Brand New Cherry Flavor

by Todd Grimson

  He pulled her to her feet, said, “Be quiet,” her wrists were tied together and he meant to probably tie them to the bed frame, a pornographic scene. He thought he had it under control. He pulled on the rope, and she jerked suddenly the other way so hard that the rope flew out of his hands, he came after her and she snarled as they fell on the rug over the trapdoor. She got her teeth into his neck, it was like she had jaguar teeth in a carnivore’s strong jaw, she went for the side of his throat and got hold, her fangs found purchase, arms around his head pulling him in closer, he didn’t expect it and he was on top but then she rolled lithely over and the big carotid artery tore open, the hot blood splashed out sticky and red, his feet thrashed and she bit him and held on as he fought her with all his might. The blood indifferently, madly burst out of the artery, her jaw seemed to open unnaturally wide, she ripped his neck even more, snorting to breathe, there was so much blood in her mouth and nose it was like she was swimming in it. She felt him weaken, she gasped to get her breath, panting, and then she smelled that he was dead.

  TWENTY-ONE

  It didn’t seem she could get all the blood out of her hair, no matter how long she stayed in the shower. She lingered … having a hard time coming back to herself, back to ordinary, more or less focused thought. The water continued to pour over her. She had a bad few moments of panic, thinking there was blood in her hair or that she couldn’t tell anymore. This kind of thing was how criminals became deranged.

  OK. Lisa turned off the water. Perfunctorily dry, she went into the bedroom, avoiding looking at the front room as she went by. She lay down on the bed. Casimir had come in here, and he meowed, the turmoil had worried him. He needed the touch of her hands and the sound of her voice to be reassured. It soothed Lisa to do this. She thought about how Caz would have acted in the situation if

  he were big, and she knew there was nothing else she could have done. The jaguar spirit had entered her, she felt. It had been alien, detached, huge, and amused. Yet she knew it, somehow. And the great jaguar mother recognized her, it knew her as an animal, through the senses … it knew her very well.

  Time passed. She got dressed, in terrifically faded soft jeans with ripped-out knees and a red polo-style top on which she figured the blood wouldn’t show up as much. No, it did not seem possible to go through channels, to call the police and say, “He tried to rape me so I bit through his throat.” The thing to do was … she could take the body to Boro. All she had to do was wait until dark.

  In the meantime, she had to do the best she could to clean up the mess. Roll him up in the ruined rug. She shut Caz in the bedroom for a while, because she didn’t want him coming out and possibly lapping at the blood. She didn’t know if he would, but it wasn’t something she wanted to see. She got out the mop and went to work. Unfortunately, there was a lot of blood on the couch. She just did the best she could.

  It was one-thirty. At three-fifteen she was supposed to pick up Raelyn at LAX. Well, she would just have to do it, take her straight over to Popcorn’s, as he’d suggested. She could take some clothes and her cut-for-speed swimsuit and come back here only after it got dark. The problem was that he was so heavy, the stairs down to her car were secluded but she’d be conspicuous, the moving itself would be extremely difficult. Even if she had help, it would be clumsy. And she wasn’t entirely sure he would fit into her trunk, certainly not without being folded. But whom could she ask?

  Christine would do it, she knew.

  Christine said on the phone that she’d had a terrible fight with Oriole over the tattoo. For all his flirtatious promiscuity, he was jealously possessive, and he had deduced from something he’d seen in Lisa’s eyes that she and Christine had finally become lovers and that the ankle tattoos were the seal of this bond.

  Lisa laughed. “It would be none of his business, anyway.”

  “I know. Actually, it doesn’t matter to me at this point. I wouldn’t play his game and try to convince him or make promises … I’m sick of him. I mean that. I don’t know why I’ve stayed with him for so long.”

  In her kitchen, Lisa listened, encouraging her friend to go over the same territory, even if it was repetitious—Christine needed to get it all out. It was soothing to Lisa just to hear her best friend’s voice. When she noticed that some time had passed, she remembered that she had to go pick up Raelyn. She asked Christine if she wanted to come along.

  “Sure. I’m curious to meet her.”

