Call Down Thunder (6 page)

‘I don’ know.’

They beached the skiff, rolled up the sail and set the anchor. LoJo took the fish box up to the cold store, and Reve, his forefinger hooked into the gill of a blue fish, walked over towards
Mi’s place. He would collect the net later. Sultan, his tail waving like a ragged old sail, trotted ahead.

The second figure was a young man in his midtwenties, broad-faced with thick shoulders and a short neck, wearing a faded blue baseball hat. He wasn’t from the village. Reve wanted to ask
what was his business, coming down here to talk to Mi, because he didn’t seem like the people who came to her meetings. He seemed too easy in himself. Most people were a little anxious round
Mi, had questions. He wasn’t like that. There was something different about Mi as well, Reve thought. She sat straighter somehow, held her head differently, looked older. The young man had
been before, that was obvious.

The man pushed his cap a little further back on his head. He had tight black curly hair and eyes that studied Reve in a level, unblinking way. He smiled. ‘You know how to handle that skiff
you got.’

‘Learn from Tomas the Boxer. Been sailin’ almost since I could walk. You know Tomas?’

The man nodded. ‘Know most everyone who takes a boat out on this strip of sea.’

‘Then you must know a lot of people,’ said Reve. He turned to his sister. ‘Hey, Mi. I brought you this.’ He handed her the fish. He always brought her something.
Sometimes she cleaned, cooked and ate them; sometimes she left them out on the sand and the birds picked them clean. This one she gutted and cleaned straight away, put it in a tub of fresh, cool
seawater. Then she set a fire and pulled out her grilling tray. Was she going to go cooking for this man? Reve wondered. Was she going to lay out a cloth and find him a box to sit on? What was this
man to her?

‘Always share the catch?’ said the man.

Reve nodded.

‘I like to see family sharing what they got.’ The man’s voice came out soft and light, not as you’d expect from someone so solid-looking. Reve noticed how his eyes
followed Mi all the time.

‘I’m out here most times,’ said Reve. Mi came and sat down by them under the tree. ‘Someone got to look out for my sister, livin out here in this old car she got. You
tell this man ’bout the boys?’

The man smiled. ‘I reckon no one mess with this girl – she getting a name. People sayin she see what comin. That right, Mi?’

She tipped her head down like she was bein shy, but Reve saw the way she looked up at this man, liking him. She looked so pretty. He frowned and looked away towards her car with its strange
little garden she had made: long shadows stretched across the sand from the different sticks and scraps she had planted there. Somehow it made the garden look as if it was moving, pointing inland
towards the setting sun.

‘She’s not always right,’ said Reve. ‘Yesterday she was talking ’bout a storm coming down.’

Mi scowled at him.

The man said, ‘Well, if she said that, I’d keep my eye on the sky. Weather can change quick enough, and no man wants to lose a boat.’

Mi shrugged. ‘I feel it in my bones. Don’t mind what Reve say; he don’t see nothin till it smack him in the face.’

The man laughed and then Mi and him talked a little longer while Reve sat silent, just listening and thinking. A couple of times Mi gave Reve a look which said plain as a black cloud in a blue
sky that she wanted him out of there, but he pretended not to notice. Then the man stood up and took his leave. ‘I got to head back, but I would like to come to one of your meetings. Maybe
you’d think of holding one in San Jerro.’

When he said that Reve realized who he was: ‘You the one they call Two-Boat?’

‘Some call me that still,’ the man admitted.

He’d been the first fisherman on their strip of coast to buy a fleet of skiffs, and now near owned San Jerro, his village. He was like Calde, thought Reve, but, he had to admit, without
being like him at all; none of his swagger, none of his threat. Two-Boat pulled his cap forward a little. ‘I bring my truck next time and maybe you and your sister come over to my village,
meet my family.’

Then he was gone, walking out across the scrub field behind the dunes, heading up the coast. It was a good walk to his village, five miles easy. He had made that walk just to see her. Reve said
as much as soon as he was out of earshot.

‘You got no understandin,’ she said.

