Quenched
by Jenny (Walicek) Clendenen
San Jose State University | James D. Phelan Literary Award - Honorable Mention, Short Story (2011)
The oppressive afternoon sank into the scorched valley like a heavy wool blanket draped over a sweltering dreamer. The sun-baked hills were naked but for the willows up by the track. A rare breeze rustled their long fronds and revealed a cluster of beige buildings below, near the dry riverbed. Two stables flanked a lush, board-fenced pasture, and the dark faces of fine horses, masked against the ubiquitous summer flies, stretched over their stall doors toward the grass beyond. The elegance of the animals could be discerned even from afar. There was a feed barn at the south end of the pasture and a house at the north, where Daniel and Althea Jordan sat on the deck in faded teak chaises.
The chaises had been pulled as far into the shade of the eaves as possible without compromising the ample distance between the Jordans. A fan spun listlessly on the window sill behind them, sending a meager gust down the center of the neutral zone.
Althea wiped at her damp forehead with her long fingers, unmanicured since she and Daniel had purchased the ranch, and pretended to read her magazine. Her pale grey eyes stopped over the pictures, but she was staring through them at worlds she could no longer reach. Besides the droning of the tired fan there was no sound save the occasional nicker of a horse, and now and then the clunking of ice melting in her glass. Once the fan sputtered and tipped, so that a wayward bit of air blew against her slender brown arm and ruffled her pages. Then she set the magazine down and got up to adjust the breeze, so that all was equal again.
Every afternoon they sat there on the fiery deck, shriveling from the inferno of the sky, mutually suffering its blistering heat beside the spluttering beat of the fan. They were not young anymore – over forty, now – but they were filled with the fierce, smoldering energy of unfulfilled ambition, of anxiety and blame. The investment in the ranch had inextricably bound them together, but the concentration of conversation on portentous business matters had left their union dry and stale. They snapped easily if they spoke, so they often chose to seethe instead.
The fan slowed and whined into a final, indolent spiral, and stopped. Daniel leaned forward and swung his balding head toward Althea with an accusatory glare. She felt it boring into her temple and glowered back at him. Shehadn’t broken it; in fact, she had tried to fix it. It was always breaking. They should have bought a new one when they made their quarterly trip into town in the spring, but the weather had been mild then, and neither of them had thought of it until it was too late.
She could scarcely wait for summer to end. Her friends back east had loved summer; it meant the Cape, the Hamptons, the Caribbean, and camps that liberated them from their overindulged children. All that summer meant to Althea now was more work, and more tension. Every year since she and Daniel had purchased the ranch, she felt sure they would never make it through the withering heat. They were too isolated to get the regular maintenance help they needed, and the property needed even more attention in such desiccating temperatures.
Each summer the vivid wildflowers on the hills devolved into ugly brown stickers and weeds, and enormous black flies descended like an iridescent plague onto her clammy face and arms. Althea longed for a garden, but the only source of water in this dry, remote valley was their private tank -- the reason for the economical price of the land -- and they could not spare a drop for unnecessary purposes. The absence of color and the perpetual heat left her lethargic and hostile. The stables were air conditioned, of course, but the house was not, and Daniel, anxious about their strained finances in their first few years as thoroughbred breeders, had never been willing to concede that they might afford that luxury now. Althea had always insisted it was a necessity, but to no avail.
She slapped at a fly on her shoulder and grimaced. Daniel was leaning back on his chaise, eyes closed, inert.
She put down her magazine and began to think about autumn and winter, when the brittle weeds and prickly foxtails would soften, and the tender new blades would emerge. The thought of the greening earth reminded her of Saratoga, of the thoroughbreds skimming over the turf course, of the peak-roofed clubhouse where she and Daniel had clasped hands and screamed, vibrating with adrenaline and trepidation, as the glistening, frothing horses rounded the turn. She closed her eyes and saw the diminutive jockeys holding their fragile, airy poses over the rippling, surging bodies of their mounts. Hoofbeats pounded in her head like the roar of a long waterfall. She inhaled; she could almost smell the moist, boot-tousled turf and the oddly fragrant scent of steaming horse manure. The racing season had lasted throughout the late summer in New York, yet she had not been aware of the heat then -- or else she had absorbed it as part of their passion, and not as the searing slice of hell that it was to her now.
