RAIN
It had not rained in 6 weeks on our little street known as Loma de Chivo,
or Goat Ridge, on the outskirts of Santo Domingo. Clouds of dust
followed trucks and motorcycles up and down the street and settled
everywhere and just a dog or a chicken or a child running could raise
up a small rooster tail. At night, even when nothing was stirring it
up, you could see the dust in the air through the slanting light of the
headlights of cars idling in front of the colmado
waiting for someone to come out of the little grocery store with ten
pesos worth of salami or a quart of beer. Chavela mopped the galleria
and kitchen floors twice a day and then would fling the dirty water out
of the bucket in a fan shaped spray onto the street to try to keep the
dust down and we would try to keep the persianas
closed on the windows to keep the dust out but it would get too hot in
the house. If a big Coca-cola or Presidente beer truck rumbled by on
its way to deliver to the last colmado the roiled dust could get so
thick that, for a moment, you could not even see Titi's house which is
across the street and only two houses down.
But then today it rained for about an hour before
lunch. La Rubia fashioned a Hipermercado Olé plastic shopping
bag into a shower cap and threw several more plastic bags over the cut
up chicken still on the scarred wooden table under the roble
tree and sat back down in the rain to wait for customers and a bunch of
little kids wearing just underwear came out of nowhere and took baths
under the down spouts that drain the water off the flat roofed houses.
A girl of about 12 who had been mopping the floor in a marquesina
across the street and one house up leaned her mop against the wall and
stood in the doorway, half in the rain, and two-stepped slowly back and
forth in the water running down the sidewalk.
I had been painting a patio wall of the garden just
outside our house with orange paint and the rain came suddenly. I just
had time to get the laundry off the line and into the house and put my
brush and roller and paint under cover and then there was nothing to do
but to sit under the galvanized metal roof of the galleria
and watch the water that ran off the patio turn oranger and oranger.
Niningo and Chavela came home from school just as it was letting up and
when I showed them the stained blotchy paint job they each said,
“What bad luck.”
©Daniel DuVall 2005