Call Down Thunder Read Online Free PDF Page A

standing.‘You watch yourself, Reve,’ said Ciele, ‘and you get Mi move in from that place she got out there; she’s not safe.’
    ‘Have you tried telling my sister what to do?’ He touched Mayash’s nose.
    Ciele smiled. ‘I got trouble minding my own family without minding yours, Reve. You tell her. She hears more than she pretends to hear, if you know what I’m saying.’
    He saw Ramon and Sali hanging around outside his uncle Theon’s cantina when he went to drop the fish off at the cold store. Sali slapped his arm like a tough guy, made a
fist at Reve then spat. He wouldn’t have dared do that if he’d been on his own. Ramon just looked at him, said nothing.
    Reve ignored them both. He shooed a sleeping dog away from the door so that he could get inside and then tagged five of the fish and shovelled ice over them. The truck would collect them in the
morning, and money from the sales would be distributed at the end of the week. The system was fair, though there was little enough money out of it; all the fisherman grumbled that they had to pay
Calde too much for the transport. But that was the way it was in Rinconda.
    He gutted and cleaned the two jackfish he was keeping and put them back in the box, scooping a little ice over them. He glanced out of the door; the boys were still there. Ramon called out
something to Theon, who came out and handed him a pack of cigarettes. The boys sauntered off towards Calde’s place.
    The villagers called him Clever Theon because he wore glasses and read books. He had helped set up the cooperative that built the cold store. He helped manage it too. He had a
truck and did a little business up in the city. He was younger than Tomas the Boxer, though one time it was Theon who really ran the village, along with Tomas and Calde. Theon didn’t look
like a hard man but he must have been. He knew how things worked, but that was all a long time back, about the time Reve and Mi’s father was killed and their mother, Theon’s younger
sister, disappeared. A smuggling deal with the Night Men went bad. Reve didn’t know exactly what happened; Tomas wouldn’t ever talk about it, but it was after that that Calde took over
most of everything in Rinconda.
    Reve asked Theon once why he had let Calde take over. ‘In business,’ Theon said to him, ‘things happen, sometimes good, because you make a careful plan, but always there is
risk and then things can go bad. Very bad. And people can go bad too. Tomas will tell you the same.’
    Reve was ten when Theon told him that. He thought that ‘people gone bad’ just referred to Calde, but since then he had wondered if Theon had also been thinking about his sister, Reve
and Mi’s mother, because the police had taken her away. Theon never talked about his sister’s arrest. ‘That’s over,’ was all he said and Reve knew better than to
pester him, but Theon’s relationship with Calde wasn’t quite over. Reve had seen Calde and Theon talking, and Calde often drank in the cantina, ordered Theon to bring him this, bring
him that. It was hard to imagine that it had once been the other way round. When he mentioned this to Tomas the Boxer, Tomas just said, ‘Theon, he like to keep his options open.’
    Reve felt his uncle really was smart, a lot more clever than Calde anyway, and he liked his uncle and Theon gave him work: cleaning up in the cantina, paying him a few cents for the bottles that
Reve collected from the shoreline.
    Theon saw Reve coming out of the cold store and raised his hand in greeting. ‘You do good?’
    ‘All right.’
    ‘Your sister was in the village today.’
    ‘I know.’
    He took off his little round glasses and polished them on his loose shirt tail. ‘She’s looking more like her mother every day,’ he said. ‘About time she gave up all that
crazy business, living in a car.’
    ‘Everyone sayin that to me,’ said Reve.
    ‘Maybe everyone got a point.’
    ‘She sayin our mother’s alive.