She could remember the racetrack and its life and power only in stuttering half-frames, like the time-speckled clips from an old movie. Between these flashes of memory she was far too aware of the sun siphoning the moisture from her skin and of her tank top and shorts sticking to her. The empty space between her and her husband seemed to shimmer, like a mirage wall maintaining their tentative truce. She thought of the swift, steaming nights of their courtship and of the cold, protracted nights she passed now, clinging to the verge of the mattress in the stifling room, but it was less a thought than a bitterness that made her swallow hard and purse her lips until they were almost white.
She shook her head sharply and looked back at the still blades of the fan. The cord hung limp against the windowsill and she realized that it was not broken after all. The plug had simply come out of the wall. She thought about getting up and restoring the power, but then Daniel would know that she had been the cause of its cessation, and he would say something snide. She peeled her magazine from her thighs and sighed. The Smirnoff model stuck to her leg, smiling seductively.
The Jordans sat still on the deck in the swiftly vanishing refuge of the shade. The furious white glare of the sun fused the beige dust and weeds into the beige siding of the long barns and the beige house and the beige feed barn and the beige fence that encircled the pasture, so that all but that green oasis in the center seemed lifeless and bleached against the parched earth, like the scattered skeleton of some huge primeval beast exposed in a desert wind.
At the far end of the pasture, over the roof of the feed barn, a tendril of grey curled up like a question mark. One of the thoroughbreds snorted, a short, trumpeting sound high with developing panic.
Daniel did not open his eyes. It was Althea who jumped up and gasped as if a pitcher of ice water had just been poured down her back. She froze for a moment and then whirled toward Daniel, her voice locked up in fear, and stomped her bare foot hard against the deck, twice, until he rose up on his elbow and rubbed his eyes. She shoved her finger at the sky, pointing. He looked at the threatening smear and then swung his legs over the chaise and stood slowly, unfolding his large, languid frame as if in a dream.
They turned to each other and stared, the whites of their eyes large against their sunburnt faces, then looked outward again toward the smoke. The wispy question mark over the roof had billowed into a paragraph of roiling black. The horses were screeching and kicking in the stables that flanked the fenced pasture. Within seconds, windows shattered in the feed barn and fire raged in livid gusts into the open air. As if they had rehearsed such a scene, Althea ran toward the hoses at the far ends of the two stables, and Daniel to the powerful, fragile animals he understood so much better than she.
Althea twisted one faucet and dragged the streaming hose to the front of the burning barn, then dropped it and ran for the other one. Pulling both as far as they would reach she held her thumbs against the nozzles and sprayed in double arcs, choking, coughing, blinking in the thick smoke. She glanced over her right shoulder and saw through the murk that five stall doors stood open, and that Daniel was squeezing through the sixth, slipping a halter around the yearling’s neck to lead her, bounding, toward the western gate of the pasture. The horses he had already taken there were running back and forth across the north end near the house, as far from the fire as they could get. She noted that there was no sign of aggression, at the moment; only of a pervasive, collective fear.
She turned her attention back to the blaze in front of her and saw what looked like an orange python wriggling and writhing along the ground from the feed barn toward the stables on her left, the stables where six powerful, terrified thoroughbreds were still trapped, bellowing in panic, their eyes rolling wildly as they lunged repeatedly against the stall doors. Althea screamed and looked back at her husband, who was still nudging the filly into the pasture. He saw. He slammed the gate shut from the inside and ran diagonally across the field behind his wife as the flames slithered up the wall and along the gutter, seeking a hold on the tarpaper shingles. Daniel yanked open the southern gate of the pasture and dashed to the stall in the most imminent peril, throwing a halter over the crazed colt’s head.
Althea’s fingers cramped around the hoses that were their only hope for suspending this hell-rain of brimstone, the ruination of their dreams. The feed barn was utterly lost. She turned both hoses on the stable, shaking as Daniel led the last of its six horses to safety.
