Call Down Thunder Read Online Free PDF Page B

that attack, and bruised too. When she was recovered she said she wouldn’t sleep in Tomas’s any more. She said that Tomas looked at her all the
time. This divided her and Reve for a while; he didn’t believe she meant that about him killing their father. He thought she was just stirring trouble. But she’d said there were things
he didn’t know; he was too young, and that if he wanted to be Tomas’s runaround, that was his choice.
    As for Tomas looking at her, the truth was everybody looked at her; they couldn’t help it. She was so different: red hair, long legs, sleepy eyes and her strange ways. She didn’t
care what she wore, sometimes an old threadbare woman’s dress that hung from her shoulders and trailed down to her bare feet, sometimes a man’s T-shirt knotted round her waist to make a
skirt. As she grew older, she became more striking and the way she dressed became more provocative. Ciele took to making patched up skirts and shirts and insisted she wear them; Mi took them, but
would only wear clothes with blue in them.
    Theon offered to let her stay up at the cantina, do a little work for him. That’s when she told him that he had a little devil tucked away in him; ‘a devil crab in its hole’
was what she said. Theon didn’t get angry – he never did, Theon – but he never made that offer again.
    She took to walking the shore, going further and further and spending more and more time down on the beach where the old Beetle VW stood on the sand. Reve came in for rough talk too, mainly
because of her, and when this turned to throwing punches, Tomas taught him how to box. Hevez and his friends didn’t bother him so much after that.
    By the time she was thirteen she was living all the time down at the car.
    Word about her stretched along the coast and people came from miles to hear the girl who spoke with spirit voices, because that is what she did now, and that’s when her meetings started.
Now she even had a man who played the drum; the drumming would whip up the crowd, get them excited; maybe it helped them believe in Mi’s spirit voices.
    Tomas didn’t approve of her meetings and wouldn’t have anything to do with them. He tried to stop Reve going to them too, but of course he did go, snuck down the beach and crept into
the edge of the crowd, always keeping at the back, and then watched how she became this other person, who danced like she was being jerked on strings and who spoke in different voices, harsh and
croaky like an old woman, but sometimes the words slipped from her lips like splinters of ice. It frightened him but he still went.
    In the mornings he would always go down the beach to see that she was still Mi and hadn’t somehow lost herself and become that other person, to see that she was all right.
    But she wasn’t all right. She wasn’t happy. And now, despite all the spirit power people believed she carried around inside her, she wasn’t even safe.
    Reve brushed the sand from the eight stones so they sat in a line, clear and white, and then he stood up.
    He never liked saying goodbye, though it wasn’t that which made his heart feel heavy when he hefted up that red box and balanced it on his shoulder. It was looking out over Rinconda and
seeing the shacks and the yards, some fires being set for cooking, and knowing that Mi was way out on her own; and that thought brought the dream woman back into his mind, so sharp and real it made
the hairs on his neck prickle.
    He started down the hill, heading for home. What had it meant really and why did it make him think of Mi and her saying a goodbye to him? He wondered if maybe his mother had looked like that
when she’d said goodbye to his father.
    Tomas was on the stoop when he got back, rolling a cigarette, the white paper like a slip of nothing in his wide hands. His black hair had dabs of grey round his temples. Other
than that he looked as fit and strong as he ever had, even though he had taken to spending the