Fiction » Kyle Jarrard

One last one

Jan 212011

A fiction by Kyle Jarrard that previously appeared in Nightsun No. 24

They come to an all-night place around five.

“One last one?” she asks.

He nods, adding that little shrug, the one she warned him about. But she has had her expensive dinner in the City of Light and lets her fairly good mood forgive him. She pats his lower back. He wonders if she will withhold love later. She hopes she won’t blurt out her lack of faith in trans-Atlantic rejuvenation.

An old German shepherd gets up, barks weakly and slowly wags its tail. On the side of its head is a lump the size of a lemon.

“If he bites me … ” she says. “Rick?”

The creature wobbles forward a couple of steps, barks again.

The bartender, stacking coins on the counter, finally takes notice, leans over the copper counter and bellows down, “Couchez, Roger!”

The dog drops into the butts and sugar wrappers.

“Imbécile,” he adds, forcing a smile at the two or four drinks. He puts out his hands as if to catch water, points them toward the empty tables.

Rick guides her to a table and even takes care of her chair, like he’d tried to do in the nice restaurant, though it had only annoyed the waiter who’d taken over with a hiss of disdain for American ignorance.

“Etienne!” the bartender cries.

The Station

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Jan 202011

Another excellent fiction by Kyle Jarrard that has yet to see the light of day.

The red sign atop the pole read IONA. Then I saw the indigo glow of the pump lights, the open bay, the rack of new tires. It’s silly, but I gave a victory whoop. Everything was going to be O.K. again, you know, as if it had always been O.K. and would never not be O.K.

I cut the music, pulled up for a fill. I’m not religious, but then and there, exhausted behind that wheel after all those hours and everything, I shut my eyes and said perhaps my first sincere prayer since I was a boy.

As I finished, a heavy cloud of dust came rolling across the road. There was no sound to it. It tumbled like a log. Then it hit and got me gagging. Onions. I covered my eyes, but the tears poured down.

Meantime, something, a pig or something, began squealing in the direction the cloud had come from, beyond the station lights. Somebody’d just got their throat slashed; it was that kind of squeal.

I don’t know how long it lasted, but it was long enough for me to get pissed off at myself for not taking care of my own business: I needed gasoline.

I dried my eyes, got out, slammed the door. Tramped around on the oil-soaked gravel stretching my legs.

I don’t know how to say it exactly but there was kind of a shining in the air where the dust hadn’t finished settling, like a firework that’s exploded but is still glowing as it drifts down. I batted my clothes; it was like talc.

The old boy who ran the place hadn’t paid the least mind. There he was in the little office, so far back on his chair that he was parallel to the floor, as though laid out dead.

Final blow

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Jan 182011

A fiction by Kyle Jarrard as yet unenjoyed by the world at large due to irrelevancy of the piece.

We arrived just after dawn at the gate with its high stone arch. Long before, we’d gone off paved road onto gravel. Old oaks, black arms reaching up into the pale sky, lined the way like sentinels. Row after row of vine filled the fields, their passage hypnotizing. The October harvests I’d joined as a youth, broken backbone, frozen fingers, gigantic meals and all, rose sharply intact from my memory as I gazed out. There would be sweet odors in the air from the distilleries, surely. For the first time in countless months, I felt totally at ease as the chauffeur put his shoulder to the great teak doors, which slowly, majestically, began to open …

Plaskett’s star

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Jan 152011

A fiction by Kyle Jarrard as yet unpublished anywhere but here, probably due to a quality issue. Your call.

I was to meet a man called Bai about getting safe passage out of the city for Plaskett’s Star, the viewing of which, the newspapers warned, was sure to be drowned in our urban glare. The address was on the far north side, so I set out from the center well before sunrise to keep the noon rendezvous. If I made it, then luck was mine and I’d go where it took me; if not, so be it. Well into life’s final downswing, I made such efforts merely to beat the boredom.

I hadn’t seen the stars in ages, much less one passing (young scientists claim they talk to us in pulses and beats). Also, I had in mind several related questions that could only be answered in the field. For example, just how much noncity lies between the perimeter of this city and the next? Is there any direction one might take from here to there and not bump into another urban splotch? Is open space an enjoyable place?