After awhile the flames began to subside, and the roar dimmed to a crackle. The sun was now an eerie orange circle burning through the veil of smoke, like a distant beacon, a lighthouse glowing in a black fog. Daniel came up behind her, his face caked with ashes and sweat and the fine dust of the woodchips that padded the stalls, and grabbed one of the hoses from her. The two of them quenched what remained of the fury, reducing the resurgent embers to hissing, steaming charcoal. Then they stared, side by side, at the black remains of the barn. They had almost lost far more.
Althea sank to her knees, exhausted, and let the precious water run over her knees and make mud of the ground under her. The stream was running thin; the water in the tank would be very low now. She would have to get up and turn off the faucets.
She felt Daniel’s hand rest tentatively on the top of her head. She looked up and saw a little twist of a smile on his tired, soot-tarnished face.
“We saved ’em,” he said, his voice cracking. “You and me. We saved the horses.”
Then all of a sudden he lifted the hose and sprayed it into the air over their heads, tipping his head back to let the sparkling shower cover his face and neck. His mouth was open and his tongue was out, like an overgrown boy in the rain. Althea could not help smiling at the way he squinted his eyes against the drops, the way the water coursed over his bald head like a stream over a granite bed worn smooth, the way he staggered drunkenly under his own small storm.
Watching him, something inside her burst, something binding that had wrapped her stomach into a tight hard knot for months, maybe years. Now the knot was unwinding. Water and tears flooded her eyes. Suddenly, like a graceless child who transmits both relief and forgiveness by a punch to the arm of her offender, she swiped at the ground where the hose ran decadently over the dust and flung a handful of mud at her husband. It splattered over his chest and neck, mixing with the soot and water that flowed in rivulets from his face. He looked down at himself as if he had been shot, and then at his wife. Althea stepped back, shocked by her own misbehavior, and covered her face, peering at him between her fingers. He grinned and turned the hose full upon her.
Althea, giggling like a schoolgirl, leaned down for more mud and slipped. Daniel stepped closer and took his thumb off the nozzle, so that she had to abandon her quest for ammunition to fend off the solid stream of water he was pouring over her head. Over her own shrieks she could hear him snorting, almost chortling, like a sixth grader pulling off some grand prank. She kicked out at him and he grabbed her ankle and poured the thinning water over her long bare legs, a hoarse, rich laughter accompanying his juvenile antics. Then suddenly he stood still, panting, and looked down at her with an expression of tenderness and desire, an expression from long ago, before the ranch, from the days when they had placed their bets and won.
Althea could hear the flustered horses rustling delicately through the lush green grass behind them, nickering, sensing that the danger had past. She held very still. She could feel the heat renewing itself through the lingering haze that surrounded them. The water from both hoses ran out on the ground, the streams growing smaller, the supply getting lower. She did not want to get up and turn them off.
Daniel sank to his knees beside her. She saw, out of the corner of her eye, that the hoses were barely trickling now. The barn was gone, and the water was gone, but so was the terrible tension between them -- at least for the moment. She looked into his eyes with her questions and waited.
He slipped his arms under her shoulders and behind her knees and lifted her like a gangly colt, muddy and sooty, against his soaked, stained chest. He stood up carefully and shifted her in his arms, finding his balance. Her cheek was sticky against his cotton shirt and the smell of him was raw, and the subtle friction between their bodies as he carried her somehow made her want to cry. He took her back to the deck where just an hour earlier they had been roused from their fuming languor, and he gently set her down on his chaise and went inside the house.
Althea’s heart moved strangely within her. Lying there on the chaise under the flaming sun and the drifting smoke, she wondered what sort of sacrifice might be made of her on this altar – if she were about to be, in some sense, burned.
She heard the front door close and he appeared beside her, kneeling. The ice trays from the freezer were piled in his arms.
Althea flushed.
“Daniel…”
He set the trays under the chaise, one by one, and put his wintry hand against her burning cheek.
“It’s all right now,” he said.
Above them, the sun blazed bright and golden across the clearing sky.