  “OK, I’ll come and get you. I better leave right away.”

  “I’ll come down to the street.”

  “Great. See you.”

  It felt very weird to lock her door, leaving the carnage within, but it made sense to do this stuff, and otherwise she’d just be sitting around with Duane Moyer’s corpse. The hanged man? When she had gone down into the secret room, she had hardly paid any attention to him. She remembered her costume far more vividly, the luminescence of the feathers, the jade and gold and turquoise jewelry, the earrings that were dangling mirrors…. The hanged man was a card in the tarot deck, she knew that, but she wasn’t sure exactly what it meant. Was it Moyer? She didn’t think so.

  In the car on the freeway, Christine suddenly pointed out that it looked like Lisa had been hit in the mouth. It hadn’t really consciously registered, though she’d been putting her tongue to the wounded area again and again.

  Hesitating only a moment, Lisa asked, flat out, without preamble, “Can you help me tonight to put a body in the trunk of my car?”

  “Yes, of course I will, I’ll help you any way you want.” And then: “You don’t have to explain.”

  This gesture was quite moving to Lisa, who took off her sunglasses to gaze into her friend’s eyes, tears were welling up and they stung— she told her the whole thing.

  “I’ll go with you,” Christine said. “I want to meet Boro … if he put this fucking tattoo on me, I should see who he is and what he wants. Maybe we can work out some kind of a deal. I’m not as apt to let things go on being mysterious as you are … I want my enigmas resolved.”

  “You’re more rational than I am,” Lisa agreed, though it was relative—and although Christine no doubt thought this statement was true and may have even nodded, contemplating it seemed to make her feel sad.

  LAX was crowded and jam-packed as usual, Raelyn’s plane from Chicago on United was getting later all the time. But the crowd scene cheered Lisa up.

  She told Christine that Popcorn was a half-assed fuck.

  “But that’s OK,” she said. “Just like you’d expect, he’d rather watch me naked on film. Total voyeur action. He’s subtle about it, sort of….”

  Christine laughed. They couldn’t talk for a few moments—there must have been an entire Boeingful of Sri Lankans deplaning. As they waited, standing, Lisa said, “I should tell you, so you’re not surprised by anything between Raelyn and me …”

  “You were lovers?”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I can read you a little. Was it fun?”

  “Yeah. The only thing I didn’t like … was that it was like she was initiating me. Her desire, before we did it, when she wasn’t sure I’d go through with it … I liked her better like that. She’s only twenty-one.”

  The plane arrived. Raelyn looked more attractive than she had existed in Lisa’s memory, more intelligent and more high-strung. Lisa embraced her self-consciously, kissing her cheek. She introduced her to Christine. The two of them seemed to hit it off; Lisa felt a little jealous, falling mostly silent after a while, hiding behind sunglasses and the hassle of driving in the ridiculous traffic.

  Lisa’s mood improved some when it turned out that Raelyn had clips of all the reviews of Manoa right in her bag. Lisa wanted to hear them, even if they were bad. Especially if they were bad. One guy said it looked like a film made by someone who’d never seen one before— and that was bad. He hated it. Another guy said the same thing—and that made it great.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Wrapped in the ru
g, Duane Moyer’s body wasn’t so obvious… they let down the backseat and put him in, with considerable difficulty, head in the trunk and feet coming up to stick out between the front seats, the rigor made him seem made out of wood. Headlights illuminated them only at an angle, reflecting, sweeping by—Lisa groaned, “Oh God,” and they laughed nervously together, fearful, spooked … Lisa was really grateful when Christine offered to drive. Her arms and back were sore from the lifting, and she was bruised in several places

  from the earlier fight. She had been so attuned to any hint of danger, of cops, every nuance of the atmosphere … it had worn her out, she was too tired to stay alert now that the corpse was in the car. Her apartment was still a crime scene, it would have to be cleaned much more thoroughly, but at least she could get rid of the body unless something went wrong. The blood on the floor and walls, seeping into the rug, had been grape-juice-hued turning to black in the evening light.

