The Bride Stripped Bare

by Rob Bliss

  Venus turned her head and played tongue-tag with Gord for a few seconds. I felt like a third wheel. It’s always kind of hot, but also kind of uncomfortable, when your buddy makes out with his girl right in front of you. Makes you wish you had a girl too. He had done it before with old girlfriends; I may have done it too, when he had nobody.

  I took a swig, slapped my knee, and stood while they weren’t looking. Perused Gord’s stacks of DVDs and books. Hoped that walking around—with my back to them both—would help my erection go down. Tried to block out the smacking lips of the lovers on the couch.

  Gord liked the same movies, as always. Lots of horror, grindhouse, blaxploitation, and Kung Fu flicks from the Seventies and Eighties. I stared at the titles, many of them I knew well, and my eyes blurred as I realized that I didn’t like my friend’s fiancée.

  Sure, I liked her body, but not so much her personality. The Venus Club? Worship me? What the hell were they talking about? Part of me said they were just being a cutesy, annoying couple who still adored each other since they hadn’t known each other for that long. And that’s what the other part of me picked up on. Gord had done this before—changed his life for a girl. And he was doing it again, it looked like.

  So what? I had learned back when he was a Goth, that if I told him what I really thought, he’d hate me. Maybe he gets married, it lasts six months, he calls me up drunk and asks if he can come out East to visit and tells me how she broke his heart. Maybe that’ll happen, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to join The Venus Club.

  I had been suckered in by girls like that too, but not as bad as Gord had.

  “Look—he’s feeling shy,” Gord said to my back.

  I turned around—my erection gone—and saw Venus lying flat along the sofa, her legs across Gord’s lap. He slipped out from under her and strolled to me.

  “We’re not watching any movies, buddy. We’re getting seriously pissed drunk at my bachelor party.”

  — | — | —

  Chapter 3

  Venus left and I headed out with Gord since he had a few things to do in preparation for his wedding. We drove around the town where he now lived, popping into stores, everyone wishing him congratulations. A very small town, lots of rednecks and people who looked as they had been in one place too long, never straying far from home. Inbreeders? Was that the word I was looking for?

  Back in his truck, I asked, “Do you know everybody in town?”

  “Pretty much,” he laughed. “Small towns are all just one big family. You’ll see them all again tonight. The bachelor party might be bigger than the wedding.”

  “Are your folks in town yet? Your brother and sister? I haven’t seen them in years.”

  “Nah, they’re coming last minute. Venus is putting them up at her place with her folks. They got a big mansion. Family with family, that sort of thing. You’re not family, so you’ll have to stay with me. Took time for my brother and sister to book vacations from their jobs. I guess my quick engagement took everybody by surprise.”

  “It did to me, too,” I said as we passed beyond the town sign, ‘Red Wood,’ then down a rural highway. “I was surprised you still had my email.”

  “Hell, I wouldn’t forget my best bud. You and me are more brothers than me and my brother. Hate that fucker, but I like you.”

  His brother, Kevin, was ten years older than him, and his sister, Elizabeth, was five years younger than Gord. I had a huge crush on Elizabeth and was always kind of terrified of Kevin. He was big—big-boned, a bit chunky—didn’t look anything like Gord. Looked more like David Berkowitz. Used to be a bouncer at a few shitty bars and strip clubs where we used to live when we were teens. Gord said that Kevin was still doing the same kind of work. He had been diagnosed bi-polar, manic-depressive, possibly even a little touch of schizophrenia when he was a kid. He had been on a ton of medication since puberty. Kevin sometimes talked slower than most people, and I’d catch him staring at nothing for a long time.

  I’m glad I had never gotten on his bad side when I was a kid. He was the kind of guy who seemed like he could kill you without thinking—literally kill, and do hard time, and be happy in jail as long as he had a good supply of cigarettes.

  Elizabeth was the opposite. Petite, not an ounce of fat, cute as a button, incredibly blue eyes, and a band of freckles across her nose. Dark brown hair which she eventually dyed blonde when she was about sixteen, and kept it dyed. She could put you in your place with a glare and a few choice words, but she didn’t go out of her way to pick a fight.