These questions pressed, a little. Got me out of bed and off to answer an ad, something no sane person ever did anymore.

There was a thick mist that morning, salty to the tongue, that grew quite dense as I crossed the big park, and I nearly walked straight into the carp pond. The thought of such a mishap distracted me altogether from my errand and enticed me to sit a while and count my blessings, as it were, there in the damp red glow of the failed dawn.
It was once an Olympic pool, they say. Now it is home for some tremendously old and large fish.

Zoned

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Jul 072010

A fiction by Kyle Jarrard (reproduced from the Mississippi Review)

You remember like yesterday going down to Acapulco to the mansion overlooking the bay. Still feel yourself in sunburned skin diving into the green ocean by the red rocks until it felt like needles would punch your eardrums. The swells of the sea carrying you this way and that. A woman with a big heavy white towel at hand when you got out and came to her shivering in the late afternoon. A man at her side in a bright yellow suit. “Say hello to the Chinese ambassador.” Stepping forward, shaking hands, leaving black footprints on the rose cement. Everyone was talking about man on the moon. You sat at a distance on a thatch chair, the maids’ daughters giggling nearby, eyes flickering like fireflies among the blue fronds.

Now that’s all zoned down there and we couldn’t afford to go out to New Mexico, much less Old Mexico, even for a weekend. When the money problem didn’t get my wife off the subject, I came right out and said there wasn’t anything out there worth visiting anyway. Well, you can imagine. Nora stayed mad at me a good month, just under the skin. Then they went and zoned that area, too. Now nobody’s going to be going to New Mexico.

Just as well. Best now to stay home, stay in.

Pelton and the Paraladies

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Jul 052010

A fiction by Kyle Jarrard (reproduced from Eclectica magazine)

I begin writing, for it feels like the beginning of the end.

I have a comfortable old trailer parked right here where they unhooked all those years ago. My job, to the tune of $100 a month, is listed as Gatekeeper 1. I control the lock that opens off the All-American and releases water south into the Coachella for distant orchards and vineyards.

I am told this position is perhaps the lowest in the federal bureaucracy, but I still consider myself lucky. And though I don’t foresee advancement, not even to Gatekeeper 2, which would pay $125 a month, earn me a new, larger trailer and more rations, I don’t care. For the time being I am simply here. It is much better than the razzle-dazzle of the big city.

I had my 50th birthday the other day, on the Ides of July. The name they gave me is Pelton Morny, and I’ve kept it all along except for a few weeks way back in late ‘74 when it was fashionable to carry your wife’s name. So, for a while, I was Pelton Rogers. Then we divorced, for various reasons, one I was a nasty drinker. (Leenda got everything. She relocated to a communal farm in Tennessee, a place that boasted of 41,000 enthusiasts.) Anyway, I made a little flour cake and ate it. But I really don’t give a damn about birthdays.

The century recently turned. I seriously did not think, or hope, that I would make it this far.

Today the gate is open. Depth marker reads 12-foot-8.

Believe it or not, an ocean skipjack occasionally breaks the surface of the All-American. It lifts your heart to see such life, brings back fond memories of drunk-fishing with Dad.

I dug on the All-American from early ‘75 to late ‘81. It stretches all the way from Diego, on the sea, across the old regions of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to the Gulf, averaging 15 feet in width and varying in depth from 10-15 feet in summer to deadly heights when it rains. In the past decade, 82 Gatekeepers have drowned. Every year we get a martyrs supplement to stick in our handbook.

I wrote "Cognac: The Seductive Saga of the World's Most Coveted Spirit" because no one had ever put together a readable, independent history of this marvelous spirit. My connections to Cognac country inspired me to dig deep into an incredible story that ranges from an exploration of the ancient bedrock, to the long and tortured development of wine growing in this region of southwest France, to the phylloxera epidemic that nearly wiped out the industry, to the machinery of modern, foreign-owned Cognac giants spreading their eau-de-vie all around the world. Frank Prial, former wine critic for The New York Times, called "Cognac" an "enthralling volume ... a compelling story, not just about the world's best known eau-de-vie, but about the people who make it and the often violent history of the remarkable but little-known region of France from which it comes."