  At the gate of Boro’s property Lisa got out, went to the intercom, pressed the button, and waited. It took a while, but she was unwilling to press the call button again. Maybe no one heard it, or it was broken. This stretch of canyon, in the darkness, seemed desolate, the wind blowing scraps of torn paper—all the imposed numbers and nonsense of civilization—and blond, ancient graveyard dust. Finally a voice, probably Ariel’s. “Yes?”

  “It’s Lisa Nova,” she said.

  There was no reply. She couldn’t think of what else to say. The gate clicked and swung in; she got into the passenger seat.

  Christine said as they went in, “Do you remember Cassandra’s words, when she arrived at Mycenae? ‘Hail to thee, gates of death.’”

  “Don’t do that.” Lisa was scared, but Christine laughed. They parked the car behind the Jaguar sedan; zombies emerged from the shadows around them, moving slowly. “They smell him,” Lisa said. Now Christine’s bravado was disturbed. One of the zombies— Brian?—stepped up close to her, and she violently started, moving back toward Lisa, who told her, “They won’t hurt us.” Christine’s fear soothed her somehow. Ariel emerged, somewhat stealthily, from the back door. She smiled at him; he nodded politely in response. Then he regarded her interrogatively. She introduced Christine and, that done, explained that they had brought along a corpse.

  “Let me see,” he said, and Lisa opened the trunk. The rug had worked itself off Duane Moyer’s face, which was stuck in a rictus of vicious surprise, one side of the throat ripped out below.

  “You did this to him?” Ariel asked. “Why? What did he do?”

  “Tried to rape me.”

  “Ah, defending your honor. Ricky! Drew! Bring this man down after us. This way, come,” and Lisa and Christine followed him into the house. Christine reached out, and Lisa held her hand. Noticing this, as he turned back to them, Ariel said, “This might be a good thing. Boro is meeting now with a gangster, a black man named Mannix. Some of his friends are here too. Just sit down and relax.”

  They came down into the huge, high-ceilinged room, lit warmly by torches held by white life-sized plaster statues of a heroically proportioned male. They walked through thirty yards or so of exotic plants to the clearing where Boro held court, a relatively small fire burning in the middle of the dirt.

  Mannix had a blue scarf tied on his head, which indicated he was a Crip or had Crip sympathies. He had pumped a lot of iron, obviously; he stood with his legs somewhat apart, his muscular arms folded across his chest. Scowling. His four followers stood behind him, some wearing baseball caps, more or less at ease.

  Boro sat on what looked like a pirate’s treasure chest, petting his black dog, surrounded by as many as twelve zombies—including, Lisa saw with real dismay, Jonathan … his eyes were dead, his skin was bluish like the rest. The bodies were starting to pile up. Jesus. She had warned him. Wanda smiled at her, too knowingly, wearing a white lacy gown like those of the female zombies.

  Lisa sat down next to Boro, close enough to pet the black dog. Christine followed; Lisa put her arm around her and pulled her close. Boro rubbed Lisa’s shoulders … she was here, she was in the moment; then she felt jaded and amnesiac. She yawned.

  Moyer’s body was laid down, disentangled from the rug.

  “Sometimes,” Boro said, “your friend of yesterday becomes your enemy of today. My Lisa here,” affectionately mussing up her hair, “she is like a jaguar in some ways. She bites your dick, watch out, it’s gone.”

  “OK,” Mannix said, “your bitch did a vampire number on the motherfucker. I respect your shit, man. Just tell me when.”

  Boro was silent, continuing to caress Lisa with a warm, sensitive hand. She didn’t mind pretending to belong to him.

  “Saturday,” Boro said. He nodded; Mannix nodded back.

  “Let’s kick it,” he said to his crew, and they left.

  A few moments later Boro asked Lisa, referring to Moyer, “What is this?”

  Lisa didn’t know what to say. She had the feeling he already knew all about it. Maybe he wasn’t as omniscient, though, as she sometimes thought.

  “I brought you a sacrifice,” she said, and felt Boro’s fingers seize her by the hair, not jerking or hurting, but letting her know.

