Brand New Cherry Flavor

by Todd Grimson

  When Lisa caught sight of Caitlin, still before noon, before lunch, she impulsively went out to her, the midwestern girl shy at the touch—Lisa seized her shoulders, the moment bled like they were lovers, all the possibilities were there, Lisa said to her, “I’ve got to have some of that shit. It’ll go bad by tomorrow, so it’s got to be today. My dad said it might not be as strong as it used to be, so this could be the last chance anyone will ever have.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Don’t tell me that. You’ve got to get some for me. I know it won’t hurt me. I need to see what those other fuckers get to see.”

  The words as such didn’t especially matter, they were secondary; what counted was the influence exerted by the eye-to-eye, the magic of the breath, the spirits breathed in by the other, Caitlin’s resistance melting … Lisa felt triumph, she didn’t want to show it but she could feel her influence working, dissolving rational objections and rational thought, she was using Caitlin, and the relation felt natural and strong.

  “I don’t know if I can get it. They put it in the refrigerator.”

  “Get it. I know you can.”

  Caitlin started to turn away, and Lisa took her by the arm again, holding her close, just looking at her, their eyes meeting … and when Caitlin left Lisa didn’t gloat, she felt instead a strange lassitude, an indifference … it was taken care of, she knew it. Caitlin would do her best.

  Other people came and went. When it was appropriate, Lisa nodded or said hello. When she saw Caitlin emerge from the main building, Lisa didn’t wait for a nod or any other signal, cutting back toward her bungalow, it was best to take it in a relaxed atmosphere, and so she’d lie in her hammock, the trip generally put one to sleep.

  When they rendezvoused, Caitlin said, “Your dad will kill me … God …,” but she handed it over, milky liquid in a plastic container, she was trembling….

  “What does it taste like?” Lisa asked.

  “I don’t know. Not too bad, I guess. Nobody really complains.”

  “Can I wash it down with a Coke?”

  Lisa took it, drank it down. It was like “green juice,” some health store shit she had tasted once, a combination of about fifteen vegetables not meant by God to be consumed in liquid form. Andrea, her sister, had drunk that and carrot juice, carrot juice all the time. Out to the hammock. Caitlin brought her a Coke.

  “You should go have lunch with the others, so they won’t connect us,” Lisa said. “Will they notice that this much is gone?”

  Caitlin shook her head, answering the second question first, and then said, “I’m going to stay with you.”

  “Cool,” Lisa said, leaning back, already becoming contemplative, like she might revisit some important dreams. Caitlin checked her pulse, and Lisa looked right at her but soon didn’t seem to know who she was. She was somewhere truly far away. It was frightening. Caitlin couldn’t believe she’d given in. How weak could she be? Now Lisa shivered as if she had malaria and suddenly said, clearly, sharply, “No!” with such feeling that Caitlin jerked to her feet, watching her … then Lisa flung herself back, moaned for a while, and began muttering to herself in unintelligible Spanish, eyes shut tight now. When she opened them, she didn’t look quite like Lisa anymore.

  “Oh God,” Caitlin said, and cried.

  In a little while Lisa groaned anew and pitched herself out of the hammock onto the wooden floor. Slowly, looking around with unseeing, horrified, animal eyes, she crawled on hands and knees. Caitlin tried not to interfere with her, but to keep her from hurting herself. Lisa’s balance sometimes seemed as uncertain as an infant’s.

  When she came to the metal canisters of film—the documentary on ants—she used them as a pillow, lying down on her side, drawing up her knees. She was quiet then.

  TWENTY

  If you looked like an attorney and acted sure of yourself, with a briefcase and some forms in your hand, the last thing a court clerk wanted to do was mess with you—Max Doppler got the case caption number from the cross index file, pulled the jacket on Perez, Osvaldo J., got his address from the bond receipt… then noticed that someone had handwritten Deceased.

  Great. Just fucking great. It figured that this Brazilian motherfucker was jerking him around, he was just too cute. Doppler tried to look as matter-of-fact as he could, he didn’t want anyone to remember him, luckily it wasn’t likely these guys noticed much, not at this time of day, when everyone was breaking for lunch.