  She broke my heart by not liking me as much as I liked her. And I was older. She was too young. For a year, she drank like an alcoholic—around the time she first dyed her hair. But after that she found a guy—blue collar, tool and die—whom she liked enough to get married to, even though the family didn’t see anything special about him. Ugly, ten years older, but he had a steady job. They tried to have kids, but it didn’t work out. I never knew all of the details, but she may have been barren. His name was Mike, if I remember correctly, and Gord hated him. Last I heard, Elizabeth and Mike split up, and she was single again. Gord confirmed their separation as we drove out of the town and into the countryside.

  Gord’s mom and dad, Don and Pam, were in their late sixties, long retired, happy that their middle child was getting married and would hopefully be providing grandkids.

  “I don’t know,” Gord said. “We’ll see about that. I’ve never been big on kids, but maybe one or two for Venus. She wants them.”

  I watched the forests and the farm fields pass by, thinking about what he’d said. He’d have kids—for her. Venus controlled him absolutely, called the shots. Gord had always hated the idea of having kids—with anyone, no matter how hot she was, or how much she controlled him—so he had really changed his tune with Venus.

  I said nothing and watched the scenery. We left the highway and went down back roads, from asphalt to gravel to dirt. Trees hedged in the road, the forest thick and dark, even in the afternoon. Crumbling farm houses and ramshackle log cabins, the occasional truck on blocks tucked back into the trees, driveways of dirt and mud.

  The truck bounced along a rutted dirt road that wound into forest for miles, lakes and streams and marshes popping up on either side, nature wild with little evidence of human beings. Though once I saw a gutted truck from the 1940s sitting across a stream, water flowing through its busted windows. I wondered who had driven it into the bush, tried to cross the stream, and gave up. Abandoned it to time and the wilderness.

  We drove for a long time, bouncing in our seats, having to slow down for some of the bigger ruts and potholes. Eventually, we arrived at a house made imperfectly of boards nailed together, opaque plastic sheets for windows, a weed-penetrated porch stretching around three sides of the house. The lawn—if you could call it that—was just churned up mud and grass, tree branches fallen and left to lie, and covered with battered and broken cars and trucks, two snowmobiles and an ATV, even an old farm plow, now an antique, half-sunken into the soil.

  Gord pulled up and we got out. An incredible silence surrounded us, felt like cotton stuffed into my ears. I followed Gord up to the broken steps of the porch and saw that some of the vehicles were riddled with bullet holes. I swallowed a lump.

  Gord opened a door covered with plastic sheet and called before he stepped inside.

  “Paco? It’s me, Gord.”

  He waited for a response, not stepping further into the house. I peered around his shoulder but could see nothing but a mass of junk.

  Then I felt cold steel at the base of my skull. I froze, heart hammering, had to pee. My voice croaked out, “Gord?”

  He turned around to see what was behind me.

  “Paco, hey—it’s okay, he’s with me.”

  “I don’t like strangers in my forest,” a voice with a Spanish accent said close to my back. My hands had instinctively raised in the air, began to shake. I didn’t dare move until, at least, the gun barrels lifted off the back o
f my neck. I watched Gord to see his facial expressions—like looking in a mirror to see if I was about to die without being able to look directly at my killer.

  “I know, man, but it’s cool,” Gord said, looking over my head. “He’s my best man. You’re not going to ruin my wedding, are you? Venus will be so pissed; she won’t dance the lambada with you.”

  A chuckle sounded behind me, and the steel left my skin. Gord saw the fear in my eyes. I heard steps squeak rotted boards behind me.

  “It’s okay,” Gord said to me, “you can turn around.”

  Hands still raised, I turned slowly on a pivot, both feet still balanced on the porch stair, to look at the man who had wanted to kill me.

  A tattoo of a rooster covered his left jugular and a flying serpent covered the right pulsing vein. Black hair, probably cut by himself with rusty scissors, a thick moustache stained yellow by tobacco, a tan face. His big belly half-hung out of his stained and ripped Harley Davidson t-shirt, jeans spattered with holes and grease stains. He held the double-barrel shotgun against his shoulder like a soldier about to march.