  “Who do you think you’re fooling with? You did good, you did fine, but don’t start exaggerating … you cannot lie to me about anything. Don’t even try. This isn’t fresh; it’s not a sacrifice. You want to sacrifice someone, you bring them here alive. You do it here. This thing is just—food.” He snapped his fingers, and several of the zombies went to the corpse. “Take him into the other room. Then if you are hungry, you may eat.”

  They picked up the body, their movements speeding up a little, betraying a certain caginess, making a low growling kind of sound. It was the male zombies who were active, but the women followed behind, also hungry.

  “Introduce me to your friend,” Boro said.

  As usual, Lisa felt like he knew the answer before he asked. Christine’s confidence seemed to have quickly returned; she was studying the environment, aware or trying to be aware of everything all around, wanting to take it all in.

  “Did you give this to me?” Christine asked, showing him the design on her ankle.

  “No, it wasn’t me,” he said, smiling. “It was Wanda here … she’s been wanting to meet you. Why don’t you two go off and talk about what it can do?”

  Somewhat to Lisa’s surprise, Christine seemed interested—she followed Wanda off to the right, through the Venus flytraps and suchlike.

  “She has a lot of curiosity,” Boro said. Then in a moment, he added, “Christine loves you, but she is also jealous of you.”

  “What do you want from her?”

  Boro smiled and stood up; Lisa stood up too. Ariel Mendoza had followed Mannix out, to see him on his way; now he returned. The black dog went to him, and he spoke to it, squatting down to it, as it accepted his ministrations and wagged its tail.

  “It is not a question of what I want. It’s what does she want for herself. We will see.”

  They walked toward the room in which Lou—or the ghost of Lou, or a dramatization of “the end of Lou”—had previously appeared. Since Lisa had killed Moyer, making use, it seemed to her, of power derived from what Boro had set in motion … power that might be traced, conceivably, back to when Lisa had fizzed urine onto the wax effigy representing Lou … she supposed she had a sort of responsibility to see what they did to Duane Moyer’s remains. And there was also a mixed desire to gaze upon the worst, to see if she could face it, the allure of evil was definitely there.

  Jonathan stared at her, his mouth all bloody, mindlessly eating the big liver, illuminated by a torch off in the corner. He seemed to be looking right into her eyes; she shuddered, but although it was sickening, she found that she could watch. The thought ran through her mind, she was trying it out: It’s too intense to be real life, it must be a movie, which she quickly realized ought be reversed. The room was lit interestingly … dark gold with glints of red.

  Boro sa
id, “They eat the good parts first.”

  “What about that one, the bald one—when did he come?”

  “A few days ago. Why do you ask this, since you know the answer?”

  Lisa gestured helplessly as they left the disgusting, squishy feast behind. “I wasn’t sure if you knew who he was.”

  “And so, anytime you might possess a secret, you try to keep it to yourself.”

  She pretended to be interested in the big aquarium, and after he pointed out a few rare fish to her, she asked him, “Are you ever going to kill me? I want to know.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” Boro said. “I want you to be my priestess. I would never harm you. But it’s possible you might do something to harm yourself. I don’t know. You want everything for free.”

  “You’ve never said what you want from me,” Lisa said. “Do you want money? I have some money, temporarily.”

  “I don’t want your money.”

  “Well, what then? Do you want me to stand on top of a pyramid and cut out somebody’s heart?”

  Boro smiled at this, he really smiled at her, and Lisa was moved to say, “Or is it me you want to sacrifice?” She could feel the nakedness of her face.

  “You could have a different kind of immortality,” he said contemplatively, abstractly, motioning with both hands. “Wouldn’t you like to be in the headlines? How about ‘Prostitute Found Murdered in Hotel Room’? Or ‘Actress Victim of Bizarre Mutilation Murder, Links to Unnamed Stars’? Think what hot items your films would be then. People would study them, looking for a clue … there’d be biographers wanting to track down everyone you’ve ever known. You could be like Sharon Tate or the Black Dahlia. Believe me: Many, many people would worship you, worship your image, memorize your face. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want to be mysterious, you want people to think about you after you’re dead. You want to be exposed.”