San Jose State University | James D. Phelan Literary Award - Honorable Mention, Short Story (2011)
The oppressive afternoon sank into the scorched valley like a heavy wool blanket draped over a sweltering dreamer. The sun-baked hills were naked but for the willows up by the track. A rare breeze rustled their long fronds and revealed a cluster of beige buildings below, near the dry riverbed. Two stables flanked a lush, board-fenced pasture, and the dark faces of fine horses, masked against the ubiquitous summer flies, stretched over their stall doors toward the grass beyond. The elegance of the animals could be discerned even from afar. There was a feed barn at the south end of the pasture and a house at the north, where Daniel and Althea Jordan sat on the deck in faded teak chaises.
The chaises had been pulled as far into the shade of the eaves as possible without compromising the ample distance between the Jordans. A fan spun listlessly on the window sill behind them, sending a meager gust down the center of the neutral zone.
Althea wiped at her damp forehead with her long fingers, unmanicured since she and Daniel had purchased the ranch, and pretended to read her magazine. Her pale grey eyes stopped over the pictures, but she was staring through them at worlds she could no longer reach. Besides the droning of the tired fan there was no sound save the occasional nicker of a horse, and now and then the clunking of ice melting in her glass. Once the fan sputtered and tipped, so that a wayward bit of air blew against her slender brown arm and ruffled her pages. Then she set the magazine down and got up to adjust the breeze, so that all was equal again.
Every afternoon they sat there on the fiery deck, shriveling from the inferno of the sky, mutually suffering its blistering heat beside the spluttering beat of the fan. They were not young anymore – over forty, now – but they were filled with the fierce, smoldering energy of unfulfilled ambition, of anxiety and blame. The investment in the ranch had inextricably bound them together, but the concentration of conversation on portentous business matters had left their union dry and stale. They snapped easily if they spoke, so they often chose to seethe instead.
The fan slowed and whined into a final, indolent spiral, and stopped. Daniel leaned forward and swung his balding head toward Althea with an accusatory glare. She felt it boring into her temple and glowered back at him. Shehadn’t broken it; in fact, she had tried to fix it. It was always breaking. They should have bought a new one when they made their quarterly trip into town in the spring, but the weather had been mild then, and neither of them had thought of it until it was too late.
She could scarcely wait for summer to end. Her friends back east had loved summer; it meant the Cape, the Hamptons, the Caribbean, and camps that liberated them from their overindulged children. All that summer meant to Althea now was more work, and more tension. Every year since she and Daniel had purchased the ranch, she felt sure they would never make it through the withering heat. They were too isolated to get the regular maintenance help they needed, and the property needed even more attention in such desiccating temperatures.
Each summer the vivid wildflowers on the hills devolved into ugly brown stickers and weeds, and enormous black flies descended like an iridescent plague onto her clammy face and arms. Althea longed for a garden, but the only source of water in this dry, remote valley was their private tank -- the reason for the economical price of the land -- and they could not spare a drop for unnecessary purposes. The absence of color and the perpetual heat left her lethargic and hostile. The stables were air conditioned, of course, but the house was not, and Daniel, anxious about their strained finances in their first few years as thoroughbred breeders, had never been willing to concede that they might afford that luxury now. Althea had always insisted it was a necessity, but to no avail.
She slapped at a fly on her shoulder and grimaced. Daniel was leaning back on his chaise, eyes closed, inert.
She put down her magazine and began to think about autumn and winter, when the brittle weeds and prickly foxtails would soften, and the tender new blades would emerge. The thought of the greening earth reminded her of Saratoga, of the thoroughbreds skimming over the turf course, of the peak-roofed clubhouse where she and Daniel had clasped hands and screamed, vibrating with adrenaline and trepidation, as the glistening, frothing horses rounded the turn. She closed her eyes and saw the diminutive jockeys holding their fragile, airy poses over the rippling, surging bodies of their mounts. Hoofbeats pounded in her head like the roar of a long waterfall. She inhaled; she could almost smell the moist, boot-tousled turf and the oddly fragrant scent of steaming horse manure. The racing season had lasted throughout the late summer in New York, yet she had not been aware of the heat then -- or else she had absorbed it as part of their passion, and not as the searing slice of hell that it was to her now.
