Kate Blackwell

Rain is not common where we lived in Nevada, forty miles east of Death Valley—four inches per annum is the average, and old-timers remember a year in the ‘60s when seven inches fell, believed to be caused by bomb tests on the plains near Yucca Mountain; otherwise, there is rarely any rain to speak of, certainly not during the summer, a ten-minute sprinkle being something we might have spoken of, Bo and I and the children and the girls in our little enclave on Highway 66 where we operated one of those pit stops you may have heard of that are popular on western Nevada’s otherwise deserted highways (the girls, I should add, lived in a second trailer about twenty yards from our doublewide, a chain-link fence separating us with a locked gate to which only Bo had the key, though he left it unlocked during the day so that I could go over to help the girls with their various ailments and requirements, which I was glad to do, the girls being my only company, except Bo and the children), so when it started to sprinkle one day in August when the temperature was 91 F in the shade and kept on sprinkling until little dark spots began appearing on the sand and the dog got to barking, first at the rain spots, then at the loud splat-splats of drops hitting the leaves of the cottonwood, well, you can imagine the amaze that struck us all, me as well as the children, who came screaming out of the shack they called their playhouse—where the hired man used to live before Bo caught him with one of the girls and beat him so badly he had to be Medivacked to Reno and the girl had her arm broken and the children and I came in for our share per usual—and there they were, tearing off their little shirts and dancing on their thin little legs, letting the raindrops wet their pale little bodies, the rain coming thicker now, falling like a kind of hard dust, which was when I thought to look up and saw a single oval cloud the color of a bruise, a central dark gold aura enfolded in radiating circles of purple and violet in an otherwise clear blue sky, though while I was looking at it and thinking how like a bruise it appeared, the cloud was joined by other purple and gold clouds drifting out of nowhere to form a single very large bruise that spread over our trailer and the girls’ trailer and the children dancing in the yard and the dog barking its head off and me standing in our door staring at the girls’ trailer to see if I could see Bo.

By this time, it was raining so hard the children decided to shelter under the cottonwood, as the drops undoubtedly hurt their tender skin, and the sand in the yard had turned gray like cement when it usually was white as bone, and the tree with the rain hitting its leaves sounded as though it was filled with chattering magpies, and the dog’s barking sounded hysterical, and that was when I saw Bo standing on the trailer’s steps with his fists on his hips. By now we were in the middle of a real downpour the like of which the children had never seen in their tender years and which even I could hardly remember from growing up back East, where we had storms that approached for hours and lasted for days, that I had taken for granted and hardly bothered to notice except to think of the trouble I would have getting to school when the mud road turned to soup, and now with gallons of rain falling two inches from my face it occurred to me that even for West Virginia this rain was something to speak of, coming down in sheets so I could hardly see Bo on the steps of the girls’ trailer waving his arms, and the children were not under the tree anymore, which was worrisome, and the dog was running in circles barking at the torrent of water that was coming around the side of our trailer and filling up the yard so that a lake had formed between our trailer and the girls’, where I could hear Bo yelling, though the rain was pounding so hard I couldn’t make out what he was saying, maybe something like why the hell aren’t you taking care of the brats, or maybe he was just signaling me that the dog was about to drown, though I’d never thought Bo cared for the dog.

That was when I stepped out into the yard, thinking I would try to pull the dog up on the steps and my knees almost buckled with the water that was pushing me away from the trailer and it came to me that the gulch must have overflowed and this was a genuine flood pouring in from behind our trailer and rushing toward the girls’ trailer, where I no longer saw Bo on the trailer steps, the steps too had disappeared, and the trailer itself seemed to have shifted in a new direction because now I was facing the big square rear window with pink curtains I had sewn for an area called “The Suite,” whereas usually I faced the row of small windows with drawn shades along the side. By now the water was halfway up my thighs and pushing me harder away from our trailer and the dog was swimming but going nowhere, struggling to keep its nose up, when a log struck him and he stopped swimming and though I was only a foot away I couldn’t catch hold of him he whirled off so quickly toward the prairie where the bomb tests had taken place and where I probably would have followed him if I hadn’t fought with every bit of strength I had to get back to our trailer where I hauled myself up into the open door and leaned for a minute catching my breath, and what did I see but the children way up in the top of the cottonwood like little birds, each straddling a limb and smiling down at me, and the next thing I knew the rain had stopped.

The water began to seep into the ground or run back into the gulch and pretty soon, after maybe an hour, the gulch was dry, but otherwise, much had changed. The dog was gone never to be seen again, ditto for Bo, who the best we could tell had slid off the girls’ trailer’s steps when the trailer shifted and was sucked into the space beneath, where the mud closed him in and dried so hard even a backhoe would have had trouble digging him out, so we didn’t hire one. The children climbed down from the cottonwood and they and I went into our trailer where the water had laid a pale green stain halfway up the walls that we allowed to remain so that those who come after us will have evidence of what happened. Otherwise, after the mud dried and our bruises healed, who would believe any of it?