  Max Doppler was forty-two years old, a little soft now, but he still lifted free weights, got on the machines, swam a few laps when he had time. He’d been a football player many, many years ago. After the last time his ex-wife had told him “Not again” about an interesting sports anecdote, he’d made up his mind never to mention any of that stuff to anyone, people either thought you exaggerated or it bored them, even others who’d played. Funny it was so private, incommunicable, while at the time the experience had seemed like the most public, obvious thing in the world.

  Doppler entered the restaurant where he’d told Mendoza they’d meet. He wasn’t a particularly good-looking man, but neither was he ugly. He sat across from Mendoza and ordered a salad and some bread. He didn’t like to eat in front of others—the last ten years had made him used to eating alone. Mendoza ordered a hamburger. He asked Doppler if he’d gotten the address. He was polite but inscrutable, as before. Doppler couldn’t tell if Mendoza knew that Perez was dead. It was always safest to believe the worst. Even so, there was no reason not to tell him and see what he did.

  Mendoza seemed to be surprised. “Did it say how?” he asked, and Doppler shook his head. As Mendoza then just sat there, staring off into space, presumably thinking … Doppler waited, then passed him the slip of paper on which he’d printed the address. The thought had taken a while to fully arrive, but Doppler’d finally come to it: So what if it’s something shady? There might be some good money involved. And Doppler was getting to the point, with his entire existence, where he just didn’t give a fuck.

  “In the information, it says how old he was?”

  Doppler shook his head and waited to see if Mendoza would ask him a follow-up. But Mendoza gave every indication of being able to keep his mouth shut, keep his thoughts to himself.

  “Since this guy is dead—I don’t know how,” Mendoza finally said, “he might’ve been sick—but since it’s a complication, I’ll pay you a complication fee, a bonus, to continue. We will go over to find this address.”

  Doppler said this was OK. Mendoza had eaten only half his hamburger; seeing the big detective glance at it, Mendoza delicately said, “Would you do me the favor and eat this?” and so Doppler got a more satisfactory lunch. He and the Brazilian were getting along. They’d drive out to East L.A.

  Doppler was driving, since he knew the territory, but as far as East L.A. was concerned, he didn’t really know that much. For a very brief spell (for six months, twelve years ago) he’d done some repossessions, and he’d done some in the barrio. It was a challenge, you definitely went there fully armed, these days if you had a semiautomatic that’s what you’d take … but this address, the house Perez had lived in, it wasn’t so bad. Although sometimes these streets could be very deceptive. The thing to do was look around for bullet holes and broken windows, gang graffiti.

  They rang the doorbell and a woman came to the door. Mendoza spoke to her in Spanish, and Doppler couldn’t follow too much, though he got the basic drift. Mendoza said he had been out of the country, that he had owed her husband some money (this after first offering his condolences for Osvaldo’s untimely death), which he would be glad to give to her … but Osvaldo had been holding a piece of furniture for him. When the misunderstanding with the police occurred, had they seized everything, or had some things been left behind? Perhaps in some other location?

  Mrs. Perez said the police were doing nothing to look for whoever had murdered her husband. Mendoza again expressed his regrets. She said if there was any property left over, the pers
on to talk to was Miguel. Mendoza gave her what seemed to be two or three hundred dollars, Doppler couldn’t tell, not wanting to seem too curious, in the overcast day watching a couple of kids, maybe five-year-olds, walk by, one little girl skipping for a few steps, walking on the sidewalk, teasing the other one, a little boy.

  In the car Mendoza explained that they would have to hurry to catch this Miguel, he was a boxer and he should be just about through with his daily workout at the gym. Rosita Perez had given him directions; in any case, Doppler knew where it was.

  At the gym, there was sparring going on, other fighters working on heavy bags, speed bags, jumping rope, all sizes of men, most of them Hispanic, most of them slender and fairly small, at least by Doppler’s standards, though he wouldn’t have wanted one of these tough little bantamweights coming after him with the intent to do bodily harm.

  Doppler asked an old man who looked like a janitor if Miguel Casablanca was still here. A young black boy went to look for Casablanca and returned nodding, saying, “He’ll be right up,” and then in a minute or so the boxer came up the stairs from the locker rooms and showers down below.