She could remember the racetrack and its life and power only in stuttering half-frames, like the time-speckled clips from an old movie. Between these flashes of memory she was far too aware of the sun siphoning the moisture from her skin and of her tank top and shorts sticking to her. The empty space between her and her husband seemed to shimmer, like a mirage wall maintaining their tentative truce. She thought of the swift, steaming nights of their courtship and of the cold, protracted nights she passed now, clinging to the verge of the mattress in the stifling room, but it was less a thought than a bitterness that made her swallow hard and purse her lips until they were almost white.
She shook her head sharply and looked back at the still blades of the fan. The cord hung limp against the windowsill and she realized that it was not broken after all. The plug had simply come out of the wall. She thought about getting up and restoring the power, but then Daniel would know that she had been the cause of its cessation, and he would say something snide. She peeled her magazine from her thighs and sighed. The Smirnoff model stuck to her leg, smiling seductively.
The Jordans sat still on the deck in the swiftly vanishing refuge of the shade. The furious white glare of the sun fused the beige dust and weeds into the beige siding of the long barns and the beige house and the beige feed barn and the beige fence that encircled the pasture, so that all but that green oasis in the center seemed lifeless and bleached against the parched earth, like the scattered skeleton of some huge primeval beast exposed in a desert wind.
At the far end of the pasture, over the roof of the feed barn, a tendril of grey curled up like a question mark. One of the thoroughbreds snorted, a short, trumpeting sound high with developing panic.
Daniel did not open his eyes. It was Althea who jumped up and gasped as if a pitcher of ice water had just been poured down her back. She froze for a moment and then whirled toward Daniel, her voice locked up in fear, and stomped her bare foot hard against the deck, twice, until he rose up on his elbow and rubbed his eyes. She shoved her finger at the sky, pointing. He looked at the threatening smear and then swung his legs over the chaise and stood slowly, unfolding his large, languid frame as if in a dream.
They turned to each other and stared, the whites of their eyes large against their sunburnt faces, then looked outward again toward the smoke. The wispy question mark over the roof had billowed into a paragraph of roiling black. The horses were screeching and kicking in the stables that flanked the fenced pasture. Within seconds, windows shattered in the feed barn and fire raged in livid gusts into the open air. As if they had rehearsed such a scene, Althea ran toward the hoses at the far ends of the two stables, and Daniel to the powerful, fragile animals he understood so much better than she.
Althea twisted one faucet and dragged the streaming hose to the front of the burning barn, then dropped it and ran for the other one. Pulling both as far as they would reach she held her thumbs against the nozzles and sprayed in double arcs, choking, coughing, blinking in the thick smoke. She glanced over her right shoulder and saw through the murk that five stall doors stood open, and that Daniel was squeezing through the sixth, slipping a halter around the yearling’s neck to lead her, bounding, toward the western gate of the pasture. The horses he had already taken there were running back and forth across the north end near the house, as far from the fire as they could get. She noted that there was no sign of aggression, at the moment; only of a pervasive, collective fear.
She turned her attention back to the blaze in front of her and saw what looked like an orange python wriggling and writhing along the ground from the feed barn toward the stables on her left, the stables where six powerful, terrified thoroughbreds were still trapped, bellowing in panic, their eyes rolling wildly as they lunged repeatedly against the stall doors. Althea screamed and looked back at her husband, who was still nudging the filly into the pasture. He saw. He slammed the gate shut from the inside and ran diagonally across the field behind his wife as the flames slithered up the wall and along the gutter, seeking a hold on the tarpaper shingles. Daniel yanked open the southern gate of the pasture and dashed to the stall in the most imminent peril, throwing a halter over the crazed colt’s head.
Althea’s fingers cramped around the hoses that were their only hope for suspending this hell-rain of brimstone, the ruination of their dreams. The feed barn was utterly lost. She turned both hoses on the stable, shaking as Daniel led the last of its six horses to safety.