‘You talk ’bout leavin, Mi. I see where you goin. You thinkin of marryin? That what you thinkin?’ He knew he should feel good, but he didn’t. ‘He got money, that
man. Rich, I hear—’

‘Enough o’ that, Reve!’ She hugged herself and started rocking backwards and forwards. ‘Anyhow, he ask me nothing yet. An’ I don’ know what I want. I’m
not safe here, Reve. I got that Hevez pushin more than you know, talkin things at me. ’

Reve reached over and took her arm. ‘I know,’ he said. There was no reason to be hard with Mi. ‘Don’ fret you’self. Hey. We figure something.’

‘Everythin pressin on me, Reve; tha’s why I want her.’

‘You could talk to Ciele.’

Mi puffed out her cheeks and stopped her rocking. ‘Ciele someone else’s mother.’

‘You won’t go runnin without me,’ he said.

‘Got nowhere to run, Reve.’ She hesitated and he wondered if she was thinking about Two-Boat. Then she said, ‘’Less we find where our mother livin.’

‘Told you, she not livin any place.’

The two of them were turning in circles, smaller and tighter, going nowhere, like when current, wind and tide all pull the water around and make a whirlpool. Suck a boat down so it never come
up. Tomas told him that.

Out on the ocean, if there was a storm coming, all you could do was run in front of it, try to find shelter.

What kind of shelter could he find for Mi?

Money. Money – that was the only thing you could be sure about. Dollars wrapped in a tight wad, wedged in a jar, buried here, under his arm.

Reve was awake again.

There was something grumbling far off. Thunder maybe. Storm back inland somewhere. Mi’s storm?

Mi.

Hevez sneering one way, Two-Boat smiling the other, and Mi somewhere in the middle.

Tomas had seen Calde. All he’d said to Reve afterwards was, ‘That man don’ have listenin ears. I got no threat on him.’

Now, as Reve lay on his pallet under the shack, hearing the sound of Tomas snoring above him, he thought, Tha’s cos you got no weight, Tomas: you live in a hammock, drink rum, got hardly
no money.

Reve, though, would get dollars. That’s what he would do. Be a rich man like Two-Boat. That way you get respect. People mind what you say if you carry dollar in your pocket.

With a dollar in his pocket he could find proper shelter for Mi.

His eyes were wide open now and the dark was solid around him, but he kept expecting to see the sky crackle with lightning because of that thunder that had woken him.

Then there was a flicker of light, and the rumbling was louder.

But it wasn’t a storm beating up the sky on the far side of the highway, and that light sweeping across their porch was never lightning, and the voices calling out weren’t shouting
because some storm was tearing boats from their moorings or ripping plastic from the shacks. That was a truck and cars, maybe two, three, easing down the bumpy track, heading for the wall.

He heard more voices, the bang of a shack door snapping shut.

Sultan stirred, lifted himself, came and sniffed Reve’s face, turned round three times and then lay down again. There were sticks of torchlight now, people hurrying after the cars and the
truck. He thought of the way gulls drifted in the air above the boats when the nets were being hauled in. There were always plenty who were hungry for the Night Man’s dollar.

Reve was one of many.

He shoved Sultan out of the way and rolled off his pallet, pulled on his jeans and scrabbled out from the end of the shack. He checked to see whether Tomas’s lamp had come on. Maybe he
would sleep through it all: hear nothing, see nothing. Reve hoped so. But whether he woke or not, whether he found out and raged and shook his Bible, it would just be spit in the wind, Reve was
going to earn the Night Man’s dollar, and that was that.

He slipped through the makeshift gate, picked his way over the stony part of the track and then ran straight down to where the truck and the cars were humped like landed whales on the deck of
the pier, men and boys shoaling round, waiting for the boats to come in and the work to start.

This was Mi’s storm, wasn’t it?

Money and sickness.

Money. That was the Night Man, the smuggling man.

Sickness. That could be him too.

Do the Night Man’s work right and keep your mouth shut and you’d be all right, but talk out of turn and then bad things happened. Everybody knew about that: hammer and club and a
person turns into a meal for crabs.

Only a fool ended up feeding himself to the crabs, Reve reckoned.

He joined the edge of a group of men gathered in a loose circle round the first car, where a señor stood, a cigar lighting up his face with an orange glow. He wondered if he’d see
LoJo. Calde was there, of course, up beside that señor, half in the light of the truck’s headlight, his stubbled face turned to the señor, telling him this, telling him that,
nodding to one in the crowd, picking out another, to go down to where the boats would come in, be ready to take the line, to hold them steady while everyone else lined up to carry whatever load the
boats brought in. Calde was this señor’s man, anyone who hadn’t known this before knew it now.

