, piece by piece, all that had passed on their journey to the city, and Tomas listened, didn’t say a word, didn’t ask a question, just listened until Reve told him about
their gone-away mother who called herself Fay. Then Tomas nodded and said, ‘Santa Fe,’ in a voice that was about as thin and whispery as wind across the marram grass. Reve found it hard
to tell him about her because he still didn’t understand why this woman had turned them away, as if he and Mi were some kind of nightmare to her, or why, having done that, she had come out in
the storm to save them from Moro, and piled up a lot of bad for herself with him. She would have known that that would be the price.

‘Your sister,’ Tomas whispered, ‘she remind Fay of what she might have been; that what happen, Reve, and it caused her fright and that made her sour.’

‘What might she have been, Tomas?’

‘Queen of this place,’ he said. ‘But she wasn’t ever happy here, wasn’t happy with me, wasn’t happy with your father, and I reckon she wasn’t happy with
that policeman in the end . . . Still,’ he said softly, ‘I hoped she come back, eh.’

‘We’re a’right without her,’ said Reve.

Tomas didn’t say anything for a while and then eventually, with his eyes closed, he said, ‘Maybe. Time to let go these things. She got a different life now.’

Yes, thought Reve, and not one that he wanted for himself or Mi. He picked up the story again. He described how they had escaped and Pelo’s fall and how they had left him there on the
rain-wet pavement, and the rain falling so thick it was almost like smoke.

Tomas put his hand on Reve’s arm. ‘Pelo . . .’ He sounded the man’s name so softly it was almost a sigh. Then he said, ‘Comes a time when you got a choice, Reve:
you go one way, you go another. Know what I’m sayin? Pelo make a fine choice; you remember that. All the time. An’ that’s what you tell Ciele. Tha’s what she need to
hear.’

Reve looked down at the large hand with its scored and sore knuckles from all his fighting and he said, ‘How can you be so sure she want hear ’bout it?’

‘Cos not knowing goin twist a person up so they got nothin but pain. That’s one thing. An’ not doing a thing that you know you got to do, tha’s the same; it jus’
goin twist you up, Reve. An’ one more thing.’ His grip tightened on Reve’s arm. ‘You know, you already done so many thing, and every one of them make you shine in my eyes,
Reve . . . that’s how it is.’

Reve had spoken to Mi on Theon’s cellphone. It was so strange talking to her and not seeing her. She told him that she was staying in a stone house with Two-Boat’s
mother, just the two of them, and the mother told her all the things she wanted to know, and when Reve asked what were these things, she laughed as if he had made a joke, but he hadn’t. She
told him about what she could see from where she was standing: the sun coming down on a little tree by the house, a tree with red flowers, and when the sun touched them it made them flame.
‘Like your woman you seen, Reve,’ she said. ‘You rememberin’ that?’ As if it was something from a long time ago.

Of course he remembered.