After awhile the flames began to subside, and the roar dimmed to a crackle. The sun was now an eerie orange circle burning through the veil of smoke, like a distant beacon, a lighthouse glowing in a black fog. Daniel came up behind her, his face caked with ashes and sweat and the fine dust of the woodchips that padded the stalls, and grabbed one of the hoses from her. The two of them quenched what remained of the fury, reducing the resurgent embers to hissing, steaming charcoal. Then they stared, side by side, at the black remains of the barn. They had almost lost far more.
Althea sank to her knees, exhausted, and let the precious water run over her knees and make mud of the ground under her. The stream was running thin; the water in the tank would be very low now. She would have to get up and turn off the faucets.
She felt Daniel’s hand rest tentatively on the top of her head. She looked up and saw a little twist of a smile on his tired, soot-tarnished face.
“We saved ’em,” he said, his voice cracking. “You and me. We saved the horses.”
Then all of a sudden he lifted the hose and sprayed it into the air over their heads, tipping his head back to let the sparkling shower cover his face and neck. His mouth was open and his tongue was out, like an overgrown boy in the rain. Althea could not help smiling at the way he squinted his eyes against the drops, the way the water coursed over his bald head like a stream over a granite bed worn smooth, the way he staggered drunkenly under his own small storm.
Watching him, something inside her burst, something binding that had wrapped her stomach into a tight hard knot for months, maybe years. Now the knot was unwinding. Water and tears flooded her eyes. Suddenly, like a graceless child who transmits both relief and forgiveness by a punch to the arm of her offender, she swiped at the ground where the hose ran decadently over the dust and flung a handful of mud at her husband. It splattered over his chest and neck, mixing with the soot and water that flowed in rivulets from his face. He looked down at himself as if he had been shot, and then at his wife. Althea stepped back, shocked by her own misbehavior, and covered her face, peering at him between her fingers. He grinned and turned the hose full upon her.
Althea, giggling like a schoolgirl, leaned down for more mud and slipped. Daniel stepped closer and took his thumb off the nozzle, so that she had to abandon her quest for ammunition to fend off the solid stream of water he was pouring over her head. Over her own shrieks she could hear him snorting, almost chortling, like a sixth grader pulling off some grand prank. She kicked out at him and he grabbed her ankle and poured the thinning water over her long bare legs, a hoarse, rich laughter accompanying his juvenile antics. Then suddenly he stood still, panting, and looked down at her with an expression of tenderness and desire, an expression from long ago, before the ranch, from the days when they had placed their bets and won.
Althea could hear the flustered horses rustling delicately through the lush green grass behind them, nickering, sensing that the danger had past. She held very still. She could feel the heat renewing itself through the lingering haze that surrounded them. The water from both hoses ran out on the ground, the streams growing smaller, the supply getting lower. She did not want to get up and turn them off.
Daniel sank to his knees beside her. She saw, out of the corner of her eye, that the hoses were barely trickling now. The barn was gone, and the water was gone, but so was the terrible tension between them -- at least for the moment. She looked into his eyes with her questions and waited.
He slipped his arms under her shoulders and behind her knees and lifted her like a gangly colt, muddy and sooty, against his soaked, stained chest. He stood up carefully and shifted her in his arms, finding his balance. Her cheek was sticky against his cotton shirt and the smell of him was raw, and the subtle friction between their bodies as he carried her somehow made her want to cry. He took her back to the deck where just an hour earlier they had been roused from their fuming languor, and he gently set her down on his chaise and went inside the house.
Althea’s heart moved strangely within her. Lying there on the chaise under the flaming sun and the drifting smoke, she wondered what sort of sacrifice might be made of her on this altar – if she were about to be, in some sense, burned.
She heard the front door close and he appeared beside her, kneeling. The ice trays from the freezer were piled in his arms.
Althea flushed.
“Daniel…”
He set the trays under the chaise, one by one, and put his wintry hand against her burning cheek.
“It’s all right now,” he said.
Above them, the sun blazed bright and golden across the clearing sky.