  “Hi,” I said through barely-moving lips. “I’m Chris.”

  “Don’t talk to me—ever—you hear me?” were Paco’s first words to me. I expected something a little more civil, but he had the gun, so he could say anything he wanted. “You fuck with me—I don’t care if you’re Gord’s best man—I’ll blow your balls off, rip out your eyes, and switch them. Got it?”

  I barely nodded; my tongue made of sandpaper. “Got it.”

  Paco looked over my head at Gord. “Why’d you bring him here? Now he knows where I live.”

  I listened to Gord’s voice while watching Paco’s face to see if he was about to change his mind about killing me.

  “Venus gives him the okay.”

  I thought that was odd. Venus knew Paco? Paco would obey the word of Venus?

  “Yeah, well, she didn’t tell me this cabrón was okay,” Paco hissed.

  Gord tried to calm the man with the shotgun. “Paco, dude, she’s about to get married. You know girls. She’ll spend days picking out the right nail polish—never mind styling her hair, finding the right shoes, and then the wedding dress. She’s a little busy. Can we do this or not?”

  Paco looked at me, lowered the gun barrels to angle at my eyes, glared at me with his lips twitching under his moustache.

  “He stays here.”

  “No, he comes in,” Gord replied.

  “In my fucking house? He’s got eyes to see.”

  “He’s cool. I told you…what he sees, smells, hears—he forgets and doesn’t ever tell. Right, Chris?”

  I felt Gord’s hand on my shoulder but kept my eyes on Paco and his gun. “I can stay here, I don’t mind.”

  The gun barrels were two inches from my chin. “That’s not the right answer, bendejo!”

  “Paco—don’t worry about him!” Gord came to my defense. “I can vouch for him and Venus can vouch for him. She said he comes in. He’s not fucking up anything. Want me to call her?”

  “No reception out here in the Nowhere,” Paco said. “You know that. I don’t exist, right?”

  A silence held, and I tried not to show how much I was shaking inside. I felt as frozen as the Tinman in Oz, not daring to move, watching Paco until he lowered the gun and stepped away.

  “I’ll meet you inside,” Paco said as he kept his eyes on me and walked backwards toward the corner of the house.

  “Is the shit off?” Gord called before Paco rounded the corner.

  “Gimme five minutes.”

  He disappeared around the side of the house, and I slowly lowered my hands. Heard Gord chuckle as I turned around.

  “Did you piss yourself?”

  “Not sure,” I said, my voice cracking. I felt numb from the neck down.

  “Sorry. I guess I should’ve warned you, my bad. He’s just got to turn off a few…let’s say, security devices, before we can go in. Or we won’t be going very far.”

  “How do you know him?” I asked in a whisper, glancing through the screen door, afraid that Paco would somehow overhear and find an insult where there was none.

  “Venus,” he said, looking at me with hard eyes, a strange glint in them. One-word answer: his eyes told me not to ask for more details.

  I didn’t. My legs were still rubbery, felt as though I was standing on a plank about to drop into a sea of sharks. Looked around at the property, the mess of machinery, but I didn’t want to look around too much. Paco obviously didn’t like people to see—or to remember what they saw—while over for a friendly visit.

  “Okay,” a voice called from within the house.

  “We’re clear,” Gord said, pulling open the battered and torn screen door.

  I followed closely, didn’t want to lag too far behind—might seem suspicious. I didn’t obviously look around, but it was hard not to see what Paco’s house contained.

  A lot of garbage, metal and plastic, bags of dried food and camping gear, which made me think he was a survivalist. So deep into the boonies, I wouldn’t put it passed him. He had tools of every kind, for automotive, carpentry and electrical—a jack of all trades with his toolbox spread across the floor and piled on the furniture. Gord and I had to step carefully over the junk to get through the room. Paco waited for us in the doorway of the next room, shotgun still in his hands, but pointed up, leaning against one shoulder.

  “Watch where you’re going—don’t break anything—you’ll pay for it with your blood, fucker.”