  He had on a blue windbreaker, with his hands in his pockets, and seemed glum and indifferent until Mendoza spoke for a while. “OK,” Miguel said then, after thinking it over, “I’ll show you around. Let’s go.”

  Mendoza asked, in English, how Osvaldo Perez had died. Casablanca kind of smiled, as though he couldn’t believe they didn’t know, and then said, “Man, I don’t know anything. All I know is what I heard: Someone stuck a shotgun in his ear while he was sitting there in his car eating a Big Mac, like, eleven o’clock at night. Somebody didn’t like him.”

  “What kind of work did you do for him, for Perez?”

  “I helped deliver furniture sometimes.”

  “I don’t care about his other business,” Mendoza said. “All I’m looking for is a jaguar-skin couch. It came from Houston, along with some jade and other stuff. The police seized some of those things, but they didn’t find the couch. It’s from an albino jaguar, and it’s very old. If you remember delivering it to someone, there’ll be a discovery fee … and if you will introduce me, I’d like to negotiate with the new owner. I have no interest in the police.”

  “What if they don’t want to sell? What if it belongs to someone, and money isn’t everything to this person? What do you do then?”

  “I don’t know … just talk. I’ll have found it, and that’s my job.”

  “Who wants it? Really.”

  “Some doctor, a scientist.” Ariel paused. “I don’t know why he wants it, though.”

  Doppler felt like he was gradually being left out. At first it hadn’t seemed like the boxer had cared for the Brazilian detective very much, but now they were developing a rapport. Doppler, to reintroduce his will into the equation, give things a little push, said, “Let’s go see the person, Miguel. If you want to make a phone call or something first, why not?”

  “This guy, he don’t talk on the phone too much. I could show you where he lives, but—you sure you want to do this? He helps me with my training, see, and I don’t wanna piss him off.”

  Doppler had the impatient idea that Casablanca was playing some kind of a game. He tried to communicate this impression to Mendoza wordlessly, and Mendoza stared back at him, aware that he was attempting to communicate something—he might have understood immediately, they might have been in harmony, Doppler just wasn’t sure. He pushed it a little more, and Miguel said, “OK. Sure.”

  As Doppler drove, following Miguel’s laconic instructions, he didn’t like the boy’s attitude. Boy. What was he? Twenty-one? Twenty-four? It was as if he had played dumb with them, dumber than he really was, and as if he knew a secret joke. The house they were going to was in Laurel Canyon, so on the way Doppler stopped by his apartment, made them wait for him while he went in and got his gun, a 9 mm automatic. He also brought down a Coke, so it wouldn’t be obvious he’d gone up for a gun.

  On the twisting road, Doppler asked, “Is this person in films?”

  “Not really. He’s into everything, man.”

  There was a gate with a video eye. Miguel got out and announced the visitors’ mission into the microphone. He got back in, and the gate swung open. The house was not visible immediately, but soon. This entrance was to the back, at a higher elevation. Several motorcycles, choppers, were parked haphazardly facing a large white Jaguar sedan, which was being washed by a young man wearing dirty jeans and matching denim vest. He appeared to be suffering from some sort of skin disease. He was very pale as well, and Doppler, assuming the worst, wondered that he had sufficient strength to be out here washing the car. He averted his eyes as he and Mendoza followed Casablanca inside.

  It wasn’t quite a mansion, perhaps, but it was a huge house … entering from the back made it somewhat confusing, hard to get a sense of the total layout. Doppler didn’t like the feeling he had of intruding into something strange. “Oh,” said a young woman with a blue body, coming out of a door and then going back in, as she vanished he realized the blueness was tattoos from head to foot, to the extent that she may have been perfectly nude and he couldn’t tell. Around a corner and they were confronted with an Indian, maybe an Aztec, wearing intricate ceremonial garb, mirrors hanging from him. He was a mannikin. That is, he wasn’t alive. He did not breathe.

  They came into a very large area with a very high ceiling and what must have been hundreds of exotic plants. So that was the smell. A huge, fancy aquarium, red and gold fish swimming by green plants in illuminated azure waters. There stood someone in a dark bird suit, evidently made of feathers, complete with head and beak, the wings as arms, the effect surreal: menacing rather than amusing. There was another life-sized statue of an Indian, probably Aztec, a king or a god in full ceremonial drag. Hardly any furniture. The smell, heavy as incense, was making Doppler light-headed. More unblinking pale young men. Six of them, standing around.