He saw the señor talking into his cellphone, his men in suits leaning up against the side of the car, smoking, guns slung over their shoulders, so relaxed, like this was a thing they did
most every day. Reve didn’t know how you could lean like that, look so easy. Funny thing was, these men weren’t so different from the police when they came into the village: stood the
same, carried the same sort of gun, looked at Rinconda people the same way, right through them, like they were hardly there.

Reve didn’t care about that one way or another so long as he got a chance to do their work. His chest felt tight as a drum; his eyes strained to see into the darkness beyond the pier.

The night was still. The sea was slick and flat like the highway, and there was just enough moonlight for the men driving the black-hulled boats to read the coastline. He itched for the boats to
come in, to carry whatever he had to carry, to scurry with all the men round him and earn as much as he could. He could almost feel the wad of notes they would pay him.

Someone lit a cigarette; another murmured to the shadowy figure next to him.

‘Hey.’ LoJo slipped up beside him, shoulders hunched, like he didn’t know whether to try to be bigger than he was or smaller so no one would see him there and tell his
father.

‘Hey.’

‘What you thinkin, Reve? You think we get our share of work when the boats come in?’

Reve nodded.

They waited and talked, and glanced at who was around them. They saw Hevez along with Sali. There was Ramon and a younger boy, his little brother; and then there was something almost like a sigh
as the boats appeared.

Reve heard the high whine of their powerful outboard engines moments before he saw the slash of white arrowing in towards the pier. Four boats, five, no, more, six, seven . . . ten! There had
never been an operation this big.

One after the other the black-hulled speedboats curved into the pier, their engines suddenly stilled so that just for a second, before anyone moved, all you could hear was the slap of the wash
against the stone and the creak of the hulls moving against rubber fenders slung down from the pier’s side.

Only a moment though, because then the work started. It looked like chaos but it wasn’t. The group Reve had been standing with dissolved as they ran, marking the boat they intended to help
unload. Then sacks wrapped tight in black plastic, heavy as a fish box, were hurried to the truck, where two of the señor’s men stood, directing where the cartons were to be put. It
was smooth as grease.

Reve ran with LoJo, the two of them panting, the night clammy on their faces, sweat running down their arms, making the plastic slippy in their hands.

‘You!’ Calde called out. ‘Move you’self. Do nothing, get nothing. You want to see a beach rat get more than you?’ For half a moment, Reve thought he was yelling at
him and LoJo, but it was Hevez.

Hevez didn’t know much about work, only knew how to swagger and push his weight. He was standing back by the truck, smoking, but when his uncle called him, he ran down to the edge of the
pier and took his turn to ferry one of the sacks. Reve nudged LoJo when Hevez staggered under the weight, almost losing his footing.

‘Nobody grieve if he fall in and drown,’ Reve muttered, running past LoJo to the truck.

‘’Cept his mother maybe.’

‘Who knows about her. She look like she suck on lime all day.’

Reve had just thrown his tenth sack into the truck and was about to run back for his next load when he heard a ratcheting noise that seemed to come from the highway, but higher
up, in the air; and growing louder and louder until it sounded heavy as thunder. Helicopter! Everyone froze, thirty-odd figures caught in the moonlight, heads all tilted up at the sky. Now the
thunder was sweeping towards them. The air thrummed and shook as if it were being pounded with a jackhammer and Reve found himself pressing his hands to his ears.

Brilliant stabbing columns of white light swept over the frail shacks of Rinconda, slashing big zigzags towards the pier, picking out the smugglers’ boats, pinning the group on the edge of
the pier unloading the cargo. Then it slowed and hovered above them.

‘This is a coastguard warning!’ The voice sounded like metal and filled the air it was so loud, louder than the hammering roar of the helicopter itself. ‘Move away from the
boats. Move away from the truck . . .’

There was the flat crack of first one gunshot and then instantly another and another and the helicopter bucked and lifted, twisted about and then like a wild giant black hornet jinked first one
way and then another while the señor’s men’s automatic rifles spattered up at it, and then the chopper swept down low along the length of the pier.