  Paco was a great tour guide. I didn’t want to touch anything, not because he commanded me not to, but because it was all filth. But I made sure to keep away any look of disgust from my face. And watched my step.

  The next room was, apparently, the kitchen. Dishes and glasses, food-encrusted pots and pans piled over all counters, cans and jars and boxes of food sometimes inside doorless cupboards, sometimes left where they were last touched, cockroaches skittering away. But at least there was enough of a cleared space across the floor so that Gord and I could follow our host down a flight of wooden, creaking steps to a poorly-lit basement.

  This was my vacation?

  Bulbs on wires lit our way. It smelled of mildew and some kind of animal shit. The air was cold. As we reached the bottom of the stairs, I could smell turpentine and windshield-washer fluid, gasoline and oil, and other acidic smells which I couldn’t place.

  We passed a closed door papered with pages ripped from 1970s porn magazines. Other doors were closed, some open but too dark to see what was inside (I consciously didn’t take a good look); and still other doors which were closed, but with holes the size of boots kicked through and the spray of shotgun pellets peppering them.

  Paco liked to have a lot of fun in his basement.

  We wandered through a bit of a warren, heading down another short flight of concrete steps, to get to the best-looking room in the house.

  All concrete, like a bomb shelter, but missing were the food and supplies, seemingly kept upstairs. This room was organized, with things in their places on the walls and floor, yellow paint outlining each object or groups of objects.

  And tons of guns. Rocket launchers, grenades, smoke grenades, machetes, trip mines, boxes labelled “C4”, machine guns sitting on the floor on tripods, and a hundred other weapons I couldn’t name.

  Paco stopped the tour, glanced at Gord, but stared at me.

  “Now you see this,” his moustache twitched to me, “now you don’t. Comprendé?”

  I nodded and swallowed, forcing myself not to look anymore at what the room contained in all of its corners, even strapped to the ceiling. “I see nothing,” I choked out.

  The room was about the size, length and height, of two handball courts. The three of us walked in a straight line to a small alcove at one end. Turned a short corner and came to a steel door. With a punch pad.

  “Don’t fucking look at me,” Paco said, his usually polite self.

  I looked away as he pun
ched in a code and the steel door opened. James fucking Bond, I thought. Paco took his survivalism very seriously. We stepped through the door, which led to a flight of steel mesh stairs. Paco clicked a switch on the wall and a wire of strung lights pinned to the ceiling came on. On either side of us were stone walls with bore marks gouged deep into the rock. Were we inside a mountain? The staircase went down about thirty feet, and just off to the left at the bottom were shipping pallets wrapped in plastic stacked three high and four deep, each pallet about ten feet tall.

  Stacked on the pallets were sandbags. What looked like sandbags, anyway.

  Until Paco and Gord approached the closest pallet for a better inspection.

  “Don’t fucking move from there,” Paco told me.

  I didn’t move and used only my eyes to watch what they did.

  Paco pulled out a switchblade and made a slit in the plastic wrap. Pulled out a sandbag, stuck the knife into it, lifted the blade up to Gord’s nose.

  Gord snorted some of whatever was on the knife. Then Paco snorted the remainder.

  I gazed up and across the towering pallets. Thought: goddamn, that’s a lot of cocaine. Next thought: I didn’t know Gord did coke. A lot of thoughts went through my head as I stood like a statue and watched my best friend and his asshole buddy enjoy the quality of the drug.

  Then Gord said, “Chris, you gotta try this, it’s too damn good!”

  I found my voice enough to say, “No, thanks, I’m fine.”

  Paco, of course, glared at me and tightened his grip on the gun. “I don’t trust no one who doesn’t do what everybody’s doing. The man told you to get over here.”

  The gun waved me over. Gord held the switchblade with a mound of powder on the tip about the circumference of a penny. I stared at it, looked at Gord’s bobbing head and wide smile, avoided Paco’s face completely, though I felt the barrels close to my ear.

  Leaned in, pressed one nostril closed, snorted. An electric bullet shot up my nose and shattered against my brain. I backed away and sniffed repeatedly, squeezed my nostrils a few times, blinked like a blind toad, and shook the quake out of my head.