  A strange-looking little man of indeterminate age, dressed in an expensive buff-colored suit—but no shirt—came out of the fronds and odd blossoms to say, “Miguel said you two gentlemen … you’re looking for a couch.”

  “Upholstered with the skin of an albino jaguar,” Mendoza said quietly, with deference.

  “I possess such a piece of furniture, but I won’t give it to you. I’m saving it, to present it to someone as a gift. She needs it, it is necessary to her.”

  “You won’t sell it, then?”

  “Look at me, brother. Do you recognize me?”

  “I don’t know,” Mendoza said, but he seemed mesmerized. Doppler didn’t like it. The little man was a dark Indian or Latino, and it looked as if someone had written all over him with medium blue ink, intricate hieroglyphics and messages, an outsized gold ring in each ear.

  “I can wait for you out in the car,” Doppler said, softly, discreetly touching Mendoza’s arm—but at the light touch Ariel Mendoza started, as if he had never seen Doppler before.

  “Brother, you have brought him: Do you give him to me? It is right.”

  Doppler didn’t like the sound of this, nor the curiously knowing smile with which the little man looked him over. It was a smile that held within it some affection, yet it frightened Doppler. He turned away from the gathering darkness and began to make his way back out. Colombians for sure. Or Peruvians, Venezuelans, Ecuadorians, Paraguayans. In any case, into some bad shit. If he had felt it wise to go past them all, beyond them there was light, glass doors leading outside … but his car was up above. The corridors were darker now than before. It would be disastrous, he felt, to lose his way. He hurried. Fuck it, he might just drive away, leave Mendoza here, even though by so doing he’d forfeit his fee. No, that’s ridiculous. There. Yes, it was a red door. Doppler came out into the shifting, undependable lavenderish daylight, constantly altered by messy clouds.

  The sickly-looking guy who’d been washing the car stood off by some shrubbery, doing something with a rake. “Hey,” Dopp
ler said, but the guy didn’t look over or respond. Then, after Doppler had walked to the gate and come back, here came Mendoza and Casablanca.

  “Let’s go,” Mendoza said.

  “OK,” said Doppler, and then, even though he’d been watching him closely, distrustfully, Casablanca caught him off guard, moving so swiftly, shocking him, one to the belly, one to the head. Doppler fell to his knees. Hands were on his body and then he didn’t have his gun anymore.

  He looked up and saw Mendoza, but Mendoza wouldn’t look at him. Doppler didn’t want to say it, but he did: “Please.” He got up to his feet, still weakened by the body shot. Becoming aware of movement, he turned to his left and saw the guy coming, taking his time, holding up the rake. Back to his right the other fucking zombies, a couple with knives, all definitely zeroed in on nobody but him. Mendoza and Casablanca stood back, somber or indifferent, and before the first zombie could reach him Doppler turned and ran, the rake just missed him, he plunged through a thorny bush, but there was no place to go. The person in the bird suit hit him with some kind of carved painted stick. There were chickens walking around, a black dog that paid no attention to him, a fountain that sent water into the air, a trembling pretty rainbow against a dirty sky, that’s what he saw when he fell. He smelled newly mown grass and felt something wet, there was a lot of it, the world continued spinning round and round.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Two days after she had taken the alkaloid, Lisa discovered something strange and exciting: The documentary on Amazonian ants had been transfigured by her proximity and her touch. Caitlin said, “You used it as a pillow for hours. The only time you moved was when I tried to dry you, after you’d peed yourself.”

  Lisa remembered none of this. She did haye some vague, impressionistic idea of the images that had taken her over, the ultravivid memories that had stained her mind, but it was only upon seeing the film—an amazing experience, she and Caitlin were there together in the dark, having decided to screen the ant film out of boredom, carrying the old Bell and Howell and the fucked-up screen to Lisa’s room—she recognized much of it immediately. Caitlin asked her, “Wasn’t this supposed to be about ants?” and Lisa said, “Shut up, shut up, this is my fucking dream, this is from the vine.”